HPB-SB-8-269: Difference between revisions

<center>{{Style S-Small capitals|dya nand saraswati.}}</center>

''June, 1879.''

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{{Style S-Small capitals|India}} is essentially the land of “humbugs,” humbugs, the most preposterous, ridiculous, and many coloured. It may be safely said, that what obtains in India, is generally of a character, that would excite the risible sense of persons not over-inclined to gravity. It would be unwise to affirm that humbug prevails only in India, and to doubt its existence elsewhere. But the humbug of India is the humbug of no other country. A sensible philosopher once seriously said, that he believed in the immortality of humbug; and we believe so too from our experience of Indian affairs. When we see a Methodist gravely assuring his long-eared audience, that all but Methodists are doomed to eternal tortures, we laugh heartily at the poor fellow’s credulity or hypocrisy. But both credulity and hypocrisy can be classed under the general head of “humbug.” A woman was one night in despair, at the sudden death of her husband. Her despair did not rise so much from her love to her partner in life, as from her grief to find, that her other half had left this sinful world without making a ''will''! She bethought her of an expedient, and immediately acted upon it, before her husband’s death became generally known. She persuaded a poor shoe-maker to lie in her husband’s bed, and sent for a lawyer. The man of law took down what the sick and dying-man gasped out—to the effect that one half of his money was to go to the disconsolate widow, and the other half to the poor shoe-maker, who had always proved a kind and obliging neighbour! In the anecdote we have given here, the ludicrous incidents are so mixed up, as to form one immortal humbug. The widow triumphed over the death of her husband, but was over-reached by the shoe-maker, who triumphed over both the dead and the living. We have spoken above of the Methodist and his opinions, his belief, but how many Protestants, who have laughed at the canting parson, have not gloated over their own future bliss, and believed from their hearts, that none but Christians would ever enter Heaven, and that the most virtuous heathens, Socrates and Plato, are damned eternally? Yet the best of the joke is, that this humbug gains credence, and is taken for Gospel? When you persuade yourself and those who will listen to you, that you can live upon love, or that you cannot live without it, do you not, dear friend, cheat yourself, and perpetrate one grand humbug? When you speak of your likes and dislikes, do you really believe all that you say? Do you not often suspect, that your neighbour’s tales are a little varnished with a romantic gloss, and can you wonder if your neighbour thinks the same of your own stories? The consolation is, that both are unwittingly humbugged.