Chapter 41

There is an old-time toast which is golden for its beauty.
"When you ascend the hill of prosperity may you not meet a friend."
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

The next picture that drifts across the field of my memory is one which
is connected with religious things. We were taken by friends to see a
Jain temple. It was small, and had many flags or streamers flying from
poles standing above its roof; and its little battlements supported a
great many small idols or images. Upstairs, inside, a solitary Jain was
praying or reciting aloud in the middle of the room. Our presence did
not interrupt him, nor even incommode him or modify his fervor. Ten or
twelve feet in front of him was the idol, a small figure in a sitting
posture. It had the pinkish look of a wax doll, but lacked the doll's
roundness of limb and approximation to correctness of form and justness
of proportion. Mr. Gandhi explained every thing to us. He was delegate
to the Chicago Fair Congress of Religions. It was lucidly done, in
masterly English, but in time it faded from me, and now I have nothing
left of that episode but an impression: a dim idea of a religious belief
clothed in subtle intellectual forms, lofty and clean, barren of fleshly
grossnesses; and with this another dim impression which connects that
intellectual system somehow with that crude image, that inadequate idol
--how, I do not know. Properly they do not seem to belong together.
Apparently the idol symbolized a person who had become a saint or a god
through accessions of steadily augmenting holiness acquired through a
series of reincarnations and promotions extending over many ages; and was
now at last a saint and qualified to vicariously receive worship and
transmit it to heaven's chancellery. Was that it?

And thence we went to Mr. Premchand Roychand's bungalow, in Lovelane,
Byculla, where an Indian prince was to receive a deputation of the Jain
community who desired to congratulate him upon a high honor lately
conferred upon him by his sovereign, Victoria, Empress of India. She had
made him a knight of the order of the Star of India. It would seem that
even the grandest Indian prince is glad to add the modest title "Sir" to
his ancient native grandeurs, and is willing to do valuable service to
win it. He will remit taxes liberally, and will spend money freely upon
the betterment of the condition of his subjects, if there is a knighthood
to be gotten by it. And he will also do good work and a deal of it to
get a gun added to the salute allowed him by the British Government.
Every year the Empress distributes knighthoods and adds guns for public
services done by native princes. The salute of a small prince is three
or four guns; princes of greater