The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c17.s1.280

v2.c17.s1.280

**Festivals.** No system of religion designed for the community at large can prosper without festivals. A dull routine of everyday life soon begins to pall—to blunt the edge of enthusiasm—and festivals are the whetstones which take that bluntness away. They serve as whips to lash flagging devotion into ardent zeal. The laity can be held together, not by daily prayers and routine formulae, but by frequently-recurring festivals in which men, women and children may join for the sake of mirth, gaiety and entertainment, with which religion is blended for their benefit. The character of the festivals may vary with reference to the intellectual condition of the people for whom they are intended; but in every system of religion which recognises festivals—and there is none that does not—there is an attempt to bend, to descend from the lofty chair of the solemn and the venerable, to take the lower orders of the people by the hand and to make them partake of the solace of religion sweetened with the honey of entertainment. They serve not only to keep alive the hold of religion on the masses and to familiarise them with its history, but also to ensure a steady income to the exchequer of the clergy. The necessity for them is so absolute that even the atheistical Buddhists could not forego the opportunities for them; and in our own times there is not a sect, whether Deistic, Theistic, Atheistic or Positivist, which has not its festive gathering of some kind or other.