ristian Church. At other times, like the tumbling in, unnoticed, of
slice upon slice of the bank of a great Indian river flowing through an
alluvial plain, opinion has silently altered, and only later observers
discover that the old idea has changed. Not a hundred years ago,
students of Kayasth (clerk) caste were excluded from the Sanscrit
College in Calcutta. Now, without any new ordinance, they are admitted,
as among the privileged castes, and the idea of the brotherhood of man
has thus made way. The silent invasion is strikingly illustrated in the
official _Report on Female Education in India_, 1892 to 1897. On a map
of India within the _Report_, the places where female education was most
advanced were coloured greener according to the degree of
advance--surely most inappropriate colouring, though that is not our
business. The map showed a strip of the greenest green all round the
sea-coast. There the unobserved new influence came in. The _Census
Report_ for 1901 showed the same silently obtruding influence from over
the sea in the case of the education of males. Many such silent changes
might be noted. And yet again, the most diverse ideas may be observed
side by side in a strange chequer. In the closing years of the
nineteenth century, the University of Calcutta accepted an endowment of
a lectureship "to promote Sanscrit learning and Vedantic studies," any
Hindus without distinction of caste being eligible as lecturers; and
then, shortly after, agreed to the request of the first lecturer that
none but Hindus be admitted to the exposition of the sacred texts, thus
excluding the European heads of the university from a university
lecture. Perhaps the lecturer thought himself liberal, for to men like
him at the beginning of the century it would have been an offence to
read the sacred texts with Sudras or Hindus of humble castes. According
to strict Hindu rule, only brahmans can read the sacred books.[2]

[Sidenote: Indian ideas.]

For in all three spheres, social, political, and religious, the advent
of the new age implied more or less of a conflict. India has still of
her own a social system, political ideas, and religious ideas and
ideals. In the Indian social system, caste and the social inferiority of
women stand opposed to the freedom of the individual and the equality of
the sexes that prevail in Great Britain, at least in greater degree. In
the sphere of politics, the absolutism, long familiar to the Indian
min