r. David Downie, a much older Rochester
man, and one of the pioneers and leaders of the Telugu Mission. He
graduated from Rochester in 1872, the year in which I began my work as
president of the seminary. I cannot easily express my gratification at
finding him in South India to welcome me, and to accompany me during a
large part of my stay on this field. Few men have so noble a record.
Though he retired from active service ten years ago, and is now devoting
himself to writing the history of the mission, he is still vigorous in
mind and heart, and to meet him is to come in contact with "an
incarnation"--an incarnation of the missionary spirit. He has seen "the
little one" become not only "a thousand," but well nigh a hundred
thousand. His faith is great, that this whole Telugu Land will bow to
Christ's scepter. Long may he live, to bless India and the world!

XI

THE DRAVIDIAN TEMPLES

The Dravidians are supposed by most ethnologists to have been the
aborigines of India. When they were subdued by the Aryans from the
north, they were crowded southward and were compelled to serve their
conquerors. This subjugation was the origin of caste; the weaker became
hewers of wood and drawers of water for the stronger. The Brahman would
have no social intercourse with the Sudra, and thought even his touch a
profanation. For the Brahman represented Brahma, was in fact Brahma
incarnate, while the Sudra was a manifestation of deity in inferior
clay. Yet the Brahman needed the Sudra, and had to propitiate him in
order to use him. So the Aryan absorbed into his own system some of the
Dravidian gods, and usually did so by marrying to Dravidian female
divinities male deities of his own. Siva, the Aryan god, for example,
took for his wife the Dravidian goddess Kali. In many ways like this,
the Aryan and the Dravidian united to form the Hindu. The Hindu religion
is a composite--a corruption of the nature-worship of the earlier Vedas
by its union with the more cruel and debasing features of the Dravidian
idolatry. The renowned temples of Southern India best represent this
mongrel form of Hinduism, and show Hinduism in its most corrupt
development under Dravidian influences.

The massiveness and vastness of these temples demonstrate the power of
the religious instinct in man, even when that instinct is most
perverted. With all their grossness and crudity, these shrines reveal a
wealth of imagination and an artistic inventiveness, w