its authority from, religion. It
enforces all that it sanctions by the most compact and relentless
religious system the world has known. It maintains that men have been
created into a great number of castes or classes from none of which can
they, by any possibility, pass into another. In whatever social stratum a
man is born there must he live and die. It is impious for him to attempt
to evade or to violate this heavenly classification. His interests and all
his rights are confined to that one caste of his birth. It is sin for him
to marry out of it or, in any way, to transgress his natal compact with
it. Neither added wealth, growing culture, a new ambition, nor anything
else can enable him to change his caste. All the forces of religion are
directed, like a mighty engine of tyranny, to bind him to it.

This sentiment of caste, after millenniums of teaching, of rigid
observance and custom, has become even more than second nature to the
Hindu,--it has grown into a sweet necessity of his life, from whose claims
and demands he neither expects nor desires relief. To the ordinary Hindu a
change of caste would be as unexpected, yea as impossible, as his sudden
change into the lower brute, or into the higher angelic, kingdom.

When Christianity was first established in India the problem of the
adoption or the rejection of caste by the Christian church had to be
faced. It was rejected by the earliest Christian community in India; for
we find no traces of it in the Syrian church on the coast of Malabar
today. Even caste titles, that dearest remnant of that system to all other
native Christians in India, have entirely disappeared from that community.
It is a great pity that the history of that victory over caste has not
been preserved as a lesson and a heritage to later Christians.

The Romish Church, which next invaded India, unfortunately despised the
Syrian community, sought no instruction from its history, made a friend of
the caste system and adopted it in all its hideousness. It did not wait to
consider the terrible fact, so patent to all at present, that Hinduism and
caste are convertible terms--that one cannot cease to be a Hindu who
maintains the caste system in its integrity. Its intention was, no doubt,
good in its way. It was an effort to make an easy way out of Hinduism into
Christianity and thus to swell the tide of incoming converts. But,
unfortunately, the path was made _too_ easy; the narrow gate was
sufficient