ly enlarged for the Hindu to enter with his burden of heathen
prejudices and superstitions, and it soon became the highway of
insincerity and hypocrisy. Moreover, the Romish Church has found, to its
cost, that an easy way from Hinduism to Christianity is an equally easy
path to return. A man who carried much of his Hinduism with him into the
Christian Church was easily drawn back by the remaining old ties and
affections. The consequence is that, while Romanism has made large inroads
upon Hinduism in some places, it has only been for a time; and the
back-sliders have been as numerous as the new converts; so that Roman
Catholicism has made little net progress in India for many years.

This alliance which Christianity made, four centuries ago, with caste was,
thus, a fatal one. It gave also a clue to the earliest Protestant
missionaries--a clue which they, in a weak moment, decided to follow. For,
the first Danish missionaries also made a sad compromise with this monster
evil. I presume that this may be regarded as a continental failing of that
day, when in Europe class differences were great and almost
insurmountable. Human rights and individual liberty were not held so
sacred, or so scrupulously defended, in Europe in those days as they are
in Anglo-Saxon countries today. Otherwise any alliance by the Church with
the caste system would have been an impossibility in India. Even today
some Protestant missionaries from the European continent are found in
India who defend the adoption of the caste system by the Christian Church.
How different would have been the attitude of the Protestant Church
towards this heathenish institution had men of the Anglo-Saxon type of
today rather than Continentals of two centuries ago started its work in
South India! In any case, the attitude of compromise assumed towards the
caste system in those early days has led to interminable evil and to
constant trouble in the Christian Church in that land.

After caste had first found admission as a friend and then was discovered
to be an uncompromising enemy to Christian life and principles, much
effort was made to expel it. Nearly all Protestant missions now denounce
it, root and branch, and preach against it, and in various ways try to
check and to cast it out. But with no great success thus far. The false
step taken at the beginning has cost the Church terribly. Today in South
India more than nine-tenths of all Protestant native Christians, while
t