e true Hindu is fervently Hindu. His religion "may be described as
bound up in the bundle of his everyday existence." His intense belief in
it, and in his Caste, which is part of it, gives edge to the blade with
which he fights the entrance of a new religion to his home. This new
religion he conceives of as something inherently antagonistic to his
Caste, and as Caste is at every point connected with Hinduism, a thing
interwoven with it, as if Hinduism were the warp and Caste the woof of
the fabric of Indian life, we cannot say he is mistaken in regarding
Christianity as a foe to be fought if he would continue a Caste Hindu.
So far, in South Indian religious history, we have no example on a large
scale of anything approaching the Bramo Samaj of the North. In the more
conservative South there is almost no compromise with, and little
assimilation of, the doctrine which makes all men one in Christ.

To return to the division--Classes and Masses--the Classes comprise
members of what are known as the higher Castes, and in speaking of towns
and villages where these dwell, and of converts from among them, the
prefix "Caste" is sometimes used. Among the Classes we find women of
much tenderness of feeling and a culture of their own, but their minds
are narrowed by the petty lives they live, lives in many instances
bounded by no wider horizon than thoughts concerning their husbands and
children and jewels and curries, and always their next-door neighbour's
squabbles and the gossip of the place. Much of this gossip deals with
matters which are not of an elevating character. It takes us years to
understand it, because most of the conversation is carried on in
allusion or innuendo. But it is understood by the children. One of our
converts told me that she often prays for power to forget the words she
heard, and the things she saw, and the games she played, when she was a
little child in her mother's room.

[Illustration: This old man is the Hindu village schoolmaster. The boys
write on a strip of palm leaf with an iron style. These little lads come
to us every Sunday afternoon. Will some one remember them?]

The young girls belonging to the higher Castes are kept in strict
seclusion. During these formative years they are shut up within the
courtyard walls to the dwarfing life within, and as a result they get
dwarfed, and lose in resourcefulness and independence of mind, and above
all in courage; and this tells terribly in our work,