heir social customs; and, having come to the conclusion that there
is nothing idolatrous in these customs, we have distinctly asked those
interpreters of Christianity whom we have in India to tell us by whose
authority they have ventured to act in a way which, as has been shown, the
Apostles never did as regards the prejudices of their Jewish converts. And
generally, as regards the action of our missionaries in this matter, we
have felt ourselves justified in asserting that our English missions have
inflicted an incalculable injury on the cause of Christianity by
presenting it to the people of India as something that must necessarily
tear the whole framework of their society to pieces.

We then inquired more particularly into the origin of caste, and, having
seen that it never could have originated in the way our missionaries
suppose it to have done, we hazarded a conjecture as to the way in which
it probably did originate, and saw grounds for supposing that the
distinctions of caste came naturally about, and that they were in
principle calculated to effect exactly the same ends that the Jewish
lawgivers had in view when they framed that Levitical law which
effectually prevented the Jews from mingling socially with the races they
lived amongst. We then looked at caste from a sanitary point of view, and
came to the conclusion that in consequence of the carrion-eating habits of
the lowest castes, and of their liability to transmit the germs of
disease, the rules which prevented them from coming into contact with the
higher castes, either in the way of taking the Sacrament, or in any other
way, are of the greatest value. We next inquired into the effects of caste
as regards social intercourse, and especially as regards the exercise of
hospitality amongst people of different castes, and saw reason to think
that the restrictions of caste, with, perhaps, the exception of the very
lowest, formed no bar whatever to the exercise of hospitality. Glancing
subsequently at the action of caste feeling in confining the sympathies of
individuals more especially to the members of their own caste, we came to
the conclusion that, though caste had undoubtedly the effect of
contracting the feelings within a narrow circle, there was to be found a
compensating advantage in the fact that the claims of caste produced, in
the aggregate, a greater amount of charity, and, in short, were calculated
to produce a better general result than would be arr