of Hindu ritual is not a new
idea; it is its bearing on doctrine that has not been clearly
considered. There _is_, then, a distinctly recognised Hindu orthodoxy in
manners and worship, at least for each Hindu community, while there is
no orthodoxy in doctrine. The broad distinctive marks of Hindu practice,
we may repeat, are the social usage of caste, and the employment of
brahmans in religious ritual. With ideas, then, thus fluid and practice
thus rigid, it will be easily understood that Christian and modern ideas
have made much greater headway in India than Christian customs and modes
of worship. The mind of educated India has been Christianised to a much
greater extent than the religious or domestic practices have been.
Perhaps it might be said that all down the centuries of Christian Church
history, opinion has often been in advance of worship and the social
code, that social and religious conventionalities have lagged behind
belief. If so, it is the marked conservatism in ceremonial that is
noteworthy in India. While Hindu beliefs are dissolving or dropping out
of the mind, Hindu practices are successfully resisting the solvent
influences or only slowly being transformed.

[Sidenote: More progress towards Christian thought than Christian
practice.]

It is not too much to say that the educated Hindu does not regard a
fixed creed as a part of his Hinduism, but rather boasts of the
doctrinal comprehensiveness of his religion. He joyfully lives in a
ferment of religious thought, surrendering to the doctrine of a
satisfying teacher, but the idea of creed subscription, or a doctrinal
stockade, is utterly foreign to his nature. For him the standards are
the fixed social usages and the brahmanical ritual. Hear a Hindu himself
on the matter, the historian of _Hindu Civilisation during British Rule_
[i. 60]: "Hinduism has ever been and still is as liberal and tolerant in
matters of religious belief as it is illiberal and intolerant in matters
of social conduct." In a recent pamphlet[68] an Anglo-Indian civilian
gives his evidence clearly, if too baldly, of the fixity of practice and
the mobility of belief. "The educated Hindu," he writes, "has largely
lost his belief in the old myths about the gods and goddesses of the
Hindu pantheon, and has learned to smile at many of the superstitions of
his uneducated countrymen. But Hinduism as a religion that tells a man
not only what he shall eat, what he shall drink, and wherewitha