apostolic zeal ranged all over Asia, even into Tibet and Tartary.
According to the Saxon chronicle, our own King Alfred sent alms to India
in 883 for St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew, and at that date there
certainly existed, besides some small Christian communities on the
Coromandel coast, two flourishing communities on the Malabar coast,
where the so-called Syrian Church has maintained itself to the present
day. Another curious and perhaps equally ancient link with the West may
still be seen to survive to-day in the small community of white Jews at
Cochin, which, according to their own tradition, was founded when their
forefathers were driven out of Palestine after the destruction of the
second Temple. To the charter which they still have in their possession,
inscribed, like most west coast title deeds, on copper plates, the date
assigned by the best authorities is about 700 A.D., and the powers and
privileges which were specifically conferred upon their ancestors show
that at that period already they had acquired in a remarkable degree the
confidence and friendship of the Hindu Kings of Malabar. The decline of
both Christian and Jewish communities seems to have begun, indeed, with
the appearance of the first Portuguese invaders from Europe, whose
incursions destroyed the peace and tolerance which Christian and Jew had
enjoyed in the days of undisturbed Hindu rule.

To what period the subjection of the old Dravidian stock to the superior
civilization of the Aryans dates back, or in what manner it was
continued, there is little as yet to show. All that is actually known is
that at some very remote period Aryan Hinduism was imported into
Southern India by Brahmans from the north, who established it in the
first place probably by force, and whose descendants have ever since
maintained the claims of their sacred caste to a position of religious
and social pre-eminence even greater than that which any other Brahmans
of the present day have succeeded in retaining. Nowhere else in India
does the Brahman, as such, wield the power and assert the prerogatives
which the Namputri Brahman enjoys on the Malabar coast. Even the
Maharajahs of Travancore, who by birth belong to the Kshatrya or warrior
caste, have to be "born again" by a peculiar and costly ceremony into
the superior caste before they ascend the throne, and one sept of the
Namputri Brahmans successfully exacts in the person of the head of the
Azhvancheri family recogniti