fy to these facts, and it is wonderful to observe the complacent air
of satisfaction with which these statements are accepted by the witness,
who added that this difference evidently arises from the more chaste and
regular modes of life in which they fall.[35]

I have said that the native Christians are probably neither better nor
worse than the lower classes from which they are drawn, and the painfully
truthful remarks given in the note below[36] seem to show that, whatever
may be the case now (and I believe that the low-class converts are
somewhat better than they were then), the converts to Christianity must
have been originally a very indifferent set of people. Christianity,
however, if it did not make these classes much better, at any rate made
them no worse. When we turn, however, to the middle-class farmers, it is
evident that to have converted them, unless that conversion had been
preceded by enlightenment, and a more advanced civilization than they had
hitherto enjoyed, would have inflicted on them an incalculable injury, by
depriving them of restraints which, as we have seen, are in some
particulars of immense importance. To become a Christian, the first thing
required of a man is that he should give up caste, and deliver himself to
the sole guidance of his conscience; that he should give up a powerful and
effective moral restraint; that he should abandon a position which carries
with it feelings of self-respect and superiority, and resign himself to
the degrading reflection that he may eat from the same platter and drink
from the same vessel as the filthiest Pariah; and that this would be
degrading there can be little doubt. Were he an educated and enlightened
man, he would be sustained by feelings which would raise him above the
influence of such considerations. But, in the absence of enlightenment,
sad would be his fate, and melancholy the deterioration that would
inevitably ensue. The way in which that deterioration would take place,
the way in which he would become careless of what he did, or of what
became of him, has been sufficiently indicated in the previous pages of
this chapter; and to give in detail the principal reasons against a change
of faith which involved the abolition of caste, would only be to repeat
what I have already said as to the effect of the institution in
controlling the morality of the sexes and the use of alcohol. Not only,
then, I repeat, would a change of dogma be as unimproving a