o assert that the castes were of divine origin.
They wrote that down and handed it on. We came to India, and finding these
statements ready to hand, have simply swallowed them down, and added them
to the number of illusions existing as regards India. But the facts really
are, that castes and orders of men sprang up, we don't exactly know how.
Brahmin writers described the castes, or at least part of them, and, in
the course of time, the writings were said to have caused the castes,
instead of the castes having caused the writings.

But whatever may be the facts as regards caste, we know that caste can
exist without idolatry, and idolatry without caste; and that though the
Brahmins, with their usual desire to incorporate everything in life with
religion, gathered caste into their garners, and endeavoured to increase
and extend it, still there is fair evidence for asserting that these two
institutions have no necessary connection, and that, as it was perfectly
possible to wind them up together, so it is perfectly possible to unwind
them and produce again an entire separation. In a word, it is perfectly
possible for a man to retain caste, not as believing it to be part of his
native idolatrous religion, but as believing it to be (what it really was
till the Brahmins seized hold of it and attached it to their faith) a
civil institution which had sprung up in remote times, and had been
inherited by him, just as rank and station are inherited in this
country.[40] And that caste can exist without religion, and alongside of a
religion as opposite to Brahminism as Christianity is, we have the most
indisputable evidence supplied by the late Sir Emerson Tennent, in his
"History of Christianity in Ceylon."

"Caste," he wrote, "as it exists at the present day amongst the Buddhists
of Ceylon, is purely a social distinction, and entirely disconnected with
any sanction or pretensions derivable from their system of religion. Nor
is evidence wanting that, even at a comparatively modern period, such was
equally its aspect amongst the natives throughout the continent of India,
by whom caste was held not as a sacred, but as a secular discrimination of
ranks. The earliest notice of India by the Greek historians and
geographers enumerates the division of the people into Brahmins,
Kistrayas, Vaisyas, and Sudras; but this was a classification which
applied equally to the followers of Buddha" (who preached that, in the
sight of God, all men were