ay upon you
no greater burden than [these] necessary things; that ye abstain from
meats offered unto idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and
from fornication; from which, if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do
well;"--when the apostle said thus, I think we ought to feel little doubt
as to the course we ought to pursue regarding the social customs of the
peoples of India.

[39] "The name 'Laws of Manu,' somewhat resembles a pious fraud, for the
'laws' are merely the laws or customs of a school or association of
Hindoos, called the Manavas, who lived in the country rendered holy by the
divine river Saraswati. In this district the Hindoos first felt themselves
a settled people, and in this neighbourhood they established colleges and
hermitages, or asramas, from some of which we may suppose Brahmanas,
Upanishads, and other religious compositions may have issued; and under
such influences we may imagine the Code of Manu to have been composed.

"The Manavas were undoubtedly an active, energetic people, who governed
themselves, paid taxes to the kins, established internal and external
trade, and drew up an extensive system of laws and customs, to which they
appended real and imaginary awards. This system appears to have worked so
well, that it was adopted by other communities, and then the organizers
announced it as laws given to them by their divine progenitor, the great
Mana. They added passages, moreover, which assert the divine claims of
Brahmans and the inferiority of the rest of mankind. Such assertions are
little more than rhetorical flourishes, for Brahmans never were either so
omnipotent or so unamiable as the Code would represent them; nor were the
Sudras ever so degraded. In Sanskrit plays and poems, weak and indigent
Brahmans are by no means unfrequent; and, on the other hand, we meet with
Sudras who had political rights, and even in the Code find the pedigrees
of great men traced up to Sudra ancestors."--MRS. MANNING'S _Ancient and
Mediaeval India_, v. i., p. 276.

[40] As an instance that a man can abandon all religious rites whatever,
and retain his caste unimpaired and unaltered, I may mention that my
native clerk told me that he had done nothing in the way of religion at
all for years; but that, of course, made no difference to him in the eyes
of his neighbours, who didn't care what he did, as long as he did not
depart from the social customs of his caste. I once said to a native
shopkeeper in Bang