are Hindus.
And yet a great many people in the West think of these people as the
pure worshippers of the highest type of the Brahmanical faith!

And it should not be forgotten that all over India there are probably
fifty millions of people who are the so-called outcasts of the land,
the miserable product of the caste system of Hinduism. They are "the
submerged tenth" of India. They are not only socially ostracized, they
are under the definite ban of the Hindu faith. They are the hewers of
wood and drawers of water of Brahmanism. They have no place in
Hinduism proper; they are not permitted to enter any of its temples.
They have no right to receive whatever comforts religion may confer;
its rights and its privileges are entirely denied to them. But the
tyranny of the religion has been such, during the many centuries of
the past, as to keep this class of people not only in absolute social
servitude, but also in religious dependence; and has taught them
(because it has compelled them) to be satisfied with the spiritual
crumbs which are the meanest remnants of what the religion professes
to give its members.

I have often felt, as I have talked with these poor, miserable
Pariahs, that I was incapable of understanding their willingness to
remain thus loosely attached to a faith which denied to them its most
elementary comforts and blessings. The mystery is doubtless to be
explained by their supreme abjectness and helplessness, which have
been ground into them by many centuries of bondage. The consequence
is, that while these many millions of outcast people are numbered
among the Hindus, and regard themselves as Hindus, Hinduism itself has
for them nothing but curses, and, more than all others, they must be
satisfied with the devil-worship of their fathers.

5. Beneath all these lower aspects of popular Hinduism is still found
what may be called its lowest stratum--Fetichism. There are many
people and tribes in India who have not ascended sufficiently high, in
religious conception, to make for themselves definite images of the
gods they worship. Like the African, they are content to take natural
objects, such as a rock or a stone, and regard it as possessed of some
spirit and worship it. Sir Alfred Lyall, that well-known authority on
India, has told us that one can find in India, as in no other land,
religion of all forms and in all grades of development,--from the
lowest step of animism to the most spiritual and abstruse