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 and superficial as changes of that sort always are with unenlightened people, but a number of positive evils would follow from the necessary abandonment of the restrictions of caste; and we may therefore conclude that, as regards the whole population, the effect of caste in helping to prevent the adoption of our interpretation of Christianity is of incalculable advantage.

When we turn to the town populations the case is widely different.  We have seen that for them the practical advantages of caste can hardly be said to exist at all, and therefore a change of religion which involved its abolition would, as regards any part of the society, at least produce no evil.  Here, at least, we are on safe ground.  But this is not all.  We see that with the better classes education and