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 equal) “and of Brahma, nor were the members of either section held ineligible for the offices of the priesthood.”  And, in the note below, the reader will find additional evidence which will show him that caste in Ceylon, just as it originally was in India, can and does exist merely as a division of ranks, and that it need not at all be necessarily connected with any idolatrous rites or worship.[41]

Having thus shown how caste did not originate, it may, perhaps, not be altogether superfluous if I hazard a few remarks as to the way in which it did probably originate.

The common idea of caste is that it is simply a combination of troublesome and fanciful restrictions, imposed upon the various peoples of India by those of the upper classes who desired to keep themselves above the jostling of the crowd.  But this institution (if that be a correct term for it) arose naturally and regularly out of the circumstances of the times, and where these circumstances no longer exist, it will as naturally disappear; and that the last must happen we have seen from, the fact that altered circumstances have already caused the commencement of its removal amongst the people of the towns.  But the general circumstances which gave birth to caste require a few words of explanation, and the following solution seems not an unnatural one.