[Sidenote:  Fluidity of Hindu thought; rigidity of Hindu practice.]

For the student of this special aspect of Hinduism a second pertinent fact here emerges, namely, that Hindu practice is much more established than Hindu doctrine.  The unchangeableness of Hindu ritual is not a new idea; it is its bearing on doctrine that has not been clearly considered.  There is, then, a distinctly recognised Hindu orthodoxy in manners and worship, at least for each Hindu community, while there is no orthodoxy in doctrine.  The broad distinctive marks of Hindu practice, we may repeat, are the social usage of caste, and the employment of brahmans in religious ritual.  With ideas, then, thus fluid and practice thus rigid, it will be easily understood that Christian and modern ideas have made much greater headway in India than Christian customs and modes of worship.  The mind of educated India has been Christianised to a much greater extent than the religious or domestic practices have been.  Perhaps it might be said that all down the centuries of Christian Church history, opinion has often been in advance of worship and the social code, that social and religious conventionalities have lagged behind belief.  If so, it is the marked conservatism in ceremonial that is noteworthy in India.  While Hindu beliefs are dissolving or dropping out of the mind, Hindu practices are successfully resisting the solvent influences or only slowly being transformed.

[Sidenote:  More progress towards Christian thought than Christian practice.]

It is not too much to say that the educated Hindu does not regard a fixed creed as a part of his Hinduism, but rather boasts of the doctrinal comprehensiveness of his religion.  He joyfully lives in a ferment of religious thought, surrendering to the doctrine of a satisfying teacher, but the idea of creed subscription, or a doctrinal stockade, is utterly foreign to his nature.  For him the standards are the fixed social usages and the brahmanical ritual.  Hear a Hindu himself on the matter, the historian of Hindu Civilisation during British Rule [i. 60]:  “Hinduism has ever been and still is as liberal and tolerant in matters of religious belief as it is illiberal and intolerant in matters of social conduct.”  In a recent pamphlet[68] an Anglo-Indian civilian gives his evidence clearly, if too baldly, of the fixity of practice and the mobility of belief.  “The educated Hindu,” he writes, “has largely lost his belief in the old myths about the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, and has learned to smile at many of the superstitions of his uneducated countrymen.  But Hinduism as a religion that tells a man not only what he shall eat, what he shall drink, and wherewithal he shall be clothed, but tells him how to perform innumerable acts that men of other nations never think have anything to do with religion at all, Hinduism as an intricate social code, stands largely unaffected by the flood of Western education that has been poured upon the country.  He instances a brahman, one of his own subordinates, college-bred and English-speaking, who, when away from home with his superior officer, had to cook his food for himself, because the brahman servant he had with him was of a lower division than his own, and he could not afford to hire a man of his own status among brahmans.”