course of time the process of intermingling, as we have seen, assumed such proportions that the priestly class, in their pride of blood, felt naturally tempted to recognize, as of old, only two "colours," the Aryan Brahman and the non-Aryan Sudra. Under these conditions the religious practices of the lower race could hardly have failed in the long run to tell seriously upon the spiritual life of the lay body of the Brahmanical community. To what extent this may have been the case, our limited knowledge of the early phases of the sectarian worship of the people does not enable us to determine. But, on the other hand, the same process of racial intermixture also tended to gradually draw the lower race more or less under the influence of the Brahmanical forms of worship, and thus contributed towards the shaping of the religious system of modern Hinduism. The grossly idolatrous practices, however, still so largely prevalent in the Dravidian South, show how superficial, after all, that influence has been in those parts of India where the admixture of Aryan blood has been so slight as to have practically had no effect on the racial characteristics of the people. These present-day practices, and the attitude of the Brahman towards them, help at all events to explain the aversion with which the strange rites of the subjected tribes were looked upon by the worshippers of the Vedic pantheon. At the same time, in judging the apparently inhuman way in which the Sudras were treated in the caste rules, one has always to bear in mind the fact that the belief in metempsychosis was already universal at the time, and seemed to afford the only rational explanation of the apparent injustice involved in the unequal distribution of the good things in this world; and that, if the Sudra was strictly excluded from the religious rites and beliefs of the superior classes, this exclusion in no way involved the question of his ultimate emancipation and his union with the Infinite Spirit, which were as certain in his case as in that of any other sentient being. What it did make impossible for him was to attain that union immediately on the cessation of his present life, as he would first have to pass through higher and purer stages of mundane existence before reaching that goal; but in this respect he only shared the lot of all but a very few of the saintliest in the higher spheres of life, since the ordinary twice-born would be liable to sink, after his present life, to grades yet lower than that of the Sudra.