well;"--when the apostle said thus, I think we ought to feel little doubt as to the course we ought to pursue regarding the social customs of the peoples of India. [39] "The name 'Laws of Manu,' somewhat resembles a pious fraud, for the 'laws' are merely the laws or customs of a school or association of Hindoos, called the Mânavas, who lived in the country rendered holy by the divine river Saraswati. In this district the Hindoos first felt themselves a settled people, and in this neighbourhood they established colleges and hermitages, or âsramas, from some of which we may suppose Brâhmanas, Upanishads, and other religious compositions may have issued; and under such influences we may imagine the Code of Manu to have been composed. "The Mânavas were undoubtedly an active, energetic people, who governed themselves, paid taxes to the kins, established internal and external trade, and drew up an extensive system of laws and customs, to which they appended real and imaginary awards. This system appears to have worked so well, that it was adopted by other communities, and then the organizers announced it as laws given to them by their divine progenitor, the great Mana. They added passages, moreover, which assert the divine claims of Brâhmans and the inferiority of the rest of mankind. Such assertions are little more than rhetorical flourishes, for Brâhmans never were either so omnipotent or so unamiable as the Code would represent them; nor were the Sûdras ever so degraded. In Sanskrit plays and poems, weak and indigent Brâhmans are by no means unfrequent; and, on the other hand, we meet with Sûdras who had political rights, and even in the Code find the pedigrees of great men traced up to Sûdra ancestors."--MRS. MANNING'S _Ancient and Mediæval India_, v. i., p. 276. [40] As an instance that a man can abandon all religious rites whatever, and retain his caste unimpaired and unaltered, I may mention that my native clerk told me that he had done nothing in the way of religion at all for years; but that, of course, made no difference to him in the eyes of his neighbours, who didn't care what he did, as long as he did not depart from the social customs of his caste. I once said to a native shopkeeper in Bangalore, "What religion are you of?" "Oh!" he answered with a smile, "no religion at all, sir." But I need not trouble the reader with further evidence to show that a man may drop his religion altogether without dropping his caste, and that therefore religion and caste have no necessary connection with one another whatever.