Thus, when Hindooism had become corrupt, the deeply meditative system of Buddha was introduced into many parts of India, and certainly brought a much higher theory and purer code than that founded on the garbled nature- worship of ancient India; but both religions co-existed, and, indeed, Buddhism was in one aspect an offshoot of the Hindoo faith. Christianity--planted, as is believed, by St. Thomas, on the Malabar coast--never became wholly extinct, although tinged with Nestorianism, but it was never adopted by the natives at large, and the learning and philosophy of the Brahmins would have required the utmost powers of the most learned fathers of the Church to cope with them, before they could have been convinced. The rigid distinctions of caste have made it more difficult for the Church which "preaches the Gospel to the poor," to be accepted in India than anywhere else. Accounting himself sprung from the head of Brahma, the Brahmin deems himself, and is deemed by others, as lifted to an elevation which has no connection either with moral goodness, with wealth, or with power; and which is as much the due of the most poverty- stricken and wicked member of the caste as of the most magnificent priest. The Sudras, the governing and warlike class, are next in order, having sprung from the god's breast, and beneath these come infinite grades of caste, their subdivisions each including every man of each trade or calling which he pursues hereditarily and cannot desert or change, save under the horrible penalty of losing caste, and becoming forsaken and despised of every creature, even the nearest kindred. The mere eating from a vessel used to contain food for a person of a different caste is enough to produce contamination; the separation is complete, and the whole constitution of body and mind have become so inured to the distinction, that the cost of becoming a convert is infinitely severer in India than ever it could have been even in Greece or Rome, where, though the Christian might be persecuted even to the death, he was not thrust out of the pale of humanity like a Hindoo convert who transgresses caste. The Christians of Malabar are a people living to themselves, and the great Bengalee nations never appear to have had the Gospel carried to them. The Mahometan conquest filled India with professors of the faith of the Koran; but these were a dominant race, proud and separate from the mass of people, whom they did not win to their faith, and thus the Hindoo idolatry had prevailed untouched for almost the whole duration of the world, when the wealth of India in the early days of naval enterprise first began to tempt small mercantile companies of Europeans to form factories on the coast merely for purposes of traffic, without at first any idea that these would lead to possession or conquest, and, in general, without any sense of the responsibility of coming as Christians into a heathen world.