* * * * * _Opinions Gathered from the Press._ CASTE PREJUDICE. REV. W. H. WARD, D.D.—ADDRESS AT CLEVELAND. Christianity in India has utterly succumbed to caste once. The missionaries of the last century, after beginning nobly, yielded and allowed caste to rule in the Christian church. “I have carefully avoided all coercive measures,” said Schwarz, in 1787. Bishop Heber allowed caste. Not till 1833 did the English Church missionaries decide, through the voice of the noble Bishop Wilson, in a peremptory pastorate letter of July 5, 1833, that no mercy should be shown to the accursed thing. “The distinctions of caste,” said he, “must be abandoned decidedly, immediately, finally. Birth condemns no class of men, from generation to generation, to inevitable contempt, debasement and servitude. The enforcement of this order broke up churches. A Sudra would sooner give up his Christianity than take the communion with a pariah. The war has been long, and is not yet fully concluded. An American Lutheran missionary lately felicitated himself that now the two castes have been prevailed upon to take the Lord’s Supper together. In a London missionary station some ten years ago a few pariahs were converted, whereupon the Shanars, at their own cost, built a chapel for their low caste brethren, lest they should have to worship with them. A few years ago a missionary led several low caste Christians into a chapel door, whereupon the high caste occupants hastily scrambled out of the window. * * * Do I say that caste is broken down? Not quite. Even yet it lingers: and where it lingers chiefest is, it shames me to say, in education and Christianity. To the infinite disgrace of the church, the chief denominations of the South divide on the caste line. The white Christians and churches are put purposely into one denomination, and the colored into another. We have white Methodists and black Methodists; white Baptist associations and black Baptist associations. What denomination is there but the Roman Catholic, the Episcopalian and the Congregational, in which whites and blacks can stand equally before God? In the South both whites and blacks accept this condition, for the most part, as right. It does not occur to them to protest against it. Even the negroes accept the humiliation to which they have become accustomed. No voice of protest is raised. Whites and blacks alike seem satisfied that God’s church united above should be divided below. Why lingers Jerubbaal amid the wheat-threshings of Manasseh? Why comes no Gideon forth, inspired with the zeal of the Lord, to cut down this horrible idol of his father’s house? * * * *