One of the most conspicuous of the Jesuit missionaries to India, after Xavier, was Nobili, who reached Madura about the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is pretended that his predecessors had been unable to convert any of the Brahmins, inasmuch as they had labored exclusively with the pariahs, who, besides being shunned and despised by the Brahmins, had paid no heed whatsoever to their Christian admonitions. Nobili, therefore, taxed his ingenuity to discover some practical method of removing this difficulty. He had before him numerous examples of those who had spread the cause of Christianity by openly professing and courageously vindicating it. There was something inspiring in the thought that in its past successes Christianity had required no disguises, but had achieved its victories over paganism in the field of open and manly controversy. To a devout and Christian mind there was no ground of compromise between Brahminism and Christianity. One or the other had to yield--they could not unite. Nobili knew this, and but for his Jesuit training would scarcely have departed from the plain line of Christian duty. With his mind, however, disciplined by the belief that it was his duty to be "all things to all men," he imitated the example of Mahomet, who went to the mountain when it would not come to him, by casting aside his character of Christian and becoming a Brahmin himself. He assumed the character and position of a "_Saniassi_;" that is, the highest caste among the Hindoos. What that word means is not very plain, but the Jesuits insist that those Brahmins who bore it had given some indications of penitence, and that the object of Nobili was to insinuate himself into their favor, secretly and by false pretenses, and thus bring them over to Christianity. There is much reason for believing that this was an afterthought, set up as a defense when the flagrant and unchristian conduct of the Jesuits excited general distrust among the Christians of Europe. But if it expressed the real motive existing at the time, it was then, as always, wholly without justification or excuse--a plain and manifest breach of Christian obligation and duty. He could not become a Saniassi without denying that he either was or had ever been a Christian, and without solemnly affirming that he was a native Hindoo, and not a European--the latter, known by the hated name of Feringees, being held in special and universal contempt by all the natives, and especially by the Brahmins.