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course we have pursued in this matter, but on the far more weighty and authoritative teaching of circumstances. I think you were present—as several of us now out here were—at a sermon preached before the Cambridge Church Society by Dean Stanley, in which he spoke at length of Bp. Mackenzie, and gave as the principle which had underlain and formed that simple and noble life, the rule always 'to do what was natural under the circumstances,' and certainly if this may be accepted as a true guide for conduct, I cannot think that we should have been acting in accordance with it, or indeed otherwise than most unnaturally under the circumstances in which we found ourselves placed, if we had refused to take a share in the work which was being carried on amongst the Delhi Chamárs. For I need scarcely remind you that this work is none of our seeking or of our creating. So far from this it is now more than 20 years since attention was especially directed to this caste, and Catechists appointed not indeed exclusively but very mainly with the object of teaching and influencing them. For many years the results of this effort, though not altogether lacking were still very small, and I think there can be but little doubt that had we at that time and while the work was still so to speak merely tentative, reached Delhi, we should have held aloof from it almost or altogether, as having no special claim on us and not falling within our proper province. But during the famine of 1877-78 things materially altered, for during these and the two or three following years large numbers of these poor people came forward to receive Baptism, and after longer or shorter periods of probation and preparation were admitted to the Church of Christ. It was at this point that our Mission came upon the scene, and we found ourselves at once face to face with a body of Christians, including indeed among its numbers a fair sprinkling of men of a very different and really Christian type, for the most part Catechists or agents of the Mission in other capacities, but with an overwhelming majority of men drawn from this caste, numbering some eight hundred souls, and giving rise to the gravest problems of future discipline and organisation; how grave you will have gathered from much that you have already heard and may still further realise, when I repeat that of this eight hundred it was only a small minority who had been in the eye of man at any rate in any real way affected by their Christianity, the rest remaining in full fellowship with their caste, sharing in its feasts, idolatrous and otherwise, adhering to the old ceremonies of birth, marriage, death, wholly ignoring Sundays, etc.; Christians in short in
