India, and probably all others, are not what ordinary descriptions of Hinduism would make them out to be. With the exception of a few monographs like Hunter's Rural Annals, and occasional descriptions of village life, almost all books that have come before the public proceed upon the assumption that, as are the Brahmans, so are the Hindus. They are filled with descriptions of Brahman ceremonial. They comprehend only Brahman literature. The vices and the virtues of the priesthood are ascribed to the nation as a whole. There seldom seems to dawn upon the mind a single suspicion that perhaps so exclusive a caste, so jealous of contact with the impure masses around, so determined to keep to itself all the religious books, so pertinacious in maintaining its own essential superiority, is not a fair representative of the masses it despises, and with whom it will have no dealings. As a matter of fact the Brahmans are as different from the people in social habit, religious practice, and mode of thought, as the Greek philosophers from the vulgar crowd in Thessaly or Sicily, who plodded in their fields sublimely indifferent to the wrangles of Epicurean and Stoic, Peripatetic and Platonist.
Even in religious Hinduism the same truth holds good. The modern representative Brahman scorns the service of the temples, and looks upon the actual priests as a lower caste. In hundreds of pagodas the poojari is not a Brahman at all; and the churchwardens, under the system recently introduced by the Indian Government, are seldom Brahmans, even in the
