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JONE, 1905.)
THE PRAOTICAL VALUE OF ANTHROPOLOGY.
187
One of the saddest of creatures in my experience was a servant of my own, who had been what is known in India as a child 'easte widow. She had nevertheless married a Muhammadan and become a Muhammadan, her own kind and religion being in the circumstances impossible to her, and she paid the penalty of isolation from her home all her life. These are the instances and these are the considerations, which show how serious a personal matter it can be to change one's mother faith.
Of course, it has been done over and over again, and missionaries have succeeded with whole populations, but in every case success has been obtained by working on the line of least resistance, and has been the reward of those who have exercised something of what we call the wisdom of the serpent in ascertaining that line. This involves a most extensive knowledge of the people ; and their work and writings prove how closely the great missionaries of all sorts have studied those, amongst whom their lot has been cast, in every phase. It has always and everywhere been so. The varying festivals of Christianity in Europe, its many rituals and its myriad customs, show that the missionaries of old succeeded by adapting to their own ideals, rather than by changing, the old habits they found about them. In the East, the Bnddhists were in ancient days, and nominally still are, grert missionaries, and they have invariably worked on the same lines. I have also elsewhere had reason to point out that in the present day the most sucoessful missionary in India is, after all, the Brahman priest, and that because he apparently changes nothing, accepts the whole hagiolatry and cosmogony of the tribe be takes under his wing, declares the chief tribal god to be an emanation from the misty Hindu deity Siva, starts a custom here and a ceremony there, induces the leaders to be select and particular as to association with others, and as to marriages, eating, drinking, and smoking, and straightway is brought into being a new caste and a new sect, belonging loosely to that agglomeration of sects and small societies known generically as Hinduism. The process can be watched wherever British roads and railroads open up the wilder regions.
All this is working tactfully, and because tact is instinctive anthropological knowledge, it is working anthropologically, and wherever, without the immediate aid of the sword and superior force, any other method is tried, - wherever there has been a direct effort to work ompirically, - wherever a sudden change of old social habits has been inculcated, there has been disaster, or an unnecessary infliction of injury, or a subversion of the constitated social system, or an actual conflict with the civil authority. Mischief, not good, comes of such things. I remember, many years ago, having cause to examine the religious idens of a certain Indian tribe, and being advised to consult a missionary, who had lived with it for about twenty-five years. I wrote to him for my information, and the answer I received was that he could not give it, as his business was to convert the heathen to Christianity, not to study their religion. Such a man could not create a mission station, and was not likely to improve one placed in his charge. Another instance of the wrong spirit, born of anthropological ignorance, comes to light in the existence of certain all-important provisions in Ants of the Indias Legislature and in judicial decisions affecting the natives of India, which prevent
change of religion from affeeting, marriages celebrated, and the legitimacy of children born, before the change, and prevent reliance on customs opposed to the newly-adopted religion, Men have become Muhammadans in order to apply the Muhammadan law of divorce to former wire, as they thought legally, and men have become Christians in order to get rid of saporfluous wives and families, and what is to the point here - Christian converts have been advised by their pastors to pat away extra wives. Think of the cruel wrongs which would thes have been inflicted on lawfully married women and lawfully begotten children, and the wisdom of the legislature and of the judges will be perceived. But the strongest instance
