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THE PRACTICAL PATH.
Hindu legislators were forced to recognise the claim of brahmanas to a special sanctity as a class.
So far as interdining is concerned, it does not seem to have ever been prohibited among the followers of one and the same religion, but it is essentially a question of conventional usage upon which depend the preservation, welfare and prosperity of society. There are certain considerations which necessarily debar one from being admitted into the higher circles of a community even in Christian and Muslim countries, where the intercourse of men is the least restricted, and there is nothing surprising in the fact that the Hindus and Jainas should not care to sit down at the same table with washermen, sweepers, and others of a similar description whose professions and habits of life hardly render them suitable companions at a feast. The penalty for an infringement of these rules, it may be pointed out, is not the loss of religion, but only excommunication, which implies nothing more than exclusion from social circles in respect of interdining, and, consequently, also, inter-marriage, for a shorter or longer period according to the nature of transgression,
The basis of caste exclusiveness, then, is not wealth or worldly status, as it undoubtedly is in European society, but spiritual purity pure and simple, though people sometimes unreasonably extend its operation to cases not acually falling within its scope. Some excuse for the wider application of the caste rule among the Hindus is to be found in the fact that their religion has become the fold of so many different and divergent forms of belief that it is practically impossible to
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