# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1859_S279
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On Caste Distinction in East India. 279

love, there we will find them ready too, provided only that they otherwise have the right disposition of heart. For example: on my last journey from Tranquebar to Madras I was stung by a scorpion. My Tamil helper noticed it, and before I had even said a word about it, he hurried up to me, seized my injured finger with great haste, and sucked the poison out of it for about a quarter of an hour, by which the pain was greatly eased and all ill effects were prevented. To eat with me, however, the man certainly would not, for on the one hand he would not have understood how he could thereby give me a sign of love, and on the other hand he would not have wished to offend against the custom and habit of his own people. But that he was caught up neither in the prejudice that he would defile himself by fellowship with me, nor held back by any lack of love and gratitude, he showed by this very act; for he did not shrink from entering into a far more intimate contact with me, even from sucking in my own blood, since here it was truly a matter of a kindness and a service of love.

In a similar way one must also be cautious in one's judgment concerning the refusal of table-fellowship among the natives themselves. Here too one would often, with injustice, charge them with pride or unlovingness, whereas it is only a matter of custom and habit. One example, of how between two people bound together in the most heartfelt love there is nevertheless no table-fellowship, may make this vivid. — The mother of our Munshi Samuel was baptized, together with her husband, only in her more mature years, by the late Missionary Bärenbruck, in Mayaveram. Since both spouses had been Shivaites, and thus by no means accustomed to meat dishes, it is easy to imagine that in their old age too they retained an aversion to meat. The husband has now already been dead for several years, but the old mother has not overcome this aversion to this very day. Her son Samuel, however, who came at an early age into a Christian boarding school, became accustomed there to meat dishes — with the exception of beef. For many years now, mother and son have again lived together in one house, and the relationship between them is the most intimate; yet to this hour the mother cooks and eats her vegetable fare entirely by herself, while the son too, with his family, has his food prepared and eats it separately from the mother. Indeed, the old mother would by no means even use one of her son's cooking vessels for herself, in which meat might possibly at some time have been prepared. And yet it is already evident, from their living together and from their otherwise good relationship, that it is neither superstitious, heathen dread nor ill will, but only a natural aversion aroused by inherited habit, that occasions this separateness.

five times more than it does now, since European articles are disproportionately expensive in India, and that it is therefore not to be thought of that an Indian congregation could ever support its own pastor. Note of the Editor.