Note 65 — Chapter II · A GROUP OF CLASSICAL ARCHÆOLOGISTS AND EXPLORERS. (continued 2)

That my needful abridgment, in the text, of Mr. Payne Knight’s words may not misrepresent his meaning, I subjoin the whole of the passage:—‘Had this powerful engine of influence’ [namely, loss of caste] ‘been employed in favour of pure morality and efficient virtue, the Hindoos might have been the most virtuous and happy of the human race. But the ambition of a hierarchy has, as usual, employed it to serve its own particular interests instead of those of the community in general.... Should the pious labours of our missionaries succeed in diffusing among them a more pure and more moral, but less uniform and less energetic system of religion, they may improve and exalt the character of individual men, but they will for ever destroy the repose and tranquillity of the mass.... The prevalence of European religion will be the fall of European domination.... The incarnations which form the principal subject of sculpture in all the temples of India, Tibet, Tartary, and China, are, above all others, calculated to call forth the ideal perfections of the art, by expanding and exalting the imagination of the artist, and exciting his ambition to surpass the simple imitation of ordinary forms, in order to produce a model of excellence, worthy to be the corporeal habitation of the Deity. But this no nation of the East, nor indeed of the Earth, except the Greeks and those who copied them, ever attempted.’—Analytical Inquiry, &c., p. 80.]