viduals would be checked by authority or tempered by discretion. There were many in India at this time, not mere fanatics or enthusiasts, who regarded the conversion of the people of India as a not improbable event, and the endeavour to promote it as a duty, which no human mandate could overrule. One officer had openly preached to the soldiers of his regiment at Barrackpur: another had inscribed the Lord's Prayer on pillars on the main road entering the capital of his district.
It is significant that, on so important an occasion as the banquet given by the Directors of the East India Company to Lord Canning on his appointment as Governor-General, Lord Palmerston had used language, which alarmists in India might not unreasonably interpret as suggestive that the conversion of the people was among the hopes, if not the immediate projects, of the Government. 'Perhaps,' he said, 'it might be our lot to confer on the countless millions of India a higher and nobler gift than any mere human knowledge; but that must be left to the hands of Time and the gradual improvement of the people.'
The hands of Time seemed moving very quick; the pace was becoming dangerous. 'The faster the current glides,' wrote Sir H. Lawrence in 1856, 'the more need of caution, of watching the weather, the rocks and shoals.' Even while he wrote, the breakers were close a-head. What — millions of anxious hearts were asking — did all these changes portend to the social and religious ascendancy of the Bráhman, to his prestige,
