Indian thought, the demands of Indian parents, and the strong representations of Indian chiefs are all in favour of religious education." No doubt "the ingenuous youths," as Gibbon called them, in many cases, "reject and despise the religion of the multitude." But even supposing that such views became those of the majority, and that atheism gained a wide footing, no nation would be constituted which we could justifiably abandon to itself.
The third religious choice before India is to embrace the truths of Christianity. India has been familiar with our faith from time out of mind, and the Indian branch of the Church is traced by tradition to the labours of St. Thomas himself. It was King Alfred who inaugurated our Indian connection by sending alms to the foundation that is consecrated by that Apostle's name.
It is a strange fact, for which history vouches, that, coincidently with our definite advent into Hindustan as a governing power, Christianity was struck with a decline. That opinion is founded on the evidence given at the parliamentary inquiry in 1832. As the Abbé Dubois pointed out on that occasion, "the Christian religion has been visibly on the decline during these past eighty years," and the priests were so abandoned, or so starving, as to make "a kind of traffic of the sacraments."
Perhaps this deterioration was hastened by the singular conduct of our government, who up to
