1831, at any rate, treated Christianity worse than they treated the vilest of creeds. For instance, our regulations expressly provided that converts to Christianity should be liable to be deprived not only of property, but of children and wife. We obliged Christians to drag the cars of idols, and our magistrates caned them publicly if they disobeyed. Our officials were employed to pull down churches and to build mosques. Thus our administrative Jacobins attacked their own religion without scruple, their policy being the contemporary counterpart of our political atheism at home. They filled the rôle of ostlers to Juggernaut. They took India to be the tied-house of paganism.
Such a scandal could evidently not last, and since then the administration has endeavoured to be strictly impartial, equally friendly or equally indifferent to all sides, presenting itself as of the religion of all, and of the convictions of none. The Indian government, like some beatific Buddha, sits aloof in the enjoyment of theological nirvana. "When Malunka asked the Buddha whether the existence of the world is eternal or not eternal, he made him no reply; but the reason of this was that it was considered by the teacher to be an unprofitable inquiry."
Accordingly, Christianity has made its own way since then, without particular let or hindrance. Will it conquer India? On this matter we have valuable testimony in the shape of a small work
