of a different saint. Thus they made the circuit of the grounds and advanced to the church, when, with a burst of glittering wheels and fireballs, the saints turned off, while the priest, and the multitude, entering the church, fell down before a female image clothed in red, and bearing an infant in her arms.
My heart sank within me and my soul turned sick at the thought that this gross idolatry, differing in nothing but in title from the idolatry of the heathen around us, was done in the name of Christ; and that for three hundred years this had been set before the Hindus as the religion of Jesus Christ and of that God who has said, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them nor serve them; for I, JEHOVAH thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.”[1]
- ↑ The writer would gladly pass by these sad and painful facts. But he would be false to his duty to truth and religion, did he not bear witness against the fearful and degrading idolatry in India of that church, by which Christianity is misrepresented before the heathen, and multitudes deceived to their eternal ruin.
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