Beloved President Richards:
Trusting that the letter I addressed to your office for President L. Snow, bearing date of June last, has been received, although detained one month on account of the steamer bearing mail having put back to Bombay, short of coal. I am doubtful that Elder Snow's communications have miscarried, as I have received none from him, save one from Malta, dated the 11th of March. In the absence of other instructions, I beg, with your permission, to communicate through the medium of the Star what might be interesting to him and others who love the cause of Zion.
In the letter referred to, I gave a brief outline of the combined opposition, military and ecclesiastical, which met our first operations in Bombay; these two powers combined leave little play for the privileges of the civil constitution.
The majority of India's European population are of the military class, the chaplains not excepted, who, by dint of their sacred offices, in their varied grades, or, as the natives of the country would say, castes, bear great sway. All are hand in hand, jolly good fellows to keep out every invading foe; and, as "Mormonism," although it makes no interference with constitutional governments, either in military or civil affairs, save to honor and obey them; still, claiming spiritual authority to teach heavenly principles, and to call upon all men to repent of their transgressions of the laws of the Lord, and to obey the Gospel of the Son of God; which duty cannot be faithfully accomplished without revealing the vile corruptions of man-made schemes—this constitutes it a most formidable foe to the usurped pretentions of the holy orders of the various contending systems, the pride, imbecility and inconsistencies of which have left a stench in the noses and a prejudice in the hearts of India's children, against the Christian religion, which will not be easily eradicated.
When an English commanding officer told me in Bombay that I should remember that I was not exactly under English law in India, I expressed the idea as a piece of petty tyranny; but we are always learning. Now I know it is so.
As I mentioned in my last, I left Bombay for this place on the 24th of June, in company of Elder Tail and family, and after one night's sailing and three days and two nights' travel by bullock wagons, in alternate rain and sunshine, we arrived at Poonah in the evening of the 27th. My first work was to hire a room to live and preach in; this was soon obtained; but the next and greatest difficulty was yet to be surmounted, viz: the possessing it; the grant of which rested with the military authorities, this being a military cantonment, hence under military law. Our position proved the more precarious on account of the Bombay interdict from entering the military boundaries, the news of which, with many of the newspapers, having reached here in so ludicrous a form that they were almost amusing, only that they were aimed against a cause so sacred.
However, in this extremity the Lord wrought for us; we therefore, after some difficulty, got permission upon the consideration that "the less these people are opposed, the less harm they will do."
I was only about two days in this new habitation, when about a dozen soldiers called, as a deputation from their regiment, to ascertain whether I had come to purchase the discharge of all who would join our Church, and send them to California, as such reports had gone through their lines, and there were about two hundred of their comrades who were ready to fall in with these conditions. I mention this farce because I believe it was a deep laid plot of the enemy to have me turned out of camp; this conviction has of late been more confirmed from the circumstance of a certain colonel on meeting one of his men saluting him thus: "Where are you going, sir? Are you going to the 'Mormon' meeting?" On receiving a negative reply, he added: "You must not go there—they will send you to California."
A soldier of another regiment dared to place one of our tracts (The Only Way to be Saved) on the table of the public library. Upon information of this act being borne to the chaplain, the commanding officer was written to, Sunday as it was (the better the day the better the deed), the unfortunate librarian was first arrested, but, upon the black sheep being found out, orders were issued to arrest and imprison him the moment he set foot within the lines. Next morning, arraigned before the seat of judgment, he was well taunted as a "Mormon," in the low slang of the common hue and cry, until he told the commanding officer that he was not a "Mormon," neither did he care for any religion. Jamieson's code being well ransacked, no military law could be found to condemn him; he was in consequence dismissed from the bar with an admonition.
The same colonel, we are told, has issued an order that none of his men are to be allowed to come to our meetings; and if any are seen with one of our tracts, they are to be severely punished. The chaplains and missionaries are diligently distributing a scurrilous publication purporting to be written by a J. G. Deck, in England, which they have honored with a reprint, and a large and gratuitous circulation here and at Bombay. As this tract has gained so great celebrity amongst the people, I have written a reply to the assertions of its author, in a tract of twelve pages, now in process of publication. But, to cap the climax of this array of opposition, the reverend father, in the bosom of the old "Mother," has publicly threatened to curse every mother's son or daughter of his flock who will dare to set their feet in our meeting house.