"I think that no compulsory efforts should be made to achieve this end; but I presume you would not think it wrong that our government should introduce the humane laws of Britain into all her foreign dependencies?"
"Why, no; such a measure, I think, would be very advisable."
"I thank you for this admission in favour of the necessity of Christian missions, especially to India, where cruelties are still practised in broad day, such as we should be apt to regard as monstrous inventions, fitted only to gratify a morbid appetite for the horrible, were they not attested by faithful eye-witnesses. What think you of this specimen? At the annual festival in honour of Muha Div (the great god), many persons are suspended in the air by large hooks, thrust through the integuments of their backs,[13] and swung round for a quarter of an hour, in honour of this deity; and often over a slow fire. Others have their sides pierced, and cords are introduced between the skin and ribs, and drawn backwards and forwards, while these victims of superstition dance through the streets. Others cast themselves from a stage upon open knives, inserted in packs of cotton. Sometimes one of these knives enters the body, and the poor wretch is carried off to expire. If an infant refuses his mother's milk, it is often hung up in a basket on a tree, to be devoured by the vultures. This is no criminal offence, as it would be amongst us, but a ceremonial regulation of their faith. And in India, the mother often sacrifices her first-born, to conciliate her guardian deity in behalf of her unborn progeny. When the child is two or three years old, she takes it to the river, encourages it to enter, as though about to bathe it, but suffers it to pass into the current of water, when she abandons it, and stands an inactive spectator, beholding the struggles and listening to the screams of her perishing infant."
"I would have all these cruel rites and ceremonies put down by the force of law; which, of course, would supersede the necessity of your missionary enterprise."
"As experience is a safe guide in the settlement of doubtful questions, a reference to it, on the present occasion, will supply palpable evidence that the labours of our missionaries in India have been of great importance and value, both to the natives themselves, and also to the government, by facilitating the introduction and peaceable establishment of a humane policy. The history of their labours proves that they were not visionary speculatists, but sober-thinking men, who knew and realized the fact, that wherever Christianity prevails it uniformly conduces to the progress of mankind;—that it communicates that just manner of thinking upon the most important subjects, which, extending its influence thence to every department of speculative and moral truth, inspires a freedom of inquiry, and an elevation of sentiment, that raises its disciples immeasurably above the level of unassisted nature. This great historic truth gave them confidence in the prosecution of their herculean labours. Let me now notice what they have already accomplished, and that without creating any popular disturbances amongst the natives, thus falsifying the predictions of their opponents, who, from the press and in both houses of parliament, were accustomed to say, that the safety of our Indian possessions was endangered by the presence of our missionaries there; and that our Indian empire would be irrecoverably lost if any legislative measure were introduced to suppress or control the superstitious customs and rites of the natives. In the first place, the missionaries have given us correct information on all matters relating to the Hindoos—their worship, and its various ceremonies—their character, and social habits; and thus, by an accumulation of authentic facts, they have disproved the statements of our popular writers, that the Hindoos are not only an intelligent, but a very virtuous people; and that their religious rites and services, though novel and repulsive to Europeans, are both chaste and humane. Since the missionaries exposed this deception, which had been so long practised upon us, no one has ventured to eulogize the virtues, or defend the religious practices of the Hindoos. In the second place, they established schools for the education of the youth of India, both male and female; and thus they have succeeded, to a very considerable extent, in diffusing both scientific and biblical knowledge, which is noiselessly but effectively rescuing them from the dominion of the debasing ignorance and superstition under which their forefathers had been living from time immemorial. And no one doubts, who is at all conversant with the present state of things in India, but the rising generation will far surpass any preceding one, in mental acuteness, in knowledge, and in moral character. In the third place, by their writings, their preaching, and their intercourse with the natives, they have proved useful pioneers in clearing the way for the peaceable introduction of the laws promulgated by the British government for the suppression of many of those cruel practices to which I have already alluded. In the fourth place, without employing any undue modes of attack and exposure, they have succeeded, to a very considerable extent, in shaking the confidence of the Hindoos in the truth of their national faith; and a powerful conviction is impressed on the Indian mind—an impression which is becoming deeper and deeper every day—that the days of their mythology are numbered, and that ere long its humiliation and subversion will be achieved. And, in addition to these proofs and indications of their success, I have to report another of their triumphs, and that refers to your own fraternity—the conversion of many of our own countrymen, who, on their settlement in India, became first speculative, and then practical unbelievers—rejecting, as visionary or fabulous, the faith of their early training, and often distinguishing themselves by their virulent hostility to the Christian missionary and his labours; but who now zealously co-operate with him in his exertions to spread the knowledge of the way of salvation."
"To you, these doings of your missionaries are splendid triumphs in confirmation of the Divine origin of that faith, which restricts the bestowal of a state of future blessedness to the comparatively few who believe in Jesus Christ; but to me they appear nothing more than the natural consequences of a well-concerted attack on a long-established and nearly worn-out order of things, which we know invariably results in dividing popular opinion. On all such occasions Divide and conquer is the motto, and when this is done, then the pruning off from the old stock of belief and opinion, and the engrafting on the new one, is an operation as natural as it is easy. Human nature is given to change; the love of it is an essential element in our mental constitution, and nothing is more common than going from one extreme to another, or more likely than the change from Brahminism or Buddhism to the faith of Christianity."
"And from Deism to Christianity also, as I have shown you. Hence, to quote your own words, I indulge the hope that you will become a believer, if we have patience."
"A possible event, on the assumed correctness of your hypothesis, as then I may be operated on by some Divine influence, which I shall have no power to withstand; but on my own supposition, as remote from possibility as the junction of the antipodes."
"We shall see. You have already advanced some way in the right direction. But to return to India. Here is a fact, which was not publicly known amongst us, till it was reported by our missionaries—that one whole tribe in India has uniformly destroyed every female child born amongst them, so that they have been obliged to take their wives from the tribe next in rank to them. On one occasion a father's heart recoiled when the emissaries of murder demanded his daughter; and he repelled them from his presence. Her life was spared, and she grew up tenderly beloved by her parents; but the sight of a girl rising to maturity in the house of a Rajpoot, was so novel, and so contrary to the customs of the tribe, that no parent sought her in marriage for his son. The grief-worn father, suffering under the frowns of his own tribe, and trembling for the chastity of his daughter, and the honour of his family, bore her off to a pathless desert, where, with his own hand, he slew her, leaving her body to be devoured by wild beasts."