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beginning, our author is betrayedin to a distinct acknowledgement, that the missionaries, with their Christianity, their bibles, and their pamphlets, had no connexion whatever, even indirectly, with that event; and yet, throughout the performance, he represents that event as having a most intimate and ominous connexion with the missionaries, and their Christianity, and their books. This melancholy affair is brought in to swell out every flaccid declamation, and to crutch every hobbling argument. There is not one spot, from Cape Comorin to Boutan, where the reader's imagination can alight, without instantly finding itself, through some incredible mirage, close to thered walls" of Vellore. The walls of every Indian city where the English reside, will be of the same dismal colour within this twelve or eighteen months, if the missionaries are still allowed to travel to the number of two in a party, unattended, unarmed, ou foot, without marks of civil authority, or any manner of commission but that which they feel in their consciences, among the Hindoo villages, mildly pleading with any of the people that choose to hear them against idolatry, offering them the sacred histories of Christ, explaining the nature of his religion, and patiently bearing every affront and insult; in short doing any thing that does not resemble, in any point of substance or manner, the proceedings which provoked the mutiny of Vellore. The natives reason well, the author says; and therefore, when they see these humble missionaries instead of armies, and bibles instead of cannon and mortars, and little books of piety instead of muskets, and possibly hear that at Calcutta printing presses are set up instead of founderies and powder-mills, and that boys are taught to read instead of being sent to the military manege to be trained on the backs of war-horses, they will most rationally infer that the government is about to coerce them into Christianity, and by the only possible instrument of such coercion, military execution. And they will be confirmed in this conclusion if they should have, heard, which millions of them never have, that at Vellore the beards of the sepoys were ordered to be shaved, and the shape of their turbans to be altered. They will never see one of these missionaries coming with his New Testament, without trembling for their beards, their turbans, and their gods.

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As far as Christianity is concerned, we presume there is now no question before the public relative to the causes of the mutiny. Taking into the account some general predisposing circumstances of a political nature, specified by this writer, it is quite needless to seek for any stronger cause for the rage and revenge of a body of pagan soldiers, than the military orders which combined a most mortifying personal affront

with a violence, with what they felt an outrage, on their superstition. As to the missionaries, no one will again have the folly, unless it be some person who has learnt the Hindoo logic from our author's example, to connect the mention of their labours with any allusion whatever to the mutiny. With regard to those in Bengal, we may be allowed an extract from "A Statement of the Committee of the Baptist Missionary Society," illustrative of the total absurdity of imagining any possible relation between their influence and that

event.

• Whatever be the cause or the issue of the late measures, they are not owing to any improper conduct of the missionaries; nor to any ill effects which have arisen from their exertions. Some rumours have indeed been circulated both in India and in England, that their exertions had some influence in producing the tragical mutiny at Vellore: but besides the consideration of that event being fully accounted for by another cause, it is inconceivable that their influence should extend to the native soldiers, among whom there is not an individual, we believe, who has embraced christianity, and possibly not one who has so much as heard of the missionaries; and of those at Vellore not one who understands the language in which they preach and write. Add to this, that if nothing like tumult, sedition, or disaffection to government, ever appeared to result from their labours in Bengal, it is incredible that such effects should be produced by them at a thousand miles distance, where neither tracts nor testaments, nor any other papers, unless it were a Gazette containing an advertise ment of a translation of the scriptures, in a language which they did not understand, were circulated! Such rumours therefore prove nothing, except it be the want of better evidence'; or a desire to catch at something which may be turned against christianity, or a wish to shift a part of the blame of a melancholy catastrophe. No one can be ignorant of the difference between measures of force and those of mild persuasion.' p. 14.

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But our author enlarges most on the general disaffection. and alarm which he asserts to have prevailed since that affair, and which he says the proclamation at Madras, and all other measures yet adopted, have proved insufficient to allay. This alarm, which is soon to turn into mortal hostility, and to bring upon us an army in comparison of which the host of Xerxes is reduced to the insignificance of the assembly at a parish church, he represents as pervading every part of the country. And in evidence of that fact, he cites the very proclamation at Madras, which expressed merely that "several corps of the native army had been in an extraordinary agitation," pled, as he says, with private testimony that this agitation had not subsided several months afterwards. Now it is very curious to see a man identifying a few thousands of sepoys at Madras, who had not yet forgotten their disgrace, had hardly recovered the right cut of their beards, and were often rumi

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nating, no doubt, on the dreadful retaliation under which their comrades and countrymen had fallen, in the close of that transaction,—to see him identifying these troops with the universal population, the fifty or hundred millions of Hindostan !! If, by all their mock-tragical rant, Mr. Twining and this his worthy coadjutor do really mean no more, than that some regiments of sepoys on the Coromandel coast retain a very natural resentment of an absurd and vexatious innovation and its fatal result, and want officers of more sense to command them, there never was a more signal instance of the extravagance which the haters of Christianity are capable of committing, in their eagerness to stop its progress; if, on the other hand, they sincerely mean, according to the obvious im port of their expressions, that there is a general commotion in the minds of the people, throughout our Indian empire, their representations are unsupported by evidence, and undeserving of the smallest credit. But it should seem that the writer of the Observations thinks no evidence, in point of fact, is necessary on the occasion, for that this dreadful and universal effect may be inferred from the magnitude of the cause; and now let us see in what terms he has the assurance to state that cause.

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"We have now a great number of sectarian missionaries spread over every part of India. Mr. Carey, the head of the Baptist mission in Ben gal, and his assistant missionaries, have been employed since the year 1804 in translating the scriptures into the various languages of India. As the different parts are translated, they are printed, as I understand, at the Company's press, attached to the College in Calcutta. Specimens of these translations are sent home by the Provost, who is enthusiastic in the commendation of the enlarged views of the Bible Society. The natives of India cannot be ignorant of these novel and extraordinary proceedings. They can form no other conclusion than this, that if we cannot persuade we shall compel them to embrace christianity. Indeed there is scarcely a shade of difference between downright compulsion and the plan proposed by Dr. Buchanan, and printed in his Memoir, a book that has caused the greatest alarm throughout Hindostan.” p. xii.

Subsequent to the religious mutiny at Vellore, I can affirm from undoubted authority, that in every quarter of Hindostan, the increase of English missionaries, and the gratuitous circulation of such parts of the scriptures as are already translated, have caused the greatest alarm and apprehension; and to these circumstances alone can we impute the trifling effect produced by the proclamation of the Madras government, which must have obtained unbounded (credit, had it not been counteracted by its being palpable to the most common observer that our actions differed from our professions,' p. xvii.

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They (the natives) saw English missionaries spread over the country from Vizagapatam to Travancore. They observe that our holy scriptures are profusely given away, translated into the language of India.' p. xlii.

I trust that the Company's press will no longer be employed in printing the translations of the scriptures, which, most assuredly, while the press was so employed, occasioned the greatest alarm throughout Hindostan.' p. xxvi.

To suppose that a people tremblingly alive, as the natives of India are, on every subject that may by possibility touch their religion, can view such proceedings without the utmost apprehension and alarm for their future security, would be an absurdity of which no unprejudiced man is capable.' p. xv.

The appearance of English missionaries, who have gone such lengths as these men have gone, must create universal alarm.' p. lxvii.

This, then, is the agency, and these are are the powers, to which the bewildered head of this man can attribute, not only as a matter of fact, but even as a matter of necessity, an universal agitation in our Indian empire, and from which, unless they are instantly restrained, he can profess to anticipate that a few months more will bring it to its catastrophe. Throughout his desultory performance, he keeps staunch to this point, that missionaries and translated bibles are the dire visitation in which India must perish; and the affair of Vellore is incessantly recalled, as a small but genuine example and proof of the quality of this evangelical pestilence. For he will have it, that the native army were alarmed and incensed by finding the Carnatic, the Mysore, and every part of Hindostan, occupied by English missionaries, who were ready to beset them on all sides with their contrivances of conversion; and that this fact must have concurred as the substantial and stronger cause, with the violation of their superstition in the orders about their personal appearance, to excite them to the sanguinary commotion. He will insist too, that this must be the cause of that ferment which, several months afterwards, called forth the Madras proclamation, and which that measure was found insufficient to tranquillize; insuffi cient, as he presumes to assert, precisely because the thickening swarm of missionaries and Christian books continued to keep in its full force all the suspicion of the soldiers, that they were to be compelled into Christianity, the same suspicion which the same cause has extended throughout Hindostan.

Now, as to the disaffected troops on the Madras territory, it is probable that many of them never heard of such a thing as a missionary; it is probable not a man of them was ever addressed by one; it is probable none of them ever read one of the tracts or translations; it is not proved that the "persons of evil disposition" who disseminated suspicion in their camp, said a word to them on this topic, (the proclamation making no counteractive allusion to it,) and if they did, it is probable that a thing so little brought within their actual view as VOL. IV.

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the proceedings of missionaries, would make but a very slight impression. All this is the probability, till there be evidence to the contrary; without furnishing one particle of which evidence, this writer has taken upon him to tell the legislature, the missionary societies, and all the religious persons of this nation, that the benevolent and peaceful expedients for instructing our pagan subjects, have very nearly provoked a general revolt of the Indian army. And while, in contempt of all decorum, their continued, disaffection is thus pretended to be accounted for, it appears, even from his own performance, that part, at least, of the obnoxious alterations which were confessedly the immediate cause of stinging these pagan soldiers to fury and slaughter, as being a violation of their religion, as he calls it, were and are carried into effect. So that the case comes exactly to be this; that whenever an Indian government or commander takes a fancy to force the natives into a gross violation of their religion, and chooses to perpetuate the consequent indignation and hazard by continning the operation of that force, it is but for such government or commander to find out, that there are, in some parts of India, a very few peaceful missionaries, who are affectionately soliciting the people's attention to a revelation from heaven, and throw all the odium which results, or threatens to result, from their own violence, on those missionaries, and on Christianity. Should they be too just or too modest to do this themselves, there will not be wanting such persons as Mr. Twining and this writer, to do it for them.

It would not, however, be so strange, that the missionaries should have been the cause of some apprehension in the camps of the Carnatic, if, as our author deposes, they have spread themselves over all Hindostan, and produced an universal combustion. This is his reiterated assertion. Now, suppose any person to receive his first and only information on the subject from this performance, and suppose him wisely to attribute, as a matter of course, some tolerable portion of veracity and decency to a writer, who goes out of his way to let us know that he has been seen, and even heard, in Parliament, and in the Drawing-room,-what number of missionaries would he conjecture, from the above passages, there must be, thus to invade and alarm the whole country? To assist his imagination, he would perhaps look back into history for the muster-rolls of those great armies that have overrun India in former ages; at least, he could not take a better rule for guessing; for there may possibly be half a dozen, or nearly so many, English missionaries in the territories under our power, on the Peninsula, and there are actually no less than mine in Bengal! It is chiefly the agency of these latter, ever

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