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Excerpt from Advantages of Christianity in Promoting the Establishment and Prosperity of the British Government in India: Containing Remarks Occasioned by Reading a Memoir on the Vellore Mutiny
The case of the soldiers, however, differed even from this. It might be, as Sir J. Craddock states, that the in¿uence of Tippoo's family 'was the grand cause of that unhappy ad'air'; But I am as fully convinced that a more favorable occasion of working on the minds of the Hindoo troops could scarcely have been furnished to the emissaries of that family. How easy was it for designing men to represent to these poor ignorant Hindoos, 'they have com manded you to e¿'ace all marks'of cast while on duty; but what is this, but a prelude to compelling you altogether to obliterate them, nay, to renounce cast, and embrace the religion of Eesa.' Ido not say that this unhappy circumstance was thus fatally improved to the prejudice of their british masters; but it was what I should have expected, and that these Mahometans would also have urged the impossibility of disobeying every subsequent command of this nature, unless the first were resisted, which to men ignorant as these Hindoos must have been, and unable to evade the command without the crime of desertion, might have enraged them almost to madness.
After this, however, to throw the blame on Christianity, and in consequence raise a hue-and-cry against christian missionaries, and this after the experience of so many years, and the testimony of the Honourable Company, as well as of a number of its highest servants, civil and military, who had borne witness to the peaceabl nature and tendency of their conduct - is so unreasonable,°as well as illiberal, that I cannot find a parallel instance in christian his tory nor do I know of any thing similar, unless it were the conduct of that heathen emperor, who after setting fire to his capital, threw the odium on the Christians.
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