their ships, so that not even a single European escaped. The English in Calcutta, after issuing orders for biting the cartridges, and when these disturbances had reached their height, were looking for the assistance of the army from London. But the Almighty, by the exercise of his power, made an end of them at the very outset. When intelligence of the destruction of the army from London arrived, the Governor-General was much grieved and distressed, and beat his head.
“ ‘At eventide he intended murder and plunder;
At noon neither had his body a head nor his head a cover.
In one revolution of the blue heavens
Neither Nadir remained, nor a followrer of Nadir.’
“Done by the order of his Grace the Peishwa, 1273 of the Hegira.”
Of course every word of this was believed by the Sepoys, for they not only had the proclamations of their Emperor and the Peishwa, but their Fakirs stood sponsors to the hideous falsehoods.
How appropriate is all this to the spirit of the Moslem creed—a Government communicating to its subjects “the delightful intelligence,” not that its enemies were defeated or slain, but that they were damned—“sent to hell!” Worthy indeed to be the successors of Tamerlane, who, after proving his claim to the title of “the scourge of God,” and marking his long track with massacre and desolation, coolly and complacently wrote with his own hand in his memoir that he felt it to be “a pious duty to assist God in filling hell chock-full of men and genii.”
When, in 1856, Sir Culling Eardly, the President of the Evangelical Alliance, wrote to Dr. Duff, of Calcutta, to ascertain the real sentiment of Mohammedans in India on a question in which the British people felt interested, (as their Government were then pressing certain reforms on the Sultan of Turkey, involving the principles of religious liberty for his subjects,) the world were somewhat surprised at Dr. Duff's reply. His inquiries led him to the conviction that Mohammedanism (like Popery) is unchangeable; that, where it has the power, it would not only enforce its claims
