they pleaded with their Government to reform what was wrong in the administration of India, and act henceforth on Christian principles in the rule of that land. Here is what these people said in 1857 in their Memorial to Parliament:
“By professing to be neutral among the various religions of its Indian subjects, the Government has in effect denied the truth, and given a great moral advantage to those foolish, wicked, and degrading systems to which the great bulk of the people adhere. Nor has the advantage thus given been merely moral. Idolatry has formerly been, and to some extent still is, publicly patronized and subsidized. Its immodest and cruel rites have been honored with the attendance of Government officers, and paid for from funds under Government control. The system of Caste, which, in every part of it, contradicts and counteracts the Christian religion, has been recognized in Government arrangements for the administration of justice, as well as in the organization of the army, and selfish humanity and contempt of their fellow-men and subjects, have thus received the highest official sanction. The Government has discouraged the teaching of the Christian religion to certain classes of its subjects, and made the profession of it, in a sense, penal, by placing some who have been turned from idols to serve the living and true God under disabilities to which they were not, before their conversion, liable. And, while allowing the Koran and the Shaster to be freely used, it has forbidden the teaching of the Holy Scriptures, or even the answering of spontaneous inquiries respecting their contents, during school hours, in the educational institutions which it supports. In all these instances the Indian Government, though professing neutrality in matters of religion, has practically countenanced and favored falsehood and wickedness of the most flagitious kind.”
They here quote dispatches of the East India Company, who had ruled India for a hundred years, in proof of the foregoing statements, and also refer to facts well known in India—such as Lord Clive personally attending a heathen festival at Conjeveram, and presenting an ornament to the idol worth 1,050 pagodas, ($1,850;) Lord
