Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/288

246 them in the lowest stage of poverty consistent with living at all.

Hearing the gospel once can usually be of but little avail with persons so degraded and mentally so blind as the mass of the Hindus. It should be followed up by a succession of impressions, that the effect be not lost. When missionaries thus go through the land, and see that nothing hinders the studding it with preachers of the truth but the want of men, they cannot but send home earnest entreaties that labourers may be sent into these perishing fields. Were men to come and dwell among them, so that they might be protected from the Brahmins if they forsook idolatry, there would be much reason for hoping that many of them would leave heathenism for Christianity. It is in this way that Christianity has spread in Tinnevelly and Madura, so that more than 50,000 persons in those districts are under the influence of missionaries and of gospel truth.

Before leaving Varey-punthal, we walked through the town. The houses were out of repair, and many of them seemed going to ruin; thus bearing witness to the inability of the people to support the burden of their taxes,