Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/316

272 is the only true religion. We preach to them “No salvation out of Christ;” and that unless they receive him and his commandments they are lost. To them this seems in the highest degree illiberal; but we can have no liberality here. For any man to embrace a new religion they deem most sinful; for them to do so, absurd. One Brahmin remarked, “You may preach as much as you please, but none of us will join the Christian church.” They were much interested in the answer, that in God's Word it was foretold that all lands should submit to Jesus Christ; that in ancient times our own ancestors in Europe were idolaters, stupidly bowing down to gods of wood and stone, but that the preachers of the gospel had gone and made known to them the sinfulness of their ways; and that though they rejected it at first, as the Hindus now do, that still it prevailed and filled the land; and, moreover, that in India multitudes were already throwing away their idols in Tinnevelly, Madura, and other districts. This to them was all new; more especially were they astonished at the story of savage and idolatrous Saxons and Britons being the ancestors of the present Christian rulers of India.