Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/215

 only use their idols as agents or representatives of the deity, for Mahadeo, (the Great God) is their highest point of veneration. The natives are emphatically a religious nation, and pay more attention to its rites than perhaps any other people living, for there is hardly an act of their life that they do not associate with their religion.

8. CONVERSION.—Much disappointment has been felt at the slow progress of conversion to Christianity, but those who have watched the obstacles to be encountered will not be surprised at the small number of converts. The propagation of the gospel in India is attended with many difficulties, peculiar to the country. No Hindoo can embrace Christianity without losing caste, in other words, without being cut by every individual of his caste; who disown him as a renegade and a vagabond; his contact is shunned as contamination even by his own family, and till of late his patrimony went to his next of kin, and he was reduced to beggary. Lately, this law was abrogated by government, and strange to say, the leading natives of Calcutta entered into an association to petition parliament that the old law disinheriting all Christian converts should be restored.

9. EASY CIRCUMSTANCES.—It has become customary in some quarters to hold up the natives as an oppressed, over taxed, ill used people,