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524 at once welcomed the advent of a Christian power, in the hope of securing its protection. Altliongh the Syrian Church in India, was Nestorian and the European newcomers were Roman Catholics, for the moment no ecclesiastical or doctrinal differences were noticed. It was enough that both were Christian for the two parties to draw together in presence of their common foe, the infidel. The friendship was mutual. The Portuguese were glad to find friends in a strange land, and the Syrian Christians were grateful for the prospect of shelter from the persecution they were enduring under the Mohammedan rule, In the year 1502 they presented a petition to Vasco de Gama begging him to put them under the protection of the King of Portugal, to whom, in sign of subjection, they sent the old sceptre of their former Christian kings, a silver-mounted rod with three little bells, and at the same time handed over the copper plates containing their charters to the Portuguese authorities. It was not a conquest; it was a voluntary, eager, grateful action like that of the Jews welcoming Cyrus. These simple people little dreamed that what they took for an asylum was really a prison, that their deliverers were to become their gaolers. At first the wisdom of their course seemed to be amply justified. The most complete friendliness was established between the old inhabitants and the colonists. The Portuguese were freely admitted to the Syrian churches, and they attended amicably. It was only by degrees that the divergencies from Roman belief and practice were noted and commented on. When a change of attitude on the part of the Portuguese was brought about, this was owing to the importation of the worst product of Spanish cruelty—the Inquisition, and that was due to the presence of the Jesuits.

Nevertheless the Jesuits did not come in the first instance as inquisitors. Their expedition to India was undertaken with a positive and constructive end in view—not correction of error, repression, persecution; but evangelisation, the spread of the Christian gospel among