DUBOIS ON MISSIONS xxv
after three decades of Mission labour as to the possibility of converting India to Christianity . I have no wish to renew the bitter controversy which ensued on the publication of his Letters on the State of Christianity in India soon after his return to France ; but no notice of the Abbe ' s career would be complete without some reference to it .
The purport of those Letters , as I understand them , was to assert that , under existing circumstances , there is no human possibility ofconverting theHindus as a nation to any sect of
Christianity ; or in the Abbe ' sown words , ' Let the Christian religion be presented to these people under every possible light , . . . the time of conversion has passed away , and under existing circumstances there remains no human possibility of bringing it back .' It would require a reproduction of the whole text of these Letters to explain fully the grounds upon which the Abbe based a decision so humiliating to himself and to his fellow-Christian workers , but the chief cause undoubtedly was the invincible barrier of what we
may call nowadays intellectual Hinduism , but which the
Abbe called Brahminical prejudice . He refers regretfully to the collapse of the Church , with its hundreds of thousands of converts , many of them of high caste , established by the
Jesuits Beschi and de Nobili in Madura ; but at the same time he made no concealment of the real causes of their failure .
'
The Hindus soon found that those missionaries
whom their colour , their talents , and other qualities had induced them to regard as such extraordinary beings , as men coming from another world , were in fact nothing else but disguised Feringhis ( Europeans ), and that their country , their religion , and original education were the same as those of the evil , the contemptible Feringhis who had of late invaded their country . This event proved the last blow to the interests of the Christian religion . No more conversions were made . Apostasy became almost general in several