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