Now, it is a first principle of the Gospel (which we had then no excuse for not understanding), that none of us lives for himself; that a candle is not lighted to be hid under a bushel; that what we have received, Christian love and Christian duty require us to impart. Yet we traded with these benighted people, and lived among them, without allowing them to see the faintest glimmer of the true light. By and by, we became their masters, or rather stewards over them for God. We knew the religious responsibilities which rest upon the rulers of a household, we could not plead ignorance of the duties of stewards; still, not only did we refrain from discharging these duties by instructing and regulating those of whom we had the charge, but we actually ignored in their sight our own recognition of God, and our own personal responsibility to a Divine Master. So that they not unnaturally judged that we were infidels, acknowledging no religious faith at all. It was a common remark made on all sides, “When an Englishman goes to India, he leaves his religion at the Cape”—because no sign of its having accompanied him was ever witnessed.
And this, be it observed, was not because the servants wantonly disregarded their employers’ injunctions. It is recorded in history against the East India Company (and I need not tell you that the responsibility does not rest wholly on them), that they never sought to make converts to Christianity, but only to get money in India. Nor, my brethren, is this a crime, a dereliction of most solemn duty chargeable on past ages only. To this day and hour, no effort has been made by authority to persuade the natives to become Christians. Nay, worse; no clear exhibition of Christianity has been made to them. There are, it is true, three bishoprics in the country, erected (and supported) by voluntary societies, when the tardy permission was given. There are also Company’s chaplains at the various military stations, and there are some few missionaries. But the whole number at the beginning of the present outbreak was only in the proportion of one clergyman to some eight or nine hundred thousand natives. I know that some persons would object, that even this little show of Christianity has been injurious to our tenure of the country; that it has roused the suspicions of the jealous infidels, lest they should be coerced into an acceptance of our religion—that, in fact, it has caused the present outbreak. My brethren, this statement is scarcely worthy of a refutation. If it were, I could furnish it in the larger attendance of native children at the Missionary schools where the Bible is read, than at the Government schools from which it is excluded; and in the candid testimony of unconverted Hindoos, that their greatest suspicions of compulsory conversion was founded on the timid, half-concealed profession of Christianity by the English. But, my brethren, suppose it even so: suppose that an attempt to proclaim Christianity did meet with opposition, did provoke mutiny, is not this what it has ever had to contend against? Should you and I be Christians this day, if the brave missionaries who first came to our island had desisted at the earliest menace or murmur of the Ancient Britons or Anglo-Saxons? O let no such vain and impious excuse be made! We are bound as a Christian nation to exhibit Christianity to all our subjects; or, at any rate, to encourage the efforts of societies and individuals to do it. We must do it discreetly, but it must be done. How else shall we give account of our stewardship—that stewardship entrusted to us for the good of our subjects? But, my brethren, we have not even brought moral influences to bear upon this people. In our country every one is bound at least to obey the common law, and so is he (as far as I know), in all our dependencies, _save in India_. But there (some restraints have of late years been laid on them) infanticide, widow-burning, wholesale polygamy, and many other equally flagrant crimes have been tolerated, nay, deliberately sanctioned, because, forsooth, they are part of the Mohammedan or Hindoo religion.