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minion of priests . Should a Brahmin take a Sudra for hh wife , he is doomed to suffer for ages in hell . This unnatural division of society is the
greatest barrier to good government . To perpetuate ignorance and superstition , none but a Brahmin is allowed to read the Vedas , under pain of death . Falsehood is universall y practised , and perjury , which prevails in all our courts , is in some instances sanctioned
by law . Most of the productive classes are accounted vile and odious , unworthy to eat , drink or sit with a member of the classes abbve them . The women , of all castes are kept in a state of slavery . In Bengal , during the year 1817 , there were burned or buried alive 705 widows . The Brahmins
also plunge the sick into the sacred rivers , that the soul in the act of departing may be washed from all the impurities of the body . Thus are yearly destroyed a multitude of British subjects . The Rajpoots murder
their female infants . During the last ten years , Kooaur , brother-in-law to the Rajah of Jointepoor , has been in the habit of repeatedly sacrificing men , for the purpose of obtaining progeny from his barren wife . The victims
are kidnapped , they undergo ablution , have a garland of flowers placed round their necks , and then have their heads cut off . Kooaur and his wife having witnessed this ceremony , conclude the tragedy by bathing in the victims * blood * Wnile evils such as these prevail , even under enlightened
governments , in Indostan , experience has taught us that they would be increased by the application of force , and can only be subdued by reason . Therefore , to kill a cow or a sacred monkey would be more dangerous than to attack from the press their three hundred ami thirty millions of Gods , or even their Vedas .
To destroy this vile superstition , and to establish in its place a pure worship , has , indeed , been the professed object of all European governments . What were the means they adopted ? The Portuguese established
an Inquisition at Goa . The Popes , ascribing to the Inquisition a divine origin , entitle it the Holy Office , and the prison , the Holy House ; while the Inquisitor and Censor are supposed to be under the immediate influence
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of Heaven . It fofk > ws , tfierefer& , that Torquemada , the Grand Inquisitor and Censor , who in fourteen years tried 80 , 000 Mahomedans and Jews and burnt 6000 of them in all due pomp , was an agent of the Divinity
Be he their god or demon , all we have heard of the cruelty of the Hindoos cannot surpass : this horrid massacre . Neither can the voluntary sacrifices at Jagarnaut be compared to the sufferings of Sieur Dellon and other
innocent men in the Inquisitions at Damaun and Goa . They were buried alive in dark and nauseous vaults , with no companions but the verrnrn nurtured in their filth . They were flogged and racked , and then in mercy starved , strangled or burnt .
Let us next consider the conduct of the Censors of the Press . Nothing could be published till examined by these infallible men . They made ex post facto laws ; they passed a decree against sixty-two printers , prohibited every book they had ever published ,
and subjected all who read them to excommunication and perpetual infamy . Erasmus ' s Paraphrase of the New Testament , printed with the approbation of Leo X . and the Inquisition , was afterwards condemned by the Censor . They punished Gailileo
for publishing his opinion that the sun , and not the earth , is the centre of the world . These positions they declared false in philosophy , and contrary to the word of God . They caused his Dialogues of the System of the World to be burnt , forced him to
abjure his errors , and imprisoned him for years in the Inquisition . The Inquisition even deprived foreign governments of the power of prohibiting any book approved by them , though dangerous to the state . The Syrian
Christians , for ae ^ es unmolested bv Christians , for ages unmolested by the tolerant Hindoos , were called on by the Inquisition at Goa to acknowledge the Pope , of whom they had never heard , and to abjure their simple
worshi p . The Censor , as if ambitious of stilt soaririj ? to pre-eminence in guilt , caused their ancient and sacred manuscripts to be burned . ' From these persecutors the Syrian Christians fted to the mountainous forests on the
Malabair coast—freedom ' s stftmgrsan c tuary . The licentiousness of the Press un
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416 A Letter to a Deptttff of the Pwhtguese Gortes .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1822, page 416, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2514/page/24/
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