suffering any outrage from them.

On the other side, they are the greatest impostors in the world; their
talent consists in inventing new fables every day, and making them pass
amongst the vulgar for wonderful mysteries. One of their cheats is to
persuade the simple, that the pagods eat like men; and to the end they
may be presented with good cheer, they make their gods of a gigantic
figure, and are sure to endow them with a prodigious paunch. If those
offerings with which they maintain their families come to fail, they
denounce to the people, that the offended pagods threaten the country
with some dreadful judgment, or that their gods, in displeasure, will
forsake them, because they are suffered to die of hunger.

The doctrine of these Brachmans is nothing better than their life. One of
their grossest errors is to believe that kine have in them somewhat of
sacred and divine; that happy is the man who can be sprinkled over with
the ashes of a cow, burnt by the hand of a Brachman; but thrice happy be,
who, in dying, lays hold of a cow's tail, and expires with it betwixt his
hands; for, thus assisted, the soul departs out of the body purified, and
sometimes returns into the body of a cow. That such a favour,
notwithstanding, is not conferred but on heroic souls, who contemn life,
and die generously, either by casting themselves headlong from a
precipice, or leaping into a kindled pile, or throwing themselves under
the holy chariot wheels, to be crushed to death by the pagods, while they
are carried in triumph about the town.

We are not to wonder, after this, that the Brachmans cannot endure the
Christian law; and that they make use of all their credit and their
cunning to destroy it in the Indies. Being favoured by princes, infinite
in number, and strongly united amongst themselves, they succeed in all