which he clothed in a Bengali dress.

We have already seen how Carey at the end of the eighteenth century
found Hindooism at its worst. Steadily had the Pooranic corruption
and the Brahmanical oppression gone on demoralising the whole of
Hindoo society. In the period of virtual anarchy, which covered the
seventy-five years from the death of Aurangzeb to the supremacy of
Warren Hastings and the reforms of Lord Cornwallis, the healthy zeal
of Islam against the idolatrous abominations of the Hindoos had
ceased. In its place there was not only a wild licence amounting to
an undoubted Hindoo revival, marked on the political side by the
Maratha ascendency, but there came to be deliberate encouragement of
the worst forms of Hindooism by the East India Company and its
servants. That "the mischievous reaction" on England from
India--its idolatry, its women, its nabobs, its wealth, its
absolutism--was prevented, and European civilisation was "after much
delay and hesitation" brought to bear on India, was due indeed to
the legislation of Governor-Generals from Cornwallis to Bentinck,
but much more, to the persistent agitation of Christian
missionaries, notably Carey and Duff. For years Carey stood alone in
India, as Grant and Wilberforce did in England, in the darkest hour
of England's moral degradation and spiritual death, when the men who
were shaping the destinies of India were the Hindooising Stewarts
and Youngs, Prendergasts, Twinings, and Warings, some of whom hated
missions from the dread of sedition, others because their hearts
"seduced by fair idolatresses had fallen to idols foul."

The most atrociously inhuman of all the Brahmanical customs, and yet
the most universal, from the land of the five rivers at Lahore to
the far spice islands at Bali, was the murder of widows by burning