Bishop of St. David's said one nation had
no right to impose its faith on another. None of the other Bishops
stirred, and the charter passed without one line towards keeping
Englishmen Christians, or making Hindoos such! The lethargy of the
Church of the eighteenth century was so heavy that not only had such a
son as Carey been allowed to turn from her pale in search of earnest
religion, but while she was forced to employ foreigners, bred up in the
Lutheran communion, as the chaplains and missionaries of her Society for
the Propagation of the Gospel, he was going forth unaccredited as a
volunteer in the cause which her paralysed efforts could not support!

For it was to India that the minds of the little Baptist Society were
turned by the return of one John Thomas, who seems to have been the
Gaultier _Sans Avoir_ of this crusade. He was Baptist by education, and
having gone out as a surgeon to Calcutta, had been so shocked at the
state of things as to begin to preach on his own account, but he was a
hot tempered, imprudent man, and quarrelled with everybody, so as to make
the cause still more unpopular with the East Indians. Yet this strange,
wild character had a wonderful power of awakening enthusiasm. He had
come home in the same ship with one Wilson, whose history was a marvel in
itself. He had been made prisoner by the French during the Carnatic war,
and finding that the captives were to be delivered up to Hyder Ali, he
resolved to escape, leapt forty feet from his prison window, and swam the
river Coleroon, in happy ignorance that it was infested with alligators;
but then going up an eminence to judge of his bearings, he was seen,
secured, and stripped naked, and, with his hands tied behind him, was
driven before Hyder Ali. His account of having crossed the Coleroon was
treated as a lie. "No mortal man," said the natives, "had ever swum the
river; did he but dip a finger in, he would be seized by the alligators,"
but when evidence proved the fact, the Nabob held up his hands and cried,
"This is the man of God." Nevertheless Wilson was chained to a soldier,
and, like the well-known David Baird, John Lindsay, and many others, was
driven naked, barefoot, and wounded, 500 miles to Seringapatam; where,
loaded with irons of thirty-two pounds weight, and chained in couples,
they were thrust into a "black hole," and fed so scantily that Wilson
declared that at sight of food his jaws snapped together of themselves.