e invented about the same time, and for the
same object, though the other persons described as incarnations were
real princes, Parasu Rama, before Christ 1176, and Rama, born before
Christ 961. In the Mahabharata Krishna is described as fighting in
the same army with Yudhishthira and his four brothers. Yudhishthira
was a real person, who ascended the throne at Delhi 575 B.C., or 1175
years before the birth of Krishna.[7] Bentley supposes that the
incarnations, particularly that of Krishna, were invented by the
Brahmans of Ujain with a view to check the progress of Christianity
in that part of the world (see his historical view of the Hindoo
astronomy). That we find in no history any account of the alarming
progress of Christianity about the time these fables were written is
no proof that Bentley was wrong.[8]

When Monsieur Thevenot was at Agra [in] 1666, the Christian
population was roughly estimated at twenty-five thousand families.
They had all passed away before it became one of our civil and
military stations in the beginning of the present century, and we
might search history in vain for any mention of them (see his
_Travels in India_, Part III). One single prince, well disposed to
give Christians encouragement and employment, might, in a few years,
get the same number around his capital; and it is probable that the
early Christians in India occasionally found such princes, and gave
just cause of alarm to the Brahman priests, who were then in the
infancy of their despotic power.[9]

During the war with Nepal, in 1814 and 1815,[10] the division with
which I served came upon an extremely interesting colony of about two
thousand Christian families at Betiya in the Tirhut District, on the
borders of the Tarai forest. This colony had been created by one man,
the Bishop, a Venetian by birth, under the protection of a small
Hindoo prince, the Raja, of Betiya.[11] This holy man had been some
fifty years among these people, with little or no support from Europe
or from any other quarter. The only aid he got from the Raja was a
pledge that no member of his Church should be subject to the
_Purveyance system_, under which the people everywhere suffered so
much,[12] and this pledge the Raja, though a Hindoo, had never
suffered to be violated. There were men of all trades among them, and
they formed one very large street remarkable for the superior style
of its buildings and the sober industry of its inhabitants. The
masons,