"They employed all methods to allure the Hindus and the Musulmans to embrace Christianity, and published tracts and books in Tamil and other languages. Such was the state of things when the great Emperor Akbar, desirous of inquiring into the nature of the Christian faith, invited the Jesuits to his Court, about the year 1582, and asked them for the life of Christ. The crafty priests, thinking that the simple life would not attract and captivate his Oriental imagination, attempted to palm upon the sovereign a false life stuffed with fables, such as are found in the mythological books of the Hindus. But the trick lost the game ! Akbar detected the fraud and dismissed them from his Court. Thus they used to conceal from the natives the essential peculiarities of the Gospel ; they accommodated its doctrines to the most absurd notions of the populace. Nor was this all. They brought from Rome heads and skulls of false saints, and rumours were artfully spread abroad of prodigies and miracles wrought by these relics ; images were moved by wires, which they pretended were miraculously moved by Heaven ; a certain tomb at Meliapur, on the Coromandel Coast was fraudulently given out for the sepulchre of St. Thomas, in allusion to an ancient tradition that the Apostle crossed the Indus and penetrated into the south as far as the Carnatic, and there, after preaching the glad tidings, suffered martyrdom. With the bones of such saints they fought ludicrous combats with the devils, and thus deceived the eyes of illiterate men. A large volume would be required to contain an enmumeration of the innumerable frauds which these artful priests practised to delude the people of India."