"The experience I have gained through a familiar intercourse with the natives of all castes, for a period of twenty-five years entirely passed in their society, during which I lived like themselves, conforming to their customs and prejudices, in order to gain their confidence, and endeavouring by these means to insinuate myself among them as a religious teacher, has made me thoroughly acquainted with the insuperable obstacles that Christianity will ever have to encounter in the deep-rooted and quite invincible prejudices, and in the invariable usages, customs, and education of the Hindoos of all castes; and it is my decided opinion, that not only the interests of the Christian religion will never be improved among them, but also that it will by little and little lose the small ground it had gained in better times; and, in a short, dwindle away to nothing… …in no country in the world has the Christian religion had to encounter the stupendous obstacles that are to be met with in India. In no country was the struggle so desperate; in none had it to deal with a people so completely priest ridden; in none had it to oppose a system of cunning and priestcraft so deep laid, and so well calculated to baffle all the attempts of that divine religion to gain a solid footing; but, above all, in no country had it to encounter any difficulty resembling that baneful division of the people into castes which (whatever may be its advantages in other respects) has always proved, and will ever prove, an insurmountable bar to its progress. In consequence of this fatal division, nowhere but in India is a father reduced to the cruel and unnatural necessity of separating himself forever from a beloved son who happens to embrace this religion; or a son to renounce forever a tender father for the same reason. Nowhere is a spouse enjoined to divorce, for the same cause, a cherished husband; or an unmarried young person, after having embraced Christianity, doomed to pass the rest of his life in a forced state of celibacy. In no other country is a person who becomes a Christian exposed, by doing so, to the loss of kindred, friends, goods, professionals, and all that he holds dear. In no country, in short, is a man, by becoming a covert to Christianity, cast out as a vagrant from society, proscribed and shunned by all: and yet all this happens in India, and a Hindoo who turns Christian must submit himself to all these, and many other no less severe trials… The crafty Brahmins, (in order that the system of imposture that establishes their unmolested superiority over the other tribes, and brings the latter under their uncontrolled bondage, might in no way be discovered or questioned,) had the foresight to draw up between the Hindoos and the other nations on earth an impassable, an impregnable line, that defies all attacks from foreigners. There is no opening to approach them, and they themselves are strictly, and under the severest penalties, precluded from access to any body for the purpose of improving themselves, and bettering their actual condition, than which, as they are firmly and universally persuaded, nothing on the earth is more perfect."