holy apostle Paul, which I had read that morning at mass, determined me to take this resolution,—‘Giving no offence to any one, that your ministry might not be blamed’ (2 Cor. vi. 3). I therefore made these poor people go to a retired place, about three leagues from here, where I myself joined them _during the night, and with the most careful precautions_, and there I baptized nine!”[94] We appeal to every impartial man, if these were apostles and teachers of the gospel. But it seems by all their proceedings, that they considered the conversion of these idolaters to consist in the mere fact of their being baptized. To administer baptism to a man _volens nolens_, was the Jesuits’ utmost ambition, and this ambition they satisfied _per fas et nefas_. Let them relate the facts themselves:— “When these children,” says Father de Bourges, “are in danger of death, our practice is to baptize them without asking the permission of their parents, which would certainly be refused. The catechists and the private Christians are well acquainted with the formula of baptism, and they confer it on these dying children, _under the pretext of giving them medicines_.”[95] Women were also found very useful in the case of newly born infants, when none other could obtain access. Father Bouchet mentions one woman in particular, “whose knowledge of the pulse and of the symptoms of approaching death was so unerring, that of more than ten thousand children whom she had herself baptized, not more than two escaped death.”[96] In like manner, during a famine in the Carnatic, about A.D. 1737, Father Trembloy writes, that according to the report of the catechists and missionaries, the number of deserted and dying children baptized during the two years of death, amounted to upwards of twelve thousand. He adds, that, as every convert knew the formula of baptism, it was rare, in any place where there were neophytes, _for a single heathen child to die unbaptized_.[97] The logical consequence of this mode of making Christians was, that at the first opportunity these converts repudiated the name of Christian with as much facility as they assumed it. This was seen on many occasions, and more particularly, perhaps, in 1784:— “When Tippoo ordered all the native Christians in Mysore to be seized, and gathered together in Seringapatam, that he might convert them to Mahometanism, amidst that vast multitude, amounting to more than 60,000 souls,” says the Abbé Dubois, “not _one_—not a single individual among so many thousands—had courage to confess his faith under this trying circumstance, and become a martyr to his religion. The whole apostatised _en masse_, and without resistance or protestation.”[98]