This scheme, however, excited violent and selfish alarm in the directors, chiefly men who had made their fortunes in India, and after living there for years under no restraint were come home to enjoy their riches. They believed that the natives would take umbrage at the least interference with their religion, and that their own wealth and power, so highly prized, would be lost if idolatry were not merely tolerated, but flattered and supported. The souls of men and the honour of God were nothing to them; they were furious with indignation, and procured from the House of Commons the omission of the clauses. There was another hope in the Lords; but though Archbishop Moore and the Bishop of London spoke in favour of the articles, the 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,