The pretense of the Jesuits, therefore, that immense numbers of converts to Christianity were made by them, must have been entitled to no higher credit than their other professions; at all events, the acknowledged authors of a system of falsehoods and deceptions are not entitled to our confidence. It is possible, however, that they may have succeeded in baptizing in secret a few of the natives, and that some Brahmins were among them. But if they did, it is quite certain that the ceremony must have been administered by stealth, and generally so that those who were baptized had no distinct knowledge of what it meant, and may not even have known the time of its administration. At no point in the Jesuit missionary system has more harm been done to the cause of true Christianity than at this. Millions of ignorant and deluded people have been persuaded to believe that Christianity consisted in nothing else but the mere ceremony of baptism, without any intelligent conception of God. Xavier commenced this system in India, and these Jesuit-Brahmins, who followed Nobili, were his imitators. Taking all the accounts together, the number of converts in India was simply enormous, and yet in 1776, after the Jesuits had left there, a very small percentage of their estimated numbers were found.[113] But these exaggerations are more excusable than the methods adopted to impose baptism upon unsuspecting and simple-minded multitudes. The German Steinmetz, alluding to this, says: "They insinuate themselves as physicians into the houses of the Indians; draw a wet cloth over the head and forehead of the sick person, even when at the point of death; mutter privately to themselves the baptism service; and think they have made one Christian more, who is immediately added to the list." The Jesuit De Bourges is represented by him as saying: "When the children 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 medicine_;" that is, by that kind of "pious fraud" which, according to the Jesuits, promotes "the greater glory of God." Another Jesuit father, whose experience in India enabled him to speak advisedly, mentions one woman "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." The number of such baptisms during a famine in 1737 are alleged by still another Jesuit to have been "upwards of 12,000." And he supplements this statement by saying that "it was rare, in any place where there were neophytes, for a single heathen child to die unbaptized."[114] Looking over this whole field of Jesuit operations, and contemplating the demoralizing influences of the Jesuits in India,