This end could be accomplished insidiously by the defilement to be produced by biting the greased cartridge. Existence without a religion was in their minds intolerable. Deprived of their own, having become outcasts by their own act, they must, in despair, accept the religion of their masters.
That such was the reasoning which influenced them subsequent events fully proved. In the times of the earlier invasions of India by the Muhammadan princes who preceded the Mughals the conqueror had employed compulsion and persecution as the one mode of converting the Hindus. The sipáhís, alarmed and suspicious, could conceive no other. It was in vain that, in the earlier stages of the Mutiny, General Hearsey, an accomplished linguist, addressing the sipáhís in their own language, told them that such ways were essentially foreign to the Christian's conception of Christianity; that the Christian's religion was the religion of the Book; and that conversion could only be founded on the conviction of the mind. They heard, but heeded not. What was this argument but a wile to entrap them? The conspirators had done their work too well. Before the hot season of 1857 had set in there were but few sipáhís in the Bengal Presidency who were not firmly convinced that the greased cartridge was the weapon by means of which their foreign masters had resolved to deprive them of their religion. No sooner had it become certain that this idea had taken a firm root in their minds than chapatis passed from village to village in the rural districts of the North-west Provinces, announcing to the population that grave events were impending for which it became them to be prepared.
