भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

inflict on these Brahmins such severe punishments, as he would have liked them to do. 545. Tired of these incessant complaints of the Christian missionaries like St. Xavier, the Portuguese Emperor issued stern orders to his Governors and other officers, that they should not neglect help in any way in the sacred (?) cause of the spread of Christianity, otherwise their whole properly would be confiscated. Even then not satisfied, St. Xavier went on complaining against the Brahmins. He, nevertheless, gloated at the tremendous success his proselytizing efforts had achieved. At the very sight of a Christian missionary, Hindu villages were taken alright and people there were said to be running away helfer skelter, for most severe were the measures taken against those of the Hindus, who did not court Christianity. Let alone the common Hindu villagers, even the high priests of big Hindu temples, the heads of Hindu monasteries and the rich in the cities, were all put into prisons and were subjected to so much physical torture, that the priestly class at many places is said to have made good their escape to places outside Goa, carrying their sacred idols with them. “Whenever I hear of any act of idolatrous worship”, wrote St. Francis Xavier to the Society at Rome in 1543 A.D. “I go to the place with a large band of these children, who very soon load the devil with a greater amount of insult and abuse, than he has lately received of honour and worship from his parents, relations and acquaintances. The children run at the idols, upset them, dash them down, break them to pieces, spit on them, trample on them, kick them about and, in short, heap on them every possible outrage.” He further wrote to the same society at Rome from Cochin on the 27th Jan, 1545, “When all are baptized, 1 order all the temples of their false gods to be destroyed and all the idols to be broken into pieces. “The cruelties’, writes a Goan Historian, J.C. Barreto Miranda, which in the name of religion of peace and love this tribunal (of Inquisition) practised in Europe, were carried to even greater excesses in India.... Every word of their’s (of the Inquisitors) was a sentence of death, and at their slightest nod, was moved to terror the vast population spread over the Asiatic regions, whose lives fluctuated in their hands and who, on the most frivolous pretexts, could have been clapped for all time in the deepest dungeons or strangled or offered as food for the flames of the pyre.” The harrowing atrocities of St. Xavier and his successors on the Hindus of his and later dates, cannot be described here for want of space.