Storia do Mogor 281.14.5

281.14.5

The persecutions at Tanjor, of which I am about to speak, have had several causes, divisible into principal and secondary. The latter were, as it may be said, the commencing and far-off predispositions to these calamities ; the proximate causes have but served to complete what the remoter began. The earlier or subsidiary causes had merely begun the irritation in the heathens' minds ; the later and more important have created this new hatred and this aversion, or at any rate have made them burst forth, not only against the Christian religion, but against all who profess it ; not only against ecclesiastics, but against laymen. Such conduct the heathen had never displayed before during all the sixty or seventy years since the reverend Portuguese fathers arrived and established that mission. The troubles broke out there and in the environs through new ways of preaching the Gospel. Never before had they adopted those lamentable methods, such as I shall note, thereby overturning and destroying by one blow the edifice that had been built up in the course of so many years, not to speak of what the heathen kings threaten to do in the future.