My life. This was published in April, 1890, written by a man who lived in India and was visiting the United States of America.
"Oh, my friends, I have been to one source of the river of missionary enterprise, and the waters thereof are bitter—bitter as hate, narrow as the grave! Not now do I wonder that the missionary in the East is at times, to our thinking, a little intolerant towards beliefs he cannot understand and people he does not appreciate. Rather it is a mystery to me that these delegates of an imperious ecclesiasticism have not a hundred times ere this provoked murder and fire among our wards. If they were true to the iron teachings of Centreville or Petumna or Chunkhaven, when they came they would have done so. For Centreville or Smithson or Squeehawken teach the only true creeds in all the world, and to err from their tenets, as laid down by the bishops and the elders, is damnation. How it may be in England at the centres of supply I cannot tell, but shall presently learn. Here in America I am afraid of these grim men of the denominations, who know so intimately the will of the Lord and enforce it to the uttermost. Left to themselves they would prayerfully, in all good faith and sincerity, slide gradually, ere a hundred years, from the mental inquisitions which they now work with some success to an institootion—be sure it would be an "institootion" with a journal of its own—not far different from what the Torquemada ruled aforetime. Does this seem extravagant? I have watched the expression on the men's faces when they told me that they would rather see their son or daughter dead at their feet than doing such and such things—trampling on the grass on a Sunday, or something equally heinous—and I was grateful that the law of men stood between me and their interpretation of the law of God. They would assuredly slay the body for the soul's sake and account it righteousness."
It looks awfully familiar as a picture of the Religious Right in America today, somehow.
(I really ought not to read obscure Kipling!)