Reports from India could seem to put the Bible’s account of the past in difficulty. Thomas Maurice (1754–1824) thought the difficulty arose from how those reports had been used. Critics gave Asian traditions an antiquity and independence that challenged revelation, while he believed they preserved altered memories of revealed truth. His seven-volume Indian Antiquities (1793–1800) attempted to establish the Christian reading through an extensive collection of religious and historical comparisons.
The divine triad of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva became one of his important examples. Maurice read it in relation to the Trinity, treating apparent resemblance as evidence of a teaching inherited from an earlier age. Differences could be explained through corruption or incomplete preservation. The Hindu traditions’ own accounts of those deities were therefore only part of what he allowed to determine their meaning.
He applied similar reasoning to chronology and sacred history. An account that appeared to reach beyond the biblical past might contain a truth that could be brought back within it. The scale of the undertaking gave readers a substantial answer to hostile uses of Indian evidence. It also made his argument dependent on reports and translations whose reliability varied, including material circulating before Wilford’s admission of fabricated passages in 1805.
Maurice’s work belonged to a contest in which access to new learning did not dictate a single conclusion. A reader could use India to challenge Christianity or to confirm its worldwide inheritance, sometimes drawing on the same published account. The growing body of information intensified the disagreement as often as it resolved it. His volumes brought the Christian defence onto the bookshelves from which the next generation would assemble still more extensive histories of ancient religion.