Reverend John Wilson, Church of Scotland missionary in Bombay and Honorary President of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, lectured in 1844 on the ‘Peculiar Claims of India as a Field of Missionary Enterprise’. India should attract missionary attention because of its ‘magnitude as a country, and the great extent of its population’, he proposed. As a predominantly British colony, it is ‘wholly accessible as a field of missionary operations’, so that ‘Through the whole of this vast country, the shield of Britain is held over the missionary for his protection’. Additionally, Wilson argues, ‘we are placed as a nation under very great obligations to India’, as a result of wars there. India also provides profitable employment for British men in both military and civil service; and commerce with India is the most advantageous in Asia: the ‘conversion of India will be attended with great advantages to Britain, nay the whole of the civilized world’. More theologically, he suggests that ‘there is a great deal of available Christian influence and co-operation in India, to be secured and directed in behalf of the cause of Christian missions’, and, because ‘India is either the fatherland or the asylum of the greatest systems of religious error and delusion, which now exist, or have ever existed, in the world’, Britain should feel an evangelical duty to eradicate such religious systems.