tllliki! m\ University of California Berkeley CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. CHRISTIAN MISSIONS: THEIR AGENTS, AND THEIR RESULTS. BY T. W. M. MARSHALL. A FRUCTIBU8 EORUM COGNO6CETI8 EOS. S. MATT. vn. 1ft. VOL I. NEW YORK: D. & J. SADLIER & CO., 31 BARCLAY STREET. MONTREAL : COR. NOTRE-DAME AND ST. FRANCIS XAVIER 8T8. MRS. HICKKT, 128 FKDKFAL STREET, B06TOX. 1864. V, I X RENNIK, SHEA & LINDSAY, BTBBMOTYFIRS AMD ELKCTKOTYPEU. GKO. W, WOOD, PRINTUL, 81, 83 & 85 CENTRE-STBKKT, No. 2 Dutch-st., N. Y. NEW YORK. B brary CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. CHAPTEE I. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. FROM the beginning men have disputed with the Church her right to teach the nations. Human societies have demanded to share, when they have not claimed to usurp, her royal pre- rogatives. Even the conversion of the Gentiles has not seemed to them too arduous an enterprise. The Divine commission, Go, teach all nations^ they anticipated before it was announced, or interpreted in their own favor afterwards. And if in this attempt, at one time to rival, at another to supersede the Church, they have employed methods which are not hers, and agents whom she could only reprove, it must be admitted that, at different epochs, and by various means, they have accom- plished their designs. Asia still bears witness to the prodigious expansion of Buddhist missions, while the disciples of Islam can point to three continents in which they have contended with success against the disciples of the Cross. Nor have these strange victories been gained only by non- Christian communities. In the fourth century, according to the well-known expression of St. Jerome, " the whole world groaned to find itself Arian." In the sixth, Nestorianism was preached from Nubia .and Abyssinia to the coast of Coro- mandel and the plains of Tartary. And though Arius died the death of Judas, and Nestorius was devoured by worms like Herod, their doctrines were eagerly embraced by millions, and their conquests included, besides Syrians, Greeks, and Gauls, men of African, Hindoo, and Mongolian race. In what, then, do the missions of the Christian Church differ from those which, in point of numerical success, have some- times equalled, and perhaps in one case surpassed, her own ? 2 2 CHAPTKB I. It is believed that a sufficient answer to tin's question will be found in the following pages. Meanwhile, without attempting to investigate the mystery of Buddhist or Moslem triumphs, of which all Christians agree in adopting the same explanation, it will be enough to observe here, that, like the more fugitive successes of Arian or ISTestorian missions, they present only points of contrast with those which won Europe to the faith, and of which all the Christian nations of the world, in both hemispheres, are the living monuments. Differing in their methods, they differ still more conspicuously in their agents. What the emissaries of other creeds have been, and by what power they have reigned among men, their own chronicles abundantly reveal. They may have fascinated thousands by eloquence of speech or action ; they may even have displayed the outward show of many virtues, without which their success would have been impossible ; but that they or their followers were the ministers of an evangelical law, of which their own life was the consistent and harmonious exposition, no Christian, of whatever sect, is tempted to believe. The success of such men, even if it had been ten times more complete and durable, would only prove that Buddhism or Arianism was true, by proving at the same time that Christianity is false. The apostolic missionary and his disciple belong to another type, and one which seems hardly subject to variation. In them all the members of the human family, barbarian as well as civilized, discern the presence of gifts which belong to the supernatural order, and of graces which connect them by an almost visible bond with the unseen world. And these gifts and graces, as the facts to be recorded in these volumes will convince us, have not faded away like the fitful zeal of mis- sionaries of another order, but are poured out as lavishly in our own generation as in any which preceded it. It is by this token, and not by numerical success, though the latter will almost always accompany it, that we recognize the apostolic commis- sion. St. Paul was as truly an Apostle when stoned by the rabble at Lystra, as when loving disciples fell on his neck and kissed him, " sorrowing that they should see his face no more." He was more than ever the chosen servant of the Most High when, with fettered limbs, he was carried out to be slain. And this is true of all who, from that day to our own, have received his vocation. The martyrs of 1862, the latest of whom we have received the record, and the disciples who accompanied them to the stake, were precisely such men, in the ardor of their faith and in their consummate charity, as the earlier victims who " washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb " in ages long passed away. The Church, as her adversaries complain, does THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 3 not change ; and both her apostles and her neophytes, who still resemble the companions of St. Stephen and St. Paul, share the eulogy of this familiar reproach. On the other hand, the communities, once full of impetuous life, w T hose founders were astonished at their own success, and seemed for a moment to rival even those mighty " fishers of men" who had toiled obscurely on a Syrian lake before they cast their nets in a wider and deeper sea, have long since passed through all the successive phases of stagnation and decay which make up the history of every human institution. Buddhism, after swallowing up eastern and central Asia, re- lapsed into mortal lethargy, and has not gained a new disciple in a thousand years. Arianism survives only, disguised under other names, in the various Protestant societies which date their origin from the sixteenth century. Nestorianism, which in our own day has seen half its adherents reconciled to the Church, has ceased for centuries either to attempt or to desire any new conquest. Even Islamism, once so fierce and arrogant, displays a dying energy only among the degraded populations of eastern and western Africa, while in Europe its decrepitude has become a jest and a proverb, and it is only not finally cast out because the rulers of the earth cannot agree what to put in its place. But if these ancient adversaries of the Church, who so often menaced her with the destruction which has overtaken them- selves, have fallen on evil days, and no longer seek to dispute the supremacy which so many victories have won, a new rival has caught up their blunted weapons, and challenges her once more to the combat of which, as of old, the Gentile world is to be the prize. It is of this latest combat that in these volumes we shall trace the history. It has lasted long enough to enable us to do so. Less than a century has elapsed since the Protes- tant communities of Europe and America commenced this war- fare, and already, by the confessions of their own agents and advocates, they behold the issue with despair. In whatever region of the earth they have displayed their many-colored banner, the result, as their own witnesses will tell us, has been everywhere and always- the same. But if the new sects have failed to emulate the numerical success of Buddhist or Arian, 01 Moslem or Nestorian missions ; if they have labored so utterly in vain that we shall have to search for other than .a purely natural explanation of failure so absolute and invariable, they have at least surpassed all their predecessors in the prodigious material resources which they have brought to the conflict, and to which, before we enter upon its history, it is necessary to give our attention. 4 CHAPTER I. The administration of many of the Missionary Societies, both of Great Britain and America, may be compared, as respects the number of their agents and the magnitude of their resources, to the machinery which exists for the government of some of the secondary States of Europe. Their emissaries are reckoned by thousands, and their revenues by millions. It is the boast of their directors and advocates, that the world has never before witnessed the application of such means to such an end. " The Apostles would have triumphed," says an American writer, alluding to the multitude of Protestant missionaries, " at such an array of champions." "The first preachers of the Gospel," he adds, referring to their alliance with the civil power and their enormous wealth, " lacked all these advantages."* And this is no rhetorical boast, as a few examples will con- vince us. A single English society for the conversion of the heathen, of whose vast expenditure we shall presently have fuller details, consumes, we are told, forty thousand pounds annually " in its home expenditure alone, before one preacher has embarked on his mission."! The revenue of this corpora- tion, the Church Missionary Society, of which one-fourth is absorbed annually by its own officers, amounted in 1859 to one hundred and sixty-three thousand pounds, and that of the Bible Society, devoted to kindred objects, to one hundred and ninety-five thousand pounds; so that these two institutions alone received about three hundred and sixty thousand pounds in twelve months, or nearly one thousand pounds per diem, and certainly not less, since their foundation, than ten millions sterling. In 1862, the English Wesleyans, who were already spending one hundred thousand pounds annually in missions more than a quarter of a century ago, employed in the same work one hundred and thirty-seven thousand two hundred and eighty pounds, and must therefore have consumed about three millions since 1840. The London Missionary Society, as far back as 1839, possessed an annual income of eighty thousand pounds. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel is known to have dealt in one year with a total of nearly one hundred and forty thousand pounds. The five Societies enumerated have, there- fore, disposed of about seven hundred thousand pounds in a single year, while their aggregate expenditure probably exceeds twenty millions. And the ratio of this expenditure, which is emulated by a multitude of similar institutions in our own and other lands, appears to increase every year. So rapid is the increment, that * Dr. Stephen Olin, Works, vol. ii., p. 347 (1853.) f See The Times, January 18, 1860. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 5 at the present time, " the working capital " of English societies alone " is not less, year by year, than two millions of money ;" and of this almost fabulous revenue, we learn from the same authority, " the large staff of well-paid officers, whose existence depends upon the success of this system," absorb for their personal share " 25 per cent."* It is, perhaps, worthy of observation, and it is the first point in the contrast which we shall trace hereafter in all its details, that while the Protestant Societies of England alone consume, according to the statement which we have just heard, about half a million per annum, and one of them forty thousand pounds, in purely domestic expenditure, the entire administra- tion of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the sole missionary organization of the Catholic Church,f including " travelling expenses, salaries, office expenses, rent, registers, and postage of the correspondence with missions over the whole globe," cost, in the year 1858, rather less than sixteen hun- dred pounds. \ The foreign, as might be anticipated, is still more profuse than the domestic expenditure of missionary bodies. In Tahiti, and the contiguous islands, the English missionaries had already received and spent " more than one hundred thousand pounds sterling" nearly thirty years ago ; with no other result, as we shall learn hereafter, than to destroy two-thirds of the native population, and to deprive the rest both of their humble foods and of their natural virtues. In the Fijian group they ad expended more than seventy-five thousand pounds up to 1860. 1 In New Zealand, the Wesleyans alone had consumed eighty thousand pounds before 1844, and probably twice as much since.!" Twenty years ago, the Church Missionary So- ciety were spending in the same remote dependency more than fourteen thousand a year, though their staff only consisted of eight missionaries and sixteen catechists ;** and as early as 1838 the total expenditure of the same society in that island already amounted to two hundred thousand pounds.ft I n Hindostan, the cost of missionary operations, including the expenditure in missionary schools, has amounted to three millions sterling since * The Times, January 17, and April 19, 1860. f The Leopoldine Society of Austria works only in a narrow field, and with inconsiderable resources. J Annals of the Propagation of the Faith, May 1859 ; No. 120, p. 157. Asiatic Journal, vol. viii., p. 107 ; new series. | Viti, by Berthold Seeman, Ph. D., &c., ch. iv., p. 77. 1 Brown's New Zealand; app., p. 273. ** New Zealand; its Advantages and Prospects; by Charles Terry, F.R.S., p. 189. \\ Dr. Thomson's New Zealand, vol. i., part 2, ch. iv., p. 313. 6 CHAPTER I. 1840.* The mere "travelling expenses" of Protestant mis- sionaries to the East amounted, so long ago as 1839, to " two hundred and sixty thousand pounds."f Even in Australia, more than fifty thousand pounds had been exhausted in mis- sions twenty years ago, though not a solitary native had been converted at that date, nor has been converted since.:): The profusion, of which these are only a few examples, and which appears to augment year by year, is successfully emulated on the other side of the Atlantic. The American Board of Foreign Missions expended, in a few years, in the single island of Ceylon, as Lord Torrington reported to his government, " upwards of one hundred thousand pounds." In the southern provinces of Armenia, as one of their friends relates, five American missionaries dispose of u about fifty thousand dollars annually ;" while others consume in their missions in Turkey "three times that arnount,"|| or thirty thousand pounds per annum. In the distant solitudes of Oregon, one of their sects spent " forty-two thousand dollars in a single year," though the mission was subsequently abandoned, and only kt inflicted pain- ful disappointment upon the society and its supporters."^ Even in the remote islands of which Honolulu is the modest capital, the same class of agents had received, up to 1853, more than fifty thousand pounds in salaries alone ; and the total " cost of missionary enterprise" in that obscure group already exceeded, by the same date, nine hundred thousand dollars ** One of the objects proposed in the following pages is to trace the results of this vast expenditure, in all parts of the world, and to examine, chiefly by the testimony of those who control and direct it, what proportion there is between those results and the means employed to obtain them. Nor can this be deemed a capricious or needless inquiry, even by those who wisely main- tain that the salvation of a single soul cannot be purchased at too great a price. It is precisely the incomparable dignity of the object in view which justifies the proposed inquiry, and lends to it all its interest. And when we find it asserted by grave and impartial writers, members of various Protestant communities, that the general result of such costly efforts has been undeniable failure ; nay, even in too many cases, that " the European teachers of the heathen have to answer for more evil than will * British India, by Montgomery Martin, chap, v., p. 227 (1802.) f Travels in S. Eastern Asia, by the Rev. Howard Malcolm, vol. ii., p. 279. | History ofN. 8. Wales, by T. H. Braim, Esq., Principal of Sydney College, vol. ii., ch. vi., p. 237. S Ceylon, Past and Present, by Sir George Barrow, ch. vii., p. 162. | Wagner's Travels in Persia, etc., vol. iii., ch. viii. 1 Dr. Olin's Works, vol. ii., p. 427. ** Sandwich Island Notes, by A. Haole, app., p. 483. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. ever be compensated by their most zealous services ;' still further stimulated to pursue an investigation which, if fairly and honestly conducted, will test the accuracy of such for- midable statements. If we " compare the visible results ob- tained," says a Protestant writer who has devoted special attention to this subject, "with the multiplied machinery, urgency of appeal, and vast expenditure, with which the mis- sions are prosecuted, it must be owned that they are greatly disproportionate,'^ And this temperate assertion is only too amply confirmed, as we shall see in the course of these pages, by a great cloud of witnesses, of all ranks and sects ; so that the organ of-one of the most influential schools of Protestant opinion in England does not scruple to declare, in the year 1859, that " we should not allow a few isolated instances of success, here and there, to blind us to what we must call, to speak plainly, the failure of missionary efforts in modern time$"\ It is our purpose to trace, in every region of the earth, both the fact of this admitted failure and its cause ; and in this at- tempt we shall be assisted, almost exclusively, by the evidence of Protestant witnesses of all classes and creeds, English and American, German and French, Swedish and Dutch ; historians and naturalists,ci vil and military officials,tourists and merchants, chaplains and missionaries. And whatever may be the difficulty . of the task, however tedious the research which it involves, it must be admitted that an English writer enjoys peculiar facili- ties in collecting the materials for such a work. Not only is the noble passion of travel and adventure the special characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race, so as to make them a kind of marvel in the eyes of languid and incurious foreigners ; but the same restless energy which impels them to wander in all lands, fording every river and scaling every mountain, almost invariably issues in a book, more or less accurate and instructive in which the impressions of the traveller are recorded. It was the examina- tion of many such volumes, and the astonishing unanimity of their authors, in spite of the diversity of their religious opinions, in one point alone, which first suggested the idea and the scheme of the work which is now offered to the reader. Yiewed simply as contributions to literature, it is sometimes possible to dispute the value and importance of the compositions referred to ; but considered in another aspect, this army of active and voluble tourists, clerical and lay, may be regarded as witnesses employed by Divine Providence, without their knowledge or concurrence, * Polynesia and New Zealand, by the Rt. Rev. M. Russell, ch. iii., p. 113 ; second edition, 1843. | Bampton Lectures for 1843, by Anthony Grant, D.C.L., ch. vi., p. 214. j Ghi'istian Remembrancer, vol. xxxvii., p. 69. 8 CHAPTER I. to detect and announce to the world a fact which the eager passions and prejudices of men would otherwise combine to con- ceal. It is this fact, momentous in itself, and in the conclusions which it peremptorily suggests, which we are about to demon- strate by ; mpartial and conclusive testimony ; and we might now pr< d at once to examine that testimony in detail, but that th i is one point which we are compelled to eliminate from the general discussion, and which may be most conveniently noticed in this place. In comparing, as we are about to-do, the influence of Catholic and Protestant missions in all parts of the world, in order to apply to the Church and the Sects a new and supreme test which could not have been employed at an earlier date, it is evident that, besides the primary question of results, two main points, must occupy our attention, the character of their respective agents, and the method of their operations. The first w r ill receive copious illustration in the course of these volumes ; the second must be considered here. The most obvious distinction, amounting to a direct contrast, between the two classes of missionaries, is found in the instru- ment which they respectively employ in their attempts to con- vert the heathen. The Catholic Missionary, imitating the example of St. Paul and St. Barnabas, often receiving no salary, and always less than the wages of a common laborer, presents himself without fear before the pagan crowd, and in spite of menaces, stripes, and death, announces to them, by word of mouth, " the lively oracles of God." During twenty, thirty, or forty years, he accepts without repugnance a life of poverty and toil ; and if the instruments of torture are one day arrayed before his eyes, he is so far from contemplating them with sur- prise or dismay, that he has often begged as a special favor from God, before entering upon the apostolic career, that he might be deemed worthy of this very trial. He has dared to ask that he might find grace to resemble his Master, not only in the tenor of his life, But even in the agony of his death. Many examples will teach us, in the course of these pages, how such petitions are answered. The Protestant Missionary, on the other hand, encumbered for the most part by domestic ties, and busy with the incessant precautions which they suggest and justify, for the claims of a wile and family are sufficiently sacred and imperious to precede all others, naturally declines to enter upon a course so dangerous and difficult, and relies chiefly upon the circulation of the Holy Scriptures, or of religious tracts, which he scatters along the coast, or dispatches into the interior, and then leaves to produce their own effect. In many countries, and especially in China THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 9 I and the Levant, the action of Protestant missionaries has been almost entirely limited to this distribution of books, although, as one of their own body observes, after an experience prolonged through several years, "it seems of little use to give books profusely without abundant personal preaching fl> an opinion which he confirms by the forcible remark, " It is qifc - evident too that the Apostles proceeded in this manner." * *> i In spite of this impressive fact, Protestants have been re- luctant to abandon their favorite method, and still more to admit that it has failed. It is true, as even they have con- fessed, that the project of converting the heathen by the circu- lation of books derives no sanction from the Acts of the Apostles; and that it was a widely different system of missionary effort which, in less than three centuries, converted the Roman world to Christianity. That system derived its supernatural force from the fertilizing blood of martyrs. St. John the Baptist, the first preacher of penance, was a martyr. All the Apostles, save one, were martyrs. Fifty-two Roman Pontiffs, in lineal succession from St. Peter, gave their lives for the faith. The only three great names in the first age of Christianity which are not, as it were, written in blood, are those of the Blessed Virgin, St. Mary Magdalene, and St. John, who alone stood at the foot of the Cross, and had their martyrdom in wit- nessing that sight. Christianity was preached and founded in blood. The very profession of the true Missionary was, and still is, to die for the salvation of souls. By no other process has the Gospel conquered the world. And this necessity was implied and foreshadowed in the Great Atonement. " Sine sanguinis effusione non jit remis*io?^ The apostles of the Crucified, if they would resemble Him, must be clothed " with dyed garments," crimsoned, like the seamless robe of their Master, with their own blood. " It is not to Thabor that Jesus invites you," cries a modern missionary to some who were con- templating the apostolic life, " but to Calvary, and to death." J He had a right to say it, for he was himself a member of a society which, in leas than a century, gave more than four hun- dred martyrs to the Church. And so far is this immutable law of the Christian apostolate, that the souls of the heathen can only be purchased by blood, from being reversed in our own times, that there have perhaps been more martyrdoms, as we shall see hereafter, in the last three centuries, the single empire of Annam having produced sixteen thousand martyrs in * Travels in 8. Eastern Asia, by the Rev. Howard Malcolm, vol. ii., cli. ii., p. 160. | Heb. ix. 22. I Lettres Edifiantes et Ourieuses, tome x., p. 376. 10 CHAPTER I. nine months of the year 1861, than in any equal period since the persecutions which Tacitus would have provoked and Pliny hardly dissuaded, which successive emperors vainly renewed, and which the Roman Senate in its later days had learned to discourage, because even the heathen began to understand the mysterious truth, that " the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church." It was by the lavish outpouring, in many lands, of this pre- cious and vivifying blood, that Christianity fought its way from Jerusalem to Rome, and from Rome to the uttermost parts of the empire. So little share had the Bible, the sole instrument of certain modern missions, in the triumphs of that tremendous conflict; so little care had its Divine Author to provide this weapon, even as an auxiliary, in that mortal strife; that it did not so much as exist, in an available form, tilt the battle was over and the victory won, till the successor of the Fisherman had finally dethroned the Cgesars, and planted the cross on the capitol which they had forever abandoned. And this great historical fact, in which is revealed the judgment of God as to the real use and office of His word, is equally true of the later conversions, in all parts of the world, from the fourth to the nineteenth century, which owed quite as little as the holocausts of earlier days the myriad martyrdoms of Rome, Smyrna, or Antioch to the dispersion of the Bible. The method of the first Apostles, as well as of the successive Evangelists to whom they bequeathed their mission, of St. Paul and St. Andrew, as of St. Augustine, St. Boniface, and St. Francis. was pre- cisely that which is still followed by the Catholic missionary. They evidently neither knew, nor desired to know, any other. That books, however sacred and persuasive, were not the appointed instruments for such a work, is decisively proved by their scanty use or total neglect of them ; but may also be in- ferred from the significant fact, that Providence suffered four- teen centuries to elapse, and the Church to win all her battles, before the art of printing, by which alone the Scriptures could be adequately multiplied, was revealed to man. That the Bible, however precious to Christians, was not designed by its Author even to assist in converting the heathen, is evident from these considerations, that the world received it too late for any such purpose ; that the Apostles and their successors neither made, nor wished to make, nor could have made if they had wished, any such use of it ; and lastly, that " the prodigious and almost incredible dispersion" * of the inspired books in modern times, of which we shall presently furnish examples, has so utterly * Dr. Grant's Bampton Lectures. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 11 failed, even in a solitary instance, to accomplish that result, or to promote in any measure the interests of religion, as to sug- gest to thoughtful and learned men the reflections expressed in the following words. '"That the Bible," saysMoehler, "cannot in itself constitute a settled, outward rule, nor was ever so in- tended by Christ, no one surely, after the awful experience which, in our times especially, has been made, and is still daily made, will feel any longer disposed to deny." * " In spite of the innumerable modern expositions of the Bible," observes Dollin- ger, "and their unquestionable scientific value, far from having produced, in any degree, a larger amount of faith, or unity of doctrine, on the Protestant side, the very contrary is per- ceivable," f Lastly, Dr. Grant, after a careful examination of the effect of Bible distributions in promoting Christian missions, exclaims, " Surely the very failure that has attended the mere dispersion of the sacred Scriptures among the heathen nations might satisfy us, that it was not designed that the Gospel should thus win its triumphs." J The circulation of Bibles continues, however, to be the characteristic feature of Protestant missions to the heathen. The agent of Protestant missionary societies has hitherto de- clined to take any part in the terrible warfare of apostles. His life belongs to his family ; and when he accepts a commission in foreign lands, the shedding of blood forms no part of his con- tract. It is confessed by general consent, that the obligations of a parent justify this reserve; and the world is so far from complaining that a married missionary should prefer the dis- tribution of books to the labors and perils of the apostolate, that his own employers recommend and applaud his decision. i' There can be no doubt," says a respectable Anglican writer, " that the plan of circulating the sacred Scriptures is infinitely preferable to that of a mission where such a circulation is not a primary object." They are still, therefore, distributed in almost countless thousands to all parts of the earth, and the least change in this peculiar system of propaganda would de- prive vast numbers of Protestant missionaries, of all nations and sects, of their only employment. It is necessary to consider, on this account, before we enter upon the immediate subject of this work, three preliminary questions, of such critical im- portance in estimating the character of Protestant missions, that the answer which a candid scrutiny will elicit suffices to determine absolutely, without further inquiry, their real nature * Symbolism, vol. ii., p. 122 ; ed. Robertson. f The Church and tJie Churches, Introd., p. 13, ed. MacCabe. i Bampton Lectures, iii., 98. . Christianity in India, by J. W. Cuningham, M.A., p. 142. 12 CHAPTER I. and influence. The three questions which we are about to examine are these : (1 ), To what extent are Bibles and tracts circulated by Protestant missionaries? (2), What is the literary value of the various translations so distributed ? (3), What use do the heathen make of them? In attempting to determine the special character of missions so novel in their form and method, as well as to trace their historical results, it was impossible either to avoid or postpone this inquiry. The British and Foreign Bible Society, whose operations we shall find to be identified with those of Protestant missions,* was founded in 1Y80. Its income, which in that year was five thousand pounds, soon increased twenty fold, and in 1791 had already reached one hundred thousand pounds.f Haifa century later, its annual revenue approached two hundred thousand pounds, and it distributed in a single year nearly one million seven hundred thousand Bibles. But this is only one institution, though certainly the most opulent, out of thousands established with a similar object. In every part of the British colonial possessions, from the banks of the St. Lawrence to the plains of Bengal, " Auxiliary Bible Societies " exist, whose number it would be nearly impossible to define exactly, and much more their aggregate receipts. " The people of England," says Mr. Howitt, u spend about one hundred and seventy thousand pounds annually in Bibles." J What they spend in other countries, who can tell ? To determine the exact number of Bibles issued annually, in all languages, by Protestant agency, it would be necessary to consult the reports of thousands of societies scattered all over the earth, many of which it is impossible to obtain at a given moment. Some writers estimate the total issue, by all sects-*- including the Baptists, who have adopted a version of their own as nearly one hundred million copies ; yet even this is considered only a beginning. " We want one hundred and thirty million Bibles," exclaimed the Rev. Dr. Plumer not long ago, as if the number already dispersed were hardly worth reckoning ; and the want will no doubt be supplied. Wherever there exists a human being, savage or civilized, who does not possess a copy of the Scriptures in his own tongue, the Bible Societies recognize a claimant. More than forty years ago, the directors of the American Bible Society announced that their aim was "the distribution of the Bible among all the accessible population of the globe, within the shortest practicable period ;" * In New York the offices of the Bible Society and of the Board of Foreign Missions are under the same roof. f History of the B. and F. Bible Society, by the Rev. J. Owen, M.A. Colonization and Christianity, ch. xxvi., p. 448 | History of the American Bible Society, by W. P. Strickland ; app., p. 371 THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 13 and in the first twenty years, while their organization was still incomplete, they expended more than six hundred thousand pounds, and distributed upwards of three million copies. " Four hundred and forty thousand Siamese," says Mr. Strick- land, " were represented as being ready for the Bible in 1833." He does not say how they manifested their readiness, and con- sidering the singular use they have made of the Bibles already distributed to them, we may perhaps infer that the Siamese are able to wait without impatience for the rest. What is the number of Bibles which they, and other barbarians, have already received, and what they have done with them, we shall learn presently. But it is not only Bibles which are dispatched in millions to every shore, deposited by the river banks of both continents, or accumulated in vast piles in the seaport towns of Asia and America; religious tracts also, destined to supplement and illustrate the sacred writings, are lavished upon the heathen world in still greater profusion. The Religious Tract Society of England, we are told, issued in the single year 1861 more than forty-one million, and since its foundation nearly one thousand million tracts* And this is only one of many similar institutions. " The Swedish Tract Society," more reserved in its operations, still counts its distribution by millions.f The " American Tract Society " had already printed, twenty-five years ago, and they have been printing ever since at an increased rate, " thirty-six millions of copies, and of the volumes nearly thirty-four millions." The kindred society at Boston had also issued, by way of inaugurating their foundation, fourteen million five hundred thousand seven hundred and forty pages ; and the writer from whom these details are borrowed gives a list of a few of the American societies which, in the course of a single year, had collected nearly one million dollars. \ And even these vast revenues hardly suffice to defray the cost of operations which are on such a gigantic scale that, as Mr. Putnam inforins us, in a well-known work, the single Society of American Missions had printed, in the course of a few years, " nearly four hundred million pages ;" their whole issue, between 1812 and 1861, amounting to " over one thousand five hundred million pages," [ or jive million volumes of three hundred pages each. This was the almost fabulous work of * Jlhe Times, June 13, 1862. f Home Life in Norway and Sweden, by Charles Loring Brace, ch.xi., p. 160 (1857). \ visit to the American Churches, by Andrew Reed, D.D., vol. ii., p. 166. Putnam's American Facts, p. 55 | Report of American Board of Foreign Missions, 1861 ; quoted in New York Evening Express, February 21, 1861. 14: CHAPTER I. one only of the innumerable associations employed simulta- neously in all parts of the world in promoting the same design, and most of which are constantly assuming still wider propor- tions. Let us come to a few examples of the measure in which different countries and nations share in this distribution of 'Bibles and tracts, .the prodigious extent of which is rather obscured than explained by mere general statements. The circulation of books, we have said, is the characteristic feature of Protestant missions ; let us endeavor to trace, by Protestant testimony, in all the spheres of missionary labor which we are hereafter to visit, their number, their value, and their effect. CHINA. I. In China, during the latter half of the single year 1 844, the Protestant tracts scattered amongst the natives filled more than eleven hundred thousand pages, or nearly four thousand volumes of three hundred pages each ; and this, which might have satis- fied the wants of a century, was only the work of a few months. Sixteen years earlier, and the operation had continued in- cessantly, like the rains which came down at the Flood, during the whole interval, Mr. Gutzlaff alone, in less than twelve months, " distributed twenty-three boxes full of Chinese books among the people."* About the same time, Mr. Medhurst, by his own account, was in the habit of giving away, at the cost of the people of England, five hundred volumes a day. Mr. Tomlin also, an Anglican clergyman, and companion of Gutzlaff, writes thus to his employers: "We are taking to Siam twenty -two good-sized chests, well filled with the bread of life ;" and one of his ordinary expressions, after discharging similar cargoes, was this, " Another sowing season is just ended."f Nor has this abundant sowing ever ceased during nearly half a century, though without producing in fifty consecutive summers even the faintest symptom of a harvest. As late as 1851, we still find a Protestant missionary reporting to his employers, " I distribute about one thousand copies a year."J Already, in 1839, the Protestant missionaries, we are told, had " printed thirty thousand separate books of Scripture, and upwards of half a million of tracts, in the Chinese language." At the same date they had issued " one hundred and fifty thou- sand tracts in the languages of the Malayan Archipelago, com- prising twenty millions of printed pages." At Canton and * China; its State and Prospects; by W. H. Medhurst ; ch. xi., p. 328. f Missionary Journals and Letters, by J. Tomlin, B. A., cli. iii., p. 55. t The Chinese and General Missionary Gleaner, vol. i., p. 45. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 15 Malacca alone they had printed, nearly thirty years ago, more than four hundred andfyfty thousand volumes* And so utterly wasted was this enormous and costly distribution, as we shall see more fully hereafter, that a Protestant missionary honestly assures his employers, "We have had no proofs that the thousands of books thrown among this people have excited one mind to inquire concerning them, have induced one soul to find a teacher among the foreigners in China, or have been the means of converting one individual." f This, as their own agents freely confess, was the result in China ; while as respects Malacca, another Protestant missionary frankly tells us, " No Malay Christian is to be found in the place." Again, in Batavia, which was afterwards abandoned in de- spair, the English missionaries alone had distributed more than one hundred and ninety thousand volumes upwards of thirty years ago. In Pulo Pinang, where the demand might be sup- posed to be insignificant, forty-four thousand volumes had dis- appeared by the same date. In Singapore alone, sixty-six thousand were dispersed ; though, as a missionary sadly relates in 1839, "not a single Malay in Singapore had made even a nominal profession of Christianity," he means of Protestant- ism, for he presently adds : " The Catholics have brought over a number of Malays, Chinese, and others, and have full audiences on Sundays." They, however, like the first Apostles, had not distributed a single tract, and probably not many Bibles; though, as Mr. Medhurst acknowledges, " they translated the major part of the New Testament into Chinese." In the Loo-Choo islands, to which an English Missionary Society sent Dr. Bettelheim as their representative, we are in- formed by an eye-witness, that " if he distributed tracts at night, the next morning the police brought them back to him, carefully tied up." For seven years he continued the operation, and when at last he retired in despair, had not gained a solitary disciple, nor succeeded in circulating a solitary tract. | What his unfruitful pastime cost the society at home, we need not stay to calculate. But we have as yet only an imperfect idea of the extent to which books have been circulated in the regions beyond the Ganges. One would have supposed that at all events a single 'version of the Scriptures would have satisfied the wants of the Malays, who are not generally considered ardent or critical stu- * Medhurst, ch. xxii., p. 592. 4- See Dr. Brown's Hist. Prop, of Christianity, vol. ii., p. 256. I Malcolm's Travels, &c., vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 114. | lUd. p. 106. | The Japan Expedition, by J. W. Spalding, U.S. Steam Frigate Mississippi ; ch. vii., p. 113 (1856). 16 CHAPTER I. dents of literature, whether sacred or profane. But this was not the opinion of the gentlemen who administer the funds of the Bible Societies. " Not less than seven versions of the Malay Scriptures have been printed," says the Rev. Howard Malcolm, who was specially deputed to investigate and report on their subsequent fate, which he does in these candid words : u Many thousands have been distributed ; but, so far as I can learn, with scarcely any perceptible benefit. I did not hear of a single Malay convert on the whole peninsula."* The seven versions were apparently insufficient. The Burmese, who have been the occasion of great expense, perhaps without knowing it, to the English and Americans, were not less generously treated than the Malays, since amongst them also, more than thirty years ago, " about two hundred and fifty thousand tracts had been printed and circulated," and how many thousands since, probably no one knows. Let us hear Mi-. Malcolm again, who thus announces to his employers the results of their liberality : " We have visited and distrib- uted tracts in eighty-two towns, cities, and villages ; supplied six hundred and fifty-seven boats and vessels, besides handing them, in a multitude of cases, to persons along shore." And lest it should be inferred that all this indicated co-operation on the part of the Burmese, Mr. Malcolm immediately adds : " But this fact is far from proving a general desire among the people for the knowledge of the new religion. A tract is in every respect a curiosity. They have never seen such paper. The shape of the book is a curiosity. Besides, it is property, and no Burman will refuse a gift without a strong reason." Sir John Bowring observes of the neighboring kingdom of Siam, that " one of the missionaries acknowledges that sheets of white paper would be yet more carefully sought. "f Mr. Malcolm might have added too, that nearly all the objects of his benevolence were Eerfectly unable to read the books thus acquired, even if they ad wished to do so. But this literary incapacity appears to have been considered wholly unimportant, either in Burmah or elsewhere. " Many of them could not read," says another official distributor, speaking even of the more educated Chinese, " but they seemed willing to remove their inability, since they accepted our books and our exhortations to learn that useful art at the same time."J And this he says, not in jest, but with serious gravity. On the other hand, the few who made the attempt to read them usually returned them with the remark, that they were composed in such a barbarous and incoherent * P. 126. | The Kingdom and People of Siam, vol. i., cli. xii , p. 377. % The Chinese as they Are, by GK Tradescant Lay, Esq., oh. xxxvi., p. 338. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 17 style as to be perfectly unintelligible. But this, which is the second point to be noticed, is too important a fact, and too characteristic of this singular missionary system, not to merit further illustration. The first Protestant version of the Bible in the Chinese lan- guage, was produced by the labors of Dr. Morrison, who freely used the translations made long before his time by Catholic mis- sionaries, but without adhering to their text. He had reason to lament his error. " 1 edited the New Testament," he says, " with such alterations as in my conscience, and with the degree of knowledge of the Chinese language which I then possessed, I thought necessary ;* the alterations being suggested appa- rently by the same motive which induced Professor Samuel Kidd to invent a new Chinese word even for God, u for fear of iden- tifying the doctrine of the Bible with the system of Popery."f Dr. Morrison's version cost more than txventy thousand pounds, but has long since been condemned, being found only to excite the contempt of the Chinese ; or, as the Bible Society cautiously admits, to be " imperfect, and not sufficiently idiomatic to be understood.";): It is "exceedingly verbose," says Choo-Tih-lang, a Chinese graduate, " containing much foreign phraseology, so contrary to the usual style of our books, that the Chinese cannot thoroughly understand the meaning, and frequently refuse to look into it." Yet, as Mr. Lay observes, " there is a great readi- ness among the Chinese to admire any thing of a literary kind ; and they had admitted, as Bridgman notices in his Chinese Chrestomathy, some of the compositions of Catholic missionaries, by the command of the most critical of their emperors, to rank amongst their classics. " They" as Sir James Mackintosh generously observes, " cultivated the most difficult of lan- guages with such success as to compose hundreds of volumes in it."|| It was an unwise act of Dr. Morrison to forsake such guides, and trust to his own inspirations. Dr. Marshman, the next editor of a Chinese Protestant Bible, committed the same mistake, and with the same result. " I am assured by mission- aries," says Mr. Malcolm, " and by private Chinese gentlemen, that neither Marshman's nor Morrison's Bible is fully intelligible, much less attractive. The same is the case with many of the tracts, and some of them have been found wholly unworthy of circulation.''^ Abel Remusat and Jules Klaproth, both cele- * Memoirs of Robert Morrison, D.D., by his Widow, vol. ii., p. 3. f Critical Notices of Dr. Morrison's Literary Labors, p. 34. % Brief View of the Operations of the B. F. B. 8., p. 4 (1862). Medhurst, cli. xxii., pp. 558-60. | Review of the Causes of the Revolution ; Works, vol. ii., p. 251 (1846). 1 Travels, &c., vol. ii., p. 218. 3 18 CHAPTER I. brated Sinologues, used privately to ridicule the infelicitous attempts of Morrison and his companions ; while Marchini, who could speak the language fluently, declares, that their Chinese versions are " an unintelligible jargon, which no one could read without laughing," and that the learned Chinese into whose hands they fell complained that their " sublime idiom " should be so wantonly caricatured. The Abbe Voisin, a Catholic missionary in China, who actually published a French trans- lation, by way of specimen, of a part of the Protestant Chinese version adopted by the Bible Society, apologizes in these words for not proceeding further with his task : " The pen falls from my hand in witnessing the ignoble and sacrilegious manner in which our sacred books are travestied, dishonored, and per- verted. I defy the Chinese scholar who possesses the most exact knowledge of his own language so much as to guess what the translator intended to -express; nor could I myself have done so, if I had not been familiar with the inspired text which he professes to translate."* And so fully and unreservedly has this been admitted, even by Protestant missionaries, though not till the unwelcome facts had become known in Europe, that as late as 1843 we find them holding a solemn meeting at Hong-Kong, " of missionaries of various Protestant denominations," summoned together for this express object, to take measures for concocting (me more version, "better adapted for general circulation than any hitherto published. "f This new attempt was made, as Mr. Lay intimates, in spite of the costly failures which had preceded it, in the vain hope " that the pages of serene and heavenly wisdom may be cleared from those ugly prodigies which now deform them so egregiously."J But the same fate still attended all their efforts ; for, as a Protestant missionary in China has quite recently informed us, "one or two new versions were attempted, but exceedingly defective, and very unsatisfactory." Finally, after efforts prolonged through half a century, and an expenditure which almost baffles calculation, but which had no other result than to make Christianity a jest among the heathen, Mr. Taylor Meadows, Chinese Interpreter to H. M. Civil Service, thus describes, in 1856, the real character and effect of those Protestant translations, which have cost such enormous sums, and have been distributed in such incredible numbers along the whole southern and eastern shores of China, at the expense of the English people, but without making so * Anncdes de la Propagation de la Foi, tome ix., p. 109. \ Chinese Repository, vol. xii., p. 551. \ Tlw Chinese, &c., ch. v., p. 52. Life in China, by the Rev. W. C. Milne, p. 503. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 19 N, much as a solitary convert : " Let the English Protestant reflect on the Book of the Mormons, and on Mor monism, as it is spread- ing in some places in Great Britain, and he will obtain a by no means exaggerated notion of the contemptible light in which our badly translated Scriptures, and Christianity in China, are regarded by the thorough Confucian ; viz., as a tissue of ab- surdities and impious pretensions, which it would be lost time to examine"* Perhaps it is superfluous to add, as a further illustration of the effects of this new system of propagating Christianity by the safe agency of books instead of the perilous toils of apostles, that the translations with which Burniali and Siam were deluged were of precisely the same character. Mr. Tomlin, himself an active agent in these proceedings, reluctantly confesses that there were so many "gross blunders" in the tracts which he and others circulated in Siam, that the king, an intelligent reader, " complains he can find neither head nor tail ;" and he adds, that Chaou-Bun, an educated native who assisted GutzlafF, though he " wrote out copies of the whole New Testament, despised all our sacred books, and said the tracts were abused and torn by the people, and ridiculed by the priests on account of their blunders,"! Dr. Hobson also, an agent of the Keligious Tract Society at Canton, reports of his own sphere of labor : " I am truly grieved that I cannot send you pleasing and en- couraging accounts of any apparent good resulting from the distribution of the tracts they are treated with great dis- respect ;"J and even the Bible Society confesses, in 1862, u your committee are still unable to give any satisfactory account of the work of Bible distribution in this locality." We have now, perhaps, sufficient information with respect to the circulation of Protestant Bibles and tracts in China and the contiguous countries. We have seen also what is their literary value, and have been told, even by Protestant writers, that far from assisting to convert the heathen to Christianity, they only increase their contempt for it. One inquiry, and not the least curious, still remains to be answered. It is impossible to hear of the millions of Bibles and tracts distributed during the last fifty years in these countries, without desiring to know what has been their final destiny. As most of the heathen could not, and the rest would not read them, what, we are tempted to ask, has become of them? The missionaries were charged to distribute them, and they did so ; * The Chinese and their Rebellion, ch. vi., p. 79. t Missionary Journals, &c., ch. xiii., p. 329. \ See The Gross and the Dragon, by J. Kesson, ch. xv., p. 234. Abstract of 5Sth Report, p. 4. 20 CHAPTER I. with what results, some of their number have honorably con- fessed. The pagans, chiefly of the lowest classes, willingly received them ; but to what use did they apply this new acquisition, this prodigious mass of volumes, of all shapes and dimensions, of which the language was supposed by their authors to resemble, more or less exactly, the dialects of China, Burmah, and Siam? This is the question which we are about to answer, by the help of various witnesses, who describe what they continually saw with their own eyes. "The cause of the eagerness which has sometimes been evinced," says Archdeacon Grant, " to obtain the sacred volume, cannot be traced to a thirst for the word of life, but to the secular purposes, the unhallowed uses, to which the holy word of God, left in their hands, has been turned, and which are absolutely shocking to any Christian feeling."* Let us see how far this statement is correct. " In China," says Mr. Lay, recording his own experience, " it has been customary for the distributor of books to scatter his wares in a sort of broadcast, and to give wherever a hand was held out to receive. The natural result of this was the consignment of the books thus bestowed to the shelf, the box, or the cupboard, where, when sought for by the missionaries, they are found in a state of spruce and intact neatness, which seemed to say : Here we are, just as you left us."f But this was a far better lot than usually befell them. "They have been seen," says Dr. Wells "Williams, also a Protestant agent, " on the counters of shops in Macao, cut in two for wrapping up medicines and fruit, which the shopman would not do with the worst of his own books." ; Sometimes they are applied to a still more unexpected purpose. " At his house at Shaouhing, Mr. Burdon," a Protestant missionary, " found an opium-smoker stretched upon the bed, with his head propped up by a volume of Alford's Greek Testament." Let us hear another class of witnesses. " The number of books which the Protestants distribute is immense," says Bishop Courvezy, a prelate well known to English travellers in the Indian Archipelago, " but the use to which they are applied is very different from that which they were intended to serve. At Singapore, I saw the walls of two houses entirely covered over with leaves of the Bible ; this profanation, however, is not * Bampton Lectures, cli. iii., p. 93. f The Chinese, &c., ch. v., p. 54. The Middle Kingdom, vol. ii., cli. xix., p. 343. Report of Church Missionary Society, p. 196 (1862). THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 21 greater than when they are employed to roll round tobacco and bacon."* Another eye-witness tells us, that in the frontier towns of China, whole cases of them were constantly " sold by auction, and purchased, at the price of old paper, chiefly by the shoe- makers, grocers, and druggists." M. Boucho writes from Pulo Pinang, " I have my self interrogated many intelligent heathens as to the use which they made of the Bibles distributed to them. They have invariably replied, that they employ them for ignoble purposes." He adds, that they were equally unanimous in declaring, "All these Bibles are translated in so barbarous and unintelligible a style, that, far from presenting the Christian religion in an attractive form, they are only suited to repel and disgust those amongst the heathen who felt some inclination to embrace it."f The Abbe Albrand, a well-known missionary, at a later period a bishop, whom Mr. Windsor Earl, though a Protestant, warmly eulogizes for his " great success in converting the Chinese,"^ and whose church at Singapore was partly built by the generous aid of his Protestant friends, after noticing an American missionary who boasted that he had "distributed twelve large chests full in a few months," continues as follows : " He must have a great reputation among his countryman, who count the number of conversions by the number who have accepted Bibles ; but I, who am on the spot, know the uses to which they are destined. There is not a day but some object passes through my hands enveloped in the leaves of some Protestant publication. How many houses are there in Singa- pore alone of which the ceilings and walls are covered with the leaves of some hundreds of Bibles in the form of tapestry ! r He adds, what Mr. Tomlin admits, that the Chinese often stole them at night in order to apply them to domestic purposes, and that some of the Protestant missionaries appeared to consider this larceny a very encouraging proof of their zeal for divine things. M. Pecot, who was familiar with both Hindostan and China, noticing the boast of the Bible societies that their versions had " penetrated into all parts of the known world," observes, that as far as his observation extends, this is perfectly true ; but he adds, " the grocers in all these countries can attest the same fact, since they distribute these translations, sheet by sheet, every hour of the day." Marchini also, speaking from actual * Annals of the Prop, of the Faith, vol. i., p. 107 ; English edition, f Anncdes, tome iv., pp. 192, 214. i The Eastern Seas, by George Windsor Earl, ch. xii., p. 392. Annales, tome viii., p. 133. 22 CHAPTER I. observation, reports, that " they are sold by the weight to shoe- makers, to make Chinese slippers ;" and this learned person expresses his astonishment, that " the English, who display so much discernment and accuracy of judgment in other matters," should allow themselves to be the dupes of salaried speculators or visionary enthusiasts. Finally, the director of the Chinese seminary at Pulo Pinang says : " 1 have myself heard a Chinese declare that he was very grateful to the Bible Society for sup- plying him with paper for a use which I dare not name, and he assured me that this was the ordinary fate of the Bibles which which were distributed to the Chinese."* Without attempting to multiply needlessly these revolting facts, let us hasten to prove that they occur as invariably in other countries. " How degrading the idea,' 7 exclaims a Protestant writer, with whose words w r e will conclude, " to put into the hands of every Chinese bargeman or illiterate porter a packet of tracts, to sell or give away on his journey as he pleases !"f Perhaps the English people, who pay*for all these publications, and without whose aid this indiscriminate pro- fanation of holy things could never be accomplished, may some day adopt the same opinion ; especially when they learn, from an equally reluctant and impartial witness, that " hardly an instance has occurred of a Chinese coming to a missionary to have any passage explained, nor any person converted who has attributed his interest in religion to the reading of books.";); Such, by Protestant testimony, has been the result, after efforts prolonged through half a century, of the distribution of countless thousands of Bibles and tracts in the regions beyond the Ganges. They have cost incredible sums, have awakened only the contempt of the few pagans who read them, have been polluted by the foulest and most degrading uses, and finally consumed as waste paper. INDIA. II. Let us turn next to India. The distribution of Bibles and tracts in Hindostan has been, if possible, still more profuse than in China. One is almost confounded by the array of figures which represent the consumption during a long series of years. The Americans alone who had, ten years ago, twenty-one establishments and thirty-one printing presses in Madras and its * Annales, tome iii., pp. 37-46. f Asiatic Journal, vol. ix , p. 343. | The Middle Kingdom, vol. ii., ch. xix., p. 3. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 23 neighborhood, to say nothing of other cities distributed, amongst other things, in one small district, and as ft were at a single throw, thirty thousand tracts.* Nearly twenty years ago they had already printed about thirty-four million pages, and up to 1858, more than three hundred million, or one million vol- umes, in Madras alone,f without gaining so much as a solitary convert ; and their operations are quite insignificant when compared with those of the English. Of the latter, General Sir Thomas Hislop gave this account : " These gentlemen set down their converts in proportion to the number of Bibles dispersed. We have ourselves observed, at more residencies than one, where scarce a vessel arrived without bringing a box or package of the above books." He then describes the embarrassment of a particular " resident," who received so many, with a request to disperse them, " that he sent them to all quarters by bundles of hundreds at a time." But vainly he endeavored to dispose of the thousands which were " heaped on him, ship after ship, till at length th|y acquired such a mass in his office, that he was compelled to remove them to an out-office, and several thousand copies were handed over to the Dutch authorities, in whose hands we are sure they will never bear much fruit." The gen- eral finishes by quoting a missionary, who " wrote home for three hundred millions of Bibles," and suggests, u that in the above manner he could easily get rid of even that number, by delivering them as ballast, or turning them out of doors with- out an index or a monitor to explain them.";): It need hardly be said that since General Hislop's time, sim- ilar operations have been conducted, by tenfold the number of agents, and upon a vastly increased scale. Fifteen years ago, the Auxiliary Bible Society of the single city of Calcutta could boast, that they had already issued " four hundred and thirty- nine thousand nine hundred and eight-seven copies." Twenty- two different missionary societies have run a race with each other, for many years past, in the same career, from one end of the Indian peninsula to the other. We may conclude, however, without further details, that India, like China, has received its millions of Bibles and tracts, and we shall now see that they had exactly the same literary value, and were employed in exactly the same way, as in the latter country. * Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. ii. , p. 340. f Religion in the United States of America, by the Rev. Robert Baird ; book viii., ch. iii., p. 691. Proceedings of the South India Missionary Conference, p. 49. (Madras, 1858.) $ Summary of Mahratta Campaign, quoted in Monthly Review, vol. Ixiv., p. 309. A Tear and a Day in the East, by Mrs. Eliot Montauban, ch. vi., p. 102. 24 CHAPTER I. We will begin with the impressive testimony of the Rev. Mr. Adams, because he was himself a Protestant missionary. " Of the one hundred and seventeen thousand tracts printed by the Bengal Auxiliary Missionary Society," says this candid gentle- man, " the most part are either mystical, or puerile, or both ; and there is scarcely one fit to be put into the hands of a native of understanding and reflection."* The natives entirely agree with him. " You make one convert annually, out of fifty thou- sand," said Nobinkissen, an educated Hindoo, in answer to a recent inquiry of Mr. Lang, and that one, as we shall see here- after, an impostor. " That is the result of preaching in the open air, all over the country, and the distribution of thousands and hundreds of thousands of tracts printed in the Hindostanee and Bengalee languages."f They are so grossly absurd, says a learned Protestant authority, in allusion to the oriental transla- tions generally, that "instead of promoting the service of Christianity, it is not irrational to impute some of the backward- ness of the Hindoos to this cause."J Let us come tp particulars. The Telinga version deserves our first notice. A Protestant missionary, desiring to test its value, gave a copy of this trans- lation to some natives in the district of Bellary. They could make nothing of it, but their curiosity was so far excited that they consulted the most learned man of their neighborhood, who took it home, and after careful examination, informed his clients, " that its style was so obscure and incoherent, that it was almost impossible to comprehend it, but that he believed it was a treatise on magic. " The Tamul version was equally successful. " The translation is really pitiful," says a Protestant clergyman, u and deserves only contempt."! But there were several versions in this dia- lect, for though one may suffice for the English and Americans, and other civilized nations, the fastidious pagans are supposed, it does not appear why, to require many. Besides, there were numerous Christian sects in Hindostan, and each wished, in emulation of every other, to produce its own. " Rheums de- clares," says a recent writer on India, " that he began to edit a new edition of the Tamul Bible before he had been in Madras one year and a half. Other missionaries have confessed to a similar folly, and have warned their successors against it." 1 ]" On the other hand, a Protestant clergyman generously con- * Asiatic Journal, vol. xxi., p. 448. Wanderings in India, by John Lang, p. 223 (1859). Asiatic Journal, vol. xxviii., p. 303. Abbe Dubois, quoted in the Annales, tome iii.. p. 20. llid. The Theory and Practice of Caste, p. 149. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 25 fesses, that some of the Catholic missionaries were the best Tamul scholars of their age, surpassing even the most learned natives, and that their writings are used to this day by Hindoo literates as text-books, and quoted with grateful admiration.* Of the Canara version, used in the neighborhood of Goa, a competent judge gives the following and many similar specimens. " In the beginningGod created the earth and the air." u Dark- ness was upon the water, but the soul of God wandered with delight over the water." " Let us make man like to us, and having our form ; let him command the aquatic insects of the sea!" "There is in this version," M. Dubois adds, "hardly a single verse which is correctly rendered ;" and he remarks, that " no Indian possessing the slightest instruction can preserve a serious countenance in reading such a composition. "f As an example of the merits of the Mahratta version, we are told that the words, " Behold the Lamb of God," are translated, " Behold the young of the sheep of God," although the Mahratta dialect furnishes a word which renders exactly our word lamb, while that which they have substituted is not even a Mahratta word.";}: In the Hindostani version, we are told by another Protestant writer, the sentence " Judge not, that ye be not judged," is thus rendered, " Do no justice, that justice be not done to you ;" which must afford the pagan reader a somewhat confused idea of Christian prudence and morality. As late as 1858, we find the whole body of Protestant missionaries admitting that " translators are apt to be misled by their munshis," and giving this example, " It has been pre- sumed that body might be substituted for flesh" and so Christ is said to have come in the body, the Word to have become lody.\ Dr. Carey's Kiinkun translation was briefly described by a native pundit as "bad letter, and no language at all."TT It appears that this gentleman was more ambitious than even most of his colleagues, and that he " executed or superintended translations of the Holy Scriptures in no fewer than thirty-five languages or dialects"** though he did not even profess to have any knowledge whatever of more than six of them, and so little acquaintance even with these that, as we shall see hereafter, lie * The Land of the Veda, by the Rev. Peter Percival, ch. vi., p. 118. \ Annales, tome iii., p. 31. | Ibid., tome iv., p. 179. baptist Missionary Account, 1819, appendix to Report. | Proceedings of the South India Missionary Conference, p. 224. (Madras, 1858.) If Periodical Accounts from the Serampore Mission, vol. ii., p. 167. ** Annals of the English Bible, by C. Anderson, vol. ii., p. 002. 26 CHAPTER I. could not make himself understood in one of them. " They have not all been tested," says the historian of Protestant missions, " but those which have, have been found so imperfect, that his versions generally are now given up as of no great value."* " They have been either simply useless," says another Protestant authority, " or, from explaining the doctrines of our faith by ridiculous forms of expression, have been absolutely pernicious."f ]STor can this surprise us when we learn from the same writer, that, owing to the " glaring mistakes" with which they abounded, "the sense of the original was sometimes com- " pletely lost, and the meaning ludicrous and absurd. Yet it would be difficult to estimate the cost of these thirty-five con- demned versions to the people of England.^ If, then, even Protestant writers admit and proclaim these facts, we may well bear to hear Catholic missionaries, who find in these lamentable caricatures of the Bible a serious obstacle to their own labors, lamenting that their influence is as deadly in India as in China, and that " owing to their monstrous errors and their barbarous style, our sacred writings are thought to be the ivork of a madman. The pagans have no sooner read two or three pages than they tear up the book, or fling it away with contempt." Yet it is to assist in fabricating such " per- nicious" volumes, the only effect of which is to render the con- version of the heathen impossible, that the English people diligently frequent meetings of the Bible Society, and con- tribute their tens of thousands annually. If they had not made an imprudent compact with their own souls to abdicate reason in matters of religion, and to abandon themselves to the treacherous guidance of emotion and sentiment, it is probable that the career of the Bible Society would have been a short one. We can hardly be surprised to hear that the natives of India make precisely the same use as those of China of the so-called " Bibles " scattered amongst them. So rapid, we are told, is their consumption in the various branches of retail trade, that of the millions which have been circulated from one end of Hindostan to the other, it is difficult, except in the capitals, to * Dr. Brown's Hist, of the Prop, of Christianity, vol. ii., p. 71. f Theory of Caste, p. 149. \ In spite of their worthlessness, it appears that the Baptist versions, which all render the word Binrrit-eiv in harmony with the doctrine of that sect, are gener- ally used by the various communities ; but as this is odious to "all friends of Infant Baptism," a Protestant missionary observes that " the Calcutta Bible Society feels the want of a new translation." " This is saying, in fact," remarks Dr. Dollinger, " we must translate the Bible falsely, in order that the heathens, to be converted, may not discover our weak points." The Church and the Churches, p. 235. Abbe (ioust ; see Annals, vol. i., p. 500. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 27 find so much as the trace of a single copy ! This singular fact is revealed by an English writer, who, though accustomed to co-operate with the missionaries, gives this fatal testimony to the nullity of their costly efforts : " At the capitals I have cer- tainly seen a number of translations of the Scriptures in the various oriental languages ; but in the provinces and towns / never, l)y application or inquiry, could hear of a copy of the sacred writings in the possession of a native?* The mystery of this wholesale decay and annihilation of so vast a number of volumes, which the traveller might have expected to find in heaps blocking up every highway, is thus explained by another eye-witness. " The greater part of the heathen who receive a copy make haste to sell it for whatever money they can get."f " They sell the Bibles," says the vicar apostolic of Malabar, who had often witnessed the operation in the two dioceses of Cochin and Oanganore, " the moment they receive them, at any price they can obtain, to merchants who use them to wrap their drugs in." Sometimes, it appears, the more devout heathen actually present Protestant books as an acceptable homage to their own divinities. " I have seen a Hindoo," says a well-known writer, " devoutly listen to a discourse, beg a tract, and, on his return to the village, leave it on the threshold of the temple, and fall down with his forehead on the floor and worship the image of Ganesa."^: He had, perhaps, not understood the discourse, for Mr. Malcolm relates that " an experienced missionary in Bengal assured me that, on an average, not one-half of the sermons of missionaries who undertake to preach is under- stood.'^ In spite, however, of their imperfect acquaintance with the Indian dialects, these gentlemen are always prepared to translate the Bible into any one of them at a moment's notice. u They learn," says Mr. Irving, " to speak a vulgar dialect of the language, and to pronounce it with a vulgar accent ; it cannot be surprising that such a one makes but few converts." " Bibles in every Asiatic language," says another Protestant writer, " have certainly been distributed at an enor- mous expense throughout British India, but the sums hitherto expended have been of little avail." [ "The Bible is read," says the Rev. W. Tracy, " not because it has any attractions in itself, nor merely as a matter of indifference, but because its * The Wonders of Elora, by Captain J. B. Seely, ch. xix., p. 524 ; second edition. \ Annales, tome iii., p. 32. 1 Seely, ch. xix., p. 475. Travels, &c., vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 265. } Asiatic Journal, vol. iii., p. 213. 28 CHAPTER I. perusal is the only condition by which admission to the school, and ultimately to the golden harvest beyond, can be obtained. Its instructions are received listlessly, and speedily forgotten."* Even the few heathens who retain their copies make no use of them whatever. " Though many of us," said one of them to a Protestant missionary in Asiatic Russia, " have the Gospel in our possession, we never peruse it ; and, besides, we have a sufficient stock of religious writings of our own."f " When men take credit," observes a Presbyterian writer, in allusion to such facts, " in permitting the Bible to have a place on the shelves of a library with the Shaster and the Koran, it is more than evident to what a pass their toleration has come.":): Yet this equivocal liberality of the Hindoo or Mahometan is still chronicled in missionary reports as equivalent to a conversion, though, in the case of all the poorer recipients, it only signifies that " the injudicious donor possesses the means of temporal advancement," while his gift, if retained at all, will only be found, as Mr. Irving observes, in the possession of that worst class of Hindoos, " who may be seen, with a Bible in one hand and a petition in the other, soliciting the alms of Europeans," and "whose lax morality shocks the feelings of even their heathen countrymen."! Yet these proceedings continue as actively at the present hour, in spite of their admitted results, as at any former date. In vain the most unprejudiced witnesses protest against them. " The mere distribution of Bibles," said Dr. Middleton, the first Protestant bishop in India, u will produce very little effect in promoting Christianity among the natives."!" " Many of them have probably gone to the pawnbrokers," said Sir Charles Oakeley, governor of Madras, a man of grave and religious character ; and he added, but the admonition was spoken in vain, " the ship-loads of Bibles transmitted to India are in danger of being worm-eaten before they can be used to any salutary purpose."** " The mission at Nagar," observes a Presbyterian writer, " has given up distributing books and tracts, finding that but little care is taken of thein."tf " The general impression," says a collective report of all the principal missionary bodies in India, " produced by a very lavish gratui- * Proceedings of the South India Missionary Conference, p. 174 (1858). f Dr. Smith's History of the Missionary Societies, vol. i., p. 255. \. Indian Mission of the Church of Scotland, by James Mcfarlane, D.D., p. 8. SindJi, by Lieut. Burton, ch. vi., p. 150. \ Theory of Caste, p. 146. 1 Life of Bishop Middleton, by Rev. C. Webb Le Bas, vol. i., ch. xiii., p. 377 ** MS. Life, by his son, the very Rev. F. Canon Oakeley. ff Six Years in India, by Mrs. Colin Mackenzie, vol. iii., ch. vi., p. 184 THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 29 tous distribution of the Scriptures, is bad. It tends to the depreciation of the Word of God, breeding contempt for it."* Yet the distribution is as lavish as ever. Lastly, for we can- not attempt to exhaust the witnesses, one historian of British India, lamenting the continued failure of Protestant missions, declares without hesitation, that these very distributions are one of its chief causes, and that their want of success is partly due ,to " their own fault, in attempting to translate the whole of the Scriptures into the most difficult languages, with which they were most imperfectly acquainted ;"f while another, who ridi- cules the barbarous versions with which India is deluged, affirms that with such auxiliaries " the attempt on the part of English missionaries to convert India is a waste of time, patience, and money.";): CEYLON. HI. The third sphere of missionary labor which we are here- after to visit is Ceylon. Here also the same facts recur. Of one of the many rrotestant sects in that island Sir Emerson Tennent relates that, " they have printed a million copies of the Scriptures, and thirty millions of other Christian publications." Again, speaking of the single year 1848, the same authority says: "The prodigious circulation of Christian tracts and translations throughout the island amounted to upwards of five million pages," or nearly seventeen thousand volumes, of three hundred pages each. The Church of England missionaries alone, as Mr. Bennett noticed in 1843, had " already distributed four hundred and twenty thousand tracts, "| and they have been distributing them ever since. We shall see presently what the Cingalese did with them. The Americans also, as Lord Tor- rington noticed in an official report, " had printed at the single establishment at Batticotta, four hundred and seventy thousand five hundred and eighty volumes. r ^[ And their prodigality has been emulated by all the other sects. Let us come at once to the question of results. " The version of the Scriptures translated by the Church of England mis- sionaries at Cotta," we learn from Sir Emerson Tennent, was * Proceedings of the South India Missionary Conference, p. 227. (Madras, 1858.) f History of British India, by Charles Macfarlane, ch. xxx., p. 375, third edition. \ Ancient and Modern India, by W. Cooke Taylor, LL.D., and P. J. Macken- zie, Esq., ch. 27, p. 520 (1851, second edition). 4 Christianity in Ceylon, ch. vi., p. 285. J Ceylon and its Capabilities, by J. W. Bennett, Esq., F.L.S., ch. vii., p. 61. *|f Ceylon } Past and Present, by Sir George Barrow, ch. vii , p. 162. 30 CHAPTER I. described, even by their own nominal converts, as " ~blas- phernous"* "Two versions of the sacred Scriptures are in existence," writes Lord Torrington, who seems to have over- looked a third by the Baptists, " both provided by the funds of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the one by the Church of England and the other by the Wesleyan missionaries ; but though their respective presses are within six miles of each other, their respective versions are so different, and both of them apparently so unsatisfactory, that a youth who has been trained to the one cannot accommodate himself to the other, and a native, though very imperfectly acquainted with our lan- guage, finds that he understands the Bible better in English than in either !"f We are fully prepared to hear that the Cingalese make exactly the same use of all this printed paper as their brethren in China or Hindostan. What else should they do with the millions of unintelligible volumes forced upon them ? " It is scarcely possible," observes a learned Protestant critic of a certain trans- lation of the " Ceylonese Sacred and Historical Books," " for a person not familiar with the subject to conceive the extent of the absurdity of these passages.":): Why then should the heathen be blamed for acting as an Anglican missionary relates in the following curious narrative ? " The people came round me in great crowds, and held out their hands for the tracts. We dis- tributed not less than three thousand. A great many of those which they received were either burned or torn to pieces. Some were torn to pieces before our eyes ; others were stuck upon the branches of trees ;" these were an appropriate homage to the native gods, whose shrines were often adorned with pictures cut out of Protestant tracts, " and some of the people, more impu- dent than the rest, as soon as they had received them, said : 4 These are fine things for wadding for our guns, when we go into the jungles to shoot.' " THE ANTIPODES. TV. The natives of Australia have not been deemed worthy of any translations whatever, either of Bibles or tracts. As their own language is not of precise or critical structure, is incon- veniently limited in its vocabulary, and obstinately defective in its inflections, the missionaries have apparently abstained from * Christianity in Ceylon, ch. vi., p. 268. f Barrow, ch. vi., p. 165. \ The History of Ceylon, by the Hon. George Tumour, introd., p. 20. $ Recollections of Ceylon, by the Rev. James Selkirk, p. 419 (1844). THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 31 attempting an Australian version of the Bible. If they spoke a dialect which it was possible to imitate, however remotely, they would no doubt have been enriched long ago with the accustomed millions of Bibles and tracts ; of which they would probably have made much the same use which the animals who roam in their forests might be expected to make if they received a similar present. The inhabitants of New Zealand, possessing a more copious language, have been dealt with in a more liberal manner. In 1840 the Bible Society presented ten thousand New Zealand Testaments at once to this people, and how many thousand more at other times probably no one now remembers.* Dr. Thomp- son mentions " sixty thousand copies of the New Testament " 2^, part of the donation which they received. f The intelligent Maori can now also read, if so disposed, and in a language pur- porting to resemble his own, " The Dairy man's Daughter," and other publications of the same order. He may have them in millions if lie likes, or, indeed, whether he likes it or not. Some- times, it appears, he is forced to buy them, and upon terms somewhat unfavorable to his own interests. Mr. Earp deposed in 1844, before a committee of the House of Commons, that " the missionaries in Hew Zealand have carried on a great trade with books printed in the native language." He also informed the House, which ordered the fact to be printed, that "the mis- sionary used to exchange his tracts for pigs and potatoes ; and he added, in familiar phrase, " the native looks upon the early missionaries, in fact, as having done him."J Apparently the native had good reason for taking this gloomy view of the transaction. "The attempt to turn a jargon, like the Maori, into a pure language, by the missionaries," says a Protestant writer, "is a decided failure, and the words they have had to coin are ludicrous samples of language making: very few Maoris understand it." Other witnesses give actual examples of the native comments upon it.|| Mr. Jerningham Wakefield says: "In the single Gospel of St. Matthew, nearly one hun- dred words are represented by sounds of which the mean- ing has to be explained to the native." He adds, that, like the inhabitants of Ceylon, "they must first be instructed in the English language," in ordei to read the Bible in their * New Zealand; its Advantages, &c. ; by Charles Terry, F.R.S., p. 189. f New Zealand, vol. i., p. 312. t Parliamentary Papers, vol. xiii., p. 155 (1844). | Letters from Wanganui, p. 30 (1845). [ See Savage Life in Australia, &c., by George French Angas, vol. ii., ch. p. 13. Tf Adventure in New Zealand, vol. i., ch. vi., p. 178. 32 CHAPTER I. Is it wonderful, we may ask in conclusion, if " many of the natives," as Mr. Fox relates, " tore up their Bibles to make wadding for their guns ?"* or if, as another writer notices, with suppressed indignation, certain volumes of " Milner's Church History met with a fate little anticipated by the writer, of being converted into New Zealand cartridges ?"f Why should the New Zealander treat the Bible more reverently than the missionaries themselves, who habitually used it as an instrument of barter ? " There is one form of illiberality in the Church missionaries," says a member of the Legislative Council of that colony, in 1845, " which has, in an especial manner, militated against their influence ; I allude to the practice of taking pay- ment for Testaments, a usual price being a good-sized pig, value thirty shillings. The natives complain of this much."J OCEANICA. Y. If we turn now to the operations of Bible and Tract So- cieties in Oceanica, a few characteristic facts will suffice, because they will amply illustrate the prudence and good sense which direct such proceedings, as well as their gigantic cost and lamentable result. Let us begin with the inhabitants of the pleasant isle of Tongataboo. Mr. Williams, of whom we shall hear a good deal hereafter, gave the following account of their peculiar privileges, in a work of w r hich thirty -five thousand copies had been consumed by the English public up to 1841, and probably many more since. u Between April, 1831, and November, 1832," that is, in the space of nineteen months, " twenty-nine thousand one hundred copies of small books, con- taining five million seven hundred and seventy-two thousand pages, had been struck off." And this, which might have appalled a more intellectual people than the dwellers in Tonga- taboo, who were profoundly indifferent to the whole operation, he considers " delightful evidence of the untiring diligence of the missionaries who supplied the matter." What effect their untiring diligence produced upon the natives we shall learn in due time. The other islands of the Pacific have not been neglected. Fears ago, " one hundred and sixty millions of pages had been * The Six Colonies of New Zealand, p. 83. !The Gospel in New Zealand, by Miss Tucker, ch. viii., p. 93. New Zealand and its Aborigines, by William Brown, ch. ii., p. 84. Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the S. Sea Islands, by Rev. John Williams, ch. xxvii., p. 123. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 33 printed in the Hawaiian dialect."* The allowance of Bibles and tracts in this case was, therefore, nearly thirty times greater than that accorded to Tongataboo which, however, does not appear to have complained of the unequal distribution. The Sandwich Islands were always particularly favored. More than twenty years ago, they already possessed nearly ninety million pages of missionary literature.f How utterly useless this costly donation has been to them we learn in- cidentally, in 1856, from an English Protestant traveller, who was not only informed by the native governor of Mawhee that " every thing that concerned the native race he believed to be, both physically and morally, retrograde;" but was also assured of the unpleasant fact, that " a capital error had been the chief cause of the unsatisfactory result," and that the error in ques- tion w r as now so manifest, that " it might have been better that their tongue had never been reduced to rules and writing, for very few books could ever be published in it."J In spite, however, of this verdict of the native authority, the " capital error" has been repeated during forty successive years. In the single year 1825, and the work has been going on uninter- ruptedly ever since, the issue of books and tracts amounted to " seventy-eight thousand. " But this soon came to be con- sidered meagre and trivial ; for when they had circulated mil- lions of Bibles and tracts in any country without producing the smallest effect, the only remedy which the failure suggested to the distributors was to circulate millions more. In the Hawaiian group this process was continued with so much vigor, that a little later we are told by an American mis- sionary, who evidently thinks it a subject for congratulation, " they print in the Sandwich Islands six hundred reams of paper in a year, equivalent to twenty-two thousand volumes of three hundred pages each."] This is the work of a single year, and is merely to satisfy the intellectual wants of the Sandwich islanders for the space of twelve months. It is clear that the whole population ought to be employed in reading, day and night, during the entire period of their existence ; and even then they would probably fall into arrears, and confess that the printers had beat them. What effect this copious literature has really produced upon them we shall see here- * Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. i., p. 47. f History of the Sandwich Islands Mission, by the Rev. Sheldon Dibble, ch. viii., p. 150. \ Travels in the Sandwich and Society Islands, by S. S. Hill, Esq., ch. viii , p. 141 (1856). Journal of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands, by C. S. Stewart ; introd., p. 21. 1 Memoirs of American Missionaries, by Rev. Gavin Struthers, introd. 4 34 CHAPTER I. after; and we shall learn, from Protestant witnesses of all classes, that they have only become ten times more vicious and worthless than they were before the missionaries arrived amongst them. The Rev. Sheldon Dibble, one of their teachers, has told us how the Bible is constructed for the use of Sandwich Islanders. The reader will judge whether the heathen in China, India, and elsewhere have any reason to complain that their brethren in the Pacific have been better treated than themselves. "Manao means thought," Mr. Dibble informs us, " and io means true or real; so the combination, manaoio, is used for faith." The inquisitive disciple of these islands, therefore, if he can read at all, and if he has not used his Bible for some purpose not con- templated by the donor, has now the opportunity of learning, by the aid of the Bible Society and its intelligent stipendiaries, that Christian faith means " real thought" But as St. Paul speaks of " hope and charity." as well as of faith, he has considerably increased the embarrassment of his translators. " Charity" they give up in despair, as the Sandwich Islander knows nothing about it, has no word by which to express it, and has even unlearned, thanks to European example, the native courtesy and hospitality which used to do duty for it. But as " hope" is really indispensable to creatures looking forward to eternity, they resolved at least to secure that important virtue. They did it after this manner : " Manao means thought, and Lana means buoyant ; so the combination, manaolana, is made by us to express hope ;"* from which felicitous combination it follows, that whenever a Sandwich Islander conceives the timid " hope" that he may one day reach the paradise of Christians, he is only indulging, though he would perhaps be surprised to hear it, in the pleasures of " buoyant thought? Whether this can be considered a satisfactory treatment or an adequate expo- sition of the Theological Virtues, we need not consider ; but we may at least be allowed to compassionate the unfortunate heathen wjio is taught by such masters that the only difference between Christian faith and hope is this, that the one is " real" and the other " buoyant" thought. What these barbarians of the Pacific do with their so-called " Bibles" when they get them, we need not stay to inquire, nor does it much matter. We would willingly believe that they employ them, like other pagans, for domestic purposes, or con- sume them as fuel, but it appears they inake a much less inno- cent use of them. " Many circumstances induced me to Ubi supra, ch. vii., p. 137. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 35 believe," says a keen and impartial observer, " that they con- sidered their religious books very much in the same light as they did their household gods."* AFRICA. VI. Africa has had its full share, as might be expected, in the abundant diffusion of religious publications which the Bible Societies delight to distribute. From every part of that vast continent north, south, east, and west we have exactly the same reports, both as to the literary merits of the " Bibles," and the uses to which they are uniformly applied. The west sup- plies the following examples, among many others: There is an African dialect called the Mpongwe (Gaboon), of w T hich mention may be found in ethnological researches, but probably not elsewhere. Out of tenderness to the population who communicate their thoughts in this harmonious tongue, and perhaps because it was " easy of acquisition to strangers,"f the Protestant missionaries had already printed, nearly twenty years ago, one hundred and eighty-five thousand pages of more or less Christian instruction,^: and they have been printing ever since. But as their vocation was to print, perhaps they might as well print Mpongwe as any thing else. It is true that there was nobody to read their books, for their own official report acknowledges, in 1845, that the "mission church," while it numbered eleven official members, had only attracted " eight natives." But if the Africans did not read their books, they were ingenious enough to find another use for them. In the same year, M. Bessieux writes from Gaboon that he had lately witnessed, in company with the other European residents, " a grand distribution, by one of the ministers, of portions of the Old Testament among the negroes ;" and that " scarcely had the children got possession of the sacred book, when we saw the leaves of the Bible converted into pretty kites." Sometimes, in other parts of the west coast, they do read the Bible ; but only, says Mr. Cruickshank, a friend and patron of the missionaries, to " wrest texts to suit their views, and to minister to their inclinations and wants." | Many examples S'ven by other writers are too shocking for quotation. Mr. uncan also observes, with remarkable candor, that " a partial * Beechey's Voyage to the Pacific, vol. i , ch. ix., p. 306. f Equatorial Africa-, by Paul B. Du Chaillu, app., p. 475 i The Year Book of Missions, by Elijah Hoole, p. 344. Annals, vol. viii , p. 75. J Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast, vol. ii., ch. iv.. p. 70. 36 CHAPTER I. education, by merely reading the Scriptures, is only the rneana of making them more perfect in villany."* Of the too celebrated Surinam Negro-English version, of which even the Bible Societies appear to have been ashamed, we need not give any description. It is enough to refer to it. There are some forms of irreverence with which, except under the pressure of extreme necessity, one may reasonably decline to make acquaintance. Even a Presbyterian writer, not easily offended by any thing proceeding from such a source, complains of it as " most ludicrous, and altogether inconsistent with that decorous and seemly garb in which the word of God should be presented to the public."f South Africa furnishes its due contingent of similar facts. Of the Kaffir .version, Dr. Colenso, a Protestant bishop in South Africa, relates, that even " the word for God, now commonly in use among the missionaries, has no meaning whatever for the Kaffirs.":): The Rev. Mr. Calderwood goes still further, and declares, in 1858, with a good sense peculiar to himself, "The plan of gratuitous distribution of the Scriptures, generally speak- ing a bad one anywhere, would be doubly so in the case of the Kaffirs." Colonel Napier adds the statement, which we might have anticipated, that " our attempts at conversion have hitherto proved an utter failure, and the Kaffirs, it is well known, have lately converted, to our cost, the Missionary Bibles into ball- cartridges or wadding."! The North, though less frequented by Protestant missionaries, who have always declined to measure themselves with Ma- hometans, reveals the usual trace of their passage. In 1859, we are told by a French traveller, " a Protestant clergyman inundated Tetuan with New Testaments furnished by the inex- haustible simplicity of the Bible Society. He decamped amidst the hisses of the people, and his books were cast into the flames. "1" Mr. Richardson, the African explorer, adds, from his own observation, the characteristic fact, that one reason why the Mahometans of North Africa despise the Bible, " is the crabbed and miserable language into which it is translated."** Finally, East Africa affords exactly the same evidence as the other divisions of the continent. Let two examples suffice. * Travels in W. Africa, ch. xiii., p. 303. f The Edinburgh Christian Instructor, December, 1829. i Ten Weeks in Natal, by J. W. Colenso, D. D., p. 56 (1855). | Caffres and Caffre Missions, ch. ix., p. 129. | Excursions in Southern Africa, by Lieut.-colonel E. Elers Napier, vol. ii., ch. xxii., p. 442. Tf Le Maroc, par M. Leon Godard, p. 40. ** Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, by James Richardson, vol. i., ch. v., p. 157 (1848). THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 37 Mrs. Colonel Elwood having presented an Arabic Testament to one of the tribes, was filled with sanguine hopes because " they requested permission to take it home to peruse." "But alas! whilst we were indulging in most pleasing speculations .... scarcely an hour elapsed ere our Testament was returned to us." Yet these intelligent barbarians, who refused to learn religion from a book, and waited for the living voice of apostolic preachers, " accepted with thankfulness some Arabic spelling- books."* Mr. Mansfield Parkyns, a capable and perfectly im- partial authority, tells of " missionaries in Abyssinia," they have been expelled since his visit, " who sit under a tent, and distribute Bibles indiscriminately to all who happen from curiosity to come in. Among the many persons I have met with who had received them, one man in particular had two copies given to him, which, as might have been expected, he sold the same evening for a jar of beer, and got drunk on the strength of it. ... I am convinced that our good friend in question, far from being able to read, never knew the meaning of a single prayer of any sort or description. Another man whom I knew, a native priest, received a copy. He could read it. The missionary, perceiving that he appeared to set little value on the book, told him to be careful of it, as its cost, even where it was made, was considerable (I believe six dollars). The priest very naively answered : ' Ah ! I am unworthy of so costly a gift ! Take back your Bible and give me one dol- lar ; it is enough for me.' "f Dr. Lewis Krapf confesses, in 1860, that he carried with him to Abyssinia, " thirty chests full" of Bibles, and actually dis- tributed " nearly eight thousand ;" and though the distribution, as we shall see hereafter, was singularly unfruitful, he gravely recommends, after retiring from the country, that "more Bibles should be distributed among them.";): Mr. Parkyns, however, speaking especially of the kingdom of Tigre, " the country with which I am acquainted, and where so many Bibles were distributed," says, " O/ what use can Bibles possibly be in Abyssinia ? First, who can read ?" And then comes the usual fact : "The use to which the many Bibles given away in this country are commonly applied is the wrapping up of snuff, and such. like undignified purposes." If it is the duty of England to furnish Abyssinia with paper for such objects, it might at least be done at a cheaper rate. * Narrative of a Journey*to India, &c., by Mrs. Colonel Elwood, vol. i., Let- ter 34, p. 329. f Life in Abyssinia, vol. i., ch. xii., pp. 153-5 (1853). i Travels, &c., in Eastern Africa, by Rev. Dr. J. Lewis Krapf, ch. vii., pp. 85-106 ; ch. viii., pp. 111-437 (I860;. P. 155. 38 CHAPTER I. EUROPE, THE LEVANT, SYKIA, ETC. YII. Throughout the Levant, Syria, and Armenia, millions of Bibles and tracts have been dispersed, of much the same literary value, with partial exceptions, and with no great variety of result. Mr. Jowett, in a report to the Malta Bible Society, says : " The bishop of Scio, a truly learned man, regrets, in behalf of his own nation, the vulgarity of that version which has been printed for the Greeks."* Many new attempts have been made since then, and some have been more successful. If there is a work which requires, not only the most delicate precision of knowledge and refinement of scholarship, but a combination of all the highest intellectual gifts, it is certainly the translation of the Bible. The framers of the English version, so conspicuous, in spite of its defects, for beauty and melody of diction, were evidently of this opinion. Yet many of the modern missionaries who have ventured upon the arduous task, which implies the perfect mastery of at least two languages, far from knowing that into which they proposed to render it, appear, from their official compositions, to have had only a slender acquaintance with their own. Mr. Strickland, the historian of the American Bible Society, relates of one of the Greek versions, as if he really believed the anecdote, that "the Ionian Bible Society had sent thousands of copies to the suffering Greeks, many of whom were seen reading the sacred pages while encamped in expectation of the enemy." It is due to him to add, that he was not the original inventor of this fiction, which had been actually published by the English Bible Society in one of their reports ; but it should have been told of any but Greeks, and especially Greek soldiers, who would be surprised to find themselves the heroes of such a tale. Mr. Strickland might have known, and probably did know, that even the Greek clergy, as a countryman of his own indignantly relates, not only make no use whatever of the Protestant Bibles forced upon them,t but often diligently collect, in order to commit them to the flames. He might have known, what American missionaries in Greece have found to their cost, that the bible-distributors in that land have been chastised by the civil tribunals with fine, imprisonment, and exile ; while the ecclesiastical authorities, as the mortified agent of an English Society resentfully re'cords, "have always strenuously opposed the distribution of the Bible in modern * Quoted in Asiatic Journal, vol. vi., p. 503. f Dr. Hobinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine, vol. i., s. 3, p. 146. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 39 Greek."* He might have known, that the Bibles presented to the monastery at Mount Sinai " remain," as a Protestant traveller observes, and will always remain, unread on the dusty shelves."f It was not impossible for him to have known also, that in 1854, the schismatical Greek patriarch, worried out of his habitual apathy by aggressive "missionaries," published an encyclical letter, in which he not only warned all his nation against the emissaries of the Bible Society, but described the latter, ex cathedra, as " satanical heresiarchs from the caverns of hell."J Finally, if it was too much to expect that an historian should be acquainted with facts with which everybody else was familiar, Mr. Strickland might at least have been warned by the candid confession of an English Protestant, long resident among the Greeks, who honestly exposes this particular fiction as " an astounding misrepre- sentation of the Bible Society," and then adds the emphatic declaration, " I have been a good deal among the Greeks, and often at Smyrna, but I have never seen one of them reading the Bible, nor do I believe has any Englishman there." It is quite true, however, as Mr. Strickland reports with undue elation, that vast numbers of Bibles have been distrib- uted among them, and that Greeks have even sometimes been the agents in doing it. But this singular fact is fully explained, when we learn from Mr. Jowett that " the Bible Society grants a commission of ten per cent, to the person employed to sell them." This condition being duly announced to one Procopius, "chief agent of the (schismatical) Patriarch of Jerusalem," that intelligent Greek eagerly replied, " Send me the books, and I shall immediately begin, and when I have furnished the patriarchate with the Scriptures, I will circulate them else- where."] No doubt he would, and all over the world if necessary, with so attractive a recompense in view. Perhaps it may be well to notice, in passing, the fate of the Bible Society in Russia, which gives the law to Greece, and whose example is commonly followed by all the Photian sects. Founded at St. Petersburg, in 1813, by the permission of Alexander, then under the influence of Madame de Krudener, it was peremptorily suppressed as early as 1826 ; and Schnitzler relates, that the immediate cause of this catastrophe was the * Journal of a Deputation to the East, vol. ii., p. 594 (1854). f The Golden Horn, &c., by Charles James Monk, M. A., vol. ii., ch. xiv., p. 104 (1851). Journal of a Deputation to the East, vol. ii., p. 816. | Admiral Slade, Records of Travel, vol. ii., p. 476. \ Christian Researches in the Mediterranean, by Rev. W. Jowett, app., p. 438, third edition. 40 CHAPTER I. unexpected discovery, that certain individuals " had been making a criminal use of the Bible."* It is true that at a later period the prohibition was relaxed, but after a peculiarly Muscovite fashion. " Missionaries may indeed introduce Bibles in any given quantity," we are told, " but let them only venture to attempt to convert, not a mem- ber of the Russian Church, but a heathen or idolater, to any form of worship but its own, and Siberia stares them and their proselyte in the face."f Perhaps, also, the indifference of the authorities to the dis- tribution of Protestant Bibles is due to the fact, that they are found to produce no more effect in Russia than elsewhere. " A total of more than one hundred thousand copies" of Bibles and tracts was scattered along both banks of the Volga by Dr. Henderson and his companions, and produced as much spiritual fruit as the same number of blank leaves would have done. The Nogai Tartars were enriched with a costly donation of " copies of the Tartar New Testament," but " one of us found," says Henderson, " that few of them had been circulated, and that the Tartars manifested little disposition to receive them."J It would occupy too much space to trace minutely the results of Bible distribution in other European countries, nor do they strictly belong to our subject. Everywhere their history is the same. Their manufacture furnishes a revenue to agents in England, and their distribution to agents abroad ; but this is the only end which they serve. In France a single agent " effected in the course of one year the distribution of two hundred thousand Bibles and Testaments. " Yet Protestantism has neither enlarged its borders, nor changed its character, in con- sequence of the operation. In 1841, " it was hardly possible," we are told, "to find twenty pasteurs who confessed the doctrines of the Trinity and the Atonement." | In 1847, Dr. Clark, an Episcopalian minister, once more described French Protestantism as " a cold formalism, and a sort of rational Christianity, with which David Hume would have found no fault. "1" He only omits to add, that it was the unre- stricted use and the individual interpretation of the Protestant Bible which occasioned this dismal apostasy. In Portugal^ the only appreciable result of the operation of the Bible Society is this, that the residents in Lisbon and its * Histoire Intime de la Russie, notes, p. 472. f Revelations of Russia, pref., p. 23. \ Biblical Researches in Russia, by E. Henderson ; ch. xvi., p. 381 ; ch. xviii., p. 427. Strickland, ch. xxx., p. 269. \ Report of Foreign Aid Society, December, 1841. TT Glimpses of the Old World, vol. i., ch. xxvi., p. 443. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 41 suburbs find that all the articles which they obtain from the public markets, and especially fruit, butter, and fish, come to them enveloped in sheets of the Protestant Bible. The better class of Portuguese see in this fact only a proof of the irrev- erence which leads to such profanation. In Spain, as a Protestant writer informs ug, Mr. Borrow's ex- pedition " was not only a most complete and entire failure, but of such a nature as entirely to defeat any future attempt of the same kind." " Hardly any Spaniard to whom I mentioned the subject," says this gentleman, "had ever heard either of the expedition or the individual !" On the other hand, the reprint of the Valencia Bible, which was taking place at the time of his visit, " supposes a large demand," he observes, " as it is rather an expensive work."* But if Mr. Borrow's Bibles failed to attract attention in Spain, where every peasant's child is familar with the sacred mysteries of revelation, their distribu- tion produced a certain effect in London. The fruit-dealers of that metropolis, as an English reviewer noticed at the time of Mr. Borrow's costly excursion, were surprised to find that they received during several weeks, together with their customary Spanish imports, a continual supply of mutilated Gospels, and fragments of the Epistles of St. Paul. It was in this way that Mr. Borrow's Bibles returned to England. Mr. Urquhart, who evidently adopted the Spanish rather than the English estimate of Mr. Borrow, was able to discover that one of his most effective tales, conspicuous for minute precision as to names and places, was deplorably inaccurate in every particular. " The Alcalde, to whom I told the story, contented himself with repeating the writer's name, and laugh- ing long and quietly. "f Mr. Borrow, who became a hero in England, appears to have been only a jest in Spain. It should be added, that even the directors of the Bible Society have learned a lesson in this case ; and while they assure their subscribers, " we can but heave the sigh of sorrow, and drop the tear of pity," they confess " that all action, as regards Bible distribution, is for the present suspended in this country.";): Every land furnishes examples of the same kind. English Bibles are found everywhere, and everywhere equally profit- able. In Austria this is their fate : " two years ago," says Mr. Kohl, " several wagon-loads of Bibles fell into the hands * Spain and the Spaniards in 1843, by Captain Widdrington, R. N , vol. ii., p 304. f The Pillars of Hercules, by David Urquhart, Esq., M. P. vol. i., ch. v., p. 72 (1850). \ Abstract of the Fifty-eighth Report of the B. F. B. 8., p. 2 (1862). 42 CHAPTER I. of the Bohemian custom-house officers, by whom they are kept to the present day under lock and key."* Italy, and especially Piedmont, have lately excited the hopes of English Protestants. The national sympathy has been mani- fested by the usual present of Bibles, and with the usual result. " I pass every day," says the Times' Own Correspondent, " a little bookstall under the Turin porticoes in Yia di Po ; its shelves are groaning under the weight of Bibles, but the old woman who offers them for sale has a perfect sinecure of it."f Yet some of the Piedmontese, we are assured by a Protestant clergyman, " do read the Bibles offered to them ; but I am obliged to admit that it is" only to find arguments against religion, and " without the slightest belief in them beyond their mere use for the occasion.";): In Switzerland, the cradle of Calvinism, and in its most Protestant canton, a report of the so-called Berne Synod lately announced, that "of every ten householders there is scarcely to be met one who now believes in God and Christ, or makes any use of the Scriptures," a result produced by the use which they made of them in former times. In Germany, where millions of Bibles have been distributed, and where the right to use them without restriction was first established, " there is no book," says Tholuck, " less studied than the Bible ; amongst a hundred Christian households there is scarcely one to be found in which the Holy Scriptures are still read."| In England, where every peasant can obtain a Bible for a few pence, the results have hardly been more beneficial to religion. In the educated classes we now witness the rapid growth of indifference or unbelief ; in the clergy such increasing discord of opinion, that hardly two can be found in the same town holding identical views; and among the masses, as the late census revealed, utter ignorance of the Christian faith among upwards of five millions of the population, so that in many regions of Great Britain Christianity may be said to have given place to heathenism. But it is time to resume our observations in more distant lands. Persia has not been neglected by the Bible societies of England and America. The Shah was induced, we are told, to sanction by his "firman" the introduction of Protestant Bibles, with the * Austria, by J. G. Kohl ; p. 67, English edition (1843). f The Times, April 29, 1862. t The Italian Valleys of the Pennine Alps, by the Rev. S. W. King, M.A.. F.K.G.S., ch. x., p. 227 (1858). 8 Bellinger, The Church and the Churches, p. 217. j Ibid., p. 325. THE BIBLE AKD THE HEATHEN. 43 politic view of gratifying " the worthy and respectable Sir Gore Ouseley, envoy extraordinary from his Majesty the King of Great Britain." But our informant adds immediately, that "he and his courtiers would rather spit upon them." Melancholy facts attested this perverse disposition. A certain Protestant missionary, who, like the rest of his coreligionists, was uncon- scious of any other mode of converting unbelievers, "with much toil and bribery smuggled some translations amongst them." Convinced at last that he was laboring in vain, this gentleman returned to England; but " on his quitting "Persia, they con- temptuously tore them up in his presence, and trampled them in the dirt." It is worthy of observation, that the English writer who records this characteristic incident, and who, in spite of national predilections, was constrained to compare " the religious feeling" of the Persians with the apathy of " the cold, calculating Prot- estant," was only tempted to an amiable pleasantry by his experience of the results of Bible distribution. " It is aston- ishing," he remarks, "to see the zeal which animates these people, literally ' pressing forward' to their temples, and with- out any adventitious aid of Koran societies"* Armenia and Syria, of which we are hereafter to speak more fully, deserve at least a brief allusion. In the former country where American benevolence expends fifty thousand dollars yearly, with results which will be found worthy of our attention the Protestant missionaries distributed, in the single year 1845, more than two million pages of print ; and the total issue by the Americans alone, in that single province, or rather in a small part of it, had reached at the same date seventy-five million pages, f Yet, as the learned Eugene Bore observes, " the people cannot understand their faulty and inaccurate translations, even when they know how to read ;"J and have so little need, as Dr. Bo- denstedt candidly intimates, of the miserable Protestant versions flung among them, that they " had an excellent translation of the Bible" many centuries before Protestantism began to exist. In Syria also, in one twelvemonth, they printed one million two hundred and eighty-two thousand pages. In the single city of Smyrna they had printed, fifteen years ago, "more than thirty- two million pages,"] for what class of readers it would be im- * Three Years in Persia, &c., by George Fowler, Esq., vol. i., ch. x., p. 127 : ch. xv., pp. 193-196 (1841). f Hoole, p. 401. \ Armenie, par M. Eugene Bore, p. 138. Life in the Caucasus and the East, by Friedricli Bodenstedt, vol. i., part 2, p. 59 (ed. Waddington). | Observations in the East, by J. P. Durbin, D.D., vol. ii., ch. xxxv., p. 294. 44 CHAPTER I. possible to guess. But the constant repetition of these figures, always amounting to millions, becomes monotonous. Two or three characteristic examples, however, may be added, for the sake of illustrating both the wisdom of these reckless distributions, which constitute the leading feature of Protestant missions to the heathen, and the ingenuousness of the agents who superintend them. The Rev. Jacob Samuel, who was sent on an expedition to Bagdad which he calls " a Missionary Tour," relates, that at Bassora the Mahometans displayed such eager- ness to obtain his Bibles, that " his house was surrounded by thousands of Mussulmans, who all cried for books"* In a single day he flung among them, he says, " about two thousand single Gospels of St. John," besides a due proportion of tracts and other publications. And this pleasing incident was narrated by impassioned orators at many a bible-meeting both in England and America, amidst the plaudits of confiding audiences. It was a great encouragement to hear that even " the Mussulmans," so long obdurate, had at last begun to " cry for books." It is true that the talc was improbable, but this only gave it additional interest. The Mahometans are the least likely people in the world to act the part ascribed to them by Mr. Samuel. " The Bible," says one who lived among them, " hardly excites curiosity enough in them to take it up and read a single verse. I have often offered it to them to read, but .they have refused to open the book."f And an English clergyman notices that when, some years ago, five or six hundred Bibles were distributed at once in Constantinople, the Sultan issued a finnan no doubt at the suggestion of others commanding all the followers of the Prophet " to cast them into the flames, and reduce them to ashes.":): Mr. Samuel, however, says he overcame all these difficulties, and that Bassora was the scene of his triumphs. Unfortunately, another traveller followed closely in the track of the unsuspecting Mr. Samuel, and arrived at Bassora in time to attest two curious facts ; the first, that Mr. Samuel had narrowly escaped being torn to pieces by his admiring Mahom- etan disciples, who " all cried for books" a fate which he only escaped by a timely flight ; and the second, that the people of Bassora, more reverential than Protestant missionaries, anxious, as they said themselves, " that a book which Mahometans as well as Christians consider sacred might not be trodden under foot, resolved, that the volumes should all be thrown into the river, * Missionary Tour through Arabia to Bagdad, by Rev. Jacob Samuel, ch. xxiv., p. 236. f Richardson, vol. i., ch. v., p. 157. \ Constantinople, &c., by Rev. R. Walsh, LL.D., vol. ii., app., p. 501. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 4:5 and this order was accordingly executed."* Such was the real version of Mr. Samuel's adventures, and such the fate of his Bibles, which are now lying at the bottom of the Euphrates. Another Protestant missionary, who visited Tiflis, Kars, and Erzeroum,and was almost as skilful in the composition of official reports as Mr. Samuel, " sent his books for sale through the bazaars and streets." When nobody would buy, he offered them gratis. The population being still apathetic, he dropped them, as a last resort, in the markets. " He heard of eight of his books being torn to pieces ;" and finally, the Kadi and Mufti declared, that so strong was the popular feeling against him, if he should be killed they could not be responsible.''! And then he decamped, fully prepared, however, to give the usual account of his triumphant labors, and of the obligations of Mahometans to the Bible Society. A still more curious instance is afforded by a well-known Protestant missionary, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Wolff, conspicuous amongst his order for energy and vivacity, but also for some- what romantic narratives of his own victories, in many lands and over many people. In these days of universal travel and easy locomotion, such tales are, to say the least, imprudent ; because, sooner or later, they are sure to encounter the critical analysis of some impartial witness, who deals with these fables as Fontanier did with the inventions of the inaccurate Mr. Samuel. Dr. Wolff who reluctantly confesses that u the Jews in Damietta sent back the Bibles I had given them," and that, " at Jerusalem, the Jews burnt several of the New Testaments I gave to them";}: has filled volumes with the history of his own successes, especially among the Arabs and Persians. Later travellers, who walked in his footsteps, thus correct the aberra- tions of his self-love. "I have frequently," says Captain Wil- braham, "heard Persians boast of having worsted in argument the well-known missionary, Wolff." But here are still more curious revelations of the same kind. Meshed and Bokhara, like Bassora, are a long way off, and far removed from the high- way of European tourists; and Dr. Wolff evidently believed, like Mr. Samuel, when he recounted his own apostolic fortitude and missionary triumphs in these ancient and remote cities, that he was at least quite safe from the unseasonable corrections of * Narrative of a Mission to India, by V. Fontanier, Vice Consul of France at Bassora, cli. xvi., p. 344. f Missionary Researches in Armenia, by Eli Smith and H. Dwight, Letter iv., p. 72. i Journal, pp. 152-244. Travels in the Trans-Caucasian Provinces of Russia, by Captain Richard Wilbrahain, ch. xxxiv., p. 389. 46 * CHAPTER I. any other writer. Yain confidence ! " The selamliks, bows, and benedictions," says 'General Ferrier, who fortunately trav- ersed these regions on his way from Persia to the Punjaub, " which Dr. Wolff talks of having received on his entering Bokhara, existed only in his own fertile imagination. The little children, instead of kissing the hem of his robe," as he compla- cently relates, " abused and threw stones at him. This increased his fears, and he endeavored to propitiate all who came near him with money and presents. The first day of the Doctor's reception by the Emir Nasser Ullah Khan, he was in such a state of alarm that he did not seem to know where he was ; he could not recognize the persons near him ; his language was incoherent, and he trembled violently. The Emir observed this, and had pity upon him. Take this wretched man home, he said to the master of the ceremonies, he is incapable of con- versing, and the terror he manifests distresses me."* It is characteristic of the mode in which such reputations are sometimes acquired, and even permanently maintained, in the British Isles, that a new work by Dr. Wolif is announced by his London publishers, in 1860, as "The Travels and Adven- tures of Dr. Wolff, known throughout the world as the great Bokhara Missionary , ,"f But if Dr. Wolff could thus announce himself in England, his name appears to have attracted less honor in the supposed scenes of his triumphs. " When I returned to Meshed," says Ferrier, " the English agent, Mollah Mehdi, was furious against Dr. Wolff, who had published a letter in an eastern paper, saying that he had con- verted the Mollah to Christianity. ' How,' he said, ' could I be converted by the mediation of that crazy man ? May the head of Wolff be covered with cinders ! May he go blind for having told such a falsehood !' I could only console him by promising to send a letter from him to Dr. Wolff, in which he would desire him to retract his statement." ^ Such examples are instructive ; and here is one more of the same kind. Dr. Holt Yates, a friend and admirer of " the great Bokhara Missionary," informs us, that he was carrying on a certain occasion a cargo of Bibles from Smyrna to Salonica. The Greek crew, less devout than their countrymen described by Mr. Strickland, thinking him a fit subject for their playful malice, assured him that " a pirate" was following the vessel. Here was another trial, and he endured it with his usual fortitude. " He insisted," says Dr. Yates, " on the sailors * Caravan Journeys in Persia, Afghanistan, &c., ch. ix., p. 128, ed. Seymour, f The Times, May 11, 1860. \ Ch. xxxi., p. 488. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 47 putting for land, leaving his clothes and his Bibles on board, and after wandering about for three days without food, pre- sented himself before the governor at Salonica, in a piteous plight ; cut and bleeding from the thorns and rocks, to the no small amusement of the Mussulman authorities, who fed and clothed him, and sent him, by his own desire, to Malta." A Ulemah, however, " declared that he must either be very wicked or mad, and that if he were allowed to live, he should be locked up."* Dr. Wolff himself, who was an active agent of the Bible Society, furnishes a suitable appendage to these anecdotes, when he tells us, that he used to offer his Bibles even to the Bedouin Arabs, though they were as incapable of reading them as their own camels, because one of them, to whom he had prob- ably given something besides a Bible, " promised to get it read whenever any one came to his house who could read."f Mr. Walpole, who visited the same lands a few years later, makes the following judicious reflection upon Bible distribution in the homes of the Arab and Mahometan : " We vend our Bibles as we vend waste-paper. Is the Koran treated thus? No instance can be shown where a good Moslem, whatever his distress, will sell his heaven-sent book. They generally give it as a present, or exchange it." J And Mr. Coleridge, alluding to the universal profanation of the Scriptures, so carelessly flung about by Protestants in all parts of the world, says: "I ask myself, what idea these persons form of the Bible, that they should use it in a way in which they themselves use no other book?" But it is time to conclude, and we can hardly do so more appropriately than by the following description, given by Ad- miral Sir Adolphus Slade, of the actual results of Bible distribu- tion in the Levant : " The lavish distribution of Bibles," he says, " is distressing to behold. Did the members and supporters of the Bible Society know how they go, how they are received, they would infinitely prefer giving their money to their poor country- men. But then the patronage of appointing missionaries, Bible distributors, &c., would cease. Let us examine what becomes of these books. r " Bibles are given to the Turks, printed very rationally in the Turkish character, one hundred and ninety -nine out of two hundred cannot read ! A Turk takes one of them as he would a treatise on fluxions, or a life of Lord Bacon, and with about * Modern History of Egypt, by W. Holt Yates. M.D. vol. ii., ch. xiv., p. 592. f Journal, p. 176. I The Ansayrii by the Hon. F. Walpole, vol. iii.. ch. iii., p. 77. Literary Remains of 8. T. Coleridge, vol. i., p. 320. 48 CHAPTER I. as much interest ... he either keeps it as a curiosity, or tears it as waste-paper.** " The Hebrews take the Bible with great pleasure, because saving them expense : they carefully destroy the New Testa- ments, and place the Old Testaments in their synagogues, sneer- ing at the donors. u The Albanians make wadding for their guns of the leaves of the Society's Bibles, if they have no other. "f And so he continues an enumeration, which, coupled with what we have already heard of the fate of Protestant Bibles in so many other parts of the world, brings us naturally to the conclusion suggested by Mr. Walpole and Admiral Slade, that the Bible Society, which has never converted a single soul in any region of the earth, and in England itself has seen a growth of practical heathenism so exactly proportioned to its own development, that at length five millions of our population are officially declared to " profess no religion whatever," is simply a vast and successful organization for supplying the heathen world gratuitously with waste-paper. It is to be presumed that its subscribers deem this a worthy object, and not too dearly purchased by the millions which have been expended upon it. The Apostles adopted a different mode, or Christi- anity would have been still in its cradle. AMERICA. VIII. When we have given two or three examples of the same proceedings in America, though far from exhausting a subject which admits of ampler illustration, we shall have said enough for our present purpose. In 1846, the single tribe of Choctaw Indians, and others were treated quite as liberally, was enriched by the donation of three hundred and twenty- thousand printed pages; from which we infer that these judi- cious savages spend their leisure time chiefly in intellectual pursuits. This was apparently the impression of the Protes- tant agents ; for two years earlier this favored tribe had al- ready received from the same quarter, but without exhausting their mental activity, three million forty-eight thousand one hundred and fifty pages of Bibles and tracts.:): So much for * An enthusiastic distributor of Bibles says of one of the Turkish versions fabricated by the Bible Society, " there is not a page, nor scarcely a verse, in the volume that does not contain something or other of an objectionable nature." The Turkish New Testament incapable of Defence, by Dr. Henderson ; pref., p. xiv. f Records of Travels in Turkey, &c., ch. xxvii., p. 518. \ Religion in the U. 8. of America, by Rev. R. Baird, book viii., ch. iii THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 49 the Choctaws. The Cherokees, perhaps because they had dis- played a less eager appetite for sacred literature, had only ob- tained up to the same date two millions two hundred and three thousand two hundred pages ; but we may believe they were satisfied with this lesser quantity, which represents con- siderably more than seven thousand volumes of three hundred pages each. The Sioux, great contemners of studious habits, were put off with less than two hundred thousand pages ; and the Ojibbeways received something under a million. We shall see hereafter, by the ample confessions of the mission- aries, what use they made of them. But even the donations to Choctaws, Sioux, and Ojibbeways, are perhaps surpassed by that offered to the JSTipmuks, or Na- ticks, at an earlier period. Mr. Eliot, as Dr. Douglas notices in his History of America, translated the Bible into their lan- guage. " It was done with good design, but must be reckoned among the otiosorum hominum negotia. Of the JSTaticks, at present (1745), there are not twenty families subsisting, and scarce any of these can read. Cui bonof"* Dr. Livingstone also mentions an equally profitable version by the same hand, which the celebrated African traveller calls " God's word in a language which no living tongue can articulate, nor living mortal understand. "f We are approaching the end, but must not conclude without observing, that even the natives of South America, though Christians, have been remembered with favor by Protestant Bible Societies. Three thousand three hundred Spanish Bibles were sent at one time to Mexico, and many more afterwards, as well as a due supply to Brazil, Buenos Ay res, Chili, New Grenada, and other provinces. Dr. Olin, the Wesleyan presi- dent of the college at Harvard, honestly records of one of these operations, that it was " an unsuccessful attempt to make some impression on the native Catholic population ;" but the mission established with that object at Buenos Ay res failed so decisively, that he prudently adds, " We trust it will inspire the board with great caution in entertaining new projects for missions among Catholics.":): Of a similar attempt in Brazil, less ingenuous historians of the same nation relate, with much animation, that " there was a rush of applicants for the sacred volume." They even recommend urgently " a missionary colporteur to go from * History of the Indians of North America, by Samuel G. Drake, book v. T ch. vii., p. 114. f Missionary Travels in South Africa, ch. vi., p. 115. \ Works, vol.ii., p. 423. 5 50 CHAPTER I. colony to colony throughout Brazil with Bibles and tracts." DivOlin's counsel was perhaps more judicious; for even if their narrative were true, it would only prove, since they do not pretend, after a residence of many years, to have gained so much as a single proselyte, that when the Brazilians had received their Bibles, they were only the more confirmed in their own faith. They confess too, that they had entertained the not unreasonable suspicion, that the "rush" only indicated " that some plan had been concerted for getting the books de- stroyed."* And an, English clergyman ascertained, thirty years ago, not only that Brazil had less need of these gentle- men than they supposed, but that "the noble public literary institution at Rio Janeiro is particularly distinguished for its collection ofjfibles, more extensive, perhaps, than in any other library in the world. "f At the town of Mendoza, in the Pampas, for no place is too remote or obscure to escape attention, an English missionary agent relates, in 1840, that he offered his Bibles to a book- seller for sixpence each, but that " after remaining on his shelf for some days without a purchaser, he recommended me to withdraw them as unsalable." So he desired him to give them away 4 In Guatemala, another English distributor was peremptorily ordered by the President to quit the country, and suffered what he calls a " violent extramission from the capital." This mis- sionary relates, in 1850, that he vainly invoked the protection of Mr. Chatfield, the British consul, who " declined to inter- fere, and rudely ordered me to leave the consulate." lie pro- poses, however, to resume his distributions, " so soon as the door shall be again opened in Providence" of which, after the lapse of ten years, there appears no immediate prospect.g In the capital of New Grenada, we learn from a Times cor- respondent in 1860, " all the Bibles distributed by the London Bible Society were collected and burnt in the public square." The British minister, it is added, was indignant, " but the American minister was present, countenancing the outrage."! Perhaps the latter was sufficiently intelligent to comprehend that the act was a protest, not against the Bible, but only against the Bible Society. He may also have known, that in this very city, the Holy Scriptures had been studied * Brazil and the Brazilians, by Rev. D. P. Kidder, D.D., and Rev. J. C. Fletcher, ch. xiv., pp. 256-340. f Notices of Brazil, by Rev. R. Walsh, LL.D., vlo. i., p. 438. i A Visit to the Indians of Chili, by Captain Allen F. Gardiner, p. 45. The Gospel in Central America, by Rev. F. Crowe, ch. xiv., pp. 511, 78, 87. I The Times, February 23, 1860. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 51 with so much zeal and success, even in the public schools, that the scholars, as a British officer reported thirty years ago, " ac- quitted themselves excessively well in replying to questions in the Old and New Testament."* They had apparently not much need of the doubtful translations of the Bible Society, and might be pardoned for throwing its present into the fire. Lastly, the Rev. Walter Golton relates, as if to enforce Dr. Olin's prudent admonition, and to show that the warning applied equally to every part of South America, that in Chili also, to which State another cargo of Protestant Bibles had been dispatched, a general procession of the inhabitants was formed, " and they were burnt in presence of the assembled multitude."! Such, by the testimony of their own agents, have been the unvarying results, without so much as a solitary exception, at any time, or in any part of the world, of that almost incredible dispersion of Bibles which even this imperfect sketch of the operations of Bible societies, both English and American, has disclosed to us. Employed in all lands for the vilest purposes, despised by the more enlightened heathen for their vulgarity and incoherence, cast into the sea by Mahometans, and con- sumed in the flames by Christians, not a trace remains, after a brief space, of the millions of books with which vague religious sentiment has inundated the world. Yet the Bible Society, whose operations we have been obliged to notice thus tediously because of their intimate con- nection with those of Protestant missions, constantly appealing to the one religious instinct which, however barren in actual results, is still deeply rooted in the English mind, has outlived the conscientious protests of its own agents, as well as the, more animated and scientific assaults of its enemies. In vain the most learned and competent witnesses expose the hollowness of its boastful pretensions. " It appears," says Dr. Herbert Marsh, " that among the European languages in which the British and Foreign Bible Society has printed, or assisted in printing, the Scriptures, there is not one into which the Scriptures had not been already translated !" But this does not prevent its orators from asserting, with cairn self-possession, that but for its labors these versions would have- been unknown. Vainly Dr. Marsh cites, amongst other examples, their Polish version. " We shall find," says that learned person, but he only wasted his words, " that besides four editions of the whole Bible, and two * Journal of a Residence in Colombia, by Captain Charles Stuart Cochrane, vol. ii., ch. xiv., p. 287. f Incidents of a Cruise to California, ch. vi., p. 168 (1851). 52 CHAPTER I. of the New Testament, published by the Catholics ; besides two editions of the whole Bible, and four editions of the New Testa- ment, published by the Socinians; not less than nine editions of the whole Bible, and eight editions of the New Testament, have been published by the Polish Calvinists." And then he adds, that since "the great body of the Polish nation consists of Catholics, and of the remainder the majority consists of Jews," fifteen editions of the whole Bible B,U& fourteen separate versions of the New Testament might have satisfied the wants of the country, or at least admonished the Bible Society not to pretend that Poland owed the Bible to English zeal. But the Bible Society knew its subscribers, and only smiled at Dr. Marsh.* And not only have the directors of this institution dispersed their crude and unprofitable translations, to the grievous detri- ment of Christianity, in lands which the providence of the Church had endowed with truer versions long before this Society had come into existence ; not only have its own agents discovered, by personal experience and observation, that the Catholic Church has published accurate translations of Holy Scripture in the language of every people whom she has gathered into her fold ; they have even confessed, with unex- pected candor, that many of these have actually been appro- priated by that very Society which loudly boasts to have every- where taken the initiative, and then circulated as its own work ! Thus, in 1818, we are told, "the British and Foreign Bible Society purchased one thousand five hundred copies of the ancient Armenian Testament from the Armeno-Catholic College in the island of St. Lazarus, Yenice; . . . subsequently, still larger numbers were procured from the same quarter, and: put in circulation chiefly among the Armenians of Turkey."f The Amharic version the principal dialect of Abyssinia prepared with great labor at Cairo under the auspices of the French consul, was also purchased by the English society with a simi- lar object.:): The Arabic version which the Bible Society formerly circulated in Syria, was also, as Mr. Jowett confesses, "the Propaganda edition," printed at Kome in 1671, more than a century before that Society was created, " expressly for the use of the Arabian Christians." Of the EtJiiopic, one of their own agents says, " In former times the Etniopic was much cultivated by the Jesuit missionaries ; to them we are indebted for the New Testament in that language."! The * An Inquiry relative to the B. and F. Bible Society, by Herbert Marsh, D.D., p. 67. f Dwight's CJiristianity in Turkey, ch. i., p. 19. i Alyssinie, par M. A. N. Desvergers, p. 39. Researches, &c., app. p. 453, | Ibid., p. 196. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 53 same tiling is true of the Tartar version, which was published, as JSTeander admits, nearly five hundred years before Protes- tant missions began ;* it is true of the Chinese, in which, as Mr. Medhurst allows, the Church anticipated the Sects by more than two centuries ;f it is true of the Cingalese, in which Mr. Harvard found a copy, "the work of some Roman Catholic missionary," at least as remote in its origin ;;f it is true of the Persian, in which tongue the Gospels were published at Kaffa in 1341 ; it is true of the Russian, which was printed at Al- cala in 1515, and again at Venice in 1518, though Alexis, the father of Peter the Great, could hardly find a copy of the Sla- vonic Scriptures in the whole Russian empire;] it is true of the Polish and all European dialects, as well as of the Coptic, Tamvl, Annamite, Malayalim, and many other oriental ver- sions. And thus it is proved, by the evidence of their own witnesses, that even in that which they have boastfully claimed as their peculiar work, the Sects have only done, tardily and without fruit, what the Church had already accomplished in all lands with such signal success, that her enemies have eagerly appropriated the treasures which she had lavishly dispensed, though they could only present to their disciples a mutilated counterfeit of gifts, which in their rude hands lost all their value. Even in their boasted distribution of the Scriptures, they confess that they have but circulated borrowed gold, which turned to dross at their touch. " The best translations of foreign Bibles issued by our Bible Society," says one who was himself a distributor of thousands, "are reprints from those made by the Propaganda at Eome I" 1 !" In China and India we have seen, by their own admissions, how the Protes- tant translators, while attempting to imitate the Catholic ver- sions, only succeeded in caricaturing them, through lack of mental and literary qualifications. " In the field of philology," says Sir John Bowring, repeating the eulogy so often pro- nounced by men of oriental learning, "the world owes much to Catholic missionaries ;" yet their Protestant imitators could not even make any profitable use of their labors, though their own, in a multitude of instances, were founded upon them. The very books which they used, even their dictionaries and * History of the Christian Religion and Church, vol. vii., p. 76. f China, &c., ch. ix., p. 248. j Narrative of the Mission to Ceylon, by Rev. W. Harvard, introd., p. 64. The Crimea; its Ancient and Modern History : by the Rev. Thomas Mil- ner, M.A. ; ch. v., p. 130. I Recherches Historiques-. sur I'origine des Sarmates, des Esclavons et des Slaves, par Mgr. de Bohusz, Archeveque- de Mohilew : tome iii.. ch. xxvii p 534. (St. Petersburg, 1812.) ft Trawls and Adventures of Dr. Wol'ff, ch. ix., p. 182. 54 CHAPTER I. grammars, were not unfrequently borrowed from Catholic mis- sionaries. Thus Dr. Marsh man, of Serampore, whose own compositions, like those of Carey, have been abandoned as worthless even by his co-religionists, acknowledged that he " owed his first sight of a Latin-Chinese dictionary to the po- liteness of the Catholic missionary, Pere Eodriguez, who had spent twenty years in China."* In like manner, when Schree- ter, an agent of the Church Missionary Society, wished to translate the Scriptures into the Bootan dialect, u he obtained a manuscript dictionary, Tibet and Italian, the work of some Romish missionary. "f And in our own day, we find in South America an English Protestant agent encouraging a missionary of his sect to learn the language of the Chilian Indians, because "in this study he will be materially aided by a dictionary com- piled by the early Popish missionaries;"^: while in the north- ern continent, the capture by the English of the papers of the martyr Sebastian Rasles, we are told was an "important event," because amongst them "there was found a vocabulary of the Abenaki language, which the missionary had compiled, and which has been preserved to this day." But though they appreciated, they commonly used these in- dispensable aids without the slightest acknowledgment, and even, when they thought they could do so with safety, affected to be themselves the authors of the very works of which their own were only a feeble and inaccurate copy. " Indeed," says one who was himself a linguist, a Protestant, and a missionary, " there are not greater plagiarists than some of the mission- aries."! And in this singular commerce there seems to have been a rivalry between Russians and Protestants. Thus Klap- roth detected that the descriptive part of Timkowski's well- known work on China " is taken almost entirely from that of Father Gaubil, whom," the great orientalist significantly adds, " M. Timkowski has forgotten to name."T In like manner, when M. Papin asked the Protestant director of the English college at Malacca, in 1834, for a copy of the Chinese grammar of Father Premare, the celebrated author of the Notitia Linguae SiniccB, which had been reprinted at the college, the following singular fact was revealed : " When we asked the minister for it under this name, he appeared astonished, having never known of the existence of Father Premare, much less that he was the author Chinese Grammar, by J. Marsliman, D.D., preface, p. 2. Periodical Accounts, vol. i., p. 60. Gardiner, Visit to the Indians of Chili, ch. vi., p. 190. Bancroft, History of the United States, vol. ii., p. 940. _ Wolff, ch. xi., p. 205. "If Timkowski's Travels, vol. ii., ch. ii , p. 127 ; note by Klaproth. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN 55 of this Grammar ; for though it is simply a literal translation of that of the famous Jesuit, the Protestant editor had attributed to himself the whole merit."* And once more : " When the late minister Morrison, of Canton, after having procured the Chinese Dictionary of Father Basil, printed it anew, lie an- nounced to the learned world that he was himself the author of it." The last case is confirmed by the authority of Klaproth, from which there is no appeal, who not only suspected the lar- ceny, but detected, by actual collation, that it was very clumsily executed, and that "Morrison's edition was full of faults."! And now we may conclude. We have heard enough, per- haps too much, both as to its principle and its result, of the method by which the Protestant communities seek to convert the heathen world. Its principle was not only unknown to the Apostles, but emphatically condemned and disavowed by every act of their missionary career ; its result has been on the one hand, a wider and more universal profanation of the Holy Scriptures than the evil spirits could have accomplished by any less effective agency ; on the other, to confirm, and even, in a certain sense, to justify the pagan world in rejecting a religion presented to them after such a fashion. We are now^ to com- pare this method, in every province of the earth, with all fidelity and minuteness, with that earlier one which St. Paul employed in the first century, St. Augustine in the sixth, St. Francis in the sixteenth, and which Catholic missionaries throughout the world still pursue in our own day. The Church, we shall see, does not attempt, any more than her first Apostles did, to convert the heathen world by the circulation of books which were not given for any such purpose, which pagans could not possibly understand, even if they were correctly translated, and which they have only, as their distributors sorrowfully attest, abused, ridiculed, and defiled. But she knows what her Lord has given her in this treasure, and how to use it. " I have con- versed with many Catholic ecclesiastics," is the honest confes- sion of one who spent a fruitless life in the distribution of Prot- estant Bibles, " and never have I heard one voice lifted up against it ; all that they require is, that the edition be conform- able to the authorized text."$ When Dr. Wolff visited the school of the Spanish friars at Damascus, he relates, that "to his utter astonishment he found that the pupils (several hun- dreds of them) had Arabic Testaments and Arabic Psalters, printed by the British and Foreign Bible Society ; and a Spanish * Annales, tome viii., p. 585. f Ap. Timkowski, vol. i., ch. ix., p. 350 (1827). j Journal of Rev. James Connor, in Jowett's App., p. 452. 56 CHAPTER I. friar, who superintended the school, said to Joseph Wolff, 'Thus we promote, and ever have promoted, the faith of the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church.' "* There is nothing in this fact to astonish a Catholic. Before the Sects were, the Church had so well guarded that sacred Book, that the chief heresiarch of modern times confessed, " but for her they would never have received it."f Arid this, as her children know, was part of her office. That she should not venerate the Divine Scriptures, which are so absolutely her own that they were abandoned by their Author to her sole authority both to define and promul- gate ; that she should be indifferent to that sacred deposit of which during long ages she was the only guardian ; which the incessant and life-long labors of her own servants diligently preserved and multiplied ; upon which all her saints were nourished, and out of which all her doctors taught ; which are daily presented to her priests in the most solemn function of their ministry, to be reverently kissed ; and which she offers at this hour, in every land, without stint or measure, to all who can relish their sweet savor ; this is evidently the dream of the fanatic, or the calumny of the false prophet. ;[ She is guiltless indeed of the cruel indecency of putting all the books of the Old Testament into the hands of children, and has not read the words of her first Pontiff with so little profit as to give the Epistles of St. Paul, without note or comment, to women and peasants, or to abandon the mystic Apocalypse to the crude fancies of every disorderly dreamer, or the trivial exegesis of every inflated sophist. And though, as the ap- pointed Teacher of the Nations, she has other guides besides the written word, being the guardian of the apostolic traditions, and taught directly and unceasingly by the immediate inspira- tion of the Holy Ghost; yet the Church is, in fact and deed, the only true Bible Society ; and with such incomparable wis- dom and power does she unfold to all her children the myste- ries of that eternal Book, that even the unlettered peasant, taught at her knees, though he has never learned to read, at- tains a familiarity with its hidden truths, a keen and living perception of its holiest doctrines, compared with which the bald and superficial word-knowledge of the subtlest mind beyond her pale is gross darkness.] * Travels and Adventures of Dr. Wolff, ch. ix., p. 181. f Luther, Comment, in S. Joan. Evangel. \ " Quid est Scriptura sacra," said Gregory XIII. to Philip of Spain ; " nisi Epistola quaedam omnipotentis Dei ad creaturam suam? Nihil autem sapientius Deo, nihil melius, nihil nostri amantius ; nihil igitur ejus scriptura prsestantius, nihil utilius, nihil necessarius." Ap. Theiner, Annal. Ecdesiast., tome i., p. 80. 2 Pet. iii. 16. " The Holy Book," says one who is at once the most popular and the most THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 57 It is by virtue of this Divine power, which she alone possesses, and of which we are about to trace the action in every land, that even the neophyte of Eastern Asia, but yesterday a Bud- dhist or a Confucian, is to-day a devout and enlightened believer, and will be to-morrow a martyr. She has placed no book in his hands, she has even warned him against the ignoble versions which dishonor the revelation of God, and expose Christianity to the derision of the heathen, yet her penetrating voice has reached the depths of his heart, and in her minister he lias rec- ognized a prophet of the living God.* Let us enter, then, with- out further delay, upon the historical investigation which we have proposed to ourselves, and which alone can reveal to us the process by which this incomparable victory is accomplished. Let us examine, by the aid of Protestant witnesses, the contrast which exists between Catholic and Protestant missions to the heathen. Old fields of controversy are exhausted, but a new one claims, and will repay, our attention. At length we can invite men to an inquiry which will test to the uttermost both the Church and the Sects. We are going to see them both in action. The conversion of the heathen world, at once the noblest arid the most arduous labor to which the best and wisest of our race have ever devoted their lives, is not less a miracle of Divine power than the creation of the physical world. Both are equally impossible to human skill, unaided by the omnipotence of the Most High. 'Yet man cannot even form any conception of the Christian Church which shall exclude this fundamental idea of her office, that she is able to convert the Gentiles. For this she was created. This is what her Founder expects her to do. And it is He who admonished us to apply the supreme test which we are about to employ, when He declared, in ages long past, that none but her messengers should prevail in that super- human warfare. "They shall build the places that have been waste from of old .... And they shall know their seed among influential spiritual writer of our age and country, " lies like a bunch of myrrh in the bosom of the Church, a power of sanctification like to which, in kind or in degree, there is no other, except the sacraments of the Precious Blood." Dr. Faber, The Creator and the Creature, book i., ch. iii., p. 69. * " And certainly, if any thing were wanting to justify the Latin Church, it would be found in the use made of the Bible by those who have rebelled against her authority, and in the results which have followed and which still follow daily from their use of it. Perceiving with the eyes of the spirit the strong and fierce devil that was entering into the Teutonic nations, and was tempting them to abuse the printing-press and the Scriptures to their hurt, the Roman Church might seem, and may still seem to superficial or prejudiced observers, to direct against the Scriptures themselves that hostility which is really directed against the evil spirit by whose hand and mouth they are produced." Dissertations on the Orthodox Church, by Rev. W. Palmer, Diss. vii., \, 135. 58 CHAPTER I. the Gentiles, and their offspring in the midst of peoples : all that shall see them shall know them, that these are the seed which the Lord hath blessed."* If, then, we should discover, by the application of this divine test, that, at all times and in all places, God has given to one Institution, and to no other, the might and the wisdom by which this miracle is accomplished ; if history should teach us, by the combined testimon3 T of all nations and sects, that He has lavished upon one class alone the highest gifts and graces which the Creator can bestow or the creature use, while he has con- stantly refused them to every other; if the messengers of the Church seem to be everywhere raised, by virtue of the apos- tolic vocation, above human frailty, while the emissaries of the Sects, who dare not so much as claim that vocation, become a jest among those who reject their religion and a by- word among those who profess it ; if the myriad disciples of the h'rst, of whatever race or tongue, emulate the sanctity and heroism of the primitive converts, while the rare pensioners of the second become a scandal even to the heathen, mocking the teachers whose wages they receive, and ridiculing the tenets which they affect to adopt ; finally, if it should appear, that, during the last three centuries, as in the fifteen which went before them, one order of missionaries have everywhere ^pre- vailed against the powers of evil, putting to flight their armies and setting their captives free, and this in spite of the most absolute poverty, and the absence of all human aids and ap- pliances, while their various rivals, scattering gold on every side, and backed by the whole power of the two greatest na- tions of the West, have only, by their own confession, left the heathen worse than they found them, then we shall have done well in proposing a new controversy, differing from all others in this, that God has already taken it out of the hands of men, to decide it Himself. It is with this object that we are going to compare, in all the world, Catholic and Protestant missions to the heathen. If the attempt has never been made before, it was because the results of the latter were hitherto imperfectly known, or not fully de- veloped, or not yet registered in the pages of history. It was impossible to obtain at an earlier date the materials for the con- trast which we are about to trace in every land. Even Bossuet could not have written the Histoire des Variations, if he had lived half a century earlier. The day has arrived when a new chapter may be added, not inferior in interest or importance^ * Isaias Ixi. 4, 9. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. 59 though compiled by an unskilled and feeble hand, to those which the world owes to the almost unrivalled genius of the Bishop of Meaux, and of which the effect was to annihilate Protestantism in France. Protestant missions, it is true, are only of modern date ; but they are at length old enough to enable us to apply to them that searching test from which their advocates would not willingly appear to shrink, because it is that which our Lord recommended to His disciples when He said : By their fruits ye shall know them. CHAPTEK II. MISSIONS IN CHINA PART I. CATHOLIC MISSIONS. THERE is a land, unvisited by Persian, Greek, or Roman, which for ages stood apart, " like a world within itself, in the remote unknown Eastern Asia."* Kingdoms arose and passed away, nations were formed and again dissolved, while this remained unconscious either of progress or decay. Yet here more than one-third of the whole human family had their dwelling. Here " a colossal empire, thronged with innumera- ble inhabitants, skilled in the arts, in manufactures, in agricul- ture, and in commerce,"f wrought out its hidden destiny dur- ing more than two thousand years, without once revealing to the rest of mankind the secrets of its philosophy, its laws, or its religion. At length the gates of this eastern world have been thrown open, that Europe might enter in, and her sons go to and fro in the land, bidding China look face to face upon races whom for twenty centuries she had refused to know. And already men begin to speculate upon the issues of this unfinished conquest. Will China, they ask, consent to receive from the West that divine philosophy so long rejected with ignorant contempt, and unlearn the delusions, both in religion and science, which have made her people atheists and her sages pedants ? Such ques- tions, which lie beyond the limits of our immediate inquiry, are not unworthy of the interest which they have awakened in the two most powerful nations of Europe. But our business in these pages is with the pastrather than the future. What China may become hereafter, we know not; what she has been, we have learned from men who did not wait for a haughty and * F. Von Schlegel, Philosophy of History, Lect. iii. f Hue, Le Christianisme en Chine, tome ii., p. 2. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 61 reluctant sanction to tread her forbidden soil. For more than three hundred years, they, and only they, outstripping the noble curiosity of science, as well as the more eager impatience of a commerce always striving to enlarge its sphere, had dis- played the superhuman valor which forced even an enemy to confess, "Where neither merchant nor traveller has penetrated, the Roman Catholic missionaries have found their way."* It was from them that Europe received the only exact knowledge which it possessed of this remote land ; for though others, at a later date, moved by the desire of gain, and accepting the hu- miliations by which alone it could be secured, found a hiding- place rather than a home in some of her seaport towns ; the missionaries of the Cross alone in defiance of every menace, of torture, and of death have braved the capricious fury of her rulers, penetrated her most distant provinces, and traversed in their apostolic course the whole extent of her vast empire, from the sea of China, across the great wall, to the plains of Tartary and Thibet, and from the gulf of Siam on the south to the shores of the sea of Okhost in the north. It is the history of their toils and sufferings, of their labors and triumphs, which we are now to relate. It is not necessary to our purpose that we should trace the earlier fortunes of Christianity in China. If St. Thomas the Apostle, as some have deemed, passed from India into China, and his message was rejected by her people, the fact would perhaps explain her subsequent calamities, but this is all the instruction we could derive from it. The question, upon which history throws only a faint light, does not belong to our sub- ject. JSTor do the early Nestorian missions, of which almost every trace has been obliterated,f unless we find a vestige of them, as Thevenot suggests, in the Lamaseries of Thibet, pos- sess any claim to our attention. It was the misfortune, per- haps a judicial one, of southern and eastern Asia to be visited in early ages by false apostles, deeply tainted with heresy ; and to this fact has been attributed a large share of the multi- plied disasters which have marked the course of religion in these ill-fated countries. But these are subjects altogether foreign to the special inquiry which we are about to pursue. It is enough to know that before our Saxon forefathers were con- verted, Christianity had been preached in China. The monu- mental stone discovered in 1625, near the city of Si-ngan-fou, the authenticity of which, though ridiculed by Voltaire, no one now disputes, decisively proves that China was evangelized be- * Gutzlaff, China Opened, vol. i., ch. vi., p. 180. Cf. Humboldt, Am Gen- trale, tome i., p. 27. f Henrion, Hist&ire des Missions Catholiques, tome i., p. 377. 62 CHAPTER II. fore the seventh century.* Even Gibbon allows that " the Chris- tianity of China between the seventh and thirteenth century is invincibly proved by the consent of Chinese, Arabian, Syriac, and Latin evidence."f In the latter century, there was already an archbishop at Pekin, who had under his jurisdiction four suffragan bishops ;:f and in the fourteenth. Pope Clement the Fifth appointed the celebrated Franciscan John de Monte Cor- vino as metropolitan, "a man," as Neander observes, "in whom we recognize the pattern of a true missionary, who spared no pains in giving the people the word of God in their own lan- guage.'^ From this date we may advance at once to the later epoch, with which alone we are concerned, and every incident of which has been narrated, either by friends or enemies, with all the minuteness and precision of contemporaneous history. In 1552, St. Francis-Xavier left Goa for China, eager to proclaim in that land the Name which he had already an- nounced to so many thousands in other regions. But his course was run ; and the Master whom he had loved and served so well summoned His apostle to rest from his labors. He expired on the shores of the island of Sancian, abandoned by the treacherous Chinese whom he had hired to convey him to Canton. Almost the very hour in which St. Francis died saw the birth of one who was destined to take his place, and upon whom the richest endowments both of nature and grace appear to have been lavished. No gift which might qualify him for his great career seems to have been denied to this eminent man. In him were united prudence, constancy, and magna- nimity of soul ; prpfound genius, cultivated by the most famous masters of the age ; delicacy and refinement of taste, unwearied industry, and habitual mortification. In 1583, Father Kicci landed in China ; and then began that famous conflict between the powers of light and darkness, in which this intrepid apostle battled for twenty-seven years, and which forms the opening chapter in the history of modern missions in China. It is that history which we are now to attempt to trace, and of which all the incidents may be conveniently arranged under three principal epochs. The first extends from the arrival of Kicci to the death of the Emperor Cang-hi in 1722 ; the second, 'from the accession of his son, Yong-Tching, and the era of per- * Blumhardt, Histoire Generate de I ' Etdblissement du Christianisme, tome iii , ch. xxxi., p. 38 ; Giesler, Ecdesiast. Hist., vol. i., p. 353 ; Marco Polo's Travels, ch. xv., p. 309, ed. Wright. Decline and Fall, ch. xlvii. Journal Asiatique, tome i., p. 135. History of the Christian Religion and Church, vol. vii., p. 76 ; ed. Torrey, MISSIONS IN CHINA. 63 sedition which he introduced, to the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773 ; the third, from the revival of the missions in the first quarter of the present century to our own day. The chief events of these three periods shall now be briefly sketched, with only such an amount of detail as is absolutely necessary to exhibit the facts which it is proposed to illustrate in these volumes viz., the character of the missionaries, the method of their operations, and the results of their labors. As the Catholics come first in order of time, we have no alternative but to begin with them. FIKST EPOCH. Bicci landed at Canton. Without money, and without books, he commenced the work for the success of which he trusted only, like St. Paul, to his own vocation, and the grace of God. Dependent from the first moment of his arrival upon the caprice of the Viceroy, nothing could be more precarious than his position during the earlier years of his residence in China. Once he was obliged to yield to the fury of the heathen, and retired. to Macao ; but he was not a man to be daunted by peril or discouraged by suffering, and before long he was once more in the city from which he had been summarily banished. He had resolved to penetrate into the interior of China, or perish in the attempt.* On his first landing he had assumed the habit of a Bonze, supposing, by a natural error, that men who exercised priestly functions, and professed an ascetic life, would be respected by their own followers. But when he had ascertained that no garb was le^s likely to attract the esteem of the Chinese, a happier inspiration led him to adopt that of the Literates, which the members of his order ever after retained during their career in China. His first convert seems to have been a poor outcast, whom he found dying by the road-side; but there was little promise as yet of the day, which only his ardent faith and unfailing courage could have ventured to an- ticipate, when nobles and princes were to become his disciples, and even the supreme ruler of that wide empire was to ac- knowledge him as a friend, a companion, and a guide. Meanwhile, he had acquired such a mastery of the purest Chinese dialect, that his compositions already began to excite the admiration of the most learned and critical readers, and one of them was destined to fill the place which it still occupies in * Vie du P. Ricci, par le R. P. d'Orleans. See also Vie du R. P. Ricci, Apotre de la Chine, par Charles Sainte-Foi (Paris, 1859). 64: CHAPTER II. the imperial library.* Thus prepared for the work to which he had devoted his life, he set out on his journey to Pekin. Months, and even years, were to elapse before that journey was completed. Through every obstacle he fought his way, always prudent but never wavering, and scattering as he went the seed of the Gospel. Many of the more learned Chinese, attracted by an eloquence which they knew how to admire, and captivated by the sublime truths which he unfolded to them, embraced the faith ; but he had set his face towards Pekin, and would not abandon his purpose. Already he approached Nankin, and it was now as easy to go forwards as to retrace his steps. In crossing the Yang-tse-Kiang he was nearly drowned, but though one of his companions perished, his own hour was not yet come. When his luggage was examined at the custom-house, a crucifix was found, which the officer on duty considered " a charm to take away the life of the emperor." This barrier passed, lie still pursued his way, gathering converts wherever he stopped, and almost always of the highest class. Turned back from one city, he fled to another. Always calm and col- lected, no difficulty took him by surprise, no snare tripped him up. Refused admission into a town, he left it on one side, and rsed on his way ; until at length, overcoming every obstacle prudence, sagacity, and fortitude, he accomplished a journey unparalleled in the annals of modern enterprise, and stood within the walls of the capital. And now, after twenty years of toil and suffering, he began to reap in joy what he had sown with tears. " Few men ever lived," says a well-known Protestant mis- sionary, of whom we shall hear more hereafter, " who did so much within a short space of time as this Jesuit." And then this unfriendly witness adds, "It will scarcely be credited that at his death there existed, in Keang-nan province alone, thirty churches ;" and that a little later, " there were few large cities where some Christians might not be found."f "What manner of Christians they were, we shall learn immediately. Kicci w^as now established not only in Pekin, but within the precincts of the imperial palace. His human science he will- ingly employed in the service of the emperor, reserving only the rights of apostolic dignity by refusing all recompense ; he consented to be a mathematician and a philosopher at court, on condition that he should be only a missionary everywhere else. In both characters he was successful. Among the most eminent of the earlier converts, attracted by his luminous teaching and * Bridgman, Chinese GtirestomatJiy, introd., p. 31. f Gutzlaff, vol. ii., eh. xv., p. 229. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 65 mortified life, was the mandarin Paul Seu, one of the highest officers of the empire, whose whole family appear to have em- braced the faith which their descendants still profess at the present day. Du Halde relates of his grand-daughter Candida, that, " during thirty-four years of widowhood she imitated perfectly those holy widows whose character St. Paul has de- scribed to us, founded thirty churches in her own part of the country, and caused nineteen to be built in different provinces of the empire."* And the grace which she used so well has abided from that hour in her house and lineage, so that a re- luctant witness reports, in 1858, that "part of the descendants of Seu are now Romanists, "f Three centuries of unrelenting persecution have failed so completely to uproot the churches founded by Ricci, that the same writer is obliged to confess, with unfeigned displeasure, that in the single province first evangelized by him, the Catholics at this hour "number about seventy thousand souls.' 9 It is well to commence our history with a fact attested by eager adversaries, which illustrates so impressively, not merely the success of the first generation of missionaries, but the almost unexampled solidity and perma- nence of its results. But it was not only the nobles and statesmen of China who consented to become the disciples of Eicci, and to learn wisdom from the lips of the stranger. St. Paul had gathered neophytes even in the palace of the Roman emperor, and Ricci adminis- tered the sacrament of baptism in that of the sovereign of China. In 1605, three princes of the imperial family were added to the company of the faithful on the feast of the Epiphany, and re- ceived the names of Melchior, Gaspard, and Balthasar. How they, and other princes of their race, adorned their profession when the hour of trial arrived, we shall hear presently from competent witnesses. That such a missionary as Ricci should have foreseen the inevitable day of suffering, and endeavored to prepare his spiritual children to meet it with fortitude, can hardly surprise us. He knew, while he was baptizing princes and nobles in Pekin,that persecution had already commenced in the provinces. It was only the true soldier of the cross who would be able to prevail in that terrible warfare of which China was soon to be the theatre. None, therefore, were admitted into the Church, but with excessive precaution, and after making " a public dec- laration of their faith, composed by themselves^ 'J " The man- darins venture all," says Le Comte, u as soon as they think of * Du Halde, tome iii., p. 79 et seq. f Life, in China, by Key. W.. C. Milne, cli. iv., p. 474 (1858). I Du Halde and Henrion. OO CHAPTER IT. becoming Christians,"* and both they and their teachers knew it. Their position resembled, in every point, that of the prim- itive converts ; and we shall see that, from one end of the em- pire to the other, they resembled them in the inflexibility of their faith, and in their contempt of suffering and death. The first apostle of China had done the work committed to him. " He had only spent twenty-seven years in China," says Mr. Gutzlaff, " and during that time he had executed an her- culean task. He was the first Catholic missionary who pene- trated into the empire, and when he died, there were more than three hundred churches in the different provinces.""^ It is true that Mr. Gutzlaff, whose own operations will be described to us by his associates, from whom we shall learn that he was more successful in amassing wealth than in making Christians, adds, disdainfully, " they converted thousands without touch- ing the heart." The dungeons and scaffolds of China will tell us whether Mr. Gutzlaff was right. A few days before Ricci died, he addressed his sorrowing companions in these words : " My fathers, when I reflect by what means I may most efficaciously propagate the Christian faith among the Chinese, I find none better nor more persua- sive than my death." And, in truth, as a modern writer ob- serves, " by his public interment, with the emperor's official sanction, he legalized Christianity in China.";): It was in 1610 that Ricci terminated his apostolic career, and now the events were at hand which were to try his work. Only five years after his death, so fierce a storm broke out that even the Fathers at Pekin, hitherto respected by the persecutor, were banished to Macao, and for a time the further progress of the faith seemed to be effectually stopped. But it had been decreed that there should never be wanting apostles to continue the work which Ricci had begun, and, in 1628, Adam Schaal was installed as his successor, with the title of " President of the Mathematical Tribunal," the emperor finding his own subjects utterly incompetent to fill the place of Ricci and his compan- ions. Religion once more found an entrance into the capital, under the protection of philosophy and science. Of all the objections urged by the infidels of the eighteenth century against revealed religion, few were more specious, none more delusive, than that which was founded upon the supposed antiquity of Chinese science. Protestant writers of our own age have sufficiently exposed the transparent impostures of Yoltaire and his school. " In order to destroy the credibility of the * The Present State of China, Letter xii., p. 411 (1737). f History of China, vol. ii., p. 121. i Hue, tome ii., p. 249. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 67 Noachian Deluge," says Mr. Hugh Miller, this unbelieving im- postor " exhausted every expedient in his attempts to neutralize that Palseontologic evidence on which geologists now found some of their most legitimate conclusions. But he only succeeded, instead, in producing compositions of which every sentence contains either an absurdity or an untruth."* " It has been proved," says Mr. Montgomery Martin, "that the early astro- nomical observations of the Chinese were absolute forgeries, as the Jesuits found no one able to calculate an eclipse. "f "Their acquaintance with the exact sciences," observes Mr. Hugh Murray, " cannot for a moment bear comparison with that of Europeans.";): u Whatever is valuable in Chinese astronomical science," adds Mr. Gutzlaff, " has been borrowed from the treatises of Roman Catholic missionaries." The accuracy of their observations, fixing the position of innumerable places throughout the Chinese empire, and ranging through 33 deg. of latitude and 23 deg. of longitude, is attested by Sir John Davis ; || while Mr. Thornton declares that Chinese chronology , rightly ex- amined, rather confirms than contradicts the Mosaic account.^ How eagerly successive emperors of China acknowledged the rare qualifications of the Jesuits, and profited by their learning, is attested by all the authorities. It was the science of the mis- sionaries, as Krusenstern remarks, and the fascination of their personal character, which secured their welcome at court ; though he perhaps exaggerates when he adds, that " the fond- ness for literature which has actuated some of the emperors is the only reason of their being tolerated."** It is true, how- ever, as Astley notices, that in spite of the friendship and es- teem of various emperors, " their religion being but barely tolerated, were always in danger of persecution. "ff It is de- * The Testimony of the Rocks, by Hugh Miller, Lecture viii., p. 279 (1862). f China, Political, Commercial, and Social, vol. i., p. 78. \. Historical and Descriptive Account of China, cli. iii., p. 225 I China Opened, vol. ii., cli. xiv., p. 169. f Sketches of China, vol. i., ch. ix., p. 264. *|[ History of China, by Thomas Thornton, Esq., preface, p. 13. " The geo- graphical labors performed in China by the Jesuits and other missionaries of the Roman Catholic faith will ever command the gratitude and excite the won- der of all geographers. . . . Portable chronometers and aneroid barometers, sextants and theodolites, sympiesometers and micrometers, compasses and arti ficial horizons, are, notwithstanding all possible care, frequently found to fail and yet one hundred and fifty years ago a few wandering European priests trav ersed the enormous State of China Proper, and laid down on their maps the posi tions of cities, the direction of rivers, and the height of mountains, with a correct- ness of detail and a general accuracy of outline that are absolutely marvellous. To this day all our maps are based upon their observations." The Taeping Rebel- lion in China, by Commander Lindesay Brine, R.N., F.R.G.S., ch. iii., p. 39 (1862). ** Voyage Round the World, vol. ii", p. 319. ff Voyages and Travels, vol. iv., p. 233. 68 CHAPTER II. monstrated, says M. Pauthier, who has done much to elucidate the history of China, " that the toleration extended to the mis- sionaries was only due to the intercession of those who were in favor at court."* Hence, the apparent contradiction of the Chinese, at different times and places, and the singular con- trast between the honors lavished upon the missionaries in one city, and the torments inflicted upon their colleagues in another. Adam Schaal, to whom we must return, was now the chief representative of Christianity and science in the capital of China. But he was not alone. In 1631, the Dominicans and Franciscans began to arrive, and in spite of the perils which surrounded them on every side, the apostolic husbandmen spread themselves over the land in every direction, from Canton to the great wall of China, and even into Tartary and Mongolia. Nor was their labor vain. "The harvest became so plentiful," says one who had watched its after-growth, " that the workmen were too few to gather it in."f " The progress of the missionaries," observes an English writer, " was in general triumphant, though interrupted by fearful vicissitudes; till, towards the end of the Ming dynasty, they were almost supreme in the palace."^: " Few missions in pagan countries," says a Protestant agent in China, " have been more favored with zealous converts, or their missionaries more aided and countenanced by rich and noble supporters, than the early papal missions in China." He had reason to say it, for it was at this time that the mother of the emperor, his principal wife, and tinally his eldest son, were baptized by Father Koffler, and shortly after dispatched to Rome, to Pope Alexander VII., the celebrated letter which has been so often quoted, and upon which such great hopes were founded. But if the emperor permitted his nearest relatives to profess the Christian faith, and even distinguished by special favors the missionaries who did not fear thus to exercise their ministry under his own eyes, it was mainly to their personal qualities that the capricious toleration was due. " The man- darins," said their sovereign, " ask me daily for new favors ; but Ma fa" this was the name which he had given to Schaal, who had just completed the reform of the calendar " though he knows that I love him, always refuses even those which I press him to accept." And when the fearless missionary acted the part of St. John the Baptist, and rebuked the monarch's vices, the latter only replied, " I pardon your invectives, be- cause I am convinced that you love me." * La Chine, p. 442. f Le Comte, Letter xi., p. 364. \ The British World in the East ; by Leigtch Ritchie, vol. ii., p. 229. The Middle, Kingdom, vol. ii., cli. xix., p. 305. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 69 A characteristic anecdote will illustrate the relations between the emperor and this celebrated missionary ; who, after being the friend and companion of the last sovereign of the Ming dynasty, continued to receive the same marks of esteem from the two first Tartar emperors, although the Tartar invasion had been successfully resisted in the south by Christian Chinese generals.* It is a custom in China that when the emperor has occupied any chair or seat in the house of one of his subjects, it is immediately covered with yellow stuff, the imperial color, and none may henceforth sit upon it. One day when Chun- tche, the second of the Mantcheou dynasty, paid a visit to Father Schaal, as he sat down sometimes on the bed, sometimes elsewhere, wherever he found a seat, the Father said to him, laughing, " But where does your majesty intend me to sit hereafter?" " Wherever you like," replied the monarch ; " you and I are not on terms of ceremony ."y On the death of this emperor, a formidable persecution arose, during the minority of his successor, Cang-hi ; for though, as the Pere d'Orleans relates, " the four regents even conferred the title of preceptor to the young emperor on Father Adam, a cabal of Bonzes and Mahometans excited such a tempest against Christianity as to result in an attempt at its extermination. "J The venerable Adam Schaal, at the age of seventy-four, was loaded with chains and cast into prison, together with a crowd of converted mandarins, of whom five were martyred. Schaal was sentenced to be strangled and chopped in pieces ; but it is related, that whenever the judges assembled to read the decree, they were forced by earthquakes to fly from the tribunal, and that the people, interpreting the portent as a warning from Heaven, obtained a reversal of the judgment. "The whole land," says Le Comte, "was confounded at this prodigy." But Schaal, exhausted by infirmity and the sufferings which he had no longer strength to endure, sank under the outrages which he had received, and died in 1666. " Fallen from fame," says the Pere d'Orleans, "deprived of his dignities, loaded with reproach and calumny, he endured imprisonment and fetters, showing by his constancy that he considered himself even more happy to confess the name of Christ in a dungeon than to have preached it with honor in a palace." Schaal was now removed, and peremptory orders being issued by the provisional governors, the flames of persecution were rekindled throughout the whole empire. Twenty-five mis- sionaries, of whom twenty-one were Jesuits, were seized, and * History of the Tartar Conquerors of China, introd., p. 6 ; ed. Hakluyt Society. | Henrion, tome ii., p. 376. ; History of the Tartar Conquerors, &c., Book i., p. 45. 70 CHAPTER II. deported from the interior to Canton. Here they waited till the storm should lull ; nor was it long before their patience was rewarded, and they were once more in the midst of their flocks. In 1671, Father Ferdinand Yerbiest, the successor of Adam Schaal, obtained once again from the new emperor, over whom he had acquired supreme influence, a respite for his brethren ; and in that single year, as a candid Protestant writer notices, more than twenty thousand Chinese were converted.* Perse- cution had borne its usual fruits, and the example of the con- fessors, according to the law of Christian missions, had won the admiration of the pagans for the faith which could inspire so much courage, and fortitude. In 1672, an uncle of the em- peror, besides many other persons of the highest rank, including one of the eight perpetual generals who commanded the Tartar forces, embraced Christianity ; and the missionaries had good reason to believe that, after a few more trials and vicissitudes, the Cross would triumph in China. Yerbiest was no unworthy successor of Ricci and Schaal. " Reckon me, O Lord," he was accustomed to say, according to the testimony of his companions, " among those who have desired, but were not permitted, to shed their blood for Thee. Under the veil of Thine infinite mercy, I dare offer my life as a sacrifice to Thee." In such a temper he labored during nearly twenty years, enjoying the confidence and esteem of Cang-hi, who was not only captivated by his science and learning, but deeply affected by the display of apostolic virtues which he had carefully tested, by means worthy of an Asiatic monarch. That men of the stamp of Yerbiest, and his com- panions Grimaldi arid Pereira, versed in all the mysteries of human science, should constantly reject the dignities and emoluments offered to them, and deliberately prefer to spend life in an unbroken course of prayer, fasting, and continence, appeared to the Tartar prince a fact which deserved investiga- tion : and by his orders spies were secretly appointed to watch the missionaries in their private hours, who were able to describe, to the astonishment of their royal master, the holy and mortified lives of Yerbiest and his brethren. The effect of this discovery upon the all-powerful sovereign of China was full of auspicious fruits for the missions ; so that when, in 1685, a fresh company of missionaries arrived at Ningpo, whose entrance was violently opposed by the heathen mandarins, Cang-hi, who had learned to appreciate them, wrote thus with his own hand to his too zealous subordinates : " It is not men of their character who should be driven from my empire. Let * MecHiurst, China, its State and Prospects, ch. ix., p. 232. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 71 them all come to my court ; such as know mathematics shall stay near my person, the rest may gd into the provinces wher- ever they please." Three years later, in 1688, Yerbiest died, and it seemed a bright and cheering prospect upon which the missionary closed his eyes. Everywhere religion was extending its peaceful sway ; and already, in spite of repeated persecutions, the Chris- tian churches of China might be counted by hundreds. It was the emperor himself who pronounced the eulogy of the great missionary who had now departed, and even published a solemn edict, "as a public testimony of affection towards him," in which he made the characteristic remark, that a not one of his calculations as to the movements of the heavenly bodies had ever been wrong." It is of Verbiest that Mr. Medhurst, with the candor which distinguishes his writings, and which made him an estimable man, though it could not make him a success- ful missionary, gives the following account : " His character for humility and modesty was only equalled by his well-known application and industry. He seemed insensible to every thing but the promotion of science and religion; he abstained from idle visits, the reading of curious books, and even the perusal of European newspapers ; while he incessantly employed himself either in mathematical calcu- lations, in instructing proselytes, in corresponding with the grandees of the empire in the interests of the mission, or in writing to the learned of Europe, inviting them to repair to China. His private papers are indicative of the depth of his devotion, the rigor of his austerities, his watchfulness over his heart amid the crowd of business, and the ardor with which he served religion. "* But Yerbiest, wise and good as he was, cannot be distin- guished from thousands of apostles whom the Church, as we shall see in the course of these pages, has sent forth into all lands during the last three centuries. Within a few weeks of his death, Fathers Gerbillon and Bouvet were received at court, and occupied in the esteem of the imperial philosopher the same place which had been held successively by Schaal and Yerbiest. It was Cang-hi who obliged them to learn the Tartar dialect, which he preferred to speak, and constantly examined them himself to ascertain the progress which they were making in his favorite language, into which, as Chateau- briand notices, one of them subsequently translated the scientific treatises of Fontenelle. In all his journeys he carried with him one or more of the missionaries, from whose society he seems * Ch. ix., p. 234. 72 CHAPTER II. rarely to have separated . himself, and with whom he lived on such terms of unwonted intimacy as excited the envy and astonishment of the greatest officers of the empire. His first question on arriving at any town had always reference to the missionary who dwelt in it. At Nankin where Father Gabiani and his companions refrained, out of humility, from presenting themselves before him, "the emperor waited for them two days, till at length becoming impatient at their absence, he sent to them a mandarin of his household named Chao, a zealous friend of the fathers of Pekin, to reproach them with not having corne to see him ;" and after presenting them with gifts, and asking them " if they had not some image of Jesus Christ about them," he informed them, that, as a special mark of favor, " on his return he would pass before the door of their house."* In 1 Y02, four years after the death of Yerbiest, a noble church, built within the precincts of the palace, was solemnly opened, the first Mass being celebrated by Father Gerbillon. When the envious mandarins remonstrated with Cang-hi about the dimensions of this church, whicli overshadowed a portion of the imperial edifice, he answered, "What would you have me do ? These foreigners render me every day important services, for which I know not how to recompense them ; they refuse all offices and employments ; money they will not touch ; religion is the only thing they care for, and it is in this alone that 1 can give them any gratification. Speak to me no more about it."f Many other illustrations might be added of the influence exerted by the missionaries in this pagan court, and its effects upon the progress of religion in China. It was natural that the extraordinary favors manifested by successive emperors towards, the missionaries should deeply impress all who witnessed them. Father Yerbiest relates that in 1682 he accompanied the reigning sovereign to Eastern Tartary, and that he was placed under the special care of the uncle and father-in-law of the emperor during the whole expedition. Ten horses from the imperial stables were set apart for his use, and while "all the other mandarins were obliged to spend great sums from their own resources," the expenses of the missionary were defrayed by the emperor. If any difficulty occurs during the journey, such as the passage of a swollen torrent, the first care of the emperor, though accompanied by his son and heir, is for the safety of Father Yerbiest. " Where is he?" was his anxious inquiry on one occasion, when night had overtaken them at a dangerous ford ; and he insisted upon * D'Orleans, History of the Tartar Conquerors, &c., p. 98. f Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses, tome xvii., p. 87. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 73 his entering into his own boat, having himself crossed the stream a second time to search for him ; an act, as Father Verbiest observes, which " caused no little comment among the multitude of eminent persons, who, through the night and following day, were toiling to effect their passage."* Father Pereira, who received in his turn similar honors, and who negotiated, together with Gerbillon, the Russian treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689,f relates, that he would sometimes say in joke to his courtiers, "Take heed of controversy with the Christian teachers, for their knowledge compels you to agree with them on every subject, and, what is more, they worship in my presence, when occasion offers, the highest God." He adds, that " many of the courtiers, who used formerly to address their prayers to Heaven, are now ashamed to use that name, and only pray to the personal God."J But we have now sufficient evidence on this point, and it is time to enter without further details upon the second period of our history. Thus far, amid partial reverses, and trials which only purified the faith of the converts, the missionaries had triumphed. From one extremity of the country to the other, the Name of Jesus and the constancy of His worshippers had become known. The new Christians were now sufficiently fortified in the love of God, and the practices of religion, to bear the sharp trial through which, sooner or later, every newly founded church must pass. One hand alone restrained the storm, and that hand was about to lose its strength. In 1722, the emperor Cang-hi died, at the age of sixty-nine, full of love and admira- tion of the missionaries, but too much enslaved by earthly passions to embrace their doctrine. He had served them, rather than himself ; and having lost the opportunity so freely gffered to him, and neglected the grace accepted by so many of his kinsfolk, was now to be taken away. His son and successor, Yong-Tching, whose vanity is said to have been wounded by the calm superiority of his Christian relatives, and their steadfast rejection of the ancient superstitions, immediately issued a decree of extermination against the religion of Jesus, and in that year of evil omen " all the missionaries without distinction were driven from their churches ; more than three hundred churches were either destroyed or converted to profane uses;, and more than three hundred thousand Christians were aban- doned to the fury of the heathen. " * D'Orleans, Appendix, p. 114. f Ravenstcin, The Russians on the Amur, p. 58. 1 D'Orleans, p. 143. Du Halde. 74 CHAPTER II. SECOND EPOCH. The second epoch of Christianity in China had now com- menced. From the hour in which Yong-Tching ascended the throne to the present time, it was only by the loss of all earthly goods, and often at the cost of life itself, that a Chinese could embrace the religion of the Cross. Our Christian forefathers of the first three centuries had endured the same trial ; and men have justly deemed it a conclusive proof of the divinity of their religion, that it could survive the persecutions which' would have annihilated any system or policy of human invention. The Church in China has displayed exactly the same proof of its divine- origin. One hundred and forty years have passed away since Yong-Tching issued his decree, and there are more than three times as many Christians in China at this moment as when he resolved to purge the empire of their presence. Princes and nobles, soldiers and peasants, women and children, have passed in turn through the fiery furnace, but each class has triumphed, even in death. The work of Eicci and his succes- sors was now to encounter the formidable test which they had foreseen, and of which we are about to witness the applica- tion. If their disciples fall away when the storm bursts upon them, it will prove that they had built on no solid founda- tion ; if they endure, like the primitive Christians, every tor- ment which the malice of men or demons could invent, and glorify at the stake or on the scaffold the Saviour for whom they shed their blood, we shall confess that His grace was upon them, lifting them above nature, and subduing the flesh to the spirit. Amjong the earliest victims of the terrible persecution which now raged from one end of China to the other, and in which mandarins of all ranks vied with each other in executing the sanguinary edicts of their master, were several of the emperor's nearest relatives. These members of the royal house had been nurtured in all the pride and pomp of the Chinese court ; one of them had even been named as a probable successor to the throne ; the greatest officers of state had been wont to approach them only on their knees. They were now summoned, not to disavow their convictions, but only to pay external homage to the state religion. It was the same easy compromise which had so often been proposed to the primitive converts, and which those true soldiers of Christ had calmly rejected. The Chinese princes were Christians of the same class, and had been formed by apostles of the same school. The Divine admonition had Bunk deep into their hearts which said, "You cannot drink the MISSIONS IN CHINA. 75 chalice of the Lord, and the chalice of devils."* With one consent, therefore, they refused to touch the unclean thing; and the whole family, including several brothers of the emperor, were degraded and exiled. Let us follow them to the scene of their long trial, in which they displayed, during many years, such patient resignation, that by the contemplation of their unmoved fortitude, amidst poverty, famine, and disease, several heathen members of the imperial family, undaunted by the prospect of a similar lot, embraced the law of Christ. Prince John, the third in age of this company of royal con- fessors, wrote thus from his place of exile in Tartary to his friend and director, Father Parennin : " What we now desire, and what you must beg of God for us, is, that by the help of His grace we may correct our faults, practise virtue, conform ourselves to His holy will, and persevere to the end in His holy service. This is the only object of our desires; the rest we count for nothing." The same quiet and sober, but invincible courage, which we shall find to be a characteristic of the Chi- nese martyrs and confessors, was displayed by all his com- panions, and always with the simple dignity of language which befitted the occasion. From first to last, they are calm and collected, as if they remembered whose honor was intrusted to them, and knew how to be heroes without clamor or exaggera- tion. " You know not," said another of the princes, whose servant wept on seeing him loaded with heavy chains, " the precious- ness of sufferings, and yet you are a Christian ! Learn that they are the pledge of a blessed eternity. Do not, then, be discour- aged ; but whatever it may cost you, continue steadfast in the faith, and never abandon the service of God." We almost seem to hear the solemn voice of the great Apostle : " Think not strange the burning heat which is to try you, as if some new thing happened to you : but if you partake of the sufferings of Christ, rejoice that when His glory shall be revealed, you also may be glad with exceeding joy. "f The same prince, when another servant offered to cover with linen the places bruised by the chains, which are said to have weighed seventy pounds, repulsed trim with these words : "Did you ever hear that in the night of His Passion our Lord endeavored to loose the cords with which He was bound, or that He placed bandages under them to relieve the smart? This Avas the God-Man ; and yet He suffered for us sinners, while we do not suffer for others, but for ourselves."^: * 1 Cor. x. 21. f 1 Pet. iv. 12, 13. $ Lettres EdificmUs, tome xx., p. 54. 76 CHAPTER II. The ladies of the imperial family displayed equal patience and generosity in the midst of want and sufferings of every kind, aggravated by the memory of a former life of ease and luxury. " These illustrious persons," says a Protestant his- torian, "were sent as exiles into a desolate part of Tartary ; the princesses were exposed to the hazard of perishing with cold and hunger. Yet in 1736 we find the members of the imperial family still adhering to the Christian religion."* Fourteen years of persecution, sometimes violent and cruel, at others subtle and insidious, had failed to exhaust their strength, or to pluck from their hearts the faith which had been planted in them. " When one reflects," said their guide and counsellor, Father Parennin, at an earlier period of their exile, " what this illustrious family has suffered during four years past, it is difficult to conceive a more formidable trial, or one which could be endured with more Christian generosity. Princesses of the royal blood, who had always lived in splendor and affluence, fallen to the lowest depths of indigence ; without the support of their husbands, with no relatives to succor them, nor friends to console ; having ever before their eyes the spectacle of their sons in chains, destined to death, and their young daughters, more hapless still, whose lot is worse than death ; unable to receive the sacraments, the only consolation which they could taste in the sad condition to which they are reduced ; to endure all these woes, and yet to bear such a deluge of suffering, not only without diminution of faith, though so recently converted to Christianity, but without uttering so much as one accent of complaint ; must we not confess, that even the constancy of the Christian heroes of the first ages of the Church offers nothing more admirable, nothing more heroic?" Well might Father Parennin exclaim, alluding to the reluctant respect paid by the emperor to himself and his colleagues at Pekin, " Oh! for fewer favors to the missionaries, and more justice to the religion which they preach !" He had himself spent more than forty years in China, was the intimate friend of Cang-hi, whom he accompanied during eighteen years in all his journeys into Tartary ; and even Yong-Iching paid the expenses of a public funeral for the illustrious missionary, who, as the Russian Timkowski observes, " is well known for the share he had in fixing the frontier between Eussia and China."f Parennin was a competent judge of Christian heroism, and himself a master of the spiritual life ; yet he * Hugh Murray's China, vol. i., cli. viii., p. 275. f Timkowski's'iZ'/m^s, vol. ii., cli. i., p. 35. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 77 declares, in his letters to Europe, that nothing could surpass " the sublime virtues" displayed by these admirable confessors. Promises and threats were employed by turns to seduce their constancy. u You are Mantcheou," said their former friends, with ingenious perseverance ; " you belong to the royal blood, and yet you renounce the customs of your ancestors to follow a strange law !" But remonstrance and sarcasm, blandishments and menaces, were equally vain. The members of the Portu- guese and Russian embassies, who visited China at this period, were filled with astonishment at the fortitude of these new Christians, and declared, on their return to Europe, that " they had found the Primitive Church in the remotest wilds of Asia." But the emperor was as steadfast in his purpose to conquer, as they in their resolution to endure. Furious at the cairn patience which baffled all his efforts,' he now ordered them to be removed from their place of exile, and shut up, one by one, in small prisons, six feet by ten. Into these dens their daily allowance of food, barely sufficient to maintain life, was intro- duced through a small aperture, by which alone they main- tained a semblance of intercourse with the outer world. Al- ready they were beginning to sink under their protracted mis- eries, and in a few days, one of the princes, when visited by the guard, was found lifeless on the floor of his oell. One by one they died. A little while, and all would have been added to the company of martyrs ; but at this moment the hand of God, who often seems to delay but strikes at last, was stretched forth, and Yong-Tching was called to his account. In 1735 he expired, and his son Kien-long reigned in his stead. One of the first acts of the new emperor, in the year which followed his accession, was to order the release of the surviving princes, who had so long been buried alive by his father's com- mand. As the noble band, of whom one was the tenth son of Cang-hi, passed on their way to the palace from which they had been banished for fifteen years, the people knelt with respect, and filled the air with acclamations. But the hopes which their release awakened w r ere of short duration. Kien- long, though naturally humane, was unwilling to bring shame on the policy of his father, and once more the decree went forth to persecute the Christians. We have seen, by sufficient evidence, how converts of exalted rank witnessed a good confession in exile or in bonds, and wore out by patient endurance the malice of the persecutor. Let us inquire whether disciples of a humbler class found strength to imitate the courage of these Christian princes, and to glorify the Holy Name in the hour of trial. The world has agreed, in every age, to accept this supreme test of faith. It knows that men are 78 CHAPTER II. not so enamored of torment as to yield their limbs to the knife or the brand, when a word or a sign would deliver them from both, in any meaner cause than that for which St. Peter was crucified and St. Paul beheaded. Other religions have produced fanatics ; Christianity alone may boast of martyrs; and the only form of Christianity which has ever begotten willing ones is that which was preached in China by Ricci and Schaal, by Verbiest and Parennin. We are about to trace the historical results of their preaching. For nearly three centuries the blood of martyrs has flowed in all the provinces of China, in the empire of Ann am, and the kingdom of Corea. The struggles and the triumphs of the first three ages of Christianity have been renewed through an equal space of time in the' regions beyond the Ganges. We have no space to recount all the details of that still unfinished warfare. Our attempt will be limited to such a sketch, neces- sarily incomplete and fragmentary, of the later history of reli- gion in China, as may suffice to prove, by testimony which man has never refused to accept, that both the missionaries who died in that land, and the disciples of every class who shared their lot, were in all points the same order of men, animated by the same invincible faith, and abounding in the same Divine gifts, as those who taught and suffered in the day when Christianity first commenced its combat with the powers of darkness. The picture which we are going to draw may not exhibit in all its parts the unities of time and space ; the various scenes which it will unfold may sometimes seem too closely crowded together, sometimes too widely separated ; three kingdoms and twenty- one provinces must find their place in it ; but one lesson every form and every object in that picture will teach us, the only one which we need care to learn from it, that Catholic mis- sionaries are always and everywhere the same, and that God is marvellous in His saints.* The persecution which devastated the Church in China during the reign of Kien-long was only the continuation of sufferings with which the Christians of that empire were already familiar. During one hundred and fifty years they had been tried in the fiery furnace, with no other result than to purify their faith and augment their numbers. In many of the provinces there, had been three generations of martyrs in the same family. We have omitted, for the sake of brevity, these earlier details; the great persecution of 1736 must not, however, be passed in silence. * The writer desires to observe, that if in these pages the titles of Saint, or Apostle, or Martyr, are applied to persons to whom the Church has not, by a formal decree, conceded them, such terms are employed in perfect submission to the decree of Urban VIII. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 79 " All, except a very small number," says one who witnessed that event, " who were intimidated by the apparatus of torture, displayed heroic constancy amid the most cruel torments. In vain they beat their faces with rods till they were covered with blood, or stretched them on the ground and lacerated them with whips and sticks; they answered constantly, ' We will live and die Christians.' "* And one result of this noble fortitude was to attract, even in pagan witnesses, reluctant esteem for the religion which inspired it. The very judges, we are told, filled with involuntary admiration, suggested to their patient victims to apostatize with their lips only, while they preserved their religion in their hearts. " Why should you die ?" said the mandarins ; " only obey the command of the emperor by out- ward compliance, and believe what you like in secret." But it was not thus the disciples of Parennin and his companions understood the obligations of a Christian. "You need not fear," said one of them, while the executioners were binding his limbs before the torture commenced, "lest I should move ; a Christian is only too happy to suffer for his faith." Then his trial commenced ; but " the mandarin was weary of tormenting the neophyte, before the latter was of enduring the anguish." And when it was over, his mother, who had stood without wavering by his side, seeing him all mutilated and covered with blood, fondly embraced him, and exclaimed, " Come, let us hasten to thank God for the favors which He has shown you." Another, who was a mass of wounds, and incapable of move- ment, being adjured by an aged heathen relative, who threatened to die at his feet if he refused to apostatize, answered witjb a noble pleasantry, which may remind us of the sublime jest of St. Laurence, " I should very much regret your death, but at all events, in my present condition, they can hardly suspect me of having caused it."f A third, who was by profession a physician, being almost beaten to death, a youth, whose godfather he was, asked permis- sion to take his place. "Why, my son," he replied, "would you deprive me of the crown which God has prepared for me ?" And these are only a few examples, among many thousands, .of the spirit which the faith of the martyrs St. Stephen and St.. James had kindled in the Christians of China. During more than ten years this bloody persecution raged. A few gave way, as St. Cyprian tells us they did even in his day, under their torments ; but the great majority not princes * Lettres Edifiantes, tome xx., p. 333. f Id., p. 351. 80 CHAPTER II. only, but magistrates, soldiers, merchants, boatmen, women, and even children,*' rivalled the heroism of the primitive con- fessors. Everywhere the same scenes occurred, and everywhere with the same result. "'On every side," writes one who bore his part in the persecution of 1746, " are heard the groans of the Christians; everywhere they are bound in fetters or put to the torture ; everywhere they seek to force them, by every device of cruelty, to renounce Jesus Christ." But they had been taught by men of the school of St. Paul, and the lesson was engraved on their hearts, that " the sufferings of this pres- ent time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us." Even the weakest disciples emulated the example of the strong. A girl of nineteen being dragged before the tribunal, showed such joy in her countenance at the honor which she was about to receive in confessing the Name of Jesus, that the enraged mandarin exclaimed, "Knowest thou not that I have power to condemn thee to death?" " Here is my head," replied the new St. Agnes ; " you can order it to be cut off, but it will be to me unspeakable joy to lay down my life." And then the heathen judges, perplexed, as their forefathers were wont to be, by a valor which they admired without comprehending, took counsel together how to deal with such incurable perversity. It was intolerable that even girls and children should laugh at their threats, and despise their torments ; caring only, as Festus complained to Agrippa a good many ages before, about "questions of their own superstition, and of one Jesus deceased, whom (they) affirmed to be alive."f The world is ever the same, and resents nothing so much as the faith which dares to survive its feeble satire, and the courage which only smiles at its impotent cruelty. And so these mandarins wisely came to the conclusion, that some new scheme must be adopted. As they could not overcome the disciples, they resolved to lay hold of their teachers. And then the word went forth, that search should everywhere be made for the missionaries with this additional precaution, that every magistrate whose vigilance they contrived to elude should be deemed a partner in their guilty rebellion, and share their punishment.' It was impossible to stimulate more effectively the zeal of the provincial mandarins. Hitherto, the missionaries, though eagerly aspiring to the crown of martyrdom, which they had come so far to seek, had consented, for the sake of their flocks, to withdraw themselves from danger. It was the injunction of the Master to His first * Rorlibaclier, Eistoire de VEglise Catholique, tome xxviii., liv., xci., p. 470. f Aqts xxv. 19. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 81 Apostles, and had always been a rule with their successors, not to seize the crown till He offered it to them. " We know," says a Chinese bishop and confessor of our own day, "that it is not permitted to anticipate the designs of Providence, without a special impulse of Divine grace, nor unless one is mercifully predestined to receive the palm of martyrdom."* In the per- secution of 1746, however, the missionaries did not doubt that the time had come to die. They had taught their children every other lesson, and they now prepared to teach them this. Father Alcober was the first seized, and the first tortured. When the obscene pagans addressed to him impure interroga- tories, he answered with a loud voice, " Questions worthy of a minister of Satan do not deserve any reply." These questions referred to female converts who had consecrated themselves to a life of chastity. " Who advised you," they said, on the same occasion, to a young woman before the tribunal, " to embrace virginity ?" " Myself," she replied ; and she was immediately consigned to the torturers. f Fathers Royo, Serrano, and Diaz were captured in succes- sion, and horribly mutilated. The first confessed, in answer to the inquiry of the judges, that he had been thirty years in China ; the two last were handed over to the executioners without even a question. But it was the bishop, the venerable Sanz, who was the special object of their search. To save the Christians the vexations and sufferings which they endured in their gener- ous attempts to conceal him, he considered it his duty to give himself up, and having addressed the tribunal with the courage and authority of an apostle, he received at once twenty-five blows in the i'ace, a number afterwards increased, in spite of his venerable age, to ninety-five ; and finally, after a fruitful apos- tolate of thirty years, was martyred, on the 26th of May, 1747. His last words to the executioner were, "My friend, I am going to heaven ; would that I could take you with me." His blood was collected, according to custom, by a famous brigand and malefactor, who became not long after a fervent Christian. The public sentence pronounced against Bishop Sanz, which deserves notice as a testimony of the heathen themselves to the progress of the faith, contained the following notable words : u The number of those whom, lie has already perverted is so great, that to whatever side we turn in this district, there is nothing else to be seen; and what is more, the very members of the tribunals, and even the soldiers, are devoted to him. v j " But what gave a singular and striking character to the apos- * Annals of the Propagation of the Faith, vol. vii., p. 257. English edition. f Lett-res Edifiantes, tome xxiii., p. 59. t Annals, vol. ix., p. 300. 82 CHAPTER II. tolic labors of the Bishop of Mauricastro," says the latest biog- rapher of St. Dominic, " was his success in winning the Chinese not merely to embrace the Christian faith, but to aim at the highest grades of perfection. The number of Christian virgins desirous of consecrating themselves by vow to God was so great, as to recall the days of the primitive Church." History has preserved with peculiar care, as if conscious of their special value and significance, whatever fragments of pagan literature referring to the triumphs of Christianity in the tirst ages have survived to later times. The great Chinese per- secution of 1747 has fortunately been recorded by a heathen annalist, and in an official document. In a report to the em- peror by the viceroy of one of the most considerable provinces, the sovereign is warmly urged by his deputy to take note, not only of the wide-spread influence of the missionaries, but of the audacity with which their disciples openly manifested their sympathy and love. " As they were conducted in chains," says this officer, " thousands of persons came to meet them, and to serve them as an escort of honor. Many showed by their tears the grief which they felt ; girls and women knelt before them, and offered them all kinds of refreshments. Every one wished to touch their clothes."* Pie almost seems to be describing the conduct of those earlier converts, animated by a similar spirit, who also touched the body of St. Paul with " handker- chiefs and aprons," to which the Almighty, approving this de- vout use of relics, gave power, as Holy Scripture relates, to heal diseases, and put demons to flight. But the heathen viceroy continues thus : " A young man named Tching-Sieou had the impudence to put himself at the head of this multitude, and to exhort them, saying, amongst other things, c lt is for (rod that you suffer ; let not death itself overcome you.' " It is impossible to desire a more impressive testimony either to the character of the Chinese converts, or to the influence and authority of their apostolic teachers. The narrative of the eloquent viceroy appears to have stimu- lated his sovereign to fresh exertions. It was not to be endured that aliens and foreigners should thus provoke his subjects to what is called sometimes, even in our own day, and by men who deem themselves Christians, u a divided allegiance." But it was the fate of this emperor, as of all the enemies of Christi- anity, to minister to the glory of the faith which he wished to uproot. The " Masters of the religion of Jesus," as he styled them, were not men to be conquered by such an adversary as this; and if they invited their brave and generous disciples to * Lettres Edifiantes, tome xxiii., p. 72. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 83 suffer for Christ, first showed them, by their own example, how to do so. They owed this debt to their followers, and they freely paid it. " What gort of a God," said the presiding mandarin to Father Beuth, when he stood before the tribunal, "is He whom you wish people to adore?" "He who created the heavens and the e^irth." " Oh, the wretch ; as if the heavens and the earth were created ! Give him ten strokes." These were blows given by a heavy bamboo across the face, the head being turned back over the shoulders. It was a common thing for the sufferer to faint after the first or second. Then writing the Holy Name in Chinese characters, the mandarin asked*the confessor to whom that name referred. It was not now the moment for reserve ; and therefore, just as St. Stephen had cried with his latest breath, " I see the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God," so this new witness announced, even to that pagan crowd, " It is the Name of the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who became Man for our salvation." " Ten strokes more !" shouted the mandarin ; and the same torment was a third time inflicted, when the bleeding victim once more proclaimed with unfaltering lips the titles of his God and Saviour. Two months after he died of his wounds ; his only delight in these last days of his life being to hear the Passion of our Lord read to him by his fellow-prisoners. It would be no exaggeration to say, that the missionaries were all, from first to last, such as Father Beuth. No menace could daunt, no anguish overcome them. One after another they fell, but as each left a space in the ranks, another hurried forward to fill it. On the 12th of September, 1748 for each year resembled that which preceded it F. F. Tristan de Atter- mis and Joseph Henriquez were strangled in prison, after the usual tortures. On the 28th of October, four Dominican fathers received their crown together. Every year, almost every month, paid its tribute of blood; and if any still survived in that long and merciless persecution, it was because they consented to delay for a brief space the final triumph, and charitably ac- cepted a hidden ministry amongst their flocks, postponing for their sakes the coveted glory of martyrdom. Yet their spiritual children, even when deprived of their pastors, were not unable .to bear that supreme calamity. They proved, in many a province of China, that they could walk bravely to the stake, though no apostle stood by to encourage them ; that they could live during long years by the strictest rule of religion, even when the minister of Christ was taken away from among them. Both these facts are attested by capable witnesses. We might fill a volume with examples of their constancy. 84: CHAPTER II. Many who think they would gladly embrace a sharp but speedy death for the sake of Jesus, would, perhaps, fail under pro- tracted torments. Many who could bear even these while sur- rounded by their brethren, and aided by their prayers, would languish and grow cold if deprived for years of all the ordinances of religion. The Chinese Christians have endured both these trials. The celebrated Father Parennin was acquainted with an old Tartar officer, one of a company of Christians living near the great wall of China, to whom for many years this worthy soldier had acted as a sort of lay chaplain. "I assemble these Christians," he said, " in my house on festival days ; we pray together ; I give them notice of the days of abstinence arid fasting. All are eager for the happiness of seeing a missionary, in order to hear mass, and partake of the sacraments. Most of them have seen none for twelve years.' 7 * There is, perhaps, nothing more striking in the history of Chinese missions and we shall meet the same fact in almost every other land, nothing which illustrates more powerfully the character both of the teachers and their disciples, than the ardor with which the latter clung to their religion, even when separated for long periods from their spiritual guides, and from all the appointed channels of grace and consolation. Nineteen years after the martyrdom of Father Beuth, though the perse- cution in which he fell had raged almost without intermission, we tind a missionary of his class not only expressing his admi- ration at the " courage with which God inspires these Asiatics, so pusillanimous by nature," but extolling the innocence and marvellous fidelity of those " who, without even the opportuni- ty of practising the duties of their religion, since they cannot so much as see a missionary, never fall into apostasy, and care- fully cause their children to be baptized. "f But we must refer for examples to the works devoted exclusively to the history of religion in China: the field which it is proposed to traverse in these volumes is too vast to permit even the attempt to exhaust a single portion of it. One special feature of the Chinese missions, which even in this rapid sketch we are obliged to notice, is the perpetual re- currence of the same facts in all parts of the empire. Every- where the missionaries were the same, the affliction of their converts the same, and the fortitude with which they were en- dured. Their history in one province exactly resembles their history in every other. Pass for a moment from China Proper, where a strong central administration secured uniformity in the * Lettres, tome xx., p. 15. f Tome xxiii., p. 483. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 85 details of the persecution, to Tong-King or Corea, and you will think you are still in the company of the mandarins who exe- cuted the orders of Yong-Tching or Kien-long. The proceed- ings are identical, and their results also. MISSION OF TONG-KING. The mission of Tong-King was founded in 1627 by Father Alexander de Rhodes. In a few months he converted two hundred idolatrous priests, a sister of the king, and seventeen of his near relations. In less than three years, he and his com- panion Father Antony Marques had baptized nearly six thou- sand pagans, including several bonzes of great repute with their countrymen for wisdom and virtue, but who now willing- ly accepted the humble function of catechists, and "rendered incalculable services to the missionaries in the preaching of the Gospel."* The usual test of their sincerity was quickly ap- plied. By the influence of the king's wives, who trembled lest the monarch himself should embrace a doctrine which con- demned polygamy, both the missionaries were banished. Would the newly converted bonzes still adhere to a religion which now seemed to have vanished like a dream ? Had the faith already taken such deep root in their souls as to support them in such a trial as this ? It had done more it had made them apostles ! When the two Fathers entered the kingdom again by stealth in the following year, they found that, in that brief space, they* fervent catechists, not content with preserving their own faith, had prepared four thousand neophytes for the reception of the sacraments. In 1639, only twelve years after de Rhodes had first entered Tong-King, there were already eighty-two thousand five hundred Christians! In seventy-two villages there were hardly any pagars remaining. In the two years 1645 and 1646, twenty -four thousand Tong-kinese were baptized. Finally, be- fore half a century had elapsed, the almost incredible number of two hundred thousand converts had been won to Christ. f Thus far the history of religion in Tong-King corresponds with what we have called the u first epoch" in the missions of China Proper. The second was now to commence, and with precisely the same results as in the former empire. The fire which was to "try the work" of the missionaries in Tong-King was already kindled in 1630, but it was not till a few years later that the systematic persecution was organized which has never * Tome xvi., p. 3. f Henrion, tome ii., 2de partie, p. 390. Cf. Voyages et Missions du P. A. de Rhodes, p. 88 (1854). 86 CHAPTER II. ceased from that hour, and which was destined to try to the uttermost, but never to exhaust, during more than two centuries, the faith and courage of these afflicted Christians. In vain the missionaries were slain or forcibly deported ; their disciples con- tinued faithful even in their absence. When Father Le Royer, and his companion Father Paregaud, secretly entered the kingdom, on the 22d of June, 1692, they found that great numbers, by whom they were received with transports of en- thusiasm, had not been able to approach the sacraments for a long period of years. And then they commenced their secret and perilous ministry. " I pass whole days," says the former, in a letter to his brother, M. Le Royer des Arsix, " either con- cealed in a boat, which I only quit at night to visit the villages by the river-side, or hidden in some retired house." He always celebrated the holy sacrifice of the Mass before daybreak, and then returned to spend the long hours of the coming day in his place of concealment. Yet, in spite of difficulties at least equal to those which were encountered and overcome by the first Apostles ; in spite of the terrible lot to which every convert saw himself inevitably doomed, and which would have appalled any but true disciples of the Cross ; in spite of sufferings and torments which would probably suffice in a few months to obliterate every trace of the languid or nominal (Christianity of certain countries of northern Europe ; the work of conversion was hardly suspended for a single hour. In 1694:, Father Le Royer himself baptized 467 adults, though they could only Have received his instructions, as Nicodemus did those of our Blessed Lord, under the shelter of night. In 1695, amid the same unceasing dangers, he admitted 435 ; in 1696, in spite of the horrible persecution then raging, 218 ; in 1697, 247 ; in 1698, 310. And his companions were all engaged in the same work, with exactly the same fruits. u Many of our Fathers," he writes, " have had a larger number of baptisms and confes- sions than myself."* A single example will show what manner of men they were whom they thus gained to God, and how they confessed the faith which the prospect of anguish and death could not deter them from embracing, nor the dread reality persuade them to abandon. In 1721, all the tribunals throughout the land were thronged with Christians brought up for judgment. Luke Thu, an aged disciple, is tirst commanded to trample on the Cross, perhaps in the hope that his example might influence the younger confessors. Lifting up the sign of salvation from the ground, in the sight of the heathen crowd, he pressed it to his * Lettres, tome xvi., p. 18. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 87 bosom, and exclaimed aloud: ' My Lord and my God, Thou who piercest the thoughts of all hearts knowest the secrets of mine ; but I desire that they should be known to these also, who think to dismay me by their threats, that they may under- stand that neither the greatest torments, nor the most cruel death, can ever separate me from Thy love." The mandarins, in choosing a victim, could hardly have made a more unfortu- nate selection ; and they appear to have been so completely overawed by the majesty of the brave old man, that for that day he was sent back to prison. But the martyrdom which he had merited was only postponed.* We reserve to the third period of these missions fuller illus- trations of the character of the lay Chinese martyrs, both because we have no space for the innumerable examples which abound in the two earlier epochs, and because the narrative of such triumphs of Christian heroism occurring in our own day, and as it were under our very eyes, will perhaps excite deeper consideration, and serve to illustrate more impressively the prodigious contrast of which we are not yet to speak, but which it is our purpose to trace hereafter in every land. The world hears with apathy of actions, however sublime, from which it is already separated by more than a century, and reserves all its attention for newer events. For this reason we do not linger over the past. The present, we shall see, has still more urgent claims to our notice, and will repay it with still more instruc- tive and abundant evidence. But we must not close our account of the second period of the Tong-King mission without showing, by at least a few instances, that the missionaries in this province resembled their brethren in every other. The emperor Chua, a worthy rival of the more potent mon- arch at Pekin whom he acknowledged as his suzerain, had commanded that search should everywhere be made for the missionaries. Fathers Francis Buccharelli and John Baptist Messari, both already worn out with disease and toil, for their life had long been a daily martyrdom, were the first victims. In vain some of the higher officers of the court, cognizant of their pure and holy lives, pleaded in their favor, declaring them " irreproachable in their conduct." Father Messari sunk to rest in prison, before the knife or the brand could be applied. Buccharelli, accompanied by a willing escort of ten of his own converts, was led to martyrdom. They marched together to death in a kind of triumphant procession, for in a few moments heaven was to be opened to them. Amongst the crowd who * Lettres, tome xvi., p. 41. 88 CHAPTER II. followed was the aged Luke Thu ; and when some, compas- sionating his venerable years, would fain have pushed him back, that the mandarins might overlook him, "Not so," he answered, still struggling to the front, " these are my brothers." On the 12th of January, 1737, Fathers Alvarez, Cratz, D'A- breu, and Da Cunha, three of them members of noble houses, all subjects of different European kingdoms, but all united by religion with a closer tie than that of family or nation, suffered martyrdom in the same place, and at the same hour. So bright with grace and unearthly joy was the face of Da Cunha, as he walked with his brethren to the place of execution, that a man- darin, puzzled by such unseasonable rapture, and utterly mis- taking its cause, exclaimed, with angry contempt, "This foreign madman thinks they are only taking him to Macao !" Others among the heathen bystanders were heard to observe, with more discernment, " It seems that death is the delight of these foreigners. What kind of a law is this, which teaches men to despise life, and to embrace death with so much joy and satis- faction ?" It was the after-contemplation of these mysterious scenes, of which their own philosophy supplied no interpreta- tion, which so often led the heathen, according to the universal law of Christian missions, to embrace the religion of which such scenes attested the divine power. There was hardly a moment's pause in the struggle of which we have only noticed a few characteristic incidents. In 1750 the same events recurred, and on a larger scale. Once more the prisons were choked with confessors, many of whom died of starvation. One of the bishops in Toiik-King was pressed to the earth by a heavy weight, and bore the torture for eighteen days. Father Laureygo, and other missionaries, shared the same fate ; and the heathen, who came to gaze upon them, went away tilled with astonishment, and sorely perplexed by "the heavenly joy which illumined their faces," even in the midst of their torments. Finally, on the 28th of August of the same year, all the surviving missionaries were forcibly dragged on board a vessel, the per- secutors having decided that it was no use to kill them, as their death only multipled converts, and were accompanied by great numbers of Christians, who, in spite of the barbarity of the pagan soldiers, filled the air with their lamentations, and pros- trated themselves to receive the last blessing of the fathers and guides whom they seemed once more to be losing forever. At the time of this last outbreak, which closed the second epoch of the Cochin-Chinese mission, the Jesuit Fathers had more than one hundred and twenty thousand Christians under their charge, the Lazarists eighty thousand, the missionaries of Propaganda about thirty thousand, and the Dominicans about MISSIONS IN CHINA. 89 twenty thousand; making a total of more than two hundred and fifty thousand converts in Tong-King alone. The persecution continued after their departure, but though some fell away, the great majority were able to bear it; and it is only their invin- cible fortitude, sustained by the teaching and example of the missionaries, which explains the almost incredible results ob- tained in this terrible mission. In 1857, Bishop Retord, the well-known Yicar Apostolic of Western Tong-King, who has himself braved death in every form, and whose continued exist- ence is not the least extraordinary fact in this history, announced to Europe that the Annamite Christians then numbered about five hundred and thirty thousand, of whom four hundred and three thousand nine hundred had actually partaken of one or other of the sacraments during the previous year.* A new fact will also claim our attention when we enter upon the third and last epoch of this mission, because it will furnish independent and unexpected testimony to its astonishing tri- umphs. AVe shall then meet native exiles from this land of martyrs, in the English or Dutch settlements of the Indian Archipelago, and find them, by Protestant testimony, as full of faith and zeal as their martyred ancestors, and answering the solicitations of Pro- testant emissaries, as the latter will inform us, with calm but earnest rebuke; so that when the Rev. Mr. Abeel, as he relates himself, met some of these Chinese exiles in Batavia, and con- fessed to them that he and his companions made no converts, they replied, "The fault is in your doctrines; if they were true, there would be no lack of genuine disciples."f In truth there is nothing in the history of Christianity more admirable than the fidelity of these Asiatic confessors. "I am astonished," says a missionary who succeeded towards the close of the last century in penetrating into the interior of the country, u that the greater part of the Christians make confes- sions in which I can hardly find matter for absolution. I sus- pected at first that they were imperfectly instructed ; but the simple manner and devout tone in which they reply to my questions convince me of the innocence and candor of their souls. 4 Oh, my lather,' they say to me, 'how should I dare do that against my God who has called me to his holy religion? May my Saviour Jesus Christ, who died for me, never suffer me to fall into such a sin.' "^ * Annals. f Journal of a Residence in China, by Rev. David Abeel, ch. x., p. 234. . \ Lettres, tome xvi., p. 194. 90 CHAPTER II. CHINA PROPER. In China Proper, during the whole period at which we have just glanced, and which we have called the "second epoch" of Chinese missions, the same work was in progress, with a steady unvarying uniformity, in spite of incessant and merci- less persecution, which assimilates the Chinese missions to those of the primitive ages. All through the first half of the seven- teenth century, more than five hundred adult converts were annually made even in Pekin itself; and their constancy is sufficiently indicated by the astonishing fact, attested by Baron Von Haxthausen, that, at this hour, there are more than forty thousand Catholics in that capital, and that still, full, of life and power, " their religion extends itself more and more in the north of the empire."* It is impossible to attribute this progress, accomplished in the face of almost unexampled sufferings and dangers, to any other causes than those which have been regarded as the sole ade- quate explanation of similar triumphs in the early ages the omnipotence of Divine grace, the persuasive example which the converts afforded to the heathen, and the apostolic character of the missionaries. Father D'Entrecolles relates, in 1715, that a European missionary who visited his neophytes for the first time declared, after living among them, "They are not ordinary Christians; they are models of virtue." Even the heathen, as we shall see, confessed the same fact. Nor couid they be in- sensible to the mysterious heroism of which they were coiir tinually witnesses. D'Entrecolles mentions the example of one of his own recent converts, who saw pieces of his flesh cut off and given to dogs to eat, and yet behaved with such patient fortitude, that even the mandarins desired the torture to cease, f It is also worthy of observation, and a significant token of the rare union of mental and spiritual endowments in a large number of Chinese missionaries of that epoch, that in the midst of their apostolic labors they still found time to devote to the interests of science. One example deserves particular mention. Humboldt used to deplore, only a few years before his death, that the experiments in terrestrial magnetism, to which he gave so great an impulse, had not been systematically conducted at an earlier period. Yet we find Catholic missionaries, two cen- turies ago, registering their observations on the magnetic dip. It is recorded of Colbert, that he one day summoned Father * Etudes sur la Russie, tome i., ch. xiv., p. 441. f Lettres, tome xix., p. 95. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 91 de Fontaney, afterwards a missionary in China, who found him closeted with the celebrated Cassini. The minister addressed the Jesuit in these words : u The sciences do not deserve, reverend Father, that you should take the trouble to cross the seas, and consent to live in another world, far removed from your country and friends ; but since the desire of converting the heathen, and of gaining souls to Jesus Christ, often induces your Fathers to undertake such voyages, I should wish them to profit by the opportunity ; and that, in moments when they are not wholly occupied in preaching the Gospel, they should con- duct such observations as may be useful to us in perfecting the arts and sciences."* We know how the confidence of the great minister was justified, and Europe still confesses, by the mouth of its most learned men, its obligations to the Society of Jesus. De Fontaney himself, a man of noble lineage, after professing mathematics for eight years in a college at Paris, was one of six Fathers to whom their superior granted permission to labor in China. To him we owe the relation of an anecdote which deserves a place even in this imperfect sketch. A Tartar colonel, charged with an official embassy to a distant part of the empire, entreated Father de Fontaney, whose disciple he was, to admit him to baptism before he set out on his dangerous expedition. Being found, on examination, to be unable to re- peat all the prayers, acts of faith, and other formularies, which the missionaries had resolved, for the sake of precaution, to consider indispensable, his request was refused. " My father," said the disappointed soldier, u do not insist upon this condition. I believe all the mysteries of religion, One God in Three Per- sons, that the Second Person became Man for us and suffered death for our salvation ; I believe that they who keep the Law will be saved, and that they who keep it not will be eternally damned. There is nothing to hinder my becoming a Chris- tian. I have only one wife, and no wish ever to have more than one ; there are no idols in my house, nor do I adore any. I adore the Lord of Heaven alone, and I wish to love and serve Him all my life." The missionary was still inexorable, and counselled him to apply again for baptism on his return from his expedition. " But, my father, if i die on the way, my soul will be lost, for who will, baptize me if I should fall sick on the way ? You see that I am prepared, that I believe all the articles of the Law, and that I wish to keep it all my life. I have just left the palace, and come hither in all haste, to beseech you to grant me this favor. I have only two hours left to prepare for my departure, for I must begin my march * Tomo xvii., p. 210. 92 CHAPTER II. to-night. Father, in the name of God, refuse me not this grace." To such a prayer only one reply was possible. The missionary yielded, and eight days after the new Christian died on his journey.* It was the same Father de Fontaney, who, when he visited Europe in after years, retained so lively a recollection of kind- ness received from English friends, that he wrote from London to Pere La Chaise, the confessor of Louis XIV., in these words : " I can declare of the English who reside in the Chinese ports that their conduct does them honor." A little later we have the evidence of Father Le Comte, who shall be our last witness, and who speaks, like de Fontaney, of works in which he had a personal share, and of events which occurred under his own eyes: "Every thing," says this well- known missionary, "is matter of consolation to us in this glorious employment ; the faith of the new converts, the inno- cence of the old, the aptness of the children, the devotion and modesty of the women." From him we learn also how far books were employed in the instruction of the Chinese. It was not indeed by such agency that they expected to convert the heathen, but they knew how to employ it in subordination to other means. Of one Chinese treatise written by a Jesuit mis- sionary, his companions were accustomed to say, " It has con- verted as many pagans as there are syllables in the book." It would have been irrational to have neglected such useful auxil- iaries. " As my visits are not so frequent as I could wish," writes Le Comte, "I endeavor to supplement them by pious books, with which, by God's blessing, China is very well stored. They have very complete catechisms, containing the whole body of Christian doctrine, and in which the life, miracles, and death of our Blessed Lord, the commandments of God and the Church, are clearly explained. There are also particular ex- positions of the Gospels, treatises upon moral and Christian duties, solid controversies adapted to the capacity of all, prac- tices of piety for various states and conditions of life, prayers and instructions for the right use of the sacraments, and a course of theology for the learned." What follows is worthy of notice : " As for the complete version of the Bible, there are such weighty reasons why it should not presently be published, that it would seem only an act of rash audacity to co it; and so much the more, because there is already a full exposition, in various books, of what is contained in the Gospels, and even of whatsoever is most instructive in the rest of the Holy Scrip- tures."! * Ubi supra, p. 317. f Letter xii., p. 391. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 93 Le Comte relates also, that in his day the Christians, besides assisting every morning at the holy sacrifice of the Mass, used to " assemble twice a day for public prayers." Father Francois Noel had noticed, at an earlier date, the same habits of piety; that many of the Christians travelled twenty or thirty miles every Sunday to hear Mass, and that on Fridays they assembled in great numbers to practise devotions in honor of the Passion. "Their austerities and penances," he adds, "would be indiscreet, if we were not careful to moderate their excess." It was by this discipline of prayer, meditation, and penance, that they prepared for martyrdom, and that so many learned rather to desire than to fear it. Of the missionaries themselves. Le Comte observes that they had commonly only the bare ground for their couch, and that their diet was so meagre, that "there is no monk in Europe whose rule prescribes such a rigorous abstinence," since many of them passed whole years together " with only rice, vegetables, and water." Lastly, of the faithful he gives this account : " The ardent love which these Christians have for Jesus Christ makes them devout in truth, and walk worthy of the profession which they have embraced. They continually repeat the fol- lowing ejaculation: 'Jesus, the Master of Heaven, who didst shed Thy blood for us ; Jesus, who died to save us !' for as this is the mystery in which we most carefully instruct them, so it is that which they most steadfastly believe." Perhaps we have now sufficient knowledge of the facts which belong to the two first epochs of the Chinese mission. The second of these periods was now to be abruptly closed, by an event of which we shall better appreciate the formidable char- acter when we have traced its sorrowful results in many lands. What the fate of the heathen world might have been if the Society of Jesus had not been overthrown, by a vast conspiracy which united the enemies of every throne and of almost every creed in Europe, at the moment when it had reached the climax of its glory and usefulness, when its members were doing battle in every stronghold of Satan over the wide face of the earth, and everywhere with success, it would be idle now to speculate. Others, indeed, had been associated with the Jesuits, and not in China only, in that famous apostolate which lasted more than two hundred years, which embraced every region of the world, and added to the Church more souls than the enemy had snatch- ed from her by the great catastrophe of the sixteenth century. But if the children of St. Francis, St. Dominic, and St. Vincent have everywhere emulated the piety, zeal, and valor of the sons of St. Ignatius, it is to the latter that men have attributed, in 94: CHAPTER II. a special manner, the success of a work in which they were en- gaged at the same hour from Labrador to Patagonia, and from the White Sea to the islands of the Indian Ocean. " People of the furthest East," exclaimed Fenelon, with accents of astonish- ment and admiration, "your hour is come! To whom do we owe this glory and benediction of our age? To the Company of Jesus"* "O famous Company," said Boss^et, before the noblest audience in Christendom, " who bear not in vain the Name of Jesus, and to whom God has given, in these last times, doctors, apostles, and evangelists, that the glory of His Gospel might break forth in all the universe, and even in lands hitherto unknown ; cease not to employ in its service, in the spirit of your holy institute, all the resources of genius, eloquence, refine- ment, and learning. "f Even Protestants have caught up the echo of these mighty voices. " A considerable portion," says Sir George Staunton, " of the intercourse which actually sub- sists between China and the nations of Europe owes its origin, as is well known, to the influence of religious motives ; and was established by the indefatigable zeal and appropriate talents of the early missionaries of the Catholic Church." And then he adds, with a noble candor, that if the Society had not been suppressed, " it is difficult to say how far the most ancient of the institutions upon which the fabric of the Chinese govern- ment is founded, or the most deeply -rooted of the prejudices and attachments by which it continues to be sustained, could have withstood their powerful and undermining influence." ^ "The Jesuits," says a later English writer, "at one time bid fair to convert both India and China / and if their career had not been stopped by political events, would probably have finally succeeded. " "Every thing was against the Jesuits," says the most upright and illustrious of continental Protestants, " and yet nothing can be more certain than that a great idea is attached to their name, their influence, and their history. Why so? It is because they knew what they were doing, and what they desired to do ; because they had a full and clear acquaint- ance with the principles upon which they acted, and the aim to which they tended ; that is to say, they had greatness of thought, and greatness of will." | They had these, and better gifts, or they would never have accomplished even a portion of the great deeds which God wrought by their hands. But we * Sermon pour la Fete de I'Epiphanie, 1685. \ Sermon pour la Fete de la Circoncision ; (Euvres, tome iii., p. 706. | Laws of China, pref., p. 3. Of. Lord Macartney's Embassy to China, vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 159. | India as it may be, by George Campbell, Esq., ch. viii., p. 397. I Guizot, Histoire de la Civilisation, &c., Lect. xii. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 95 shall meet them again, in many a land, and find other oppor- tunities of reviewing their work, and of appreciating its true character. Meanwhile, the unwilling decree, extorted by violence and conceded with regret, the decree which a later Pontiff, himself a confessor, was destined to annul and reverse, had gone forth against them, and China was robbed of her^ apostles just as she was beginning to know and obey their voice. u Let us submit and adore," said the last superior of the Jesuits at Pekin, when the fatal edict was announced ; " I confess, however, in spite of the most complete resignation, that my heart has received an incurable wound. Oh, my God, how many souls will now be replunged into the darkness of idolatry ! how many will never emerge from it !"* And now the enemy had triumphed, and the clouds, which seemed about to part asunder, once more fell in thick darkness over the land of China. Let us sorrow for a moment, if not with the banished apostles, at least with their orphaned flock. For half a century the Christians of China were well-nigh abandoned to themselves. During two whole generations many neither saw, nor so much as heard of, a minister of religion. A few indeed remained, scattered here and there through that wide desert ; but dismay had fallen upon them. The events which were shaking Europe to her foundations were felt even in eastern Asia. The religious societies, which alone could supply teachers for the heathen, were everywhere destroyed. The har- vest was great, but there were none to gather it in.f For many years silence reigned- over the pagan world. Yet, in spite of a trial without parallel in the history of Christianity, and which fell simultaneously upon every region of the earth ; in spite of a calamity, immense and universal, which would have utterly uprooted religion in many a country of Europe, there was not so much as a solitary example throughout the world such as had once been known in North Africa, in Phenicia and Bithynia, and the other provinces of Asia Minor of the destruction of any church which had been founded by Jesuits, Dominicans, or Franciscans, either in Asia or America. All survived, by a special Providence, this new and unheard-of catastrophe ! All number at this hour, and notably in China, a greater multitude of Christians than existed before their trial began. The Evil One had bruised the heel of the Church, but she has received power from God to crush his head. And if we marvel in secret why he was permitted to overthrow for a time the Company of Jesus, using as his instruments all the children of pride and blasphemy in every kingdom of Europe, it is the last General * Annals, vol. ix., p. 310. f De Guignes, tome ii., p. 337. 96 CHAPTER II. of the Society who explains for us the mystery in his ency- clical letter to his brethren of the 27th of December, 1839. "It was permitted by God," said Father Eoothaan, "in order to teach us, us above all men, to have a lowly opinion of our- selves. It is faith which instructs us, and experience also, that God and His Church have no more need of our help than of that of other men."* In other words, the Company of Jesus was a great instrument in the hands of God, but the Church was a greater still. THIKD EPOCH. It is time to speak of the third and last epoch of the Chinese missions. Thus far our tale has been of men who had passed to their reward before any of our own generation had come into being. We are now to tell of others, upon whose work we have looked, so to speak, with our own eyes ; who have gone out in our own day, and from among ourselves ; whose very faces are still familiar in many a household of France, Italy, or Spain ; with some of whom we have even had the honor of personal inter- course, and of whose hand we still feel in memory the grateful pressure. Will they prove such as their fathers? Has the nineteenth century power to generate a new race of apostles and martyrs? Is it in such an age as this, rotten with impiety and unbelief, busy only with schemes of material prosperity, which it abandons one after another for some new device, equally futile, and soon to be rejected in its turn, that men of the stamp of St. Paul and St. Gregory can still be found? Yes ; the world may change, but the Church remains the same; and therefore she continues to produce, and will pro- duce to the end of time, as Bossuet speaks, " doctors, apostles, and evangelists." Let us see how far the apostolic missiona- ries of our own generation resemble those who have gone before, and who are awaiting them in heaven. In the sketch which we are about to present, and which must be limited to a mere outline of the chief incidents of the pres- ent century, we shall no longer be left to the testimony of Catholic witnesses. Heathens and Protestants will now assist us in our inquiry, and throughout the remainder of these volumes they will not again leave us. Let us begin with the heathen. In 1805, from which date we will resume our history of missions in China, the emperor, Kia-King, a savage and unre- * Cretineau Joly, Histoire des Jesuites, tome vi., p. 311. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 97 lenting persecutor, who was killed in 1821 by lightning, pub- lished a new edict against the Christians. The testimony of this imperial witness has a peculiar value. He speaks, like the high priest of the Jews, of men whom he hated, but could not subdue ; for, as even Mr. Gutzlaif observes, though apparently with regret, he " could not extirpate a sect which had so many ramifications, and had taken root in the very heart of the em- pire."* Mr. Gutzlaff and his friends, as we shall see presently, would have willingly assisted Kia-King to extirpate the hated " sect," which, however, numbers exactly five times as many members as it did when that monarch commenced his ener- getic operations. Here is the confession of Kia-King in his angry proclamation : " All who become Christians, whether rich or poor, directly they embrace this religion, have such an affection for one another, that they seem to be of one lone and one flesh, ,"f In the same year, as Sir George Staunton relates, several persons were condemned to punishment or slavery for becom- ing Christians ; and especially one, an Italian missionary, " be- cause he has not only," says the official decree, " worked on the minds of the simple peasantry and women, but even many of our Tartar subjects" the most vigorous and influential of the Chinese races "have been persuaded to believe and con- form to his religion ; and it appears that no less than thirty- one books upon the European religion have been printed in Chinese characters.''^ Once more. In 1826, a petition was presented by the man- darins to the king of Cochin-China, praying him to adopt new measures " to prohibit this perverse religion," on these grounds : " Since this religion has penetrated into the kingdom, thousands of persons profess it in all our provinces ; and they who are imbued with this doctrine are animated with a zeal which transports them out of themselves, and makes them run about hither and thither like madmen. The followers of this law multiply every day; they are continually building new churches; their abominations are diffused in every direction, and there is no place which is not infected by them." The re- port of these alarmed mandarins is confirmed at the same Hate by an English Protestant, who says, " Christianity makes great progress in Tong-King. In June, 1821, a whole district sent deputies to ask to be instructed in the Christian faith."| * China Opened, vol. i., ch. xi., p. 365. f Annales, tome i., p. 153. ' \ Laws of China, app., p. 533. Armales, tome iii., p. 469. J Asiatic Journal, vol. xvii., p. 298. 8 98 CHAPTER II. But the heathen were not content with recording the num- bers of the Christians ; their virtues also extorted their unwill- ing applause. "The Christian religion," said a mandarin of the district of Te-Yang, speaking from his tribunal, "is diffi- cult and austere, and obliges men to great sacrifices," he was a good judge on this point, since he was at that moment pass- ing sentence on Christians; "yet if all men could agree to embrace this religion, and to follow its laws and precepts, cer- tainly we should have no need of watch-dogs to guard our houses, or to frighten away robbers ; it would not even be ne- cessary to shut our doors during the night as a precaution against evil men, because all men would then be upright and conscientious."* Yet this " whited wall," in the very act of celebrating their virtues, could command his satellites, like Ananias of old when St. Paul pleaded his " good conscience before God," to smite them on the mouth. We have heard, and shall hear again, what the heathen said of the Christians ; let us confirm their report by the testimony of witnesses of another order, but at least equally hostile. In the early part of the present century, Timkowski was sent by the Russian government to Pekin, and from him we derive the following information. In the year 1805, he says, in conse- quence of the discovery of a map of China, executed by the Jesuits, on which the sites of all the Catholic missions were marked, " a fresh persecution was commenced against the Christians. They endeavored to oblige them to trample upon the Cross, and to abjure their errors; they who refused were threatened with death. At Pekin many thousand persons were discovered, who had embraced the Christian religion, even among the members of the imperial family and mandarins." New tortures, Mr. Timkowski says, were invented expressly for this occasion. " They made incisions in the soles of their feet, tilled the wound with horse-hair, finely cut, then closed it with a plaster. It is affirmed that such tortures had never before been practised in China. Several of these miserable beings, chiefly Chinese soldiers, lost their courage during these tor- tures, but the majority remained faithful to their religion."f We are approaching our own day, yet we still find the Chi- nese Christians, by the confession of an enemy, as conspic- uous for constancy and fortitude as their fathers had been two centuries earlier. The persecution of 1805 died out in Pekin, for a reason which is worthy of notice. u In the sequel," Timkowski relates, "the president of the criminal * Nouvdles Lettres Edifiantes, tome ii., p. 488. G rosier, tome iv., ch, ix., p. 456. f Travels, vol. i., ch. ix., p. 365. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 99 tribunal, having learned that in his own house nearly all his relations and servants were Christians ', became less rigorous in his examinations, and more indulgent towards the Christians." Dr. Wells Williams, a Protestant agent in China, who dis- plays a far deeper hatred of these generous confessors and martyrs than of their pagan oppressors, and whose deplorable language shall be quoted hereafter, makes the following re- luctant admissions: "Many of their converts exhibited the greatest constancy in their profession, suffering persecution, torture, imprisonment, banishment, and death, rather than deny their faith ; though every inducement of prevarication and mental reservation was held out to them by the magistrates, in order to avoid the necessity of proceeding to extreme measures, If suffering the loss of all things is an evidence of piety, many of them have proved their title to it in many ways."* No man, as far as we know, has hitherto suggested any better title, nor need these Chinese Catholics aspire to a nobler distinction than that which they share, alone amongst modern Christians, with the disciples of St. Peter and St. Paul. The opening of the third epoch of Chinese missions reveals, then, the same phenomena with which the earlier periods have made us familiar. A new generation both of teachers and disciples had now commenced their warfare, yet resembling so exactly, in all points, those who had gone before, that in pur- suing their history we shall seem to be still (Conversing with the children of Kicci and Schaal, of Yerbiest and Parennin, of Noel and Fontaney. The combatants are new, but their virtues and graces are still the same. On the 14th of September, 1815, at which date Protestant emissaries, whose mode of life their associates will presently describe to us, had begun to enter the Chinese seaports Bishop Dufresse, after an apostolate of thirty-nine years, the whole of which had been one long martyrdom, was led to the scaffold with an escort of thirty-two Chinese confessors. " During the administration of this true apostle of the Christian doctrine," says Mr. Montgomery Martin, in spite of incurable prejudices, " there were frequently fifteen hundred adult baptisms annu- ally.'^ And now, after a .whole life of patient toil and apos- tolic purity, he was ascending, in the company of thirty-two of liis children, the Calvary of martyrs. Throughout the five years which followed, Chinese priests and laymen, devout and valiant as their French, or Spanish, or Italian models, were continually martyred, and died, as St. * The Middle Kingdom, ubi supra, f China, &c., vol. ii., p. 485. 100 CHAPTER II. Polycarp or St. Cyprian died, calm, constant, and exulting. When Paul Tuy, one of these native priests, was informed by the imperial officers that he was condemned to death, he 1 con- tented himself with asking, with perfect composure, if it was really true ; and when assured that nothing was more certain, he calmly replied, " I should never have ventured to hope for so signal a grace."* It was in the same year, 1818, that many Christians were exiled to the wastes of Tartary ; and when, in 1823, after five years of suffering, pardon was offered to all who would renounce the Christian religion, five accepted the offer which more than two hundred steadfastly refused. In another place, out of a band who had endured the torture of the cangue for ten years, an existence more intolerable than that of the most abject tenant of a Russian or a Mahometan prison, only one accepted the same condition, though more than half of the original num- ber had died under the suffering. Even the primitive Chris- tians rarely sustained such a trial as this. And they were everywhere and always the same. In 1815, a girl of twenty was asked by a heathen judge, " How can you worship a God whom you do not see ?" "With ready wit she answered, "You yourself honor the emperor almost like a god r yet you do not see him ;" a reply which excited the admiration of the pagan, and appears to have saved her life. Old age was as prompt and valiant as youth. Father Charrier tells of one, who had lived more than fourscore years, who made this answer before the tribunal: "Before I renounce my God to adore yours, I must see that they are better than mine. At my age one should not do things lightly. In the first place, then, what are your gods ? Pieces of wood without life. If I cut down a tree in my field, I can, in the course of a single day, make a dozen of them."f He also was released. Sometimes it was a sorer trial than loss of liberty or dislocations of limb which was proposed to these Asiatic Christians. They were bidden to that direst spectacle which human nature can contemplate, the agony of their own children. This also they bore as firmly as the saints of old. An aged father, himself a confessor, seeing his son gashed with wounds, but rejoicing by faith that his child should be destined to wear the martyr's crown, exclaimed, " Let them scourge yoii, my son ; if they kill you, heaven will presently be yours." At other times it was children who consoled and exhorted their parents. Surely Pins YI1. had reason to say, when such cases were reported to him, in which the superhuman is revealed to all but the wilfully * Annales, tome vii., p. 431. f lUd., p. 482. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 101 blind, " It is like a passage from the annals of the primitive Church." The missionaries, both European and native, led their dis- ciples in the combats for which they had so effectually prepared them. In 1816, on the 13th of February, Father John de Triora, a Franciscan, was strangled. Four native Chinese priests were also martyred in succession. A fifth died in prison of his tortures, as well as twenty laymen, all in the single province of Su-tchuen ; in which, nevertheless, there are at this day nearly as many Catholics as there were in 1805 in the whole empire of China. Such are the fruits of martyrdom. In the very midst of these events, which were now of almost daily occurrence, a single priest, Father Masson, could report, that in one year, in his own mission, he had baptized one thousand and six adults, and given seventy-nine thousand communions.'* The same work was in progress, at the same hour, in every other province. Thus in Tong-King and Cochin-China, in spite, or rather because, of the incessant persecution, in the course of the single year 1820, there were nearly sixteen thousand bap- tisms. It is true, as we learn from the missionaries, that not all continued steadfast. Thus in 1821, in the province of Su-tchuen, " some of our Christians," they report, " had the cowardice to apostatize; but the great majority have preferred to endure every kind of evil treatment rather than renounce the faith." And even the few who failed, through human infirmity, in the hour of trial, commonly implored reconciliation. Father Masson relates that some who had yielded under torture pleaded the example of St. Peter, when they asked to be restored, u whom our Lord pardoned in spite of his fall." It is to be noted also, that the pagan Chinese, who generally manifested contempt for the unhappy apostates, did not conceal their respect for their more courageous brethren. Bishop Fontana says that the viceroy of Su-tchuen, a near kinsman of the emperor, having threatened some recent converts with death, they answered with one accord, u We will willingly suffer death for our religion;" upon which, rising up from his seat, and pointing them out with his finger to the mandarins, he said, " These are indeed true Christians ; they truly profess the religion of the Lord of Heaven." Then, turning to the officious mandarin who had caused them to be arrested, he said, u Why have you brought me these men, who are guilty of no crime but the desire of dying for their religion ?" In spite of these fine words, they were all banished for life to the deserts of Tartary.f Yet the malignity of these judgments only provoked fresh con- * Tome x., p. 261. f P. 250. 102 CHAPTER II. versions. In Su-tchuen, thus incessantly scourged and afflicted, there were nearly two thousand adult converts in 1824 ; in Tong- King, where the condition of the Christians was still more insup- portable, there were, in 1825, eighty-three native priests and more than three hundred ecclesiastical students. Change the names and the dates, and you may believe that you are reading the history of Christianity in Smyrna, Lyons, or Corinth. It is neither possible nor expedient to trace all the details of this astonishing warfare, in which men seem to display the qualities of angels, and which are rather subjects for meditation than for narrative. Yet we must try, before we pursue the his- tory to our own day, to form a distinct notion of the actual daily condition, if not of the faithful, at least of their teachers and guides. A few facts will serve to illustrate it. Bishop Fontana, Yicar Apostolic of Su-tchuen, was in such extreme indigence, that he could not even afford to buy vest- ments for his clergy, who were compelled to celebrate the Divine Mysteries in such robes as were never seen in Europe. His colleague, in exile at Pulo Penang, in 1824, was " obliged to sell his pocket-handkerchiefs, and other little effects," to obtain food. And so universal was this destitution, that when a new mis- sionary arrived in Cochin-China, and presented himself to the bishop, he would exclaim, " Oh, my Lord, the fowls in France are better lodged than you !" Monseigneur Florens, bishop of Sozopolis, also sold his humble effects, to buy rice for the poor Chinese ; and died at last, venerated even by the heathen for his gentleness and charity, after an apostolate of forty-seven years. His successor found his property to consist of a hair shirt and two disciplines. The wealth of St. Paul was probably of the same kind, and not more abundant. The clergy, it need hardly be said, were as poor as their bishops, poorer they could not be. Father Masson, writing from Tong-King to his friend the mayor of Luneville, says, "I possess nothing beyond the circumference of my own body, yet it seems to me that I am as happy as it is possible to be in this world." Father Gleyo came out of prison, after eight years of close bondage, and then started immediately, as if he had suffered nothing, to evangelize " a part of the country hitherto unknown," possessing not a farthing, and his whole baggage consisting of a single shirt, a pair of drawers, and a pair of stockings."* The common nourishment of the missionaries in the interior, with the exception probably of those who were in great cities, seems to have been vegetables, and a sort of cheese made of beans. Multitudes of Christians, especially in Cochin- China, driven from their homes, and unable to return without * Lettres Edifiantes, tome xxvi., p. 407. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 103 encountering certain death, died of starvation. We shall hear Sresently, on Protestant authority, of fourteen hundred Cochin- hinese exiles in one place. "They receive the Sacrament of Extreme Unction," writes one who shared their sufferings, " when they have nothing more left to eat, and then calmly await the arrival of death. I have sometimes given Extreme Unction to five or six at a time. I cannot yet habituate myself to this terrible and heart-rending spectacle."* Yet these men, full of tender solicitude for the trials of their disciples, were indifferent only to their own. Bishop Tabert, one of the Vicars Apostolic in Cochin-China, to whose pre- decessor Louis XVI. had given some ecclesiastical vestments, writing just as a fresh burst of persecution had died away, says pleasantly, " They were old and worn out, but they were the best I had, and I kept them for the greatest solemnities. Now I have lost every thing. I have only two poor chasubles, of which one is in strips, and the other patched with linen. What a bishop !"f It was this prelate who, when banished for a time from Cochin-China, occupied his forced leisure in composing a " Latin and Annamite Dictionary," in two quarto volumes, a grammar, and other works, " very superior," as Mohl reported to the Asiatic Society of France, " to any thing which we be- fore possessed.";}: Another Chinese bishop, writing at the same date, " from the depths of a cavern lighted by a wretched lamp, and hunted by police commissioned to arrest him for capital punishment," says, " I have left the cleft of the rock in which I was stationed ; this is the sixth cavern which, within a few months, has served as an asylum to me in my seventy-fifth year." In 1834, for lapse of time brought no change in their con- dition, the Abbe Retord, afterwards bishop and confessor, re- ceived a secret dispatch from one of his colleagues, which an- nounced in these words his actual position: "I am concealed in a hole, four feet and a half in width and nine in length, in- accessible to any ray of light. The silence is broken only by the hum of mosquitoes, and the gambols of rats, who show no respect for my presence. For thirty-four hours my retreat was surrounded by seventy soldiers, and for eighteen I remained without motion. I confess that at the beginning such a life ap- peared to ine tedious." The Abbe Marette, who was hunted in the same manner, and subsequently martyred, says: " I was not without apprehension, you may suppose, crouched between * Annales, tome ix., p. 61. f Tome vii., p. 535. I Rapports f aits d la Societe Asiatique, tome ii., p. 51. Annals, vol. x., p. 9. 104 CHAPTER II. two walls. I recommended myself to all the saints, and in particular to my companion, so lately martyred, whose clothes, covered with his blood, I had with me in my hiding-place."* Perhaps these facts afford a sufficiently clear idea of the daily life of the missionaries. That men of our own generation should cheerfully support such an existence during twenty, thirty, or forty years ; that they should accept a life of crucifixion, and even embrace it by a deliberate election ; that they should divorce themselves forever, and without repining, from dearly loved kinsmen and friends like Father Dollieres, who had re- ceived no tidings from home during twenty years, and in one letter heard of the death of all his relations this is a mystery to which religion alone supplies the clue. " Behold," said the chief of the Apostles to his Master, " we have left all things, and have followed Thee ; what therefore shall we have?" And the answer to him, and to all such as him, was this : " Amen I say to you, that you who have followed Me, in the regenera- tion, when the Son of Man shall sit on the throne of His majes- ty, you also shall sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And every one that hath left house or brethren . . for My name's sake, shall receive an hundred-fold, and shall possess life everlasting."f The promise has been fulfilled, in all ages and in all lands, and nowhere more conspicuously than in the land of China, and in the nineteenth century. When Father Masson, one of this apostolic company, of whom we have heard in these pages, was asked by a priest in Europe, who had thoughts of entering the Chinese mission, what special difficulties and spiritual trials he might expect to encounter, the missionary gave this sublime and memorable answer : " As respects the peculiar temptations and spiritual troubles to which one is most exposed in this manner of life, it is happily impossible for me to give you any information, since I have always found myself in a state of joy, and have observed the same thing in all my colleagues." " You wish to know," writes another, "what troubles I endure. I have none. Or rather, I experience the sweetest consolations in seeing the great number of conversions which, through God's grace, are daily wrought under my eyes. Last year we baptized more than twelve hundred adults. Praise be to Jesus !" If these men, and a thousand like them, were doing the same work as St. Peter or St. Paul, from the same motive, and in the same way, why should it appear strange if they received the same consolations ? , * Vol. i., p. 120. f Matt. xix. 27-29. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 105 The primitive missionaries were aided, as we learn from many places of Holy Scripture, by miraculous events. They abound equally in the annals of modern missions ; but we reserve to a later period of our history the fuller consideration of this subject. " If our churches," says the Bishop of Isauropolis, in 1830, " are only covered with thatch, they receive nevertheless the visits of heavenly spirits." Pie then alludes to choirs of angels being heard, when no one could be seen, and adds, "but I cannot venture to speak of these things, because the temper of men's minds in France would not endure them."* Frequent miracles, as any one familiar with the Acts of the Apostles would anticipate, marked the whole course of the Catholic apostolate in China. Many are rec'orded, or referred to, but always as events which were too probable to excite astonishment, or to need comment, in the Lett/res JEdijiantes, and the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi. One of the missionaries, who w r as himself condemned to death, but deliv- ered, records, among other miracles, the raising a dead man to life.f The well-known apparition, on various occasions, of fiery crosses in the heavens, which were seen all over China by thousands of pagans, and of which drawings were published, seems to defy cavil. But we shall find hereafter a more con- venient occasion for the examination of this subject. And now that we have perhaps a sufficiently distinct idea of the men who labor at this moment in China, and of their manner of life, let us terminate this sketch by a brief account of some of the principal incidents of their apostolic warfare within the years of our own passage through the world, from 1830 to 1860. It is not of the dead only that we are now to speak, but of some also who are still living, and from whose works we shall be able to judge whether the age of apostles is past. In 1831, the young Deschavanes, worn out by fatigue and privations at the age of twenty-eight, died at his post, refusing to seek health in Europe ; and in the same year, that we may mark its course by a single fact, in spite of incessant persecu- tion, and as it were under the very eye of the emperor, nine hundred and seventy-eight baptisms were administered in the city of Pekin. In the renewed persecution of 1832, which raged throughout the northern and central provinces, the fortitude of the Christians w r as so universal, that all, with the exception of a solitary indi- vidual, declared amid their tortures, that "they would die rather than renounce their religion." The emperor himself said, * Annales, tome v., p. 391. f Diners Voyages de la Chine, cli. xxii., p. 149. 106 CHAPTER IT. in one of those singular edicts of wh'ch we have seen other examples, that "the Christians were not guilty of any crime; but that which rendered them without excuse in his eyes, was, that every one of them, even to a blind old woman, despised his authority, in order to obey a European."* In 1833, throughout the whole of China Proper, except only some of the maritime districts in which the Christians were so numerous that the mandarins were unwilling to disturb them, the same events recurred; but it was perhaps in Cochin-China that the martyrs displayed most conspicuously, during this year of suffering and trial, those superhuman qualities which all Christians have agreed to admire in the annals of the primitive confessors. We have only space for a few characteristic exam- ples. It was in 1833 that the Abbe Francois Isidore Gagelin, one of those generous priests of whom modern France has pro- duced so many, terminated his apostolic course. For the nar- rative of his martyrdom we are indebted to his friend the Abbe Delarnotte, himself afterwards a martyr, who was almost an eye-witness of every detail which he recounts. The Abbe Gagelin had been long in prison, uncertain what lot should befall him, together with his colleagues, Father Jaccard and Father Odorico. They were confined in separate dungeons ; but from the 23d of August to the llth of October, the two latter, by the connivance of their guards, had been allowed to visit him twice a week. On the llth of that month Father Jaccard, who had received information of what was coming, wrote a letter to his brother in bonds, which contained the following words: "I think I ought to tell you, happy brother, that you are condemned to death." The next morning the Abbe Gagelin replied, "I recommend myself to your prayers, and to those of Father Odorico, as w r ell as of M. Delamotte ;" but still hesitating to believe that he was destined to so great an honor, he modestly suggested, that perhaps he would only be sentenced to exile. The letters continued to pass to and fro between these " prisoners of Jesus Christ," letters so full of simple dignity and apostolic courage, that even a Protestant writer re- marks of this correspondence: "It was worthy of a man who had lived well, and was about to die well."f On the evening of the 13th, Father Jaccard, who had now obtained certain intelligence, wrote to him, " Your sentence is pronounced ir- revocably, and so, behold you a martyr !" All doubt about the future being at length definitively removed, Father Gagelin replied as follows : " Sir, and dearest * Annales, tome vi., p. 487. f Chinese Repository, vol. viii., p. 609. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 107 colleague, the tidings which you announce to me, that I am ir- revocably sentenced to death, fill my inmost heart with joy. Lcetatus sum in his quce dicta sunt mihi in domum Domini ibimus. The grace of martyrdom, of which I am most un- worthy, has been from my earliest childhood the object of my most ardent desire. I have specially solicited it every time 1 elevated the Precious JBlood in the holy sacrifice of the Mass. In a little while, then, I am going to appear before my Judge ; to render Plim an account of my offences, of the good which I have omitted to do, and even of that which I have done." After some simple and touching reflections, and a few words of farewell addressed to his family and friends in France, he con- tinues : " The sight of my good Jesus crucified consoles me in any bitterness which may accompany my death ; my whole ambition is to depart quickly from this body of sin, to be united to Jesus Christ in a blessed eternity. Oupio dissolvi et esse cum Christo. I have only one more consolation to desire, that of seeing you and Father Odorico for the last time." This happiness was to be denied him, though the three mis- sionaries were before long to be reunited in heaven. On the 16th, Father Jaccard, who now addresses him as "venerated colleague," and " dear martyr of Jesus Christ," after telling him that all hope of their obtaining permission to see him is gone, continues thus: a Father Odorico and myself cease not to speak of your happiness. He is radiant with joy, and would fain share your lot. I confess that I should be almost sorry if the king released you, now that you are so near the moment which will give you the palm of martyrdom, and ad- mission into heaven. Pardon me, dear brother, all the scan- dals which I have caused you, and all the uneasiness which I may at any time have occasioned you." On the 17th, at seven in the morning, the happy victim was led out of prison by a band of soldiers, two mandarins riding in the rear of the procession. The pagan crowd, filled with admiration at his patient composure, exclaimed, " Why should an innocent and worthy man like this be put to death? Who ever saw any one go to death with so little emotion ?" Shortly after, the martyr had won his crown.* Fathers Jaccard and Odorico, his friends and fellow-laborers, were both sentenced to exile, with secret orders to the mandarins to starve them to death. The injunction, apparently through a motive of benevolence, was disobeyed. The latter died in prison in 1834, when on the point of being strangled. Four * Vie de M. I' Abbe Gagelin, Mission air e Apostolique et Martyr, par 1'Abbe Jacquenet (Paris, 1850). He was declared " Venerable" in 1840 by Gregory XVI., ch. xii., p. 458. 108 CHAPTER .II. years later, on the 21st of September, 1838, after protracted sufferings, Father Jaccard received in his turn the much-coveted crown of martyrdom. Ten bamboos were broken by the exe- cutioners over his body ; but ' ; though each stroke made the blood flow, this intrepid soldier of Jesus Christ did not utter a sigh, nor allow a single cry to escape his lips." The bishop of Armecy, who undertook to relate to his mother the circum- stances of his glorious death, says, that when Madame Jaccard heard that the martyrdom was accomplished, "she uttered a cry of joy, and burst into a flood of tears, exclaiming, 'Thanks to the Almighty ! I am delivered from the dread which I felt, in spite of myself, lest he should be overcome by his suffer- ings.' "* Thomas Tien, a Chinese youth of eighteen, died with him, and displayed, not only the fortitude, but even the the gayety of spirit, which the Chinese martyrs shared with the victims of the primitive ages. " Upon arriving near the inn where it was usual for criminals on their way to execution to take some refreshment, the young Thomas, turning to Father Jaccard, said in jest, 'Will you take any refreshment, father?' ' No, rny child,' replied M. Jaccard, smiling. ' Nor I either,' added Thomas; 'to heaven, then, my father!' r But we must go back for a moment to 1833, and to the martyrdom of Father Gagelin. He did not die alone. "While living he had not labored in vain, and the spiritual children whom he had begotten to God proved worthy of their apostle and guide. Many accompanied him in that last dread journey, whose death was perhaps as admirable as his own, and affords a new proof that the Church knows how to gain in the nine- teenth century exactly such converts from the heathen as all her apostles had won in the eighteen which went before. Some were beaten till the flesh fell in pieces from them, yet these poor Chinese neophytes were as valiant in the combat, as unmoved in their torments, as the venerable pastors who had made known to them the Saviour for whom they died. They even jested, with a holy mirth, under the shadow of the scaffold. Paul Doi- Euong, being roughly dragged to execution, and embarrassed by his chains, said smilingly, " Let us go a little slower; I know the way, and there is no danger of our losing it." Michael Kenou, a friend of Paul, was thus addressed on the following day by the king himself: "You have seen Buong's head cut off; well, have you learned to feel a little ? If you are ready to renounce your religion, speak." " Certainly," replied the con- fessor, with the sober dignity which a true martyr always displays, " we all fear your power much ; but as to abandoning * Annals, vol. i., p. 397. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 109 my religion, that I can never do. If you release me, well ; if you order my head to be cut off, I shall suffer it cheerfully."* reter Lieou, another of these Christian heroes, who was in his seventy-sixth year, died with such holy calm, that even the executioners, confounded by such mysterious joy, exclaimed to one another, " Truly this Christian religion is a good religion !" And they seem to have been all alike. Young and old, men and women, all had received through the ministry of their apos- tolic teachers such a measure of faith, such an ardent longing for the vision of Jesus Christ, that cowardice, lukewarmness, and self-love found no place among them. In truth, they had already accepted martyrdom in purpose when they consented to embrace Christianity, for they knew, like the Christians of the first ages, that it was no lip-service which the profession required from them, and that the baptism of blood was likely to follow close upon that of water. And so when the hour of trial arrived, it did not take them by surprise. Thaddeus, a son of the martyr Michael Kenou, being himself in bonds, and ignorant of the fate of his parents, wrote thus to them from his prison : " I salute my father and mother. I beg them to remember the example of Jesus Christ, who suffered for us ; to call to mind also that the Holy Virgin, His blessed Mother, had her soul pierced with a sword of grief; yet it was necessary that she should conform to the will of God the Father. I beg my father and mother to remember and meditate upon these examples; lest they should give way to sorrow, should be impatient and afflicted on my account, and thus render themselves guilty in the sight of God, not accepting His holy will. It grieves me that you should be conscious of my sufferings ; but I beseech you to render thanks to God, who gives me strength to support all these torments, "f We have seen that his parents needed not his pious counsels ; and if we would comprehend the prodigious work of grace which had raised thousands of semi-barbarians to these sublime degrees of virtue, we have only to reflect for a moment upon the con- dition of their unconverted fellow-countrymen. The events just referred to occurred in (Jochin-China. Bishop Taberd, one of the seven Vicars Apostolic of the kingdom of Annam, in his account of the terrible persecution of which they were the fruits, speaking only of his own vicariate, says: " Eighty thousand Christians are flying hither and thither in the deepest distress, and often destitute of every thing, so that a native priest writing to me observes, ' Our Christians will die of hunger before they have time to die for their religion.' Nearly * Annales, tome vii., p. 529. t im. 110 CHAPTER II. four hundred churches, the creation of their labors and alms, are utterly destroyed." And then this prelate adds, " Forests, caves, and rugged mountains, these are at present the asylum of our missionaries ; prisons or exile that of our neophytes." Yet they have survived this trial, like every other, and come out of it, as we shall see presently, with increased numbers. We must be blind indeed not to discern the divinity of that religion which such a tempest could not even weaken, more blind and gross than the pagans themselves, multitudes of whom were con- verted by the contemplation of virtues which should not leave us unmoved, and of triumphs in which even they could discern the power of God. Yet the emperor Minh-Menh, the Nero of Cochin-China, was no feeble adversary. There is something so purely hellish in the malice of this monster, such a personal and inextinguishable hatred of Christianity in all his acts, that it is easy to see who presided at his councils. It was no mere jealousy of foreign influence, no petty partiality for national customs, which dictated his atrocious edicts. Like Yong-Tching, he knew w r hat Chris- tians were, and deliberately abhorred them with the fury of a demon. The son of Gia-Long, his own predecessor, had been, as an intelligent Protestant traveller remarks, " a decided con- vert to the Christian religion, and accompanied the Bishop of Adran to France in 1787."* A French navigator relates, that the mausoleum "which Gia-Long built in honor of the Bishop of Adran, still forms the most curious monument in the city of Hue-Fou."f Minh-Menh was not, therefore, wholly ignorant of the truths of Christianity, nor of the character which they imparted to their professors. Many of his own mandarins had warned him of the bad effects of his suicidal policy, but in vain. Civil war devastated his kingdom, and his greatest nobles assured him that he had no braver soldiers, no more faithful subjects, than the Christians. He only replied by a fresh out- burst of demoniacal rage. A legion of devils seem to have entered into this man. But even with such allies he utterly failed, from first to last, in his warfare against Christianity, and only furnished occasion for fresh victories to those whom he strove in vain to exterminate, but who conquered him by the very agony which he thought was a triumph for himself. In 1833, the year which saw the death of Father Gagelin, another martyrdom, more appalling perhaps in its details than any which ever occurred even in the blood-stained land of China, attested both the unappeasable malice of Minh- * Crawfurd's Embassy to Siam and Cochin-CMna, ch. xviii., p. 509. f Voyage de la Favorite, tome ii., p. 318. MISSIONS IN CHINA. Ill Menh, and the supernatural fortitude of his victims. Four years earlier, the Abbe March and, a French priest of the diocese of Besancon, quitted his country for the mission of Lower Cochin-China. When the persecution of 1838 broke out, he refused to quit his post, for he served One who had said, " The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." For two years he succeeded in escaping the search of the blood- hounds who were on his track. In September, 1835, during the civil war which then raged, he was captured, and the heart of Minh-Menh was filled with exultation. Conducted forthwith to the capital, and surrounded by all the instru- ments of torture in order to intimidate his soul, his examina- tion commenced. " Are you Phu-Koai-Uhon ?" This was the Chinese name of the Vicar Apostolic. " No, I am not." " Where, then, is he ?" " I know not." " Are you acquainted with him?" " I know him, but it is long since I have seen him." "How many years have you been in this kingdom?" "Five years." That night the flesh of both his thighs was burned off with red-hot irons, and then he was inclosed in a cage, two and a half feet in height, three in length, and two in width ; and so he passed the night. On the morrow he was again brought forth, and then was enacted a scene of horror at the bare recital of which nature shudders, but which our fathers were accustomed to look upon without fear in the amphitheatres of Smyrna and Antioch. At a signal from the presiding mandarin, live men held him down, while five others plunged at the same moment as many bars of hot iron, each eighteen inches long, into different parts of his body. The strong heart of the martyr did not fail, though the anguish was more than mortal man could bear ; yet even the sharp and bitter cry of agony was obedient to faith, and as the smoke rose up, and the tender flesh seethed under the burning rods, the baffled heathen only heard him exclaim, " Oh, my Father!" And then they mocked him, when the irons had grown cold in his body, arid cried out, " Father of the religion of Jesus !" And next they asked him questions of his religion. " Why do Christians tear out the eyes of the dying?" they said, alluding to the anointing of the eyes by Extreme Unction. The victim, gathering up all his strength, answered, " They do not so ; no such thing is ever done." Upon this five fresh irons were applied to him. "Why do married people," they asked, when these in their turn had become cold, " stand before the priest round the altar?" He could still speak, so he said, " They come, in the assembly of Christians, to ask a blessing on their union." A third time his agony recbmmences. "What enchanted bread do you give to people who have confessed, 112 CHAPTER II. to make them cling so firmly to their religion !" " It is not bread," replied his dying lips ; " it is the Body of onr Lord Jesns Christ, Incarnate, and become the nourishment of the soul." Thus, to the last, he witnessed for God. But it was not over yet, though fifteen ghastly furrows had been burned in his body. They offered him food, which he refused. And now two other executioners advanced, each armed with a keen and heavy blade ; a rolling of drums is heard, and when it ceases, both his breasts are lying on the ground. He makes no movement. Again the drums are heard, and again two great pieces of flesh are cut from him. He turns his eyes to heaven, then nature yields, and he bows his head, before they have finished their work. Strike on, ministers of hell ; that poor body feels no more! The soul, which you could not touch, has fled, and the martyr is with his God. Such are the apostles whom the Church sends to do her w r ork, even in this nineteenth century. "Through great tribulation," they pass to their immense reward. Like all their predecessors, during eighteen hundred years, it was in the Church that they found the gifts which made them what they were, and without which they would neither have obtained courage to enter upon that terrible warfare, nor strength to persevere, nor grace to triumph in it. Man is too weak, as even the pagans have understood, to contend alone in such a strife as this. If that " burning fiery furnace," into which the martyrs of old were cast, was tempered as " by a w T ind bringing dew," so that " the fire touched them not at all, nor troubled them, nor did them any harm," it was because there was One among them, whom even the King of Babylon recognized, when he cried out in astonishment and fear, "Did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? Behold, I see four men loose, and walk- ing in the midst of the fire, and there is no hurt in them, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God." * More than, twenty years have elapsed since the event just narrated, yet the battle of which it was only a characteristic incident has not ceased to rage during the interval. Each year in succession has witnessed a repetition of similar combats. It is impossible to record them all. "The time would fail to tell," as the Holy Apostle speaks, of all the great actions accomplished in this eastern land, by men animated with his own spirit, and ever ready, as he was, to die for the souls of their brethren, " not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrec- tion." In every part of China the same scenes occurred ; but there is one region, to which we have not hitherto referred, in * Daniel iii. 92. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 113 which they present such a character of extraordinary sublimity as is not surpassed, if indeed it be equalled, even in the annals of that divine religion which has inspired so many noble deeds. COKE A. At the southern extremity of the vast province of Mantchooria, jutting out between the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan, lies the great peninsula of Corea. Here reigns a sovereign who is nominally dependent, like the kings of Annam, upon the em- peror of China. If we interrupt for a moment our narrative to notice the progress of Christianity in Corea, the digression will hardly require an apology. " There is nothing," says an eloquent French writer, " in the records of missions, so like a martyrology as the annals of the Church in Corea. Her whole history is written in blood. Every date is marked by a perse- cution, every detail describes a scene of torture, a dungeon, or an execution. Every person discovered to be a Christian is invariably a martyr. Her first neophyte was a martyr. Her first Chinese apostle a martyr. Her first native priest a mar- tyr. Her first bishop a martyr. Her first European mission- aries w r ere all martyrs." Let us see what has been the result, up to the present hour, of the conflict in Corea between the apostles of the Church and the powers of darkness. It is perhaps worthy of remark, that England had the honor to give a martyr to Corea. In 1788, Father Thomas King, of the Society of Jesus, died in that land. But it is only of efforts made in our own day that we propose to speak, and our narrative com- mences with the year 1817. It was at that date that the prelate, himself destined to martyrdom, who governed the over-tasked apostles of this land of martyrs, appealed to Catholic Europe for fresh laborers in the Corean mission, and these were the attrac- tions which he offered to their charity : " Any ecclesiastic who may receive this vocation may be assured that he will have the happiness to suffer much for the glory of God, that he will make many conversions, and that in a few years he will obtain the crown of martyrdom." . The formidable invitation was ac- cepted, and here is a recent example of the spirit in which the true missionary of Christ responds to such a call : " It is for the purpose of penetrating into a kingdom from whence his prede- cessors have only been delivered by the scaffold, and with the intention of sharing the misery and proscription of a few faith- ful and unknown strangers, that M. de Maistre has devoted ten years of his life, spent sixty thousand francs in roaming around the impenetrable frontier, in running about in all sorts of dis- 9 114: CHAPTER II. guises, through all kinds of perils, from the ports of China to the deserts of Leao-tong, seeking for Corean guides, whom he looked for in vain, asking alternately the Chinese barks and the French ships to land him upon the coast where his tomb was already marked out ! Death was so evidently to be the result of the enterprise, that the most courageous seamen re- fused to be his accomplices by lending him their aid. It required the zeal of an apostle to comprehend this heroism, and to second its endeavors. Father Helot, being a priest, under- stood what the Cross required of him ; and as a member of a society whose tradition it is that they have never been baffled by any difficulties or perils, he felt himself at the post where his company wished him to be, when rivalling in zeal and courage a foreign apostle. In the general panic, the Jesuit becomes the pilot of a battered bark, safely conducts his intrepid passenger to an unknown land, and having deposited him on the shore, and looked after him for a while with prayers and earnest good wishes, returns to his neophytes with the consoling satisfaction of having exposed his life for a mission that is not his own."* The " intrepid passenger," piloted by a Jesuit as courageous as himself, fought his way at last into the interior, and com- menced the secret and perilous labors which his companions will presently describe to us. A French journal has lately announced his final destiny : " The Eon Sens of Annecy relates the death in Corea of a missioner belonging to the illustrious family of de Maistre. Father Joseph Ambrose died of fatigue and want on the 20th of December, 1857, after spending ten years in that persecuted mission. "f In the single year 1839, Bishop Imbert, whom the Holy See has since proposed to the veneration of the faithful, accompa- nied by Fathers Chastan and Maubant, was martyred, with an escort of two hundred and fifty of their disciples, of whom seventy were beheaded, and one hundred and eighty strangled. In 1847, Bishop Ferreol, who had then supreme charge of this afflicted church, described in a letter which reached Europe, u the generosity and the triumphs of the Corean martyrs." He gave an account also of the " apostolic ministry, so crucifying to nature," in which he and his clergy were engaged. The mode of living, he says, "is fatal to Europeans;" and we can easily believe him when he adds, that rice and water formed their only food. It was only by the aid of the most complete disguise that they could ever venture out, as death would immediately have followed detection ; and the Christians, even those "belonging * Annals, vol. xiv., p. 190. f Weekly Register, August 30, 1859. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 115 to the highest nobility," could only receive the sacraments at midnight, when the pagan members of their family, who would have betrayed them without mercy, were asleep. " This myste- rious secrecy," the bishop adds, u is here a necessity, for every Christian seized is put to death, unless he rescues himself by apostasy."* Yet they not only cheerfully accepted this u cru- cifying" existence, but in the course of that very year, in spite of the appalling lot which conversion entailed, so powerfully did divine grace co-operate with these apostolic missionaries, that they baptized seven hundred and sixty-eight adults, and admitted four hundred and sixty-seven fresh catechumens, being an addition of one thousand two hundred and thirty-five to the number of those who were willing to purchase, even at so great a price, the hopes and. the privileges of Catholics. Let us pass over ten years, for we are compelled to be brief, and in 1856 we have another account of the Corean mission from one who had just succeeded in entering it. He writes to a friend in France, a priest like himself, and here are some of his words : " The Europeans have hitherto made Shanghai the term of their wanderings eastward, but the Catholic missionary, who has heard the words of his Divine Master, Ite docete onunes gentes, 4 Go, teach all nations,' cannot circumscribe himself within limits where treaties, ships, and cannons guarantee freedom and security. His duty calls him amidst dangers and sufferings. . For my part, I have had but a small share in them ; unworthy to suffer for my God, my portion has been less than that of others." He had started from Shanghai in company with three men of his own class. The first was Bishop Berneux. " the veteran of the missions," who had already spent twelve years in Mantchooria, had been scourged and imprisoned in the dungeons of Tong-King, and was looking forward to martyrdom as the crown of his labors, when he was rescued by the appearance of a French frigate. He had just been appointed by the Holy See head of the Corean mission, a post for which the brave and ex- perienced confessor had been duly trained by previous suffer- ings. The second fellow-passenger in this voyage was a Jesuit from the interior of China ; the third, a missionary who had already toiled in India ; the fourth, the writer of the letter which we quote. They are in sight of Corea, after a painful voyage, and the spectacle suggests to him this reflection: "Corea! Corea! that name which sounds auspiciously in every heart anxious for the salvation of souls ; that name which has only been heard in Europe as the symbol of persecution and martyr- dom, that name revived and fortified us. The past was forgotten r * Annals, vol. x., p. 268. 116 CHAPTER II. all our desires, all our thoughts, were for that land." In the night of Good Friday, 1856, they landed in a creek, and on the following day, escorted by Father Daveluy, who had been sent by M. de Maistre to meet them, they entered the capital, muf- fled in the national garb of mourners, which effectually conceals the features. The streets were crowded, but their disguise was impenetrable ; though the writer adds that he could not help saying to himself, as the people jostled him on every side, "If you knew who I am, you would do worse than elbow me." In the following year, on the 8th of September, 1858, Father Feron, another Corean missionary, writes to his family from the " Valley of the Pines," a secret position in which he was studying the language of the country. It is difficult, he says, " for us to send any thing from Corea, even a simple letter. In order to secure the dispatch of this, it will be necessary to send it by way of Mantchooria, secreted in the boot of a courier ; this courier will travel expressly for us on foot upwards of six hundred miles in the depth of winter, and under pretence of purchasing merchandise at a fair, which is held annually on the frontiers, he will deliver our letters to the couriers sent by Bishop Verolles," the well-known confessor, and Yicar Apostolic of Mantchooria " and will bring back to us the correspondence of the mission, as well as the other objects, packed in the form of bales of Chinese merchandise." If these precautions were necessary in the dispatch of a letter, we may judge of those which the security of the writers re- quired. Yet Father Feron, writing to his mother and sisters, and therefore without reserve, could jest at his terrible position with charming pleasantry, and thus describe some of its details ; " I live in one of the finest houses in the village, that of the catechist, an opulent man ; it is considered to be worth a pound sterling. Do not laugh, there are some of the value of eight pence. My room has a sheet of paper for a door. . . . the rain falls through my roof as fast as it falls outside, and two large kettles barely suffice to receive the water that filters through the grass-covered roof of my presbytery." And then, tenderly mindful, no doubt, of that loved group at home by whom his letter would be eagerly read, he enumerates his worldly posses- sions : " The prophet Elisha, at the house of the Shunamite, had for furniture a bed, a table, a chair, and a candlestick in all, four articles. There was no superfluity here. For my part, if I were to search well, I could also find four pieces of furniture. Let us see : first, a wooden candlestick ; second, a trunk ; third, a pipe ; fourth, a pair of shoes ; total, four. Bed, none ; chairs, none ; table, none. Such being my furniture, am I richer or poorer than the prophet ? This is a problem which is perhaps MISSIONS IN CHINA. 117 not easy to solve : for, admitting that his room was more com- fortable than mine, we must also consider that none of the fur- niture belonged to him ; whilst in my case, granting that the candlestick belongs to the chapel, and that the trunk was lent to me by Monseigneur Berneux, it cannot be denied that at least the pipe and the shoes are mine. The latter I only put on to say Mass in. As to the pipe, it serves to keep one in countenance when travelling in a country where every one smokes, though I have not succeeded in discovering any charm in it, and have even been intoxicated by it after two experi- ments, which has quite taken away from me the desire of making a third." Is there not something attractive in this simple gayety of spirit, worthy of an apostle who had bidden an eternal farewell to all the ordinary joys of life, and who could thus jest at the poverty within his humble dwelling, and even at the death which was lurking at the door ? The Abbe Feron speaks with admiration of the Corean Christians : " When once they have learned the truth, no sacrifice is too great for them. A nobleman, or the son of a mandarin, will become a laborer, if necessary. Indeed, there are few who are restrained by sacrifices, when the salvation of their soul is at stake. Would that all Europeans were like them in this respect!" Many of the converts, it is said, quit their homes immediately after baptism, to find a refuge in the mountains, where they labor, or starve, as Providence may ap- point. It must be admitted that such converts are at least in earnest. Let us conclude with some extracts from a letter, of the same recent date, addressed by the venerable bishop of this persecuted flock to the Baron Henri de la Bouillerie, who had been one of his pupils, a quarter of a century before, in a French college, of which the bishop hacj been Eector : " My palace consists of a single room, three yards long and two wide. I spend four months of every year in this room, which I never leave except to administer to my neophytes. None of the pagans suspect my presence in my real character, and the Christians themselves do not know where I reside. I communicate with them through the medium of four catechists, to whom alone my door is open. If there is a sick call, they come, fetch, and accompany me. With the mourning dress already mentioned, I can go into the town without danger The Abbe Feron, whom, as a new-comer, I have placed in a position where he has a better chance of find- ing provisions than elsewhere, wrote me some time since that, compared with Corean missioners, the Trappists are complete Sybarites ; but, like a courageous inissioner, he willingly accepts this ultra-Trappist regimen, and will soon become habituated to 118 CHAPTER II. it. But do not grieve for the privations we have to endure ; they are so abundantly compensated, that we look on them as nothing." And then he describes the astonishing faith and fervor of the neophytes, who seem to rival those who dwelt of old in the catacombs, and to receive graces proportioned to the almost desperate position which they so generously embrace. During eight months of the year, the bishop visits the country missions, where there is more liberty of action. In September, the Christians assemble in the mountains for a spiritual retreat, to which they look forward with lively joy, but which is a period of exhausting labor to the bishop and his companions. In the capital, however, the most rigorous pre- cautions are still observed. Even women of the highest rank only visit the bishop at midnight, encountering the greatest perils in order to hear mass and receive the sacraments, and with the certainty of death if discovered. If by chance their pagan relatives or domestics should be awake on their return, they know their fate. Yet in spite of these terrible difficulties, as formidable as any w r hich religion has ever encountered, " the blood of the martyrs," in the words of Bishop Berneux, " is beginning to bring forth fruits. .... It is an incontestable fact that there is a more sensible tendency than ever to conform to our holy religion. Our persecutors themselves assert it ; and the mandarins, like the apostate emperor of old, admitted a few months since, in one of their assemblies, that Christ would triumph. What would they say if they saw the son of a minister of the king, himself a mandarin, sending us presents, and asking as a favor permission to visit us ; if they knew that the wife of one of the king's uncles has urged his brothers to become Catholics ; and that in these very palaces where the vow has been so often taken to exterminate even the last vestige of the Christian name, the true God has His worshippers, who are only waiting for more peaceful times to present themselves for baptism ?" Finally, the Yicar Apostolic relates, that whereas two years earlier there was not a single bishop in Corea, and only two missionaries, while the coasts were so carefully guarded that ingress was almost impossible, there are now two bishops and five priests, who minister to fifteen thousand two hundred and six Christians, every one of whom is a hero by the very act of his profession, ready to endure for the love of Christ all that malice can inflict, and whose number is annually increased by several hundreds. Such are the fruits of apostolic labors which only the faith of Catholics could inspire or sustain, which even pagans contemplate with awe and admiration, and which God alone knows how to recompense. We shall hear again of Corea, and of the men who labor in MISSIONS IN CHINA. 119 it at this moment, from Protestant travellers in China ; mean- while, let it be permitted, in terminating this brief notice, to give a single example of the courage and virtue, not of its foreign apostles, but of its native confessors. We know in spite of what discouragements they dare to profess the faith ; let us see how they maintain their profession when the hour of trial arrives. In 1852, Father Thomas Tshoez, a native Corean priest, and a member of one of the noblest and wealthiest families in the land, wrote to the director of the foreign missions in Paris. Amongst other examples of recent martyrdoms, this Corean missionary, who had spent three years on the coast in vain attempts to enter his native land after completing his studies at Macao, but had at length succeeded, notices two, in which he had a special interest, because they were those of his own father and mother. The former, in spite of his rank, had accepted the lowly office of catechist in 1839, and subsequently resided in the town of Seoul, from which a fresh burst of persecution ban- ished him, his family, and kinsfolk, amounting to about forty persons. They were followed by the emissaries of the king, and tracked to their retreat, where they were devoutly preparing for the martyrdom which they knew was at hand. " We have long been expecting you," said the head of this noble family to the satellites when they knocked at his door ; " we are quite ready, but the day has not yet dawned ; rest your weary limbs, and accept some refreshment, after which we will set out in due order."* The emissaries of the king, filled with astonishment at so much charity and fortitude, exclaimed with enthusiasm, "This man and all who belong to him are truly Christians! There is no fear of their attempting to escape ; let us take a little rest." At length they commenced the journey which was to be their last in this world. The little children, foot-sore, and fainting with heat, it was in the summer season, expressed their sufferings in plaintive cries, but even this trial did not overcome their parents and relations. "Courage, my brethren," said the elder Tshoez ; " Behold the angel of the Lord, with a rod in his hand, measuring your steps. Behold our Lord Jesus Christ going before us with His cross to Calvary." Arrived at the capital, the poor children "clinging with their little arms to the necks of their mothers," they were " greeted with sighs of pity, or assailed by curses and imprecations. 1 " "O wretched and wicked men," exclaimed some of the pagans, " how can you fly in the face of death with these tender chil- dren ?" It seemed to them monstrous and unnatural, for they * Annals, vol. xv., p. 7. 120 CHAPTER II. had never heard of the Holy Innocents, and knew not what glory awaits those who die for the name of Jesns. Francis Tshoez, the father of the priest who relates their mar- tyrdom, was tortured on the following day, and then invited by the presiding judge to apostatize. " Would you persuade me to perjure myself?" was his reply : " If it is a crime to break faith with man, how much greater must be that of infidelity to God !" One hundred and ten strokes of the bamboo tore his flesh to pieces, but he looked steadfastly through that brief hour of suf- fering to the sure felicity beyond. The rest were subjected in turn to the same tortures. " Some of them," says Father Thomas Tshoez, " half dead, and totally unconscious of what they were saying, muttered a formula of apostasy dictated by the judges." On the following day, Francis was again brought into court, and commanded to read a few pages out of a book of Catholic devotions which they presented to him, "for the purpose of examining his doctrine." " With a smile of pleasure," says his son, " he opened the book, and began to read with so much unction and feeling, that the whole assembly arose, from a spontaneous movement of admiration, and extolled our holy religion, which inspires a joy so pure and unfeigned amid the horrors of the most frightful torments." For forty days they continued to torment him with fresh miseries, " which he bore with such indescribable patience, that the executioners sur- named him the stone, on account of his apparent insensibility." Finally, on the 12th of September, says his son, " my father consummated his glorious martyrdom." But there were still other victims, whose fate is related by the same witness the only priest, perhaps, who ever lived to narrate the martyrdom of his whole house and kindred, and then devo- ted the remains of his own existence to convert their murderers. His mother's turn came next. "Although descended from one of the most noble of the Corean families, my poor mother submit- ted without shrinking to every species of privation . . . Ever the same, that is, constantly firm and magnanimous, she witnessed without emotion the day of combat. Gentle and patient as a lamb in her suffering, she repulsed with noble self-possession every thing that was capable of wounding the dignity of a Christian soul." Already, during the journey, she had "carried in her arms her youngest boy, and encouraged the others by hold- ing up to them the example of Jesus flying to Egypt with Mary and Joseph." And now a sorer trial came upon this Christian mother, so lately widowed. " Exposed to the rack," says her son, "she saw her flesh torn, and her joints dislocated, without uttering the slightest complaint. But all this torture was nothing in comparison ^with the agony which she felt in witnessing the MISSIONS IN CHINA. 121 sufferings of her children. Their sighs pierced her maternal heart with a sword of grief. The milk no longer flowed to her wounded breasts, and her infant child sought in vain to satisfy the claims of nature at the dried-up source from which it had once derived sustenance. Hence she who had set at defiance the executioners and their tortures, who had endured every species of personal suffering, was overcome by her tenderness. Blinded by the ardor of maternal love, she thought she might be permitted to pronounce an outward formula of apostasy, whilst in her heart she protested against the words." But the weakness of a moment, under the most cruel trial which can befall human nature, was to be speedily repaired. " God from His throne in heaven," writes her son, " witnessing the strug- gles of this poor mother, stretched out His hand to His ser- vant." Retracting with bitter tears her unwilling fault, she once more proclaimed before the judges the faith which had supported her in all her agony, and on the 30th of January, 1840, the last of her house and race, with the exception of one who was to recount her fall and her triumph, she received the crown of martyrdom which so many torments had earned. Such are the Christians of Corea, and such the fruits of an apostolate which has already won more than fifteen thousand converts to the faith w r hich demands from its professors such sac- rifices, and does not demand them in vain. Once more let the reader ask himself, whether this is the work of God, or of man. CHINA AND ANNAM. And now we must return, in order that we may bring it to an end, to the history of missions in China Proper and Tong-King. Our last date was 1833. Of the twenty-seven years which have subsequently elapsed, each deserves its own record, for each has contributed its due proportion of apostolic labors and triumphs. If the history upon which we have entered referred to China alone, such details would not be too minute ; but we have to visit in turn every country of the world, and can only glance at the missionary annals of each. For this reason we have no alternative but to suppress a multitude of facts and incidents which would otherwise deserve our attention, and must confine ourselves to a rapid summary of such as illustrate most effect- ively the contrast which it is our purpose to trace. In 1837, on the 20th of September, Father Cornay was led to martyrdom. He died as one who had led an apostolic life might be expected to die, but it is of his disciples, rather than of him- self, that we are tempted to speak. Three of them, Paul Mi, Peter 122 CHAPTER II. Duong, and Peter Truat, the first one of a family of martyrs, were present when Father Cornay was seized, and were destined, after long sufferings, to share his fate. From their dungeon they addressed a letter in French to the members of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. " Strangers, and unworthy of your attention," they said, " we should not have ventured to send a letter to Europe, lest we should seem to be influenced by vanity, or anxious to be spoken of afar; but the counsels of Father Marette, and the example of the primitive Christians, who communicated to each other their afflictions and their con- solations, have encouraged and will excuse us. ... Besides, we have the confidence that the memorial of three men about to die for the religion which you have made known to them, will excite still more your zeal in favor of our persecuted breth- ren and idolatrous kinsfolk." And then they relate in simple words what had already befallen them. They had been racked and scourged, but without showing the least sign of wavering. " How insane you must be," said one of the judges to Paul Mi, who had just received one hundred and thirty blows; "you have not seen the hell of the other world, and while waiting to do so, you expose yourself to the hell of this." The answer of the martyr would probably only seem an additional absurdity to the shrewd pagan. " 1 willingly submit," he said, " to the hell of this world, in order to avoid the hell which endures for- ever." For many months they lingered in prison, suffering al- most every torment which man can inflict or endure, and this was the temper in which these Chinese Christians accepted a lot from which a violent death was to be the final issue. " Since you wish it," said Paul Mi, in a letter to Father Marette, " I will speak of my sufferings, though, however great these may be, my sins are still greater. There is no sort of misery which I have not endured. . . . The only grace which I unceasingly beg from God, is a constant conformity to His holy will. Ask it also for me, that so, in spite of my un worthiness, 1 may glorify the Lord by my death. Alas! how have I, a poor sinner, de- served to be elected to martyrdom ? There is surely in this thought enough to cover me with confusion." Father Marette, who could not without excessive rashness have ventured near them in person, and who has already told us how he kept with him in his own hiding-place the blood- stained clothes of a martyred colleague, contrived to convey to them the Blessed Sacrament by the hands of a native priest, who affected to enter the prison only as a visitor. " I did not conceal from myself," he says,- " the danger of a communion made under the eyes of our enemies, but the necessity of sus- taining with the bread of the strong these poor weak soldiers, MISSIONS IN CHINA. 123 destined to the most terrible of combats, made me indifferent to every other consideration," And so they communicated secretly in the very presence of their guards. Paul Mi was the eldest of the victims, but his companions were filled with the same spirit. " Your son does not think himself worthy," wrote Peter Duong to the same missionary, " to offer you his thanks and his prayers ; but confiding in the merits of Jesus Christ, he beseeches God to take his father under his special protection. . . The happiness which awaits us, the thought of heaven which we already approach, make such an impression on my soul that there is no room for any other desire. Sinner as I arn, I confide in the merits of my Saviour and in the protection of the Holy Yirgin, and of the blessed martyrs who await me in the bosom of God. I salute you for the last time." Peter Truat, the youngest of this company of confessors, in whom some sign of weakness might have been feared, wrote thus : u Your little child offers you a thousand salutations. I am overjoyed at having been predestined lay God for martyrdom. . . . I quit life without regret. The only pain which I feel is to be separated from my father." The love of these martyrs for their apostles is manifested by a thousand tender expressions. " Formerly so united," he continues, " why are we now torn from each other ? Who could have supposed that the father and the brothers would be thus scattered here and there by the tempest ? . . . Your son will not fail to follow the salutary advice which you have given him how to conduct himself in his last moments." He then alludes to the noble death of Father Cornay, and adds, " Pray, while your son is in the combat, that God at your entreaty may grant him strength in the midst of his trials, and a death like that of his Master."* On the 18th December, 1838, " the prisoners of Jesus" as the pagan crowd called them on their way to the stake, received their crown. That night, their bodies, which had been secretly withdrawn by the aid of an official, were buried with due honor. " What joy," says Father Marette, "for me to see again, after their triumph, these dear children whose souls had just taken flight to the bosom of God ! With what religious satisfaction I kissed the impression which the instrument of death had left on their mangled flesh !" Two native priests, who offered the holy sacrifice in presence of their remains, two catechists, five re- ligious women, and about thirty of the faithful, assisted at that midnight scene. And then Father Marette repaired once more to his hiding-place, to prepare others for the same combat, or to * Annals, vol. ii., p. 202. 124: CHAPTER II. brave it himself when his own hour should come. It was not far distant. * The year 1838 was a terrible one for the Church in Cochin- China. On the 12th of June, the aged Bishop Ignatius Delgado died 'in prison of his sufferings, after having held during forty years the office of Vicar Apostolic in Tong-King. Thirteen days later, his venerable coadjutor, Bishop Dominic Henarez was led to martyrdom, in spite of his gray hairs, after an apostolate of forty-nine years. Ten days after his death, Bishop Havard, stretched on a mat in a wretched cabin, after all his noble labors, died of want and fatigue. Fathers Candahl and Vialle, who had long been hiding in caves and dens, died the same death. Father Simonin perished in his flight to the mountains. It is worthy of remark that Father Candahl twice received a fratuitous passage on board an English ship, though he was nown to be a Catholic missionary. He and Father Vialle suc- ceeded in entering Tong-King in the spring of 1835, passing through perils of every kind, sometimes shipwrecked, often hiding in caves and mountains, exhausted by hunger and thirst, their feet wounded and bleeding, and only venturing at night to the sea-shore, to moisten their parched lips with its brine. And this life they led, to their last hour, with no other motive than to declare to aliens and strangers the name of that Saviour for whose sake they cheerfully embraced such a career. But the year 1838 had not yet reached its close, and w r as to be consecrated by another of those sublime combats in which man is raised, by the succor of Divine grace, to the dignity of the angels. On the 24th of November, Bishop Borie, Vicar Apostolic of Western Tong-King, was decapitated, after seven fruitless attempts on the part of the executioner, whom the martyr calmly encouraged in his task, while even the mandarins hid their faces in horror. When Bishop Borie refused, at his trial, to answer certain questions addressed to him, the presiding judge angrily exclaimed, " When your flesh is torn to pieces with iron rods, will you then be able to keep silence ?" " I shall then see what I can do," he replied ; "1 dare not flatter myself before the trial." In his prison he continued to preach Jesus Christ with extraordinary fervor. "The joy which beamed in his face, notwithstanding the heavy cangue which weighed down his shoulders, excited the admiration of the pagans. 'This master,' they were heard to say, 'has truly a heart for teaching religion; if hereafter he can continue to instruct, us, we also will embrace his doctrine.' "* The Church in Cochin-China had lost four bishops in a single * Vol. i., p. 551. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 125 year. Bishop Cuenot, upon whom the mantle of the martyred prelates had now fallen, and who was destined himself to expire in prison, while under sentence of death, in 1861, after an apostolate of thirty -four years,* had reason to say, in a letter addressed to Europe, " Our ranks are thinning fast, and if this deplorable crisis lasts, our poor flock will soon be orphans." " The year 1838," said the Pro-Vicar Apostolic, at the same date, " has been a year of sorrow and misery for Tong-King and Upper Cochin-China. The sword of persecution has com- mitted terrible ravages, and heaven has been peopled with martyrs. The two Dominican bishops of Eastern Tong-King were beheaded in July. Three Spanish fathers of the same order were also beheaded, and seven native priests shed their blood for Jesus Christ." Their disciples, we have seen, were worthy of such teachers. It was only by the fervent exhortations of apostles endowed with such gifts, that timid Asiatics, hitherto ignorant, sordid, and godless, could be raised to such sudden perfection. By the preaching of the Gospel, and the participation of the Sacra- ments, they had found strength to imitate their guides. " Their constancy," observes Father Marette, who had so often encouraged and witnessed it, and whose own martyrdom was now at hand, " is the more worthy of admiration, since they are neither Europeans, sustained by the natural vigor of their constitutional character, nor apostles, impatient to shed their blood for the Gospel, but cowardly Asiatics, whom grace alone has converted into heroes." " Fool," said a mandarin to one of the lay martyrs of this year, who had received more than five hundred lashes in forty days, " why are you so obstinately bent upon dying?" A smile was his only answer; and when the moment of his martyrdom, in which he was accompanied by his family and children, arrived, and the executioner secret- ly offered for a certain sum to cut off his head at one stroke, u Cut it into a hundred pieces, if you like," said the martyr : " so that you cut it off, that will satisfy me." It was the contemplation of such scenes which, as in the primitive days, continually added to the number of the faithful. u We know," said some of the mandarins, filled with involun- tary admiration of the superhuman virtues displayed by their victims, " that you do not merit death, and we would willingly save you ; but the orders of the king do not permit us to do so. Pardon us, therefore, if we are compelled to take away your * Among other productions of this prelate was one entitled, The Truth of Christianity explained to Pagans, " an excellent work in four volumes, written in a style of such elegance and perfect knowledge of the Annamite language, that it would seem hardly possible to be the work of a foreign pen." Annals, vol. xxiii., p. 259. 126 CHAPTER II. lives, and do not impute this crime to us." Rarely has sin and unbelief offered a more notable homage to faith and virtue. But we must hasten to an end. Every year in succession witnessed the same events, and was illustrated by the same triumphs. We cannot recount them all. In 1840, according to the narrative of Father Joseph Clauzetto, Pro-Vicar General of the province of Hu-Quang, Father Perboyre, a French Laz- arist, was martyred, after long and horrible tortures. "We were tracked as beasts of the chase," says Father Clauzetto, who with difficulty escaped ; " they pursued us, poor mission- aries, as robbers, though we have no other feeling towards these Gentiles than that of charity, no other wish than to open to them the gates of heaven." Some of the children of their school were cruelly scourged for refusing to disclose their retreat, and one of their catechists nobly submitted to have his arm cut off rather than reveal it. In every direction the missionaries were flying. Father Perboyre was caught in a valley, worn out with fatigue and famine. "Thirty piastres to any one who will show me a missionary !" cried an officer, when he came in sight of the fugitive group, and it was a Christian who yielded to the temptation, and to save his own life pointed to Father Perboyre. The missionary was conducted in triumph from tribunal to tribunal, and cruelly tortured at each. New forms of suffering were invented in order to shake his constancy, and force him to disclose the residence of Bishop Rameaux, Vicar Apostolic of the province of Kiang-Si, whom they especially desired to seize. When their efforts were baffled by his inflexible fortitude, they offered to release him immediately if he would apostatize. A Chinese priest, who penetrated in disguise to his dungeon, re- ported that " his whole body is one sore, and his emaciation shocking to behold : he has hardly strength to utter a few words ; he can neither sit nor stand ; many of his bones are bare, his flesh hangs in pieces, and his clothes are soaked in blood." When they presented a crucifix to him, desiring him to trample on it, he could not restrain his tears, and only replied by pressing the image of his Saviour to his lips and heart. On the llth of September, 1840, after one of the most painful and protracted martyrdoms ever endured by man, he entered into his rest. In the same year, Father Torrette, also a French Lazarist, finished his career ; his last words being those of the Apostle, Mihi mori lucrum, " To me to die is gain." This year saw also the death of Father Luke Loan, a native priest, whose virtues were so much venerated even by the pagans, that it was only by offering a large bribe that the mandarins could procure an executioner. " Sly father, I bow before you," said this man, MISSIONS IN CHINA. 127 when he came to perform his task ; " if it depended on me alone, you should live in peace ; but the king's will must be done, and I cannot resist it. Do not, I beg, impute your death to me, and when you are in heaven pray for me."* It would be easy to multiply these examples, which alone furnish an adequate explanation of the astonishing success of the missionaries. Even the pagans understood, that such men must be supported by the immense power of God. Even they confessed the truth, which is hidden from some nominal Christians, that where His gifts are, there He is Himself. "Truly, this Christian religion," they said, "is a good religion." They judged it by its fruits. It was, as a rule, only the higher officers of the State who willingly persecuted the Christians, and even they were often subdued by their supernatural patience and fortitude. In the persecution which followed the capture of Father Perboyre, and which involved a vast number of Christians, Father Clauzetto notices particularly the case of two women, a young girl and a widow, who seem to have pro- duced a profound impression upon their judges, and even upon the viceroy himself, who was present at their trial. " They boldly confessed Jesus Christ, often repeating to their judges, 4 Cut off our heads if you will, but do not hope to make us abandon our faith.' The mandarins were amazed; the firmness of these holy women gave such authority to their words, that the persecutors, after hearing their defence of Christianity, ac- knowledged that they had nothing to reply. On beholding such virtue, they dispensed with the torture. Some pagans even offered them presents, as a testimony of esteem and ad- miration." And this feeling, he says, became general. Even the guards of the Christian prisoners were often so touched by their simple dignity and unconquerable virtue, that, " instead of ill-treating, they exhort, they supplicate: 'Why do you per- sist in suffering ?' they asked ; ' is there so much harm in saying a word, or making a sign, in order to please the mandarin ? You might still be Christians at home.' r Sometimes the offi- cials filled up tickets, declaring their apostasy, and when the Christians entered the court, handed them to the judge, who would say, "You have at last renounced Christianity?" And when they eagerly replied, " No, we are still Christians ;" " Go, go," he would say ; " I understand ; you have apostatized ; go home." Father Francis Tchiou, a Chinese Lazarist, relates in 1840 the martyrdom of his own brother, and then describes the amazing constancy of a Christian girl, Anne Kao, a victim in * Vol. viii., p. 201. 128 CHAPTER II. the same persecution. After trying her by various torments, they caused her to be brought before the tribunal when she was faint with hunger, and offering her food, desired her to eat in token of apostasy. Her reply deserves our attention, not only for its own sake, but because it won the sympathy and admira- tion of the w r ife and daughter of the presiding mandarin, who openly manifested " their pity for this Christian virgin." " If in your eyes" said the famished girl, " it is apostasy to eat, I de- clare to you that I will die of hunger, rather than take the smallest portion of food / hut if you see in it only an indifferent or ordinary action, I will eat" " You are an obstinate woman," replied the mandarin, "eat as you please."* If we still linger over the year 1840, it is because there is no more famous date in the annals of Chinese missions. It was in this year that Bishop Retord, who so long ruled the Church in Western Tong-King, announced to Europe the singular change of policy which was then inaugurated in Cochin-China, but only to be quickly abandoned. Weary of their continual failures, and convinced by experience that the slaughter of the Christians only increased their numbers, they have more than trebled in Cochin-China during this century, and amount- ed before the persecution now raging (1860) to more than five hundred thousand, the pagan authorities resolved for the first time to appeal, not to the passions, but to the reason of their countrymen. Edicts were published all over the country, from which the Bishop quotes such passages as the following: "In order to instruct and undeceive the Chris- tians," all governors of provinces, subordinate mandarins, chiefs of districts, and mayors of villages, were charged to address to them these arguments : " This Jesus, the author of your re- ligion, is a man of a distant country, and of a race different from ours What the missionaries teach on the subject of their Cross, to which a little child is attached, is, in great part, incomprehensible. The best plan is not to believe any thing about it. " You will say, that you observe the religion of Jesus in order to go to heaven after your death. Do you see what has hap- pened to the priests Marchand and Cornay, to the chiefs Trum- Ilien and Trum-Hai (Fathers Fernandez and Henares)? Have they not perished miserably? Has not their punishment been for all a subject of compassion and terror? Yet these four missionaries observed their law more perfectly than the people; but this has not prevented their unhappy death. And these are the men who used to relate to the crowd such fine things * Vol. ii., p. 175. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 129 about their future destiny ! But their death has unveiled the knavery of their words ! To speak sincerely, how can a person ascend to heaven when he no longer lives?" The royal edict then proceeds to notice the case of two apostates, and continues thus: "They have trampled on the cross ; they are free, and await in peace the end of the days which Heaven may grant them. Acknowledge, then, on which side are the joys of paradise, on which the sufferings of hell. If you are insensible to these considerations, if you continue to assemble in order to pray in secret, you show the blindest stu- pidity, and the most criminal obstinacy." Finally, the decree ingeniously observes, " Such are the great thoughts which we must develop for the Christians, in order to enlighten and convert them." If these arguments were less effective than their royal author anticipated, they appear at least to have been faithfully em- ployed by his officers. They were met, however, on the part of the Christians, by other arguments, which so confounded the mandarins, that it was not long before they abandoned logic in despair, and took once more to the knife and the scourge. Perhaps a single example, related by Bishop Retord in 1840, will suffice to illustrate the effect of their public dis- cussions with the Christians. Father Paul Khoan, an Annamite priest, represented on this occasion his Christian brethren, being brought up from prison for that purpose, while a mandarin enjoying the confidence of the king undertook to justify the superior wisdom of his mas- ter's philosophy. It is true that the Christian advocate hardly appeared under favorable circumstances. He had been more than a year in a Chinese dungeon, and was at that moment under sentence of death. Four of his colleagues, Chinese priests, had recently been martyred. Fathers Thomas Du and Dominic Xuyen had been horribly tortured. The legs of the latter " were burned with plates of red-hot iron, his flesh pierced with sharp points, and his body lacerated with scourging. They drove sharpened irons under his nails Amidst such horrible temptations, the two venerable priests did not manifest a moment's weakness." At length they were slain, and within a few days Fathers Peter Thi and Andrew Lung, also Chinese priests, carne to the same end. It was just after these events that Father Khoan was brought from his prison, to debate with judges who had always this final argument of the knife in reserve, if he should be so imprudent as to overcome them in discussion. In spite of these discouragements, Father Khoan accepted the debate, of which the following is the substance, 10 130 CHAPTER II. though we are obliged for the sake of brevity to suppress many details.* MANDARIN. "The king loves you, because you are a native of the country. If he has sent you to prison, it was only to five you the opportunity of repentance. He authorizes me to ischarge you, if you trample on the cross." PRIEST. " Your kindness affects me, and it gives me pain to refuse you. I have only to beg that you will give me due notice of the day of my death, that I may arrange my affairs before quitting this world." MANDARIN. " Yes, I will inform you of the time. But you tremble with cold out there in the court. Drink a cup of tea, and sit by me on this mat. I feel pity for you ! What pleas- ure you would give me by trampling on the cross !" PRIEST. "I have reflected well upon what you say to me, but the more I reflect, the more I feel the reasonableness of my religion, and my obligation to observe it strictly until I die. If I abandon the Gospel, I shall avoid death, it is true ; and I can secretly follow my religion at home, as Gia-Long, the father of the present king, wished me to do ; but there would be no in- tegrity in acting thus. I should be unfaithful to the Lord of Heaven, whom I have adored up to the present time, and I should scandalize those to whom I have preached, if they saw me wanting in constancy and fidelity." , MANDARIN to his Officers. " You hear what he says. How can we hope to conquer the firmness of such a man ?" To Father Khoan. " I was already persuaded that your resolution was immovable. For this reason I examined two of your disciples first, lest, encouraged by your example, they should imitate you ; but my plan has failed, and they have shown the same constancy as yourself. Tell me, have you no wish to live ?" PRIEST. " Mandarin, if you spare my life, I will return you thanks, for who does not love life ? "... But the Christian, in dying for the sake of his Creator, will obtain a more valuable recompense in heaven than the transient life of this world." MANDARIN. " That is very well ; but how do you know there is a paradise ?" PRIEST. "The sovereign of an earthly kingdon, has he not distinctions of honor, and privileged places for his faithful servants? Shall the Supreme Master of heaven and earth have none with which to reward those who have been faithful to him unto death ?" * Vol. ii., p. 182. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 131 MANDARIN. "But how do you know that there exists a Master of heaven ?" PRIEST. "Great mandarin, the universe is an open book which teaches it clearly. Consider all the wonders of nature, and you will easily comprehend that there is a Being who made them, a Lord who governs them. . . ." MANDARIN. "What you say is true; I agree to it." (To the Officers.) " He speaks deliberately and with calmness. In truth, what he says is very fine. He is not an ordinary man. He is persuaded that there is a paradise." (To Father Khoan.) " I must frankly confess that in hearing you speak I am moved to Compassion, and I wish I could save you. But the law of the kingdom is very severe. If you do not trample on the cross you will be sure to die. . . . But enough ; you have convinced me ; you are not an ordinary man." Arid then they sent their report to the king, and shortly after Father Khoan was martyred. It was in the face of such difficulties, and of a persecution which never relaxed, that Christianity had to fight its way in Cochin-China. Yet these terrible obstacles only insured its triumph. The pagans could not refuse to admire the pure lives of their Christian fellow-countrymen, nor the mysterious heroism of their death. And when they witnessed the martyr- dom of priests of their own race, they openly avowed the respect which such scenes inspired, like the mandarin who exclaimed at the death of the Venerable Peter On, " Yes, Peter On is truly a holy person!" But we must bring the history to an end. Every martyrdom, whether of bishop, priest, or layman, only produced fresh can- didates for the same honor. In 1841, Bishop Iletord secretly consecrated Father Hermosilla, " in a cabin thatched with straw, in a village situated on the edge of a dense forest, so that, in case of imminent danger, we might take refuge in it." And then the new bishop, who was arrested in 1861, at sixty-three years of age, after a ministry of thirty-four years, started for another part of the country to consecrate a third, so that the Church might be prepared for all emergencies ; " for in these regions," says Bishop Retord, "we must hasten to anoint other foreheads with the holy chrism, lest our own head should presently fall under the axe of the executioner."' In 1842, the same courageous prelate, for he still survived, could say : " Since my return to Tong-King, I have already consecrated two bishops and eleven priests. We have at present but one priest less than before the persecution ; for in proportion as heads Fall, others rise up to blunt the sword of the executioner." And so this warfare continued. In the year 1844, in the 132 CHAPTER II. single vicariate of Western Tong-King, one thousand two hun- dred and thirty-seven adults were received into the Church; in 1845, one thousand three hundred and twenty-eight; and in 1846, one thousand three hundred and eight ; being an addition of nearly four thousand persons in a single province who deliberately embraced the lot of the Christians, with all its terrible penalties. Between 1820 and 1858, the total number of converts in Tong-King alone was one hundred and forty thousand, "an increase so much the more wonderful, as it has been accomplished in thirty-eight years of atrocious and almost uninterrupted persecution. In the year 1854 alone there were five thousand three hundred and seventy adult converts." Finally, the state of the Annamite church in 1858 is described in the following almost incredible summary : There were at that date, in spite of incessant martyrdoms, fourteen bishops (in addition to more than thirty in China Proper) ; sixty European missionaries ; two hundred and forty native priests ; nine hundred clerical students; six hundred and fifty catechists; sixteen hundred native nuns ; and five hundred and thirty thousand Christians. " Our Annamite brethren," says the annalist of this marvellous mission, " may with justice repeat at the present day what Tertullian said to the persecutors of old : 4 We increase in proportion as you cut us down.' "* Yet the pagans, unconscious instruments of the Evil One, have done their best to destroy them. In 1850, the village of Ly-tou-pa, near the city of Kiu-hien, contained two hundred and forty inhabitants who were all Christians. They were so remarkable for their virtues, that even the pagans in the neigh- boring villages "proclaimed aloud that the inhabitants of Ly-tou-pa were irreproachable." The mandarins of Kiu-hien thought otherwise, and suddenly appeared in the doomed village. The houses were sacked and pillaged, and the torture of the confessors followed next. " Will you renounce your religion?" cried a mandarin, in the intervals of their torment. "JS T ever," was the answer of all. At length " the mouths of the confes- sors were full of blood, and they were unable to reply." One voice alone was heard to say, " Jesus ! save us !" "Oh! they still pray," exclaimed the mandarin ; " strike, strike, kill them !" " Their jaws are crushed ; the blood gushes from their mouths ; their hands hang paralyzed, and the bloody scourge still makes deep gashes along their backs." Five days after they are brought up from prison, and commanded to trample on the cross. " ' Mandarin,' replied one of them, in the name of his * Annals, No. 119, p. 58. See also, for an authentic record of the principal details, the excellent work entitled, Mission de la Cochin-Chine, et du Tonkin (Paris, 1858). MISSIONS IN CHINA. 133 companions, ' it is useless to speak to us of apostasy. We are prepared to suffer every thing, rather than renounce our faith. You can imprison, exile, or decapitate us, if you think n't, but can never deprive us of our God.' On hearing these words, the judge struck his breast with bewilderment. He seemed to say, ' Alas ! what is to be done with such people ?' In a word, he had never met with Christians." The letter which describes these details was written by the Pere Bertrand, of the Society of Jesus, from the city of Kiu-hien, and dated the 23d of August, 1850. The same triumphs were accomplished in China Proper, and with the same results. In 1848, Bishop Perrocheau writes from the great province of Su-tchuen, in the very heart of China, and this is his report : " In spite of the obstacles which the mandarins oppose to the conversion of the infidels, we have admitted twelve hundred and eighty neophytes upon the roll of catechumens, and baptized eight hundred and eighty-eight adults within the year. God be praised !" It was of Bishop Perrocheau, who died in 1861, that the viceroy of Su-tchuen, a cousin of the emperor, told the Abbe Hue that he knew the very house in which he lived ; and he added, " I have not dis- turbed him, because I have convinced myself that he is a vir- tuous and charitable man."* From Nankin Bishop Maresca reports, almost at the same date, that he had baptized five thousand adults in the course of the year, and between fifteen and twenty thousand children, and that he had established the Stations of the Cross in nearly three hundred different localities. In 1851, that we may continue the history to the present hour, Father Dnclos died in prison, and Father Augustiii Schoeffler, a French missionary, perished on the scaffold. As the latter went to the place of execution, a placard was carried before him containing these words : " He confessed truly the whole charge of preaching the religion of Jesus. His crime is patent. Let Mr. Augustiii be beheaded, and cast into a stream." In 1852, Father Bonnard, at the age of twenty-nine, gained the martyr's crown. "Trample on the cross," they said to him, " or you shall be scourged and put to death." " I have told you," was his answer, " that I fear neither your scourging nor death. I did not come here to deny my religion, nor to set a bad example to the Christians." All his care was for his disciples, who suffered with him, and who imitated his apos- tolic courage. His last letter but one to his bishop, a confessor * L'Empire CMnois, tome i., ch. ii., p. 51. 134 CHAPTER II. like himself, but who had escaped a hundred deaths, contained these words : " If I have ever given your Lordship or my breth- ren any offence during the short time I have been on the mis- sion, I entreat you to forgive me. Allow me, my Lord and Father, to cast myself in spirit at your feet, to ask your blessing." "You have never offended me in any thing," replied the ven- erable prelate. " The blessing you ask I have given you ever since your first arrival in the mission. . . . When you are in heaven, bless us in your turn." In his final letter the martyr says, " On the eve of my death, April 30th, 1852, I place my trust in the mercy of Jesus. I have the sweet hope that He has pardoned my innumerable offences. Should I be able to move the sovereign goodness of God in your favor, rest assured that I will not forget you. I die contented. Praise be to the Lord ! Farewell to all in the sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary. In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum." The bishop addressed the victim, whom he could not ven- ture to approach, in these words : " I am jealous at seeing you depart before me for the heavenly kingdom, by the shortest and safest road, while I am still left to be tossed on this stormy sea. I, your bishop, the old captain who have seen twenty years' service in a strange land, should not I have been crowned before you ? How dare you thus supplant me ? But I forgive you, because such is the will of God. . . . Depart, then, in peace, favored child of Providence. I envy you, indeed, but with the envy of love, with the jealousy of tender- ness. How happy are you ! You are about to join the Bories, the Cornays, the Schcefflers, and all the other apostles and martyrs of this mission. How great will be their joy to see you admitted into their glorious company !" He went on foot to the place of execution, the heavy cangue round his neck, and holding up his chain with one hand. They had bound him so tightly that the blood oozed from his fingers. He was finally decapitated, and then cast into a river. That night his body was recovered, and the bishop recited over him. in a whisper the last offices of the Church. His clothes, covered with blood, and even his hair, were sold in pieces by the pagans to the Christians, who desired to possess the relics of a martyr. In the same year, 1852, Bishop Louis de Castellazzo writes from the province of Chan-Tong, that in nine years he had built twenty-two churches, some of w r hich were capable of holding six hundred persons. Still in the same year, Bishop Rizzolati, Yicar Apostolic of Hou-Kouang, describes the tortures inflicted upon Father Andrew Koung, a Chinese priest, who was superior of the college of Hou-pe, and who received three hundred blows at MISSIONS IN CHINA. 135 once. He was known to be still alive in his dungeon in the following year. In 1853, Bishop Lefebre reported to Europe the noble confes- sion and death of Father Philip Minh, also a Chinese priest, and conspicuous among his colleagues for ability and prudence. When brought before the tribunal, he uttered this prayer, worthy of one of the primitive saints : u My God, since it has pleased Thee to subject Thy humble and unworthy servant to this trial, I beseech Thee to grant me grace and fortitude to pass victorious through the contest in which I have engaged. Inspire me with words of wisdom and prudence, that I may answer the magis- trates with becoming fortitude." When they desired him to trample upon a crucifix placed on the ground before him, and he had calmly refused, "the mandarins ordered the satellites to drag him over it. They accordingly seized the chain with which he was loaded, and pulled him with all their force ; but the fervent confessor sat down, resisting their efforts with the whole weight of his body, and their attempt was consequently unsuccessful. The magistrates no longer insisted upon the act, but proceeded to draw up the sentence." On the 3d of July he was martyred. While in prison, even the pagan soldiers were heard to deplore his fate, and when the last act was over, the bystanders said aloud, "The good priest has gone to heaven." His head was cast into a river, but recovered by a Christian, and secretly buried with his body. In 1856, Father Huong met the same fate with the same forti- tude and joy. The details were described in that year by Father Galy, a French missionary, who had himself been condemned to death fifteen years earlier, but was afterwards liberated. In 1854, he seemed again on the point of martyrdom, and wrote thus : " If I am seized, what happiness ! At length the axe will no longer spare me. As a relapsed offender, no indulgence will be granted me." And when a little later the same generous priest, in whom the prospect of martyrdom only excited joy and gratitude, heard of the arrest and subsequent liberation of Bishop llermosilla, he observed 'in one of his letters, " I imagine that he will not feel much obliged to his people for the sum they paid for his deliverance, when his first wish was to die the death of a martyr. The pity of our friends, however well intended, is sometimes fatal to us." It was also in 1856, on the 29th of February, that Father Chapdelaine was martyred, in the province of Quang-tong. He had a few days before been tortured, and had received one hundred blows on the face, so that his jaws were completely smashed. He was carried back to prison, frightfully mutilated, and unable to move hand or foot; yet a moment after, to the 136 CHAPTER II. astonishment of all who saw him, " he rose up, and began to walk, as if in perfect health." When his guards asked him to tell them privately how it was possible that he should be able to walk, " the Father answered with a smile, It is because our good God has protected and blessed me."* Every year in succession witnessed the same combats, in which Europeans and natives, priests and laymen, men and women, fought the good fight, and yielded up their lives in testimony of the faith. The year 1857 was distinguished by confessions as remarkable as any in this long catalogue. On the 3 1st of January, a native priest and four Christians were beheaded. On the following day, eleven neophytes shared the same fate ; and two days after, ten others, all in the same town. On the 6th of April, Father Paul Tinh, at the age of sixty-seven, was beheaded. As he was led to execution, the grand mandarin took him aside, and assuring him of his esteem, offered him his life if he would renounce his religion. " Grand mandarin," he replied, " my body is in your hands ; do what you like with it ; but my soul belongs to God ; nothing can induce me to sacrifice it to the king's pleasure." The martyrdoms continued through April and May, and on the 20th of July, the Spanish Bishop Diaz, after a long and fruitful apostolate, was beheaded in his turn. In 1858, his head was recovered by some Christian fishermen, and brought to Bishop Melchior, who was himself destined to a still more terrible martyrdom. In 1859, Father Paul Loc was martyred at Saigon, three days before the arrival of the French expedition, of which the temporary failure has only increased the afflictions of the Christians. In this year the faith of the lay confessors was especially tried. Four hundred were seized at once in one place. John Hoa, the chief of a village, a man respected even by the pagans for his virtuous life, was tempted by the mandarin with flattering words : " Your fault is not a crime, but I must request you to trample on the cross, that I may place you at the head of your district. You are a distinguished subject. What is the use of manifesting this obstinacy in degrading yourself, and why should you expose yourself to the torture ?" " Let me die, rather than renounce my religion," was his only answer. u Will you agree to trample on the cross, that I may discharge you ?" said a mandarin to Martha Lanh, the superioress of a native religious community. " It is better to die," she replied, "than to be unfaithful to God;" when the heathen judge ordered her to be smitten on the mouth, and to receive twenty- nine lashes with an iron rod. She received eighteen more * Annals, vol. xvii., p. 346. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 137 lashes at a second examination, fourteen at a third, and thirty- eight at a fourth ; yet a month after she was still alive.* When Elizabeth Ngo refused in the same year to put her foot on a cross which they had placed on the floor, and being cruelly scourged called aloud upon Jesus and Mary, the mandarin ironically said, " Yery well, call upon your Jesus, and let him endure the torture in your place." At a third examination, the mandarin, furious at being baffled by a woman, lost all self- possession, and commanded her to be flogged to death. She received one hundred and fifteen blows, when the executioner stopped, and exclaimed, "She is dead!" " Unbind her," said the mandarin, resolved to triumph at least over her corpse, u and drag her upon the cross." At this order she seems to have recovered for a moment her consciousness, and " doubling up her legs, she held off the cangue with one hand, to prevent strangulation, while with the other she seized the sign of our Redemption, and raising it in the air, as a trophy of her victory and pledge of salvation, she cried out, c God be praised !' ' : The Christians of China, then, from the days of Ricci to the present hour, have been ever the same. We have noticed only some of the more prominent incidents of their warfare, because it was impossible to mention them all. A few have apostatized under their torments, but others have hastened to seize the palm of which they had proved themselves unworthy. In 1805, after more than forty years of abandonment, Sir George Stauiiton estimated the Christians of China Proper at two hundred thousand, f In 1840, Commodore Read reported that " there are not less than five hundred and eighty-three thousand Catholic converts at this time.":): In 1859 there were five hundred and thirty thousand in Cochin-China alone ; besides forty thousand in the city of Pekiu, eighty thousand in the diocese of Nankin, || one hundred thousand in the province of Su-tchuen,^f sixty thousand in the district of Shang-hae,~ x "* forty thousand in the diocese of Fukien,ff sixteen thousand in Corea, ten thousand in Mongolia, nine thousand in Thibet, about the same number in Mantchooria,JJ and many in Tartary, amounting probably in the aggregate to more than a million. * Annals, No. 123. f Laws of China, p. 176, note. j Around the World, by Commodore George Read, vol. ii., p. 230. Annals, No. 119, p. 58. | Souvenirs d'une Ambassade en Chine et au Japon, par le Marquis de Moges, ch. vii., p. 181 (1860). Tf L'Empire Chinois, tome i., ch. vii., p. 333. ** Visit tc the Consular Cities of China, by Rev. George Smith, M.A., p. 140. t Five Years in China, ch. xi., p. 184 (1848). Ravenstein, x., 112. 138 CHAPTER II. And the increase of pastors, in spite of incessant martyrdoms, has kept pace with that of disciples. In 1859, there were fifty-one bishops, and six hundred and twenty-four European and native priests, the latter numbering four hundred and twenty-eight. There were also eighteen ecclesiastical colleges. Finally, the number of Chinese women who have embraced the religious life in the order of St. Dominic is so great, that a few years ago a special persecution "was directed against the Chinese TertiariesJ*'* and " whole families were united in the fellowship of the order." And now we may conclude. Other victims have indeed been immolated, whose names, as well as the manner of their death, are known to us ; and probably many more of whom we shall never hear. In the first half of 1859, fourteen priests had been arrested almost simultaneously, of whom ten are known to have been strangled or decapitated. In 1861, we have already heard of the death or captivity of nearly thirty new victims, all of the ecclesiastical order. Three bishops, at least, have been added to the army of martyrs. The Dominican bishop Melchior, the successor of Bishop Diaz, was literally hacked to pieces. " Five executioners," says the narrative of his martyr- dom in the Hong-Kong Register, " commenced their frightful duty. They were armed with a kind of bill-hook, or hatchet, purposely blunted, in order to inflict greater suffering. They commenced by cutting off the legs above the knees, each limb receiving about twelve blows before it was severed. The same process was repeated with the arms." Finally, they tore out his bowels, but " as long as strength remained, he ceased not to call on the name of Jesus." His head was afterwards crushed to fragments, arid thrown into the sea. In the same year, the Abbe Yenard was martyred in Western Tonquin. His executioner, a man of experience, had previously decapitated four priests on the same day, the 25th of March, 1860 ; and when he asked what this new victim would give to have his head taken off at one blow, the martyr only replied, " The longer it lasts, the better for me." " We shall meet again before the tribunal of God," were his last words to his pagan judges, when they pronounced their sentence. "His zeal," observes his bishop, in reporting his death, " was wonderful." For eighteen months prior to his death he had evangelized the heathen village of Bat-Dong, and with such fruits, that when a mandarin, immediately after his martyrdom, to whom he had said, before the whole court, " Jesus Christ can easily overcome you, as He has overcome so many others," hastened to the * Life of St. Dominic, ch. vii., p. 365 (1857). MISSIONS IN CHINA. 139 village, " to make the inhabitants trample on the cross," this was the result : " The entire population was unanimous in refusing to apostatize, and the mandarin was obliged to retreat before these six hundred united Christians, though he has since published edict upon edict against them." And it is of such disciples as these, who convert their heathen neighbors by the example of their evangelical virtues, and cleave to the faith amid the sharpest trials which can assail it, that Protestant writers affect to speak with contempt ! The Abbe Venard left behind him an Annamite translation of the Concordantia fivangdica, the Acts of the Apostles, the whole of the Epistles, the Apoca- lypse, and unfinished portions of other sacred Scriptures.* In 1862, the effects of the French treaty of 1860 began to be felt in some, but only in some, of the provinces of China. It was in this year that Bishop Anouilh, vicar Apostolic of West- ern Pe-tche-li, obtained through the influence of the French legation the imperial palace in the city of Tching-ting-fou as a site for his cathedral, seminary, orphanage, and schools. The effect of this unexampled incident upon the popular mind is thus described by the venerable prelate : " The eclat of such a donation is immense, and equal in itself to several imperial de- crees." "I have been travelling," he adds, in recounting "the marvellous results of our lately acquired liberty," "during many months, not only through my old Christian congrega- tions, but into many towns and villages where the Name of the Lord was hitherto unknown. Nearly always I preach in the public places, in the streets, all but on the house-tops. I preach, not in presence of a few individuals, but to immense masses of people. . . . Sometimes, at nightfall, I was ready to sink with fatigue, and quite incapable of uttering an- other word ; but my audience were still all anxiety to hear me. Next day I began as before. God blessed my efforts, and in the course of fifteen days the number of conversions which took place exceeded three thousand. . . . Nine villages, with nearly every one of their inhabitants, have come over to us ; and in more than twenty others numerous families broke their idols, and declared their determination henceforth to adore only the Sovereign Lord of heaven and earth." On the 19th of April, 1862, the same apostolic missionary writes as follows : " Before I left Pekin, whither I went to con- secrate the holy oils for the three northern provinces of the empire, I baptized one hundred and twenty converts, most of whom made their iirst communion, and were confirmed the same day. On my return" (to his own diocese) " I poured the water * Annals, vol. xxiii., pp. 266-70. 140 CHAPTER II. of regeneration on the heads of several hundred adults, who had prepared themselves for the sacrament of baptism with great ardor. At this moment I have twenty catechists occupied in instructing my thousands of catechumens, and they are far from sufficiently numerous to carry on this severe labor, for there are eighty new villages just converted to Christianity"* But this bright picture has another and a darker side. If religion is renewing its peaceful triumphs in some of the prov- inces subject to the authority of the imperial government, it is still only by the blood of martyrs that it gains them in others. It was almost at the same moment in which Bishop Anouilh was reporting his tranquil successes, that Bishop Faurie, Yicar Apostolic of Kouy-Tcheou, was thus recounting victories of an- other kind : " The blood of martyrs has been flowing in our province. The Abbe Jean Pierre Neel, a missionary from the archdiocese of Lyons, together with four lay assistants, were slain in the chief city of that province, on that 17th of February." Father Neel had been only two months at Kia- cha-loung, "the latest theatre of his zeal," and had already made more than a hundred converts. The Chinese general, Tien-ta-jen, a disreputable adventurer, since disgraced, affect- ing to regard the disciples of Father Neel as rebels, instigated the mandarin Tay-lou-tche to slaughter them. One catechist escaped. " Walking night and day," says the bishop, " with- out tasting food, until he reached me, he threw himself on his knees, exclaiming, ' Glory be to God, father, we have martyrs again !'" The bishop's narrative terminates with these words : "At the moment that the Abbe Neel's head rolled on the ground, a bright cloud is said to have descended rapidly from the heavens, and having remained a few moments over his body, it disappeared. The pagan crowd were seized with fear, the executioner more than all ; and we have since been informed by pagans who came to tell us the news, that this chief is still greatly troubled in mind, and now believes that he was guilty of a very wicked action. I shall test the authenticity of this miraculous cloud very strictly, though it in no way surprises any one who knew the Abbe Neel. He was indeed a saint."f And still others come forth, day by day, to fill the place of the departed, and desire to be clothed with the blood stained mantle which covered them in the days of their mortal toil. Still the Church offers her noblest children to God, and till the hour of His second coming will never cease to provide for sac- rifice the appointed victims, "who are to be slain, even as they." In the first nine months of 1861, and in two only of the dioceses * P. 318. t p - 33 2. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 141 of Annam, there were sixteen thousand martyrs, and nearly twenty thousand Christians condemned to perpetual slavery. In every town lately captured by the French, the Christians were found to have been gathered together and burned alive. Five hundred calcined bodies were thus discovered in one pit. But we have heard enough. Every region of the earth will furnish in turn the same scenes to our contemplation, and the vastness of the field which we have still to traverse admonishes us not to linger on the way. In China, during three hundred years, from the first hour to the last, we have found the Catholic missionaries ever the same, and have seen them do what man cannot do by his own strength, nor has ever attempted to do but by the inspiration of God and the counsels of the Church. She has proved herself to be in the nineteenth century what she was in the first ; and the powers of darkness are obliged to confess, that she can send forth apostles now, and build up disciples, who are no other, in their faith and charity, in the holiness of their life and the majesty of their death, than the men who shared the toils of St. Peter, or gathered wisdom from the lips of St. Paul.* * No allusion was made in a former edition of this work to the well-known con- troversy between the Jesuits and Dominicans, on the subject of the rites cele- brated annually by the Chinese in honor of their ancestors. For the sake of brevity, this incident, and many others which would require to be noticed in a complete history of Chinese missions, was suppressed. There could be no other reason for omitting to discuss an event which, in all its aspects, reflects equal honor upon the Holy See and upon the Society of Jesus. 1. The dispute turned, not upon any question of Faith, which among Catholics is happily impossible, but solely upon a question of fact, with respect to which even the Vicar of Christ claims no infallibility. 2. The Holy See had long before instructed the missionaries to suppress no rites or customs of the heathen which were not manifestly at variance with the spirit of the Gospel. " Nulla ratione suadete illis populis, ut ritus suos, consuetudines, et mores mutent, ne sint apertissime religioni et bonis moribus contraria." Histoire Apologetique de la Conduite desJesuites de la Chine, p. 5 (1700). 3. The Jesuits had employed eighteen years, with their customary prudence, in endeavoring to ascertain, from every authority whom it was possible to con- sult, whether the rites alluded to were in their nature civil or religious. From all they received the same reply. The Emperor, who perfectly understood the grounds of their solicitude ; Mandarins of all orders, both Christian and pagan ; Literates, and members of various tribunals, who were especially conversant with such points ; and lastly, the most virtuous and enlightened of their own disciples, concurred in the declaration that these rites were purely civil. 4. The Dominicans, moved only by the zeal for religion which has always dis- tinguished that illustrious order, but perhaps less favorably placed for judging the question, refused to allow their converts to take any part in this national observance. Upon this, the matter was referred to Rome. 5. The sentence of Innocent X., which was necessarily provisional, disallowed the observance in question, " till the Holy See should determine otherwise." But this first brief inspired by religious precaution, was modified by Alexander VII., and again by Clement IX., whose decisions left the matter, in effect, to the con- science of each individual Christian, according to the precept of St. Paul, " to him 142 CHAPTER II. PART II. PROTESTANT MISSIONS. AND now we have to exhibit the first example of that instruc- tive Contrast of which every part of the earth will furnish a new one, and which it is the main purpose of these volumes to trace, in every land in which the Church and the Sects have confronted each other. What the Church can do, we have seen ; let us ask the Sects to unfold, in their turn, the secrets of their annals. The day has at length arrived when we can apply to them the formidable test, J?y their fruits ye shall know them. And we have no reason to suppose that they will shrink from the trial. Protestantism has not usually worn a timid or modest front. Its voice has hitherto been loud and menacing, and in its passage through the north and west of Europe it has affected the mien of a conqueror rather than of a suppliant. that esteemeth any thing to be unclean, to him it is unclean. . . . Blessed is he that condemneth not himself in that which he alloweth." Rom. xiv. The case calls for few observations. However prejudicial the controversy may have been for a season to the progress of the missions, because it betrayed to the heathen for the first time a difference of opinion in their Christian teach- ers, it is impossible not to admit that it reveals, on the part of all concerned, the purest zeal and the most perfect abnegation of self. The Holy See was willing to peril the loss of a whole empire, which seemed every year to approach more nearly the epoch of its conversion, rather than even run the risk of sanctioning a doubtful observance. The Dominicans, moved by the same spirit, refused to accept a responsibility which conscientious motives urged them to decline. The Jesuits, though convinced that the first judgment was a mistake, ac- cepted it with that unfaltering obedience of which they were ever the most perfect models. " The brief," said one of their lay members, writing from Pekin, " has in no degree discouraged the missionaries. The Holy Father has spoken ; that suffices. There is no longer a word to be said ; they do not even allow themselves a gesture. They are silent, and obey." Lettres Edifianten, tome xx., p. 523. Lastly, at least one of the Dominicans confessed, long after the discussion was closed, that he " believed the Jesuits were right." It seems to have been one of the privileges which their sublime founder ob- tained for the Jesuits, that, while everywhere exposed to calumny and per- secution, they should always be justified by events, and almost always by the voluntary testimony of their accusers themselves. MISSION'S IN CHINA. 143 But the inevitable hour of trial arrives at last for all human things, and Protestantism must accept, with whatever repug- nance, the inexorable judgment which it is the province of history to pronounce upon all the works of man. The introduction of Protestantism into China has been de- scribed by Mr. Gutzlaff, one of its earliest and most conspicuous advocates, and it is to his pages that we shall tirst have recourse. One remark, however, is needful by way of preface. Thus far we have spoken of grave men, engaged in a grave \vork. The sweet but solemn figure of Ricci arid Schaal, of Verbiest and Parennin, of Sanz and Dufresse, and their martyred successors, has not yet faded from our recollection. We have now to hear of others, to whom, though professing another faith, we must endeavor to do justice. Jf, then, it should be found that the literal citation of their own words, the bare recital of their acts, reads like a satire, let not this be imputed as a fault to the annalist, who does but quote the one and record the other. If the history which a multitude of Protestant witnesses have traced of their own operations in China should seem, to remove us, at one step, from the region of heroism to that of comedy, the writer, whose only aim is to present an epitome of their narratives, is evidently not responsible for this result. That he should abstain from unadvised or superfluous comment, the reader, to whom alone the office of judge belongs, may reason- ably require ; but this is all which he is entitled to demand. And with this caution we commence the history of Protestant- ism in China. DR. MORRISON. Mr. Gutzlaff 's narrative opens after this manner : "Dr. Mor- rison was the first herald of the Gospel who landed on the shores of China."* A few years later, Dr. White, a Protestant American bishop, used this language, in his Instructions for the Missionaries to China : " You cannot be ignorant that in a former age the Christian religion was extensively propagated in China, being countenanced by successive emperors, and others of high rank in the empire."f Mr. Gutzlaff was not ignorant of this historical fact, for he often bears unwilling testimony, as we shall see, to the noble warfare of the Catholic missionaries ; but it was convenient to forget, in introducing his hero, what everybody else remembered. Dr. Morrison, * China Opened, vol. ii., ch. xv., p. 233. f Oydopadia of American Literature, by Duyckink, vol. i., p. 301 (1855). 144 CHAPTER II. then, was " the first herald," if not of the Gospel, at least of Protestantism, in China, and we are invited by his various biog- raphers to take note of his life and works in that land. We have ourselves no knowledge of either, but his friends and com- panions will freely supply whatever information we desire. Dr. Morrison, they tell us, commenced life in the humble guise of " apprentice to a last and boot-tree maker." By honorable industry he rose from this lowly state to the office of a preacher, and, after some experience in this new function, accepted an offer, in spite of the remonstrance of his family, to proceed to Canton. On his voyage out, his widow he was twice married informs us that he " sat him patiently down to the Jesuit Harmony of the Gospels, composed in Chinese, and copied out every syllable of it for his own future use." It was impossible to acknowledge more frankly his obligation to the men whom he was now going to assist, or supplant, in convert- ing the empire of China. His biographer adds, with pardona- ble enthusiasm, that perhaps " angelic eyes sometimes looked over his shoulder, beholding with glowing admiration both the wisdom and goodness of God in thus training the man who was to unbar the gates of life to the millions of the East."* As, however, his other biographers unanimously attest that Mr. Morrison never unbarred any gates whatever, not even his own, which he always kept carefully locked, the millions of the East remained wholly unconscious of his presence. Arrived at Macao, we learn from Mr. Ellis, a well-known Protestant missionary, that "so strong was his sense of the necessity of caution, so unwilling was he to obtrude himself on the notice of the people of Macao, that he never ventured out of his house. "f Sow, there were only two classes of people at Macao, the Chinese and the Catholics ; from the former he had nothing to fear, since the government was in the hands of the Portuguese; and of the latter he says himself, "The Portu- guese Roman Catholics'do not do any thing violent against us ;" while elsewhere he allows that they behaved to him with great civility, even conveying his letters and parcels between Macao and Canton, and sometimes giving or lending him books. Mr. Ellis adds, therefore, with apparent reason, that " he carried his precaution further than was necessary ; but it seemed better to err on the safe side." Perhaps it would have been still safer to have remained in England, where he could at least have taken exercise freely ; whereas " the first time he ventured out into the fields adjoining the town of Macao (we are still quoting * Memoirs of Eobert Morrison, D.D., by his Widow, vol. i., p. 134. f Brief Notice of China and Siam, by Rev. W. Ellis, p. 59. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 145 Mr. Ellis), " was in a moonlight night, under the escort of two Chinese." But these timid and fugitive excursions, which could hardly have compensated him for so long a voyage, were evidently not his only employment, for his widow tells us, that while at Macao, he " found an object of tender esteem," who henceforth occupied a prominent place in all his thoughts. If we were speaking of Mr. Morrison simply as a British citizen, it would perhaps be ungenerous to notice the incidents of his domestic life; but as they are obtruded upon us by his partial biogra- phers, who seem to think that they suitably illustrate the career of " the first herald" of Protestantism in China, we have no alternative but to take them into account in estimating his public character. From this time forth, then, the pages of Mr. Morrison's journal abound with ardent allusions to " my beloved Mary," which alternate with texts of Scripture, and other more or less con- gruous topics. If his wife, for they were speedily married, has a headache, he records, in a volume which it was his intention to print, that "it pleased the Lord" to support her in some unex- pected way; and if he has one himself, she not the first, but the second wife presently writes, that he did not " murmur," but that " his entire acquiescence in the arrangements of Divine Providence sustained his mind."* Such were their mutual reflections on this familiar malady. But his journal has many entries of the same class. " It would be all easy," he exclaims at one moment, "if Mary were well!" but the next, rebuking this transient weakness, he adds, " Patience, O my soul !" His soul, of which he candidly reveals the secrets, seems to have been in constant need of these admonitions. On one occasion he says, " My mind is in a serious frame, a little depressed, a little melancholy; but still holding fast." On another day the entry is, " I have to-day \>eQv. pretty comforta- ble ;" but on the next there was a change for the worse in his fitful and intermittent piety, and he was only " tolerably com- fortable." A little later the season of gloom recurs, and he is " weighed down with an accumulated load of guilt. But as all these passages, and many more like them, were destined to travel sixteen thousand miles, and to be published in England, he presently throws off this incubus of guilt, assumes a more cheerful tone, and rejoices, in characteristic language, to be once more under " the benignant government of Jehovah." There is no better test of a man's character than his habitual language. Mr. Morrison's was, to say the least, peculiar. If * Memoirs, vol. i., p. 294. 11 146 CHAPTER II. he writes to one of the directors of the missionary society which employed him, and alludes, as he always does on such occasions, to some religious topic, he suddenly exclaims, " Pardon, dear sir, my breaking off to vent the workings of my mind at this moment."* Perhaps a man really overcome by religious emotion would have been more careful to hide than to print it. Sometimes he is more natural, and then he says crudely, " But for the cause I serve, I would gladly exchange my present situation for any in England or Scotland of fifty pounds a year,"f a sentiment which, if not apostolic, was at all events perfectly genuine. But we are now sufficiently acquainted with Mr. Morrison's character, and may proceed to review his actions. We next find him settled at Canton. " In the close of the year 1818," says Mr. Ellis, " he received an appointment in the Honorable Company's factory, which he has held to the present time (1834), w T ith credit to himself and satisfaction to the Com- pany, and without neglecting the great object of his mission." When we learn, as we shall do presently, how the " great object" advanced, we shall have no difficulty in believing that it suffered very little from his conflicting avocations in the factory ; espe- cially as his colleague Mr. Milne tells us, in his Retrospect of the Mission, "all that the missionaries to China could fre- quently do" he means the Protestant missionaries " was to address an individual or two, with fear and trembling, in an inner apartment, with the doors securely locked" It seems they still adopted the same excessive precautions at Canton which Morrison had employed at Macao ; and while the Catholic missionaries and their converts were accepting martyrdom in every part of the empire, these heralds of another religion were cautiously hiding themselves in what a vehement preacher of their own sect calls, with honest contempt, a skulking and precarious sojourn in obscurity and disguise. "j Mr. Ellis, however, though he relates all these incidents, is of opinion, that " to persevere under such circumstances," as a great many merchants and clerks at Canton were doing at the same moment, " required no common strength of princi- ple, no faint and wavering love to Christ and love to souls, and no mere transient impulse of desire for their salvation." What- ever else we may think of this sentiment, we cannot at least deny, that Mr. Ellis is in all respects a suitable biographer of Mr. Morrison. It appears that Morrison's salary at the factory was five hundred pounds a year, "which was, after a few years, in- * Memoirs, p. 166. f P. 310. \ China and the Chinese Mission, by Rev. James Hamilton, p. 20. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 147 creased to one thousand pounds."* It was on his promotion to this income, which he no doubt faithfully earned, that his widow makes the following remark : " Thus did the Supreme Disposer of all events attest the fidelity of His servant, and make plain his way before him !" We may venture, however, to doubt whether the acquisition of a liberal income is always a conclusive proof of acceptance with the " Supreme Disposer." tc Blessed is he who hath a thousand a year," though it expresses a popular conviction, is hardly an accurate version of the First Beatitude. But Mr. Morrison, already a " missionary" and a factory clerk, had other sources of income. He was also a private tutor, and makes mention of " a Dutch youth, my fifth pupil."f It was perhaps fortunate that " the millions of the East" never lifted the latch of his door, for he could hardly have had much time at their disposal. He found leisure, however, to pursue his study of Chinese, and as he had begun with a Harmony of the Gospels composed by the Jesuits, so he continued to the end to profit by the labors of Catholics. " I cannot refrain from inserting," he says, " that I have now the assistance of Chinese Christians of the Romish Church" Elsewhere his journal records, " I read part of the Exposition of the Ten Command- ments by the Catholics" His immediate teacher was Abel Yun, " a Koman Catholic Chinese from Pekin," and a convert of the Jesuits, who had " taught him the Latin language, which he speaks fluently." At another time the entry is, " Received from a Chinese Roman Catholic a present of three small volumes ; his younger brother, an intelligent boy, sold me a book of Meditations."^: But his intercourse with Catholics was not always limited to the purchase or acceptance of their books. Sometimes he even visited their churches, where he saw multitudes of Chris- tians a " vast number" is his own expression worshipping God, not "with locked doors," nor ''in fear and trembling," but as openly as they might have done in London or Paris. " I went," he says, " on Friday evening to the Roman Catholic cathedral," where he found the people commemorating the Passion of our Lord. There was, he tells us, in the church " a representation of Jesus," and " the preacher called upon the people to look at the part into which the spear was thrust, and held out his finger to point to it. In a corner was a figure as large as life, laid in a tomb, and exhibited as the body of Jesus. * History of the Propagation of Christianity among the Heathen, by Rev. W. Brown, M.D., vol. ii., p. 252. f Memoirs, vol. i., p. 293. i Missionary Transactions of the London Missionary Society, vol. iii., p. 328. 14:8 CHAPTER II. The people went forward, one after another, and kissed the feet of the figure."* And then Mr. Morrison went home, meditating perhaps upon this instructive scene, and comprehending how the Chinese Christians had grown familiar with the Passion of their Redeemer, and whence they had derived courage to confess Him openly before men, and even, when the occasion arose, to lay down their lives for him. Mr. Morrison, however, continued, as Mr. Ellis says, " to err on the safe side." But he remembered that he had been sent to China as " a missionary," and that he must at least do something to keep up the character ; and so, in the florid language of Mr. Ellis, " this devoted missionary tried the practicability of print- ing part of the Scriptures." The Catholics had anticipated him in this good work by four hundred years, as Neander has told us in speaking of John de Monte Corvino ; and the candid Mr. Med- hurst was aware, as he confesses, that a second time, at a later date, " the Catholics had translated the major part of the New Testament into Chinese." Mr. Morrison was also conscious of this fact, and endeavored to turn it to good account. " The Acts of the Apostles," we learn from his biographer," the trans- lation of which had been the work of some Roman Catholic missionary, was his first undertaking."f He might well confess his obligations " to the Catholics," who, as Abel Remusat says, " composed in Chinese in a style equal to the best authors of that country." But Mr. Morrison, even with the aid of such masters, could only spoil their work. His version of the Scriptures has long since been abandoned as useless; his Grammar, Protestants tell us, "is rather a record of the imperfection than of the com- pleteness of his own progress ;"J while his Dictionary, though copied from that of Father Premare, is " full of faults " according to Klaproth, and " very defective " according to Mr. Taylor Meadows.) But it was nothing to write books, imperfect as they were, and costing enormous sums, unless he could get them into circulation. There was, however, some danger of irritating the Chinese, and Mr. Morrison, we have seen, was accustomed to precautions. "As to circulating the books which I have printed," he says, with perfect candor, " there is nothing done in this respect but with the utmost secrecy and caution, and in a way that could not easily be traced to me." Yet an ardent Protestant assures us, that " the Jesuits," meaning the Catholic missionaries, " have * Memoirs, vol. i., p. 361. f Brief Notice, &c., p. 61. Monthly Review, vol. Ixix., p. 469. Note to Timkowski's Travels, vol. i., ch. ix., p. 350. | Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China, p. 24. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 149 never found any difficulty in circulating the books which they have printed in Chinese ; but, on the contrary, they have been obliged, after circulating a large impression, to print a second edition."* Men who exposed their lives every hour of the day were not likely to indulge excessive caution about their books ; and in noticing the contrast, we may perhaps accept the expla- nation of an English Protestant, whose sympathies were all in his favor, that " Dr. Morrison's labors were not of a dazzling and heroic order, "f Thus far this " first herald " of Protestantism in China hardly attracts our sympathy; nor can we agree with his amiable biographer, that*" angelic eyes," which love to look on brave and saintly deeds, were likely to derive much satisfaction from the contemplation of his cautious proceedings. But it is time to inquire, before we pass to others, what success he had in inducing the refractory "millions of the East" to enter "the gates of life." He will tell us himself. " On the Lord's day I have preached to the Chinese in my own house, but I have not to rejoice over them as converted to God."J Yet in the next sentence he tells us of four Catholic missionaries just banished from Pekin, because they had been too successful in the same attempt. Again ; while he is himself carefully shut up in his house, " with locked doors," he frankly admits, though apparently without deriving any instruction from the contrast, that " the Christians here" i. e. the Catholics " are discovered by their refusing to subscribe to the public idolatrous rites of the heathen." Speaking of an outburst of persecution in the prov- ince of Su-tchuen, he says of the Catholics : "The two leaders, who would not recant, are ordered to be strangled immediately. Thirty-eight, who also refused to recant, are ordered to be sent to Tartary, to be given as slaves to the Eleuths.'' A little later, in 1820, he notices, that "four poor men, barbers, at Pekin, were seized, and would not renoimce 'the European religion.' J: So that they were everywhere the same, whether at Canton, Pekin, or in the interior provinces of the empire; even these poor Chinese neophytes barbers, shopkeepers, and women being more courageous soldiers of the Cross than this educated and opulent representative of English Protestantism. Again and again he refers to similar examples, but only to adhere more closely to his own manner of life. "A French missionary," he says, " after repeated orders were sent to him, was obliged to leave; whilst 1 remained unmolested." Why * Memoir on sending the Scriptures to China, by William Moseley, p. 22. | The Cross and the Dragon, by John Kesson, ch. xv., p. 211. i Memoirs, vol. i , p. 298. | Ibid., vol. ii., p. '65. 150 CHAPTER II. should they molest him ? What was a servant in the English factory to them ? " There have been edicts," he adds triumph- antly, " against the Roman Catholic missionaries, threatening them with severe penalties ; but my name and pursuits are, I believe, wholly unknown to the Chinese government."* No doubt they were, although he had now been there about six years. If St. Paul had practised as many precautions as Mr. Morrison, he would have known neither bonds nor imprison- ment, neither scourging nor death, but the heathen would have remained unconverted. The entry in his journal of March 15th, 1813, is as follows: " Present at worship only A-Fo, Low-He' en, A-Pan, and A-Yun. At the beginning of worship they were irreverent and laughed," which seems to have surprised him ; yet surely the spectacle of a married gentleman, in an easy attitude, reading something out of a book, was not awe-inspiring, and might well appear to this mirthful congregation far below even their own idea of " worship." On the 18th of April, " six were present ;" and on the 9th of May he is able to say, " I was mistaken in saying that I never had more than nine ; there were this morning," including the ladies of his party and the servants, " ten persons at worship." But on the 23d of the same month cornes the sorrowful admission, "I ain concerned that none seem to feel the power of truth ;" and again, a few Sundays later, for their religion only manifested itself on Sunday, " I am concerned that my ministrations are apparently in vain." In the follow- ing year, 1814, " on February 28th, Lord's day, I addressed five persons, from the 12th chapter of Hebrews. I was myself deeply interested in the subject." Unfortunately the interest began and ended with himself. And twelve months later, he is still "conducting worship with Mrs. Morrison and Mrs. Milne ;" the " millions of the East" being completely deaf to the feeble accents of so cautious a herald. Three years after, Mr. Medhurst still reports, that " his labors were confined to the narrow sphere of his own household." In 1820, the same sterility is once more attested by the various colleagues who had now. joined him, and Morrison writes to the society at home, "All the new missionaries com- plain to me of being dispirited. "f Yet Mr. Medhurst, speak- ing of this very year, says, " A French missionary was strangled in the province of Hoo-pih, by order of the government ; and L'Amiot, who had been twenty-seven years in Pekin, was banished to Macao." Mr. Medhurst adds, " they have now * Memoirs, vol. i., p. f Vol. ii., p. 26. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 151 Catholic communities in all the provinces, and in many there are public chapels, where service is performed by native priests." And then he notices, with not unnatural admiration, that the Lazarist Fathers had even established an ecclesiastical seminary " in Tartary, beyond the wall of China."* In 1821, for lapse of time brings no change, "Dr. Morrison was much concerned at the small effect produced by his labors." In 1822, he still writes, "there are few natives on whose con- science Divine truth has made an impression." In 1832, after ten years more of enormous expenditure, " only ten persons have been baptized ;" every one of whom was immediately, in spite of what Morrison himself calls their "obscure views," provided for by " the mission," and employed in printing, but apparently without securing their fidelity ; for some years after, the Rev. Howard Malcolm, who was sent to visit and report upon all the Protestant missions in the East, candidly informed his employers : " there is no Chinese convert at Canton, nor religious services in that language, nor giving of tracts. 5 ' f And this is confirmed by Dr. Wells Williams, an American mis- sionary, who confesses, in 1839, that " the prospect at his death was nearly as dark as when he landed ;"J while even of the " baptized" printers Morrison himself records, that they were of such doubtful morality, that they were commonly addicted to theft, and, on one occasion, " stole several cases of type." We may now pass to other witnesses. The "first herald" of Protestantism in China has confessed his failure. Whatever he put his hand to came to naught. He established a newspaper, and it died with the first number. He founded a school, and out of a total of twenty-nine pupils, nine were dismissed for " bad conduct" or " stupidity," three ran away, and eight were removed by their parents. [ He published books which have long been abandoned as worthless ; and after expending either upon himself or his literary failures, about one hundred thousand pounds, contributed chiefly by the people of these islands, did no more towards the conversion of China than if he had never quitted the shores of England. In 1834, the year of his death, his journal contains this passage: "It is thirty years since I was accepted as a missionary in Mr. Hardcastle's counting- house." Who Mr. Hardcastle was, and how he came to cumulate in his own person the functions of a merchant and a pontiff, is not explained ; but as almost the last entry still deplores his " small * China; its State and Prospects, ch. ix., p. 243. f Travels in South Eastern Asia, p. 189. The Middle Kingdom, vol. ii., ch. xix., p. 327. 8 Memoirs, vol. ii., p. 67. j Chinese Repository, vol. xii., p. 623. 152 CHAPTER II. success," this he appears to have thought he ought to account for. He does it in this manner : " I think it is utterly imprac- ticable to any but a Roman Catholic missionary, who has persons in the interior already attached to his cause," to venture into the country. Yet his colleague, Mr. Medhurst, answers this unworthy plea by the honest rejoinder, that " the Catholic mis- sionaries had once no knowledge of or adherents in China, but went forth in the first instance unprotected ;" and Morrison repeatedly acknowledges that the heathen being now on the watch for them, they run the same risks, perhaps greater, at the present day than in earlier times. "Three European Roman Catholic missionaries," he says in one place, " entered China about a year ago ; . . . . there was a. great risk of losing their lives if discovered by the government." And again : " There is a native Roman Catholic at the seminary in Macao, who is pre- paring for a mission to Corea. Many have lost their lives there, but this person is willing to sacrifice. himself. He offers himself up to God"* He only stops short of the confession which a more candid coreligionist makes for him, when he says : " The risks the Catholic missionary would run, and the dangers he would hazard, are greater than those which the Protestant mis- sionary feels himself called upon to encounter."*)' In other words, the latter is willing to write and preach, but not willing to suffer or die. And this invariable and admitted contrast between the two classes is thus explained, with partial accuracy, by an American Protestant bishop, who had noted the same unwelcome fact in other lands : " Why is it that we contemplate such an enterprise with terror? Is it not because we have lost the true original idea of the ministerial commission ?"J In 1834:, Dr. Morrison reached the climax of his fortunes, and was made vice-consul, with a salary of one thousand three hundred pounds a year, "rather an anomalous place for a mis- sionary," as he himself observes, though he cheerfully acquiesced in the anomaly, and would have profited by it without scruple ; but in this year he died, and left his place to others, to run the same career, record the same confessions, and repeat the same failures. * Memoirs, vol. i., p. 403. f The Cross and the Dragon, ch. xiv., p. 189. \ Narrative of a Tour in Turkey and Persia, by Rev. Horatio Southgate, vol. i., ch. xvii., p. 293. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 153 ME. MILNE AND MB. MEDHUEST. The second herald of Protestantism in China was Mr. Milne ; but as Morrison reports that " Mr. Milne is engaged in preach- ing to a few Europeans," and Medhurst adds that, " finding that the public preaching of the Gospel, and free intercourse with the natives, were difficult in China, Mr. Milne removed to Malacca,"* we need not ask from him any further testimony to the character of Protestant missions. The third was Mr. Medhurst, well known by his work on China, and a man of considerable ability and remarkable can- dor. It is Mr. Medhurst who quotes with approbation the confession of his colleague Mr. Milne, with respect to Ricci and his followers : " They will be equalled by few, and perhaps rarely exceeded by any ;" and then he adds, with a kind of involuntary enthusiasm, "They have long since joined the army of martyrs, and are now wearing the crowns of those who spared not their lives unto the death, but overcame by the blood of the Lamb, and the word of his testimony." Mr. Medhurst goes still further, and forcibly contrasts, though perhaps without intending to do so, the constant valor of the Catholic missionaries with the incorrigible pusillanimity of their Protestant contemporaries. " Dozens of Catholic priests," he says, " are every year clandestinely introduced into the country ;" while " Protestant missionaries limited their efforts for a quarter of a century to those parts where Europeans generally reside, or where the British and Dutch governments afforded protection. "f He notices also, though without comment, the apostolic poverty of the same courageous men. u The salary of each native priest," he says, " is eighty-two dollars yearly," rather less than seventeen pounds. He might have added, if he had known it, that even the French and Spanish priests, some of whom are members of great European families, only receive five hundred francs, or twenty pounds, per annum, for their whole support ; and even from this scanty allowance " a por- tion is deducted, either for the support of the college of the mission, or for providing wine for the Holy Sacrifice, as well as books, &c., &c." Mr. Medhurst gives us some information about the Protestant " converts," whom he describes with his usual sincerity. Of " one of the first baptized" he reports, that " when told that * China, &c., ch. x., p. 264. f lUd., ch. vi., p. 135. 154: CHAPTER II. money was never given, except for work done or goods deliv- ered, he became indifferent, and is now, we fear, gone back."* Of another he says, u he was so far softened as to worship Jehovah, though he continued to adore the idols of the country." This convert had apparently adopted the Roman universality of worship, and was quite willing to admit any number of new gods, provided he was not asked to abandon the old. Of another convert, a certain Chin, Mr. Medhurst gives this account : " He is a smoker of opium. He will of course find eight to ten dollars per month very inadequate." It appears, then, that this was their bribe to a " convert." " He once Eromised fair to be a Christian ; when in affliction he destroyed is idol ; when restored, gave loose to evil habits. A still more curious specimen of Protestant neophytes was Lee, a Chinese of Malacca, evidently a man of considerable resources, who speculated with much ingenuity upon the forlorn solitude of his wealthy teachers. Allowing Mr. Medhurst to suppose that he was about to desert him, though nothing was further from his thoughts than to forfeit his lucrative friendship, the latter wrote off urgently to Morrison, entreating him to promise that Lee should be appointed " the first Chinese teacher in the college," which was precisely what that intelligent individual aimed at % The college here referred too was established at Malacca, with the object of providing native Protestant teachers in China. Its history deserves a brief review. Thousands of pounds were expended upon it, and these were the results : Mr. Howard Malcolm reported, after an official visit, that " the schools so vigorously and so long maintained, have not been prolific of spiritual good. Thousands who have attended them are now heads of families, but no Malay Christian, that I could learn^is to be found in the place. ,"f Dr. Wells Williams adds, that the " Protestant missions among the Chinese emigrants in Malacca, Penang, Singapore, Rhio, Borneo, and Batavia, have never taken much hold upon them, and they are at present all suspended or abandoned,"^ after an expenditure which no report will ever reveal to the world. The Rev. Dr. Brown, the historian of Protestant missions, says, that " these stations had been carried on for many years, and though much labor and money had been expended upon them, they had been attended with little success, particularly as regarded the conversion of souls." " The Anglo- Chinese College," he adds, " dragged on for years a languid * Ch. xi., p. 297. f Travels in 8. Eastern Asia, ch. ii., p. 114. | The Middle Kingdom, vol. ii., ch. xix., p. 331. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 155 existence," but, in spite of its cost, " was never in a state of much efficiency, as regarded either professors or students."* Once they made a convulsive eifort to arrest its decay, by announcing that they would admit, not Chinese, for whom it was intended, but " persons of any Christian comrnunion."f No one came, and in 1842 it was closed, and transferred to Hong-Kong, with results which shall be noticed hereafter. Such, as their own witnesses attest, was the issue of all the Protestant schemes in the Archipelago. On the other hand, as early as 1824, there were already three thousand Catholics in Malacca alone ; and in Singapore, as Commodore Wilkes notices, although the Protestants " have not met with any success, the Catholics have already made one hundred and fifty proselytes to their faith, though they have only so recently arrived.":); And Mr. Malcolm adds, that " at Singapore, where extraordinary efforts have been made, not a single Malay has yet been converted to the Protestant religion; while the Catholic missionaries, who have two churches there, have effected a great number of conversions amongst the Malays, the Chinese, and others, and assemble every Sunday in their churches a considerable concourse of men of all religions. What can be the reason of this difference ?" The only one he can suggest is, that " the Papist missionaries are in general men of pure morals, and live much more humbly. " A few years later, in 1856, the handful of Catholics had become seven thousand, and in that single year four hundred and fourteen pagans were converted and baptized. || At a later period, Mr. Windsor Earl reports once more " that the labors of British missionaries have been absolutely thrown .away." He notices moreover the usual fact, that " they have invariably remained at the chief settlements of the Europeans;" and that "the effects of their labors are rarely heard of, except through the medium of missionary publications brought out from England"*^ Mr. Walter Gibson relates, in 1856, of the city of Batavia, that " the Catholic clergy were the only ones who ever paid-any visits of mercy and charity."** Finally, when M. Papin visited the defunct Malacca college, one of the Protestant missionaries frankly avowed, " that the enormous expenses incurred in its construction were only so * Hist. Prop. Christianity, vol. ii., p. 264. f British Settlements in the Straits of Malacca, by T. J. Newbold, Esq., vol. i., ch. iv., p. 182. \ United States Exploring Expedition, vol. v., p. 396. Travels in S. Eastern Asia, iii., 24. j Madras Catholic Directory for 1860, p. 175. ^ The Eastern Seas, cli. xii., p. 398. ** Glance at the East Indian Archipelago, p. 385. 156 CHAPTER II. much money thrown into the sea, and that all which had been reported of it in Europe was pure charlatanism."* Let us return to Mr. Medhurst. In a letter to Morrison, who made no secret of his own hopeless failure, he asks, " Why are we not successful in conversions ?"\ The true answer does not seem to have occurred to him, and the " sad disunion" among the Protestant missionaries is the only explanation which he admits. Perhaps the evidence still to be offered in these pages may afford a more complete one. His own failure, in spite of his talents and genial character, appears to have been as manifest to his intimate associates as to himself; for Mr. Davidson says of him, just before he made his final move to Shang-hae, in the hope of redeeming the years which he had already wasted, " Mr. Medhurst has been a per- sonal friend of mine for these twenty years, and he will believe me when I say, that I heartily wish him all success ; but of his success I have my doubts !"J Mr. Medhurst, who was too honest to conceal or pervert the facts which were continually under his observation, appears to sum up his conviction of the impotence of all Protestant efforts to convert the heathen, especially in China, in these words : " The Christian public having got the idea that China is shut, must retain their opinion until we can get men of God to open it." Yet at the very moment when Mr. Medhurst pronounced this sentence upon Protestant missionaries, the eighteen prov- inces of China had been constituted into as many apostolic vicariates, in each of which there was a Catholic bishop, in many of them two, besides other prelates in Corea and the kingdom of Annam,not one of whom was tempted to doubt that China had been " open to men of God" for many centuries. There is much conflict among Protestant writers on the question whether China is, or ever will be, "open" to their efforts. The differences of opinion are remarkable. Dr. Reed says, " China is as open now, and has been for the last twenty years, as it ever will be till we strive to enter," a statement with which his readers will probably concur. On the other hand, Mr. Howard Malcolm affirms with energy, from actual observation, u I am not only persuaded that at this moment China is not open to the settlement of Christian teachers, but satisfied that Protestants are far from being ready to have it open."] In 1849, a Protestant missionary says, " China is * Annales, tome vii., p. 585. f Morrison's Memoirs, vol. i., p. 14. \ Trade and Travel in the Far East, ch. xvii., p. 279. Visit to the American Churches, vol. i., p. 76. 1 Travels, &c., vol. ii., p. 196. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 157 now ripe for the Gospel ;"* but in 1854 the society which em- ployed him is still asking, " Has the time arrived for sending the Gospel to China ?"f Evidently the whole question depends upon what these gentlemen understand by " open." China is quite as open to Christian teachers as Thrace was to St. Paul, or Britain to St. Augustine indeed a good deal more so. "When I left China," says Mr. Lay, "there were at least half a million of natives living within the range of our daily excur- sions, with whom a missionary might have as many interviews as he pleased.";): Lieut. Forbes adds, that " perfect toleration is granted to all sects of Christianity in the live ports ;" and Mr. Tomlin declared, in 1844, sixteen years ago, that " through the length and breadth of the land an English mis- sionary might pass with little difficulty, as the writer and all his missionary brethren who have been much amongst the Chinese can attest."! Yet the Protestant missionaries, though danger has long since disappeared, at least in the regions which they frequent, are still asking if China is " open," still repeat- ing Mr. Medhurst's question, " Why are we not successful in conversions ?" MR. GUTZLAFF. Our next witness is Mr. Gutzlaff, the most ambitious and ac- tive of all the "heralds" whom Protestantism has sent to China. It will be useful to form some acquaintance with his character, and with the results of his busy life and labors. Of Ricci Mr. Gutzlaff says : " What might not Ricci have done had he dedicated his labors to the Blessed Redeemer ?"T Almost in the next page he quotes the letter of the Empress Helena of China to Pope Alexander YIL, in which she utters the prayer of her heart that " the emperor and all his subjects might learn to know and adore the true God, Jesus Christ." Mr. Gutzlaff does not ask himself who taught her that name, or who gave her courage to confess it, even from the steps of her imperial throne. Yet he might have known, and probably did know, what so many of his co-religionists in China have" pro- claimed. The Catholic missionaries, says Mr. Malcolm, taught u the glorious doctrine of the Divine Unity. The true God was V * Missionary Gleaner, July, 1852. f Ibid. August, 1854. j The Chinese as they are, ch. vi., p. 58. ^ Five Years in China, ch. xi., p. 185. | Missionary Journals, introd., p. 17. 1 History of China, by Rev. Charles Gutzlaff, vol. ii., p. 121. 158 CHAPTER II. set before the Chinese. Every part of the empire was pervaded by the discussion of the new faith. Thousands and tens of thousands saw and acknowledged the truth. True, they were Jesuits," a good many of them were Franciscans, Dominicans, or Lazarists, " but that very many of them were holy and devoted men is proved by their pure lives, severe labors, innu- merable privations, and serene martyrdom."* Mr. Hamilton also, a Presbyterian preacher, more violent and prejudiced than even most of his order, seems astonished at his own confession, that " some of their converts appear to have been exemplary Christians," and that " on the Trinity and Incarnation they are clear ; while the perfections of the Deity, the corruption of human nature, and redemption by Christ, are fully stated. "f Yet Mr. Gutzlaff could affect to doubt whether Ricci " dedicated his labors to the Blessed Redeemer.":): A few pages further on, forgetting what he had just said, Mr. Gutzlaff notices a modern Catholic bishop, Monseigneur de Saint Martin, who, as he says, " testified to Jesus Christ before the mandarins a noble testimony worthy to be recorded." In another place he relates, that " while the missionaries held assem- blies, and instituted congregations, in honor of the Holy Virgin, they had also assemblies where the most fervent Christians meditated upon the death and sufferings of our Saviour. " We shall see presently how many such assemblies Mr. Gutzlaff and his friends succeeded in forming. There is a strange inconsistency in Mr. GutzlafFs writings, at one time arrogant and boastful, at another almost abject, which makes it difficult to attach a definite meaning to his words. " Probably few men," says the Chinese interpreter to H. M. Civil Service, "have excelled Dr. Gutzlaff in the capacity for rapidly inditing sentences containing a number of propo- sitions not one of which should be correct. In fact, all his labors are characterized by superficiality."! At one moment he sneers at the Catholic missionaries for "propagating the legends of saints," and at another lauds their sublime confes- sions before the tribunals ; in one page he reproaches them for not preaching Christ, though they preached Him only, and in the next he espouses the cause of the Nestorians, who made void the whole doctrine of the Incarnation, against what he calls the * Travels, &c., vol. ii., p. 225. f China and the Chinese Mission, p. 15. | An official of the province of Kwang-tung reported to the emperor in 1851, chat he had collected from Catholic natives " books copied in our Chinese char- acter, which were aU about Jesus. Jesus was the person who was nailed on the cross." Quoted by Commander Brine, The Taeping Rebellion, ch. iv., p. 94. Journal of Three Voyages along the Coast of China, p. 398. I The Chinese and their Rebellion, ch. xviii., p. 376. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 159 "cold-hearted orthodoxy" of the Fathers of Ephesus. Yet Mr. Gutzlaff was eminent amongst the Protestant missionaries of China, and we are obliged to refer to him, both for the sake of his evidence, and also as a conspicuous specimen of a preacher of Protestantism to the heathen. Mr. GutzlafF travelled more than any of his colleagues, and boasted of it; but Mr, Malcolm, who evidently appreciated him, says : " To pour annually millions of tracts along the same line of coast ; to go in face of prohibitory edicts, and only as protected by cannon ; and to be at the expense of both tracts and voyage, while so many of the books are yet scarcely intel- ligible, is at best but a very imperfect mode of conducting a mission." And again he says : " Mr. Gutzlaff' s usefulness can extend little beyond his study and his scholars."* Like Mor- rison, he was a private tutor as well as a missionary, until he abandoned both callings for a more remunerative profession. Sometimes, we have said, Mr. Gutzlaff could use humble words. Here is an example : " Protestants have been anxious to occupy the outposts, rather than to enter the Chinese em- pire." He does not tell us why they displayed an anxiety so unusual in Christian missionaries, but he adds, " in the outer settlements, where the missionaries were at liberty to act, they have established schools, &c. . . . Yet the grand work of evangelizing China can scarcely be said to have commenced in earnest." And again : "There are ten native converts, truly a small number !"f But such modesty was unusual with him, and he desires the world to understand, that if he and his friends have completely failed in China, they have been much more successful in Siam. He hoped, perhaps, that no one would know any thing about the latter country, and forgot that Providence has its own witnesses. Let us follow him to Siam. " Of the various individuals mentioned as encouraging in the public journals of Messrs. Gutzlaff and Tomlin," says Mr. Mal- colm, who fortunately visited Siam, " none have continued so"^ The Protestant missionaries, said Dr. Ruschenberger a little later, " are toiling in a cause the success of which appears to be almost hopeless." Mr. Abeel, after protesting against " those favorable but false conclusions which are too frequently deduced from missionary journals," confesses of the pretended Protestant converts in Siam, " there were no grounds of cer- tainty for concluding that any had been renewed in the spirit * Travels, &c., vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 194. f Chirm Opened, vol. ii., ch. xv., p. 233. J Travels, &c., vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 159. Voyage Hound the World, by W. S. Ruschenberger, M.D., ch. xxxi., p. 310. 160 CHAPTER II. of their minds."* Long after, in 1842, th'e American Board for Foreign Missions unwillingly confess, that "the members have utterly failed to establish a permanenjt school among the Siamese.''t ^ n d then comes the usual contrast. Mr. Craw- furd admits that, more than thirty years ago, the " Catholic Christians of Siam" were becoming a numerous body.J Dr. Richardson, who was sent thither on a mission by the Indian government, speaks with honor of the "highly respectable men" by whom the Catholics were instructed in the faith, and adds, that besides the native Christians, "there are fourteen hun- dred Cochin-Chinese Roman Catholics." Mr. Abeel angrily describes the same class at Batavia, where " a number of Cochin- Chinese," he says, "professed the Roman Catholic religion, and evinced a degree of caution and bigotry which had no doubt been inspired by their calculating leaders." It seems that these Chinese confessors, driven by persecution from their own country, rejected his tracts with contempt, and told him, as he confesses, in answer to his own remark that Protestants made no converts, " The fault is in your doctrines ; if they were true, there would be no lack of genuine disciples."! Their own faith had been proved under sore trial, and when they told him to his face that there were " thousands upon thousands" of Catholics in their own country, this Protestant teacher, who could not so much as induce a single soul, in China, Siam, Batavia, or anywhere else, even to listen to him, makes this comment on the religion for which they had sacrificed all : " If the word of these men can be relied on, how widely prevalent must be its errors, and how anti-Christian its influence in Cochin-China ! 7; ^ An interesting illustration of the nature of that influence, as respects their instruction, is supplied by Mr. Finlayson, who was much struck by meeting a native * Journal of a Residence in China, by Rev. David Abeel, ch. x., p. 234. \ Reports, p. 159. \ Embassy to Siam, &c., ch. vi., p. 162. Journal of a Mission to the Coast of Siam, in Journal of the Asiatic Society of ^Bengal, vol. ix., p. 237. | It is necessary to resist the temptation, which occurs at almost every page, to furnish illustrations of the real character of Protestant missionaries, and of the solemn mendacity of their biographers ; but on this occasion we may relax the rule. Mr. Abeel, a mere adventurer, who never converted a single soul, and could only revile those who did, is thus described by the Rev. Dr. Ver- milye, in order to stimulate the waning interest of his countrymen, and attract fresh subscriptions : " Splendid worldly triumphs did not mark his way. But how sweet the thought that from far-distant parts of the globe the Saviour's ransomed ones shall greet this faithful missionary on the shores of life, and converted souls from various climes shall be crowns of his rejoicing in that day " Biographical Sketches of Distinguished American Missionaries, p. 241 ; edited by H. W. Pierson, M.A. (1852). *JT Journal, p. 150. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 161 who spoke Latin with great purity, and who " had received his education in Siam, in the Catholic seminary."* But the same influence was sometimes manifested in a manner which would be still more offensive to Mr. Abeel. The prime minister of Siam, we are told by Mr. Hugh Murray, having visited Eng- land towards the close of the seventeenth century, " had become a Protestant in London, but the diligence of the missionaries at Siam brought him within the pale of the Catholic Church. "f Lastly, Mr. Neale declares, that "it is not to be wondered at that the Siamese readily give ear to the Catholic priest, bound like their own in bonds of perpetual celibacy." And then he gives some account of the Protestant missionaries, to the num- ber of " seven or eight, and their families," located on the two banks of the river near Bangkok. " The missionaries on one side were at warfare with those on the opposite bank regarding certain points of Church doctrine ; but as they were all sup- ported by one society, they were compelled to have a board meeting once a month, to draw up reports, and send in their drafts for monthly pay.";f Captain Laplace also remarked during his stay in this coun- try, that " the missionaries established in Siam are chiefly occupied in disputing with one another, and condemning each other to eternal fire." On the other hand, " the Catholic Missionary Society at Bangkok, when I was there," says Mr. Neale, " consisted of one bishop and about ten French priests, besides one or two prose- lyte Chinese priests. Of the former I can hardly name one that was not endowed with every talent that strict collegiate education could afford ; and the latter were useful, because, besides being sincere Christians, they possessed the power of expounding the Scriptures to their Chinese brethren."! And this is confirmed by Mr. Earl, in spite of rooted prejudice, when he says, that the great success they have met with in Cochin- China, and in other parts of Eastern Asia, is to be attributed to "their entire devotion to the cause in which they are engaged," and their utter indifference u to pecuniary emolument."^ "The Catholic missionaries," says Sir John Bowring in 1857 it is well to continue the testimony to the latest moment " have certainly always exhibited a zeal, a patience, a devotion, the most perfect and persevering;" and then, after noticing that there are seven thousand and fifty Catholic converts in Siarn, he adds * Finlayson's Mission to Shim, ch. iii., p. 136. f Discoveries in Asia, vol. iii., book 5, ch. i., p. 233. \ Residence in Siam, ch. ii., p. 34. Campagne de Circumnavigation de la fregate I'Artemise, tome iv., p. 117. i Residence, &c., p. 39. \ The Eastern Seas, ch. xii., p. 394. 12 162 CHAPTER II. nearly forty years after Mr. GutzlafF 's venturesome account of his own and his friend's triumphs "it may be doubled if they made a single convert among the Siamese."* We have followed Mr. Gutzlaif to Siam, and the excursion has not been unprofitable. Precisely the same evidence, illustrating the same invariable contrast, might be supplied with respect to Singapore and Pulo- Pinang. At the latter place we hear, in 1852, of a Catholic seminary, with "one hundred and fifty native ecclesiastical students;" and at the former of a band of missionaries whose learning and virtues are recorded with enthusiasm, even by lay writers. Here the Abbe Mauduit "lived in the woods, at Boukat-Tima, in the midst of a colony of five hundred Chinese," whose attachment to religion and to its ministers had only been increased by suffering and exile. Here the Abbe Issaly was the companion of an aged Chinese priest, who was spending his last days in ministering to his "numerous Christian country- men at Singapore." " Oh, how insignificant are we all !" exclaims an eye-witness of their labors, " travellers, diplomat- ists, or consular agents, in comparison with these missionaries ! When 1 contemplated so much abnegation and so much zeal, when I saw some going forth to seek martyrdom in China, others pursuing the most wretched into their huts ... I w r as no longer surprised that, destitute and without aid, they had acquired an influence over the population which the Anglican clergy, with their wealth and their aristocratic habits, could not obtain. Others saw it as well as myself, groaned over it, but dared not utter their thoughts."f And it is not only in Siam and Batavia that Catholic Chinese are found rivalling in devotion and forti- tude the martyrs and confessors of their own land. Even in Japan Mr. Hodgson met Chinese Catholics, "who had a large col- lection of Roman Catholic books," and courage enough to recom- mend them openly to the Japanese.^ Even in the West Indies a Protestant minister angrily records that, " many Chinese Coolies have married among the Creoles, and have embraced Roman- ism.'^ It is certainly a striking fact, that while Chinese converts are added to the Church in so many foreign lands, and every- where display the same ardor and sincerity, the Protestant missionaries despair of converting them even in their own. The only additional passage which we will quote from Mr. Gutzlaff is one which supplies its own comment : " We sincerely hope," he says, " that henceforth Roman Catholic missionaries * The Kingdom ami People of Siam, vol. i., ch. xii., pp. 350, 371, 376. { Voyage dans VArchipel Indian, par V. Fontanier, Ancien Consul a Singa- pour, Me.mbre Correspondant de 1'Institut ; ch. xii., pp. 178-182 (1852). \ Residence in Japan, ch. x., p. 221 (1861). The West Indies, by Edward Bean Underbill, ch. iii., p. 49 (18G2). MISSIONS IN CHINA. 163 may emulate the Protestants in preaching Christ crucified !" Such was the parting counsel of Mr. Gutzlaff to the mission- aries of the Catholic Church. And yet the man who gave this advice, and bade others imitate his apostolic zeal, actually abandoned for a more lucrative calling, not only the office, but even the name of a missionary. "For some years before his death," we are told by Dr. Brown, "Mr. Gutzlaff had ceased to call himself a missionary."* He found it more profitable to " take the office of interpreter to the English commission," says Dr. Williams, " at a salary of eight hundred pounds. "f " He has lost much of his influence as a Christian minister," says the Rev. Gustavus Hines, " both among the natives and foreigners. Report affirms that he has fifteen thousand pounds deposited in the Bank of Australia, which he has accumulated while em- ployed as a missionary !"$ But he seems to have fallen still lower. " Mr. Gutzlaff is attached to the personal staff of the general as interpreter," says a British officer of rank, " but is, in fact, under Sir Hugh, head of the police." And even in this character he failed ; for the same authority tells us, that on an important occasion, " Gutzlaff's information proved altogether false." Lastly, having failed as a missionary and a policeman, he tried his hand at medicine, but always with the same result. " The Chinese eagerly sought his prescriptions," says Mr. Downing, " although his skill was of the most moderate char- acter."! Such was the celebrated Protestant missionary who reproached Ricci for not serving the Redeemer, and admonished the Catholic evangelists to " emulate" his zeal for Christ. Some British official in China has attempted to perpetuate the memory of Mr. Gutzlaff, but the attempt displays more irony than reverence. The "Island of Gutzlaff," near Chusan, we are informed by a recent traveller, " is a barren rock."T MR. TOMLIN. Mr. Gutzlaff's friend and companion, the Reverend J. Tom- lin, of St. John's College, Cambridge, next claims our attention. As we are relating the history of "Protestantism in China, we cannot fairly refuse to notice any of its more prominent agents. For this reason we will hear Mr. Tomlin. * Hist. Prop. Christianity, vol. iii., p. 371. f The Middle Kingdom, vol. ii.,ch. xix., p. 341. t Life on tJie Plains of the Pacific, ch. xiii., p. 266. The Last Year in China, by a Field Officer, Letter xxi., p. 135. fi The Fan Qui in China, by H. Downing, M.B.C.S., vol. ii., ch. vii., p. 175. 1 The Times, August 28, 1860. 164 CHAPTER II. The missionary career of this Anglican clergyman, who visited innumerable places in the East, but only to abandon them all in turn, is not unworthy of our attention. Batavia first re- ceived him ; but the climate was trying, and still more the people, so he prepared his baggage, and wrote in his journal : " The very name of this place strikes terror into the hearts of most Europeans, so that few missionaries care to be sent hither."* Yet a lay traveller assures us, that " Batavia de- serves not, after all, the bad name strangers have commonly given to it."f From Batavia, Mr. Tomlin wandered to Singa- pore, thence to Siam, thence to China, thence to travel with Gutzlaff, and finally to India, doing nothing anywhere, except distributing thousands of Bibles and tracts, which nobody read, or could read. Yet to each place he confidently affirms that he was "called by the Lord," though the call appears only to have enjoined a flying visit, since from each he transferred himself immediately to another. Wherever he went he tells us " the arm of the Lord was revealed ;" everywhere also " the Lord is doing wonderful things," though apparently not won- derful enough to induce him to stay to contemplate them. He was constantly " much refreshed in his labors ;" and though he does not even pretend that he ever made a solitary Christian in all his journeys, he is able to report, that " the abundant bless- ing of the Lord rested upon our humble labors in the medical department.";): In Siam he hired a certain Hing, for adequate recompense, to assist in the translations of which he tells us the intelligent sovereign of that country " could make neither head nor tail ;" and which, he adds, " were abused and torn by the people, and ridiculed by the priests on account of their blunders." " The old man Hing," he relates, " pleases us much ; he has a sound rnind and inquisitive spirit, is meek and tractable, approving the truth." But a little later these encouraging hopes " were much blighted," he says, for they discovered that their inquisi- tive disciple wished, in Mr. Tomlin's own words, "to make only a partial covenant with the Lord," and " fell into loose habits," and was "impatient of the restraints we imposed upon him, especially regarding the Sabbath," and, when his wages ceased, " at last resolved to leave us." Another of these " meek and tractable," because highly salaried converts, by name Chaou-Bun, after " writing out copies of the whole New Testament," unfortunately relapsed * Missionary Journals and Letters, ch. ii.. p. 31 (1844). f Qerstaecker, Voyage Round the World, vol. iii., p. 173. f Ch. vii., p. 180. | Ch. vii., p. 188. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 165 "into gross darkness, and his spirit broke forth against the truth, and he despised all our sacred books." While in Siam, Mr. Tomlin had " a Sabbath Chinese ser- vice," and the congregation, he says, " numbered from six to eight individuals, who cheerfully attend." They had reason to be cheerful, for they never received such wages before or since. Bishop Courvezy, Yicar Apostolic of Siam, one of the French missionaries whom Mr. Neal visited with so much pleasure, gave this account, in 1 838, of the proceedings of the Protestant missionaries at Bangkok: "They print and distribute tracts, but do not make a single proselyte. By distributing medicines they contrive to collect together a certain number on Sundays. The way they manage the matter is as follows: All who apply for remedies on the Saturday are told they shall have them, if they come at a certain hour on the following morning. When they arrive the next day, the ministers have a breakfast ready for them, after which they receive instruc- tions from a catechist who is still a pagan" such as Hing, or Chaou-Bun, "they say some prayers, and are then invited to eat again. At length the medicines are distributed, when they who came for them depart, never again perhaps to make their appearance. I have received these details from two Chinese, who once attended the meetings, but have been for the last few months fervent Catholics."* Another of Mr. Tomlin's associates in Siam was " the young prince La Eat," to whom he presented, as was his custom, " a pocket-bible ;" a gift which that royal youth did not appre- ciate, being, as Mr. Tomlin records, " occupied with trifles, yet he may, by the Lord's blessing, be impressed with serious things" an eventuality which Mr. Tomlin did not stay long enough to attest. Mr. Tomlin now bade farewell to Siam, and took charge of the Anglo-Chinese college at Malacca, after trying Batavia, Singapore, and a good many other places, and always with the same result. At each change, however, he says, " I was at liberty to enter on another missionary enterprise, to which I felt myself called in the Providence of God ;" and then he took ship from Malacca and set out for Calcutta. The number of "calls" which Mr. Tomlin received was very considerable, and would have bewildered most men, for they seemed to contra- dict one another ; and as the various places to which they invited him lay wide apart, he must have consumed a large part of his time in travelling from one to the other ; a circumstance which implies the absence of all method and foresight, and obliges us * Annals, vol. i., p. 107. 166 CHAPTER II. to conclude that " calls" so diverse and eccentric, and always leading to nothing, came from another source than that to which he referred them. However, he is now in Calcutta, and we may hope has found a resting-place at last. But his wanderings were not yet ter- minated. In Calcutta his children " became sick," and he re- solved to close his agitated career and return to England. The ship in which he embarked caught fire in the Calcutta river, but the passengers were promptly rescued by another vessel, of which " the captain entreated us kindly ;" upon which Mr. Tomlin and his friends hastened to read " suitable portions of God's word," and especially " the narrative of Paul's shipwreck in Acts xvii." And then he had another "call." "The Lord opened a way for proceeding to Cherrapungi ;" and Mr. Gray, a fellow-missionary, " considered the Lord's dealings with us very remarkable, and thinks I have a very distinct call from Him." So they set out for Cherrapungi ; but not without first reading " second and third chapters of Ezekiel," because they contained the appropriate words, " Son of man, I send thee to the house of Israel." But the Hindoos, or house of Israel, dwelling at Cherrapungi, did not retain him long, as a new " call" deprived them of his presence. He stayed long enough, however, to ascertain and it was the only discovery which he made in India that " the great foes to Christ and His gospel are the Pope, Mahomet, and Brahma ;" and that " the Pope's emissaries," whom he found everywhere doing the work which he everywhere abandoned as hopeless, " are com- ing forth like a cloud of locusts."* So he resolved a second time to quit India, after having "sojourned," as he observes, " like the Patriarch Jacob, many years in the East ;" and hav- ing accomplished this final voyage, arid reached England in safety, had the satisfaction to know, after so many and various wanderings, that he had at last received a true " call." DR. SMITH. We have now made acquaintance with several of the most eminent and energetic " heralds" of Protestantism in China, whose operations had already consumed thirty years, and exhausted vast sums of money, but, as we have seen from their own testimony, without even the smallest effect upon the popu- lations of Eastern Asia. Among the teachers there had not been a solitary martyr, among their hearers not a solitary Christian. Let us continue the narrative to the present hour ; and our next * Cli. iv., p. 379. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 167 witness is an authoritative exponent of the Anglican religion, the " bishop" whom it dispatched to recommend its claims to the people of China. The Rev. George Smith was originally sent to these regions " on behalf of the Church Missionary Society," and has written an account of all that he saw and did. His book opens with the statement, characteristic of the noble munificence of the English people, that " an anonymous donor gave six thousand pounds for commencing a mission in China." Alas ! that such a gift, and many more like it, should have been fruitlessly squandered, not in promoting the honor of God or the welfare of the heathen, but in supporting such institutions as the Malacca college, or paying the expenses of a Gutzlaff or a Tomlin, or in fees to pretended converts who worshipped " Jehovah" while it lasted, and Buddha when it was spent. For this has been the only fruit of an expenditure almost unparalleled in the history of missions. The agents of Prot- estantism have sown, but have not reaped ; they have planted, but have not gathered ; " the grass is withered, and the flower is fallen, because the spirit of the Lord hath blown upon it."* The first fact which we will borrow from Mr. Smith has reference to the estimate which the Chinese, like other heathen nations, have formed of the English religion. " Perhaps this English doctrine," they told him, " may be very good, but we wish that you would first try it on the English themselves, for they are wicked men. "When this doctrine has made them better, then corne and speak to us."f And this statement is more than confirmed, as respects even the teachers of the doctrine, by Mr. Sirr, in 1849 ; by whom we are told, that " to prove the impression produced on the minds of the Chinese heathens by the lives of the missionaries being at variance with their preaching, the common expressions made use of with reference to them are, Lie-preaching demls"\ That preachers who were thus appreciated by the discerning pagans should fail to convert them can hardly surprise us. Some u converts," however, they made, and Mr. Smith will tell us of what sort. At Amoy, he says, " the most regular attendants on the services" not one of whom, he admits, had even been baptized " were, from their situation or employment, in some measure dependent on the missionaries, and whose sincerity might on that account be exposed to suspicion." Yet it was of such unbaptized heathens, attracted only by gifts and bribes, and * Isaias xl. 7. f Visit to the Consular Cities of China, by Rev. George Smith, M.A., p. 54. i China and the Chinese, by Henry Charles Sirr, M.A., vol. ii., ch. x., p. 216. P. 398. 168 CHAPTER II. always ready to desert the moment their wages ceased, that for many years the missionaries were wont to report as follows to the societies at home, who relied chiefly upon such reports to obtain fresh subscriptions: U A signal blessing," says one, " has attended the work at Ainoy." " Our meetings," writes another, " continue to be attended with unabated solemnity and interest."* " So mightily," says the Secretary of the London Missionary Society, in 1857, with intrepid composure, " has the Word of God grown and prevailed !" As Amoy was formerly represented by Protestant missionary societies as the solitary exception to their misadventures in China, it may be well to suspend for a moment our narrative, in order to test the fidelity of their reports. To expose this, and all similar inaccuracies, of which we shall detect a considerable number in the course of these pages, it is only necessary to employ a little industry of research. Whenever we hear of unwonted missionary successes in any particular spot, we have only to interrogate Protestant travellers who have visited it, and the fiction presently collapses. Here, then, is the candid testimony of men actually resident in China, who were themselves engaged in the work, and only desired to exaggerate its success. The first writes from Amoy itself, and discloses in these words the real character of the operations in which he had taken part : " In the case of most applicants we find much difficulty in deciding whether to receive them or not."f This witness evidently agreed with Mr. Smith, that the motive of the applicants was exposed to suspicion. A second authority, also a Protestant minister, but only a visitor in China, and therefore perfectly sincere in his report, pleasantly declares of Protestant converts in every heathen land, he had visited a good many, "it is much easier to get them converted than it is to keep them so.";); But we have a third testimony, which is more precise and minute, and which will furnish all the information we desire to obtain. In 1856, Dr. Ball, an American Protestant, who was not only the intimate associate, but the constant guest of the missionaries at Amoy, and who regularly frequented their weekly service, though he does not so much as allude throughout his voluminous correspondence to their gaining even a solitary convert, makes 'this decisive revelation with respect to Amoy itself: "The audience numbered about a dozen !" Now, as at least one-half of this scanty audience were probably Europeans, and the rest * China and the Missions at Amoy, p. 45 (1854). f The Chinese Missionary Gleaner, vol. i., p. 51. 1 Rev. G. Mines, Plains of the Pacific, ch. xv., p. 308. Rambles in Eastern Asia, by B. L. Ball, M.D., ch. xxxix., p. 320 (1856). MISSIONS IN CHINA. 169 the servants or paid " dependants" of the missionaries, we may at length appreciate at its true value the " signal blessing" which had accompanied the Protestant sermons at Amoy, as well as u the unabated solemnity and interest" with which they were heard. Mr.- Lockhart, writing five years later, not only confesses that these pretended converts were " most of them patients" of the dispensary over which he presided, with every qualification for the task, but quotes the admission of his colleague Dr. Hobson, that they were perfectly " indifferent" to religion, and only submitted to the infliction of a sermon, because it was ingeniously administered together with the drugs which they probably considered the least distasteful of the two.* And if there be still any shadow of doubt as to the missionary triumphs in Amoy, where Protestantism " grew and prevailed so mightily," the evidence of the latest Protestant writer on China will effectually remove it. " I was informed," says Mr. Oliphant, in 1859, "by a high clerical Protestant authority, that, out of the mass of Protestant converts hitherto made, there were only five whom he really believed to be sin- cere."! Such, by their own confession, was the result, after so many years of enormous expenditure, of all the Protestant attempts, not in Amoy only, but in the whole Chinese empire ; and as the number of the missionaries was two hundred, it follows, by the testimony of this " high clerical authority," unless his estimate was too sanguine, that each of them has succeeded in making one-fortieth part of a convert in half a century, while each of these precarious converts has proba- bly cost England and America at least a quarter of a million sterling. The same cases w T hich occurred at Amoy, where a few pagan Chinese were willing to attend the Protestant service as long as they were paid for doing so, are recorded also at Hong- Kong, and in the other ports which Mr. Smith visited. Thus he tells us of one A-tah, who had allowed the American missionaries to give him " an excellent education," and of course a gratuitous one, but who defrauded them at last of the equivalent upon which they had calculated, in the shape of future service to be rendered to them by their accomplished pupil. " A-tah has recently abandoned the missionaries at Hong-Kong," bays Mr. Smith, " and connected himself with the mercantile establish- ment of Powtinqua," a position to which, no doubt, he had long been aspiring, and fur which, thanks to his teachers, he was now fully qualified. The Americans might well regret " the difficulty and disapp intment," and desire some better * See p. 304. f Lord Elgin's Mission, vol. i., cli. xiii., p. 254. 170 CHAPTER II. return for all that he had cost them ; for of one of their establish- ments we are told, u the annual expenses of the missionaries are eleven thousand dollars."* Nearly twenty years ago, " the American missionaries in China represented no less than six missionary societies ;"f and "up to 18 47, the number sent to China, not including females, was already one hundred and sixteen" \ To return to Amoy. We next find Mr. Smith in communi- cation with a certain Ban-hea, " a constant visitor of the mis- sionaries," who, he says, was " an old man, who was formerly inclined to embrace the Koman Catholic religion, but was de- terred by fear of persecution." Ban-hea seems to have under- stood that his new friends were not likely to lead him into such peril. Morrison used to say, that if there were no danger, "several of iny people would avow their belief in the Gospel, but they are afraid. " Arid Mr. Lay, an American missionary, considerately excuses their hesitation. " I acknowledge," he says, " that the subject is often afraid ; and no marvel, for who, unless he were animated with a spirit of martyrdom, would not fear the hell of a Chinese prison, or the revolting tortures of a trial ?"|| Yet in this very city of Amoy, where the Protestant missionaries were holding their clandestine meetings, and whispering to their timid visitors and to one another their fears of a prison and a trial, the Catholic Chinese, " animated," like the primitive Christians, u with the spirit of martyrdom," were acting as Mr. Smith describes in the following words : " The Koman Catholics are numerous in some districts of the neigh- boring mainland. The French ambassador and suite, during their recent visit to Amoy, visited a village about forty miles distant, in which nearly the whole population were Roman Catholics. . . . His Excellency afterwards spoke of his heart be- ing kindled with religious enthusiasm, as he beheld the joyous spectacle of the inhabitants coming forth with crosses and medals hanging on their bosoms. About five hundred persons in this village, and the same number in some neighboring vil- lages, professed Christianity." And they professed it openly, without " fear of persecution ;" for Mr. Smith adds, that they had nearly completed a chapel, " estimated to cost eighteen hundred dollars. "T Some years after Mr. Smith's adventures, the Chinese Chris- * Colonial Church Chronicle, vol. v., 396. Journal of American Oriental Society, vol. i., p. 46. Scenes in China, by Mrs. Henrietta Shuck, Missionary in China, p. 246. | Memoirs, vol. ii., p. 369. The Chinese as they are, ch. vii., p. 72. P. 486. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 171 tians, in various parts of the empire, were still exhibiting the same instructive contrast which produced so little impression on his mind. The Abbe Hue has given examples in his latest work, which are sufficiently curious to deserve a moment's attention, especially as they will be found to afford a suitable commentary upon Mr. Smith's narrative. At Tching-tou-fou, a capital city, a young man " threw himself on his knees" be- fore the Abbe, " made the sign of the cross, and begged his blessing." "Such an act," says this celebrated missionary, " in presence of the bonzes, and a crowd of curious witnesses, testified a lively faith and remarkable courage." " He began to tell me," continues M. Hue, " without the least restraint, of the numerous Christians in the capital," and having professed openly his faith, proceeded loudly to attack " the idols and superstition of the bonzes."* In another city, Tchao and his family behaved with such courage in his presence, " that even the mandarins congratu- lated them ;" arid at the departure of the missionary, crowds of the Christians assembled, to bid him farewell : " all wore their rosaries round their necks, threw themselves on their knees, made the sign of the cross, and in chorus demanded our blessing. We did not observe that this religious act excited the least movement of hostility or raillery among the heathens. They maintained a respectful silence, and contented themselves with saying: 'these are the Christians, who are asking the chiefs of their religion to obtain happiness for them from Heaven.' v On another occasion, in the province of Su-tchuen, he saw "a great number of Christians going in procession, with 'banners flying, to celebrate a festival in a neighboring village."f Such was the conduct of Catholic Chinese, not in the sea- port towns, but in the very heart of the empire. Mr. Smith, to whom we must once more return, saw other " visitors" at Amoy, who consorted with his colleagues, but " had not yet shown any decided proof of a change of heart." They had " ceased to worship idols," at least they said so, " but they had not yet generally adopted the decided course of ex- pelling the image from their household." And accordingly, when Mr. Smitli told a .Chinese that one Ta-laou-yay " had put away his idols," the former " called him an old hypocrite, and asserted, that if he could gain admission into the interior of the house, he doubted not that we should find the idols in some other room. "if How is it that in all heathen lands, only the vile and the worthless are found to gravitate towards the L 'Empire Ghinois, toine i., ch. i., p. 39. Oh. ii., p. 51 ; ch. vi., p. 270 ; ch. vii., p. 333. Visit. &c.. D. 399 : Cf. u. 412. f Ch. ii., p. 51 ; ch. vi., p. 270 ; $ Visit, &c., p. 399 ; Cf. p. 412. 172 CHAPTER II. emissaries of Protestantism, or to hold intercourse with them ; while they who are filled with noble and generous thoughts, and willing to manifest them in action, instinctively ally them- selves and their destiny with the teachers of the Catholic faith ? We have seen that Mr. Smith is only able to record the in- sensibility of the Chinese to the invitations and caresses of Protestantism, except as an occasion of gainful traffic ; but he had frequent opportunities of witnessing their appreciation of teachers of another order. Wherever he directed his steps, by land or water, he was met by the unwelcome apparition of Catholic converts. He is at Shang hae, where Dr. Ball found, to his great mortification, only "seven or eight Chinese" pen- sioners on Protestant bounty ; though, as Mr. Scarth notices, there were missionaries of every sect, " Protestants, Lutherans, Calvinists, Calvinistical Seceders, Baptists, Sabbatarians, &c."* Of this city, Mr. Smith says : " In the city and neighborhood there are large numbers of Roman Catholic professors of Chris- tianity. The diocese of their bishop is computed to contain about sixty thousand Roman Catholics." If he amuses his leisure by inquiries into the system of transporting grain in China, he learns that u of the six thousand junks which annually bring down the grain for the emperor from Tartary, many are manned by Roman Catholic sailors." But the grace of conver- sion had not been confined to men who, like the first Apostles, had passed their lives on the water ; and who, as Monseigneur de Besy, apostolic administrator of .Nankin, relates in 184:3, " direct their boats hither and thither, wherever they hope to meet a minister of the True God. They often assemble in the evening, to the number of twenty barks, in the middle of the river, and sing in choir their prayers, which always conclude with an invocation to ' Mary conceived without sin.' Their prayers must ascend as an agreeable incense to the Throne of the Lamb." At Ningpo, the Catholic converts, Mr. Smith tells us, were not fishermen, but principally belonged to the middle class of tradesmen."! In this city, we are informed by Sir John Davis, there are no less than thirteen Protestant mis- sionaries ;": and though the majority of the inhabitants are barely conscious of their presence, except as dispensers of medicine, such was the progress of the Catholic religion, that " the year 1848 witnessed the erection of a church without diffi- culty in the centre of the town of Ningpo, the mandarins themselves granting the ground for the building. " * Twelve Years in China, eh. viii., p. 80. P. 244. China, since the Peace, by Sir J. Davis, vol. ii., ch. vii., p. 255. Annals, vol. xi., p. 15. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 173 A little later Mr. Smith is in the province of Fokien, in the northern part of which, u at the distance of one hundred miles from Foo-Chow, there is a Popish Bishop, a Spaniard, ninety years of age, who has been fifty years in the country. There is also a Popish college ; and the, Romish converts are said to be more numerous than the Pagan inhabitants in some of these districts, so that they are too powerful to become the victims of persecution."* In reading this narrative by such a writer, we are reminded of the forcible remark of the Abbe Faivre, one of the Lazarist missionaries in China. " Protestant missions," he observes, "will not have been altogether without result in these coun- tries ; for, in the first place, they will have proved their own complete sterility ; and, in the next, the Protestant missionaries will be forced to render this testimony, that wherever they have been, they have seen the Catholic religion established, the faithful full of fervor, and the ranks of the missionaries con- tinually recruited. "f Sometimes Mr. Smith comes into actual contact with Chinese Christians, and he is always careful to record his impression of such interviews. He is in a boat on the river Min, and the crew, who probably knew nothing of the character of their passenger, u on their first coming on board, crossed themselves repeatedly on the forehead, cheeks, and breast, after the most approved Roman Catholic fashion." Their religion was evi- dently a reality, and they were " not ashamed of the Cross of Christ ;" but this was not the reflection which their Christian behavior excited in Mr. Smith. Presently he meets " about a hundred villagers, and finding that they were principally pro- fessors of the Roman Catholic religion," one of his party took the opportunity of informing them, that the Mother of God "was only a sinful mortal like ourselves !" upon which he adds, " they appeared to be somewhat staggered, and looked in his face as if incredulous and distrustful." Yet that significant look had no lesson for Mr. Smith and his companions, who were perhaps ignorant that the very Turks reproach Protestants for their irreverence towards Her whom even Mahometans honor as the Mother of Christ.J But Mr. Smith had other adventures not less instructive than this. " I visited a Corean junk," he says, " manned by Roman Catholic sailors, and lying in the river off the custom-house." The captain of this junk which had crossed the broad waters * P. 352. | Annals vol i., p. 321. \ See D'Herbelot, Bibliotheque Orientate, art. Miriam; and Lady- Sliiel's Life and Manners in Persia, ck. vi., p. 87. 174: CHAPTER II. of the Yellow sea, not for lucre, but from a motive of religion had lost "his own father and grandfather" by martyrdom. But this had not daunted him, nor his Christian crew ; and Mr. Smith tells us that " their only object in making so long and perilous a voyage was to obtain a bishop for Corea, whom they would carry back in their junk." For months they had been at anchor alongside that custom-house, answering the inquisitive demands of the officials with such pretexts as their ingenuity could devise, and patiently waiting, at the sacrifice of time, and braving the perils of discovery, till God. should bring their bishop to them. To these fearless Christians, Mr. Smith, unmindful that he stood in presence of a company of confessors with whom religion was the chief concern of life, presented a number of his books ; but within an hour they had detected their real nature, and came " to return the whole of the books, and to decline the present from me." It is satisfactory to know, on Mr. Smith's authority, that at last " they accomplished the object of their visit, and took back a bishop and three priests. The bishop had already been seven years a missionary in one of the interior provinces :"* and now he was on his way, escorted by the children of martyrs, to shed his own blood whenever God should require the sacrifice. To him it does not appear that Mr. Smith ventured to offer any books. But his stock was not yet exhausted, and he was not easily discouraged. To a Buddhist priest, he says, "I gave a tract, which he was unable to read, and which I received again." Others retained his presents, but " not one of them," he says, " could read," which must have diminished their value. And then he crossed the stream and " landed on the south side of the river, but found none of the villagers able to read. I ascertained, however, that there were some Roman Catholics who were able to read." So he sent them some of his tracts. Thus far he had clung to the coast, like all his brethren, and scattered tracts -as he went; but accustomed now to see Chinese faces, he gathers courage, and boldly determines upon " a trip into the interior." It is true that what he calls going to the interior was simply an excursion of a few miles in a boat, on a river not unknown to Europeans, and that it required no greater temerity than a Frenchman would display who should venture in a steamer from London Bridge to Richmond. Of course the object of the journey was to distribute tracts, which the people could not read, and which his own friends have told us were not worth reading if they could. The expedition starts, not without a quickening of the pulse at the possible perils of the * P. 154. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 175 voyage. Both shores are carefully scanned, and the rowers duly prepared for a backward move in case of sudden emergencies. Mr. Smith directs his anxious glance on every side, book in hand, when at length an object strikes his eye. "Watching my opportunity," he says, and we almost share his emotion, "1 folded up the book, and . . . threw it safely on the dry bank"* This daring feat accomplished, the bold missionary and his companions, smiling perhaps at their own courage, hurried back to the neighboring town. This was Mr. Smith's plan for the conversion of China. It was not successful, perhaps because it was so entirely new. Neither St. Paul nor St. Barnabas, so far as we know, were much given to the distribution of tracts, nor did they spend their days in rowing along the shores of the ^Egean or the Adriatic, looking for " dry banks" on which to deposit their message to the Heathen. They delivered it themselves, heed- ing neither stripes, nor imprisonment, nor death, but rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for Christ's sake ; a mode of preaching the Gospel which Catholic missionaries have always imitated, not in China alone, but, as we shall see hereafter, in every region of the earth. We might now, not unwillingly, turn from Mr. Smith to other witnesses, who claim at least a moment's attention, but that he has reappeared, in a new form, on the scenes which we have just visited. In 1858 we hear of him again, and this time not as the agent of a missionary society, but as an Anglican bishop in China. The lapse of years has not much altered his views on either of the subjects which he had previously handled the Chinese, or the Catholics. He has not begun to convert the one, nor ceased to hate the other. Long years before, he had declared, that he preferred even the Mahometans of China to the Catholics. "I always felt a sympathy," he said, " with the poor dispersed disciples of Islam in this pagan wild, and regarded their denunciation of idols, and their worship of one God, as a comparative approximation to OUT own religion"-^ the comparison being with the religion of Alfred the Great, St. Anselm, and Sir Thomas More. Dr. Smith prefers the disciples of Ali and Omar, who blaspheme Christ, to the children of St. Francis and St. Bernard, who adore Him. And he is the same in 1858 as he was in 1814. On the 18th of October, of the former year, he wrote from Shang-hae to " the Archbishop of Canterbury :" " I confess," he said, " that I have gathered lessons of moderate expectation from the fruitlessness of my past appeals for help. In the tenth * P. 148. f P. 213. 176 CHAPTER II. year of my episcopate I behold but few signs of any great and sustained movement of 6*ur Church for the evangelization of the Chinese race. ... As to missions of our Church among the Chinese, after fourteen years since my first landing on these shores, I still see (with one exception)" we have seen what the exception was worth u but little progress made, and but inconsiderable results achieved." There is much more in the letter, which we need not quote, because it was thus appreciated on the spot by a Protestant writer, in the Ilong-Kong Register* "We cannot but regret the tone of jealousy with regard to his Roman Catholic brethren that pervades his letter. It is not by indications of a sectarian spirit such as this that the cause of true religion and Christianity is to be advanced in China. . . . Their zeal is equal, their self devotion in many instances far greater, and yet, because they do not agree with the Bishop of Victoria, or own his spiritual jurisdiction, they are to be looked on as dangerous foes ! Writing such as this is not only unfair, but it is dangerous." And this estimate of the Anglican bishop seems to be general among such of his co-religionists as have enjoyed opportunities of judging him. u The conduct of the bishop," says the Hong- Kong Daily Press, in the thirteenth year of his episcopate, " is most reprehensible. For the last three years we feel sure he has not done two months' work in his diocese. He draws his stipend in consideration of the performance of specified duties : those duties he neglects for other vocations which are more lucrative or agreeable, and we will defy him to reconcile his conduct to common honesty, to say nothing about his duties as a bishop."f DR. BETTELHEIM. Perhaps we might have fitly concluded this narrative with the story of Dr. Smith, which illustrates so effectively the nature of Anglicanism, but one more example shall be added, because it will serve the double purpose of introducing us to a new scene, and of completing the tale to the year 18H2. For several years Dr. Bettelheim represented an English society among the mild inhabitants of Loo-Choo. The ingenuity of this amiable people had been exhausted in attempts to drive him away by gentle means. "The Loo-Chooans," we are told, " had tried every way to get rid of him ; they had addressed, through the Chinese, to the English minister, Lord Palmerston, * Number 43. f Quoted in the Weekly Register, November 16, 1861. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 177 remonstrances against the mission, which invariably closed with the petition that he would remove Bettelheim. They urged with much energy, that a missionary should leave a country when his presence was not agreeable to its people."* But Dr. Bettelheim, who was in no danger, and received his salary punctually, would not go. In vain the courteous police of Loo- Choo collected the tracts which he distributed every night, and brought them to him, tied up in neat parcels, every morning. But they put him to flight at last. " After eight or nine years of the unequal strife, Dr. Bettelheim sought for a time, quieter scenes and more propitious circumstances in Europe. "j He was replaced by the feev. E. H. Morton, " as spiritual teacher to a people who are about as well prepared to receive Chris- tianity as they were when his predecessor went among them." Mr. Morton, however, speedily retired, " Dr. Bettelheim has not since returned, and probably the mission will not for the present be resumed." In 1862, the Church Missionary Society still speak of " the late Loo-Choo Missionary Committee," and of trying again when " the way shall appear providentially opened.":}: TESTIMONY OF PROTESTANT TKAVELLEKS. We have now perhaps sufficient knowledge of the fortunes of Protestantism in China, as revealed by its most conspicuous agents, from 1816 to 1862 ; and if we still multiply evidence which may seem superfluous, it is because each fresh witness attests some special feature of the contrast which all detect and proclaim. Some record with involuntary admiration the con- tinual progress of the Catholic missionaries, their fortitude and self-denial, and the fervor of their flocks ; others, in spite of their religious sympathies, speak with contempt or indignation of their Protestant contemporaries, and disclose without hesita- tion the true character of their followers. Let us hear a few witnesses of both classes, before we pass to the same order of facts in other lands. In 1858, Mr. Minturn, an ardent American Protestant, was struck by " the earnestness with which a numerous congrega- tion of Chinese chanted the responses in the Romish cathedral at Shang-hae ;" while Mr. D'Ewes, almost at the same date, and * The Japan Expedition, by J. W. Spalding, U. S. Steam Frigate "Missis- sippi," ch. vii., p. 113 ; ch. xiv., p. 337. f The Medical Missionary in China, by Win. Lockhart, F.R.C.S., ch. xii., p. 356 (1861). \ Report of C. M. Society, p. 16 (1862). ^ From New York to Delhi, ch. iii., p. 33. 13 178 CHAPTER II. Mr. Oliplmnt a little later, thus contrasted the two classes of missionaries, and their works, in the same city : " There is," says Mr. D'Ewes, " both an American and English school for the education of Chinese children, but, I hear, not very well attended, nor could I discover any traces of Protestant mis- sionary labor in the interior." And then he continues thus : "By far the most extraordinary establishments I saw at Shang- hae, were two Jesuit colleges Nothing can exceed the order and regularity, and apparent harmony, with which these extensive establishments are carried on." The Fathers taught, he adds, " sculpture, painting, music, languages, &c., and evi- dently by able and distinguished masters. When it is con- sidered how extremely difficult it is to obtain even a smattering of the Chinese language, and how very few Europeans amongst the commercial class, and even amongst our own missionaries and diplomatists, arrive at any thing like proficiency, the self- denying hard labor and study of these priests is truly wonder- ful. The pupils appeared happy, and proud of their occupa- tions, and far more intelligent than the generality of Chinese we met with."* On the other hand, Mr. Oliphant says of the Protestant schools in the same place, " the children are taught only the most rudimentary works in their own classics. Their education seems likely, therefore, to be of little service to them, either amongst their own countrymen or foreigners. "f But if Mr. Oliphant, who has apparently no sympathy with Catholics, agrees with Mr. D'Ewes in his estimate of these Protestant institutions., he thus describes another Catholic col- lege, about twelve miles from the city of Shang-hae, where he found " eighty young men and boys in the several school-rooms, deep in the study of the classics and polite learning of the Chinese the mission was almost entirely conducted by Jesuits. The best possible understanding evidently subsisted between them and their pupils, whose countenances all bore evidence of happiness and contentment. Notwithstanding the fact that twelve hours out of the twenty-four were devoted to work or religious exercises, the establishment was kept scrupu- lously clean ; the dormitories were models of neatness ; so that habits foreign to the Chinese domestic character were being in- stilled into the inmates.":): In 1862, we hear once more of this college from an Anglican chaplain, who could not conceal his reluctant admiration, but * China, &c., by J. D'Ewes, Esq., cli. viii., p. 291. f Lord Elgin's Mission. \ Ibid. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 179 who laments that the Anglican mission at Shang-hae " is not in a more flourishing condition." The latter, he says, is inferior even to the American ; to which, however, he does not attribute even a solitary convert. Indeed, this gentleman's volume is so remarkable for the total absence of religious allusions, that he offers a kind of apology for saying nothing " of my own de- partment."* His readers will probably infer that he found nothing to say. The Marquis de Moges, who accompanied the Baron Gros in his first embassy to China, visited the same college, at Zi-ka- wei, and found " nearly one hundred pupils," in an institu- tion "far from all European aid," but which, he says, was often visited by mandarins, one of whom " forwarded to Pekin, to a member of the Imperial Academy, the compositions of some of the elder scholars, which were returned with corrections and most encouraging remarks. r f M. de Keroulee also, at a still later period, speaks of meeting a pupil of the Pere Delamarre, who. in addition to the French language, spoke Latin with a precision and fluency which excited the admiration of men educated in the colleges of France.:): Mr. Oliphant's experience seems to have been everywhere of the same character. He goes to the Catholic mission at Chusan, and there a Lazarist Father " did the honors of the establishment with great simplicity and cordiality. We in- spected his industrial farm, cultivated by the boys of the school, a clean chubby-looking set of little fellows, with happy smiling countenances, very different in expression from that of Chinese youth generally. They evidently regarded their spiritual masters with feelings of affection and gratitude We afterwards visited, with our reverend guide, a girl's hospital in the town, which did equal credit to his management with the rest of his establishment." At another time he goes to the " cathedral at Tonk-a-doo." " Here one side of the spacious area was filled by a large at- tendance of Chinese female converts, whose devout demeanor testified to their sincerity, and whose neat, and occasionally handsome costume, and pleasing countenances, formed an agreeable contrast to the majority of the fair sex the stranger meets in a Chinese town." At Shang-hae, he says, " I was informed that the Roman Catholic missions can boast of converts even among the man- darins ; while numerous instances of devotion, and acts of * How We got to Peldn, by the Rev. R. J. L. M'Ghee, Chaplain to the Forces, ch. iii., pp. 41, 42 (1862). f Souvenirs d'u/ie Ambasmde, ch. vii., p. 180. \ Un Voyage d Pekin, par Georges de Keroulee. ch. iii., p. 39 (Paris, 1861). 180 CHAPTER IT. private charity to the missionaries and their converts, were related, both on the part of those Chinese who were members of the Church, and of those who had merely benefited by its institutions." On the other hand, speaking of the results of Protestant education, especially at Hong-Kong, and we shall find the same characteristic fact in every other country of the world, he observes, " in too many instances the knowledge they have acquired only serves to increase their evil influence"* And this statement is confirmed in the number of the Hong- ITong Daily Press, already quoted : " All the schemes which have been hitherto attempted," says that journal, " have re- sulted in utter failures. English education has been given to Chinese youths with no other object that we could see, but to qualify them for hypocrites or for sharpers" Commander Lindesay Brine, an intelligent British officer, who does not disguise his Protestant sympathies, observes once more, in 1862, of the Catholic school attached to the cathedral at Shang-hae : " I found the children at their lessons, and was astonished to see such a well-dressed, bright-looking set of boys, in all respects far superior to the average of Chinese lads met with elsewhere ;" and then he adds, like all the other witnesses, "having shortly before observed the children of the Protestant schools in Ning-po, I was not prepared to find such a marked and favorable contrast, and was at a loss to account for it until made acquainted with the very different method of tuition and selection."! Let us hear other witnesses. The evidence of Colonel Armine Mountain, formerly Adjutant-general of the Forces in India, and an eager advocate of Protestant institutions, though cau- tiously mutilated by a sensitive editor, is only rendered more impressive and significant by that unusual process. "Of the English missionaries," he says, " I know nothing ;" and then he added a statement which his biographer has carefully sup- pressed, but the substance of which we may easily infer from the words which follow immediately in the next sentence of his letter : il JSut there is a class of men in China to whom, however mistaken in their belief, we cannot refuse respect, the Roman Catholic missionaries, men who, in the guise of natives, live in the interior, unknown to the government, in hourly danger of their lives, subsisting upon the precarious contributions of their followers.":); Mr. Power, a gentleman in the British service, traces, in 1853, * Narrative of Lord Elgin's Mission to China and Japan, vol. i., ch. xii., p. 236 ; ch. xiii., p. 257 f The Taeping Rebellion in China, ch. iii., pp. 53, 60. \ Memoirs of Colonel Armine Mountain, C B., cli. viii., p. 212. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 181 in expressive words, the same contrast. He is at Koo-Lung- Soo, where the Anglican missionaries, as we shall be informed presently, had only two converts, who displayed their piety by " running off with the communion plate," and he writes as follows : " The worthy Fathers Zea and Aguilar were both quite young men, but in devotion to their duty, in true Christian charity, benevolence, and strong religious faith, they appeared to me to surpass any men I ever met with, they were so forget- ful of self, and so full of pity and compassion for others." And then he describes the Protestant missionaries : " They are not of a character generally to have much success. They settle themselves down at the ports, surround themselves with com- forts, and confine their labors to the distribution of boxes full of tracts, written generally in very bad Chinese. The China- man sees one man devoting all his energies to the one purpose, and that an unselfish one ; sacrificing comfort, health, society, all that can make life desirable ; the other comes when he can do so with perfect safety, bringing a wife and family, squab- bling for the best houses, higgling for wares, and provoking contempt bj r a lazy life."* It might seem impossible to add any thing to such a picture, yet another Protestant, a member of an English university, has contrived to do so. "When in China," says Mr. Sirr, " we are grieved to our heart's core to see the servants of the Romish Church indefatigably and zealously working, making converts of the Chinese, regarding neither difficulties nor discouragement ; while too many Protestant missionaries occupy their time in secular pursuits, trading and trafficking." This, he observes, is particularly odious, because they have all " ample salaries ;" and he goes on thus : " Alas ! the lives of many missionaries, whom we have seen in China, and elsewhere, are totally foreign to and at variance with their sacred calling, much of their time being passed in attending auctions, buying at one price, and transferring their purchase to a native at an advanced rate, al- though they receive a handsome allowance, more than suffi- cient for their support. . . . The conduct of many missionaries is most unbecoming, whether considered in a Christian or social view ;" and then he adds, from his own observation, that even tiie pagan Chinese, filled with contempt for such pretended teachers of religion, commonly call them " Lie-preaching devils"^ Never, probably, were so-called " missionaries" thus described by their own associates; and if "the first herald" of Protestantism in China had but a feeble claim to * Residence in China, ch. xv., pp. 151, 157 (1853). f China and the Chinese, vol. ii., ch. x., p. 216. 182 CHAPTER II. our esteem, it must be admitted that his numerous successors have still less. It is to be observed also, as a special feature in the history of Protestant missions, that the latest account of them is always the worst. In the year 1861, after half a century of barren toil and incalculable expenditure, the Ilong-Kong Daily Press, a journal devoted to British and Protestant interests, thus esti- mates both the missionaries and their work. After a candid admission, recorded in the very midst of the men whom he describes, that the only result of all their labors was hopeless failure, this English writer continues thus : u Instead of at- tempting to remedy the defect, they are too conceited to admit it. There is as much devotion in all the Protestant mis- sionaries we know of in the south of China as there is in a bootjack. Their shameless indifference to their unscrupulous laches is really incredible to those who have not witnessed it. We have tried time and again to arouse them to a sense of their duties, but it seems to us that they are dead to the voice of truth, and are content to eat the bread of idleness, so long as they possess the power to deceive the patrons who maintain them." Yet the gentlemen who are thus described by those who know them best are never weary either of commending their own labors, or of exposing their futility. In 1862 the Rev. J. Bur don informs the Church Missionary Society,* that at Hang- Chow, a city of three hundred thousand inhabitants, he hired a house, with the " consent of the authorities," and began to preach the doctrine of the Thirty-nine Articles. Nobody in- terfered with him, " inquirers presented themselves," they " seemed in a prepared state of mind to hear and accept the Gospel," and u came frequently to talk about the truths of God's word." But the usual ludicrous climax was at hand. u I was doomed to be disappointed ! One by one they discon- tinued their visits, and 1 fear that now they have lost their in- terest altogether, if, indeed, they ever really had any." Then he tells a story, in the usual terms, of one individual " becom- ing connected with Christianity," and finally, " the removal of the missionaries," on the arrival of their former disciples, the Tae-pings, terminates the tale. Lastly, in Ib62, we have the testimony of the various Eng- lish gentlemen, including a Protestant clergyman, who were members of the scientific expedition conducted by Colonel Sarel, with the object of tracing a passage into India across the western frontier of China. These witnesses, who prosecuted * Report, 1862, p. 193. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 183 their long journey, including the navigation of the Yang-Tsze, throughout a course of eighteen hundred miles, were riot exempt from the usual prejudices of their countrymen. But they were men of honor and of cultivated minds, and disdained to mis- represent the facts which they encountered, not without surprise and mortification, wherever they set foot in the interior prov- inces of the empire. Their evidence will fitly close the series which commenced forty years before their arrival in China. They are already far up the Yang-Tsze, when in the neigh- borhood of the Tnng-Yan rapid they overtake a passenger junk. " The passengers," they observe, " were a high mandarin arid his family, and they turned out to be Roman Catholics." In this case they had an opportunity of noticing that religion has still, as of old, its conquests among the aristocracy of China. Presently they are at Wan, and here they find matter for still graver reflections. "There is little doubt," says one of the historians of the expedition, u that the Roman Catholics have done much more in China than the world gives them credit for, and from this place upwards we observed numerous Christians among the Chinese. They used to make themselves known to us by the sign of the cross. The number of Christians in the province of Sz'chuan is said to be about one hundred thousand. There are two bishops, and we had subsequently the pleasure of meeting one of them, as well as two of his priests, and my remembrance of them will ever be associated with the idea of missionaries indeed." They continue their journey and come to Hulin, which they find " to be almost entirely a Roman Catholic village." The inhabitants, probably assuming their European visitors to be, like themselves, disciples of the cross, " hurried us off to see a place of worship which they had lately finished." This pious work they had completed in the face of persecution, for they related " the shameful treatment they had received from the mandarins." " This was only one of the many instances we witnessed," says Dr. Barton, k ' of the good the Catholic priests have done in China, while throughout our journey we did riot meet with a single Protestant." At Chung, ' some more Roman Catholics visited us here, continuing to come over in boats from the town till a late hour .... They stated that the mandarins had persecuted them and burnt their church." It is nearly three hundred years since persecution first began in this very region, and we have here Protestant testimony to the results of the long conflict. It was the habitual contemplation of these arid many equally significant facts which suggested to this company of 'educated Protestants, who had diligently investigated the missionary 184 CHAPTER II. pretensions of their co-religionists, the following candid reflec- tions : "To such men as these," their historian observes, referring to the Catholic missionaries and their works, "is due a meed of praise which I am unworthy to proclaim, and will therefore only refer to the contrast between them and the Protestant missionaries" And then he indicates the prominent feature of the contrast, in terms exactly agreeing with the equally emphatic reports of Mr. Sirr, Mr. Power, and the other Protes- tant witnesses. " Located among the European and American communities at the open ports on the coast, the Protestant missionaries live in all the ease and comfort of civilized society, surrounded by their wives and families, with dwellings equal, and often much superior, to what they have been accustomed to in their own country. . . I believe I shall not be wrong when I say there is not a single Protestant missionary a hundred miles distant from. a European settlement."* RESULTS OF PKOTESTANT MISSIONS. The testimonies which have now been cited sufficiently prepare us for those which are to follow, and it is time to show, as we did in reviewing the Catholic missions, what have been ihejinal and admitted results, by exclusively Protestant testi- mony, of all the costly efforts maintained during nearly half a century by the agents of English and American societies. " The number of conversions effected by the Protestants," says M. Hausmann, who dedicates his book to M. Guizot, and seems to profess an equal indifference to all forms of religion, " is perfectly insignificant when compared with those effected by the Catholics, "f "The religion of the Catholics," says Baron von Haxthausen, " extends itself more and more in the north of the empire, and even in Pekin itself their number is said to exceed forty thousand.":): Mr. Montgomery Martin, a warm opponent of the Catholic religion, observes, " Perhaps there are not more than twenty or thirty Christian Protestant Chinese, while Catholicism num- bers its tens and hundreds of thousands."! "Great progress has been silently made," says Sir Oscar Oliphant, in 1857, though he does not so much as allude to the * Five Months on the Tang-Tsze, by Thomas W. Blakiston, late Captain Royal Artillery, ch. ix., p. 155 ; cli. x., p. 179 ; ch. xi., pp. 182-5 ; ch. xviii., p. 319. f Voyage en Chine, tome i., ch. iii., p. 129. i Etudes sur la Ruszie, tome i., ch. xiv., p. 441. China, Political, &c., vol. ii., p. 491. - MISSIONS IN CHINA. 185 Protestant attempts, " and continues to be so made, in the mis- sionary field."'* " It is superfluous," writes Mr. Osmond Tiffany, with refer- ence to his Protestant companions, " to say aught of mission- ary labors, simply because they have little or no importance"^ The American traveller, Dr. Ball, who spent all his time among the missionaries, and was their constant guest and con- fidential friend, though he eloquently describes their " com- modious and very well-furnished houses," never so much as alludes, throughout the whole of his ample correspondence, to their making a solitary convert. " There is something inexplicable," says the Rev. Howard Malcolm, " in the sterility of the Protestant missions ; for the Catholic missionaries, with very limited resources, have made a great many proselytes ; their worship has become popular, and everywhere excites the attention of the public." And again : " Up to the present period, the principal portion of missionary labor has been preparatory."^: " Little has been done," says another, " by missionaries in China, except the printing of books." "The Protestants," observes Mr. Leitch Ritchie, "have as yet confined their efforts to the distribution of books along the seacoast, the result not being, in the mean time, of any obvious importance."! " We have no proofs," adds a candid American missionary, " that the thousands of books thrown among this people have been the means of converting one individual."!" "The activity of the missionaries of the Romish Church in China," says Sir John Davis, who has little love for them, " has no rival, as to either numbers or enterprise."** " Since the death of Dr. Morrison,-' observes the secretary of the Religious Tract society, " little has been done in China," and we have seen that Dr. Morrison did nothing.ff " For many a long and toilsome year," says the secretary of a London missionary society, in 1855, "has the Christian mis- sionary been laboring for this people . . . unblessed with the knowledge of any successful issues of his labor."^ " As to missionary labor in China," writes the Rev. W. C. China ; a Popular History, ch. v., p! 45. The Canton Chinese, ch. x., p. 181. Travels, &c., vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 263. Points about China and the Chinese, ch. xxxii., p. 314. The British World in the East, vol. ii., p. 230. Quoted by Dr. Brown, Hist. Prop. Christianity, vol. ii., p. 256. ** China, vol. ii., ch. vii., p. 235. ft The People of China, by the Religious Tract Society, ch. xi., p. 326. \\ Missionary Gleaner, December, 1855, p. 245. 186 CHAPTER II. Milne, in 1858, " hitherto this department of enterprise has been that of pioneering, for which service about one hundred and ninety men have enlisted and left their native shores."* "The whole number of Protestant missionaries in China," says Mr. Scarth, in 1860, "probably exceeds the number of converts who are not actually in their pay." A little later this friendly witness briefly describes the multitude of rival sects as "a number of different denominations of Christians, stumbling forwards in various directions, but with indifferent success ;" though he considers the "comfortable appearance" of their dwellings a proof " that home is not forgotten in this scene of their weary, almost unprofitable labors."f Dr. Grant appears to sum up the whole history, when he in- forms the University of Oxford that " the attempts of Protest- ant bodies to evangelize China have signally failed.";); Mr. Wingrove Cooke leaves nothing to be added, when he declares, in 1858, " I will not say that the Protestant missionaries are making sincere Chinese Christians, those who say this must be either governed by a delusion, or guilty of fraud. " A still higher authority, who observes, in 1861, that " in the south of the empire (Protestant) Christianity among the natives has turned into ashes, while further north it has generated into blasphemy," frankly adds, that " Protestant missionary labor is a grand swindle, and the sooner it is denounced and exposed the better."] Lastly, in 1862, for up to the latest hour the evidence never varies, an English Protestant, who records his opinion with undisguised repugnance, laments once more that, in spite of " the labor and funds that have for so many years been devoted" to the teaching of Protestantism, " the re- sult is almost inappreciable.''!" Such are the acknowledged results of all the enormous ex- penses incurred by Protestant missionary societies in China during this century. The contempt of their own friends and advocates, whose sympathies they have first abused and then alienated, and the derision of the pagans, to whom they have made Christianity at once ludicrous and hateful such are the fruits which Protestantism has reaped in China. But it is time to show, without pausing to offer comments upon a history which needs none, that there is exactly the same difference, by the confession of the same reluctant and impartial witnesses, in * Life in China, p. 510. f 2 lf icelve Years in China, cli. viii., p. 77 ; ch. xxiv., p. 267. i Bampton Lectures, Lect. vi., p. 214. China, ch. xi., p. 181. | Hong-Kong Daily Press. Tf Brine, The Taeping Rebellion, ch. iii., p. 61. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 187 the quality as in the number of the disciples who have been won respectively by the Church and by the Sects. What the Catholic natives are we have seen, and not even the annals of the primitive Church surpass those of the nineteenth century in China, Corea ; and A imam. The Catholics, of all ranks, as Dr. Williams angrily confesses, " have exhibited the greatest fidelity, even at the risk of death ;" while the super- natural virtues displayed, in every province of the empire, by men who but yesterday were godless and sordid barbarians, have so kindled the admiration of their pagan countrymen, as to add to the ranks of the faithful, in spite of incessant perse- cution, more than eight hundred thousand souls in forty years. On the other hand, even the most trusted of the nominal Protestant converts have proved so irreclaimable, that the Rev. Theodore Hamberg, one of their teachers, admits that, "on ac- count of the perfidious character of some of his Chinese attend- ants, or catechistS) he was obliged to dismiss several of them."* " Some of us," says another Protestant missionary, " have ex- perienced serious embarrassments from having the best teachers we can procure stupefied and disabled by the influence of opium"t for which Mr. Medhurst used to allow his disciple Chin ''eight to ten dollars per month." "Two assistants of the missionary Mr. Roberts/' we learn from Mr. Hamberg, in 1855, " fearing that Siu-Tsuen, with his superior talents, would after baptism be employed by Mr. Roberts, and that they them- selves would lose their position, planned how they mighr get rid of him, and prevent his being baptized, and in this they suc- ceeded.'^ Such were even the " catechists" and " assistants" employed by the Protestant missionaries, who, in spite of this accurate knowledge of their real character, continued to employ them. Such was their estimate of the value of Christian bap- tism, and such its effects upon themselves, that they were only solicitous to prevent others from sharing them. The rank and file of their converts were not more worthless, how could they be? but here is a specimen of them. Mr. Forbes, who notices with admiration that "there are more than forty thousand Catholics" in the apostolic vicariate of Fu-kien, adds: "I wish 1 could say as much for the success of the Church of England mission, but at Koo-lung-su, where I was for upwards of a year, the only two Protestant converts that I could hear of were suspected of running off with the commu- nion plate." * The Chinese Rebel Chief, Hung-Siu-Tsuen, introd., p. 6 (1855). \ Asiatic Journal, New Series, vol. xxxii., p. 329. JP 48. Five Years in China, ch. xi , p. 184. 188 CHAPTER II. Even their scholars, over whom they had so many opportuni- ties of acquiring supreme influence, and who were glad to learn English, though at the cost of a weekly sermon, "emulated the irregularities of the converts." Dr. Ball reports, in 1856, that at Ningpo, for the facts were everywhere uniform, " some Chinese boys in the school have been pawning their clothing, and taken away some money. Investigations are being made by some of the missionary teachers." This gentleman adds, that their practice of "learning English in the schools of the missionaries," with no other object but " to turn it afterwards to their own advantage for trading purposes, in the Chinese character, seems to me natural."* The contrast of which these are examples, and the incorrigi- ble immorality of the few Protestant converts, and of their profligate " catechists," are so perpetually affirmed and illus- trated by writers of all classes, that the advocates of Protestant missions, far from attempting to refute their evidence, found upon it such argumentation as the following: "To object to flrst converts, because they are less perfect than Christians who have higher privileges, discovers great ignorance of human nature ;"f a plea which is, perhaps, still more curious, con- sidering that they have been half a century at work, and that the " first converts," both of the Apostles and of later Catholic missionaries, have been saints and martyrs, than the unwel- come phenomenon which it attempts to explain. But even the testimonies already cited do not disclose every feature of the contrast which we are tracing. We have seen how Protestant writers speak of their own missionaries as a class ; sometimes they even name individuals, and compare them, one by one, with the Catholic teachers, whom they hap- pen to have met, as Mr. Power met Fathers Zea and Aguilar, and of whom they speak as he did. Commander Elliot Bing- ham tells us, in 1842, that his frigate was visited by a French Catholic missionary, who had just come out of a Chinese prison, where he had been " nearly starved." " He came on board," says this officer, " without apparently feeling the least pleasure at his release. He had failed in his object, ~but would try it Mr. Fonblanque, writing from the interior of China in 1861, and addressing his cautious confessions to the Times newspaper, reluctantly attests, that " the self-devotion, the zeal, and, as a very general rule, the pure and simple lives led by the French missionaries in China, are not without their effect upon the * Rambles in Eastern Asia, ch. xxxvi , p. 301 ; ch. xxxviii., p. 317. f Missionary Records of the Religious Tract Society, ch. ii., p. 20. \ Narrative of the Expedition to China, vol. ii., ch. iii., p. 101. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 189 people ;" and lie adds, that even the pagans openly manifested reverence towards them.* Mr. Scarth relates, in 1860, that he visited "a village where a worthy Catholic missionary resided. He had about two hun- dred converts. His house was just like the other cottages in the village, all the villagers being of a poor class. Poor man ! he had just got out of prison, yet had returned to Ids flock. He seemed to be much respected, but was too delicate-looking for his task. He was about to proceed some thirty miles off to visit a sick man. His intelligence had at once given him an ascendency among the poor ignorant villagers ; and he seemed bent on doing good. It is a pity that all missionaries are not equally self-sacrificing." And then he apologizes for the very different life of his own friends by adding, " but it is hard to call upon intelligent men to tear themselves from civilized European habits, to plunge into poverty and obscurity in a Chinese village,"f in other words, it is unreasonable to ask for apostolic virtues in a Protestant missionary. The Singapore Free Press, of April 13, 1843, says of the missionaries in Cochin-China, that the heathen themselves were so astonished at their quiet submission to the most cruel tortures, which they could have escaped by a word or a sign, that they used to say to one another, "These foreigners probably possess some charm to deaden pain.";j; Perhaps their fathers said the same thing of St. John when he came out of the boiling caldron ; of St. Paul when he was scourged ; of St. Peter when he was crucified. Let us hear other examples, but all of recent date. Mr. Forbes met a missionary, not a European, like the priest whom Commander Bingham received, but a native of Corea. He was "of noble birth, and by profession a Roman Catholic priest. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, had all died for that religion." He was returning to his own country, the land of martyrs, " on foot, a distance of at least fourteen hundred miles." He had already tasted persecution, for " more than once he had witnessed a partial massacre of his own flock, and had himself been hunted down by dogs." And now this descendant of a race of martyrs was going calmly to face all this again. Yet he was one who might have taken his fill of social pleasures, if he had been so minded ; for the * The Times, June 17, 1861. Niphon and Pe-cheM, by Edward Barrington De Fonblanque, p. 216 (1862). f Twelve Years in China^ch. vi., p. 61. \ Chinese Repository, vol. xii., p. 539. 190 CHAPTER IT. English officers "found him a clever, agreeable, well-informed man, with a fund of anecdotes, and a very good manner," and he spoke six languages.* Perhaps he was a friend of that other Corean of whom Morrison said, " lie offers himself up to God." Mr. Forbes, who is a British officer, gives also, like Mr. Sirr, Mr. Power, and others, individual examples of Protestant mis- sionaries. They are of another type. He meets a " Church of England clergyman," who refused even "to attend the military hospitals to administer the consolations of religion to the sick," though he was paid for that object. When the regimental surgeon rebuked him, he answered, u Soldiers and sailors are so very bad, it is of no use; I never like to go near them." So the military authorities hired " an American missionary, who undertook the cure of souls of an English regiment, at a salary of two hundred and fifty pounds per annum, paid weekly.'" He is called, in his turn, to visit a dying English soldier, but only went " as far as the foot of the staircase," and hearing that it was a case of delirium tremens, " turned upon his heel, and went his way." But there was, adds Mr. Forbes, a mis- sionary of another class there. " Father Barrentin was in the hospital at the time, and though his stipend is only ninety dol- lars per annum, less than twenty pounds, yet upon that he lives, and declines all offers of further payment." There was still mercy in store for the dying Englishman, " at whose re- quest, communicated to him through the hospital attendant, the good Father administered to him the last offices of the Roman Catholic Church, in communion with which, I need hardly say, the poor man died."f The Rev. Gustavus Hines, an American Protestant minister, was so much impressed by the same class of facts during his stay in China, that he was tempted to express his astonishment that some of the Episcopalian chaplains at Hong- Kong, " after spending Sunday evening in card-playing and wine-drinking, will enter the sacred desk," not, as he intimates, with much advantage to their hearers.;): Sometimes their friends openly jest at the failure which, in missionaries of such a class, is not surprising. Thus the Rev. Mr. Malan begs them playfully not to " delude themselves" with the expectation, which incessant misadventure should have cor- rected, that "sharp, intelligent, skeptical, and often very learned men," like the Chinese, " will, as a matter of course, bow to * five Years in China, p. 190. f P. 186. \ Plains of the Pacific, ch. xiv., p. 270. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 191 a few scattered emissaries of a more florid complexion,"* for BO he describes the two hundred Protestant missionaries in China. Mr. Walter Gibson, an American Protestant, expressed, in 1856, the same unfavorable impression, which he too had formed from actual observation, of the same class of agents. " The. Chinese, Hindoos, Malays, and other people of the East," he says, u may become wiser, stronger, and happier, when mis- sionaries of the Gospel shall go forth among them more zealous and unencumbered, and less as mere stipendiary agents of a company."^ And this appears to be the almost universal senti- ment of independent Protestants, who have actually watched their proceedings in China. " I was born a Protestant," said one of the interpreters to the British plenipotentiary in China to the Vicar Apostolic of Nankin, "but I cannot refrain from admiring the heroism, the devotedness, and the superiority of the Catholic missionaries in China.";]: Mr. Wingrove Cooke also appears to sum up his estimate of their unsuccessful rivals, when he says, "Ignorant declairners in bad Chinese have no success in China;" and an English journalist of high character concludes from such revelations as are found in that gentleman's well-known work, not only that " as a body the Protestant mis- sionaries appear to command less respect than is paid to their Roman Catholic rivals," but that " they adopt the low tone of morality that is prevalent among those whom they seek to con- vert, and thus bring humiliation upon their order. " A curious illustration, and it shall be the last, of the feelings with which the English residents in China regard the mortifying contrast which they so candidly attest, is contained in a fact which is sufficiently remarkable to deserve notice. There are at this moment eight Chinese children in England, the writer has seen and conversed with four of them, the offspring of four English Protestant merchants and of as many -pagan Chinese women. Of these children, six are in convents in England, and the other two under the guardianship of Catholics ; and their fathers have desired that they may be brought up in the Catholic faith, towards which they already display earnest and intelligent attachment, solely in consequence of the respect which they have conceived for Catholic missionaries, and the disgust which they entertain for those of another class. Here we may fitly close the evidence, exclusively Protestant, as the reader will observe, to this particular feature of the * Who is God in China, Shin or Shanh-Te? by the Rev. S. C. Malan, p. 176. \ The East Indian ArcMpelago, p. 134. | Quoted in Annals, vol. v., p. 828. | Manchester Guardian, quoted in the Times, September 25, 1858. 192 CHAPTER II. contrast which we shall hereafter trace in every region of the earth. Never since Christianity was first promulgated were professors of religion so described, or so appreciated, by their own friends and associates, except only the same class of missionaries in all the other countries of the world which we have still to visit. HOW THE MISSIONARIES RESENT THEIR FAILURE. But if the Protestant missionaries have failed to attract either the respect of the pagan or the sympathy of their co-religionists ; if they have endured the mortification of seeing the first embrace in tens of thousands the Catholic faith, and of hearing the last avow their admiration of those who preached it to them ; they have at least attempted, after their own manner, to avenge their defeat. If they could not make converts them- selves, they could defame the disciples of others; if they dared not imitate the heroism of their rivals, they could sneer at it, like Dr. Smith and his clergy, and attribute it to unworthy motives. It was in this way, therefore, that they revenged themselves. We have seen already that Mr. Gutzlaff, whose own labors were more profitable to himself than to the Chinese, could venture to say that "the Catholic missionaries converted thousands without touching the heart." Dr. Wells Williams, one of his successors, is still more emphatic, and assures his readers, that the Catholic converts, who shed their blood in every province of the empire for the name of Jesus, " can hardly be considered as much better than baptized pagans."* This, he adds, must be our judgment of them, "until the confessional be abolished, and the worship of the Virgin." The Rev. William Gillespie, another Protestant missionary, explains to his own satisfaction the conversion of hundreds of thousands of Chinese, at the peril of goods, liberty, and life, by observing that "in becoming Papists they give up nothing f^ a remark which he may perhaps have borrowed from a Dutch Protestant, who suggested that the constancy of the Japanese martyrs under all their torments " was to be attributed to the firmness of the national character !"$ Mr. Montgomery Martin, with almost as little respect for the intelligence of his readers, informs us, that if the Protestant missionaries have failed, it is only because " they will not adopt secret and stealthy means to * The Middle Kingdom, vol. ii., ch. xix., p. 324. The Land of Smim, ch. iv., p. 132. Montauus, ap. Charlevoix, Histoire du Japon, tome v., liv. xiii., p. 367. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 193 promote Christianity."* Mr. Peter Auber agrees with him, and deplores that " the means which the Catholic missionaries took to propagate their faith were not open and direct, but covert and disguised. "f If he had visited Corea himself, or Cochin-China, or even Nankin, he would perhaps have called upon the mandarins to announce his arrival. Mr. Samuel Kidd, afterwards Professor of Chinese at the London University, informs the world, that the Catholic success in China " was gained by pandering to human passions and lusts !'^ This gentleman has since passed to the other world. The Rev. Joseph Edkins, another missionary in China, expresses the " painful reflections" with which, at the college described by Mr. Oliphant, Mr. D'Ewes, and others, he saw some of the pupils, who were taught sculpture, " forming images of Joseph and Mary, and other Scripture personages." If they had been fashioning a Yenus or a Bacchus, he would have ap- plauded their praiseworthy skill, but he was indignant that they should be like " the idol-makers in the neighboring towns, moulding Buddhas, and gods of war and riches, des- tined to be honored in much the same manner. " Mr. Edkins also laments, no doubt with sincerity, " the worldly policy of the Jesuits," that is of Ricci, and Schaal, and Yerbiest ! Even English Protestants who were never seen in China, repeat the same language. "The conversions were easy" we are gravely told, in a paper published by a well-known English society, because the converts only " accepted the Romish rosary for that which the Buddhists used." And this account of an army of martyrs and confessors was solemnly read before the u Royal Geographical Society of England !"|| Lastly, for we cannot quote them all, another English association, alluding to the baptism of outcast and dying children, flung into what Barrow truly calls " the horrible pit of destruction at which Roman Catholic missionaries attend by turns as a part of the duties of their ofHce,"T denounces this charitable and perilous administration of the sacrament, without which " a man can- not enter into the kingdom of God,"** as " an infamous and clumsy fraud upon the poor Chinese."tt Surely only this was wanting to add a still more inexpiable discredit to the proceedings of men who could attempt thus to * Vol. ii., p. 491. f China, by Peter Auber, ch. ii., p. 47. \ China, section vii., p. 393. " The Religious Condition of the Chinese. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, vol. xix., p. 129. \ Travels in China, ch. iv., p. 168. ** John iii., 5. ft Ecangelical Christendom, vol. i., p. 184. 14 194: CHAPTER II. cloak their own mortification, by reviling apostles whom they had not courage to imitate, and scoffing at works which they had not faith to attempt. THE MULTIPLICATION OF SECTS. That there are individuals among the Protestant missionaries in China who would repudiate the language which has now / been quoted, and refuse to repeat it, we may easily believe. They may be as unsuccessful as an Edkins or a Gillespie in converting the heathen, but they have too much integrity, too much self-respect, to employ the phraseology of such writers. But these few, men of honor and of kindly dispositions, are overwhelmed by the multitude of mercenaries, of various sects, who are now assembled in the seaports of China. Thirteen years ago the American missionaries alone already amounted to one hundred and sixteen, " not including females." How many there are of other classes we may partly infer from the following list of societies, each of which had its agents and representatives in China more than twenty years ago. 1. The London Missionary Society. 2. The Church Missionary Society. 3. The General Baptist Society. 4. The Presbyterian Free Church Society. 5. The Methodist Society. 6. The Chinese Evangelization Society. T. The Rhenish Evangelization Society. 8. The German Evangelization Society. 9. The Swedish Evangelization Society. 10. The Berlin Evangelization Society. 11. The American Board of Foreign Missions. 12. The American Baptist Missions. 13. The American Presbyterian Missions. 14. The American Episcopal Missions. 15. The American Methodist Missions. 16. The American Southern Baptist Missions. 17. The American Seventh Day Baptist Missions.* Such is Protestantism, prolific at least in sects, if in nothing else. And the list just cited has probably received ample addi- tions since that date. The effect of this colhivies of sects has been just what we might have anticipated. In China, as in every other pagan land visited by Protestant missionaries, it has simply confirmed the heathen in their own errors, and in a mingled * Dr. Brown's Hist. Prop. Christianity, vol. iii., p. 370. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 195 hatred and contempt for Christianity. They are Protestant witnesses who record this fact. " It is to be regretted," said Lord Elgin in 1858, in a dispatch to Lord Clarendon, " that the existence of profound divisions among ourselves should be one of the first truths which we Christians reveal to the heathen whom we desire to convert ;" and the statement is the more remarkable because it appears to have been suggested by " an address presented to him by the missionaries at Shang-liae."* " There is no greater barrier," says Mr. Colledge, a British official in China, " to the spread of the Gospel of our Saviour among the heathen, than the division and splitting which have taken place among the various orders of Christians themselves. Let us ask any intelligent Chinese what he thinks of this, and he will tell us, that these persons cannot be influenced by the same great principle ; but that Europe and America must have as many Christs as China has gods""\ " There is a great and fatal error to be avoided," says another English writer, who had examined the same facts, " and that is, the rivalry of religious sects among each other, and the attempt to gain followers at the expense of each other's tenets.";): We shall see hereafter the same rivalry of Protes- tant sects in every region of the earth, and everywhere with the same result : the angry scorn of the pagans for a religion which cannot even unite its own followers in one body. On the other hand, at the very moment that lay writers were deploring the ceaseless conflicts of Protestants, and their effects upon the Chinese, a native official was reporting to the late emperor, Kien-fung, as one of the marked features of u the doctrine of the Lord of Heaven," i. 0., the Catholic religion, that " there is great unanimity of opinion amongst the pro- fessors of the doctrine." Ten years later, one of the most blasphemous of the Tae-ping leaders, who had long been nominally a Protestant, and " for years a native catechist," employed by the missionaries, gave to the admonitions of one of them this crushing reply : " He was desirous of being friendly with us ; but there was such a variety of sentiment among us / and the simple fact, our being what we are. deter- mined him to follow his own course."! * Scarth, cli. xxiv., p. 267. f Suggestions with regard to employing Medical Practitioners as Missionaries to China, p. 33. $ Bernard's Services of the Nemesis. Brine, The Taeping Rebellion, ch. iv., p. 95. j Ibid., ch. xii., p. 287. 196 CHAPTER II. MEDICAL MISSIONARIES. One advantage, however, has resulted to the Chinese, even from the multiplicity of Protestant sects ; for as each is un- ceasingly striving to surpars every other, and possesses almost unlimited pecuniary resources for the furtherance of its designs, hospitals conducted by European methods have been established in several of the seaports. The Americans have even formed a special class of missionaries, professors of medicine, having the title of "reverend," and aiming to acquire influence over the souls of the Chinese through their bodies. The plan is an excellent one, though it has completely failed as a missionary project. Mr. Malcolm frankly confesses that " a sense of failure in regard to direct evangelical labors renders popular the sending out of physicians:" some of whom, we learn from a competent authority, " do incalculable mischief by their imper- fect knowledge of the healing art."* The hospital reports of the Medical Missionary Society in China show that thousands of the natives have profited by the medical skill of the English and Americans, and are loud in praises of it ; yet they cannot touch their conscience ! In 1861, Mr. Lockhart, himself a " medical missionary," reports that he " has attended to more than two hundred thousand individual patients," and many of his companions were engaged in the same work ; yet the whole mass which they have held, as it were, in their grasp, slips away from them, admiring their drugs and their surgery, but utterly indifferent to their religion. In 1845, Dr. Hobson, who had in two years seven thousand two hundred and twenty-one patients in a single city, but deplores that they "have not given satisfactory evidence that they feel the moral truths inculcated," attributes the failure, for which it was necessary to account, not to the want of vocation on the part of their English and American teachers, but to "their own innate apathy and indifference to religion gener- ally."! Yet a gentleman bearing the singular title of " Arch- deacon of Ningpo" says, "you seldom enter a Buddhist temple without seeing some anxious faces watching till one of the 1 sticks of fate' falls out of the shaker. This is taken to the attendant priest for his interpretation.''^ " Where in Protestant * Medical Missionary Society in China,, p. 6. See also The Campaign in China, by Captain Granville Locke. f The Medical Missionary in China, by Win. Lockhart, F.R.C.S., F.R.G.S., ch. ix.,p. 207; ch. x., p. '281. \ Pictures of the Chinese, by the Rev. R. H. Cobbold, M. A., late Archdeacon of Ningpo, p. 14. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 197 countries," asks Captain Blakiston, " do we find people going to such an expense as is entailed by the number of candles, in- cense, sticks, and paper consumed every evening?. . . I think many of us have an example of earnestness set us by the heathen Chinese."* Such men have surely as much religion as the barbarous tribes of England or Germany, whom a St. Augustine or a St. Boniface won to Christianity ; and we have seen that, under the guidance of missionaries of another order, hundreds of thousands of Chinese have cheerfully abandoned all, and many of them life itself, to embrace a far more exact- ing religion than that which the opulent agents of Protestant- ism offered them in vain. THE MISSIONARIES IGNORANT OF THE LANGUAGE. Another fact, in illustration of the failures of Protestantism in China, claims a brief notice, before we pass to new scenes. The number of the missionaries is legion, but not one-tenth of them can even speak the language, however imperfectly. Timkowski, who was sent to Pekin by the Russian government a few years before Morrison went to Canton, confesses, that " the Russian students at Pekin never made themselves thoroughly acquaint- ed with the real meaning of Chinese words."f The Russians, in spite of their political advantages, have never so much as attempted to convert the Chinese, and their superior at Pekin confessed to Father Ripa, " that he only baptized Russians ;J" so that Gutzlaif remarks, perhaps with unconscious irony, that u the government has never upbraided them on account of their proselyting zeal." And the Protestants, resembling these sterile sectaries in their exile from unity, resemble them also, not in- deed in their lethargy, but in their ignorance of the Chinese dialects. The Rev. David Abeel observes, that " those missionaries who have not been toiling for years at the language are not qualified' 1 for their office. Hence they commonly pay unbaptized Chinese to do their work ; and Dr.- Smith mentions one who was em- ployed " to read a tract, after previous preparation and instruc- tion by a missionary at his own house," but who, in spite of this tuition, " hazarded comments of his own, which were of a rather equivocal tendency. " If Protestant missionaries are * Five Months on the Yang-Tze, cli. xviii., p. 318. f Timkowski's Travels, vol. ii., ch. i., p. 27. | Ripa's Residence at the Court of Pekin, ch. xvi. Visit to the Consular Cities of China, p. 416. 198 CHAPTER II. content to employ such doubtful auxiliaries, a usage common to them in all heathen countries, the singular practice is partly explained by the fact, noticed by Dr. Berncastle, that " plenty of men may be obtained who, for about tivepence a day, would read and speak of the Gospel, just as they would read or speak of the writings of Confucius."* Such assistant missionaries, however, appear to earn their modest wages by compromising with " equivocal comments" the very religion which they are paid to teach, though they neither believe it themselves, nor wish to make others believe it. It was the actual experience of these facts which made Mr. Malcolm exclaim, "It is a great mercy that China should be shut at present. Were it otherwise, Protestants are without persons to send ; while Popish priests abound in the East, and would instantly enter in great numbers, making the field worse for us, if possible, than now." Yet half a century might surely have sufficed to overcome the difficulties of the study, if en- countered in a spirit of religious zeal and charity. They are no doubt great, as Colonel Cunynhaine observes, " except to a man with indomitable spirit and determination.'^ Yet the Catholic missionaries are able to hear confessions in Chinese at the end of one year, or at the most two. " The Holy Ghost," says one of their number, " is the great Teacher of languages." Even Mr. Edkins, speaking of the " French Sisters of Mercy" at Ningpo, expresses his surprise that they " did not employ native schoolmasters or schoolmistresses" in their schools, as the Prot- estants do, but taught them themselves, and "proved their competence" by reading Chinese books in his presence.;): On the other hand, the Protestant missionaries remain for the most part so ignorant of the language, that, although there were about two hundred of them in China, most of whom are ready to accept any lucrative employment whatever, it was found impossible even to obtain an interpreter for the public service ; while Baron Gros and General Montaubau had only to apply to the superior of the French missions, and their demand was immediately satisfied. "The want was very much felt," we are told, by the officers of the British expedition, who " repeatedly applied for some one to be sent up in that * A Voyage to China, by Dr. Berncastle, vol. ii., p. 281. f Recollections of Service in China, by Colonel Arthur Cunynhame, ch. xv., p. 208. " In China some eighteen provincial dialects prevail, almost all deviating so much from others that the speakers are not mutually intelligible ; and besides these there are other distinct forms of speech in the mountains of the same em- pire." Sir Charles Lyell, The Antiquity of Man, ch. xxiii., p. 461 (1868). \ The Religious Condition of the Chinese, ch. xii., p. 238. Un Voyage d Pekin, par Georges de Keroulee, ch. iv., p. 55. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 199 capacity."* In 1851, Lord Jocelyn suggested, no doubt with 'some reluctance, that the "members of the Roman Catholic institution at Macao would easily be induced to furnish, at all times, a certain number of interpreters for the use of govern- ment.'^ And this, it appears, would be nothing new. " It was from Father Ripa's foundation that Lord Macartney ob- tained two interpreters for his embassy.";}: Yet Dr. Smith is supposed to have founded a college to supply this very defect, of which Mr. "Wingrove Cooke asks, in 1858, "Where are the interpreters who were to be supplied by the bishop's college, an institution that has, I believe, for some years received two hundred and fifty pounds annually for this purpose ? It has never yet turned out one Chinese scholar !" And as late as 1854, the Abbe Hue, who had spoken the Chinese language for years, found that one of their latest lit- erary productions, of a very ambitious kind, was such a hopeless "jargon," that he could only say of it, "I am convinced that in the whole empire there is not one Chinese capable of under- standing a single page of this book."|| THE TREATY OF 1860 AND THE TAE-PING REBELS. "We have now almost completed, perhaps with excessive de- tail, our review of Protestant missions in China. One point only remains to be noticed, and then we may proceed to trace the same history in other lands. Great events have occurred in China since Sanz was scourged to death, and Borie calmly encouraged his unskilful executioners to strike more firmly at his head. A new era has been inaugu- rated, by the arms of England and France, in this distant land. The cross has been reared again on the summit of the Catholic cathedral of Pekin, "and once more the TeDeumw&Q chanted within its long-neglected walls, in grateful homage to the Almighty Maker. "^f The fifth article in the French treaty of 1860 stipulates for "the restitution of all lands and buildings which formerly belonged to the Catholic Church throughout the * Services of the Nemesis, ch. xix., p. 194. f Six Months in China, ch. vi., p. 145. j A well-known British officer complains in 1860, that " the old Jesuit map of China is still our only guide," and adds that it "has just been reproduced for the use of our naval and military authorities in China, by the topographical department of the War Office." The Past and Future of British Relations in China, by Captain Sherard Osborne, C.B., ch. iii., p. 128 (1860). C/dna, ch. xxvii., p. 359. I L' Empire Cliinois, tome ii., ch. x., p. 432. 1 Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860, by Robert Swinhoe, Staff Interpreter, &c., ch. xiii., p. 361 (1861). 200 CHAPTER II. whole empire of China."* The age of persecution is over. As far as China proper is concerned, its last page has been written, its last victim buried, or cast into the sea, or consumed in the flames. The same thing will perhaps soon be true of Corea, as well as of Tong-King and the whole kingdom of Annam. " Persecution is no longer to be feared," cries a Protestant mis- sionary, and in this unwonted security he discerns " a peculiar encouragement"-)- for himself and his companions. Already he begins to speculate on a more tranquil and pros- perous future ; and this expectation is founded, not simply on the cessation of persecution, but on the growth of a new power in China, with which Protestantism made haste to ally itself; and by whose aid it hoped at length to snatch the success which had been hitherto denied. It is upon this alliance with the Tae-ping rebels that we are about to make some final re- marks, because it forms perhaps the most instructive and characteristic feature in the history of Protestantism in China. That Protestant missionaries were the original abettors of the existing rebellion in China, and that it owed its <^m'-religious character to their teaching, is now admitted even by themselves. "There can be no reasonable doubt," says the Eev. J. Edkins, as if it were a subject for congratulation, " that this insurrec- tion began in strong religious impressions derived from reading the Scriptures and tracts published by Protestant missionaries."^: And this is confirmed by lay writers. " We have no doubt," says Mr. Macfarlane, in his history of these events, " that Gutzlaff contributed to the movement."^ The chief " was long under the tuition of Mr. Roberts;" and Kang-Wang, the second in command, " spent several months in Shang-hae, and wrote out a commentary on the entire New Testament from the in- structions of the late Dr. Medhurst."| The editor of the North China Herald, who detected that the chief of the insurrection was " a cunning impostor," observes the significant fact, that u he applied to himself the terms employed in Gutzlafs version of the New Testament for the ' Comforter,' and that used ly Morrison to designate the Holy Ghost. In all his proclama- tions posted on the walls, he appears with these titles, 'the Comforter, the Holy Divine Breath.' "T It is certain, moreover, that however anxious some of them have lately become to disavow all connection with it, the * De Ke"roulee, ch. x., p. 196. f Gillespie, The Land of Sinim, ch. v., p. 140. i Ch. xv., p. 269. | The Chinese Revolution, by Charles Macfarlane, book ii., p. 82. | The Times, October 8, 1860. ^[ Impressions of China, by Captain Fishbourne, ch. vi., p. 270. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 201 formidable organization which has proved so prolific of blas- phemy and crime was not only created, but hailed with exul- tation by the Protestant missionaries. " It is a religious move- ment" says a writer of that class, "essentially Protestant Christian in its origin, development, and tendency."* "If it succeeds,'' Mr. Gillespie exclaims with delight, " China will be thrown open to the efforts of Protestant missionaries/' " The movement is essentially Protestant in its principles," was the triumphant announcement of the commander of the Hermes, "that is, holding the Bible alone without tradition."-)- And they all used this language, although not wholly ignorant, even at that period, of the true nature of this horrible sect. " Behold what God hath wrought !"J said the Rev. Mr. Roberts, the spiritual instructor of the rebel chief; though he also was at least so far cognizant of the real character of the insurrection as to be able to report, though without any misgiving on that account, that some of these ferocious neophytes " baptized themselves." Two Anglican bishops in succession, Hobson and Smith, gave their countenance to the movement. The former wrote, in 1853, to the "Archbishop of Canterbury:" "There is a strong guarantee for the Christian sincerity of the leaders among the rebels ;" and added, with evident satisfac- tion, " The rebel chiefs profess to believe in Protestant Chris- tianity." The latter, when the missionary Ham berg published the blasphemous "visions" of Hung-Siu-Tsuen, attached "a high degree of probability to them!"|| It is true that there was one motive for suspicion, but it only confirmed these Anglican prelates in their good opinion of the rebels. Dr. Hobson told his correspondent in England that " it is strange that these rebels do not seem to have any intercourse with the Romanists" but this was a note in their favor. Mr. Hamberg, their biographer, knew also, that the wretched versions of the Scriptures which they had received from Gutzlaff and others were so inaccurate that, as he confesses, they " made many mistakes as to the meaning," and that Siu-Tsuen inter- preted various passages to refer to himself, and enforced the interpretation upon his followers. Mr. Hamberg knew, more- over, that in administering a- sort of baptism, which was a mere symbol of the rebellion, they used " two burning lamps and three cups of tea ;" and that, instead of the sacramental words, they said in these orgies, " Purification from all former sins, * Calcutta Renew, vol. xxii., p. 102. f Impressions of China, ch. v., p. 180. i Missionary Gleaner, February, 1853, p. 69. Macfarlane's Chinese Revolution, pp. 118, 122. |] The Chinese Rebel Chief, introd., p. 6. 202 CHAPTER II. putting off the old, and regeneration." He knew this, and much more ; and yet desired, like Hobson, and Roberts, and Gillespie, and the rest, that Protestantism should make alliance with them for the chance of ulterior gains. At length, after " urging these ruffians to go forth and kill," as Mr. Wingrove Cooke observes, the indignant reproaches of their own country- men forced the missionaries to break their compact with a rebel- lion which their own teachings had originated, and to confess its intolerable wickedness. " I am ashamed," said Mr. Lay, who had witnessed these proceedings, "that any who bear, the name of Christians should be the abettors of evil men and evil things, especially in a heathen country." But such protests were for a long period ineffectual. "The missionaries still hang their hopes upon this rebel cause," says Mr. Cooke, even in 1858. And two years later, Mr. Edkins was once more arguing in defence of these savage allies, and protesting against what he called u an indiscriminate condemnation" of them " for mistaking the nature of Christianity in some points !" though Mr. Russell, also a Protestant missionary, confesses that " their notions are perfectly blasphemous, terribly repulsive to the mind and heart of a Christian."* And now let us see what was the nature of the Christianity which Protestant teaching had created, and with which Protestant missionaries wished to make a treaty of alliance. " There is no reason to suppose," says Mr. Oxenford, " that the insurgents are otherwise than orthodox Confucians, "f But even this was a character which they were far from deserving. "Time was," said the leading journal of Great Britain, on the 3d of January, 1859, "when the English sympathies were directed by our missionaries into something like favor for these ruffians. They lived, indeed, by rapine and plunder, and died like locusts when there was no more left to destroy; they quenched indiscriminately all human life, 'even,' as they boasted, * to the children at the breast,' and they made it suffi- ciently manifest that their only object was plunder. But they had established a hideous and revolting burlesque of Chris- tianity, and the missionaries would fondly hope that their inten- tion was to establish a real Christianity, and that when the leaders assumed the names of the Three Persons of the Trinity, it was only an ignorance they would be glad to correct. This hope is now extinct in all sane minds. Eight years have gone by, and no Christian missionary has been invited or even tol- erated among them. Every part of China is now open to mis- * Church Missionary Society's Report, 1862, p. 198. f History of the Insurrection in China, by MM. Callery and Yvan, supple- mentary chapter, p. 312. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 203 sionary labor, except only the devastated cities where these rob- bers find refuge" A little later, the same journal, after declaring, on the authority of a correspondent from Shang-hae, that " they are polygamists and opium-smokers," and that " they do not pos- sess even a superficial knowledge of the tenets of Christianity, much less of its practice," continues thus : " We have now some reliable description of the working of that rebellion which had found so much favor in former times among the missionaries, who hang upon the skirts of the Chinese popula- tion, and listen to far-off tidings of what is happening in the interior." The language and the sympathies of the Protestant mission- aries, whose real character the great journalist thus scornfully attests, were now to be finally rebuked by men of their own religion. " Is there nothing to hope," asks Sir John Bowring, in 1860, " from the Tae-ping movement ? Nothing. It has become little better than dacoity. Its progress has everywhere been marked by wreck and ruin ; it destroys cities, but. builds none ; consumes wealth, and produces none ; supersedes one despotism by another more crushing and grievous ; subverts a rude religion by the introduction of another full of the vilest frauds and the boldest blasphemies."* "We found the rebels," says Mr. Laurence Oliphant, almost at the same date, " making war like Jews, living like the worst description of professing Christians, and believing like Chinamen !"f " Their idea of God," says the Eev. Mr. Holmes, a candid American mission- ary, who visited them towards the close of 1860 and found them practising " the most revolting idolatry," " is distorted until it is inferior, if possible, to that entertained by the Chinese idolaters.";): " They do nothing," adds an English traveller in 1861, "but burn, murder, and destroy; they hardly profess any thing beyond that." It is " a reign of hideous ruin and unutterable desolation," says another eye-witness at a still later date, while its " so-called religious character can only be regarded as the most monstrous blasphemy the world has ever witnessed." He even adds that the missionaries themselves, though the statement is only true of some of their number, "have given up all hope of it, shocked, no doubt, by its hideous desecration of every name and idea we are taught to revere."] Yet even in breaking their alliance with these criminals, the * The CornMll Magazine, January, 1860. f Lord Elgin's Mission, vol. ii., ch. xx., p. 463. j: The World, New York journal, December 28, 1860. The Times, May 15, 1801. Ibid., August 2, 1861. 204: CHAPTER II. missionaries have only acquired fresh dishonor. Even the English in China proclaim that they now revile the Tae-pings only because the latter have cast them out. When Mr. Roberts, the preceptor of the rebel chief, said at last, in 1862, " I have turned over an entirely new leaf, and arn now as much opposed to them as I was ever in favor of them," it was only because Kan-Wang butchered his servant before his eyes, and grossly insulted himself, besides robbing him of his personal property. " Most persons will agree," says the London and China Tele- graph of the 31st of March, 1862, " that he (Roberts) fully de- serves any amount of suffering that may be inflicted on him. Mr. Roberts has done his utmost to delude Europeans as to the true character of the Tae-pings ; he has kept back some facts, has falsified others, and has acted throughout in a manner utterly inconsistent with his assumed character of a Christian missionary. On such conduct no comment can be too severe." Finally, that we may see the real influence of Protestantism in China appreciated by its own professors, and its complicity with this frightful manifestation of a system professedly derived from the Protestant Bible, and " essentially Protestant in its principles, in its origin, development, and tendency," distinctly affirmed, let us note the following explicit declarations. "It is always laid down as an axiom in the books and mani- festoes of the Tae-ping insurgents," says Dr. Scherzer, " that the doctrines of Christianity, as deduced from the writings of the missionary societies, are the leading principle of the move- ment."* "The rebel leaders," observes one who knew them, " are to, a great extent the discharged servants and horse-boys of the European residents"^ and therefore familiar with the practice as well as the theory of Protestantism. Some of them had even been paid assistant missionaries ! Kan-Wang, one of their "kings," "had for years been holding the position of native catechist in our principal Chinese colony.";): "Tien- Wang's Christianity," says another, "is nothing but the rank blasphemy of a lunatic," though he has received " dozens of Bibles," and every form of instruction which the missionaries could offer him, besides being "talked to, written to, memorial- ized, and addressed in all shapes and forms about the truths of Christianity," but only to make him spurn his former teachers, whom he silences with this argument, that " he has been to heaven, and they have not." * Voyage of the Novara, vol. ii., ch. xiv., p. 369 (1862). See the Times. March 11, 1862. Brine ch x.. p. 242. Blakiston, ch. iii., p. 43. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 205 "We see in this movement," says Mr. Edkins, still rejoicing in the evils which he and his colleagues had assisted to create, "The effect of the, distribution of 'Bibles and Christian tracts. 7 '* " This Tae-ping revolution," adds a writer in the China Mail, of the 24th of February, 1859, " is the result of foreign inter- course with China ; this blasphemous manifesto," forwarded by the rebels to Lord Elgin, " is a result of Christianity preached to its people. Truly we cannot pride ourselves over such results !" And this is all, as its own advocates confess, which Protes- tantism has accomplished in China. It could not convert the Chinese, but it could create the Tae-ping code of religion and morals, that horrible compound of " Protestant principles" and Pagan interpretations which Mr. Hervey, the British con- sul at JSTingpo, reported to Mr. Bruce, the minister at Pekin, to be " the most gigantic and blasphemous imposition as a creed that the world has ever witnessed. "f After fifty years of costly but sterile effort, it has been willing to redeem its failures even by an alliance with Siu-Tsuen and his sanguinary crew ! This is the conclusion of labors in which two hundred men English, German, and American have been actively engaged, with unlimited resources, during half a century ; and it is in the following remarkable words that the final issue of their work is appreciated even by the men who most warmly desired its success, and were most solicitous to conceal its failure : " All past missionary experience," says a grave correspondent of the Times, who dates from Canton, on the 12th of May, 1859, " goes far to enforce the unwelcome truth, that the abstract doctrines of a Protestant faith find acceptance among a heathen and idolatrous race with infinitely greater difficulty than Romanism. There stands the fact." ' There is a wide field," says one of the most influential of American journalists in 1861, after carefully reviewing the latest reports of the Protestant missionaries, "for the exercise of missionary labor in China; but we are disposed to believe that the fruits of that labor will be reaped by the Romish, and not by the Protestant Church." It was the consideration of the relations of Protestantism with the Tae-ping rebels, and their admitted results, which com- pelled this reluctant admission, and forced the same writer to confess, with almost astonishing candor, that only the Catholic missionary can now repair the evils which the Protestant agents have created, or exorcise the unclean spirit with whom they have made a treaty of alliance. "Although the religion of the * Ch. xv., p. 278. f The Times, June 13, 1862. 206 CHAPTER II. Tae-ping," he says, may be considered half Christian, it will, we think, only be developed and perfected under the benevo- lent auspices of the Church of Rome."* CONCLUSION. And now we have heard enough. We have traced, in all its details, the contrast winch the Chinese missions exhibit in their agents, their method, and their results. During three centuries we have seen the missionaries of the Catholic Church in freedom or in chains, in the palace of the emperor or the obscurity of a dungeon, in the dignity of their lives and the heroism of their death everywhere confessing Him by whose grace they became what they were. And we have seen that the spiritual children whom they begot, in every province of that empire, from the deserts of Tartary to the gulf of Siam, were worthy of them. The annals of Christianity tell of no braver deeds, the records of its combats contain no nobler triumphs. St. Peter would have embraced such apostles as his brethren ; St. Paul would have said to such disciples, " You are our glory and our joy. "f On the other hand, we have seen the missionaries of another religion crowded together in the seaports of China, " listening to far-off tidings of what is happening in the interior;" but we have not once met them in Su-tchuen, nor in Corea, nor in Tong-King, nor in Mongolia, nor in Tartary, nor in Thibet. They have consumed fifty years, and untold sums of money, in safely multiplying books which nobody could either read or understand ; they have scandalized the very heathen, as well as their ow T n friends, by the manner of their life, so that the former called them " Lie-preaching devils," and the latter only named them with a jest or a sneer ; they have gathered a few disciples whom they hesitated to receive, and were ashamed to acknowledge, who took their wages without thanks, and plun- dered them without remorse ; they have published reports, which they privately confessed to be false, of conversions which never took place; and they have only succeeded at last in confirming more deeply in their errors the heathen, to whom they have made Christianity both hateful and ludicrous, and in obstructing the apostolic labors of men whom they reviled without knowing, and whose heroism they grudgingly confessed without once daring to imitate it. During two whole generations they have watched the brave press forward to the battle-field, but have * New York Herald, February 17, 1861. f 1 Thess. ii. 20. MISSIONS IN CHINA. 207 themselves refused to take part in the fight. They had no vocation to this apostolic warfare, and they knew it. " These actions," they seem to have said, " belong not to such as us." And so when blood began to flow, and the moment arrived for confessing the Name of Jesus, they turned their heads and fled away. And while the furnace was being heated, " seven times more than it was wont to be heated," and the valiant " walked in the midst of the flame, praising God and blessing the Lord," and even women and children, but yesterday pagans, were crying aloud in the midst of their torments, " Let them know that thou art the Lord, the only God,"* these men hastened to their homes, to hide themselves in an inner room, and to write words of malice against the faith which the mar- tyrs were sealing with their blood, and against the apostles who had delivered it to them. The reader has now sufficient evidence before him upon which to exercise his judicial function, and may at length apply, if so minded, the Divine rule, By their fruits ye shall know them. * Daniel iii. 24, 45. CHAPTER III. MISSIONS IN INDIA, PART I. CATHOLIC MISSIONS. MANY voices have rebuked England's misrule in India, but none so loudly as those of her own sons. " Were we to be driven out of India this day," said one of her most illustrious statesmen, "nothing would remain to tell that it had been pos- sessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by any thing better than the orang-outang or the tiger." 41 And long years after, in 1858, a writer devoted to her interests could still say, " At the door of England's covetousness, self-seeking, and heartlessness, lies the guilt of Indian heathenism. "f The history of England's domination in India, as even they whose hearts yearn towards her have confessed, is mainly a record of covetousness and unbelief. "The depth of English irreligion in India," says a partial student of its history, "is surely quite awful."J A thousand writers have flung the same reproach at her, and often in language which makes the ears tingle. But if we cannot reject the testimony of her own people, we may at least disclaim all sympathy with those alien accusers who impute to her offences of which she is innocent, or only guilty in part. In the eyes of such men her crime is not that she governs India ill, but that she governs it at all. This is what they cannot forgive her. It is not true, as her enemies falsely proclaim, that she has made no effort to convert the tribes of Hindostan ; but it is true that she made them toe * Burke. Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill, Works vol. iv., p. 41. f British India by John Malcolm Ludlow, vol. ii.. p. 367. \Ibid., p. 243. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 209 late, and after a fashion which did not merit, and could not receive, the benediction of God. For long years, as we shall learn presently, she left them to their idols ; bade her own sons pay honor to the demons of the land ; recruited her treasury the only Christian nation which ever did so by a tax on idol worship ; and rivalled even the votaries of Mahomet and Ganesa in lubricity and intemperance. Then she sent a few adven- turers, hired for wages among the sects of Denmark and Sweden, for her own sons, as we shall hear, refused to bear the message, to preach what they called " the gospel" to men who were scarcely more ignorant than themselves of the sacred learning of the Apostles, and the mysteries of the spiritual life. After more than a hundred years had been fully reckoned, better and truer men, acting as they were led by their conscience, and only despising the Church's aid because they knew her not, began, one by one, to enter this paradise of devils. To exorcise such a legion as they presently encountered was beyond their power ; and so they fled away, like Martyn, scared and cowed, for the devils laughed them to scorn. But their history shall be recounted in their own words in its proper place. Mean- while, let us speak of others, who were before them in time, above them in gifts and graces as far as heaven is above earth, and who left them an example which they knew not how to imitate. ST. THOMAS, AND ST. FRANCIS XAVIEK. That St. Thomas preached the Gospel in India, and that he failed to make any solid or permanent impression on the mass of its inhabitants, are truths which hardly admit of denial. The first is attested by various and abundant evidence; the whole history of India proves the last. There is enough in the traditions which still survive in Southern India to show that an Apostle has passed that way ; there is unhappily more than enough to demonstrate that an after-growth of weeds has over- spread and defaced his path. He was one of the Twelve, therefore men fear to say that- his mission was a failure ; if they were judging one of his successors, they would say it without hesitation. No doubt he did all that God willed him to do ; yet we find ourselves resisting a feeling of surprise that he did no more. It is true that some Protestant writers of little reputation have denied that St. Thomas visited India, as others have asserted, with equal confidence, that St. Peter was never at Rome. One of the most learned of orientalists replies to them 15 210 CHAPTER III. as follows : " That St. Thomas was the Apostle of the Indies is attested by all ecclesiastical records, Greek, Latin, and Syriac."* Even Baldoeus acknowledges, "It is the general opinion that the Apostle St. Thomas did come into the Indies. "f Bernoulli also attests the universal tradition, and relates how, in course of time, the converts of the Apostle " retournerent a leur ancienne idolatrie."J Our own Alfred sent presents to his tomb. Between St. Thomas and St. Francis Xavier there is an interval of more than fourteen hundred years. Whatever was attempted or accomplished during that long period towards the conversion of India, has been recorded, as far as their knowledge permitted, by men who made this portion of history their special study. The subject, however, lies beyond the limits of our immediate inquiry. We have a sufficiently wide field to survey, and little temptation to stray beyond it. All that we are concerned to investigate happened between the middle of the sixteenth century and the present hour. To the religious history of India during this period, or at least to an outline of its more prominent incidents, let us now direct our attention. On the 6th of May, 1542, after a voyage of thirteen months, St. Francis landed at Goa. It was in such words as the following that St. Ignatius had announced to him his election to the difficult and glorious mission for which others had been originally destined, but which it was the will of God to confide to Xavier. "By higher counsels than those of our short- sighted judgment, Francis, for we cannot penetrate the designs of God, you, and not Bobadilla, are destined to the mission of the Indies. Thus, what we have so earnestly desired, what we so long waited for in vain at Venice, this passage across the seas into barbarous countries, now, contrary to all hope, presents itself to you here in Rome. It is not a single province of Palestine, w T hich we were seeking, that God gives you, but the Indies, a whole world of people and nations. This is the soil which He intrusts to your cultivation ; this is the field which He opens to your labors."! It is difficult to speak fitly of such a one as St. Francis. When we attempt to do so, we are rebuked at the outset by the * Asseman. Dissert, de Syris Nestorianis, tome iv., p. 439 f In Churchill's Collection of Voyages, vol. iii., p 573. \ Description de I'Inde, tome i , p. 41. Henrion, tome i , ch. iv., p. 69. " Even the white Jews of Cochin," says Dr. Wolff, " testify in their records, engraven upon copper plates, that when they arrived in India they found Nazarenes, i. e. Christians, converted through the preaching of the Apostle St. Thomas." Travels and Adventures of Dr. Wolff, ch. xxvii , p. 450. I Life of St. Francis Xavier, by Bartoli and Maffei ; Oratorian edition (1858). MISSIONS IN INDIA. 211 admonition of one who, though fully qualified, declined a simi- lar task, saying, " Let a saint write about a saint." Yet if we adhere with simplicity to the narrative of his biographers, our unworthiness may pass unperceived, and we may effect our pur- pose without immodesty or presumption. The life of Xavier, if he had been the only Christian of his form and stature since the last of the Apostles died, would suffice to prove the truth of God and of the Catholic Church. None but God could have created, none but the Church could have used, such an instrument. The world and the sects con- fess, with mingled anger and fear, that he is not of them. Doctor, prophet, and apostle, what gift which one of our race can receive or use was denied to this man ? Whilst he was in the world few understood, perhaps none fully, what he really was. It was only by the solemn juridical process which pre- ceded his canonization, and in which evidence was adduced on oath such as would have more than satisfied the most jealous and exacting tribunal which ever sifted human testimony, that some of the facts of his stupendous career were revealed to nis fellow-creatures. To converse at the same moment with men of various nations and dialects, so that each thought he heard him speak his own tongue ; to satisfy by one reply subtle and oppo- site questions, so that each confessed he had received the solution of his own difficulty in the words which answered every other ; to heal the sick, to raise the dead, to bid the waves be still, so that the very Gentiles called him in their rude language, " the God of nature y" such were some of the gifts of this great apostle. Yet this was not his real greatness. It was his humility, charity, spotless virtue, and intimate union with God, which marked him as a saint. To work miracles was no necessary part of his character or office. Yet this lower gift was also added, for the advantage of others, to those which had already made him the friend and disciple of Jesus. To such as possess the gift of faith, by which alone Divine things are apprehended, the life of Xavier is as a book written by the hand of God, yet without a single mystery. It is intel- ligible even to a child. Admiration it may excite, love, joy, and gratitude every thing but surprise. The Church has begotten since her espousals with Christ a thousand such. If she could cease to produce saints, she would cease to be. But that hour will only arrive when the number is full, and her work ended. To all others St. Francis is, of course, u a stone of offence." They dare not deny his virtues, but they are peevish and irri- tated at the mention of his miracles. Why spoil the fair narra- tive of his life with these idle fables? Such deeds take him out of their cognizance, and affront their good sense; so they affect 212 CHAPTER III. to defend him from the injudicious language of his friends. He was a good and devoted man, but let us hear nothing of mala- dies healed, and graves opened. We are in the nineteenth century. Miracles were tolerable in the first ages ; but these are now a long way off', and so is God. He must not be brought too near to us. He is in heaven, and we on earth ; why seek to diminish the distance between us ? True, He promised that His servants should do such things, and they did them ; it cannot be denied, at least not openly, since it is writ- ten in the Scriptures. Even the "shadow" of an Apostle falling on the sick is said to have dispelled their infirmities; and though it is a hard saying, and takes no account of the "laws of nature," and is directly reproved by modern science, it must be believed, whatever effort it may cost. But surely there is enough of such things in the Bible. Why add to them ? Why should our Lord create apostles now ? They are dead and buried, and have left no successors ; it is irrational to pretend to revive them. They have really no place in such a world as this, least of all in our busy and sensible England. Such tales may meet with success in other climes, but are rebuked by the robust good sense of Britons, and shrink before their manly scrutiny to the puny dimensions of fable. And so they cut the life of St. Francis in two, accept that which is natural, and fling away that which is supernatural. His virtues they pardon, not with- out a struggle, but they can go no further. Like Pilate, they fear to condemn, but cannot resolve to acquit. But they have a special motive for denying his supernatural powers, and they do not conceal it. They are so far, indeed, from understanding the character of a saint, that they do not even believe in the existence of one. Why should the Almighty have made any thing higher than themselves? "A good man," as they speak, who is of a benevolent mind, gives alms, says his prayers, and reads the Scriptures, this is the loftiest type of humanity which they are able to conceive. All beyond this is visionary and chimerical. Such a man as St. Francis is as wholly unknown to them as he is to the inanimate creatures, the unshapen rocks, the rushing waters, and the waving trees. But they perfectly comprehend that if they admit his miracles, they must confess his doctrine. And so an Englishman of good repute, and more than average intelligence, says of the first apostles of India: "The accounts of their extraordinary success cannot be credited, without admitting, on the same authority, the miracles of St. Francis Xavier and others, by which it is said to have been promoted."* This is equally true of those * Lord Valentia's Travels, vol. i., ch. v., p. 204 MISSIONS IN INDIA. 213 earlier Apostles who witnessed the Transfiguration ; but happily our countrymen are inconsistent, and their reverence for the Bible, though too often a mere superstition, preserves them from excesses into which more logical minds have fallen. That St. Francis Xavier had the gift of miracles is as certain as any thing which depends upon human testimony and the evidence of the senses. It appears to be confessed even by some Protestant writers.* By his power with God was accomplished, again and again, that which St. Paul relates of others, by whose faith, he says, " women received their dead raised to life again." One whom he raised from the dead, Francis Ciavos, afterwards entered the Society of Jesus.f But it is with his ordinary work as an apostle, which in truth was the greatest of his miracles, that we are especially concerned. What he did in India and Japan there is no need to relate at large, for, who is ignorant of it ? He did what man never did, or could do, except by the indwelling might of God. " He preached with such vehemence of soul as might be expected in a man tilled with the Spirit of God, and accustomed to the light of eternal truths ; a man whose life added such weight to his words, that even when silent, the mere sight of him was sufficient to touch the sinner's heart." And the traces of his work, in spite of woes and mis- fortunes which shall be recounted hereafter, and which might have sufficed utterly to uproot the tender vine which he had Elanted, still remain. When a Protestant minister tried, in iter times, to seduce the people who had long lost their apos- tolic guides, and w r ere driven to wander, like sheep without a shepherd, they had still faith enough to reply to his new doc- trine, " When you can raise people from the dead, as St. Francis Xavier did in this very place, we will give you an answer.'^ And even the unconverted pagans, more than two centuries after his death, still venerated him alter their gross and carnal fashion ; -for, as La Croze bitterly observes, " There is, near Cape Comorin, an old idol of St. Francis Xavier, to which the heathen themselves make pilgrimages. They call it the Pagoda of Parapadri, i. e., of the great father " " He released those who were possessed by the devil, and, in several instan- ces, raised the dead. Hence he obtained the name of the Great Father ; but he is said not to have been at all elated by the authority he exercised, or the celebrity he acquired." History of Ceylon, by Philalethes, A.M., Oxon. 1817 ; ch. xxxv.. p. 225. "My pen," says the Calvinist Baldoeus, "is not capable of expressing the worth of so great a man." Churchill, vol. iii., p. 545. f Henrion, tome i., 2de partie, liv. ii., p. 481. \ Lettres JHdifiantes, tome x., p. 118. Histoire du Christianisme des Indes, tome ii., livre iv., p. 31. " Eo non Christian! inodo ex omni finitima regione, sed ethnici etiam fama acciti, velut ad certum in rebus miseris perfugium, confluebant." Cordara, Hist, Soc. Jesu., pars Ota., lib. xvii., p. 665. 214: CHAPTER III. Saint Francis has described, in many places, his method of preaching and instruction. As far as words can exhibit that which passes words, it was simple enough. It was always by the Creed and the Commandments that which was to be fie- lieved, and that which was to be done that he commenced : and these he expounded with extraordinary care, repeating his lessons, whenever circumstances allowed, "twice a day for a whole month." " It is impossible," writes the saint, " to de- scribe the admiration of the Gentiles, as well as the new Chris- tians, for our holy law, which they declare to be perfectly in conformity with the law of nature and right reason. What I chiefly insist upon, and most frequently repeat, are the Creed and the Commandments." And we know what abundant fruits followed his persuasive teaching, so that his biographers say : " It would be difficult to give an idea of the harvest of souls, or of the works worthy of an infant Church in its first fervor, which here attended our holy apostle. He himself, in a letter to St. Ignatius, OW T IIS that he has not words to describe them ; but says, that frequently the multitudes who flocked to him for baptism were so numerous, that he was unable to go on raising his arm to make the sign of the cross in the administration of the sacrament, and that his voice literally became extinct, from the incessant repetition of the Creed, the Commandments, and a certain brief admonition of the duties of the Christian life, the bliss of heaven, the pains of hell, and what good or evil deeds lead to the one or the other."* And amidst his great labors, taking barely nourishment suf- ficient to support life, and finding repose at night chiefly in prayer and meditation, so that he was continually seen rapt in ecstasy by those who watched him in his private hours, he re- ceived those "abundant consolations" of which St. Paul speaks, and with which he seems to have been favored above many of the saints. " Often have I heard a person," he writes to St. Ignatius, as if speaking of another, "laboring amongst these Christians falteringly exclaim: O Lord, give me not such great comfort in this life ; or if, in the excess of Thine infinite good- ness and mercy, Thou w T ilt thus favor me, call me to Thy heav- enly glory, for it is too great a torment to live any longer with- out seeing Thee." A few words will suffice about the actual results of his labors. " When the saint entered the kingdom of Travaucore, he found it entirely idolatrous, but when he left it, after a few months' residence, it was entirely Christian." Along the coast " he founded no fewer than forty-five churches." And as the labors * Life, p. 73. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 215 of the first apostles were " confirmed by signs following," so innumerable miracles attested the continual presence of the Holy Ghost with this man of God. Even children, armed with some object which had touched his person, his cross, or his rosary, were able to cast out devils and heal the sick, and were often employed by him for such purposes, when his own occupa- tions left him no leisure to accept the invitations which pressed upon him from all parts. At Malacca, a mother whose child had been three days in the grave, came to him in faith, and desired that the lost one might be restored ; for, said she, " God grants all things to your prayers." " Go," he replied, " and open the tomb, you will find her alive." And thereupon, in pres- ence of a vast concourse of spectators, who had assembled to wit- ness the miracle, for his power was known, " the stone was re- moved, the grave opened, and the young girl was found alive."* In the island of Moro, " he converted the whole city of Tolo, containing twenty-five thousand souls, and left at his death no fewer than twenty -nine towns, villages, and hamlets, added to the kingdom of Christ, and subject to His law." By the year 1548, more than two hundred thousand Christians might be numbered " along the two coasts starting from Cape Comorin ; and they afterwards gave full evidence of their virtue by the courage with which they encountered the persecutions raised against them by the Gentiles ; when, far from denying their faith, all, even mere children, readily presented their necks to the executioners." But we need not pursue further the details of his history. Since the days of St. Paul no greater missionary, perhaps, has appeared on earth. Like St. Paul, too, he prevailed, because he was firmly knit to Peter, and to his Holy See. It was in the might of her blessing that he went forth, and without it he would have been only a visionary and a fanatic, perhaps an heresiarch, at best a brilliant but unprofitable rhetorician. That St. Francis was a man taught of God, and full of the Holy Ghost, that he was most dear to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, that the Catholic faith which he believed and delivered to others was the true and perfect revelation of the Most High, and that in the regions which he evangelized he did an apostle's work and obtained >an apostle's reward ; these are truths which none would even have doubted, unless ignorance had blinded their judgment, or sin obscured it, or pride and passion had supplied a motive for denying what the Gentiles themselves, less blind and perverse, and moved by better and purer instincts, were constrained to admit and proclaim. Two hundred and thirty years after the death of the saint, * Life, p. 140. 216 CHAPTER III. his tomb was opened, and then the promise which such as he have shared, by a special privilege, with their Divine Master, that even their flesh " should not see corruption," was once more fulfilled. " His face was not in the least changed, so that portraits might have been taken from it."* Yet it is of a man thus distinguished from his fellows even in death, that the dis- ciples of another faith have ventured to speak in words which even the heathen would blush to use. " Francis Xavier," says the Rev. James Hough, " lived for the reputation of his order."f Dr. Geddes openly scoffs at him ;;f Dr. Morrison laments his " misty and obscure views ;" Dr. Grant denies that he could work miracles;! and in 1857, another English writer, as if anxious to prove that even the pagan has keener religious in- stincts than some who boast to have a special insight into the mysteries of revelation, confidently affirms, that " his Christian principles were of a very questionable nature. "T Alas ! for those who have less discernment of the works of God, and the signs of His presence, than even the heathen and the outcast. THE SUCCESSORS OF SAINT FKANCIS. St. Francis came nearer than most of his race to the highest excellence which a creature can attain, but we shall now see that his successors in the Indian mission were not unworthy of him. While yet on earth he had said, of himself, and his few companions : u This mission will scarcely survive its founders, unless you send fresh laborers." His appeal was heard, and it is the career of those who followed in his footsteps, which we are next to trace. Through every fluctuation of good and evil fortune, but with patient endurance and steadfast constancy, his immediate successors pursued the task which he had commenced. By their labors the ecclesiastical province of Goa, originally constituted by St. Francis, had been divided into two, of which the second was named the province of Malabar ; and in addition to the flourishing missions established on both coasts, new churches had been formed in the interior, which remain to this day, wherever the messengers of peace found an entrance. Let us pass over an interval of fifty years, and we come to a * Annales, tome viii., p. 583. History of Christianity in India, vol. i., p. 211 (1839). History of the Church of Malabar, p. 42. The Fathers of the London Missionary Society, vol. i., p. 57. Bampton Lectures, app., p. 344. \Two Tears' Travel in Persia, &c., by Robert B. M. Binning, Esq., Madras Civil Service, vol. i., ch. vii., p. 97. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 217 name illustrious in the apostolic annals, and to an epoch worthy of our earnest attention. Few periods have been more glorious to the Church, none more misunderstood by her en- emies. A brief allusion to the political state of Western India at the close of the sixteenth century, is indispensable to a full understanding of the events which are now to be related. Portugal had been chosen by Divine Providence as the chief instrument in propagating the Christian faith in the wide regions of the East. " From the Cape of Good Hope to the frontier of China, an extent of twelve thousand miles of coast, all the principal emporia were in her possession."* The discoveries of Yasco di Gama, and the victories of Albuquerque, had led to the planting of the Cross along the whole western shore of the Indian peninsula. Animated at first by an admirable zeal for the glory of God, the fervent and generous men whom Portugal sent forth to so many lands, were at least as anxious to enlarge the dominions of the faith as to promote the interests of their own nation, which at this time had attained the climax of her splendor and renown. But this first epoch of faith and zeal did not last long. The noble traditions which had inspired the conquerors of Malabar ceased to animate men who were now absorbed only by the pursuit of gain, and the ignoble arts of a greedy and unscrupulous traffic. Thus it is ever with men and their works. When life seems most vigorous, then comes dissolution or decay. All fail, by their own fault, save only the Church, which abides forever. The Portuguese name, once so pure, was defiled by those who bore it ; and the city of Goa, the metropolis of Portuguese India, became a proverb and a scandal among the heathen. The horror which the Indians had now conceived of the European character, and the contempt which they felt for its vices and inconsistencies, had become almost a passion. The use of gross meats and of strong liquors, condemned both by the law and the instincts of these Asiatic tribes, was inexpressibly revolting to men who comprehended only the rigors and austerities of religion, and confounded the means of purification with the end. " Nothing," says a modern traveller, " equals their frugality ;"f and one of the latest historians of India adds, that they still practise the same austerities, "from affectation of Brahminical purity."^ To be a pranguij or even to hold communication with one, was, in their estimation, the foulest dishonor. The rare vir- tues which might still be witnessed in individuals, failed to subdue the undiscriminating scorn and hate with which they * Discoveries in Asia, by Hugh Murray, vol. ii., cli. ii., p. 70. f Haussman, Voyage en Chine, tome i., ch. iii., p. 129. \ Rickards' India, vol. i., pp. 51, 272. 218 CHAPTER III. regarded the Christian name. Conversions were at an end. For fourteen years Father Gonsalvo Fernandez had labored amongst the people of Madura without gaining so much as a single new disciple. His own virtues extorted their unwilling admiration, but he was identified, by rank and origin, with men who belonged, as they deemed, to an almost bestial caste. It was necessary to apply a remedy to this immense evil. The hour had arrived which was to determine the fortunes of Christianity in India, and decide, at least for a long period, whether light or darkness should cover the land. At such a crisis the hand of God was stretched forth, to lay hold of the man whom he had chosen to accomplish a work apparently impossible, and to guide him to the distant shore on which this terrible conflict between good and evil was about to commence. The apostle destined for this formidable mis- sion was Robert de' Nobili, one of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus, and it is of his career that we must now speak. Robert de' Nobili, like so many of the earlier Catholic mis- sionaries, was a man of noble birth, a nephew of Cardinal Bellarmine, and near kinsman of Pope Marcellus II. In quitting Europe, and the brilliant position which would have seduced a less heroic temper than his, he had abandoned with deliberate contempt the honors and dignities of which the world vainly strives to redeem the insignificance by persuading such men to accept them. He began, then, like a true apostle, by forsaking all to follow Christ; and his after-course was worthy of this beginning. * In 1606, in company with Father Albert Laerzio, the provincial of Malabar, he entered the mis- sion of Father Fernandez, and there set himself to contemplate the terrible problem which God designed him to solve. With the keen vision of a saint, and the calm strength of a heart which had already accepted martyrdom in purpose and desire, he examined the battle-field which lay before him. The next moment his resolve was made. He would stand face to face with the great demon who vexed India with his sorceries and enchantments, wrestle with him in single combat, and by God's grace trample him under foot. And this resolve he lived to execute. St. Paul, the great exemplar of missionaries, had said : " All things are lawful to me, but all things are not expedient." And again : " If meat scandalize my brother, I will never eat flesh." Here was a rule for later apostles. The new evangelist of India MISSIONS IN INDIA. understood that, for the sake of his brother, he must abstain from flesh, that he might not give scandal ; and from that hour he made a vow to God that he would never eat meat again. But this was a very small part of the whole sacrifice required of him. The institution of castes, though by many deemed only a civil institution, analogous to the distinctions of rank which exist in Europe,* could not be permanently recognized, for it was contrary to the great principle of Christian fraternity. But neither could souls be abandoned for such a cause.f " Touched by the deplorable blindness of these people buried in the dark- ness of death," says his companion Laerzio, " penetrated with the grand thought that Jesus Christ came for the salvation of all men, that He must everywhere triumph over the demon, destroy his kingdom, and release his captives; recognizing also the true cause of an obstinacy so frightful and perverse ; Father Robert de' Nobili resolved to apply to this evil an effective remedy. Imitating the example of St. Paul, who became all things to all men, and that of the Eternal Word, who became Man in order to save men; Father Robert said within himself, ' I also will make myself an Indian in order to save the Indians.' ' : He saw at a glance all which this sublime purpose involved, and without fear he accepted all.J Authorized by the Archbishop of Cranganore, as well as by his immediate superior, he now presented himself before the Brahmins. U I am neither a Prangui nor a Portuguese," said he, " but a Roman Rajah, that is, a member of the highest order of nobility ; I am also a Saniassi, that is, a penitent who has re- nounced the world and all its pleasures." Both statements, as a Protestant writer of our own day candidly remarks, were " strictly true." He had as good a right to make them as St. Paul to declare, at one time that he was a Hebrew, at another that he was a Roman citizen. From this moment, condescending by a supreme effort of charity to the infirmities of those whom he desired to save, he separated from his brethren, who were known to have mingled with men of other castes, and admitted none but Brahmins to his society. Rice, bitter herbs, and water, tasted once in twenty-four hours, constituted his whole nourish- * The Theory and Practice of Caste, by B. A. Irving, Esq., ch. i., p. 35. f " Caste is one among many instances of the peculiar exaggerations in which the Hindoo mind loves to indulge . . . Caste may be modified and rendered less harsh in its general outlines, but it will never cease to exist." Travels in Peru and India, by Clements 11. Markham, F.S.A., F.R.G.S., ch. xxv., p. 424 (1862). \ The following narrative is mainly derived from the Letters published by the Pere Bertrand in his Histoire de la Mission du Madure, of which the ori- entalist Mohl reported to the Asiatic Society of Paris, in 1841, " they ought to have a place in all the libraries of the learned." Rapport, 31 Mai, p. 19. Theory of Caste, ch. v., p. 127. 220 CHAPTER III. ment ; a humble cabin was his house. Buried in a mysterious solitude, he received visitors only with extreme reserve. The fame of the great Saniassi of the West is gradually bruited abroad, and the doctors of the Gentiles crave an audience of the illustrious penitent. They are told by his Brahmin attendant that the Father is engaged in prayer, or in meditation, or in the study of the Divine law. After being rejected two or three times they are at length admitted. Fascinated by his eloquence and distinction of manner, and charmed by the purity and eloquence with which he speaks their language, by his recitations from memory of the most famous Indian authors, or by the verses which he declaims with exquisite taste, they hasten to publish abroad the rare qualities of the hidden apostle. Their report reaches the ears of the king, who sends a message expressing his desire to see him. The Father, consenting to receive these empty honors, but not for his own sake, and deeming that the time was not yet come, replies that he is absorbed by the duties of his state, and does not quit his house. At length he makes his first conquest. A Brahmin of the highest rank, aspiring after perfection, but disdaining the religion of Christ, of keen and practised intellect, and familiar with the philosophical systems of the East, resolves to visit him. Their conference lasts twenty days, during which the subtle conflict of two vigorous minds is sustained, and all the treasures of Christian science are unfolded by the hand of a master. The Brahmin was no common ad- versary. Skilled in logic and metaphysics, versed in the writ- ings of the Platonicians, he combated every position. At length he avowed himself vanquished, embraced " the foolishness of the Cross," was instructed, and admitted to baptism ; and then he became himself an evangelist. His example was speedily followed by others, convinced chiefly by the solid reasons which the neophyte unfolded before them. On the 8th of August, 1608, another of the same order, but eminent among all for his natural gifts, applied to the Father for instruction. Touched by the truths of faith, he flung away with indignation the ashes with which his forehead was smeared, and forbade his three sons henceforth to bear the marks of idolatry. His demand for baptism was refused till he should prove his constancy, which he and his household had soon an opportunity of doing. And now the fruits of this great attempt began to multiply. Convinced by the testimony of his Brahmin servants that the secret life of the apostle was one of unceasing mortification and prayer, unable too to resist the wisdom that was in him, fresh converts were continually added, and always of the highest class. The Father himself, in describing the triumphant results of his patient and ingenious charity, says : " Besides my manner of MISSIONS IN INDIA. 221 life, my food and costume, and my using exclusively the services of Brahmins, there is another circumstance which aids me powerfully in making conversions ; it is the knowledge which I have acquired of their most secret books. I find it stated in them that their country originally possessed four laws, OT vedas: that three of these laws are those which the Brahmins still teach at the present day, and that the fourth was a purely spiritual law by virtue of which it was possible to attain the salvation of the soul."* He then goes on to say that this fourth veda was stated to be in great part lost, and that no man was sufficiently holy or learned to recover it ; while the remaining vedas acknowledge that they do not suffice to confer spiritual life.f " From all this," he adds, " I take occasion to point out to them, that they are living in fatal error, that neither of the three vedas which they recognize has power to save them ; that in consequence all their efforts are vain, and this I prove to them by citing the very words of their sacred books. These people have an ardent desire of eternal happiness, and in order to merit it devote themselves to penance, alms-deeds, and the worship of their idols. ^ I protit by this disposition to tell them that if they wish to obtain salvation, they must listen to my instructions; that I have come from a remote country with the sole object of bringing salvation to them, by teaching them that spiritual law which, by the con- fession of their Brahmins, they have wholly lost. I thus adapt myself to their opinion, after the example of the Apostle, who preached to the Athenians the Unknown God." In the midst of his successes it was not to be supposed that he would escape the trials and contradictions which the saints have always desired to encounter, and without which they have deemed their work imperfect. The pagan Brahmins presented a petition to the king against him for refusing permission to his disciples to wear ashes, or any other symbol of idolatrous worship. A strong excitement was created, and one of his own Brahmin attendants abandoned him in fear; but requesting permission to return shortly after, w r as rejected as unworthy. The authority of the king, w r ho visited him in person, and proffered his active protection, discouraged his enemies, and completed his triumph. A little later, in a conference of eight hundred Brahmins, assembled to judge his doctrine, the defence * Bertrand, tome ii., p. 21. f " We still know tlie vedas very imperfectly." Mohl, Rapport, p. 41. " Sir William Jones penetrated little beyond modern versions of particular pas- T." Speir's Life in Ancient India, ch. i., p. 42. . . " La societe indoue est encore bien plus profondement religieuse quo les socictes Grecque et liomaine." L'l/ido sous la domination Anglaise, par le Baron Barchou de Penhoen, tome ii., liv. viii., p. 145. CHAPTER III. of the evangelical law was urged with so much force by one of his converts that his accusers were compelled to retire from the assembly, humbled and confounded. In 1609, we find him writing as follows, from the city of Madura : " Every day our progress becomes more visible, and the conversion of the Gentiles less difficult. The persecu- tion raised by the Brahmins has had no other effect than to strengthen our position in this city. I have just now baptized eight persons, and am preparing the remaining catechumens." At this period his day seems to have been occupied as follows. Besides the ordinary duties of the religious life, meditation and prayer, from which alone he derived strength to pursue such a career, he was engaged in the study of languages, in composing a voluminous catechism, " adapted to the genius and capacity of the people," in four daily instructions to the Christians or the catechumens, and finally in audiences granted to the numerous visitors who desired to confer with him on the spiritual law. " My church," he says, " can no longer contain the Christians ; it has become necessary to enlarge it; but I am without money, and must beg your charity to send me some assistance." Shortly after, two of his neophytes were dispatched to the college at Cochin, and their journey affords us the first opportunity of judging what sort of Christians were formed by his instruction and example. It is to be noted that de' JSTobili, in the letter which announced their approaching visit, distinctly informed his colleagues, that they were too soundly instructed to take offence at the external differences of caste, mode of life, ceremonies, &c., which they would remark in the Christians to whom they were sent. " You need not fear lest they should be scandalized, either at the college or in the city, by these differences. They are fully instructed in all such matters. They know that, in spite of the extreme diversity of our usages, we all serve the same God, and practise the same law, and that in this respect there is absolutely no difference amongst us. Far, then, from supposing that this journey will produce an injurious effect upon our newly-founded church, I trust that it will prove most beneficial to it." The anticipations which he thus expressed were fully realized. ,It was perhaps a bold experiment, but the result showed that where the true knowledge of the Christian law existed, the institution of caste was a purely civil rite, and dwindled to a mere question of social etiquette. The two neophytes, Yisou- vasan and Maleiappen, accomplished their journey in safety, and are thus described by the Fathers at Cochin, whose guests they had become: "That which touched us most deeply was to find them so perfectly instructed in the truths of our holy reli- MISSIONS IN INDIA. 223 gion. Our Fathers took pleasure in proposing to them all sorts of questions, even upon the highest mysteries, the Holy Trinity, the Real Presence, &c. ; to which they replied with such con- fidence, promptitude, and exactness, as filled us with admira- tion." Here, then, was an adequate and independent proof of the success which had attended the labors of de' Nobili, and at once the severest and most conclusive test which could be ap- plied to them. At the request of de' Nobili, whose incessant toils now ex- ceeded his force, Father Emanuel Leitan was instructed to join him, and from him we have the following account of the mission of Madura, dated the 28th of September, 1609 : " I wish I could express to you the feelings which the contemplation of this infant church has excited in me, and the piety of these angels whom Father Robert has gained to God at the price of so many labors and sacrifices. I have never seen Christians who, in so short a time, were so perfectly instructed in the things of God and of holy religion." He then describes their manner of life and spiritual wisdom, and adds examples of the fresh conver- sions continually wrought by his illustrious colleague. A little later, the apostle himself writes as follows to the provincial, who had proposed to visit his mission: "Believe me, Reverend Father, you will taste here such abundant and lively joy as you can neither imagine nor I express. The Lord gathers into the fold so great a number of new sheep, that in a few days my church will no longer be able to contain the neophytes, and we must once more think of enlarging it. During the past month I have baptized a great number of idolaters, and if I have not admitted more, it is because I am unable to suffice for so great labor. At all times, but especially in the commencement, and in this country, it is of the highest importance only to baptize catechumens after having subjected them to a long trial, and instructed them radically in all the truths of the faith. The Christians whom we are now forming are the nucleus of the church which we seek to establish ; it is by the careful discipline of these first elements that we shall assure its fervor, constancy, and generosity in the time to come."* Again, in the following year, he writes these remarkable words to the learned Antony Yico, whom he desired to associate to his labors: "I have to relate to you things so extraor- dinary, that if I were writing to any other than a professor of theology, I should think it necessary to preface my account, by way of precaution, with an explanatory statement. I should warn him not to be astonished at the display of so many sorceries * Bertrand, tome ii., p. 73. 224 CHAPTER III. and witchcrafts, since we are in a land wherein the demon still exercises a terrible and universal empire, and in which this visible action of Satan is an e very-day fact, recognized by the whole Indian people, and forming the motive and basis of a large part of their worship. I would bid him also not be amazed at the wonders which God works among our Christians, since from such marvels, according to the holy Fathers, spring the healing waters which must fertilize the precious plant of Chris- tianity, newly sown in this savage soil. No doubt there may be particular cases in which simplicity exaggerates natural facts, and attributes them to supernatural causes; but a man must be blind, or obstinate beyond all measure, not to recognize in this country the occurrence of innumerable prodigies of both kinds." It is curious to see a Presbyterian author, two hundred and forty years later, repeating the same fact, and asserting, on the authority of Protestant missionaries, that "in heathen countries siK^li as this, Satan still exercises a power which was formerly allowed him, but of which he is now in a great measure de- prived in Christian lands."* The " prodigious success," as Laerzio speaks, of the method adopted by de' Nobili was now more and more apparent. By a severity of life intolerable to a lower degree of charity than his, he had removed the first prejudices of the Indians; and by the wisdom and eloquence with which he combated the errors of their religion and philosophy, he gradually won their assent to the pure doctrine which he preached. " Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ," had now become the ordinary salutation of the Christians when they met in the streets, and yet the faith which it expressed was only in the beginning of its triumphs. It is interesting to read the description of the great apostle by whose labors it was so rapidly spreading, and of whom Father Antony Vico, a competent judge of men and their works, thus speaks in a letter to Claude Aquaviva, General of the Society of Jesus : " However exalted was the opinion which I had formerly en- tertained of Father Robert's capacity for the work of converting the heathen, it was very far below the reality, which I should be disposed to call the ideal perfection of a missionary, if I did not actually witness it with my own eyes. How shall I describe that consummate science which unfolds without effort the most arduous questions of theology ? that elasticity of talent which, while it reveals truth to the comprehension of the ignorant, knows how to charm and fascinate the learned? that fertile eloquence which amazes us by the opulence of its language, in * Six Tears in India, by Mrs. Colin Mackenzie, vol. i., ch. vi., p. 243. Cf. Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, by Lieut.-Col. W. H. Sleeman, vol. i., ch. xi., p. 89. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 225 spite of the difficulty and variety of the idioms of these people?" It is impossible, he adds, after a long enumeration of his great qualities, not to refer them " rather to a special grace, an extra- ordinary gift of the Divine bounty, than to the natural talents of Father Robert."* Such was the man whom Providence had elected to combat with superstition and error in their most inveterate forms, and to triumph over them, not by human weapons, but by the power of evangelical truth and charity, even in their strongholds. So great was his success, that some of the most spiritual men of the age did not hesitate to say, that it constituted "the most admirable missionary work" in the modern annals of the Church. "The Mission of Madura" became a proverb through- out Christendom ; and its founder is said, though doubtless a portion of the work was accomplished by his colleagues, to have converted more than one hundred thousand idolaters, nearly all of whom belonged to the caste of Brahmins. Once more it was proved, as St. Francis and his companions had already proved, that the Hindoo was not beyond the reach of grace; and that when he saw a saint, he was able to recognize him. If in later times he has seemed to reject Christianity, it was only, as we shall see, because he could no longer detect any thing Divine in the new order of teachers who presented it to him. And now de' Kobili prepared to quit Madura, in which one hundred and fifty thousand native Christians attest even at this day the solidity of his work, and, attended by Indian cate- chists formed by his own hand, resolved to penetrate still further into the interior, and to carry the message of peace to nations and tribes yet more remote. But at this moment began that great and cruel trial which formed the crisis of his apostolic career, and which it is necessary to notice briefly before we continue the history of missionary efforts in India. f Whoever has derived his notions of the celebrated mission of Madura, and of its illustrious founder, from the writings of Prot- estant historians, can hardly fail to have received unfavor- able impressions of both. Bold and confident in their general assertions, minute and circumstantial in details, reiterated by successive writers without the variation of a phrase, they have probably beguiled many an unwary and inexperienced reader. Who would suspect that charges so grave and formidable, fortified by an almost ostentatious array of names and dates, * Bertrand, tome ii., p. 138. f A modern English writer remarks, in proof of his influence, that in the celebrated Hindoo edifices at Madura, the " dissimilitude to the general style of Hindoo architecture was occasioned by the suggestions of the Jesuit mis- sionary, Kobert de' Nobili." Robert's Hindostan, vol. ii., p. 69. 16 226 CHAPTER III. were only the inventions of fretful and unforgiving jealousy ? Yet the most superficial examination will suffice to expose their real character, and will be found to afford a new illustration of the value of Protestant traditions against the Church, and of the mode in which they are perpetuated. Every Protestant writer, with two or three exceptions, has ascribed the success of the mission of Madura, and its wonder- ful results, to a guilty connivance with pagan superstitions. This is their explanation of apostolic triumphs which they neither believe nor understand. La Croze, Geddes, and Hough, and other writers of their class in a long succession, luxuriate in language of which we need not offer even a specimen ; and direct against de' Nobili and his successors charges of forgery, imposture, superstition, idolatry, and various other crimes which it is unnecessary to enumerate. Even the respectable Dr. Grant, who is not to be confounded with such writers as these, has fallen, no doubt unwittingly, into the same delusion.* It is not, as perhaps might have been anticipated, from the pages of Mosheim, that vast arsenal of untruths from whose ample stores every private venture of Protestantism has ever since been fitted out, that the tale was originally derived. JBut there is one name which invariably occurs in the writings referred to, one witness whom they all quote, and to whom the whole history is to be traced. That witness is " Father Nor- bert," ex-Capuchin, and ex-missionary in India. In a work published by this person in lT44r,f under circum- stances which shall be described immediately, all the fables which have since been repeated as grave historical facts are found. He is quoted, apparently without suspicion, by Dr. Grant in his Bampton Lectures. Yet a very little inquiry, and even a reference to so common a book as the J3iographie Uni- verselle, would have revealed to him the real character of a witness, by whose help he has not feared to defame some of the most heroic and evangelical men who ever devoted their lives to the service of God and the salvation of their fellow-creatures. Norbert was one of those ordinary missionaries who had utterly failed to convert the Hindoos by the usual methods, and who was as incapable of imitating the terrible austerities by which the Jesuits prepared their success, as he was of rejoicing in triumphs in which he had no share. The critical moment had arrived for him which occurs once in every man's life, and upon which his whole future destiny often depends. For a time he seems to have hesitated, then made his choice, and that choice * Bampton Lectures for 1843. f Memoir es Historiques sur les Missions des Malabar es> MISSIONS IN INDIA. 227 was fatal. Stung with mortal jealousy, and yielding to the suggestions of a malice which amounted almost to frenzy, he attacked the Jesuits with fury even from the pulpit. The civil power was forced to interfere, and Dupleix, the governor of Pondicherry, though he had been his friend, put him on board ship, and sent him to America. Here he spent two years, " less occupied in the work of the missions than in planning schemes to revenge himself on the Jesuits." The publication of the mendacious work which he had prepared on the Malabar mission, and in which he treated the Society of Jesus as a band of scheming malefactors, was prohibited by authority, but he quitted Rome and printed it secretly. Condemned by his own Order, though he affected to vindicate it from the injuries of the Jesuits, he fled to Holland and thence to England, in both which countries he found congenial spirits. In the latter he established first a candle and afterwards a carpet manufactory, under the patronage of the Duke of Cumberland. Thence he wandered into Germany, .and subsequently, having obtained his secularization, and put off the religious habit which he had defiled, he went to Portugal. Here remorse seems to have overtaken him, and he was permitted, by an excess of charity, to assume once more the habit of a Capuchin, which he a second time laid aside. Finally, after having attempted to de- ceive even the Sovereign Pontiff, he died, in a wretched con- dition, in an obscure village of France.* Such was the witness upon whose statements all the Prot- estant histories of Christianity in Malabar are solely founded. He will continue, we may be sure, to be eagerly quoted by the same class of writers. The latest of them, in a work as super- ficial and unlearned as it is coarse and presumptuous, surpass- ing all his predecessors in violence of language, still clings to this discredited witness; and despising the judgment of Chris- tendom, as well as that more awful judgment of which it is only the precursor, is not ashamed to speak of " the impiety of the Jesuits," to declare that they went to India " with a lie in their right hands," that " the Christianity of Madura was un- disguised idolatry," and that its apostles " relied on an unin- telligible preaching, and an -equally unintelligible ceremony of baptism."! They were " liars," according to this person, because they called themselves u penitents," though their whole life was one long crucifixion ; they were " liars," because they announced themselves as " rajahs," though many of them belonged to the * Biographic Universette, in voc. t Christianity in India, by J. W. Kaye, ch. i., p. 33 ; ch. ii., p. 73 (1859). CHAPTER III. most illustrious families of Europe ; and they were " idolaters," though they taught their disciples to sacrifice life itself, and constantly set them the example, rather than countenance by word or look the abominations of the Gentiles. There are some forms of guilt which no human enactment has defined, and no earthly tribunal is competent to avenge. We will not seek to pass sentence on such an accuser. We have no court in which to try him ; but we shall meet him again before the just Judge. It was the Lutheran La Croze who had encouraged Mr. Kaye to speak after this fashion, by asserting, long before, that " the Jesuits regarded the mission of Madura as a very lucrative aft'air !" And as if even this were too weak to satisfy his re- sentment, he added, that lust of money was the characteristic, not of the Jesuits only, but of Catholic missionaries generally.* It was not so that our Lord had spoken of them. " You shall be hated of all men for my Name's sake," was His prom- ise, and abundantly has it been fulfilled. Neither their bitter austerities and mortifications, nor their sordid food and lodg- ing, which a beggar would have disdained to share, nor their angelic patience and charity, nor the supernatural sanctity of their lives, nor the calm heroic dignity of their deaths, could avert the imprecations of men of whom it has been well said, " they believe neither in truth nor in virtue, "f It is in lan- guage against which heaven and earth silently protest that they have described that noble army of evangelists, every one of whom might have said with St. Paul, " I fill up in my flesh those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ."' The mouth which could revile such as these, and charge them with fraud, covetousness, and idolatry, need not fear it would scarcely be a greater crime to call St. John unchaste, or St. Paul a usurer. But we owe no answer to men who have forfeited by their excesses all claims to respect. It may be said, however, in defence of the better sort of Protestant writers, that the fables by which they have been not unwillingly deceived were successful, for a moment, in their influence upon men of another and a higher order. The great Bellarmine himself, the near kinsman of de' Nobili, was for a time disturbed by the specious fraud, and wrote to demand an explanation of the complicity with heathen customs attributed to his nephew. The explanation came, and, as Norbert bitterly confesses, " he changed his opinion.";): In 1615, the cardinal, now perfectly * Histoire du Christianisme des Indes, tome i., liv. i., p. 83. \ Bertrand. j Memoires Historique*, &c., tome i., liv. i., p. 17. MISSIONS IN INDIA. informed, wrote once more to console the apostle in his trials, and to exhort him to " continue in his noble and glorious career." In Malabar itself, where all the facts were known, the Archbishop of Goa, Primate of the Indies, though he had actually presided at the Synod of Diamper which condemned the use of the Brahminieal cord, solemnly approved the con- duct of de' Nobili ; whilst his diocesan, the Archbishop ot Cranganore, added to his approval these remarkable words : u Would to God that Father Robert had more imitators of his virtue than impugners of his conduct ! For my part, I would willingly wear six hundred Brahminical cords, if by doing so I could effect the salvation of a single soul." The prelate knew, perhaps, that it was only an emblem of rank, and that the Brahmin, in investing his son with it, said, u ego te nolrilem hac linea facio."* In 1623, by a Bull dated the 31st of January, Gregory XV. gave his supreme sanction to the method pursued by de' .Nobili ; and, in 1707, Clement XL repeated the same judgment. Clement XII. indeed ordered them to abolish the distinction! of castes; but as this decision, founded upon an extreme view of the theory of caste, was found to be absolutely fatal to conversions, Benedict XI V., by his Bull of the 12rh of September, 1744, not only applauded the conduct of the Jesuits, but authorized them to have two classes of missionaries, one for the nobles, and another for the pariahs. The decision was received with joy in India, and the Fathers contended with one another who should have the lower calling. Among the first who devoted themselves for life to the pariahs were d'Orbigny, Barbosa, Da Costa, Pimentel, d'Almeida, and others, who forgot their own nobility to become the servants of slaves and outcasts. Such was the termination of the celebrated controversy about the mission of Madura, which in its first stage lasted ten years, and out of which its founder came forth victorious. " His whole conduct," says an eminent Protestant writer, rebuking by his solitary protest the libels of his co-religionists, " was so admirably adapted to its end, that he was soon surrounded by crowds of converts ; and although his method of instruction at first gave great offence and scandal at home, it seemed to be the only one fitted to advance the cause? \ But his work, though justified by the unanimous voice of the ecclesiastical authorities, constantly approving during one hundred and thirty years, had received during the first conflict a serious check. The fruits of that work remain indeed, as we shall see hereafter, to this day ; but the conversion of the * Jouveny, lib. xviii., p. 508. f "Ranke, History of the Popes, vol. ii., book vii., p. 93 ; ed. Austin. CHAPTER III. peculiar class to which he had devoted himself with such im- mense success was suspended and henceforth impeded. " The general movement which had been excited amongst the Brah- mins, from 1606 to 1610, was arrested, and was only very im- perfectly revived at a later period. So true it is that it is diffi- cult to recover an opportunity once lost !"* Had this lament- able discussion, which owed its origin to jealousy rather than to a just susceptibility, never arisen, it is impossible to say how far the success of de' Nobili would have been carried, or what would have been the condition of India at the present day. It is time to close our account of this great apostle, who, during forty-five years, led such a life as even the solitaries of the Thebaid might have feared to imitate ; but who labored with such abundant fruit that, as an English writer remarks, "he lived to see, as the reward of forty-five years of missionary toil, a church in every town of importance in the south of India" \ Visited with blindness in his old age, he used the affliction as a means of drawing still nearer to God by perpetual meditation and prayer. The city of Meliapore, near which he had long lived in a humble cabin, was sacked and destroyed towards the close of his career, and the very stones of which it was built transported to a distance; "and then men beheld with astonish- ment the hut of Father de' Nobili standing unhurt by the side of the ruins.":): But when this happened he had already gone to receive his crown. MISSIONS IN CENTRAL INDIA. Almost identical in date, as well as in their general character, were the " not less remarkable labors," as Ranke notices, after Jouvency, " of the missionaries at the court of the emperor Akbar." At the close of the sixteenth century, in the year 1599, " Christmas-eve was celebrated with the greatest solemnity at Lahore j numerous catechumens, with palm-branches in their hands, went in procession to the churches and received baptism. . . . . In the year 1610, three princes of the blood-royal solemnly received baptism" at the hands of Father Geronimo Xavier, a nephew of St. Francis. Akbar himself, as a British historian notices, reverenced " the images of Jesus Christ and the Yirgin when they were shown to him by the missionaries,"! and solicited permission, reluctantly accorded, to retain them in his palace for a single night. The nobles of his court, " and even * Histoire de la Mission du Madure, tome ii., p. 197. f living's Theory of Caste, ch. v., p. 128. I Bertrand, tome iii., p. 114. Ranke, p. 94. || Elphinstone's History of India, vol. ii., ch. iii., p. 323. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 231 Mussulman doctors, in spite of their general aversion for images," displayed the same interest, and for twenty successive days the church of the Jesuits in Lahore was thronged from morning till night by audiences which numbered from three to four thousand. So universal was the movement, that the Persian ambassador to the court of the Mogul brought his children to be baptized, and the Fathers " went about their functions in Lahore as if in the middle of Rome." 41 For a time it appeared as if Central India was about to be subjugated, in its turn, by the faith. In the very stronghold of Eastern superstition and idolatry, the missionaries of the Cross contended with the enemy of mankind, and seemed on the point of wresting his kingdom from him. The piety and constancy of their disciples, numbering already many thousands, attracted continually the homage of the heathen, and Protestant writers have admitted that at this moment the whole fabric of oriental demonology was menaced with ruin, from which it was only saved by political events which the missionaries could neither anticipate nor avert. The triumphs of the Gospel were not, then, limited to Western and Southern India, to which, however, we will now return, for the sake of tracing the pro- cess by which they were gradually accomplished. THE BLESSED JOHN DE BKITTO. The next great name which occurs in the roll of Indian evan- gelists is that of the Blessed John de Britto. The son of a viceroy of Brazil, and the intimate friend of John IY. of Portugal, the apostle whose labors we are now to describe, and who was born in 1647, was educated at court as the companion of the royal princes. At the age of fourteen, on his recovery from a danger- ous illness, during which he had invoked the intercession of St. Francis Xavier, he embraced the religious life and assumed the habit, though still performing his functions as one of the royal pages. With infinite difficulty he finally obtained the king's permission to retire from court, and announced to his mother in these words his new calling: "It is time that I should quit you, my mother, to follow Jesus Christ." When the humility and abnegation of one so highly born and so delicate- ly nurtured excited the admiration of his new associates, he was wont to say^: " I have only known true nobility since I became the companion of the friends and disciples of Jesus Christ." In 1673 he was ordained priest, and in the same year embarked for India, where he ardently hoped, and was destined by Provi- dence to tirid the crown of martyrdom. "f * Hist. Sec. Jesu. pars vta. ; auctore Josepho Juvencio, lib. xviii., pp. 451-464. f Hutoire du Bienheureux Jean de Britto, par le R. P. Prat (1853). 232 CHAPTER III. He was not long in discovering the true nature of the mission to which he had now dedicated himself. Like his predecessors, he understood that the Indian could only be won to God by apostles who had courage to lead a supernatural life. " We would rather descend into hell," was their common remark, "than be the disciples of Pranguis" The austerities and the virtues of de' ISfobili were imitated by de Britto, and, if possible, with greater success. On Easter-day, 1678, he admitted to baptism three hundred catechumens at once, every one of whom had been long and diligently prepared by himself. From that hour his converts became so numerous, that all the witnesses who were examined during the process of his beatification de- clared themselves unable to reckon them. When, for the first time, he was condemned to death by the governor of Tanjore, the Christians of that province declared that they would quit the kingdom en masse unless the edict was repealed ; u for fear of depopulating the territory," their petition was granted. More than eighteen hundred of them subsequently received Holy Communion at his hands on the same day. Of all the Indian missionaries none seems to have been more openly favored with Divine succors, to which, with character- istic modesty, he thus alludes : "These prodigious favors of God are so frequent that our Christians have become accustomed to them." But it is not of himself that he writes. " A neophyte named John has become celebrated by the instantaneous cures which he effects by reciting the Creed over the sick. The pagans themselves eagerly apply to him, or recommend themselves to him in their infirmities." The examples which he notices of energumens being delivered from possession at the moment of baptism occur at almost every page. The celebrated Father Bouchet attests the same fact. " It has been my happiness," he says, " to consecrate the greater part of my life to preaching the Gospel to the idolaters of India ; and I have had also the con- solation to witness this fact, that some of the prodigies which contributed to the conversion of the heathen in the time of the primitive Church are daily renewed among the churches which we have formed in the midst of this pagan land."* Of many of them, he adds, Englishmen and Protestants were witnesses. But to return to de Britto. Amongst the labors which filled up his daily life were con- stant disputations with the most learned of the Brahmins, whom he refuted out of their own books, until at length, con- founded by perpetual defeats, they no longer dared to accept his challenge, and declined all public controversy. And now the power which God gave him was displayed more and more * Lettres Edifiantes, tome xi , p. 43. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 233 mightily. In 1686, from the 5th of May to the 17th of July, he baptized two thousand and seventy catechumens.* Like St. Paul, he suffered stripes, bonds, imprisonment, hunger, and thirst ; he wandered from place to place without a refuge ; and though naturally of a frail and delicate constitution, survived trials under which many of his brethren speedily sank. At Mangalore he was lowered into a tank by a pulley, and plunged and replunged into the water, till life was nearly extinct ; while his catechists and neophytes, after sharing the same torture, were subsequently scourged, and though some died under the blows, only one sought escape in apostasy. Shut up with him in prison, they found strength and consolation in his fervent exhortations, and especially in his continual discourses upon the Passion of our Lord. After an incarceration of eleven days, he was brought forth, and commanded to invoke the name of Siva. His only answer was to repeat with tender devotion that of Jesus. The enraged governor struck him on the face with his own hand, when he calmly turned to him his other cheek. On the following day, he was exposed naked on a rock, under the burning rays of the Indian sun, and then beaten with rods and whips till pieces of his flesh were torn away. One of his catechists, at a later period the witness of his martyrdom, received such violent blows on the head, that one of his eyes was forced out, and hung down upon his cheek. "Tell his master," cried the governor, with grim pleasantry, " to replace it for him." To confound the scoffing persecutor, this power was given him ; and when de Britto had made the sign of the Cross, the eye was immediately restored to its place. The governor ordered a book to be brought, and when the miracle was proved by the confessor reading out of it, the impenitent barbarian, who " would not believe though one rose from the dead," angrily exclaimed, "He has done it by magic!" His chief secretary, however, was converted, and confessed "that a religion which could produce such proofs of its origin must certainly come from heaven. "f The persecutor himself, by one of those judgments of which the history of missions supplies so many examples, was subsequently impaled alive by one of the native princes. . In 1688, de Britto was sent to Portugal on the affairs of the mission, where he was embraced as a brother by Pedro II., and welcomed with public veneration, the greatest nobles thronging round him to kiss the marks of the wounds which he had received in the service of Christ. In vain the king attempted to retain him, beseeching him to undertake the education of his * Prat, liv. iii., p. 199. f Prat, liv. iii., p. 230. 234 CHAPTER III. heir, and offering to send out many missionaries in his place. "The Indian mission," he answered, "was that in which a man might hope to do most for the glory of God, and suffer most for His sake;" and it was only by threatening the pious monarch with the Divine displeasure that he at length extorted a reluc- tant consent, though even then the king tried to thwart him, by secretly giving orders to remove all vessels out of the Tagus, on the day on which he was to embark, so that he had to row many miles in an open boat to overtake his ship, which had already started. On the 3d of November, 1689, he was once more in India. In fifteen months after his return, filled with new strength from above, he had already baptized eight thousand infidels; and when a prince of the country, of great power and influence, being miraculously healed, besought him to confer the same sacrament upon him, " You know not," was the reply, " what purity of life the profession of Christianity requires. I should be guilty before God if I gave you the grace of baptism before having sufficiently instructed and disposed you to receive that sacrament." Being required, as a first condition, to put away all his wives but one, he immediately complied ; and this was the event which ultimately led to the martyrdom of de Britto. An English writer has said, in the energetic language of his period, that "a lewd woman danced off the head of St. John the Baptist." A similar fate was reserved for the Venerable John de Britto. One of the prince's discarded wives was a niece of the king, to whom she appealed for vengeance, and by whose order de Britto was seized, on the 8th of January, 1693. As he was dragged to- execution, the blood flowed from the wounds which had already been inflicted on him, and lest he should expire too soon, they placed him on a horse. From a similar motive, that he might have a keener sense of suffering, they postponed his death ; and being once more consigned to prison, he wrote to his brethren a letter which contains these words : "I am at present in prison, awaiting the death which I am about to suffer for my God. It was the hope of attaining this happiness which constrained me a second time to visit India." On the 3d of February, the day before his martyrdom, he confessed to Father da Costa, " I have this year baptized four thousand pagans." He had long before announced to his disciples his death, and the precise manner of it ; arid even the executioners, whom fear and awe almost disabled fur their task, confessed that "he went to the stake like a conqueror in a triumphal procession." When the Archbishop of Cranganore announced his martyrdom to the Pope, he said : " The Gentiles themselves proclaim his glory, and affirm that they saw, during MISSIONS IN INDIA. 235 three nights in succession, rays of brilliant light hovering over the stake from which he was suspended."* Such, in his turn, was this great servant of God and of the Churcb. Ten years were occupied in collecting on the spot, from innumerable witnesses, the facts recorded in the Acts of his Beatification. The catechist Mariadaghen, his constant com- panion, deposed on oath, that in the plains of Valetirel he bap- tized in a single day three thousand pagans. Another gave evi- dence that in ten days, with scanty assistance from others, he conferred the same sacrament on twelve thousand catechumens, so that they were obliged, as in the case of St. Francis Xavier, to support his Avearied arms. A third made his deposition in these terms: "I know that in his second expedition to Marava, where I lived many years,'' and in the forests of which country the saint had caused numerous chapels to be erected, " the venerable Father converted many thousand Gentiles, sometimes baptizing five hundred and sometimes a thousand catechumens a day." Father Bouchet, who himself converted thirty thou- sand idolaters, declared : " I know no missionary who has con- verted so many souls to God." Even the Dutch Protestants, forgetting for a moment their hatred and jealousy, celebrated his glorious death ; and the Calvinist John JXoot, who was the com- missary of Holland on the coast of Coromandel, in a letter dated the 3d of December, 1693, only ten months after his martyr- dom, affirmed as follows : " His body continued fresh and without the least smell, though in this country, in consequence of the extreme heat, corpses exhale almost immediately a pes- tilential odor. In truth, the executioners themselves were so greatly amazed, that they said to the Christians converted by him whom they had just slain, 'Truly this was a man of God ;' and the neophytes answered them, 'It was this man who made known to us the God by whom we were created.' In saying this, they offered their own heads, to suffer martyrdom as their master had done ; but the pagans, far from consenting to their demand, expressed deep regret for what they had just done. Furthermore, the whole of that country has embraced the law of Christ "\ Such were the men whom God raised up to de- clare His Name in India, and such, even by the testimony of Protestants, were the fruits of their work. LAYNEZ, BORGHESE, AND THEIR COMPANIONS. It would be impossible, without extending this compilation to inconvenient dimensions, to pursue with equally minute detail * Prat, liv. vi., p. 409. f Prat, liv. iii., p. 367. 236 CHAPTER III. V the history of all the companions and successors of de' ISTobili and de Britto, yet each of them might well claim a separate biog- raphy, and deserves from us what he gained from his contem- poraries, grateful respect and loving veneration. " They were giants," as one who lived at a later and less glorious epoch of Indian missions has said,* and they triumphed in their day, be- cause neither the world nor the devil could resist the might that was in them. Possessing, for the most part, the rarest mental endowments, so that if they had aimed only at human honors they would scarcely have encountered a rival in their path ; versed in all the learning of their age, and conspicuous even in that great society which attracted to itself for more than a cen- tury the noblest minds of every country in Europe ; they had acquired, in addition to their natural gifts, such a measure of Divine grace and wisdom, such perfection of evangelical virtue, that the powers of darkness fled away from before their face, and the Cross of Christ, wherever they lifted it up, broke in pieces the idols of the Gen tiles. "I confess, says one who did not visit India till nearly the last of these apostles had been banished from it, " that I have criticised the Jesuits of Hindostan with critical, per- haps with malignant temper. I distrusted before I knew them ; but their virtue has conquered and annihilated my prejudices. I have discovered in them men who knew how to ally the most sublime degrees of prayer with the most energetic and absorbing activity of life; men wholly detached from earthly things, and whose mortifications would have appalled the most fervent ancho- rites; men who refused themselves even indispensable necessaries, while they ceased not to exhaust their strength in the arduous toils of the apostolate ; patient in all their afflictions, humble in spite of the esteem which they attracted, and the success which accompanied their ministry ; burning with a zeal which, while it never knew relaxation, was always wise and always prudent. Never were they so cheerful and contented as when, after having consumed the whole day in preaching, in hearing confessions, or in the discussion and decision of the most delicate and difficult questions, they were suddenly summoned from their sleep to carry the succors of religion to some dying man, perhaps at a distance of several miles. I do not hesitate to say it, they were workmen whom no toil could confuse, no labor exhaust. But if I give this testimony with pleasure, I speak also under the constraint of necessity ; for all India would lift up its voice, if I used any other language, and tax me with imposture."f When we have added a few words upon some at least of their number, since we may not stay to offer to all our respectful * Abb6 Dubois. f Perrin, Voyage dans VIndostan, tome ii., p. 166. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 237 homage, we may proceed to estimate the final results of their labors. Who in that company of evangelists was nobler than Francis Laynez, a hundred times confessor, and all but martyr ? He was accustomed to say, in allusion to his own immense labors, that " there was a time for sowing and a time for reaping ;" and he would often refer to the early history of the mission of Madura, where some years elapsed without their making a single convert. He loved solid foundations, and was no hasty builder ; yet in 1700 he baptized five thousand catechumens with his own hand, every one of whom had been instructed by himself.* Again, in the following year, partly through the persuasive converse and example of these first converts, he admitted to the same sacra- ment> between the months of January and September, four thou- sand seven hundred and twenty-five pagans ! During thirty-two years he witnessed for Christ through all the trials and sufferings which can befall the disciple of a Crucified Master. Once he was mangled in every part of his body by the teeth of a crew of pagan fanatics, who rushed upon him like wild beasts, and would have torn him to pieces. When in 1704 they sent him to Home, to answer the calumnies which the Evil One had again spread abroad against himself and his brethren, he had already con- verted forty thousand souls. It was to Clement XI. that his celebrated memorial, Defensio Indicarum Missionum, was pre- sented. By the command of the Pontiff it was printed at Rome, in 1707, and won for its author the uncoveted dignity of the episcopate, from which he vainly entreated to be relieved. Con- secrated in 1708 at Lisbon, he returned immediately to India, where he continued the same almost incredible austerities, and persevered in the same patient toil, as if he had been the humblest of the flock committed by the Supreme Pastor to his oversight. In .1712, he visited Calcutta, where he was received with the highest honors by the English governor ; and in 1715 he died, after an apostolate of more than thirty years, during which he had converted to God upwards of fifty thousand idolaters. We shall presently, when we come to speak of the agents of another creed, find ourselves contemplating QI\\J failure, uniform and irretrievable ; meanwhile, let the reader observe that every successive generation of Catholic missionaries we have noticed only a single type of each rivalled the triumphs of that which preceded it, and always by the same methods. Never in the annals of the Christian apostolate was the work and presence of God more visibly manifested. Never were His messengers adorned with richer graces, nor endowed with more irresistible * Prat, p. 496. CHAPTER III. might. And they continued to the last hour such as de' Nobili, de Britto, and Laynez. Let us resume the catalogue which we have interrupted, and remember, for our own sake, if not for theirs, Fathers Martin and Bouchet, whom France, the nursery of evangelists, gave to the Indian mission. The firs't, who was surnamed " the Martyr of Charity," and who spoke almost all the dialects of the East, baptized in the single year 1698 two thousand catechumens, and has sufficiently revealed the character of his converts by re- cording, that it sometimes happened to a missionary " to hear the confessions of several villages without finding a single person guilty of a mortal sin." Of the wealthier converts he relates that, in the season of Lent, some would undertake to provide for five poor persons, in honor of the Five Wounds of our Lord ; some for thirty- three, in memorial of His life on earth ; some for forty, in remembrance of His sojourn in the desert. Father Martin had been captured by the Arabs on his way from Persia to India, together with his companion Father Beauvol- lier ; but they escaped death, because as the one was always reading Arabic and the other Persian books, their tormentors supposed, in spite of their vehement rejection of Islamisrn, that they were not Europeans. It is Father Martin who reports, that the pagans in his time expressed such profound veneration for St. Francis Xavier, " that there was reason to fear lest they should place him in the rank of their false divinities." He also mentions the fact, characteristic of this extraordinary mission, that in his day, "no missionary baptized less than one thousand converts yearly"* Of his companion Father Bouchet it was said, that he might have declared of one of the cities which he inhabited, in the words of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, " There were only seven- teen Christians when I came here, and now, thanks to Jesus Christ, there are only seventeen infidels.'' In the year 1700 this illustrious missionary wrote : " Our mission of Madura is more flourishing than ever ;" and then assigned as a sufficient explanation of its progress, " We have had this year four great persecutions.'^ I n tne same year he said, "I think I must have heard more than one hundred thousand confessions." -From him also we learn that the catechists and other converts of that period bore torture with the heroism of the primitive saints ; and no marvel, when we consider what their teachers were. "In India," says Sir James Mackintosh, speaking of the Society of Jesus, " they suffered martyrdom with heroic * Bertrand, tome iv., p. 12. f Lettres Edifiantes, tome xiv., p. 192. MISSIONS IN INDIA. constancy ;"* and their disciples, here as in China, learned to imitate their valor. It was of Bouchet himself that the hea- then said, when on one occasion they were sacking his humble dwelling, "This strange man is as little concerned as if we were pillaging his enemy's house ; he does not even look at us !" And when, at another time, being made prisoner, his captors proposed to secure him for the night in a temple of idols, he escaped the pollution by warning them, that he would break all the idols to pieces. It was Father Bouchet, once more, who said, " Our missionaries, who are sometimes obliged to visit Madras, speak warmly of the courtesy of the English, and of the marks of friendship with which they honor them. I owe them this expression of our gratitude, and am rejoiced to have an opportunity of declaring it publicly. r f Nor let us forget Xavier Borghese, in whom every good and perfect gift seems to have been united ; who had renounced all the highest honors of the world, and with his brother, and two cousins of the same illustrious family, had offered himself to God in the Society of Jesus. It was he who when bidden by the heathen judge, as the Prince of the Apostles was once bidden, no longer to mention the Holy Name, answered with sublime indignation, " Think you that I left my country, and all that was dear to me on earth, and came here to preach the law of the true God, only to keep silence now that I am here?" And when the heathen heard him, they said one to another, " This man is a rock, at whose feet threats and words break like the waves.";): Then the judge arrayed before his eyes the instruments of torture, and Borghese smiled and said, "These are only fit to frighten children ; when I came hither to preach the Gospel I expected to suffer more than this." " We will see," replied the judge, " whether your disciples have as much courage as yourself;" and then he ordered his soldiers to break the bones of one of his catechists." " Now I begin," exclaimed the latter, as soon as he heard the command, "to be truly your disciple. Do not fear, my Father, that I shall do any thing unworthy of a Christian. Only give me your blessing, and I am ready to bear all." The apostles of India, it is evident, had known how to form -the same class of disciples as their brethren in China. With Borghese let us number also the two brothers Carvalho, Simon and Joseph, rivals in virtue, both martyrs in desire, and one in fact, as the prison of Tanjore could testify ; and LaFon- * Review of the Causes of the Revolution; Works, vol. ii., p. 251 (1846). | Lettres, tome xiii., p. 105. { Lettres, tome x., p. 210. Bertrand, tome iv., p. 94. 240 CHAPTER III. taine, destined for China, but arrested on the way by his admiration for the Indian mission, and who converted such a multitude of the highest caste that he was called " the Apostle of the Brahmins ;" and De Proenza, who in three years won ten thousand souls, whose conversion he modestly at- tributed to the edifying example of his neophytes, and the salutary effects of persecution, rather than to his own labors ; and De Mello, who counted fifteen thousand three hundred and eighty-six as the harvest of four consecutive years ; and de Saa, who smiled upon his torturers, and when their bloody work was over, finished by giving them his blessing, at their own re- quest ; and Capelli, who having vainly sought to enter Ton- quin, found in India the grave which was refused him in China. Nor must we omit Diaz and Bertholdi, Rodriguez and Pe- reyra, Belmonte the martyr, and Bouttari, named by the heathen " the Penitent without spot," over whose body even the English shed tears of regret ;* and d'Alineida and da Cunha, both kins- men of martyrs, and the latter beaten to death with clubs, like St. James, his last words being the holy Name of Jesus. Let us remember also, that we may gain their prayers, Ribeiro and Louis de Vasconcellos, de Choisel and de Montjustin, Maury and de Saint Estevan, Mamiani and de Faria ; and Boves, who was led with a chain round his neck to confess Father Fernan- dez, who was dying in prison of his torments ;f and Paul de Mesquita, who was martyred by Dutch Calvinists ; and the three Dominicans whom the Mussulmans slew, and then con- fessed that they saw three days after enveloped with light. Let us recall also Beschi, the prodigy of genius and erudition, of whom a Protestant missionary relates, in 185i, that he was " the best Tamil scholar of his age," and that " his name is venerated even among the Hindoo literati ;"J and the learned and chivalrous Intorcetta, not unworthily honored by the magnificent panegyric of Abel Remusat. To these let us add, since we may not stay to relate all their noble deeds, the apostolic Yerjus, who used to say to his younger brethren when they desired to follow him into India, u It is not to Thabor that Jesus invites you, but to Calvary, and to death." And this he said not to discourage, but to warn them. " Remember," he added, " that arrapostle dies daily. Do not, then, conceal from yourselves the difficulties ; they are very great, and the ordinary measure of charity is not sufficient to overcome them. But the charity of Jesus Christ which animates you will no doubt * Tome iv., p. 403. f Henrion, tome ii., lere partie, p. 187. i The Land of the Veda, by the Rev. Peter Percival, ch. vi., pp. 118-120 (1854). MISSIONS IN INDIA. 241 augment your own."* It was Yerjus who said to a dying father, who proposed to disinherit a wicked son, and to leave all his property to the Society, " Such sentiments are riot in accordance with the dispositions which become us at the hour of death. Send for your son, speak to him as a father, and then do whatever reason, paternal love, and religion may inspire. But whatever decision you adopt, choose any other heir than the Jesuits ; and, for myself, be assured that, however ardently I may desire the establishment of my mission, rny zeal shall never serve as a pretext either to the vengeance of a father or the ruin of a son." It is pleasant to add, to the honor of our country and people, the statement of Yerjus, that "even Eng- land, though at war with us, sometimes furnished us with op- portunities of dispatching our missionaries by her ships, and we ought to confess our obligations to the Royal Company of London for the good offices which it has performed for us in this respect." Who, again, more nearly approached the true apostolic char- acter than the -martyr cie Sidoti, who, in 1709, was landed alone on the coast of Japan, in spite of the remonstrance of the officers of the ship which conveyed him, and to whom he re- plied : u It is not in my own strength that I confide to sub- due these people to the yoke of the Gospel, but in the all- powerful grace of Jesus Christ, and in the protection of so many martyrs who in this land have shed their blood for His name." As the boat approached the shore, he was observed to be absorbed in prayer, and on landing kissed the ground. Don Carlos de Bonio, looking out of curiosity into the bag which contained all his effects, found a small portable altar, a box containing the consecrated oils, a breviary, the Imitation of Christ, a crucifix, a picture of the Blessed Yirgin, and two Japanese grammars. This was all his wealth. He was seized almost immediately, shut up in prison at Jeddo, where he converted his keepers, who were all martyred, and finally inclosed in a pit with a small aperture to admit air, where he died a lingering death.f * Lettres Edifiantes, tome x., p. 376. f Lettres, tome xi.. p. 278. For the sake of brevity, all reference to the mission of Japan, so inexpressibly glorious both to the apostles and their converts, is omitted in these pages. Here also the intrigues of Protestantism, and the unex- ampled crimes of the Dutch Calvinists, aided by the commercial rivalry of Spain and Portugal, ruined a flourishing church, and secured the triumph of paganism. " The faith implanted in the breasts of some hundreds of thousands of converts," says a living Protestant writer, " was no mere nominal creed, to be swept away by the first wave of persecution. It not only furnished them with courage, but with arguments with which to meet their persecutors. . . . The early records of the Church do not afford instances of more unflinching heroism than is furnished in the narratives of those martyrdoms to which Japanese of all ranks were sub- 17 242 CHAPTER III. Not unworthy to be compared with this faithful witness was Le Caron, though his apostolic career ended almost as soon as it began. Learning, immediately upon his arrival in India, that a number of idolaters, driven out of their village by the inhabitants because afflicted with a contagions malady, were dying miserably in a neighboring forest, he hastened to their succor ; and after ministering with patient charity to the bodily wants of these afflicted outcasts, and converting nearly the whole of them to Christ, he died himself, together with his cate- chist, of the disease which destroyed at once the evangelist and his disciples.* Such as these they continued to the end, and to their last hour He whom they served was with them. Like their brethren in China, no perils could alarm, no sufferings discourage, no malice resist them. Filled with the presence of God, all teach- ing the same uniform doctrine, and all illustrating it by the same marvellous sanctity of life, they won first the admira- tion and then the love and confidence of a race naturally dis- posed to the contemplation of Divine things, and only asking for teachers whose virtues proved that God was with them. " Catholicism," says Ranke, without appreciating his own words, " was eminently calculated to vanquish even such a world as this." Not one of them, we have been told, converted less than a thousand pagans annually. And these apostolic triumphs continued, in spite of the absence of all human aids, up to the last hour. Even Protestants have confessed, that if they had not been forcibly withdrawn, they would probably have converted all India. " Their progress," to quote Ranke once more, " outwent all expectation, and they succeeded in overcoming, at least to a certain extent, the resistance of those national systems of religion which are the immemorial growth of the East."f As late as 1730, for we must hasten to an jected when the day of trial came. . . . We have reason to believe that the last spark has never yet been extinguished, and that, smouldering secretly, the fire of Francois Xavier still burns in the bosoms of some of those who have re- ceived the traditions of his teaching." Oliphant, Lord Elgin's Mission, vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 25. Another British official not only confirms this report, but adds, from personal observation, the following extremely remarkable statement. " I have reason to believe that in the island of Yezo alone there are more than eighty thousand persons who have secretly, in fear and trembling, maintained and preserved not only the utensils and books of their Christian ancestors, but who actually by stealth still practise their worship. The Japanese are a think- ing race ; they admit they have no good religion, and were it allowed by the government, I have no hesitation in asserting that from one end of Japan to the other the Roman Catholic religion would be hailed with delight, and ac- cepted with unanimity/' A Residence in Japan, by C. Pemberton Hodgson, late H.B.M. Consul, ch vi., p. 143 (1861). * Lettres, tome xiii., p. 222. f Book vii., vol. ii., pp. 92-97. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 243 end, and cannot attempt in such a sketch as this to recount all their labors, or even to record their names, we still find Father Calmette acknowledging with devout gratitude the "grace de miracles constants et asscz ordinaire" with which they were favored ; and in 1743 Father Possevin could once more say, "There is not in the world a more flourishing mission than that of India, nor one in which the faithful, of all the provinces, offer more numerous examples of those virtues which were the glory of primitive Christianity."* For more than two hundred years, the Indian apostles had pursued, with almost unvarying success, their task of mercy, and now we approach the last page of their annals. The evil day was at hand, but when it came it found them such as their fathers had ever been. To the last hour, and in every land which was blessed by their presence, they displayed the same apostolic graces which forced even an apostate, filled with admiration of u their learning, their philosophical genius, their piety, and their benevolence," to exclaim, " The Jesuits have been the greatest missionaries upon earth. "f M. Perrin had now reached India, and tells us, as one example out of many, of Father Busson, still emulating the unwearied charity and valiant austerities of those who had gone before him ; Busson, who ate nothing but bread and bitter herbs, and yet labored without ceasing, and " though covered with wounds and ulcers, seemed always insensible to pain, always calm, gentle, and gay, and died at last at the foot of his crucifix." Finally, let us mention the name of Xavier d' Andrea, the youngest of all, the last survivor of that noble army, and the only one who still remained alive in India when the Society was re-established by Pius YIL, in 1814. With him the record closes; for now the hour of darkness was at hand, and the Evil One was about to snatch his first victory, after more than two centuries of confusion and defeat. SUPPRESSION OF THE JESUITS. In 1754, Mary Anna, of Austria, sister of Charles VI., and wife of John V. of Portugal, who had worked with her own hands for the Indian missionaries, and supported them with all her strength, foreseeing that great outburst of blasphemy and crime which began with the suppression of the Jesuits and culminated in the French revolution, exclaimed, shortly before * Tome xiv., p. 192. f Travels and Adventure* of Dr. Wolff, ch. vii., p. 144 (1861). 244 CHAPTER III. her death, " Woe to these missions when I am no more !" Her prediction of sorrow was speedily accomplished. In the follow- ing year, all the succors which the missionaries had heen ac- customed to receive from Europe were stopped, and from that time till the day of their death the Bishop of Cochin and the Archbishop of Cranganore lived upon alms. In 1755, orders arrived from Portugal, then abandoned by a fitting chastise- ment to the administration of Pombal, and one hundred and twenty-seven Jesuits were seized at once, and cast into prison at Goa. A few weeks later, on the 2d of December, they were dragged on board a vessel, of which the captain vainly declared that from forty to fifty was the extreme number he could re- ceive. But the orders of the viceroy, Count d'Ega, were im- perative, and the ship started on a voyage during which twenty- four of the Fathers died of scurvy, and the rest arrived more dead than alive at Lisbon, where they were flung into dungeons, of which only the lowest and darkest cells were assigned for their dwelling. Here they languished for years, meek and re- signed in the midst of almost intolerable sufferings, and mourn- ing rather for their orphaned flock than for their own unmerited wrongs. Once they met during their captivity, each standing at the door of his cell, to hear from the month of a jailer, fitting deputy and agent of the Marquis de Pombal, the total suppression of the Society. Thirty-five died in prison during the first sixteen years, among whom were Diaz, Albuquerque, and da Silva ; and when at length the doors were opened, and they were permitted to re-enter a world in which they had no longer a home, a family, or a calling, forty -five Fathers sur- vived, sole remnant of all the missionaries of India, China, and America, amounting to many thousands. EFFECTS OF THK SUPPRESSION. And now India was abandoned once again to the demons who had so long ruled her. Never, perhaps, during their ceaseless warfare with our race, had the powers of darkness gained a more signal triumph. The great apostles who had been able, by the irresistible might which they derived from their union with God, to overthrow u principalities and powers," were now forever silenced ; or if they still lifted up their voices, it was in that company which St. John saw, " under the altar," to whom it was said, that u they should rest for a little time, till their fellow-servants and their brethren, who are to be slain even as they, should be filled up?* Meanwhile, their implacable * Apoc. vi. 11. MISSIONS IN .INDIA. 245 enemies seemed to triumph over them. " For two hundred years," says one who exulted in their fall, "these Fathers had struggled against hate, and though they might flatter themselves with apparent reason that they would overcome it, they finished by succumbing to it. Oh ! how active and vigilant is that hate which is eternal like God, and terrible like him !"* But the real victims of the barbarous and remorseless con- spiracy which robbed every land at once, from the frontiers of Europe to the furthest East, and from Lake Huron to the mouth of the Plata, of its pastors and evangelists, were not the apostles themselves, to whom suffering and ignominy were pre- cious, and who cared not how thorny was the path which led them to Jesus ; but the unfortunate heathen, now deprived of the only teachers who were skilled to unloose their bonds, and to win them from their idolatry and superstition to the knowl- edge of the true God. " The Jesuits bid fair," says one whom we have already quoted, and who bears a name well known amongst us, " to convert both India and China ; and, if their career had not been stopped by political events, would probably have finally succeeded "\ We have seen how great a work they had already accomplished; but it was the mysterious pur- pose of the Almighty that the kingdom of Satan should not yet be overthrown, and they who were most likely to destroy it were withdrawn from the combat, just as they seemed about to obtain a final and undisputed victory. The day which had opened with such bright promise of grace had now set in thick darkness. The Hindoo was once more alone with his idols, and none remained to tell him that he was in the embrace of death. No doubt he had deserved his fate ; but there were others, scattered all along both shores of that great peninsula, from the Bay of Bengal to the Persian Gulf, to whom the word of truth had been declared, and who had re- ceived the gift of faith. Who can think without pity of their sad lot ? Who should now break to them the bread of life 1 Would they struggle on, poor orphans of Christ, trusting to His compassion who is the Father of the fatherless ; or sink down in hopeless despair, and forsake Him who seemed to have forsaken them ? On one side of them was the Hindoo, who upbraided them as outcasts ; on the other the fierce and persecuting Mahometan, who had already vexed them, and their fathers before them, and who now attacked them with fresh fury when he found that their defenders were gone. In the single year 1784, thirty thousand Christians of Canara were forcibly carried * D'Alembert, Sur la destruction des Je suites, (Euvres, tome v., p. 244. f India as it may be, by George Campbell, Esq., ch. viii., p. 397. 24:6 CHAPTER III. off at once,* and this was only one instance out of many. And besides these deadly foes, and the equally terrible scourge of " an inundation of Mahrattas," they were surrounded by sec- taries of every name and creed, now bolder than ever, Syrian, Danish, Dutch, and English, who each spread his snare for them. And they were alone, with none to warn, to guide, or to help. u For nearly sixty years" says one who hated them for the faith which they professed, "i. 0.,from 1760 to 1820, scarcely any care was taken of the Catholic missions, and of their numerous converts. The older missionaries gradually died out, while none arrived from Europe to fill their place. "f Was this, then, to be the end of all the labors and sacrifices, of all the prayers and meditations, of St. Francis, of de Britto, of Laynez, of Borghese, and their fellow-workmen ? Why did the Good Shepherd abandon His sheep, and leave them to a warfare in which victory seemed impossible, while defeat would be not only fatal to them, but a sore reproach to the guides and teachers who had gone amongst them in His name, and by His aid had set them free? Other churches, indeed, even some which had been planted by Apostles, had perished utterly ; were these also to be laid waste, and their children to ask in despair, " why is my sorrow become perpetual, and my wound desperate so as to refuse to be healed ?";{ The answer which history supplies to this question reveals one of the most unexpected facts in the annals of Christianity. It would almost seem as if God had resolved to justify His servants, by a special and marvellous providence, before the face of the whole earth; and had left their work to what seemed inevitable ruin and decay, only to show that neither the world nor the devil, neither persecution, nor fraud, nor neglect, could extinguish the life that was in it. And so when men came to look upon it, after sixty years of silence and desolation, they found a living multitude where they expected to count only " the corpses of the dead." Some indeed had failed, and pagan- ism or heresy had sung its song of triumph over the victims ; others had retained only the great truths of the Trinity and the Incarnation, while ignorance, and its twin sister superstition, had spread a veil over their eyes ; but still the prodigious fact was revealed that more than one million remained, after half a century of utter abandonment, who still clung with inflexible constancy to the faith which had been preached to their fathers, and still bowed the head with loving awe when the names of * Historical Sketches of the South of India, by Colonel Mark Wilks, vol. ii., ch. xxx., pp. 528, et seq. \ Missions in South India, by Joseph Mullens, p. 135 (1854). J Jeremias xv. 18. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 247 their departed apostles were uttered amongst them. Such is the astonishing conclusion of a trial without parallel in the history of Christianity, and which if it had befallen the Chris- tians of other lands, boasting their science and civilization, might perhaps have produced other results than among these despised Asiatics. When we have furnished some account of their present condition, and have heard what even their enemies say of them, we may proceed to ask the latter what they have attempted towards the conversion of India, and how far the attempt has been successful. PRESENT STATE OF THE INDIAN MISSION. The following table, which exhibits the state of the Catholic missions of India in 1857, in all the twenty Apostolic Vicariates into which the territory is now divided, will serve to show, that the permanence which so wonderfully distinguishes these missions, as well as the neighboring churches of China, is not the privilege of one or two places only, but is equally con- spicuous in every part of the country. It will be observed that the mission of Madura, founded by de' Kobili, still counts one hundred and fifty thousand Catholics ; while that of Verapoly, the field in which so many of the Jesuit missionaries labored, numbers nearly two hundred and thirty thousand. 1857. Vicariates. Bishops. Catholics. 1 Madras .............. Right Rev. J. Fennelly .............. 44,480 o T, , ( " Anast. Hartman ........ ) ^ ~ ., AA . 2Bomba 7 ........... I Ignatius Persico ....... \ 17 > 100 3 Eastern Bengal . . ..... " Thomas Olliffe .......... 13,000 4 Western Bengal ........................................ 15,000 5 Pondicherry .......... Right Rev. Clement Bonnand ....... 100,046 6 Madura .............. A. Canoz, S. J ........... 150,000 7 Hyderabad ........... " Daniel Murphy .......... 4,000 8 Vizagapatam ......... T. E. Neyret ............ 7,130 9 Mangalore ........... Michael Anthony ........ 30,480 1 Quilon ............... Administrator, F. Bernardino ....... 56,000 2 Mysore ............... Right Rev. E. L. Charbonneaux ..... 17,110 13 Coimbatore ........... Administrator, C. Bonnand .......... 17,200 14 Agra ................ Right Rev. F. C. Carli .............. 20,100 15 Patna ............... A.Zubber ............... 3,400 16 Ava and Pegu ........ " J. B. Bigaudet ........... 5,320 17 Malayan Peninsula ---- " A. Boucho ............... 5,400 18 Siam ................. " J. B. Pallegoix ........... 4,900 19 Jaffna ............... J. Bettachini ............ 65,500 20 Columbo ............. Cajetano Antonio* ....... 90,900 From this table, which considerably understates the numbers * Madras Directory for 1857. 248 CHAPTER III. at the present time, we learn that there are still in the Indian missions not far short of one million Catholics; or if we add the Christians attached to the Goa schism, professing also to be Catholics, and whose gradual reconciliation may be anticipated, we shall have a total of about twelve hundred thousand, the living witnesses of the labors and triumphs of the missionaries of the Catholic Church. *The Indian Church, then, in spite of trials, which might well have dimmed the faith and exhausted the patience of her children, still retains her numbers, and once more folds her sheep in secure pastures ; but even this is not the most striking fact in her history. It has always been one of the royal prerogatives of the Church, one of the special marks of her Divine origin, that she alone, while maintaining her own distinctive life, and baffling, almost without effort, the assaults of the various sects and schools which encamp outside her walls, has power to attract to herself, one after another, the children of error, of whatever class or creed. We shall see this hereafter impressively illustrated in the missions of Syria and the Levant. But it was perhaps hardly to be expected that India, after her unequalled misfortunes, should furnish evidence of the same truth. The following table of adult baptisms, i.e.* conversions, will indicate with sufficient clearness the operation of that Divine power which belongs to the Church alone, and by which her peaceful conquests are made amongst all those, of whatever class, who are " ordained to eternal life." It will be seen that the returns are very imperfect, in some of the Vicariates relating only to a single year ; but they will more than suffice to prove the fact which we have affirmed. Vicariate, No. of Adult Baptism, 1 Madras .............. From 1&50 to 1856 ...... 742 134 2 Bombay .............. " 1852 to 1854 ..... 88 55 3 Eastern Bengal ....... No return ............. 4 Western Bengal ...... From 1844 to 1855 ..... 112 221 5 Pondicherry .......... " 1853 to 1855 ..... 1,384 144 6 Madura .............. " 1853 to 1856 ..... 1,045 178 7 Hyderabad ........... No return ..... ........ 8 Vizagapatam ......... From 1851 to 1855 ..... 954 45 9 Mangalore ........... In 1854 ................ 100 8 10 Verapoly ............ Annually more than. . . . 1,000 11 Quilon ............... Inl854 ................ 204 12 Mysore .............. In 1853 ............... . 200 13 Coimbatore .......... From 1848 to 1846 ..... 590 14 Agra ................ In 1855 ................ 20 44 15 Patna .............. In 1855 ................ 10 13 16 Ava and Pegu ........ In 1855 ................ 103 1 17 Malayan Peninsula . . .In 1855. .............. 272 18 Siam ................ No return ............. 19 Jaffna ............... From 1852 to 1855 ..... 1,348 124 20 Columbo ............ In 1856 ................ 326 372 MISSIONS IN INDIA. 249 It is proved, then, that the churches founded by St. Francis Xavier and his successors not only preserve their own numbers, but are continually augmented, apparently by some thousands annually from the ranks of Hindoos and Mahometans, of Nestorians and Armenians, as well as of all the multiplied sects Anglican, Anabaptist, Presbyterian, Wesley an, and others, which display to the inhabitants of India the various and ever-shifting forms of Protestantism. And the accessions from these diiferent sources appear to increase annually. In the year 1859 the number of adult converts in the single province of Madura reached two thousand six hundred and fourteen; while in the diocese of Yerapoly "more than a thousand heathens are being baptized yearly, besides many Nestorians, and some native Protestants."* The latest account from the vicariate of Madura, published by Father Sairit-Cyr, in 1859, records the reconciliation of more than live thousand schismatics, and the recent conversion of five hundred idolaters and four hundred Protestants. There were at that date forty-three Jesuit Fathers in the mission, and thirty-five had died in their work in the previous twenty- one years. The native college of Negapatam, frequented exclusively by young men of high caste, had already produced seven priests, eight theological students, a large number of catechists and schoolmasters, and several government officers. Five orphanages and three hospitals had been founded by the Fathers, besides convents of Carmelite and Franciscan Suns, "who discharge," says Father Saint-Cyr, "with surprising exactness and fervor the duties of the religious life. r f That Hindoo women should find grace to lead the austere life of the Carmelite or the Franciscan, will appear incredible to all but those who know what graces accompany a religious vocation. It remains only to ascertain, in the last place, what is the character of the existing native Catholics, after their long and formidable trials, and how far they display that steadfast attachment to the Church of which their fathers set them the example. CONDITION OF THE CHRISTIANS. The missionaries who, during the last twenty years, have entered into the vineyard which others had planted, must first be heard. They had no previous experience of Asiatic Chris- tians, and their praise, if they praise, will at least be free from * Madras Catholic Directory for 1860, p. 154. f La Mission de Madure, par Louis Saint-Cyr, S. J., p. 5 (1859). 250 CHAPTER in. all suspicion of personal or interested motive. It was the work of others, and not their own, which they were now, for the first time, enabled to estimate. Besides, their evidence, whatever it may be, shall be compared immediately with that of Protestant witnesses. It is in these words that a European missionary, who writes from the coast of Coromandel, describes his first impression: "I am astonished at the faith of these Christians!"* A little later, in 1829, M. Bonriand, subsequently bishop, relates that this faith, which half a century of trial had failed to destroy, was easily communicated to others, and that he and his colleague had already baptized one hundred and seventy converts, chiefly of the highest castes, since their recent entrance into the Telinga mission !"f In 1838, Father Garnier, of the Society of Jesus, writes as follows : "The Christians of these countries are in general well disposed, and strongly attached to the faith. The usages intro- duced among them by the Jesuits still subsist ; morning prayer in common, an hour before sunrise ; evening prayer, with spiritual reading; catechism for the children, given every day by a catechist, "and the devotions of Mass on Sundays in the chapel. When the missionary makes his tour of the district, all approach the sacraments. But in spite of these excellent practices, there still remains much ignorance and superstition ; we shall have a good deal to do to form them into a people of true Christians. Our efforts shall be directed to this end, before we turn our attention to the pagans ; their turn will come when we are more numerous. Among the latter there are many who are not far from the kingdom of God ; may we soon be able to gather them in !"J In 1839, Father Bertrand, writing from Madura, says of the Sanars : "One might almost say that they have not eaten with Adam of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that they were created in the days of original innocence. Among these Indians there are numbers, who, if asked whether they commit particular faults, will reply: 'Formerly I did it is many years since. I told it to the Father, who forbade me to do so, and since then I have not committed It.' We reckon more than seven thousand Christians of this caste." Of the Odeages, " who may be said to live in general in com- parative affluence, and esteem themselves noble," the same witness says : " They give great consolation to the missionary * Annales, tome iv., p. 152. Ibid., p. 158. Annals, vol. i., p. 168. English edition. Annals, vol. ii., p. 142. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 251 by their enlightened faith, regard for their family, and ad- mirable docility." Of the Brahmins, " who are, as it were, the gods of the coun- try," this is his report : " I fear not to call them, with some exceptions, whitened sepulchres. Christianity makes among them but little progress."* "After the Brahmins come the Moddiars and the Vdlages, of whom a great many have been converted to Christianity. Among these, the missionary, with some few noble exceptions, finds little consolation, bur many annoyances and afflictions. We have, however, two congrega- tions entirely composed of Vellages, who, by their fervor richly recompense us tor the labor we bestow upon them, and encour- age us to take particular care of the caste. They aie, more- over, the distinguished men of the country." Finally, he adds, that u in the midst of so many crosses, and continually assault- ed by schismatics, our Christians have been strong in the faith, and constant in their perseverance." In 1842, Father Louis de Saint-Cyr makes the following striking observation: "Within a certain radius around what we call the centre of the mission, all the villages, with rare ex- ceptions, are Christian ; beyond this circle, and a little further removed from the residence of the Fathers, you enter the region of paganism. This fact proves how valuable was the presence of the evangelical laborers in this country, and what a vivify- ing influence 1ms been diffused by the exercise of the holy min- istry. If these former converters of souls had been more nu- merous, all this part of India would at the present time be enlightened by the light of faith."f In the following year, 1843, Mon seigneur Borghi, vicar apos- tolic of Agra, says : " Ten years ago conversions were rare, because pastors were few. Religion was then almost unknown : now what a contrast! Three new churches lately built, Divine worship celebrated with solemnity, double the number of priests, and I may add also double the number of conversions, for these are always proportioned to the number of evangelical laborers. Surrounded as we are by sects, religion advances, in the midst of them, with quiet but steady and unimerrupted progress.":): In 1845, a missionary writing from Trichinopoly says: "The eagerness of the people for instruction is one of the finest traits in their character. We could keep the faithful for twenty -four / * Long before St. Francis Xavier had told St. Ignatius, " Si non obstarent isti deploratce malitiae homines, gentiles omnes nullo negocio fierent Chris- tian!. " E-pist. Indicce, p. 17 ; ed. Berg., 1566. f Vol. iv., p. 70. t Vol. v., p. 367. 252 CHAPTER III. hours together in church without wearying their attention ;" and he notices with admiration "the tender emotion which they display, shedding tears and bowing their heads to the ground, when the image of the Crucified is exhibited to them."* This eagerness of the Catholic natives for religious instruction, of which they were so long deprived, is attested by a candid Prot- estant missionary, who says: "It is remarkable that the books published at. Pondicherry should obtain such a wide circulation. Those who cannot afford to pay the price for a printed copy ob- tain the loan of one, and transcribe it on the palm leaf."f It would be easy to multiply these interesting testimonies, but it is time to confirm them by Protestant evidence. The Catholic writers exaggerate nothing, but recount with the same simplicity their consolations and their trials. Ignorance, they say, is, on account of past neglect, the great misfortune of some of their flocks, and it is to remove this master evil that their first efforts are directed. They earnestly complain also of the demoralizing influence of Europeans, especially in the large cities on the coast, where the native Christians, exposed to every species of cor- rupting agency and example, are too often a subject of grief and anxiety to their pastors. They lament, too, with reason, the multiplication of sects, all contending together in the very face of the heathen, and outbidding one another, like eager mer- chants, in their attempts to purchase "converts," while they bring contempt and derision upon the religion which they pro- fess to hold. But. in spite of these manifold difficulties, they are perfectly unanimous in reporting the constancy of their disciples, the virtues of many of them, and the gradual progress of the faith. Let us now see, in conclusion, how far their testimony agrees with that of Protestant writers of all sects most of whom, it should be observed, have manifested a hatred of the Catholic Church which will at least clear their evidence from all suspicion of partiality. To begin with the celebrated Henry Martyn, we learn, by undesigned confessions, both the spiritual influence of the clergy, and the obstinate stability of their flocks. The first Martyn attests and envies in the following declaration : " Cer- tainly there is infinitely better discipline in the Romish Church than in ours, and if ever I am to be the pastor of native Chris- tians" a hope which was not destined to be fulfilled " I should endeavor to govern with equal strictness.''^ The second fact his biographer unwittingly proclaims, when he tells us that * Vol. vii., p. 245. The Land of the Veda, by the Rev. P. Percival, ch. vi., p. 122. Memoir of the Rev. H. Martyn, p. 288, 9th edition. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 253 Martyn "made an offer to the Rom an Catholics at Patna of preaching to them on Sundays, but the proposal was re- jected"* Dr. Claudius Buchanan, whose candor often trips up his pre- judice, is our next witness. "Dr. Buchanan," says Major Scott Waring, "does justice to the Romish clergy and missionaries in India, whom he describes as pious and zealous men, and that they have done much good by the purity of their lives, and the influence of their example."f But let us hear Bu- chanan himself: "There are at this day in India," he says, " members of the Church of Rome who deserve the affection and respect of all good men.";]: But he has more to tell us. He travelled much, as is well known, in Southern India, and here are some of his observations : " From Cape Comorin to Cochin there are about one hundred churches on the sea-shore alone. Of these the chief part are the Syrian-Latin, or more properly the Syrian-Romish churches. Before each, on the sand of the shore, is a lofty cross, which, like the church itself, is conspicuous at a great distance." Sometimes he saw churches of more recent construction. "The civil magistrate of the island of Ley den showed me three Roman Catholic churches lately built, and assured me that every person on the island is a Christian." He is next at Jaffna, and in the church there, " the largest structure of slight building which I ever saw, every Sunday about a thousand or twelve hundred people at- tend, and on feast days three thousand and upwards." At Manaar, " they were all Romish Christians." At Tutycorin, "the whole of this tribe, without exception, are Christians in the Romish communion." " I visited Mahe and Calicut. The Romish Christians are numerous." And then he relates what kind of Christians even the poor boatmen in his employ were. "Before they hoisted the sail, they all joined in prayer to God for protection. Every man at his post with the rope in his hands pronounced his prayer. . . . One of Mr. Swartz's catechists, who accompanies me everywhere, appeared to be a good deal edified by the scene." Dr. Kerr, also an Anglican minister at Calcutta, confirms Buchanan's account, though with extreme regret, and tells us that " the Roman Catholic Syrians, it is thought, are much more numerous than the members of the original church. . . their congregations are reported at ninety thousand" 'While of the missions attached to the college of Yerapoly, he says : "The * P. 274. f Letter to the Rev. John Owen, by Major Scbtt Waring, p. 15. i Christian Researches in Asia, p. 75 (1840). Pearson's Memoirs of BucJianan, vol. ii., pp. 49-60. 3d edition. 254 CHAPTER III. number of Christians composing these churches must be great, as all and every of the fishermen are Roman Catholics."* Dr. Middleton, the first Protestant bishop in Calcutta, who considered that for a Hindoo to become a Catholic " is little more than exchanging one idol for another," will now give us his tes- timony. "In the evening," he informs us, "Mrs. Middleton and myself usually walk on the sea-shore," a habit which some- times made them witnesses of instructive scenes. " During one of his evening walks," says Mr. Le Bas, who shares his notions about the Catholic religion, " the bishop met with an instance of that retired and lonely religion which often strikes Protes- tants so forcibly in Catholic countries, and which form, per- haps, one of the most pleasing peculiarities of the Romish wor- ship. Being by the water-side, he came near to a small oratory .... lighted by three small lamps suspended from the roof. In this little chapel, an aged and solitary worshipper was so deeply engaged in prayer that he appeared insensible to the presence of strangers, and paid no attention to the bishop until his devotions were finished. They then learned from him that this lowly house of prayer had been constructed by himself, together with four or five other native Christians, for the pur- pose of daily devotion ; but that on Sunday he regularly at- tended the service of the Church. "f Dr. Middleton must have regretted that these seemingly devout Christians had only " ex- changed one idol for another ;" especially as he remarks, " it is curious that in every part of Asia you find the Church of Rome ;" and again, that " Protestants as we are, it were bigotry to deny that the Church of Rome, notwithstanding that she may have exaggerated her successes, has done wonders in the East"\ Mr. Rhenius, who was both an Anglican and a Lutheran minister at the same time, and who gave a great deal of trouble, as we shall see presently, to the Church which he professed to serve, speaks like Martyn, not only of the exact discipline which the Catholic missionaries maintained, but of his own misadven- tures in trying to seduce their flocks. " Their priests guard them well," he says, " against making inquiries, and ha\ e care- fully instilled into their minds that we are heretics." Ap- parently they had succeeded in producing that conviction. Mr. Thornton, one of the most exact authorities on Indian statistics, while he estimates the population of the Goa district * Report on the State of the Christian* of Cochin and Travancore, by the Rev. >r. Kerr, Senior Chaplain of Fort St. George, pp. 10-12. f Life of Bishop Middleton, by the Rev. C. Webb Le Bas, vol. i., ch. ix., . 265. \ Vol. ii., ch. xix., p. 96. Asiatic Journal, vol. xxi., p. 446. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 255 at three hundred and thirteen thousand two hundred and sixty- two, adds : " Of this number two-thirds are stated to be Christians of the Roman Catholic persuasion ;"* and an equally impartial witness observes of the same province, "The Roman Catholics have made many converts among the natives, and greatly contributed to their civilization, and dispersed much of the darkness of paganism. "f Dr. Francis Buchanan, speaking of the class who are commonly most defamed by Protestants, and of the several thousand Christians whom he visited at Tulava, the remnant of those persecuted by Tippoo who destroyed all their churches, generously says : u These poor people have none of the vices usually attributed to the native Portuguese, and their superior industry is more readily acknowledged by the neighboring Hindus than avowed by themselves."^: While another English writer, violently anti Catholic, observes gener- ally of the Portuguese, whose noble works it is now the fashion to decry, u ln their whole course in India the Portuguese have left the traces of conversion ; and around the coast, from the Cape of Good Hope to Canton in China, a distance of twelve thousand miles, the Portuguese language is spoken, and the cross of Christ adored." " Amidst the ruins into which their temporal possessions have fallen," says General Parlby, " the vestiges which they have left of their faith seem destined to survive the debris of their earthly grandeur, and to be so firmly rooted that they will never be wholly effaced."! The Rev. James Hough, though he ventures even to sneer at St. Francis Xavier, confesses, in a moment of distraction : "It is well known that there are native Christians of the Roman Church in India, especially of the Carmelite mission at Madras, whose character is unexceptionable, and who occupy stations of responsibility in the public service Some have given satisfactory reason to believe them to be sincere Christians."^ Mr. Harvard, a Wesleyan missionary, whose own failure seems to have left him abundant leisure to examine the opera- tions of others, ventures to suggest, that probably among the native Christians, u there are some who worship God in spirit and in truth ;" and even tells us that u the Portuguese Chris- * Gazetteer of India, by Edward Thornton, Esq., vol. ii.; Account of Goa. f Remarks on Mr. Turning's Letter, by a Member of the B. and F. Bible Society, p. 7. J Journey through Mysore, &c., by Francis Buchanan, M.D., F.R.S., vol. iii., ch. xiv., p. 24 Fifteen Tears in India, by an Officer in His Majesty's service, p. 360 (1828), Cf. Julius Von Klaproth, in Timkowski's Travels, vol i., p. 51, note. J Tlte Establishment of the Anglican Church in India, by Major-general Parlby, C.B., p. 19 (1851). Tf History of Christianity in India, vol. ii., p. 491. 256 CHAPTER III. tians, by their neatness and cleanliness, exhibit a pleasing contrast to the external appearance of their heathen neigh- bors."* Mr. Wylie also, who has written a work on the Bengal missions, in which he notices that at Chittagong " the Chris- tians are mostly Roman Catholics," and that the number of children at the Catholic school u exceeds one hundred," supplies fresh evidence of the energy with which they embrace the doctrines proposed to them. " They are restricted," he says, " from attending Protestant churches or schools, on pain of expulsion from the Church, and denial of the rites of sepulchre."t What would they have cared for either, if they had not been devout Christians, who perfectly comprehended the nature of the penalty ? Mr. Mullens, again, who was a Protestant missionary, and whose ordinary language about the Catholic Church is a sort of wild shriek of uncontrollable passion, writes thus : " At the present time, 1854, the Jesuit and Roman Catholic missions are spread very widely throughout the Madras Presidency. We have nothing like them in North India, except in the neigh- borhood of Dacca, at Hussingabad, Furreedpore, and Pubna, where there is a Catholic population of thirteen thousand souls." A little later, vexed by the too palpable contrast between such as himself and the Catholic missionaries, he says of the latter : " I allow that they dress simply, eat plainly, and have few luxuries at home. I allow that they travel much, are greatly exposed, live poorly, and toil hard. I have heard of a bishop living in a cave on fifty rupees a month, and devoutly attending the sick when friends and relatives had fled from fear." Perhaps you think that all this has touched his heart, and that he is now going to give glory to God ? The anticipa- tion would not be unreasonable, but he continues thus : " All this is much easier on the Jesuit's principles," who, he adds, " is supported by motives of self-righteousness," " than it is to be a faithful minister on the principles of the New Testa- ment.";); One would have thought it easy enough to live luxuriously, receive a large salary, and do nothing, except talk about " the principles of the New Testament." But enough of Mr. Mullens. Our next witness belongs to the military service of India, is an implacable enemy of Catholics, and declares as follows : " I speak far within limits when I calculate the number of native * Narrative of the Mission to Ceylon, by the Rev. W. Harvard, f Bengal as a Field of Missions, by M. Wylie, Esq., p. 65. | Missions in South India, p. 139. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 257 Catholics on the coast, and in the countries dependent on Fort St. George, at three hundred and fifty or four hundred thousand souls, exclusive of Bednore, Malabar, and the countries for- merly converted by the bishop and priests of Goa." And then he adds, " Many Catholic missionaries have from thirty to seventy thousand souls, over whom they exercise the most arbitrary and despotic sway."* Henry Martyn, with better judgment, called it "discipline." Another, whose testimony refers to the vast diocese of Pondi- cherry, in which we have seen that more than fifteen hundred converts were received in two years, from 1853 to 1855, thus writes of the Jesuit missionaries : " Whatever the prejudices against the order may be, and how r ever justly incurred, or other- wise, it cannot be denied that the Jesuits were great masters in the art of instruction ; and the advances which the Christians of Pondicherry have made in the language and principles of European knowledge, is an eminent proof of the ability of those Fathers."f It may be added, that many English writers, and amongst them- Captain Hervey in 1850, attest the striking su- periority both of natives and half-castes in the Pondicherry district,;}: where French influence has prevailed ; and one of them does not fear to assert, that "in India, France opened the way, established a system of native government, and created the whole of those implements through which we obtained possession of India." It is of the Catholic bishop and his missionaries at Pondicherry that a consular agent generously observes, " they transmit in a single year more useful docu- ments to Europe, and do more to extend knowledge and civiliza- tion in the world, than the agents of the different governments, such as myself and others, do in the whole course of their lives."|| Turning now to another part of India, we may notice the language of the Honorable F. J. Shore and of Colonel Sleeman with respect to the great Catholic colony, consisting of two thousand families, at JBettiah, north of Chuprah. The former says that their bishop " had inculcated such sound principles among them, that the Christian converts were far more indus- trious, as well as more moral, than their heathen neighbors, and were consequently much better off in worldly comforts :"T and the latter, who says of their bishop, " this holy man had been some fifty years among these people, with little or no * Strictures on tJie Present Government of India, by an Officer, p. 80. f An Essay on the Religious Prejudices of India, p. 23. j Ten Tears in India, vol. ii., ch. xi., p. 284. The Pillars of Hercules, by David Urquhart, Esq., M.P., ch. vi., p. 355. II Voyage dans I'fude, etc., par V. Fontanier, tome ii., ch. xiv., p. 344 (1844). 1" Notes on Indian Affairs, vol. ii., p. 468. 18 258 CHAPTER III. support from Europe, or from any other quarter," gives the following account of his flock, many of whom were employed at that time in the English camp : " Better workmen I have never seen in India, but they would all insist upon going to Divine service at the prescribed hours" Colonel Sleeman adds, that " the native Christian servants who attended at the old bishop's table, taught by himself, spoke Latin to him."* An earlier writer had noticed the same interesting community, and its " venerable priest, Father Romualdo," as early as 1816, and then observed, "their num- bers are rather augmenting than diminishing, "f Lastly, the heathen themselves bear witness to the zeal and sincerity of the Catholic native, even while perfectly discrimi- nating, as we shall see more fully hereafter, the real character of the nominal Protestant converts. Long ago, as Mr. Forbes confessed, they used to say, " You call yourselves Christians ; so do the Roman Catholics, who abound in India. They daily frequent their churches, fast and pray, &c. ;" and then, refer- ring to the different habits of Protestants, they would inquire, says Mr. Forbes, " whether we really believed our own Scrip- tures ?"J And this is once more confirmed, as respects native converts, in our own day. An English writer, who relates in 1859 his conversations with Nobinkissen, an educated Hindoo, not only admits that the latter described the few Protestant converts as reprobates and impostors, who ridiculed in secret the very teachers whose wages they received, but that he frankly allowed, in spite of his pagan animosities, that the Catholic neophytes were Christians indeed. Their number, the Hindoo told him, was small, for it is not in Calcutta that the Gospel has free course ; but even there, where every in- fluence combines to thwart its progress, the work of the mis- sionary of the Cross attracts the respect of the heathen himself. " Those natives," Nobinkissen informed Mr. Lang, " who vol- untarily present themselves, are, after a strict examination, and a due warning that they must hope for no temporal ad- vantage, admitted into the Church." " And do they have many applications ?" " Very few indeed ; but those whom they admit do really and truly become Christians. ," * Recollections of an Indian Official, vol. i., ch. ii., p. 17. f Asiatic Journal, vol. ii., p. 68. ; Oriental Memoirs, by James Forbes, F.R.S., vol. iii., ch. xxviii., p. 32 ; ch. xxxii., p. 185. Wanderings in India, p. 225. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 259 CONCLUSION. Such, even by Protestant and heathen testimony, are the works of modern Catholic missionaries in India, in spite of their poverty, and of all the varied difficulties which beset their ministry in a country of pagans under a Protestant government. " The Roman Catholic missions in India," says one of the latest writers on that country, " with the most limited means, have had the most signal success."* Yet it would be difficult to conceive a combination of more formidable impediments than those which they now encounter during every hour of their apostolic toils. Opposed by the secret or open hostility of powerful officials, destitute of temporal resources, no longer contending only with the prejudices or the vices of the heathen, but with the far more fatal scandal of a nominal and conten- tious Christianity, which presents itself to him under twenty different forms, and which he contemplates with mingled surprise and contempt, the conditions of their warfare are less favorable than in the happier days when martyrdom so often crowned its labors, and assured its triumph. It is the mission of England, as we shall see more and more clearly in every chapter of this work, to make the conversion of the heathen impossible. Even St. Paul, and the companions of St. Paul, would hardly have struggled with success against the obstacles, hitherto unknown in the world, which Protestantism creates in every pagan land. When England has no longer an agent or a representative in India, the missionaries of the Cross will once more contend on fair terms with the evil spirits who rule her. Until that hour, which is perhaps not far distant, they must be content to gain a few here and a few there, and to deserve the success which they will not always obtain. And now we may close our review of Catholic missions in India. We have traced the outlines of their history, from its opening to its final chapter; and if it does not reveal the presence of God and the operations of His grace, it were vain to ask where we must look for the signs of either. It was the constant and progressive success of the Catholic missionaries in this land which first suggested to Protestants, the story of whose operations will next claim our attention, the attempt to rival them. " The Catholics, ages back," said a British writer hi 1813, " have converted numbers in India ; why then should Protestants despair?"^ He forgot that, to imitate their * Theory and Practice of Caste, ch. v., p. 130. f The Duty of Britons to promote Christianity in India, by Joseph Barrett, p. 20. 260- CHAPTER III. triumphs, it was necessary to be, in all points, such as they were. The Indian evangelists, from St. Francis, who first led the way to the shores of Asia, to Xavier d' Andrea, the last sur- vivor of that long line of apostles who " by faith conquered kingdoms," were men of like passions with ourselves, yet they found strength to lead a supernatural life, and to die as only they can die who, while living, have been " hid with Christ in God." It is not by such weak words as we know how to use that their career can be worthily described. To God alone it belongs to judge the men whom He made what they were, or to measure the deeds which they could neither have conceived nor executed, without the succor of His grace and the commu- nication of His power and might. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 261 PART II. PROTESTANT MISSIONS. WE have now, for the second time, to trace a contrast. We have seen what men may become who have been trained in the sanctuary and nurtured at the altar of God, and what they can accomplish ; let us inquire, since we have proposed tp ourselves this task, what has been effected by others, whose fathers laid waste that sanctuary, and cast the altar to the ground that their children might tread it under foot. The first fact which the Protestant writers reveal to us is characteristic, and fitly introduces the strange history which they have published to the world of the fortunes of Protestant- ism in India. "More than half a century," they tell us, elapsed from the first appearance of the British in India, " before they thought of erecting a church for themselves."* They were not, then, likely to take much trouble about the edification of others ; and we are not surprised to learn, that more than a century passed away before they made any attempt whatever to recommend their religion to the pagans among whom they had come to dwell. But even this is not all. During a second period of one hundred years, that attempt, though timid and furtive, was systematically prohibited and punished by the English government and its agents. " Of the government of India it may truly be affirmed," says Dr. Close, u and fully established by circumstantial evidence, that its whole weight, influence, and authority, has been directed against the progress of Christianity among the heathen."f Such is the opening page of that long history of unexampled shame which we will now read to its last chapter. * An Indian Eetrospect, by the Dean of Carlisle, p. 6 (1858). f Ibid. 262 CHAPTER III. POLICY OF THE GOVERNMENT IN INDIA. " The European nations who succeeded the Portuguese in the dominion of India," says Mr. Hugh Murray, referring to the Danes, Dutch, and English, " felt for a long time a much less ardent zeal for the diffusion of their own purer faith than had animated the latter for the propagation of Catholic observances." And as if he felt that this hardly expressed the whole truth, he presently adds : " The conduct of the English in India formed a striking contrast to that zeal, however little distinguished by knowledge or choice of means, which had certainly distinguished the Catholic nations."* It was not, however, want of zeal only which marked the conduct of the English, nor was this the only feature in the "contrast" between them and their Catholic predecessors. They did nothing, indeed, to promote Christianity, but they displayed abundant and ingenious energy in stifling the voice of its advocates, and sternly prohibiting its progress. For two hundred years it was a maxim with the English of all classes, that no attempt to convert Plindoo or Mahometan should be tolerated. " The fundamental principle of British rule," said Lord William Bentinck, "is strict neutrality"-^ And in obsequious accordance with this rule, "the East India Company refused all missionaries passages in their ships either to China or India. "J In vain a few individuals endeavored to gain a surreptitious entrance into this forbidden land. " Two mission- aries who landed on the banks of the Houghly were sent back to Europe forthwith in the same ship in which they arrived ;" an effectual admonition to all who might be tempted to imitate their example. In 1812, " the American missionaries, driven to Bombay from Calcutta, were imprisoned. When they escaped in a native coasting vessel they were pursued, retaken, and confined to the fort."|| "There was a raid," as another writer expresses it, " against the missionaries in Bengal, and no less than five, partly Americans, partly English, were driven out of the country by the imperative orders of an unyielding government. "T Nor was this vigorous policy abandoned so long as they could venture to employ it. "So late as 1813, * Historical Account of Discoveries in Asia, vol. ii., ch. v., p. 220. f Asiatic Journal, vol. xviii., p. 8. i The Middle Kingdom, by S. Wells Williams, vol. ii., cli. xix., p. 325. Missions in Bengal, by J. J. Weitbrecht, ch. v., p. 198. i Close, p. 9. 1 Christianity in India, by J. W. Kaye, ch. vii., p. 256. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 263 not a single missionary could be allowed to go out in a British ship."* The Dutch, also Protestants, had been not less diligent in fighting against Christianity in India. The East India Com- pany of Holland peremptorily forbade the admission of mis- sionaries into any part of their territories ;f and their agents, consistent in all their actions, forcibly seized the Catholic churches on the west coast, and converted them into factories. " The Danish merchants also," we are told, " occupied only with the interests of commerce, were altogether indifferent to their religious condition.";}; Such was the conduct of the three Protestant States which had succeeded the Catholic powers in the dominion of India. "The degradation of our religion," says a Protestant writer, " could scarcely be more complete in the eyes of the heathen. " Yet even this only faintly represents the policy of Protestant governments in India. It was possible to devise still more ef- ficacious methods of thwarting the progress of Christianity in India, and they were quickly adopted. " By government regu- lations of 1814, native Christians were debarred from filling any public office of respectability. There is on record one in- stance at least, in which a Sepoy was actually dismissed from the army, in consequence of embracing Christianity !"|| At a meeting of the Church Missionary Society on the loth of April, 1813, various resolutions were passed, of which the seventh was in these terms : " That this society has learnt with pain that Christianity is liable to discouragement, in consequence of na- tive converts having been generally excluded from those offi- cial situations in India which are freely bestowed on Hindoos and Mahometans." And these amazing proceedings received the sanction and approval of the most eminent English states- men of India down to the present hour. " I think the English government in this country," said Sir John Malcolm, " should never, directly or indirectly, interfere in propagating the Chris- tian religion.''^" " We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain," says an official document which bears the illustrious name of Lord Macaulay, " from giving any public encouragement to those who are engaged in' the work of converting natives to Christianity."** In 1853, a director of the East India Company, * Close, p. 27. Smith's History of the Missionary Societies, vol. i., p. 206. Pearson's Memoirs of Su/artz, introd., p. 12. Close, p. 27. I lUd. *1[ Kaye's Life of Sir John Malcolm, vol. ii., Correspondence, p. 362. ** The Duties of Great Britain to India, by Charles Hay Cameron, p. 77 ; Cf., p. 149. 264: CHAPTER IIL and not the most obscure amongst them, still repeats: "It ap- pears to me absolutely necessary that we should scrupulously avoid all interference with the religion of the Hindoos."* Lastly, in 1859, Lord Ellenborough gave this advice to the House of Lords: "No measure could be adopted more calcu- lated to tranquillize the minds of the natives, and to restore to us their confidence, than that of withholding the aid of govern- ment from schools with which missionaries are connected. "f When the same peer charged Lord Canning with having "sub- scribed to a missionary society," Lord Lansdowne remarked, in spite of strong personal sympathy with the Indian viceroy, that if it were true, ' he would no longer deserve to be continued in his office as Governor-general of India !"$ At the same moment Mr. Kinnaird was informing the House of Commons, that the natives of India, interpreting the Queen's proclamation to " ab- stain from all interference" with their religion as a rebuke to those who had done so, urged upon the local government, " that the missionaries were acting contrary to the Queen's proclama- tion by staying in India, and that therefore it was their duty to drive them away at once." In the presence of such facts, we may accept without diffi- culty the temperate statement of a great Indian authority, and confess, that " the conduct of the English has not hitherto tended to beget a favorable opinion of their religion in the eyes of the natives ;" especially when lie adds, from his own experience, that "persecution, both negative and positive, from the English government, from individuals, and from his own countrymen, is what the native who becomes a convert to Christianity has too often been exposed to."|| Such is the al- most incredible history which is emphatically epitomized by Mr. Campbell, when he says, " For a very long period, govern- ment regarded and treated Christianity as a most dangerous innovation."*^ But it was not enough for the power which now possessed India to prefer the interests of commerce to those of religion, and to affect infidelity in order to reign with greater tranquillity over a nation of heathens. It dreaded, indeed, and discoun- tenanced the promotion of Christianity, and banished or impris- oned its advocates ; but it willingly became the patron of every foul superstition which found favor with its new * Memorials of Indian Government, by Henry St. George Tucker, p. 483. f The Times, April 16, 1859. j The Sepoy Revolt, by Henry Mead, ch. xx., p. 247. The Times, April 16, 1859. I Notes on Indian Affairs, by the Hon. F. J. Shore, vol. i., p. 458. Tf India as it may be, by George Campbell, ch. viii., p. 894. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 265 subjects. The religion of Christ might prove " a dangerous in- novation," so they made friendship and alliance with the idols of Hindostan. The history of that alliance must be recounted to us by Protestants, since no other testimony than theirs would avail to prove it. " In former days," they tell us, " the connection between the government and the two chief religions of India Hindoo and Mahometan was of the closest and most dishonorable kind. At the end of the last century, the pagodas of the Madras Presidency were falling into decay." It was the British gov- ernment which promptly arrested their ruin. " Juggernauth fell into the hands of Lord Wellesley, &,ndjcrilgrim taxes were established at Gaya, Puri, and Allahabad. The system soon spread, and at last in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies attained a depth of infamy which few in England have ever imagined. Hundreds of officers submitted to it without scruple, helped to extend it, and reaped large g&imfrom their share in temple management. We stand amazed at the awful degrada- tion to which the government descended."* The government, we are assured by another writer, even " gave sums of money, according to the request of the priests, for the expenditure of the ceremonies ;"f so that a Protestant missionary exclaims, in alluding to these and similar facts, " Christian England is the main support of idolatry in this country." "The celebrated Jumna Musjid," says a recent English writer, "the most ancient and splendid mosque in Lahore, was converted by Eunjeet Sing into an arsenal. This mosque, immediately after the inauguration of British rule, was, after being put in thorough repair and order, handed over to the charge of the principal Mussulman Moollahs of Lahore, to be restored to its original purpose of religious worship !"j It is not easy, therefore, to decide whether England displayed most vigor in violently discountenancing Christianity, or in liberally maintaining paganism ; nor can we marvel, when a native writer declares, in 1859, while contemptuously scouting the notion that his countrymen regarded missionary operations with any feeling but supreme indifference " It is not religion, but the want of religion, which has brought so much evil to this country." An ardent Protestant, long resident in India, thus records the same class of facts: "The compliances with both Muham- *The Eclectic, February, 1859, p. 141. f Orissa, by William F. B. Laurie, p. 57. j The English in India, by Captain Evans Bell, p. 31. Thoughts of a Native of Northern India, quoted by Ludlow, Policy of the Crown towards India, Letter xv., p. 201. CHAPTER III. medan and Hindu superstitions, of which men calling them- selves Britons and officers have been guilty, are perfectly marvellous. At Delhi is a mosque built by Colonel Skinner; and Englishmen in former days, under the influence of Hindu wives, have been known to paint themselves, and perform Pujah, or worship at the river-side like heathens."* We are not, therefore, surprised to learn from General Parlby, that " it was usual for the highest classes of society to accept invitations from opulent Hindoos * to festivals in honor of the idol.' "f "The disgusting and gory worship of Juggernaut," says Mr. Howitt, " was not merely practised, but was actually licensed and patronized by the English government. It imposed a tax on all pilgrims going to the temples in Orissa and Bengal, appointed British ofhcers, British gentlemen, to superintend the management of this hideous worship and the receipt of its proceeds/';): They even became ingenious, it seems, in multi- plying such sources of revenue ; for a Protestant missionary informs us, that they also imposed a tax on those "who desire the privilege of drowning in the Ganges," and that this scheme was " calculated to yield two hundred and fifty thousand rupees." This gentleman can hardly be deemed to exaggerate, when he adds, that such proceedings " assimilated professed Christians with idolaters, till the Christian character in India is scarcely distinguishable even in the broad feature of abhorring idols." And as late as 1857, we find the Protestant bishop of Carlisle declaring, in a public address, that the same proceed- ings still continue. " In one of the Presidencies, for the sup- port of idolatry and Mahometan superstition, upwards of fifty thousand pounds are regularly expended every year by this country for the maintenance of that idolatrous and supersti- tious worship. This is no negative work. It is not a question whether we should have discountenanced it or not ; but here is a positive and downright encouragement of it."| One more witness to these singular facts shall be quoted, because he is supposed to represent, more accurately than any other writer, the opinions of the majority of Englishmen. " The Company," says this great authority, beginning with a skilful limitation, "seems to have thought that they held their position in India upon much the same terms as the Dutch held their footing in Japan, by tenure of trampling on the * Six Yea/rs in India, by Mrs. Colin Mackenzie, vol. i., ch. vii., p. 313. f The Establishment of the Anglican Church in India, by Major-general Parlby, C.B., p. 115 1851). | Colonization and Christianity, ch. xviii., p. 295. Pilgrim Tax in India, by J. Peggs, missionary at Cuttack, p. 41. | The Fast Day Sermons, p. 59. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 267 Cross. Practically, they worshipped those ugly Indian deities more servilely than their own votaries did. Their only anxiety was to induce the natives to show them what they should honor, what they should salute, what they should respect; and they honored, saluted, and respected accordingly. This idolatry of other men's superstitions prevalent among the officers of the East Indian service is a mania by no means yet extinct."* This, indeed, is the most wonderful fact of all, that such things were still possible in the year 1859. " Some time ago," says the correspondent of the Times in India, " an officer inarched down his regiment to slaughter the goats sac- rificed on the occasion of one of their festivals." He adds, that at these religious festivals " the colors were actually car- ried in front of the idols, and blank cartridges were issued by the commanding officer from the government magazines ! The Sepoys attended in full uniform, worshipped the images, and called on them to bless the standards and the arms which they bore in the Company's service." Mr. Russell might well say, " For a Christian people we did very odd things in India ;"f and perhaps it may even be doubted whether this light rebuke, which appears to have satisfied his temperate indignation, was altogether adequate to the occasion. Other writers, more impressed by such facts than Mr. Russell, though more familiar with them, confirm his statement that these incredible performances of Protestant officials are still repeated in our own day. In 1852, the Calcutta Review con- tained the following words : "To this day the residents at Nagpore and Baroda, the representatives of the government, take a share in the heathen festivals. In the Madras Presi- dency the evil continues to a fearful extent. Down to 1841, more than four hundred thousand pounds a year passed through the hands of the Madras government in connection with hea- then temples, and the annual profit was seventeen thousand pounds. ":{: So that an Anglo-Indian writer, alluding to these facts, as well as to what he calls " the measureless folly of our rule," declares, in 1857, that " had the Sepoys not rebelled, the wrongs of India might have gone on accumulating, until God grew utterly weary of us," -and that "we should have been cast out from India, a scorn and example to the nations. " There is nothing, perhaps, in the annals of any Christian * The Times, March 16, 1859. f The Times, April 12. The Results of Missionary Labor in India, p. 47. The Sepoy Revolt, Its Causes and Its Consequences, by Henry Mead, ch. xv., p. 183. An Anglican clergyman relates, in 1860, that an Arab servant, whom he employed in Algeria, and who told him that the English religion was " next 268 CHAPTER III. people which can even be compared, for enormity of guilt, with the conduct of England during the first two centuries of her dominion in India. " The case," as one of her own clergy protests, " is without parallel in the history of the Christian religion."* But she can bear burdens which would break the heart of any other nation with tranquil composure, and with an air of candid innocence which would almost deceive the angels. It is true that she sometimes displays a calm and measured contrition. Once in a long course of years she summons all her people, at the bidding of some sudden panic, to keep solemn fast. On the appointed day, obedient to the edict of her supreme magistrate, she smites her breast, not too rudely, but with cautious and lenient hand ; she listens with grave decorum to a preacher, whose discreet admonitions might be mistaken for a panegyric ; and then goes home, with the cheerful persuasion that the crimes of a century are blotted out. She has appeased, by a suitable effort of national piety, the mild and indulgent divinities to whom she has recourse in her leisure moments. Such a fast she kept in the year 1858, to commemorate all which she had done in that wide empire which lies between the Indus and the Ganges. A loud cry of wailing, a shriek of pain, had been borne through the air, and startled the ears of all her people. Then she fell on her knees, and for a moment seemed to pray ; the next, she rose up, and the cry which had come across the great sea waxed fainter, and was heard no more. A few fresh graves, a few widows listening for a voice which they shall never hear again these were all the signs which remained to tell that England had received another warning. But we have little space for reflections on a history of which we have only heard the opening chapter, and which we must now pursue to the end. Two facts have already been proved by sufficient evidence ; the first, that for two hundred years England resisted, even to violence, the propagation of Chris- tianity in India ; the second, that she set up her throne in the temples of idols, and replenished her exchequer by a tax on their worship. We have still a third fact to consider, before we examine the nature of her missionary efforts, when she could no longer succeed in repressing them, because it is one which, even if no other blight were upon them, would ade- quately account for their failure. best to liis own," recounted to him the following instructive tale: "He had met at Constantinople a Hindoo Mussulman, who had told him how the English reverenced the Moslems how they gave way to their faith Therefore there could not be much difference between us, or we should have destroyed their religion when we had the power." The Great Sahara, by H. B. Tristram, M.A. ; ch. ix., p. 139. * Close, p. 28. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 269 CONDUCT OF THE ENGLISH IN INDIA. " It is by means of the horrid villanies of Christians," said Mr. Ziegenbalg, a Protestant missionary in India, " that the name of Christ has been made scandalous to a proverb." This is the fact of which we are now to furnish evidence. A recent writer on India affirms, mainly as the result of per- sonal observation, that " the conduct of the Europeans," which term is here a pleonasm for the English, " is such as to make the natives despise and abhor them."* If we may believe one half of what is reported of that conduct, the native verdict is not deficient in justice. " We have visited every coast," says a respectable English clergyman, " with a charge indeed to bless, but must we not Confess it ? in reality to curse."f " Our early settlers were often men of intemperate habits and licen- tious lives," says the latest historian of India, " outraging decency, and scandalizing Christianity. England herself is chargeable with a large share of the vices which her children import into foreign lands." And then he gives particulars. " It was. no uncommon thing for English gentlemen to keep populous Zenanas . . . honorable marriage was the exceptional state.":): But it is impossible to give full details of the spectacle which the majority of Englishmen presented to the heathen in their daily life, and which might have made even the Hindoo blush, if such an emotion had been possible to him. Most of them also had the courage to avow openly the unbelief of which their morals were an illustration. " Infidelity is too prevalent in Bengal," said Lord Teignrnouth writing to Wil- berforce, so that, he adds, it was considered rather a bold thing to acknowledge the truth of Christianity; and we shall see presently, by an accumulation of perfectly impartial testimony, that the English are rapidly communicating this plague of un- belief to the unfortunate Hindoo. It is to be noted also, that, far from recording any improve- ment, the latest writers give exactly the same account of the character of their countrymen in India at the present moment, which was given by others' in the earlier years of the present century. When a well-known Protestant missionary visited Kunjeet Singh at Lahore, the prince addressed him thus : "You say you travel about for the sake of religion: why, then, do you not preach to the English in Hindostan, who have no * Six Years in India, vol. i., ch. vii., p. 333. f Bampton Lectures for 1843, Lect. i., p. 31. \ Christianity in India, p. 101. Life of Lord Teignmouth, by his Son, vol. i., p. 293. 270 CHAPTER III. religion at all" And when the missionary related the anecdote to Lord William Ben ti nek, the Governor-general observed : "This is, alas! the opinion of all the natives all over India."* The opinion remains unchanged at the present hour. "The degradation of the native character," says a gentleman who writes from Calcutta on the 22d of August, 1859, "produced by the conduct of a very large proportion of Anglo-Indians, cannot fail to cast a stain upon our national character, and is the worst obstacle to the introduction of Christianity. We have lowered instead of raised the standard of Morality"^ We shall find the same complaint of English influence in other lauds, though nowhere in more earnest language than has been used to describe its effects in this: "Of the Europeans in India generally," says an English writer in 1852, "the truest account would be the most unfavorable. We have heard of some who regard themselves as Hindus rather than as Christians ; of others who deemed Muhammedan festivals fit objects for special patronage; and of others who directly counteracted the instruc- tions of missionaries, by advising young men not to become Christians, and teaching them that Deism was the true religion for men. We have heard, too, of thousands who lived as though they regarded gentleness, mercy, and spiritual worship less than the heathen by whom they are surrounded.";); There are certain maxims implanted in the heart of man at his creation, certain instincts which inform and guide the heathen as well as the Christian, certain desires and aspira- tions which lend dignity even to the Hindoo; and all these, we are told by fifty Protestant writers, of various sects, have been systematically outraged by the English in India. Of all the sentiments with which they have inspired the Asiatic tribes, in spite of their affected humility, perhaps none is so universal, none so intense, as the feeling of scorn and contempt. Ludi- crous examples are sometimes given by Indian writers of the mode in which they privately vent the disgust which they dare not openly manifest. Thus, at a great banquet, given by a wealthy civilian, who had a splendid establishment, " was ex- tremely particular about high-caste servants, and treated them magnificently," the host went to the kitchen to see why the dinner was delayed. " There he found all his servants stand- ing in a row, with their backs towards him, each man proving his orthodoxy by solemnly spitting in rotation on a fine ham, which was about to be served up to the company. " But * Travels and Adventures of Dr. Wolff, cli. xxi., p. 375. | Naval and Military Gazette, p. 635, October 1, 1859. $ The Results of Missionary Labur in India, p. 7. Mackenzie's Six Years in India vol. ii. ch. v., p. 140. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 271 we should err in supposing that it is always, or even commonly, religious feeling which inspires such acts. They are often only the expression of angry contempt. The Hindoo judges his master by precisely the same estimate which the latter applies to him. He is not slow to appreciate those who, whatever their defects may be, have the qualities of men. He can esteem, and even love, a statesman like Lawrence, or a soldier like Jacob or Hodson. But when he is outraged in all his instincts by tyrannical triflers, by masters who have survived the age but not the manners of school-boys, who have none even of the external dignity which orientals so highly esteem and so rarely violate; when he is daily in contact with so-called Christians, whom even his gross nature despises as coarse, vicious, and trivial, and whose religious teachers are to him only types of vanity, ignorance, and worldliness ; is it wonderful that at times his pent-up scorn and hate should overflow, and madden him to acts of violence and blood ? It was this mingled loathing and disdain which culminated at last in the great Sepoy rebellion, and which is too charac- teristic of the influence of Protestant England among pagan nations not to merit fuller illustration. That " the terrible disaster of 1857 revealed the rapidly grow- ing bitterness against English officers,"* is affirmed even by the more intelligent of their own number. Colonel Hunter, repeat- ing words used by Sir John Malcolm fifty years earlier, confesses with sorrow " the feelings of disgust and sometimes of bitter contempt entertained by the natives towards their English chiefs.f "The mass of the English officers, loth civil and military" says Captain Evans Bell, " detract from the moral strength of England in India, lower the native ideal standard of English ability and honor, and introduce an element of insolence, contempt, and tyranny, which is most dangerous to our power, and derogatory to our national character. The same great vice pervades our entire system.'' It is the influx of coarse and vulgar triflers, in both services, which " has led to the establishment of the ' damned nigger ' system in every department, civil and military. Boys just emancipated from school, who care for nothing but beer and billiards, whose very ignorance of their language and customs makes them dislike and despise their native subordinates, are placed in charge of companies of Sepoys !" And so, when the revolt began which perilled our Indian Empire, and which, we may be sure, is only the precursor of similar outbreaks, "the European officers * The English in India, p. 113. f Ludlow, Thoughts on the Policy of the Grown, Letter xxii., p. 299. 272 CHAPTER III. showed themselves to have no commanding or restraining power over their men, and were invariably, up to the last moment, utterly ignorant of their men's intention and views."* "They have awakened," says a native, "even the dreamy Asiatic to anger, and have literally compelled even the Hindu, proverbially meek and patient as he is, to revolt."f From every side we receive the same evidence. The Santals, numbering about two hundred thousand, and described as " naturally a quiet, teachable people," but absolutely void of religion, are in danger of adopting the abominable superstitions of the Hindoo, out of sheer contempt for. the English. " Until lately," says an English clergyman, " the Santal felt the greatest reverence for the European ; but contact with the latter .... has tended greatly to diminish his esteem for his English rulers. A /few words spoken by an Englishman some years ago would probably have produced more effect than weeks of earnest labor would now be able to excite; so that it is manifestly our duty not to wait till the last remnant of respect for Europeans has left the Santal's breast."^ Mr. Russell has illustrated, in the most striking passage of his book on India, the feeling of the native towards men who are often, in spite of their profession of Christianity, both morally and intellectually his inferiors. Speaking of the riotous banquets of British officers, he says : " The native servants stand in perfect apathy and quiescence, with folded arms, and eyes gazing on vacancy as if in deep abstraction, and at all events feigning complete ignorance of what is going on around them." Yet the Hindoo menial, less degraded than his master, is busy with silent comments on the ignoble scene. " A native gentleman," to whom Mr. Russell addressed an inquiry on this subject, gave him the following information : " I will speak the truth, if the Sahib will not be displeased at it." " Well, pray speak. I am certain that you will not willingly offend us." " Does the Sahib see those monkeys ? They are playing very pleasantly. But the Sahib cannot say why they play, nor what they are going to do next. Well, then, our poor people look upon you very much as they would on those monkeys ; but they know you are very fierce and strong, and would be angry if you were laughed at. They are afraid to laugh. But they do regard you as some great powerful creature sent to plague * Pp. 3-5. Causes of the Indian Revolt, p. 23 (1857). Report of the Church Missionary Society, 1862, p. 104. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 273 them, of whose motives and actions they can comprehend nothing whatever."* It is curious to lind a British officer recording exactly the same verdict, pronounced by West African natives, upon his military colleagues in that remote spot. " The Mahometans," says Major Gordon Laing, " view with pity, and frequently with disgust, the levity of the whites;" and then noticing a particular case, in which some of these semi-savages had been listening outside a mess-room to English officers "huzzaing" over their cups, he adds : " The Mandingoes all concurred in one remark, which was thus expressed : ' Great God ! since my birth I never saw such Kafirs as the white men !' "t But there is more to be said on this subject, and on the im- pression produced upon the natives by English Protestants in India. " Most Europeans," we are told, " treat the natives more like brutes than men.";): Even " the children catch up the strain. I have heard one, five years old, call the man who was taking care of him a ' black brute,' and a < black rascal.' " And one who has had ample experience of Indian life, and who gives painful instances of such brutality even on the part of u old officers, who ought to have set a better example," tells us that the natives say, " We would rather be as we are than change to a religion of which the professors give us such poor specimens of their sincerity."! Even the missionaries shock them, not only by the " barbarous jargon," as Mr. Irving observes, which most of them speak, but by the luxury and worldliness of their lives. When the Rev. Mr. Perceval invited a learned Hindoo to eat as the English do, he answered in these words : " We Hindoos do not bury the dead in our stomachs ; we do not make our stomachs into burial-grounds."!" Even the Kandyans, low as they are in the scale of civilization, are revolted by their want of temperance, and call them " beef-eating slaves ;"** while the Afghans consider them "a white-faced, pig-eating race of infidels, who are very fond of fighting and drinking, and appropriating other people's countries."ff It was in order not to shock such prejudices, which are only a corruption of the great Christian law of mortification, that the Catholic missionaries cheerfully acquiesced in a life of unvarying * Diary in India, vol. ii., ch. viii., p. 149. f Travels in Western Africa, by Major Alexander Gordon Laing, p. 889. \ Mackenzie, ch. iii., p. 79. Observations on India, by a Resident there many years, p. 149 (1853). I Ten Years in India, by Captain Albert Hervey, vol. i., ch. v., p. 104. 1 The Land of the Veda, ch. xii., p. 272. ** Ceylon; An Historical Sketch; by Henry Marshall, F.R.S.E., Deputy In- Bpector-general of Army Hospitals, p. 83. ft Journal of a Mission to Afghanistan in 1857 by H. W. Bellew, ch. v., p. 274. 19 274: CHAPTER III. austerity. "It is absolutely necessary," says one of thorn, "to embrace this manner of life in order to produce any fruit, since these people have the conviction that they who are the teachers and guides of others should themselves lead the most perfect life."* " We eat a little meat when we are in the South," says a modern missionary, " but in the North we must endeavor to dispense with it, for the pagans never eat it publicly, and pro- fess the utmost abhorrence for the carnivorous propensities of Europeans."f Even this sacrifice the English missionary de^. clines to make, although, as Dr. Grant forcibly observes, '' the ability 'to endure hardness' in a practical way, unthought of now-a-days, seems to me indispensable;" and then he adds, " Missionaries have told me that the idea which the natives have of them is, that they merely work for their pay." " The English missionaries," said Jacquemont long ago, " are astonished that they make no conversions ! They have wives, horses, servants ; they inhabit a commodious mansion, and call themselves missionaries! But there are other missionaries, who traverse the country on foot, and with naked feet, to convert the heathen. They have converted numbers, and continue to do so. They imitate the example of the Apostles, and not rarely they share their success also." M. Barchou de Penhoen makes the same observation at a later date : " Husband and father, linked to all the interests of the world, the Protestant minister cannot be a soldier of the faith, a crusader of the Gospel."[ He has chosen a lower calling, and even his co-religionists acknowledge, however unwillingly, that the heathen despise masters who are only men like themselves. Let us hear once more how even English writers judge their own countrymen. " England's remaining combat must be," says Mr. Raikes, "not only with the cunning, the ignorance, the superstition of her Eastern children, but with the pride, the sloth, and the selfish- ness of her own sons. "If And there is nothing superfluous in the admonition. "The haughty superciliousness," Mr. Shore observes, " the arrogance, and even insolence of behavior, which the generality of the English think it necessary to adopt towards * Lettres Edifiantes, tome x., p. 282. " Vestra siquidem castitas," wrote a General of the Society to the Jesuits in India, " non tantum ad propriam per- fectionem, vel opem proximo qualemcunque suppeditandam refertur ; sed eo etiam penetrat, ut vos idoneas reddat operas, quse apostolice discurrant ad gen tee vinculis, quibus implicates sunt, exsolvendas." Claude Aquaviva, Epist. Prcepos. General ad Patres et Fratres Soc. Jew, p. 252 (Romae 1615). Annals, vol. i.,p.!73. Bampton Lectures, app., p. 816. i Quoted by De Warren, L'Inde Anglaise, tome iii., ch. xii., p. 230. LInde SOILS la domination Anglaise, tome ii., liv. viii., p. 134. [ Notes on the Northwestern Provinces of India, by Charles Raikes, Collec- tor of Mynpoorie, p. 77 (1852). MISSIONS IN INDIA. 275 the natives, by way of keeping up their own dignity, is extremely great."* And innumerable writers repeat the same reproach. " It is in India' especially," says Count Edouard de Warren, once an officer in the British, service, " that the certainty of impunity encourages them to commit such insolence and such oppression as might make the angels weep."f ISTo wonder if it exasperates the Hindoo, or if the educated native bitterly resents the ignorant incapacity of "youthful students, fresh from Hailey- bury College, possessing nothing more than a smattering of the native language,":); for as Mr. Lang observes, even as late as 1859, " not one civilian in a hundred, no matter what his rank or grade, can read and write Hindostanee or Persian. " "A century and more of intercourse," says a Bengal ese Hindoo in 1857, " has not made the Hindu and the Englishman friends, nor even peaceful fellow-subjects. Day by day the estrangement is becoming more and more complete. That is your fault."! And a year later, a Protestant clergyman confirms the verdict of the Hindoo, and once more declares, that " a hundred years of inexpressible misrule are answerable for it."T Is it surprising that the Indian should "earnestly entreat" such teachers of religion as he daily sees, " to begin by converting the Chris- tians "** especially when he so thoroughly appreciates their real character, that Dr. Claudius Buchanan could say, writing from India to a friend 'at Cambridge: "Your profession of the Christian religion is a proverbial jest throughout the THE FIRST ANGLICAN MISSIONARIES NOT ENGLISH. We have now sufficiently prepared the way for the important inquiry which we are next to pursue. It is time to enter into the actual details of Protestant missionary eiforts in India, to interrogate, the agents employed in them, and to determine, by * Notes on Indian Affairs, vol. i., p. 10. f L'Inde Anglaise, tome iii., ch. xiv., p. 257. i The Civil Administration of the Bombay Presidency, by Nowrosjee Fur- doonjee, Interpreter to H.M. Supreme Court, p. 31 (1853). Wanderings in India, p. 213. | Causes of the Indian Revolt', by a Hindu of Bengal ; edited by Malcolm Lewin, Esq. ; p. 21. In 1862, an English Protestant lady relates, once more, the following anecdote of an " honest moonshee," who "had been reading a transla- tion of Mill's History of India." "On one present suggesting to him that his countrymen all hated the English, he bent his eyes to the ground, and smiled a decorous assent. ' The Book/ said he, ' of your nation is excellent ; it inculcates meekness, charity, and gentleness ; but we seek these qualities in vain in the character of the English.' " Our Last Tears in India, by Mrs. J. B. Speech vi., p. 131. 1" The Indian Religions, by an Indian Missionary ; ch. xix., p. 157 (1858). ** Murray's Discoveries in Asia, vol. ii., ch. v., p. 224. ff Pearson's Memoirs of Buchanan, vol. i., p. 183. 276 CHAPTER III. their own testimony, the results of their labors. As the English did nothing whatever towards the conversion of the Hindoos for nearly two hundred years, we must put them out of sight for a moment, and begin by some notice of the Ger- mans and Danes, who at all events attempted the work which the masters of the country declined to undertake, or only de- sired to obstruct and defeat. We are told by Protestant writers that for a very long period " the assistance afforded by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge to the Danish Lutheran missions, was the only Eublic effort that was made by members of the Church of Eng- ind to extend the knowledge of the Gospel beyond the limits of professing Christendom."* This singular fact was noticed in his day by Lord Teignmouth with the following comment: " It is a remarkable circumstance, that in the history of those who have devoted themselves to the propagation of the Gospel among nations where it was unknown, the names of divines of the Church of England rarely, if ever, occur."f The complaint is still repeated in our own day. " Our young men," says Dr. Tait, Protestant Bishop of London, " are ever ready to go forth to distant portions of the globe for any secular object, but a difficulty is felt in inducing them to go in the cause of the Gospel. "J In India, the Anglican Church was obliged to employ Danish and German Lutherans as her representatives, because her own members declined to accept the office. Indeed it may be reasonably doubted whether she would ever have undertaken missionary work at all, but for the activity of the various sects to which she had given birth. It was not till these hostile bodies, whose very existence was for the most part a protest against her own apathy, began to fill the world with the clamor of their ceaseless conflicts, that the English estab- lishment awoke from the slumber which they rudely disturbed, and consented to wage in self-defence, and in other lands, the war which she could no longer confine to her own. In India her apparition appears to have been even more tardy than elsewhere. " No English clergyman could be prevailed upon to go thither," says Dr. Close ; who repeats the statement that "all the missionaries helped by the Christian Knowledge Society," and, he might have added, by what is called the " Society for the Propagation of the Gospel," " were Luther- ans and foreign ers." We shall presently hear these foreign emissaries taunting their Anglican employers with the fact, and * The Missionary Crisis, by the Rev. A. Dallas, p. 6. f Life, vol. ii, p. 116. J Quoted in the Times, February 10, 1860. Close, p. 20. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 277 using it to justify their attacks upon a Church of which, not- withstanding, they were the recognized ministers ! " For a long time," Dr. Close informs us, " they could not get a single missionary to go out. They sent an English clergyman to Cal- cutta in 1789, but he deserted soon after his arrival." This was discouraging, and so, " in 1797, they sent another, a Ger- man, but he also deserted."* Yet there was urgent need for active measures, since, up to this date, Mr. Kaye tells us, "the Protestant religion made scant progress in India. There were occasionally conversions, but, unhappily, .they were en- tirely in the wrong direction." And then he explains that some of the English became Catholics, like the son of Sir Heneage Finch, and some Mahometans !f "So alarmed was the government," says an Anglican chaplain in India, " at the progress of Romanism, that they resolved to enforce against its professors the penal statute, Twenty-third Elizabeth, chapter L ; and having discovered that one John da Gloria, a Portu- guese priest, had baptized Matthew, son of Lieutenant Thorpe, deceased, they arrested him on a charge of high treason, for procuring a person to be reconciled to the Pope."J These events, however, do not appear to have removed the repugnance of " divines of the Church of England" to mission- ary work. " It must be acknowledged with shame," observes Dr. Grant, " that whatever more cheering conquests have been gained in India, have been effected by German missionaries ; . ... in vain do we look for one name in the annals of our Church shining with the illustrious title of Apostle to the Heathen." And again : " By far the ablest Protestant mis- sionaries in connection with the Church of England have, throughout, been not Germans only, out Lutherans. In 1842 the number of Lutheran ministers on the list of the Church Missionary Society amounted to twelve; and to judge from the names of those in its employ, above forty are either Germans or of German extraction. " The fact is confirmed, up to the year 1853, by another English writer, who says: "As there are more candidates for mission work in Germany than there are in the Church of England, the latter is glad to avail herself of the services of Lutheran ministers, whom she ordains and adopts as her own."| And so permanent is the disinclination for missionary work, except as a means of promotion, that even * Close, p. 11. f Christianity in India, ch. ii., p. 56. i The English in Western India, by Philip Anderson, A.M., one of the Hon. Cys. Chaplains, ch. iv., p. 145. Lect. i., p. 13. Six Years in India, vol. i., ch. iv., p. 152. 278 CHAPTER III. as late as October, 1859, we still find one of the ablest organs of the Establishment bitterly resenting the fact. " It ought to put England's Church to the blush to see all kinds of temporal advantages and inducements held out, as a kind of bait, to men to induce them to condescend to take upon them the apostolic office of .missionary to the heathen."* Some curious results have followed, as might have been an- ticipated, from the habitual employment by the Church of England of missionaries, who, though they consent to serve her, flatly deny many of the gravest doctrines which she main- tains, at least nominally, to be a part of revealed truth, and even laugh at the " orders'' which, together with their salaries, she induces them to accept. " There is scarcely an orthodox Christian in the Lutheran Church," says Dr. Joseph Wolff, who had a considerable acquaintance with that institution, and who explains the eagerness of German missionaries to accept their position by observing, that "many tinners and shoemaker journeymen, not able to go on with their profession, go to Basle under the pretext of being converted, in order to become missionaries." Dr. Wolff regrets also that "they learn to live luxuriously," and even -that " the way in which workmen of different descriptions are taken up, ordained ministers, and sent out as missionaries, merely because they can speak a little on the subject of religion, has frequently turned to the de- struction of their own souls, by puffing them up with pride, "f However, as the Church of England could procure no others, she sent German and Danish Lutherans, a few of whom, con- fining ourselves to the most conspicuous, we will now observe at their work. THE LUTHERAN-ANGLICAN MISSIONARIES. The only names which have any claim to our notice are those of Kiernander, Ziegenbalg, Kohloff, Rhenius, and Schwartz ; upon each of whom, except the last, a very few words will suffice, because they will exhaust their meagre and unprofitable history. Mr. Kiernander, whose "chivalrous and romantic career" excites the admiration of Dr. Close, apparently because he " walked in silver slippers,";); was the friend of Clive, and " was smiled upon by governors and councils, and even by the directors at home." The Dean of Carlisle thinks that the * Christian Remembrancer, p. 382. f Wolff's Journal, p. 332. | Indian Retrospect, p. 11. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 279 labors of this " rich and fashionable missionary" were " not without spiritual fruit." Let us inquire, then, how he became rich, and what were his labors. We shall quote, according to our custom, only Protestant authorities. "The English had driven away the Portuguese Catholics, and Kiernander was put in possession of their church, which was commodious and airy."* Such was the beginning of this gentleman's career, who was now appointed "English Chaplain" at Fort William, but who had never the slightest pretension to the title of "missionary," with which he has been superfluously decorated. The chaplain at Fort William next married " a lady with a sufficient dowry," with whom he had been accus- tomed, we are told, to exchange significant glances from his reading-desk or pulpit, so that his congregation had confidently predicted the matrimonial climax which ensued. This lady unfortunately died, and Kiernander sought consolation else- where. "A similar religious love-making to that which had united him to Werdena Fischer," says his admiring biographer, " made him triumph over the yielding heart of Mrs. Ann Wooley, a wealthy widow." She also had frequented the church at Fort William, from which the Catholics had been expelled to make room for her suitor; and in that church, once used for other purposes, a second courtship found a " commo- dious" field of action, and terminated as prosperously as the first. The lady, we are told, "was fat and unwieldy," but this inconsiderable drawback did not arrest Mr. Kiernander, for " by this marriage he acquired about twenty-five thousand pounds," and money bore a high rate of interest in India. "He was now enabled to keep a splendid table and to live in a superb house." The " excellence of his wines" was famed even in England, " and reports soon reached the Society in England of the luxurious living of their missionary, nor was the frequency of his entertainments forgotten." But this was pure malevolence, for, as his generous biographer adds, " there was no defection from his high calling in these hospitalities," and the rich and fashionable missionary was still u intent on imparting the sacred truths of Christianity." Which of those truths his own manner of life specially illustrated, the biography does not ex- plain. Perhaps St. Paul would rather have approved the rice and bitter herbs which formed the sole diet of a St. Francis, a Borghese, a Mamiani, and others; though they were members, unlike Kiernander, of the highest order of nobility, and had abandoned, what he never possessed, rank, dignities, and honors, for the love of Him who became poor for their sakes. * Asiatic Journal, New Series, vol. xv., pp. 67 et seq. 280 CHAPTER III. But the fabulous prosperity of the chaplain at Fort William was not destined to last long. Costly wines and frequent en- tertainments have ruined ampler fortunes than his ; and so, having done honor to many a banquet, and sorely mutilated many a text, and otherwise acted in a manner altogether worthy of his " high calling," he reverted to his first estate, came to poverty and a dishonorable old age, and departed out of this life. Neither Hindoo nor Mahometan had learned from his lips the way of truth, and even if they had been conversant with his somewhat jovial career, were not likely to have been much impressed by it. Of Ziegenbalg but little need be said, for it does not appear that his life supplies any material for history. He does not even profess to have succeeded in converting the heathen, though he seems to have complained, with reason, that u the hindrances resulting from the vicious lives of Christians in these parts, besotted with the pursuit of pleasures and riches," were fatal to any such attempt. Of Kohloff also there is nothing more impressive to report than what the biographer of Schwartz relates of him, as if it summed up the whole of his career: "Kohloff lived to see his son diligently engaged in the English mission, and the rest of his family comfortably provided for."* The missionary career of Mr. Rhenius deserves more notice, on account of the lively illustration which it affords of the in- convenience of employing Lutheran ministers as clergymen of the Church of England. In this respect it is curious and in- structive. " Rhenius, with some of his German coadjutors," says Blumhardt, u broke off his connection with the Church Missionary Society ;"f and Mr. Rhenius tells us himself, with great plainness of speech, why he did so. He, like so many of his countrymen, not in India only, but in Europe, Africa, and America, in which latter country the Established Church em- ployed Dutch Calvinists to do its work,:): was a clergyman of the Church of England ; but he did not conceive that this superficial tie obliged him to accept her doctrine. He wrote, therefore, with considerable vehemence against that Church ; and so popular were his invectives among his colleagues, that ' live episcopally ordained missionaries" of Tinnevelly signed their names to the declaration, u there is no episcopal feeling And so, when he was accused of insubordination, he * Pearson's Memoirs of Schwartz, vol. ii., ch. xvi., p. 129. f Blumhardt, Christian Missions, p. 39. I Discoveries of the English in America, in Pinkerton's Collection, vol. xii., p. 413. Asiatic Journal, vol. xvi , p. 164. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 281 gave the following triumphant reply : " I was in nowise bound to the Church of England, but came out to the mission-field in the capacity of a Lutheran clergyman, just like the many German missionaries who, before me, had been sent out to India by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge." And then he adds, with calm indifference : " I published a little book, pointing out certain errors in the forms of the Church of England, in the same way as I have published many other little books against errors in other bodies of men."* It is a well-known habit of gentlemen of this school to " publish little books" against the religious opinions of the rest of man- kind. A good portion of their lives is generally consumed in that occupation; and the Church of England was perhaps im- prudent in employing men who were not likely to make any exception in her favor. Heber discovered the error, as we shall see when we come to examine his testimony, but failed to remedy it. And in 1834:, we find the Protestant Bishop of Calcutta complaining in a circular to his clergy, " I discovered a system at work in direct opposition to our Protestant Epis- copal Church, by the members of which they were sent out."f He does not seem to have suspected that the fault was in those who sent them. If the Protestant Episcopal Church chose to employ men who repudiated her doctrine and scoffed at her "orders," she had evidently forfeited all right to censure them. Yet this incredible system, strikingly characteristic of the real nature of the Anglican Church, is still maintained all over the world, at the present hour, to the great amazement of other Protestant sects, as we shall see hereafter, whose members taunt her with a fact peculiar to herself among all Christian commu- nities. In 1844, Mr. Weitbrecht, a Church of England mission- ary in India, is still boastfully exclaiming, " While England has supplied the means, our German Lutheran churches have supplied the menf\ and in 1851, an Anglican in India repeats the ludicrous complaint, that the Lutherans u are using all their exertions to draw away as many of our people as they can." We have only to add of Mr. Khenius, that " the Tinnevelly mission broke off all connection with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and started on its own account," under the auspices of Rhenius and his " episcopally ordained" friends; * Vol. xx., p. 153. One Anglican clergyman, and there are probably thou- sands of the same mind, actually published a book with the following singular title, The Right of a Clergyman to Oppose the Errors of his own Church, by Henry Erskine Head, M.A., Rector of Feniton, and Chaplain to the King of Hanover (1841). f Vol. xvii., p. 233 ; New Series. i Missions in Bengal, ch. vii., p 328. Colonial Church Chronicle, vol. v., p. 379. 282 CHAPTER III. an event which may have been instructive to the heathen, but would hardly persuade them to exclaim, as their forefathers did, " See how these Christians love one another." Mr. Schwartz is the last of the German or Danish missionaries whom we shall notice. As far as can be judged from such materials as we possess for estimating his character, he was a man of pure intentions, honest zeal, and active industry. His notions of Christianity were such as were proper to his class, vague, distorted, and incomplete; but such as they .were, he was sincere in proclaiming them. He often mistook emotion for faith, and except the historical doctrine of the life and death of the Redeemer, of whom he knew only what can be known to men in his condition, his creed contained no article. The Holy Catholic Church and the Communion of Saints, the Sacraments which are the inventions of Divine love, the Great Sacrifice of the New Law, the Priesthood after the order of Melchizedek, these were to his apprehension less than fables, they were gross errors. In his age Protestants knew no more of that Church in which the life of Christ is renewed and perpetuated, than the savage who wanders, unconscious of God and of his own soul, by the shores of the Pacific ; or rather, they regarded her with exactly the same feelings of ignorant suspicion, and superstitious fear, which the heathens of the first three centuries felt towards her. "When Schwartz says of Catholics, "They are of their father the devil, and the Pope,"* he was probably rather repeating what he had heard from others, than uttering a con- viction to which he had been led by study and reflection. It was the wretched jargon of his age, and we may believe in charity that he spoke it mechanically. Schwartz had strong religious instincts, and apparently a moral purity far above most of his order. What he knew, or thought he knew, he honestly desired to impart to others ; and if he failed as a missionary, it was not for want of sincerity or uprightness. What he lacked was precisely that treasure of which he never knew his need, the gift of Divine faith and the mission which God has resolved to bestow only in His Church. For want of these, his work came to naught, and his excellent qualities, which attracted the respect of all who knew him, were only like the perfume of wild flowers which is wasted in the thank- less air. How immeasurably superior he was to almost all his followers is proved by the fact, that "he was decidedly unfriend- ly to the marriage of missionaries, upon the elevated principle suggested by the great Apostle to the Gentiles, 1 Cor. vii. 32."f * Pearson's Memoirs, vol. i., ch. ix., p. 277. f Vol. ii., ch. xxi., p. 346. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 283 This is perhaps the most notable circumstance in his history, for that he failed, from first to last, to renew the triumphs of the Catholic apostles, or to effect any real or lasting conversions, is admitted both by himself and his warmest admirers. Lord Yalentia, who speaks with deserved kindness of " the respectable Danish missionary, Mr. Schwartz," and praises the zeal of his companions, says, " So little, however, has been their success in conversion, though laboring with every advantage, that the hope of "succeeding among other missionaries must be small indeed." He then recounts what the Rajah of Tanjore had done to aid them, and adds: "Is it possible that more than this can be done to give Christianity a fair chance in India ? Yet how few have been the number of the converted V It must be allowed that Schwartz had more than a "fair chance," so far as human means could give it to him. " He so conciliated the esteem of one monarch of Tanjore," we are told, " as to obtain from him an appropriation of live hundred pago- das annually for the support of the missionaries.'^ It is true that his patron had strong motives for this unusual benevolence, as Schwartz seems, by his influence with the government, to have procured for him the dignity which he held, in the place of his rival, Ameer Sing. The Rajah had good reason to be grateful. Schwartz was also the first who received direct pecuniary support from the English government. It is a mistake, however, to suppose that he initiated the mission of Tanjore with which his name is connected. " You have heard," says Dr. Claudius Buchanan, " that Mr. Schwartz was useful in the southern part of Hindostan. It is true. But Mr. Schwartz entered upon the labors of others. The gospel had been preached in that quarter near one hundred years past.":); Schwartz often complained, like Ziegenbalg, of the difficulties created by the immorality of Christians. The son of a Nabob of the Carnatic, struck with his profession of piety, said to him : " We always regarded you Europeans as a most irreligious race of men, unacquainted even with the nature of prayer." The Brahmins also used to say to him, " Should you not first endeavor to convert the Christians, before you attempt to proselyte the pagans ?" And when one day he told a Hindoo dancing-master and his female ^pupil, that "no unholy person shall enter into the kingdom of 'heaven," "Alas! sir," said the ndl, " in that case, hardly any European will ever enter it," passed on. * Lord Valentia's Travels, vol. i., ch. vi., p. 316. f Christianity in India, by J. W. Cuningham, M.A., p. 136. i Pearson's Memoirs of Buchanan, vol. i., p. 171. Memoirs of Schwartz, vol. i., ch. xx., p. 311. 284: CHAPTER III. And now a word about the " converts" of this well-inten- tioned man. A writer who lived long in the same part of India says, "The numbers he did convert were so inconsiderable, that the advocates for missionary exertions, while they pronounce those eulogiums on his character which it so justly merits, care- fully avoid all mention of the success of his public mission/** Mr. Montgomery, who was private secretary to the Governor- general, said of his nominal converts, u Mr. Schwartz could not have any reason to boast of the purity of his followers ; they were proverbial for their profligacy '."f To this fatal criticism Schwartz only answered by a tu quoque, and the prompt retort, that they were no worse than those of other people. Captain Seely relates the following anecdote in illustration of their real character. He met " a party of eight highly respectable Hindoos and Mussulmans in the garden- house of the venerable Shah Saiit." To this company the cap- tain recommended the claims of the Christian religion upon the respect of all mankind. " Upon my mentioning the well-known name of Schwartz," he says, "the company said that no real converts had ever been made ; that those who had professed Christianity were men who had lost their caste for crime, or some abomination, or those who, having nothing to lose by the change, born polluted, and always avoided by all other ranks, would wish to assume another character, and that was always attainable by their becoming Christians. But even with this wretched people, our success, dishonorable as the converts were, was very trifling ; and many, finding that nothing was to be gained by the change, and that the promises held out to them had not been fulfilled, relapsed into their former state. "J Schwartz himself seems to have frankly confessed his failure, when he said, writing from Tanjore to Chambers, "I wish I could send you a list of real converts. . . . But alas ! how rare are these !" And even such as they were, they were evident- ly paid for their profession, for his biographer confesses that " Schwartz obtained from the government a monthly allowance of forty pagodas for the Protestant poor -," i. e., the converts, " at Nagapatam." Finally, if we inquire what was the defini- tive result of his labors, his successors are willing to inform us without the least reserve. " TJyerman and Bennett," two Prot- estant ministers, " affirm, in 1839, that ' no vital religion is found in any of the preachers or native Christians of Tanjore;' "| * Observations on the Present State of the E. I. Company, by Major Scott Waring, p. 47, 4th edition. \ Apology for the Christian Missions to India, by Andrew Fuller ; app., p. 3. j: The Wonders of Mora, ch. xix., p. 468. | Pearson, vol. i., ch. xiii., p. 380. \ Travels in S. Eastern Asia, by the Rev. Howard Malcolm, vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 74. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 285 and Mr. Clarkson, a missionary in India, adds, in 1850, this final comment upon the boasted mission of Schwartz : " The history of Indian missions shows that several places, which once 4 seemed the garden of the Lord,' have become again a wilder- ness. In Southern India ' a Tanjore Christian 1 became a ly- word"* Such have been the admitted results of all his toil. " No missionary," says Mr. Charles Ross, " ever acquired the influence which he did He was indefatigable in his en- deavors to promote Christianity, but his exertions did not pro- duce much fruit, "f That Schwartz, in spite of his integrity and zeal, the succor of English authorities, and the patronage and protection of natives of rank, should have failed so signally, is only a new proof that the effectual conversion of souls, which is as great a miracle as the creation of a world, is not to be accomplished by such instruments. The Catholic missionaries, as we have seen, succeeded in spite of the combined opposition of all the influ- ences which were constantly, but vainly, exerted in favor of Schwartz. The failure of one missionary of his stamp is a more impressive fact, and more suggestive of pregnant conclu- sions, than the misadventures of a thousand luxurious men like Kiernander, or conceited ones like Rhenius. ENGLISH MISSIONARIES. It is now time that we should speak of England's own share in the work of Indian missions, and of the efforts which she originated or subsidized, when she at length rose up from her long slumber of two hundred years. If she had taken any part in missionary operations at an earlier period, it would have been due to her to give it the first place in our review ; but as her own agents hardly came on the scene before the present century, there was no need to anticipate their reluctant apparition. It was certainly not too soon for England to offer some atone- ment for the past. We haye seen that it was long before she even suffered a missionary to enter her territories, and when at last she consented to admit them, they were not unfrequently men of tainted character and questionable antecedents. " Mis- sionaries have gone out," says Mr. Cunningham, "and from this country, who have dishonored their great cause, and rather confirmed than shaken the superstitions of the people they * India and tJie Gospel, by the Rev. William Clarkson, Lecture vl, p. 323. f The Cornwallis Correspondence, vol. i., ch. ix., p. 240. 286 CHAPTER III. visited."* Yet there have never beeji wanting men in England to protest, with perfect sincerity, against such hirelings, and to cry aloud, though almost always in vain, for a nobler race of missionaries, to represent with greater dignity to the heathen world their religious opinions. Rarely indeed has the call been heard, and then rather by accident than design, and never with any result but to show, that even the highest gifts, both moral and intellectual, when divorced from the service of the Church and dedicated to the interests of a Sect, may indeed give lustre to individual character, but are too weak to win souls to Christ. We are about to consider one of the most affecting examples of this truth. The most conspicuous name, perhaps, in the Indian annals of Protestantism is that of Henry Martyn, and it is one which deserves, on several accounts, our careful consideration. HENRY MARTYN. If there is any name which Protestants would unanimously agree to inscribe in the foremost rank of honor, and accept as a type and symbol of what they deem the highest development of the Christian character, it is probably that of Henry Martyn. No other, perhaps, has attracted such general sympathy, or been invoked with such universal applause. What, then, was the rare distinction, the peculiar eminence of moral dignity, or spiritual grace, of which this popular sentiment is the witness and expression ? It was impossible for the annalist of Indian missions to avoid this question, and it can only be answered by a candid examination of the facts of a life which has often been regarded by Englishmen with an almost romantic interest. Perhaps the writer may be permitted to say, that he did not approach this investigation without sharing, in some degree, the partial impressions, almost the prejudices, of his .countrymen. Catholics are so far from refusing to acknowledge the graces which are sometimes found outside the Church, or confessing them grudgingly, that they search for them with an almost credulous desire, and exult in the discovery of them as in their proper happiness, because it is only where grace and virtue are that they can hope for conversion to the truth.f And for this reason they are slow to admit that they have been deceived. They are willingly beguiled by that charity which " hopeth all things ;" and when some cruel delusion is exposed, some popular * Christianity in India, p. 147. f The following are condemned propositions : " Nullse dantur gratia?, nisi per fidein." " Extra ecclesiain nulla conceditur gratia." MISSIONS IN INDIA. 287 idol stripped of its seeming beauty, some reputed saint dragged from his uu merited niche, Ihey only are the real mourners, for they feel, with reason, that the loss is theirs. If we would know what was the true character of the most celebrated of Protestant emissaries, of one who has not only been compared to the noblest apostles of the Church, but often preferred before them, we must accept the testimony of Prot- estants. We have no other witnesses, nor could we use them if we had. It is from his own friends and companions that we must derive all our knowledge of him, and to them we are now going to listen. The common opinion of Marty n is, that he was truly an apostolic missionary, that he went to India in the loftiest spirit of self-sacrifice, and that, being there, he did all which could be done by an uninspired man. The truth is, as revealed by himself, and by his most enthusiastic panegyrists, that he was never a missionary at all, in any sense whatever; that he quitted his country from motives which, however respectable, might have influenced the meanest of mankind ; and that, to the day of his death, he was so far from converting a single soul, that long and familiar intercourse with him actually drove back into apostasy the man who was his most intimate associate, the partner of his daily life, and the sharer of his toils. And first, he had no pretension whatever even to the title of a missionary. Mr. Kaye, whose qualifications as a witness are unexception- able, since, on the one hand, he calls Martyn " a hero and a martyr,-' and a good deal more to the same purpose, arid on the other, speaks of the Catholic Church in language which is almost maniacal writes as follows: "Henry Martyn, like Brown and Buchanan, like Thomason and Corrie, was a chaplain on the establishment, and in no accepted sense of the word a missionary. It was not his mission to preach the Gospel to the heathen, but to perform church service in the presence of the Company's servants, to marry them, to bury them, and to baptize their children."* And not only was he never a missionary, nor ever gave his friends the slightest pretext for calling him one, but his motive for going to India, as revealed to us by his biographers, was such as we can only relate on their responsibility. It is said, indeed, that he abandoned the fair prospects which his great abilities and suc- cessful academical career opened to him in England ; and this is perfectly true. Others have done the same, but were never on that account deemed apostles. And when we turn to the record of his life, we do not advance beyond the " table of * Ch. vi., p. 184. 288 CHAPTER III. contents," before we learn what sent him to India. In Mr. Sargent's enthusiastic memoir, which eulogizes all that he ever said or did, we read, almost in the title-page, this fatal disclo- sure: "Yisits London respecting a Chaplainship to the East India Company, in consequence of pecuniary losses" And even this fact, which furnishes indeed an adequate motive of prudence for going to India, but a very slender claim to the character of an apostolic missionary, does not reveal the whole truth. Mr. Kaye supplies farther evidence, chiefly, as it seems, on the authority of Mr. Simeon, who was Marty n's friend and adviser. The story is painful and humiliating, but too characteristic of Protestantism and its favorite heroes to be omitted. Martyn had formed an attachment, we are told, to a young lady, who, in the words of Mr. Kaye, " did not love Henry Martyn," but was attracted towards some other man whom her mother deemed ineligible. The young lady's conduct we need not discuss. Whether, as some say, she only objected to accom- pany Martyn to India, or Mr. Kaye's account be the true one, is not of the slightest importance. But we could hardly restrain a smile, if the rising mirth were not checked by graver thoughts, when we read the story of her lover's proceedings, as recounted by men who would have us believe that he was of the school of the apostles. Never did an excited and impassioned boy, just emerged from pupilage, display less dignity of character, less of that self-control against which even the most ordinary men blush to offend, than this celebrated person. We seem, as we pursue the narrative of his biographers, to be reading rather some fashionable romance than the life of a Christian missionary. And so far was he, as some imagine, from sacrificing this ill- fated passion to the desire of preaching to the heathen, that even after he had resolved to visit India, " in consequence of pecuniary losses," his only thought was how he could gratify it, and still win the reluctant maiden who cast so dark a shadow over his after career. The ship in which he embarked was detained at Falmouth by adverse winds ; and this involuntary exile, whose soul we are told was filled only with high thoughts of missionary enterprise, hastily left the vessel, and to relieve " his lacerated heart" hurried back to seek one more interview, and try one last effort, with his obdurate mistress. Foiled in this final suit, "he wept and groaned," says Mr. Kaye, "till he was weary of his crying ; till his throat was dry, and his eyes failed him."* And this, we are to believe, was an apos- tolic missionary ! It is difficult to bring home to the mind of a Protestant, * Ubi supra. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 289 who rejects as fanciful and unreal the " counsels of perfection," knows nothing of the triumphs of Divine grace, and suspects that all men share his own infirmities, the contrast between Catho- lic and Protestant missionaries. Yet even the least spiritual of men, even the jester and the libertine, will confess, that he cannot imagine St. Paul, when about to sail for Cyprus in order to evangelize the heathen, taking advantage of a foul wind to quit the seacoast and hurry back to Antioch, in order to make a lover's last appeal to a disdainful or a capricious girl. You feel that such a thought is ludicrous and profane. It outrages all your perceptions of what is congruous and true ; it cuts to the quick the most refined and sensitive emotions of your soul. And you confess that a similar story related even of the most obscure Catholic missionary, of this or any other age, would excite almost the same feelings, and be received only with a smile, so monstrous is its improbability. Such is the instinc- tive testimony of the Protestant world, though it regards similar conduct even in the greatest of its own heroes as perfectly natural arid becoming. Whence this prodigious contrast ? How is it that the Catholic missionary is always, in the manner of his life, such as St. Paul or St. Barnabas, and the Protestant never f What explanation can you propose of this incontestable fact short of the confession, that the gifts and graces proper to an apostle are still present with the first, and ever wanting to the last ; that is, that God is with the one, and not with the other? Mr. Martyn in due time accomplished his voyage. Arrived in India, he seems only to have excited among his fellow-clergy " unseemly pulpit contentions." Such was the first eifect of his presence. Even on the journey out he had failed, by his violence and want of judgment, to attract his fellow-passengers. " It was a failure," says Mr. Kaye, " to be utterly deplored." While still at home he had been rebuked for the indiscreet vehemence with which he recommended his own views of religion, and he had not yet learned the calm wisdom which, while it disdains compromise, knows how to deal mercifully with the infirmities of others. He was intemperate and unconciliating, as tempest- uous in his religious emotions as he had been in his passions and affections. And this was the impression which he seems to have produced, while in India, even upon persons disposed to judge him favorably. Sir James Mackintosh, no unskilful or captious judge, records this opinion of him : " His meekness is excessive, and gives a disagreeable impression of effort to con- ceal the passions of human nature."* And Captain Seely, whose sympathies were always with such men, while lamenting that * Kaye's Life of Sir John Malcolm, vol. ii., cli. ii., p. 64. 20 290 CHAPTER III. the clergy were too often " uncourteous among those who could and would have aided their labors," adds, " of which the late Mr. Marty n was a proof."* Even his admirers notice with regret his changeful and restless temper. "Sometimes san- guine and hilarious," says Mr. Kaye, " at others despairing and dejected. His soul never rested." And he completes the picture by these touches : " Ever alive with emotion, trembling with deep joy or deeper sorrow, with wild hope or profound despair." This hardly agrees, it must be confessed, with that type of evan- gelical piety and holy equanimity which St. Paul has described, and which even persons of ordinary virtue are accustomed to exhibit. The true missionaries of the Gospel are not one thing to-day and another to-morrow, nor does the closeness of their union with God depend upon the state of their health, the fitful coming and going of emotion, or the condition of their domestic affairs. Their feet are planted on a rock against which the waves vainly beat ; and if the tenor of their life does not prove this to you, ask for further evidence in their death. We need hardly stay to inquire what was actually accom- plished by Mr. Martyn in India. On this point there is not even any dispute. Though he possessed the highest human qualifications, great ability and extensive attainments, so that, when in Persia, " the acuteness of his reasoning, combined with the perfect knowledge he possessed of Persian and Arabic, often confounded the most learned advocates of the Koran,"f yet so utterly without even the appearance of results were all his efforts, that his biographer gives up this part of the case as hopeless. He even attempts to forestall every inquiry on this capital point as unreasonable and profane. "If success be demanded," he says, with an evident apprehension lest any should apply that unwelcome test, " it is replied, that this is not the inquiry with Him ' of whom are all things,' either in this world, or in that which is to come. With Him the ques- tion is this : What has been aimed at ? What has been in- tended in singleness of heart ?":{: We have seen, however, that there is another class of laborers, who, not content with good aims and intentions, know how to accomplish results also, and having planted and watered, reap in due season fruitful har- vests, so that, in spite of the absence of all those temporal advantages which Martyn and his companions enjoyed, "no missionary converted less than a thousand pagans annually." The sum of Martyn's success, as avowed by himself, is limited to " one old woman," who, he " thought," was seriously * Wonders of Elora, ch. xix., p. 521. f Travels in the Persian Provinces, by James B. Fraser, ch. xxi., p. 307. \. Memoir of Rev. H. Martyn, p. 482. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 291 impressed ; while all that his biographer ventures to say is, that " at Shiraz & sensation has been excited." " Whatever he did," says a well-known Protestant writer, " he did it with all his might, and yet he failed ; he made very few converts, and was obliged to acknowledge in his journal and correspondence, that he could discern but few visible effects of his ministry."* Lastly, -he says of himself ; "I am much neglected on all sides, and without the work of translation, I should fear my presence in India were useless." Yet even of his translations a Protest- ant missionary says, "Henry Martyn's Persian Testament is wholly incomprehensible to vulgar readers."t And now we come to the story of Sabat, the most remark- able incident in Martyn's career, and perhaps in the annals of Protestant missions. Sabat was an Arabian Mahometan, who had received baptism from Dr. Kerr, and made " a public profession" of Christianity. Dr. Claudius Buchanan says his conversion was " as evidently produced by the Spirit of God, as any conversion in the primitive Church. "J He was em- ployed for a long period by Martyn to assist him in his trans- lations, lived under the same roof, and was the daily and hourly witness of his life and labors. " Mr. Martyn, in his latest letters," says Buchanan, in 1809, " speaks of Sabat in terms of affection and admiration." " The great work which occupies the attention of this noble Arabian," says Martyn himself, " is the promulgation of the Gospel among his own countrymen. " What, then, was the effect upon this generous and ardent con- vert of the intimate converse which so long subsisted between himself and Martyn, and the knowledge which he acquired, from daily observation, of his labors and their results 2 Mr. Martyn's journal supplies the answer to this question. The " perfect inutility" of his preaching, which could not be con- cealed from his companion, produced the first unfavorable impression on his mind. Then Sabat would ridicule his small and gradually diminishing congregation, and Martyn, mortified by his failure, would retort bitterly. " He may spare his sar- castic remarks," writes the latter, u as I suppose that after another Sunday none at all will come"\\ Finally, Sabat, penetrated to his inmost soul with contempt, recoiled from what he seems to have considered a transparent imposture, and relapsed into Mahometanism. Thus was Martyn not only unable to win converts himself, but the daily experience of his * Quarterly Review, No. 25, p. 443. f Malcolm's Travels in 8. Eastern Asia, vol. ii., p. 307. \ The Star in the East, a Sermon, by Rev. C. Buchanan, p. 29. Ibid., p. 26. Memoir, p. 288. 292 CHAPTER III. * incapacity, and perhaps the near contemplation of his way- ward and imperfect character, actually drove back into apos- tasy one who had been converted by others. We have dwelt longer upon the history of Martyn than can be attempted in the case of others, on account of the remark- able lessons which it conveys. It would be superfluous to offer any comments upon the facts of his career. If we cannot think without sadness of his wasted talents, and the high qualities which availed him so little, at least his failure excites in us no other feeling than sorrow. We can speak no harsh word of him, though he feared not to brand with the horrible name of " Antichrist" that holy Church in which he would have at- tained the rest and peace which he sought so passionately, but knew not where to find, and whose blessing would have given him strength to effect the work which, for want of it, he left undone. And so, after years of pain and disquietude, of what his biographer calls " mixed emotions" and " acute mental misery," he came to his end, full of good desires and intentions, which, we may well hope, were less unprofitable to himself than to others. Poor victim of an earthly religion, which has no medicine for sick souls like his ; and though it talks to its votaries of a far-off' Saviour, can neither win Him to them, nor guide them to Him ; which feeds them on empty wind, or emptier words ; and when at last it hides them out of eight in the silent grave, has done no more for them than when it^received them, naked and forlorn, as they came from their mother's womb. In such as Martyn we see how it does its fatal work, marring all natural gifts, however fair and noble, because it knows not how to add to them those which are supernatural. He was of that class of whom earthly religions have produced so many, who pant after excellence which they can never attain ; whose very prayer is wild and tempestuous, more full of wailing than of trust, more like the " exceeding bitter cry" of the disinherited son than the loving confidence of the true heir ; and whose piety, even in its best form, re- sembles rather the fluctuating ebb and flow of emotion and sentiment, the fitful caprice of human passion, than that deep rest in the Holy Ghost, which none may find but in the Church of God. To such as these it is not given to win souls. They are too slenderly equipped with apostolic graces to succeed in apostolic warfare. How should they vanquish demons, or break the fetters of their captives, who have not even learned to overcome themselves? MISSIONS IN INDIA. 293 DR. CLAUDIUS BUCHANAN. The name of Dr. Claudius Buchanan would hardly require special notice in these pages, since he was still less a missionary than Martyn,but that he has shared with the latter, one knows not why, the ardent eulogies of Protestants, and furnished a theme to enthusiastic biographers. A Protestant historian speaks of Buchanan, with " Heber, Spencer, and Carr," as " enduring as true a martyrdom"* as any of the Jesuits, and considers their success more conspicuous. We can hardly re- fuse, therefore, to notice the object of such unusual praise. Mr. Kaye, whose infelicitous fate it seems to be to defile, one after another, the heroes of the very cause which he strives to uphold, has sketched for us the history of Buchanan. It presents a curious illustration of the simplicity with which Protestantism accepts its heroes, and the temerity with which it canonizes them. Buchanan, he tells us, was in his youth " a wandering min- strel." He had found the restraints of domestic life too irksome, and to relieve himself from their yoke he became a strolling player, obstinately refusing every invitation to return to the paternal roof. Weary of this somewhat questionable calling, he next became " an attorney's clerk ;" and Mr. Kaye adds, with scant reverence for the future " missionary," that " though he sometimes wanted a dinner, he had money to spend on theatres, spouting clubs, and other public amusements."f But even this does not blunt Mr. Kaye's appetite for histor- ical invective, especially when he is dealing with the luminaries of his own sect. He is careful, therefore, to inform us, speak- ing of a later period of Buchanan's life, when he had become a clergyman and settled in India, that " one of the most intel- ligent officers in the Company's service, a resident at a native court," was accustomed to say of Buchanan, "I am convinced that he is a man of wretched and most unchristian like vanity.";): Nor can we venture to deny with any confidence that the opinion of this intelligent officer was strictly accurate. " I often com- pare myself, in my present exile," says Buchanan, "to John, in the island of Patmos." Whether the position of an ex-min- strel and attorney's clerk, promoted to a professorship in a Cal- cutta college, and whose " exile" was solaced by opulent ease, was quite identical with that of St. John at Patmos, may per- * The Early Jesuit Missions in JV. America, by the Rev. W. Ingraham Kipp, M.A. ; preface, p. 8. f Christianity in India, cli. vi., p. 167. j History of the Administration of the E. I. Company, p. 636. Pearson's Memoirs of Buchanan, vol. i., p. 150. 294: CHAPTER III. haps be disputed, especially as even an admirer tells us that, " for the present Mr. Buchanan was almost a silent witness in this Patmos for the word of God."* But if his estimate of his own merits was sometimes excessive, he compounded for this infirmity by duly appreciating the defects of others. Thus he tells us of his fellow-clergy in India, that " the chief fault of the missionary societies at home was in the selection of the men. It appears that most of them were weak, and most of them novices." Again, describing his own immediate sphere, he says, " We have some of all sects in our congregation, Pres- byterians, Independents, Baptists, Armenians, Greeks, and Nestorians ; and some of them are part of my audience at the English Church. But a name or a sect is never mentioned from the pulpit."f Under the circumstances, this precaution was probably judicious. Sometimes he speaks of Catholics, and, being perfectly inde- pendent of "missionary societies at home," with singular fair- ness. The Jesuits he often praises, declaring that "their infor- mation is generally more important than that of the Protestant missionaries," and that " they very politely gave me all the books I wanted, and letters of introduction to their brethren in the south." He might well trust to their books and their authority in getting up his facts about India, for, as Count Bjdrnstjerna confessed long after, " it is to them that we are really indebted for the best accounts of India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.''^ The only incident in Buchanan's career, who never converted, nor pretended to convert, even a solitary heathen, was his visit to the Syrian Churches of Malabar, of which he has frankly avowed both the motive and the results. " When I reflected," he says, " on the immense power of the Romish Church in India, and on our inability to withstand its influence alone, it appeared to me an object of great consequence to secure the aid and co-operation of the Syrian Church, and the sanction of its antiquity in the East." Such candor almost disarms criti- cism, especially when he adds, that this scheme, which the Anglican Church has often tried elsewhere, notably failed. We must quote his own words. The Syrians were in great straits. The larger number of them had already submitted to the Catholic Church and abjured their * Sketches of Christianity in India, by the Rev. M. Wilkinson, p. 98. f Vol. i., p. 324. \ The fheogony of the Hindoos, by Count Bjornstjerna, p. 6 (1844). Cf. History of India, by the Hon. Mountstewart Elphinstone, vol. ii., book 12, ch. iii., p. 653. Christian Researches in Asia, p. 64. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 295 heresy ; the remainder were therefore not unlikely to welcome the advances of an emissary who, in their apprehension, represented both the Church and the Government of the great power whose subjects they had now become. Yet they did not hesitate a moment to give the same contemptuous answer to his embassy which the Church of England had so often received from other oriental sects, whose " co-operation" she has vainly solicited. Buchanan visited Mar Dioriysius, the " Metropolitan of the Syrian Church," and this was his reception: u The bishop's chaplain confessed to me that they had doubts as to the purity of English ordination. ' The English,' said they, ' may be a warlike and a great people ; but their Church, by your own account, is but of recent origin.' ' This was a grave rebuff from men under whose antiquity he wished to shelter his own very " recent" Church ; nor could he, after all his efforts, extract from the bishop any other remark than this, that " he did not perfectly comprehend our ecclesiastical principles !"* The efforts of the Anglican Church in India to connect itself with this sect, and their mortifying conclusion, deserve a brief notice. So long as it was hoped that the Nestorians might be induced to join them in that opposition to the Catholic Church for which the former had only too keen a relish, they were flat- tered and caressed, Bibles and money forced upon them, and every mark of sympathy and respect. Above all, their " purity" and a antiquity" were vehemently celebrated. La Croze had praised, fifty years before Buchanan, " the considerable marks of purity"f which the Nestorian Church exhibited, and Protestant bishops and clergy have eagerly repeated his language up to the present time. " There is perhaps," says an Anglican clergyman, u no example of a Church more pure, simple, and apostolic.";): We shall have additional proofs of this complicity when we come to speak hereafter of Armenia and the Levant. Yet these Syr- ians, as Dubois observed, u destroy the whole economy of the mystery of the Incarnation, and acknowledge two distinct and separate Persons in Christ." And Mr. Wrede, who also had lived among them, says: "They reject the Divine nature of Christ, and call the Virgin Mary only the mother of Christ, not of God. "|| With these unfortunate sectaries the bishops arid clergy of the Anglican Church in India strove earnestly to form a treaty of alliance; and it was not until their advances had been repelled * P. 66. f Histoire du Christianisme des Indes, tome i., liv. i., p. 4. i Christianity in India, by J. W. Cunningham, M.A., p. 117. Asiatic Journal, vol. iii., p. 74. I Account of the St. Thome Christians on the Coast of Malabar, by F. Wrede, Asiatic Researches, vol. vii., p. 370. 296 CHAPTER III. again and again that they affected to discover, in the words of Dr. Brown, that "these ancient churches are, in reality, little if at all better than the Romish Church. We question if there are even to be found in them those examples of piety which are occasionally to be found in the Church of Rome."* But by this time the Syrians had peremptorily refused all further intercourse with Protestants, and Dr. Wilson, the Anglican Bishop of Cal- cutta, had "resolved to disconnect the Church Missionary So- ciety from the Syrian Church altogether.''! Dr. Buchanan did not of course foresee this result, when he went to solicit the " co-operation" of the Nestorians against " the immense power of the Romish Church in India." The only additional fact in his history which we need notice is his visit to the Catholic Archbishop of Goa, to whom he related, with admirable tact and judgment, the popular traditions about the atrocities of the Inquisition. The only comment, he tell us, which his graphic tales elicited from the venerable prelate, w r as expressed by the occasional ejaculation, which hardly inter- rupted his flowing narrative u mendadum ! mendacium /"; DR. JUDSON. A second name to which it would not have been necessary to allude but for a special reason, is that of Dr. Judson. It is this gentleman who is selected by a well-known Protestant reviewer, out of the thousands from whom he might have chosen his model, as worthy to be compared with St. Francis, De Britto, or any Catholic missionary whatever. The character of Dr. Judson, he says, is one of the glories of Protestantism, which need not fear, while it can point to his " devoted courage," the most unsparing criticism of its missionary agents. It will be interesting to examine the history of one whom even the Satur- day Review considers a model missionary. The Rev. Adoniram Judson commenced his career nearly fifty years ago. Unlike the order of apostolic missionaries with whom he is compared, Dr. Judson was so little prepared to in- vite the heathen to any definite belief, that he had not decided, when he left Boston, what he should believe himself. He 'changed his opinion, therefore, on one of the most important truths of Christianity, not before he set out for the East, but during his voyage thither. " On the passage," we learn from * History of the Propagation of Christianity, &c., vol. ii., p. 348. f Missions in 8, India, by J. Mullens, p. 130. i Christian Researches, p. 85. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 297 Mr. Wayland, "Mr. Judson became convinced that the New Testament furnished no authority for infant baptism."* Dr. Worcester, who has also written his life, sees in this incident only " a transfer of denominational relations ;" a more serious biographer laments, that it " not only gave much distress to the members of the mission, but produced, perhaps, other feel- ings, besides chagrin to the minds of the members of the board that had sent him out."f St. Paul speaks of people who are "carried about by every wind of doctrine," " ever learning, and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth," and he includes " the doctrine of baptism" among those cardinal verities which form the " foun- dation" of Christianity 4 But it is permitted to Protestant missionaries to change their views on such subjects, and Dr. Judson used the privilege. This was his first step, and the next was a suitable sequel. His immediate destination was Burmah. His conduct in that country is thus described by a Protestant writer, in a treatise which has the honor to rank as a Cambridge Prize Essay. "The methods by which missionaries endeavor to attract attention have frequently operated to the injury of their cause among a people who are, perhaps, more alive to their absurdity than even Europeans. Judson, for instance, commenced his missionary labors at Rangoon, in Burmah, by constructing on the side of the road leading to the grand pagoda a little hut of bamboo and thatch, without doors, windows, or partitions. Here, as his wife relates, he used to sit all day long, and say to the passers by, ' Ho ! every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat ; yea, come, buy wine and milk without price.' What could be more ill judged, not to say absurd, than this ? How could the passers-by, by any human possibility, have the least compre- hension of this beautiful metaphor ? Taking it in its literal sense, the only one in which they could take it, can we blame the Burmese for laughing in his face, and considering him, prima facie, either a fool or a madman ?'' We are not surprised to learn from an enthusiastic biographer, that Dr. Judson consumed six years in Burmah without attract- ing a solitary disciple. At length one convert is recorded, of whom we are told nothing whatever, not even his position in Dr. Judson's establishment ; and then Dr. Worcester hastens to * Memoir of the Rev. Adoniram Judson, D.D., by Francis Wayland, vol. i., p. 95. \ Religion in tJie United States of America, by the Rev. Robert Baird, book viii., ch. v., p. 703. . t Hob. vi. 1, 2. Irving, Theory and Practice of Caste, ch. v., p. 150. 298 CHAPTER III. add, " We must now abandon details altogether," a precau- tion which obliges us to conclude that Dr. Judson's missionary career supplied only scanty materials for history. Perplexed by his continued failure, he now resolved to try the final remedy of a visit to the king. " When did you arrive ?" was the abrupt inquiry with which the Burmese monarch greeted him. " Are you married ? Why do you dress so?" The king was probably comparing him in his own mind with the Catholic missionaries whom he had seen, and was evidently not impressed by the aspect of his female com- panion, or the peculiarity of his costume. But Judson did not contide wholly in such auxiliaries, nor present himself empty- handed. A petition, in which he solicited the royal favor ; a tract, which purported to be written in the Burmese language; and a Bible, in six volumes gorgeously bound these were his gifts to the sovereign of Bunnah. The petition, Dr. Worcester relates, his majesty " read through deliberately without saying a word;" the tract "he dashed to the ground ;" the Bible kC he did not notice." And then the king walked coldly away, leaving his minister to communicate to the Protestant embassy the following decision: "In regard to the objects of your petition, his majesty gives no order. In regard to your sacred books, his majesty has no use for them. Take them away !" " The missionaries," Dr. Worcester adds, " were satisfied that they had made a mistake."* It was perhaps natural that Dr. Judson should now resolve to quit Burmah. His companions had already departed, as we learn from a remonstrance addressed by himself to the board which employed him. "I should be inclined to advise the board," he wrote, " to send out no more missionaries to these parts, unless they can devise some way of making them go where they are sent, and stay there."^ He did not follow his own advice, but this was perhaps because he had come to the same conclusion as his fugitive colleagues. And so he went his way, his last farewell to the people of Burmah being expressed in the parting exhortation, "Read the live hundred tracts I have left with thee !" a task which they had shown no inclination to begin, and which they have probably not yet completed. Such was the issue of Dr. Judson's labors in Burmah. Further details in illustration of his character are supplied by his friend Mr. Gouger, and as Judson is represented, even by so fastidious a critic as the Saturday jffeview, as a model * Biographical and Historical Sketches of Distinguished American Mission- aries, p. 90. f Way land's Memoir, vol. ii., ch. viii., p. 304. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 299 Protestant missionary, they claim perhaps a moment's atten- tion. Mr. Gonger was the companion of Judson and Dr. Price in the prison to which they seem to have been committed, by the king's order, under the notion that they were European spies. Fellows in misfortune, they laid aside official restraints, and became frank and communicative. " In my early days of wildness," Dr. Judson told Mr. Gouger, in one of these mo- ments of expansion, " I joined a band of strolling players. We lived a reckless vagabond life, finding lodgings where we could, and bilking the landlord where we found opportunity in other words, running up a score, and then decamping without paying the reckoning." We have seen that this was also Dr. Buchan- an's preparation for missionary toils ; but Judson, having sur- passed that gentleman in his early irregularities, appears to have surpassed him also in the energy of his repentance. "At a later period," he told Mr. Gouger " when the enormity of this vicious course rested with a depressing weight on my mind" he returned to the scenes of his youth, and paid his tavern bills. The incident, Mr. Gouger informs us, was handled with remarkable skill by an American Missionary Society. "He contrived to attach himself," was their ingenious report to their subscribers, "to a theatrical company, not with the design of entering upon the stage, but partly for the purpose of familiarizing himself with its regulations, in case he should enter upon literary projects!" Judson himself, who had a good deal more integrity than his employers, and might have passed with credit through life if he had chosen any profession but that of a missionary, would not have tolerated this pious fiction. " Judson knew so well," says his friend, " this tendency in America, and had seen his own letters so garbled, that he wrote a peremptory prohibition to print his letters, unless they were given entire." The im- mediate occasion of this honest proceeding seems to have been as follows. The King of Ava had proposed to Dr. Price to teach English to a few young natives, that they might be qualified as interpreters a project which was never executed. " What was our astonishment, shortly after, to read in a periodical, the announcement that the King of Ava was favor- able to the Christian religion ; that there was every prospect of his im mediate conversion to Christianity; that he had sent to Calcutta for a number of Bibles; and that we might hope, as the result, that the whole of this mighty nation would now become shortly evangelized!"* * Mr. Gouger notices a recent book, by a Mistress Wylie, the wife of a Prot- estant missionary, who gives much the same account of the Karens, a people on the frontiers of this kingdom, whom she represents as model Protestants, to the 300 CHAPTER III. Judson's fellow-missionary, Dr. Price, who shares with him the eulogies of missionary societies, seems to have vexed him not a little. He was a "medical missionary," without any knowledge of medicine. Dr. Price's second wife was " a blind native woman, of Siamese extraction," whom he had deprived of sight by operating on her eyes. This was the usual fate of his patients. As the woman was hideously uncomely, besides being a pagan, Judson "refused to perform the ceremony." This impediment, says Mr. Gouger, Dr. Price vanquished by " a threat of a peculiar nature." u Brother Judson," he replied, to the admonitions of the latter, "the law of America, and of nature, provides for cases where a minister is not to be found." While in prison, Dr. Price and Dr. Judson were bedfellows, an arrangement said to be consecrated by American usage. The former had acquired an intolerable habit of kicking Dr. Judson, and obstinately defending the practice as necessary to his own comfort ; a view which the latter, wearied with the long prison nights, naturally resented. " A feud arose," says their sympathizing companion, who accepted the missionary pretensions of both with perfect seriousness, " between these two excellent men, which had been gradually gaining ground, and broke out on a certain midnight with such violence and recrimination, that I was fain to come between the parties to preserve the peace."* Dr. Judson got out of prison and went to India. But wherever he went, his history was the same. He converted nobody, in Burinah, in India, or anywhere else ; and in spite of good but impotent desires, only confirmed the scoffing pagans in their contempt for the religion which he taught. He was con- spicuous among those well-meaning but unprofitable agents, who teach before they have learned, whose life ebbs away in sterile emotion and disjointed talk, and of whom Mr. Windsor Earl observed on the spot : "Their labors are rarely heard of, except through the medium of missionary publications, brought out from number of many thousands. Mr. Gouger, who shrewdly observes that the annexation of Pegu by England will probably strengthen the hands of Protest- ant missionaries, only ventures to report, and that from hearsay, that " their pro- fession is not rendered grotesque by the admixture of any exuberant element of paganism !" We shall see too many examples in the course of this work of the real meaning of such statements, to permit us to accept the narrative of Mistress Wylie without some better evidence than her own assertion. Dr. Latham no- tices that the native shamans " predict a deliverance from the grinding tyranny of the Avans," and connect their hopes with the advent of the English and Amer- ican missionaries. The latter will no doubt profit for a season by this circum- stance, since the Karens will be likely to regard them as political auxiliaries. Ethnology of Ir.dia, by R. G. Latham, M.D., F.R.S., ch. vi., p. 96 (1859). * Personal Narrative of Two Years' Imprisonment in Burmah, by Henry Gouger, ch. xvi., p. 178 ; ch. xx., p. 227 (1800). MISSIONS IN INDIA. 301 England"* It is of such men that another Protestant travel- ler, Mr. Kennett Mackenzie, frankly declares, that " the so- called missionary labors in Burmah cause more harm in a short while" than all other influences " will do in the course of years."f And his failure, like that of Schwartz, is the more significant, because, as all his biographers admit, he con- ducted his operations during many years without let or hin- drance, encountering no other opposition but the contemptuous indifference which he knew not how to overcome. "The people of Burmah," Sir William Sleeman reported to Lord Dalhousie, in 1852, " are not in any way opposed to us from either religious or political feelings ;"^ while another British official candidly relates that missionaries of a different order, having the gifts and the vocation of apostles, easily win the love and respect of the very people with whom Judson and his companions were only objects of derision. " It is a pity," said Major Burney, who was English Resident at the Burmese court at the very time of Judson's career, " that some account of Father d'Amato cannot be communicated to the civilized world. He lived among his flock, like one of themselves, and was venerated by them in no common degree." Mr. Gouger also notices Father Ignatius Brito, a native Burmese Catholic priest, who was in prison with Price and Judson, where he spent his nights in singing "Latin songs set to plaintive music, in honor of the Virgin Mary, in good taste and with good voice," and when released, " became a useful and respected pastor of a small church in those remote regions."! We fail thus far to detect in Dr. Judson the apostolic char- acter which the Protestant reviewer claims for him, but he was distinguished in another way, which perhaps inspired the admi- ration of t a critic who deprecates " Catholic asceticism" as a mere " exotic," which Protestants can do very well without.^" Mr. Mullens, who has been already quoted, notices with cordial approval, that Protestant missionaries " do not become hypo- chondriac by living alone;" and Judson guarded himself so effectually against the depressing influences of solitude, that he contracted three matrimonial alliances during his missionary career, and enjoyed the rare advantage of having his memoirs composed, not like Morrison, by a second, but by a third wife. The various marriages of Dr. Judson, and the terms in which * The Eastern Seas, ch. xii., p. 398. Burmah and the Burmese, pref. (1853). Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, vol. ii., p. 367 (1858). & Asiatic Journal, New Series, vol. x., p. 274. Ch. xxiii., p. 256. Saturday Review, January, 1859. 302 CHAPTER III. they are narrated by his biographers, deserve attention, because they assist us to appreciate one of the most eminent of Protest- ant missionaries. Of Dr. Judson's first wife, who died more than thirty years ago, we are told by the Kev. Dr. Worcester, " it is not ex- travagant to characterize her as the woman of the century." The eminence of her gifts did not, however, exempt her from bodily frailties, and this lady died. -Dr. Worcester, constrained to " abandon details altogether," and having nothing to relate about converts among the heathen or martyrs among their teachers, falls back upon the first Mrs. Judson, and endeavors to do justice to her merits. Having exhausted this topic, he returns to his hero, and goes on thus : " Mr. Judson ceased to tread the path of life alone, and a new character appears in our narrative." This was the second Mrs. Judson. She also, as we might have anticipated, was " the most finished and faultless specimen of an American woman." She had been previously married to the Eev. Mr. Board man, " a tall, manly, earnest young Christian," who died in Burmah, and whose final scene was so striking, that " the deaths of Wolfe, of Chat- ham, and of the younger Adams" we have no assistance in de- termining who the latter gentleman was " have been not un- fittingly compared with his." It was natural that Mrs. Board- man should lament so great a loss, aud Dr. Worcester records that " her sorrow was deep and intense, but she was sustained by Divine consolation" that is, she married Dr. Judson, to whom she bore eight children. When he quitted the East, she sailed with him for America, but died on the passage, at St. Helena, and Judson, who was present at her death, " traced her upward flight." The missionary landed alone at Boston, in 1845, and his arrival "produced everywhere a thrill of emotion, and the strongest desire to look upon the man who had suffered and achieved so much for the cause of Christ." He had suffered the loss of two wives, but what he had achieved, in any cause whatever, Dr. Worcester does not explain. He adds, however, that Judson withdrew himself from the unwelcome ovations which greeted him in Massachusetts. Public manifestations were distasteful to a man " whose heart was bleeding under be- reavement ;" and who knew, moreover, a better source of conso- lation than any which they could offer him. And so, eight months after his arrival in Boston, he once more led to the hy- meneal altar " a gifted spirit," Miss Emily Chubbuck, " who left the companionship of early friends and the pleasing paths of literature, to become the successor of illustrious women, in the sympathies of his home, and the labors of missionary life." MISSIONS IN INDIA. 303 This lady, " Mrs. Clrubbuck Judson," as she is styled in the biography to distinguish her from " Mrs. Boardman Judson," survived her husband, and the story, which is more fertile in connubial than in missionary adventure, fitly terminates with these words : " She lives, to illustrate the graces of intellectual and Christian culture, and the undying strength of conjugal and maternal devotion."* THE ANGLO-INDIAN BISHOPS. It would be impossible to notice individually the various gentlemen who, during the present century, have represented the manifold sects of Protestantism in India, and whose claim to the character of apostolic missionaries was not less substantial than that of Judson and Buchanan. Some of them will traverse, from time to time, the scene which we have still to unroll ; but it is now time to consider, in a separate form, the special opera- tions of the Anglican Church in Hindostan, when she at length assumed, in 1814-, a distinct organization, and resolved to pre- sent herself in more imposing guise to the contemplation of the Hindoos. Up to that date she had salaried chiefly Danes and Germans, Lutherans and Calvinists, because no others would accept her commission. But if the Church of England, accus- tomed to such alliances, intrusted her honor to men who brought fresh ignominy on a name already somewhat tarnished even among the oriental sects, she could still plead, in arrest of condemnation, that their irregularities had not hitherto been controlled by adequate ecclesiastical authority. When she could find time to dispatch one of her "bishops" to India, the world would witness a very different exhibition of her real character. There were some little difficulties to be removed, the acqui- escence of the government to be solicited, the salary to be determined and secured, and then a new era would dawn for India. So at last she chose her bishop, and the object of her choice was Dr. Thomas Middleton. It was apparently high time to try this final remedy. " From the want of superintendence," said Lord Yalentia, just before Middleton arrived, "it is painful to observe that the characters of too many of the clergy are by no means creditable to the doctrines they profess, which, together with the unedifying con- tests that prevail among them even in the pulpit, tend to lower the religion, and its followers, in the eyes of the natives of every * Biographical Sketches, &c., pp. 99-111. 304: CHAPTER III. description."* As a remedy for these evils, Lord Yalentia rec- ommended the appointment of a bishop, because the "natives of India are greatly swayed by external appearances." Let us inquire, then, what effect was produced upon them by the ar- rival of Dr. Middleton. Mr. Kaye, who is always at hand when the distinctive attri- butes of some Protestant dignitary are to be ruthlessly exposed, tells us that Middleton, while yet in England, "had obtained the livings of Tansor and By thams, a prebendal stall at Lincoln, the Archdeaconry of Huntingdon, the Rectory of Puttenharn in Hertfordshire, and the great parish of St. Pancras in London." And lest this impressive catalogue should be insufficient to determine Middleton's real character, he adds, that " he was a cold and stately formalist, had adecided taste for military salutes, and struggled manfully for social precedence."f Notwith- standing these dispositions, the Church of England sent him to India, and Mr. Le Bas has written his life. To his pages we must refer for an account of his proceedings, and of their influence upon religion in Hindostan. We learn from Mr. Le Bas that Middleton had stipulated for a salary of five thousand pounds a year for himself, two thousand pounds for each of his Archdeacons, ten thousand rupees additional for himself whenever he went to Madras, ten thousand when he visited Bombay, " besides the use of a ship." But he had held too many benefices at home to accept this as an -adequate compensation for their loss. His own letters show how he resented the wrong. " As to my salary," he says, and he said it very often, "the chief-justice has four thousand pounds more, and the puisnes two thousand pounds, allowing for a different mode of payment, though their jurisdiction is limited to Bengal, and mine extends over India.";): The greater opulence of " the puisnes" he seems to have regarded as a spe- cial indignity, and his biographer avows his own disapproval of the incongurous arrangement. " Lie indicated dissatisfaction," says Mr. Le Bas, " at the scantiness of his salary ;" but the insensible government slighted his reiterated complaint and coldly abandoned him to his poverty. They seem to have thought that as he received altogether more than ten times the salary of ail Archbishop in France, he might contrive to live upon it. But the slenderness of his income was not the only source of his dissatisfaction. He considered that an official whose "jurisdiction extended over India," though India remained * Travels, vol. i., ch. v., p. 199. f Christianity in India, ch. viii., pp. 286, 301. t Life of Bishop Middleton, by the Rev. C.Webb Le Bas, vol. i.,ch. vi.,p. 177. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 305 perfectly unconscious of the fact, should receive a due amount of public homage. Even this reasonable expectation was mortified. "As to my reception on landing," he says, with evident emotion, " it was any thing but what it ought to have been." In this generous and apostolic temper he commenced his episcopal labors. That they ever extended beyond the ranks of those who were called his clergy, though most of them pro- fessed " another gospel" than his, is not pretended ; but at all events his position afforded him opportunities for excursions into various provinces of India, and the facts which they brought under his notice must have tried him almost as severely as the insufficiency of his income, and the unexpected coldness of his reception. The only signs of life and progress which ever met his eye were exhibited by the Catholic missions, while those which were conducted by Protestants were already hastening to decay. Thus, at Cuddalore, he received "a melancholy representation of the decayed state of the mission ;" while of the once vaunted establishment of Tranquebar, upon which so much money had been lavished, we are told, " the mission of Tranquebar was a source of perpetual agitation and distress to him. It was hastening to decay, and apparently to utter extinction."* And not only was this the unpleasant spectacle which met him everywhere, but even the English dis- played a culpable indifference to the claims of his "jurisdiction." " The Baptists," he says, with grave irony, " seem to have abandoned all conversion ~but that of Europeans ; but they boast of their success among his Majesty's European troops, "- which he appears to have thought was not exactly their pro- fessed object in going to India. On the other hand, as we have seen, he had opportunities of noticing that " the Church of Rome has done wonders in the East." Among the various journeys of Dr. Middleton in India, the first receives the special attention of his biographer, and is perhaps the only one which calls for ours. It appears that he rarely consented to resign the society of Mrs. Middleton ; and he records that, on a certain occasion, when the wind was inconveniently high, so as to interfere with the tranquil enjoy- ment of his pastoral voyage, "While I was endeavoring to comfort Mrs. Middleton, our little dog jumped upon her lap, as if fully impressed with the terror of the scene." Perhaps some of his readers may have thought that terror was not exactly the feature which predominated in the scene; and that the spectacle of a " bishop" comforting his wife in a gale of wind, * Ch. xvi., p. 481. 21 306 CHAPTER III. \ with such assistance, might justify other emotions. But Mr. Le Bas would reprove this levity, for he considers " the progress of the first Protestant Bishop of India a subject of high and solemn interest."* Even his enthusiasm, however, will allow that men who are familiar with the Acts of the Apostles, and the annals of Catholic missionaries, may reasonably contemplate Dr. Middleton's journey with less awe than himself; and perhaps even be pardoned if they see in it nothing more impressive than the harmless excursion of a highly respectable gentleman, accustomed to "struggle for social precedence," who deemed himself underpaid with five thousand a year and perquisites, and who carried with him wherever he went a wife, a "little dog," and whatever appendages such companions demand. f If it be true, as Lord Yalentia intimates, that " Hindoos are much swayed by external appearances," we may easily estimate the impression which Dr. Middleton and his associates must have produced upon them. " Brahminism," says the censo- rious Mr. Kaye, " stood not aghast at the sight of the lawn sleeves of the bishop. "J What its disciples, who are some- what exacting in their notions of what is becoming in teachers of religion, thought of his manner of life, is nowhere recorded ; though we may perhaps infer their secret judgment from the remarks of their princes to Heber, to whom they continually oifered shawls and veils, with the courteous explanation, " that they would probably be useful in his Zenana." The first " bishop" whom England sent to India does not, then, appear to have produced all the results expected from him. " We do not know," says an historian, alluding to his labors, "that the diffusion of our religion among Hindus, Mahometans, or Parsees, has been very materially accelerated."^ Nor need this surprise us, when we find that he utterly failed even to remedy the confusion and disorder among his co-religionists. "All the Protestants," he tells us himself, <% Wesleyans, Baptists, and American Puritans, act together with tolerable cordiality, and the clergy countenance them, so far as they can, without making improper concessions. In this manner the work is going on, and otherwise it would not go on at all."|| "One of the early sources of disquietude to the first Anglican prelate in India," we are told by General Parlby, * Ch. vi., p. 200. f " Ed e un tal uomo che deve predicare il Mistero della Croce e le vertfc del Vangelo? Quale derisione! quale impostura! quale follie!" Ventura, La Hdleze della Fede, tome ii., p. 97. \ Administration of the E. I. Company, p. 646. History of British India, by Charles Macfarlane, ch. xxx., p. 375 (1857). 1 Life, ch. xii., p. 347. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 307 arose out of a demand by the Presbyterians "for the alternate use of the cathedral in Calcutta."* The last of them, Dr. Cot- ton, appears to have given the Presbyterians even more than they asked for. " In India," an Anglican society was lately informed by Mr. Beresford Hope, " the Bishop of Calcutta has ordered his chaplains to allow the Presbyterian chaplains to go shares in their chapels, "t Such has been the progress since Dr. Middleton's time. It is true he deplored " the discordant tenets of the mission- aries," and apparently not without reason. " Next to the sus- picion that the Europeans are generally destitute of all real religion," says his biographer, " the grand impediment the Gospel has to contend with among idolaters arises from the multiplicity of shapes under which our visible religion presents itself to their notice. Their observation uniformly is, that they should think much better of Christianity, if there were not quite so many different kinds of it"$ Dr. Middleton and his successors were not able to afford the heathen much assistance in this difficulty, by diminishing the number of conflicting sects whose existence provoked their comments, and perhaps justified their contempt for the "visible religion" of their masters. " Romanism is one" says a writer whom we shall have to notice hereafter; "Mohamedism is one; and Pagan- ism is one ; but we are not one. And until we become one, the world will never be convinced " The prospects of the heathen world are, then, somewhat gloomy, as there is not yet much sign of Protestantism converging to unity ; and we shall find reason in the course of these pages for believing, that the manifold sects which it has generated are chiefly occupied, in all parts of the globe, in making the conversion of the heathen impossible. Failing in all other aims, they are only too successful in this.j " A large portion of the sterility of our missions," says Dr. Grant, " may be attributed to that discord which Christianity" he means Protestantism " exhibits in the very sight of the unbeliever." And he repeats the barren confession again and again. " Must there not arise," he asks, " a strong presumption in -the mind of an unbeliever against the Divine origin of that doctrine, or system, which cannot be * TJie Establishment of the Anglican Church in India, p 17. f Quoted in The Times, June G, 1861. i Life, ch. v.. p. 132. | Reed's Visit to the American Churches, vol. ii., p. 293. || Two centuries ago, a well-known Protestant writer, in a formal treatise on the conversion of the heathen, while admitting that the " disputationes et rixae inter Christianos" were one of the fatal fruits of the so-called Reformation, add- ed, " unde Christiani fcro prius deveniunt Gentiles, quam Gentiles Christian!." J. Hoornbeek, De Connersione Indorum ct Oentilium, lib. i., cap. i., p. 3 (1669) 308 CHAPTER III. clearly ascertained, or on which its upholders cannot unite ?" He quotes also the observation of a gentleman familiar with Indian missions, who told him : " I question whether any hut those who have come into contact with it as missionaries can realize its evil in a missionary form to the heathen."* Dr. Grant appears to forget that every one of these sects had been bred from the Church of England, and that it was she who created and then sent them to India. Her clergy also, as we shall see presently iu the case of Anglican bishops of Cal- cutta, are often the first to justify by their practice the very dissensions which officially they are supposed to condemn. Even in explaining to the educated heathen a phenomenon which he is sufficiently acute to notice and appreciate, they use such language as the following : " I will not conceal," says Dr. Eowland Williams, in a book intended to assist the Hindoo in approaching to Christianity, "nor need you wonder, that with a general agreement among Christians as to the essentials of their faith, there are points as to some of its aspects variously disputed"f and it is hoped by such admissions to conceal from the subtle pagan the real character of Protestantism ! Dr. Williams cannot but know that that form of religious opinion has been before the heathen for half a century, and that he has already judged it, as we shall see again and again in future chapters of this work. In India, Protestantism has dis- played life and energy only in the ceaseless conflicts of its various sects. As far back as 1813, Mr. Marsh declared before the House of Commons: " Provided India is supplied with a plentiful assortment of sects Calvinists, Unitarians, Methodists, Moravians, &c. no one seems to feel the least solicitude whether the Christianity that is to be taught there be the genuine language of its Author, or the dream of mysticism and folly."^ " If they were to succeed," said Major Scott Waring, who saw them multiplying on every side, " we should have as many different sects as there are castes among the Hindoos." Fortunately they have failed ; but far from diminishing in numbers, we find a celebrated writer still noticing, in 1858, " the itinerant expounders of the faith, who, to the great astonishment of the Asiatics, present themselves in the most various forms as the ministers of many different churches, yet all claiming to be of one religion !' | And in 1859, Mr. Russell once more deplores, that " the differences between Christian * Bampton Lectures, app., p. 316. f Christianity and Hindotism, by Rowland Williams, B.D. ; p. 507 (1856). } Speech of Charles Marsh, Esq., M.P., July 1, 1813. 4 Observations, &c., p. 45. | The Times, 21st October, 1858. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 309 missionaries do not present a very encouraging front to the Hindoo or Mussulman would-be neophyte;" while another writer, who spent more than a quarter of a century in India, declares that " the rancor and bitterness" displayed by the various Protestant sects tawards each other " surpassed the fa- naticism of the Mussulmans at Hyderabad, and the violence of the Brahmins at Poonah."* We shall see the same melancholy spectacle exhibited in every part of the world, and everywhere with such disastrous results, that it is impossible to doubt that the emissaries whom Protestantism has dispatched to every land are only employed in increasing the perplexity, and rivet- ing the bonds, of the pagan, by convincing him of the earthly origin of all religions save his own. But to return to Dr. Middleton. Perhaps the only thing in connection with him which need excite our surprise, is the fact, which will always remain unexplained, that any one should have thought it necessary to write his life. The solitary inci- dent which Mr. Le Bas is able to record in two large volumes, is his establishment of a " college," which, he must have known, has proved a total failure ; and to which, as we shall presently learn, the Hindoos refuse to send their children, because its scholars invariably become atheists. Middleton proposed, as a bait to reluctant missionaries and professors, enormous salaries, which excited even in India such comments as the following : " The bishop's plan is a piece of worldly mechanism, construct- ed to attract qualified performers by a direct appeal to those feelings which regulate the choice of professions by the calcu- lations of interest."f The professors, it appears, were easily found, but Mr. Howard Malcolm assures us, in 1839, that "there have as yet never been more than ten or twelve students at a time. The salary of the principal is one thousand pounds per annum, and of the second teacher seven hundred pounds.";): And in 185T, exactly forty years after its foundation, M. de Yalbezen noticed on the spot that " the bishop's college is almost entirely abandoned ;" although, as Count de Warren observed, when he visited it in 1843, " it admits Christian children, wheth- er European or native."] But it is time to pass from Middleton to his successors. What- ever the later Anglican bishops in India may prove, they can hardly present fewer claims to our esteem than the first of their number. Towards the close of his career, when his wife's * Thirty Tears in India, by Major Bevan, vol. ii., ch. vii., p. 102. f Asiatic Journal, vol. ix., p. 339. I Travels in 8. Eastern Asia, vol. i., ch. i., p. 17. Les Anglais et I'Inde, par E. de Valbezen, ch. iii., p. 162. | L'Inde Anglaise, tome iii., ch. xii., p. 233. 310 CHAPTER III. health became a subject of anxiety to him, Mr. Le Bas relates, that " his terrors were aggravated by the circumstance that the loss of Mrs. Middleton would consign him. to a state of the most hopeless and appalling desertion. Without her, the world was, to his imagination, a scene of such dreariness and bereavement, that his heart sunk at the very thoughts of it."* "We can only suppose that he wished to show, by these ignoble words, that it is unreasonable to ask for apostolic gifts in an Anglican prelate. The indiscretion of biographers is proverbial ; but when Mr. Le Bas takes so much pains to reveal Middleton's real character, why does he still insist upon the world accepting him as a saint and a hero ? Of those who in succession filled the place which Middleton had now vacated, only one has left a name to posterity. We would speak with all tenderness of the amiable and accom- plished Heber ; and if we might view him simply as a gentle- man, a poet, and a scholar, would willingly add our wreath to the laurel crown which popular sympathy has awarded him. But we have to estimate him, not as a man, but as a missionary, and may not concede to purely natural gifts the homage which is due only to such as are supernatural. It has often been remarked that Heber, whose poetical tem- per was inflamed in early life with tales of oriental romance, and to whose imagination India was a land "rich with barbaric gold," was singularly deficient even in such spirituality as his form of religion encourages. In the three ample volumes which disclose the secret thoughts of his heart, and record the daily coimnunings of his soul, there is hardly so much as a solitary exhibition of devout and Christian feeling. He writes always as a refined and speculative tourist, never as a missionary, nor as one to whom the contemplation of Divine truths was famil- iar. " His published Travels in India," says a Protestant writer, " contain little or nothing to indicate piety ;"f and in this remark there is no undue severity. On the other hand, it is refreshing to read volumes in which there is absolutely no trace of. the nauseous phraseology which is usually the staple of such compositions. You will find nothing in Heber about "calls" which he never received, and "conversions" which never took place. Perhaps there are only two men in the whole army of Protestant missionaries, Heber and Living- stone, whose pages are unsullied by the dismal jargon of cant, and whose manly natures disdained to sacrifice to the comic divinities of methodism, the Pan and Silenus of the conven- ticle. * Life, vol. ii., ch. xxvii., p. 309. f Howard Malcolm, vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 77. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 311 Heber seems, like Middleton, to have not only exerted no influence whatever upon the heathen world outside his commu- nion, but to have contended in vain with the disorders which prevailed within it. "Instances of actual conversion to Chris- tianity," he says, " are as yet very uncommon ;" or, as he ex- presses it a little later, " few indeed in number, but enough to show that the thing is not impossible."* "The Roman Catho- lics," he confesses, " are considerably more numerous ;" and then, under the tyranny of prejudices from which even his emi- nent qualities did not exempt him, he tries to defame their character. Sometimes this petty and ungenerous temper was rebuked even by men of his own religion, and one example de- serves mention. Heber had stooped to sneer at a Catholic mis- sionary, venerated even by Protestants as the very " type of a Christian minister," and drew upon himself this rebuke : " Bishop Heber seems scarcely to have done justice to this excellent man, in ascribing his popularity to the smoothness of his manner, and his tact in administering to the self-love of his associates."f Of his ow r n position among the rival sects which, in the very presence of the heathen, were waging perpetual war with each other, he often speaks bitterly. " Our chief hindrances," he says, " are some of those who are professedly engaged in the same work with ourselves, the Dissenters. These are indeed very civil, and affect to rejoice at our success ; but they, some how or other, cannot help interfering, and setting up rival schools close to ours; and they apparently find it easier to draw off our pupils than to look out for fresh and more distant fields of exertion and enterprise."^; Yet Heber's own clergy seem to have instructed their rivals in the very arts which he reproved. The twentieth report of the " Calcutta Auxiliary Baptist Missionary Society" complains, with apparent reason, that when they " dismissed a native preacher for gross immorality, the missionaries of the Propaga- tion Society received him into the Church of England ;" and in our own day, a Presbyterian writer reproaches " the frequent laxity of some of the Church of England missions," on the same ground, that they eagerly receive converts dismissed from other sects on account of their irregularities.! The inconvenience, however, of the continual migration of "converts" from one sect to another appears at last to Lave instigated one Anglo-Indian * Heber's Indian Journal, vol. ii., ch. xxviii., p. 203 (1843). f Asiatic Journal, vol. xv., p. 150. | Vol. ii., Correspondence, p. 189. Asiatic Journal, vol. xxxvi., p. 8. II Mackenzie, Six Years in India, vol. iii., ch. iv., p. 145. 312 CHAPTER III. prelate to " discourage all attempts at prosely tism from any other Protestant Church."* The Lutheran clergy appear to have given Heber a world of trouble, from which he could not well escape as long as they were actually employed, as they are to this day, as ministers of the Church of England. In the capital itself he must have witnessed strange sights; for even "the Mission Church at Cal- cutta was then occupied by the Rev. Mr. Ringeltaube, a clergy- man of the Lutheran Church, who had been sent to India under the patronage of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowl- edge !"f Heber had, therefore, no power to correct, nor even any right to rebuke them; and though he professed to be indig- nant with some of the English clergy for openly communicating with heretics, he actually allowed, when reproached by a Luther- an minister, that he was perfectly ready to imitate them. " Were I to return to Germany," he wrote apologetically to the Rev. Deocar Schmidt, "I would again, as before, humbly and thank- fully avail myself of the preaching and sacramental ordinances of the Lutheran Evangelical Church.";); He seems, therefore, to have anticipated that remarkable theory, more fully developed in our own day, which makes Church communion a question of geography, and condemns in one province as an act of schism what in the next it approves as Christian and Catholic. It was intolerable for Lutherans to oppose Anglicanism at Calcutta, but it would have been equally criminal in Anglicans to oppose Lutheranism at Berlin. We can hardly be surprised if in their conflict with the Protestant bishops of India the Lutherans always triumphed. It appears, then, that the English religion failed, as complete- ly under Heber as it did under Middleton, either to attract the heathen without, or to quiet the divisions within its fold. It would, however, have been something if the Protestant bishops had been able at least to inspire their own clergy with more generous feelings than they had been wont to display before their episcopal rulers arrived. Even this they failed to effect. Long after both Heber and Middleton had left this world, arid bid an eternal farewell to its brief honors and emoluments, the un- scrupulous acquisitiveness of the Anglican clergy was a jest in Indian Society, so that even the gravest and most religious statesmen of that country thought it a fair subject of remark. " Owen, the late Chaplain General, died last year," 1825, says Lord Teignmouth, " worth more than one hundred thousand pounds. I speak positively as to the amount, on the authority * Asiatic Journal, vol. xxxvi., p. 275 (1841). f Pearson's Memoirs of Buchanan, vol. i., p. 147. j Correspondence, p. 249. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 313 of one who went to Doctors' Commons and procured a copy of his will."* And this, though an extreme, was not a solitary case. " It would seem," says a writer who has already given us valuable information, " that at the close of the last century the Company's chaplains were a money-making race of men. There is a curious entry in the journal of Mr. Kiernander, the old Danish missionary, running in these words : ' The Rev. Mr. Blanshard is preparing to go to England upon an American ship in about a fortnight, worth five lakhs of rupees. Mr. Owen two and a half lakhs. Mr. Johnson three and a half lakhs/ An average annual saving, if Mr. K. is to be trusted, of two thou- sand live hundred pounds! These churchmen must have de- voted themselves to something more lucrative than the cure of souls, and the burial of the dead. What it was may readily be conjectured. "f We have no further aid in determining to what kin'd of traffic Mr. Kaye's conjecture alludes, but may perhaps assume that it was nothing more discreditable than the pursuits condemned in the caustic apothegm of Bernoiilli : "Tout ce qui va dans 1'Inde, militaire, medecin, missionaire, est marchand, ou le devient /"; or the equally emphatic statement of Haafner, " Personne ne part pour 1'Inde que dans 1'intention de faire fortune." But this point, as illustrating the character of Prot- estant missionaries, deserves further notice. " For some years," observes a great Indian authority, " it was a common practice of many of the missionaries in India to talk of the hardships of their situation, the sacrifices they had made in leaving their family, friends, and native land, thus creating very erroneous impressions upon people in England. Now, I believe, for the most part, that those who come to India as mis- sionaries are far better off in means, situation of life, and general comfort, than they would have been in England." After other remarks, in which he openly ridicules their pretended " devo- tion to the cause" as a motive, in any degree, for coming to India, and observing that u their labor is infinitely less than it would have been in England," he continues thus : " The clergy of the Church of England, too, will not, I think, refuse to allow that their situation has, with few exceptions, been improved by their appointment to India.' . . . Those of the lowest origin usually give themselves the greatest airs. This affectation is, however, on the wane ; men have begun to find out that no ' one believes their pretensions."! * Life of Lord Teignmouth, vol. ii., p. 465. I Kaye's Administration of the E. I. G., p. 630. I Description de 1'Inde, tome iii., Supplement, p. 105. t Voyages dans la Peninsule Occidentale de llnde, par M. J. Haafner, tome i., . 8 Notes on Indian Affairs, by the Hon. F. J. Shore, vol. ii., p. 470. 314 CHAPTER III. It is, perhaps, not surprising that these pretensions should excite derision in India, where the true position of the so-called missionaries is perfectly appreciated. They are not ignorant, for example, that besides the large salaries which they receive, the " Calcutta Diocesan Additional Clergy Society require the residents of the station,-' i.e.) the English, "to pay one hundred and fifty pounds for the clergyman's passage and outfit, and to deposit two hundred and fifty pounds, in order to send the clergyman back to England in the event of failure of health. They are also required to build a parsonage, and keep it in repair."* Such are the "sacrifices to which the* Anglican clergy are subject in India. Nor can we believe that, as time goes on, they learn to manifest a more apostolic character. A letter, written from India to a mother, in 1858, by a clergyman's wife, and commu- nicated to the writer of these pages, contains the following, among similar examples : " Dr. shirks work so very much, and pretends weakness so much. It is very disgusting to see a man like him, the picture of health, pretending weakness to shirk work, yet able to amuse himself, and go to large dinner- parties almost every night. You would be shocked at the style of clergy out here. It seems to me that they remain for the pay, and put aside conscience as regards work. Money , money! is the cry here with almost every one." This lady adds: "Thank God, my darling," meaning her husband, "is not of this sort." The progress of time, as we have said, does not appear to correct these infirmities. In 1859, we find Dr. Cotton, the Prot- estant Bishop of Calcutta, consoling his clergy under the dis- dainful reproaches of the Calcutta Review, whose censures, he observes, " were circulated as a tract, in which the missionaries are identified with the aristocratic and exclusive English, 4 riding in proud vehicles, indulging in costly and refined ob- servances, with doors besieged by pampered menials.' ' : Such rebukes, Dr. Cotton assures his colleagues, are clearly unreason- able ; and that he might furnish them with a peremptory refutation of all such peevish criticisms, he suggests to them a convenient and effective reply: "You may answer," he says, " that asceticism is no part of the Gospel system"\ * Colonial Church Chronicle, vol. v., p. 305. f Primary Charge of the Lord Bishop of Calcutta, quoted in the Overland Bombay Times, November 26, 1859. Let it be permitted, before we proceed, to contrast the words of a true Christian priest with those of this Anglican prelate on the same subject. The reader will judge which sound like an echo from Heaven. " There were five spiritual presences in the Cave of Bethlehem. They were Poverty, Abandonment, Rej ection, Secrecy, and Mortification. They started with the Infant Jesus from the Cave, and they went with Him to the Tomb. They MISSIONS IN INDIA. 315 It is consoling to turn from these ignoble pictures to the con- templation of another class of missionaries, whom Providence has employed the same witnesses to describe. Mr. Malcolm reluctantly confesses of the Catholic clergy, " they are men of good morals, and live far more humbly than other missionaries ;" while he adds that " their stipend is twenty pounds per annum." And even this revenue, which would have appeared a revolt- ing absurdity to Dr. Middleton or Dr. Cotton, is more than they sometimes receive ; for another writer recounts with amaze- ment that " the missionaries manage to live and clothe them- selves on one shilling per day. Though there are sixty-two Europeans employed, and many churches to repair, and endless lawsuits to undertake, the whole mission at Madura," with its hundred and fifty thousand Catholics, "only costs one thousand five hundred pounds per annum !"* Why should these writers be astonished that there are still in the world men who have ceased to " mind earthly things," and w r ho can affirm, as St. Peter did, without either shame or ostentation, "silver and gold have I none?" The apostolic missionary is content with the re\vards which his Master knows how to give him in secret ; it is " the hireling, whose own the sheep are not," who bargains, like a merchant, for salary and pension, before he will lift up his voice to the heathen ; and who, like the established clergy in India, "after ten years is entitled to the half-pay of a major, after seven years to that of a captain. "f The world exhibits, in its various scenes, many a striking contrast; but what con- trast does earth manifest to us like that which exists between the Catholic and the Protestant missionary? It is probable that Heber suffered many a pang in the society to which his office introduced him ; but though his refinement are stern powers, and their visages unlovely, and their voices harsh, and their company unwelcome to the natural man. . . . The companionship of the Beasts, and the room they had as it were lent Him to be born in, betokened His ex- ceeding Poverty. The Manger was the type of Abandonment. The refuse Straw, on which He lay, and which perhaps Joseph gathered from under the feet of the cattle, well expressed that rejection wherewith men have visited and will visit Him and His Church through all generations till the end " There was something, therefore, in these five things, which expressed the character of the Incarnate Word. They portrayed His human sanctity. They were a prophecy of the Three-and-Thirty Years. They foreshowed the spirit and genius of Ills Church in all ages. They reversed the j udgments of the world, and were new standards according to which the last Universal Judgment was to be measured. They . . were in themselves a revelation. . . Even now, what are all heresies, which concern holy living, but a dishonoring of them ? Asceticism is part of the ignominy of the Cross ; and modern heathenism turns from it with the same disdain which the elder heathenism of Greece and Rome showed for it in the days of the persecuting Ca?sars." F. Faber, Bethlehem, ch. iii., p. 145. * The Theory and Practice of Caste, ch. v., p. 1UO. \ The Wonders of Elora. ch. xix., p. 489. 316 CHAPTER III. was often wounded, his spiritual nature endured the trial without a shock. It would be easy to show how little claim this amiable man, whose wretched death excites no remark on the part of his biographers, had to the supernatural character ; but the evidence would be both painful and superfluous. He does not, indeed, affect any other character than that which was really his own. He was a man of cultivated mind and refined tastes, but he hardly pretended to be an apostle. When he goes on a visitation tour, he says, with a simplicity which was free from all affectation, " I left, with a heavy heart, my dear wife and children, for the visitation of Madras and the South of India."* The world is reasonable, and does not expect an Anglican bishop to manifest any higher feeling than this. He may be, and often is, courteous, liberal, and upright ; but St. Paul's advice he cannot follow, for he hungers after the same earthly pleasures which other men crave; and though Holy Scripture points to a loftier state, and promises special rewards to those who embrace it, his ambition is content with a lower lot. To Heber the life of St. Paul, of St. Francis, of de Britto, and their brethren, would have been simply intolerable for a single week. He was an excellent specimen of an English gentleman, but he was no more an apostolic missionary, dead to self and the world, than the late Duke of Wellington, or the Speaker of the House of Commons. It is characteristic of the unreality of a certain class of Anglican writers, that one of their principal authorities could venture to say, " Men like Henry Marty n and Heber, Rome would have canonized long since."f Rome, as this reviewer calls the Church, would have declined to employ such men even as " ostiarii." There is perhaps no need to trace further the succession of obscure names which have been connected with the Protestant bishoprics in India. The life of the last, for they have all found biographers, has lately been written by his son-in-law, and is quite as instructive as any which preceded it. Dr. Daniel Wilson does not appear to have been happier than Heber or Middleton in his dealings with Hindoos, but his experience among his own countrymen exactly resembled theirs. " Sad, sad," he says, in almost his first letter from India, " has been the unsettling of the diocese since Bishop Middleton !" in whose time, as we have seen, it was sufficiently deplorable. Dr. Wilson seems to have followed Heber's practice rather than Middleton's in his intercourse with other Protestant sects. * Journal, vol. ii., ch. xxviii., p. 172. f Christian Remembrancer, October, 1859, p. 375. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 317 " My heart," he tells Bridgman, an American missionary, " is with all of every Church" an expansiveness of sympathy which would have surprised St. Paul. He was afflicted by " the overflowings of infidelity," and particularly by the cir- culation of " a large edition of Paine's Age of Reason, printed by some who professed and called themselves Christians, for the perversion of the educated and inquiring natives." He consoled himself, however, as Lord Macaulay used to relate when in a cheerful mood, with all the luxuries which wealth could command. " The palace was completely and handsomely furnished," says his son-in-law, with an emotion worthy of the subject; and he spent four thousand five hundred pounds during the first six months of his office " a close carriage with Venetians," and " a light barouche," swelling the items of the upholsterer's bill.* He did not convert any Hindoos, probably because they never heard of him. Before we conclude our particular notice of the Anglican Church in India, the final results of whose operations will be discussed presently, it may be well to add a few examples of the estimate formed of her character, both by the heathen and her own members. Our first witness is a Brahmin, whose description of that well-known " service" which has been said to resemble " a funeral ceremony over a defunct religion," exhibits the impres- sion which it would not unnaturally produce on the mind of an acute and educated heathen. " Curiosity once led me into one of these churches, where a young man dressed in white began the performance of the ceremony. Had it not been for the carelessness of his manner, I should have been tempted to believe that he was engaged in offering prayers to the Deity. .... The ceremonies of the day were concluded by an elderly priest, in a black robe, who read, in a languid and monotonous tone, from a small book which he held in his hand, a sort of exhortation, the truths contained in which seemed equally indifferent to himself and to his audience, "f The Brahmin who drew this picture could not possibly foresee that a grave English traveller would one day produce an exactly similar one of " the fashionable church in Calcutta." Let the reader judge whether the aspect which Anglicanism presented to the Hindoo in 1855 was likely to attract his veneration. " On looking round the church I was astonished to find that the men who were laboring at the punkahs were the only * Life, of Daniel Wilson, &c., by Rev. Josiah Bateman, vol. i., ch. xii., pp 317, 320, 325, 331 (1860). f Hamilton's Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, vol i., p. 91, 5th edition. 318 CHAPTER III. natives in it! After the glowing accounts I had read in Eng- land and Ceylon of the success of missionary exertions in India, I was naturally astonished at this, and looked and looked again in the vain hope of discovering some quarter of the church set apart for neophytes and proselytes. No, there was no such thing." He then describes the service, and finally adds, " Before the conclusion of the sermon the church reminded me of Hogarth's picture of the Sleeping ' Congregation ; one striking difference, however, there was in Hogarth's picture the clerk, at least, is wide awake ; in the fashionable Calcutta church the clerk was fast asleep. All around were to be seen closed eyes, and heads leaning back as softly as hard rails and wooden ledges would permit ; here and there an energetic snorer. ... It was truly a lamentable, and, at the same time, a strange sight. Altogether, a more truly melancholy spectacle than this outrageous burlesque of devotion it would not have been easy to parallel elsewhere. To judge by the fashionable Calcutta church, religion was a mere ceremonial mockery an ingenious contrivance for passing away one day in the week in strange contrast with the others."* Another respectable English writer relates his experience in these words : u Were it not for the necessity which exists for the presence of a clergyman for the performance of the civil rites ordained by the canons of the Church, many of the chaplains might as well be in England as in India."f "I am of the number of those," says an Indian official in 1843, " who were opposed to the commencement of the new cathedral in India, and for reasons which appear to me insuper- able, that out of the six churches connected with the established religion at present in Calcutta, one only, the old one, has any thing approaching to a regular and full congregation. "J This was thirty years after they had tried their final remedy of introducing " bishops." Finally, a Protestant missionary makes the following almost incredibie report : " The state of religion is very low. I attended most of the principal Protestant places of worship and by actual enumeration found the largest audience not to exceed two hundred and fifty persons. Several of them were not more than one- third that number. " If this be, as it has been from the first, the aspect which the English religion presents to the Hindoos, we cannot be sur- * Tropical Sketches, by William Knighton, A.M., p. 196. f Modern India, by Henry H. Spry, M.D., vol. i., ch. v., p. 196. \ The Stranger in India, by George W. Johnson, Esq., Advocate of the Supreme Court at Calcutta, vol. i., p. 297. Howard Malcolm, vol ii., ch. i., p. 35. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 319 prised to learn, as we shall do immediately, that the latter greatly prefer their own; or rather, that they do not believe the nglish have any religion at all an opinion which we shall find to be universal among all oriental communities. It appears that one energetic Englishman, however, became himself an object of worship to a company of Shanars; but even in this extreme case they still contrived to manifest their critical appre- ciation of the British character, since " the offerings presented at his tomb. were spirits and cigars."* On the other hand, they easily discriminate, like the heathen all over the world, the dif- ference between Protestants and Catholics. " You call your- selves Christian," the Hindoos say, as we have already heard ; " so do the Roman Catholics, who abound in India. They daily frequent their churches, fast and pray, and do many penances ; the English alone appear unconcerned about an event of the greatest importance." Mr. Kaye ventures to quote these strik- ing words from Mr. Forbes, and adds this comment upon them : " The natives of India marvelled whether the British acknowl- edged any God."f If we turn to the volumes published by Mr. Forbes, we find that experienced writer recording this instructive fact: "I have been asked by many natives of India, whether we really believed the truth of our own Scriptures ?" and he justifies their inquiry by adding, a little later, that it was impossible to deny u the fatal tendency to infidelity among the Europeans in India, es- pecially the younger part of the community. ": Mr. Walpole also admits, and appears to illustrate by his own example, the instability of Protestant opinions in pagan lands, when he says, u Living among heathens, insensibly one learns to forget one's own faith, while one despises theirs." OTHER PROTESTANT MISSIONS. We would willingly omit to notice in detail the other Prot- estant bodies which have sent emissaries to India, but there are two or three of them which- must, in conclusion, be briefly re- viewed, and especially one, both because its operations have been on a larger scale than those of others, and because its agents have imprudently indulged in more vaunting language. The sect of the Baptists claims to have outstripped its rivals in * Kaye's Administration of the E. I. G., p. 652. | Christianity in India, ch. iv., p. 90. ; Oriental Memoirs, by James Forbes, F.R.S., vol. iii., ch. xxviii., p. 82, and oh. xxxi., p. 185. The Ansayrii, &c., by the Hon F. Walpole, vol. iii., ch. xiii., p. 318. 320 CHAPTER III. success ; we are obliged, therefore, to inquire in what that suc- cess consists. The principal scene of the Baptist mission appears to have been Serampore, where they erected a college, and endeavored to act on the native mind by means of education. " Up to 1829, no less a sum than twenty-one thousand eight hundred and thirty-eight pounds had been expended on the college."* Apparently tiiis expenditure had not been too accurately pro- portioned to the means at their disposal, for in 1837, by their own account, " they were sinking into debt."f But all their operations were of the same ambitious kind. At Calcutta they had a printing establishment which " cost upwards of twenty thousand pounds.";): It was from these two places that they deluged India with thousands of Bibles and tracts, each more wretchedly mistranslated than its predecessor; for although Dr. Carey, one of their most conspicuous members, received a salary of eight hundred pounds a year, " not as a missionary, but merely as a professor of Sanscrit and Bengali," his linguistic qualifications appear to have been of an ambiguous kind ; and w r e are told by a Protestant missionary that after many years of practice, during which he preached to the Hindoos whenever he could induce them to listen to him, he made the mortifying discovery " that he was not understood !"|| Another writer furnishes a more minute account of his labors, and one which is too curious to be omitted. After noticing that Carey had the courage to issue translations of the Bible " in no fewer than thirty-live languages," a very few of which he knew imperfectly, and the rest not at all, Dr. Brown says : "It is painful to think that so much labor and expense should have been thrown away nearly in vain. Had Dr. Carey produced even one good trans- lation, he would have rendered a greater service to the cause of missions than he has done by all his versions put together. His versions generally are now given up as of no great value."!" But if the Baptists, who, according to their own account, were rivalling the Apostles in their labors and triumphs, and who were constantly sending to England such reports as, " the * India and Europe Compared, by Lieut.-general Briggs, F.R.S., ch. vi., . 167. f Asiatic Journal, vol. xxiv., p. 231 ; New Series. | Brown's History of the Prop, of Christianity, &c., vol. ii., p. 67. Apology for the Christian Missions to India, by Andrew Fuller, p. 43. " Dr. Bryce received a civil appointment, objectionable in every point of view." A Voice from India, by Captain J. B. Seely, p. 102. H Howard Malcolm, vol. ii., p. 2G5. 1 Hist, of Prop, of Christianity, vol. ii., p. 71. Mr. Weitbreclit gives nearly the same account of them. Missions in Bengal, ch. v., p. 200. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 321 Church is breaking forth on the right hand and on the left,'' and others equally veracious,* failed in the work of trans- lation, the general character of their mission seems to have been on a par with their literary productions. " A more un- happy state of things than what existed in the mission family at Serampore," says the historian of Protestant missions, " it is not easy to conceive;" and then he explains that they were all fighting together, and, as usual, retorting texts of Scripture. "Marshman," he says, was "jealous of any young man of talent," and " they made the new comers uncomfortable, with the view of getting rid of them, and making them willing to go elsewhere !" They were always quarrelling about money, and their historian adds, "We do not know a more melancholy chapter in the history of missions than is to be found in the various pamphlets connected with the Serampore controversy. "f The Marshman referred to in this account, is the person whom Rammohun Roy used to perplex, by asking him how he would, on his principles, argue with a Catholic, a task to which the shrewd Hindoo seems to have suspected he was hardly equal. And he had some reason for the suspicion, since he was personally acquainted with the misadventures of certain Baptist preachers in India, and particularly with the " Rev. William Adams, missionary at Serampore,'' who, as Dr. Wolff relates, "entered into controversy with Rammohun Roy, and the result was, that he was overcome by his arguments, and the poor man denied his God and Saviour, and is now a most decided infidel and scoffer at Divine revelation."^; He might also have known the Rev. Mr. Thomas, who, after a somewhat agitated career in England, joined the Baptists in India, where, as they reported a little prematurely, " a Divine blessing crowned his efforts." He himself, however, tejls us : " Whilst I was destitute of support for myself or my family, one of my relations," apparently he had married an Indian woman, " offered to save me from perishing, on condition of my bowing down to an idol. After some hesitation 1 complied, but I am still attached to the Christian religion."! And now a word about their so-called converts. We can only take our information from themselves, or other Protestants who knew them. "Their converts," says Mr. Bowen, "are accused of wallowing in every crime that degrades human nature ; r ^f * Periodical Accounts from the Serampore Mission, passim. f Dr Brown, vol. ii., pp. 63-65. j Wolff's Journal, p. 44. Report of the Committee of the Baptist Missionary Society, October 7, 1819. I History of the Missionary Societies, by Rev. T. Smith, vol. i., p. 328. ^[ Missionary Incitement and Hindoo Demoralization, by John Bowen, p. 27. 322 CHAPTER Til. and we shall presently hear the Baptists admitting that the accusation was perfectly just. But unfortunately this is not all. "In their correspondence," continues Mr. Bowen, "it abundantly appears that they are no strangers to the existence of vicious practices, even in their own society. The crimes of the Hindoos are depicted with a virulence altogether un- equalled, while those of their own followers are softened into 4 imprudencies, fallings off, irregularities, and unlovely intima- cies.' These are the terms by which fornication and adultery are noticed if the parties happen to be the brethren"* "The converts made by the Baptist mission," writes another ardent Protestant a few years later, " are the most wretched creatures imaginable. Under the Baptist system all is dreary. The convert receives the word only, and is left to grope his way in the dark over obstacles which not one in a hundred surmounts."f Rammohun Roy, whom Colonel Macdonald with military ardor calls " another Luther,"^: and the Unita- rians claim as " a Hindoo convert to the Christian faith," says of the same class, " They are not only idle, debauched reprobates, but gross railers against the truths of Christianity ; and are not less loud in accusing the missionaries of deluding them by false promises, than the former are in stigmatizing their own proselytes as i enemies to the cross of Christ.' " We have now only to add, in the last place, that the Baptists themselves admitted the fact. " A great part of the Christian converts," says Rammohun Roy, petitioned Dr. Middleton after this manner. They complained that they had been " seduced by Dr. Carey with the hope of support and protection," but that after having " become objects of contempt and derision to their Hindoo brethren, they experience the fallacy of those promises by which they were deluded,"! and beg his interfer- ence. An inquiry was instituted, and Dubois, who was on the spot, relates its issue. " About two years before my departure from India, the Protestant missionaries of Serampore found themselves obliged to expel from their service all their new converts, whom they had employed in their printing establish- ment, in order to furnish them with the means of subsistence." Their own explanation offered to Middleton was this: "They had been forced to take this step, because these wretches, after being made Christians, became so vicious and intemperate, that, * P. 34. He adds, in a note, that " these milky expressions frequently occur in missionary correspondence" (1823). f Fifteen Years in India, by an Officer in His Majesty's Service, p. 363 (1823). i The Civilization and Instruction of the Natives of India, p. 24. ^ Defence of the Precepts of Jesus, by Rammohun Koy, p. 74. 1 P. 76. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 323 they were afraid the example of their daily scandals would ruin all their pagan workmen"* In 1859, that we may trace their history up to the present hour, we have once more a specimen of Baptist converts, which may remind us of the Anglican neophytes in China. Mr. Lang relates in that year that an educated native, holding a govern- ment office, assured him that all the nominal Protestants, of whatever sect, "only assume Christianity in the hope of tem- poral advantage and preferment, arid fling aside their newly put on faith, and laugh and scoif at your credulity the moment they find their hope frustrated. I could give you at least a hundred instances, but one will suffice. Not long ago a Mus- sulman, named Ally Khan, was converted by Mr. Jones, a missionary in Calcutta, and shortly after his conversion obtained an appointment, with a salary of a hundred rupees a month, in the Baptist Missionary Society. Here he contrived to embezzle sixteen hundred rupees, for which offence he was indicted in the Supreme Court, found guilty, and sentenced to a year's im- prisonment in the Calcutta jail. On hearing the sentence he exclaimed : 'In the name of the devil, is this the reward of re- nouncing my religion ? Farewell, Christianity ! from this hour I am a Moslem again.' "f Such have been the boasted missionary successes of the Bap- tists. And it is from their co-religionists that we learn the facts which they themselves long attempted to conceal. " The Bap- tist missionaries of Serampore," says Rammohun Roy in a letter to the Rev. H. Wade, " always give a flat denial to any one who expresses the slightest doubt of their success, but the Bap- tist missionaries at Calcutta are sincere enough to acknowledge publicly, that after a painful toil of six years the number of their converts does not exceed four ; while the Independents, whose resources far exceed those of the Baptists, acknowledge that in seven years they have only made one proselyte."^: " In looking back on the Serampore mission," says Dr. Brown, in spite of his Protestant sympathies, " it is impossible not to be struck with the fact, how much the results fell short of the great expectations which were long entertained of it. Nearly every department has proved a failure. It would almost seem as if God had inscribed on the Serampore mission, ' I will stain the pride of all glory.' " Only two examples, one American, the other German, shall be added. Both are recorded by the missionaries themselves. * Asiatic Journal, vol. xix., p. 7G5. f Wanderings in India, by John Lang, p. 224. \. Quoted in the Annales, tome iv., p. 194. Hist. Prop. Christianity, vol. ii., p. 75. 324: CHAPTER III. In 1840, at Hubli, in the Southern Mahratta country, "hun- dreds and thousands declared themselves ready to become Chris- tians, if they could only dwell together in places of their own." u Such an invitation," continues the report, "was only too wel- come. So the missionaries founded two establishments, one at Maladamudra for the cultivators, and one at Bettigherri for the weavers." Thus far there was only motive for rejoicing. "But alas ! no sooner had the missionaries settled at these two places, than they had the great mortification of finding out that the whole of the movement was nothing more than a deep-laid fraudulent plan of a few cunning Hindu rogues, who, in this way, tried to take advantage of the inexperience of the mission- aries. For as soon as they found out that they could not obtain their real objects, they, together with all their followers, at once broke off all connection with the missionaries, and left the lat- ter alone in their newly-built houses." In 1845, the Basle Missionary Society commenced a mission in the Neilgherries. It was opened, they relate, by " Brother Weigle," reinforced by Brother Biihter, Brother Moerike, and Brother Metz. Being " received with great indifference," they tried the effect of a school, and paid one hundred boys, as they frankly avow, " ostensibly for working in the garden in the afternoon, but in reality for corning to school." Their next step was " the direct preaching of the glorious Gospel," which was so far successful, that, if we may be pardoned for repeating such words, "some received Jesus into their Pantheon, and called upon His as well as upon other names !" And this they call "success." They collected, however, as we might have anticipated, a great deal of money, and one gentleman seems to have left them all his property. Meanwhile, "there were several hopeful cases, but no real conversion or baptism took place," so that " at last it became a great trial of faith and patience to preach to the same well-known and apparently hopeless generation." At the end of 1856, their hopes revived, for " we were strength- ened by the arrival of Brother Kettle." This was evidently an auspicious event, and from that moment " the signs of the coming day were unmistakable." The day, however, was hardly^ to be distinguished from the night, so faint was the illumination which accompanied it. " In June, 1857, one man came forward and expressed a wish for baptism," which they gave him, and probably other gifts with it. "The sensation created among the hill-tribes by this baptism," they say, as if so unexpected an event justified impressive language, u was like an earthquake that shook the mountains from one end to the other." The mountains, however, brought forth nothing, and the earthquake quite as little, and their official narrative MISSIONS IN INDIA. 325 ends, in 1858, with these words: " Two souls have been given us !" In thirteen years, eminently prosperous in temporal affairs, the spiritual conquests of the whole company of Prot- estant missionaries amounted to two questionable disciples, of whose subsequent history their report furnishes no account. Four years later, in 1862, they were visited by Mr. Clements Markham, who scrutinized their work with lively sympathy, but only to report once more, "They have schools, and labor amongst the Badagas, but as yet with scarcely any success."* RESOURCES AND QUALIFICATIONS OF THE MISSIONARIES. We have now nearly completed our general review, and have only to state, in conclusion, what have been the final results, up to the present hour, of Protestant missions in India, including the operations of all the various sects, as they are revealed to us by their own agents and friends. The testimony is copious, and much of it may be deemed superfluous ; but in demon- strating facts which so many passions and prejudices conspire to pervert and misrepresent, it is expedient rather to err by excess than defect. We have seen, in the earlier part of this chapter, what was accomplished in India by Catholic missionaries, and what was the manner of their life. We have seen also some features of the contrast which exists between them and the Protestant emissaries, both in personal character and in the results of their labor. Before we complete that contrast, it is necessary to notice a special circumstance which constitutes an important preliminary distinction between the two classes, and the nature of which can be indicated in a few words. The Catholic missionaries, as we have seen, had to contend, from the first moment of their arrival, with difficulties and obstacles which can only be compared with those which the first Apostles of Christianity encountered and overcame. They were not masters and rulers in the country which they sought to evangelize, but helpless sojourners, and they came of a hated and despised race. They had no human aids, no political succor. During the latter part of their career they had even to endure the active hostility of other European tribes, who seized their prop- erty or converted their churches to profane uses, and who were known by the natives as lords and conquerors. It was only by the exercise of powers belonging to the supernatural order that * Travels in Peru and India, ch. xxii., p. 372. 326 CHAPTER III. they could hope to prevail. Yet their success we know was complete.* The English, on the contrary, have enjoyed every human ad- vantage which in such an enterprise it was possible to possess. "The prestige of the British name," says a Protestant mis- sionary, " attaches itself to the evangelist. He also meets with considerable attention and regard from the people, as being identified with the rulers of their country."f " In our Indian empire," observes another Protestant writer, "strong Civil power and a full representation of the constituent functions of our episcopal Church combine to promote and propagate the faith. "J And this obvious advantage has been often noticed. "England," says an American writer, "rules by her laws and arms over one hundred and fifty millions of pagans, and by her policy and influence over three hundred millions more, who are all accessible by Christian effort. As the result of all this, Christianity is placed in the most favorable position for making aggressions upon pagan idolatry. " In other words, England has long occupied with respect to India a more favorable posi- tion than the Church held towards the Roman world after three centuries < f bloody persecution. " There is no heathen country," Dr. Corrie used to say, "where a missionary can do so much good, with so little personal inconvenience."! In truth they hardly seem to encounter opposition. "All who have closely watched the feelings of the natives," they confess, " towards the missionaries and their work, know well, that their prominent characteristic is one of perfect indifference."^ " The temptations of the missionary here," one of their number confesses, " are not connected with hardships and self-denial ; the liberal allowance of the society and the state of the country forbid this."** " We have been masters of the whole penin- sula," observes a recent writer, "and our missionaries have enjoyed many advantages which of necessity arise from that circnmstance."ff But this is not all. In addition to the facilities derived from their connection with the dominant power, and the motives which * " Ubi vis naturalis est maxima, effectus autem minimus, et ubi vis natura- lis est minima, effectus autem niaximus, ejusmodi effectus a causa seu vi natural! repeti nulla ratione potest." Perrone, Prcelect. Theolog., t. 1, p. 344 ; Sterilitas Protestantism* in suis Missionibus apud Infideles. \ India and the Gospel, by Rev. William Clarkson, Lect. iv., p. 165. \ Christian Researches, &c., by Rev. William Jowett, p. 356. Dr Stephen Olin, Works, vol. ii., p. 347 (1853). | Quoted in Abolition of Female Infanticide in Ouzerat, by the Rev. John Cormack, M.A., ch. xiv., p. 306. t The Indian Mutiny, Thoughts and Facts, p. 26 (1857). ** Memoir of John Adam, late Missionary at Calcutta, p. 226. ff The Theory and Practice of Caste, ch. v., p. 119. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 327 powerfully influence the subject natives to accept the instruc- tions of their masters and patrons, we must reckon the vast material resources at their disposal. To build churches, to found colleges and schools, to endow orphanages, to recompense cate- chists and teachers with ample salaries, and to attract a sordid and impoverished race with the offer of assured subsistence, all this was as easy to Protestant as it was impossible to Catholic missionaries. "Twenty -two evangelical societies," we are told, " English, American, or German, (in 1859 they had increased to twenty-five]. supply the magnificent annual subsidy of one hundred and eighty -seven thousand pounds sterling,"* a sum which has subsequently attained far larger proportions. Twenty years ago, and the number is now greatly increased, " ninety chaplains cost the Company annually eighty-eight thousand pounds."f We have seen that in the province of Madura sixty- two Catholic missionaries consumed only one thousand five hundred pounds ; so that each Protestant cost exactly forty times as much as each Catholic missionary. The mere travelling expenses of Protestant missionaries already amounted, up to 1839, to two hundred and sixty thousand pounds.:): In 1851, the cost of the Anglican establishment alone was one hundred and twelve thousand pounds; and in the following year, a Pres- byterian writer boasted, with more truth than prudence, that the yearly expenditure of Protestant missions in India alone was " about one-fifth more than is annually raised for Papal missions in all parts of the world. '" In 1850, the government expended on the Anglo-Indian " Established" Church one hundred and seven thousand eight hundred and fifty-five pounds, though, as Protestants have told us, her clergy " might as well be in England as in India," as far as the interests of the natives are concerned; while they gave to the Catholics of India the sum of five thousand four hundred and sixty-seven pounds or twenty- four pounds less than they bestowed within the same twelve- month upon a single individual, the Protestant Bishop of Cal- cutta.! Well might a modern Catholic missionary, struggling with poverty amid thousands of Christians as poor as himself, exclaim, "The Protestants .expend immense sums, particularly in the South. How happy shall we be if, on our side, we can add to the flock of the Good Shepherd, not by purchasing * Les Anglais et L'Inde, par E. de Valbezen, ch. iii., p. 162. Mr. Mullens says, in 1854, " they spend nearly two hundred thousand a year." Missions ir t & India, introd., p. iii. Cf., India in 1858, by Arthur Mills, Esq., M.P. j- Howard Malcolm, vol. ii., p. 323. i Ibid., p. 279. & The Darkness and the Dawn in India, by John Wilson, D.D., F.R.S., p. 60 | Present Position of Catholics in India, by the liev. W. Strickland, p. 6. 328 CHAPTER III. Christians, but by establishing schools, employing catechists, and erecting chapels !"* If, however, there is so great a disproportion between the material resources which the two classes respectively command, it must be admitted that the contrast between the personal qual- ifications which they bring to their task is not less conspicuous. Fleury remarks, in his Memoirs on the Studies necessary for the Eastern Missions, that we discern " in the Fathers, and espe- cially in St. Clement of Alexandria and St. Austin, a wonderful knowledge of the poets, historians, and other heathen writers, and a perfect acquaintance with the errors which they wished to combat." We have seen how de' Nobili, de Britto, Beschi, and others, used the same exact knowledge in their apostolic con- flicts with the learned Hindoos. "An instance is often quoted," says an English writer, " of an Indian work which was praised by Voltaire, as containing the purest doctrines of Christianity, and which was, as he stated, many hundred years old. It has since been discovered to have been the production of an Italian missionary, and written in 1621 !"f Such attainments, how- ever, are deemed wholly superfluous by Protestant missionaries. So entirely void are even the Anglican clergy, who are probably a higher class than those of other sects, of this indispensable knowledge, that " Bishop Corrie used to say, that it was a mercy if a missionary did no harm in his first year.":): Dr. Bu- chanan also observes, " I have sometimes been ashamed to see the Christian missionary put to silence by the intelligent Brah- min.'^ And this is surely not surprising when we consider that the feeble arguments of the missionaries are usually employed in defence of detestable errors, condemned by the intuitional conscience even of pagans. How should the Hindoo not despise a religion of which he is told, by the highest Anglican author- ity in India, that " asceticism is no part?" "They look on all human existence," says Moehler, " as a period graciously vouch- safed by God for purification and purgation This idea is also stamped on the civil life of the Hindoo, and is particularly perceptible in the mutual relations of the several castes." And they perceive in their Protestant teachers, not only the meanest intirmities of human nature, but a total insensibility to primary truths which are still sacred to themselves, and which consti- tute their portion of those primitive traditions which time has not wholly obliterated, and which they hold in common, not * Annals, vol i , p. 178. \ Ancient and Modern India, by W. Cooke Taylor, LL.D., ch. xxvii., p. 515. \ Bengal as a Meld of Missions^ by M. Wylie, Esq., p. 25. A Sermon, by the Rev. Claudius Buchanan, D.D., p. 21. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 329 only with St. Paul, but even with the sages of heathen an- tiquity.* " 1ST ot unfrequently," says a candid American writer, " when the young missionary is preaching, and making, as he supposes, his triumphant assaults on the system of the people, is the native scholar seen to throw out his significant glances, indi- cating, what he will sometimes express in words, ' the young man is ignorant, he knows nothing about us.' "f " K~ot one of us," says a German missionary in the Nicobar Islands, " ever learnt the Nicobar language so perfectly as to be able clearly to explain the will of God concerning our salvation to 'the natives.":): So he and his companions employed their leisure time in collecting shells for sale. " Never will conversion be wrought among the Hindoos," says an Indian author, " by the present system of the missionaries, ignorant of their philosophy, and even of the religion they would combat. " Lastly, Mr. Rus- sell makes, in 1859, the following judicious remarks : " So long as a Christian minister can argue with a moulvie or pundit with patience and ingenuity, he will be listened to with interest and respect; he will be permitted to expound the Scriptures, and to warn his hearers against the errors of their faith, provided that he refrains from insulting, contemptuous, and irritating language ; but if he be a mere ignoran tilliterate zealot, with- out any qualification (temporally speaking) except a knowledge of Hindostanee and good intentions, he may be exposed to the laughter, scorn, and even abuse of the crowded bazaar, in con- sequence of his manifest inability to meet the subtle objections of his keen and practised opponent. From what I have heard I regret to state my conviction is, that no considerable success, so far as human means are concerned, can be expected from the efforts of those who are like the ancient Apostles in all things but their inspiration and heavenly help."|| And the heathen have reasoned exactly like Mr. Russell. " If Paul, who was undoubtedly a prophet," said an educated Hindoo to Captain Seely, " made no effect on King Agrippa, how am I to be per- suaded by those who are neither saints nor prophets f "T If, however, the Protestant emissaries in India had all been * Yet it is precisely their religious practices which excite the ignorant scorn of their English teachers, who know not how to profit by them, as St. Paul would have done, to introduce the evangelical maxims of which they are a corruption. " The whole year round," is the shallow comment of an English Protestant, " is nothing but one succession of different mysteries and mummery, in honor of some saint or of some holyday." El wood, Narrative, &c., vol. ii., p. 229 j Journal of American Oriental Society, vol. ii., p. 150. \ Letters on the Nicobar Islands, by the Rev. C. J. Latrobe, p. 65. Graham's Letters on India, p. 284. f The Times, March 17, 1859. TT The Wonders of Mora, ch. xix., p. 469. 330 CHAPTER III. distinguished by learning and ability, we may safely infer, from the examples of Heber and Martyn, that their failure would have been equally conspicuous. How great that failure has been we are now to hear from their own mouths, or from the confessions of their associates and friends. GENERAL RESULTS IN THE THKEE PRESIDENCIES. Beginning with the Bengal Presidency, and with the year 1809, we have the following statement by an ardent supporter of the Anglican establishment : " Although there have been missionaries in India for above a hundred years, they have not made any converts of consequence, nor converted as many families as their own number has amounted to"* Thirteen years later, we are told by Mr. Townley, a Protestant mission- ary, k< When I left Bengal, there was one Hindoo, concerning whom the missionaries in Calcutta had hopes and he has been actually baptized. "f Three years after, the Cal- cutta Missionary Society still report, that they are u seriously and painfully impressed with the little success which has hitherto attended their labors among the heathen." Exactly thirty years later, in 1855, Mr. Campbell declares once more " As regards the great provinces of Bengal and Hindostan, no material religious impression on the population either has been made, or is now ~being made"\ He does not, of course, mean to assert that there were no nominal converts, for of them we have such descriptions as the following. A native told an American traveller, in 1858, that " all the Khitrnutgras in Calcutta were Christian. I was surprised to hear this, and asked him to what Church they belonged. ' Oh, sir,' he replied, ' they do not belong to any Church, but they will all eat pork and drink brandy.' " Such was the popular Hindoo notion of a " Christian." And that it was a perfectly just es- timate is once more admitted, in 1862, by Protestant mission- aries of all denominations, in the following official reports. We will begin at Calcutta, and hear first the agents of the Church Missionary Society. " Calcutta," says the Kev. James Vaughan, u is, and has been for years, the receptacle of the very worst Christians of the Mofussil stations. It is a regular cave of Adullam, .... many of them being more depraved * The Dangers of British India, by David Hopkins, H.E.I.C.S., p. 27. f An Answer to the Abbe Dubou, by Henry Townley, p. 109. 1 India as it may lie, ch. viii., p. 395. From New York to Delhi, by .Robert B. Minturn, Jun., ch. xvi., p. 152. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 331 even than the heathen around them. The effect of all this upon the heathen need not be told. Of course these poor people are known by all to be Christians, .... and the circumstance of their being baptized, and to some extent instructed in Christianity, appears to have rendered them ' twice dead.' 1 "* It is impossible to speak more plainly, but Mr. Vaughan might have added, that all these " reprobates," as he cafls them, who, in his own words, " have never been any other than nominal Christians," were nevertheless eagerly baptized by Protestant missionaries, and represented in earlier reports as devout disciples, just as converts of precisely the same class are still represented in later ones. But Calcutta is neither the only nor the worst example. From every part of Bengal come the same reports. " A far heavier discouragement," says the Church Missionary Society, u was experienced at the &antipore Training Institution" Here they had concentrated their resources, and collected their most promising subjects; and this was the result. "A dis- covery was made that a native Christian agent, who was much trusted, had been carrying on a system of peculation and immorality, which had so deeply affected the discipline and the habits of the students," that there was no alternative but " to suspend the Institution, and to send home the students to their parents and friends."f Of the district of Kislmagurh, once represented as a kind of Protestant Elysium, the same Society speaks as follows: u The reports of the missionaries speak of no improvement in the Christian condition of the people generally, and of no acces- sions from the heathen." They add, that the moment " the gratuitous feeding, clothing, and boarding of their children," by which alone their nominal disciples are attracted, is discon- tinued, they betray their true character. " One of the senior missionaries gives the saying of one of his people as only a specimen of the mercenary spirit which had pervaded the peo- ple 4 If the Sahib would give me but four rupees a month, I would not only go to church myself regularly, but would make all the people of the village go too.' "J At the low charge of four pounds and sixteen shillings per annum, he was willing to profess Protestantism himself, and to make all his village profess it too. Yet these, once more, are the very men whose " con version" has been celebrated with loud hosannas in every town, and almost every village, of England; and what the missionaries formerly reported of Santipore and Kishnagurh, * Church Missionary Society's Report, 1861-1862, p. 90. f P. 100. t P. 101. 332 CHAPTER III. they are now repeating, with the certainty of the same issue, of Tinnevelly and Travancore. The Society adds, as might be expected, that " there is a brighter prospect," we know that for fifty years they have thriven on prospects, and then, having suggested this familiar consolation, proceeds to quote the confession of the Rev. Mr. Blumhardt, that his converts also were apt to " turn out mere mercenary hypocrites," and that he could only "reiterate his complaints of the cold and lapsed condition of the mass of his native Christians." From Benares the Rev. Mr. Fuchs writes thus : " Our native Christians, as a body, in their every-day life and practice, are far from being in a satisfactory state. The number of native Christians has continued stationary."* If the missionaries have any respect for Christianity, they have surely reason to rejoice that it has ceased to attract such professors. From Gorruckpore the Rev. Mr. Reuther reports " two or three great evils." The first, he says, with remarkable naivete, " is carelessness with regard to religion !" The others were only habitual drunkenness, quarrelling, " and abuse among each other." "With a general awakening," observes Mr. Reuther, " we have not been blessed ;" and then he adds, "We would go on opening our mouths wide till the Lord shall be pleased to fill them."f In this attitude we are obliged to leave him. From Agra Mr. Schneider writes, "The motives for embracing Christianity were chiefly the desire to find employment, and to have their bodily wants provided for. ... It is a fact that many new converts have, after their baptism, not adorned their Christian profession, and so have even proved great oifences and stumbling-blocks to the cause of Christ." In other words, the sole result of Protestant missions, and we shall meet the same fac^t in every other land, is to dispense sacrilegious baptisms, and to make the heathen despise Christianity even more than they hate it. Mr. Schneider, who is described as an " experi- enced missionary," so thoroughly appreciates Hindoo Anglicans, that he says, u I have almost come to the resolution not to baptize an inquirer till 1 know how he may be able to support himself in an honest way, for if his bodily wants cannot be supplied, he will only he a burden and disgrace to tlw Church.*^ It is to be observed, however, that these frank confessions, which contrast so notably with former reports, are quite a recent phenomenon, and may probably be attributed to the in- convenient candor of lay writers, who now abound in India, and * P. 110. f P- 116- | P. 121. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 333 whose accounts of the real effect of Protestant missions suggest to those who conduct them the disagreeable necessity of pru- dence and reserve. From Meerut comes the usual story, with the addition of a report by Mr. Haernle, that he and his Anglican colleagues,- for these Germans are all, at least nominally, ministers of the Church of England, had been fighting with " the Baptist mission of Delhi," an episode attended with " evident injury to the spiritual growth of the native Christians." The turbulent Baptists, he complains, "have built a chapel only a few steps distant from our own ! The progress of the Lord's work has, by this violation of the principle of mutual amity and non- interference, been greatly hindered."* Yet these gentlemen marvel that the heathen despises a religion, which is to him, as to others, the very symbol of earthliness, contention, and disorder. Finally, the Rev. William Clarkson, also a Protestant mis- sionary, and accustomed to exalt the value of his own labors, confesses, that, in spite of all the bribes and other attractions which have been offered to the Hindoo during a whole century, " the converts from among European and East Indian society, have/ar exceeded those which have been granted from among the heathen. "f Perhaps we have now sufficient knowledge of the Church of England missions in Bengal. Let us hear the Baptists in their turn. At Delhi, whence they made their raid upon the Angli- cans at Meerut, this is their report for 1862 : " While sixty-six persons have been baptized, seventy-five have been excluded from the churches." By this remarkable process, if we knew the aggregate of their disciples, we could reckon the exact hour at which Indian Baptists will cease to exist. But " the com- mittee" hasten to offer an explanation to their alarmed sub- scribers: "The missionaries say that some, unknown to them, had never entirely renounced their old heathen habits, while others had expected to benefit in their temporal circumstances." They would probably have resented as libellous such an account of their neophytes, if it had. proceeded from any but their own agents. " Being disappointed," they continue, " they joined themselves again to idols. Such defections are not new in India, and are not unexpected. It is always difficult to fathom the motives of the people, and to determine on the sincerity of the professions they make." Having satisfactorily disposed of this point, they exclaim, in the same page, "The committee are * P. 127. f India and the Gospel, by the Rev. William Clarkson, Lect. v., p. 220. 334 CHAPTER III. happy to report that in this great country the work of evan- gelization goes steadily forward."* " Of the important institution at Serampore, the committee have to report very favorably." This institution has been in existence so many years, and has cost such enormous sums of money, that they might well hesitate to report of it otherwise; yet they presently reveal, in these words, its real character: " Not that the immediate fruit is seen in the conversion of souls. Of this the instances are few." And then they quote this ad- mission from the tutors and professors of the Serampore college: "Of late years, there has been amongst the younger educated Bengalees a great diffusion of infidel opinions, and some of our young friends" that is, their pupils " boast of themselves as belonging to the school of intuitional religion. "f We shall hear further evidence, at the close of this chapter, of the real fruits of missionary schools in every part of India. Finally, the Baptist committee add, without the least inten- tion of jesting on so grave a subject, "During 1861, we had no addition to the Church by baptism ; but at the close of the preceding year Mr. Eobinson had the pleasure of baptizing two of his own children." " In Agra," they observe, "we still have to deplore an almost universal apathy, and indifference to the truths we preach; numbers will listen to us, but very few appear to consider the subject worthy of further inquiry." And then they give this summary : " During the past year we have had several painful cases of Church discipline. . . . What with members who have left the station, and others (including paid catechists) who have been cut off for immoral conduct, our loss has been heavy.":): Yet they assure their subscribers, for the fiftieth time, that their "prospects" are excellent, that "Christ's kingdom is at hand," which they prove by referring to " Greek literature" and " the great Neander" and that the best thing they can do is to continue their subscriptions " with unflinching courage, and unfaltering faith." Let us turn now to the Wesleyans. Of their disciples " in and around Bangalore," where they preach " about forty ser- mons a week," this is their account in 1862: "Although they sometimes seem to ' run well,' a very little thing 4 hinders' them. In too many instances they manifest spiritual feebleness, or religious inconsistency." It is probable that more impartial observers would object to this melodious phraseology as some- what deficient in energy. " In their English school," they say, * Seventieth Report of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1862, p. 6. f P. 22. \ P. 35. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 335 r " great interest has been manifested in the Bible lessons," but they assist us to appreciate its intensity by adding, " We regret to say that we know of no instance in which the truth has had a saving effect."* In Mysore, " two of the same family have been excluded for quarrelsomeness and manifest lack of c desire to flee from the wrath to come.' We desire to see a work among them of which we may speak more confidently." But they also expect future triumphs, and have already " seasons of gracious refreshing," which afford them all the consolation they require. The agents of the London Missionary Society are as emphatic as all the others in asserting their success, and as copious in E roving their failure. "The general aspect of the mission in ndia," they say with a prudent suppression of particulars, " is highly animating." Their pupils also " are made familiar with the majesty, and rectitude, and mercy of Jehovah. "f We shall see hereafter what their pagan scholars really are, and what they think about the " rectitude of Jehovah." Let us turn now to Madras. In 1821 Mr. Bowen gave the following account : "In a late report of the Madras committee to the Church Missionary Society, we find that ' twenty heathens have been admitted as catechumens, and commenced a course of preparatory instruction. Only one individual of the whole number has abided the test.' "J Nearly twenty years later, in 1839, a Protestant missionary writes as follows of Madras: "As to real converts, one missionary thought there were but two or three in the whole city and suburbs ; another thought there were not half a dozen, at the utmost. No one supposed there were more than that number. " When Mr. Baber, chief judge of the Provincial Court of Madras, was examined before a com- mittee of the House of Lords, he said : " No such thing is known as a convert by any of our English missionaries."! Still later, in 1817, " the natives of Madras presented a petition to govern- ment, signed by more than twelve thousand of the Hindu com- munity, expressing bitter animosity against the missionaries.''^ Yet an Anglican chaplain declares of the Madras Presidency : " It may be emphatically and truly designated the missionary diocese of India !"** , It would be tedious and unprofitable to multiply testimonies * Report of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, 1862, p. 39. \ Report of the London Missionary Society, 1862, p. 31. \ Missionary Incitement, &c., p. 10. Howard Malcolm, vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 59. \ Asiatic Journal, vol. iv., p. 316 ; New Series. "[[ India and the Gospel, Lect. iv., p. 203. ** Sketch of the Established Church in India, by Edward Whitehead, M.A., Chaplain to the Bishop of Madras, ch. vii., p. 100. 336 CHAPTER III. which we have already heard. They would exactly resemble those which have been cited with respect to Bengal. ' There are the usual hollow boasts, and the us-ual significant confessions. Thus the Wesleyans announce, as might be expected, that Hindoo Methodists " generally appear to have grown in grace." How far they believe their own idle tales is shown by later admissions, in the same report, of the " feeble piety" and "inconsistent conduct" of their disciples. All the sects use the same phraseology, and all their agents employ the same spasmodic and convulsive style. They have invariably, for the consolation of their subscribers, " one man," or " one woman," who is an exception to the " reprobates" who form the mass of their salaried neophytes, but who is quite sure to have lapsed, long before their next report appears, into the same condition as the rest. Meanwhile, Bible-texts are heaped together, pre- dictions of future success fill up all the blank spaces, and the narrative always closes with a passionate appeal for more money. The moral condition of Hindoo Protestants is a dismal subject of contemplation, but that of most of their teachers is hardly less so. If, finally, we turn our attention to Bombay, the report of the fourth annual meeting of the Scottish Missionary Society contains these words: "The missionaries cannot as yet say that any actual conversions to Christianity have been made by them."* In 1838, the Kev. J. H. Gray writes : " I can say nothing encouraging. The carelessness and apathy of the people, and their great ignorance of the plainest truths, have often compelled rne to inquire what inducement they had to be- come Christians ?"f And once more, the present k< Bishop of Bombay assents to what is said on all hands, that there are but few native Christians of undoubted sincerity.":}: " It is quite clear to me," says the Rev. A. Davidson, in 1862, " that of those who professed a desire of baptism, a large majority were influenced by unworthy motives." Even of those actually ad- mitted he confesses, in cautious terms, " much remains that we deplore ;" and he adds that their original vices " we seldom see entirely eradicated from the adult." This refers to Aurung- abad, while of Hyderabad we are told, " Mr. Burn has labored at this station throughout the year; he cannot report the acces- sion of a single convert." Nor can we be surprised, even by such confessions as these, when we learn what examples the natives have before their eyes of endless confusion and schism * Asiatic Journal, vol. xxiv., p. 197. f Hist, of Prop, of Christianity. &c., vol. ii., p. 333. I Out and Home, by the Rev. II. T upper, p. 152. | Report of Church Missionary Socitty, pp. 81, 84. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 337 among their Protestant teachers. Thus of the Presbyterian sect at Bombay we are told, in 1852, "The Scotch ecclesiasti- cal establishment consists of two churches, now unhappily opposed to each other."* And again, " by the secession in 1843, the Church of Scotland was deprived of all her mis- sionaries in India."f And this event, we are told by the same writer, was celebrated in a sermon by Dr. Duff, " in a strain of exaggeration seldom equalled and never surpassed." In presence of such facts we have no reason to wonder at the acknowledged results, up to the present time, of all the Prot- estant missions in the three Presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. RESULTS IN PARTICULAR DISTRICTS. If now we inquire what has been the success in particular cities arid districts, we shall find it to be everywhere of the same character. The following may be taken as examples. Of Tranquebar, after so many years of lavish expenditure, we are told by a Protestant clergyman, that " in 1816 only three missionaries remained in connection with this once flourishing field, and two of these were supported by English funds.";); Twenty-three years later an American missionary adds, " There is now almost no visible effect of missionary labor there the mission is entirely relinquished. It is the opinion of some of the best-informed persons in that region, that many of our missionaries have been unconverted men. If such be the fact, the wonder ceases. " Of Tanjore, the scene of the labors of Schwartz, we have already heard from one Protestant missionary that " no vital religion is found in any of the native Christians ;" and from another, that " a Tanjore Christian has become a by-word." Of the converts of Tinnevelly, of whom even the Anglican clergy have imprudently boasted, the historian of Protestant missions thus speaks: "Though most of them could not be deemed Christians, and but a small proportion of them were baptized, yet it was considered as something that they had for- saken their idols." And' again, "As whole villages came for- ward asking instruction, so whole villages also fell away/' And once more : " Though there has been an extensive profes- sion of Christianity in Tinnevelly, and a considerable outward improvement of the people," thanks to English money, " we * Life in Bombay, ch. xii., p. 231 (1852). f Missions of the Church of Scotland, by the Rev. James Macfarlane, p. 74. i The Land of the Veda, ch. xviii., p. 426. Howard Malcolm, ch. ii., p. 69. 23 338 CHAPTER III. have no idea that there has been much spiritual good effected in that country."* And this is once more confirmed, in 1858, by the joint confession of all the principal missionary societies in India, Anglican, Presbyterian, Wesleyan, and Congrega- tional English, American, and German. " The Tinnevelly brethren," says their collective report for that year, " are fully alive to the fact that Christianity is as yet only in an infant state in Tinnevelly ;" while even of the nominal converts they add, with unusual candor, " there are many who are still very ignorant, and but barren professors, "f Yet for several years past Tinnevelly " has been the watchword at Anglican mis- sionary meetings, and has been gravely represented as the scene of unexampled missionary triumphs. "J Of Benares, a Lutheran writer says, " the work takes but little root here, although there K?Q fourteen mission schools.^ Of Travancore, after boasting of earlier conversions, Mr. Clarkson sorrowfully confesses, " The number has since been reduced, there having been several relapses." || Of the reputed conversions at Kisfinagurh^ a native Prot- estant minister told Mrs. Colin Mackenzie, in 1853, that u he attributed the exaggerated accounts to the necessity of creating a sensation at home at public meetings in order to raise money ;" and she adds, from her own observation, that " their Christi- anity consists in nothing but renunciation of idols . . . one did not even know who Jesus was."^f Of Central India generally, an experienced Protestant mis- sionary says, " I have met with native Christians who have been baptized, some on the eastern, some on the western coast, and others at more southern stations lamentable to say, they were not to be known from the heathen but in name!"** " In Western India" the same competent witness declares, " conversions have been scanty . . . for more than two hundred years have the natives of Western India been conversant with Europeans, but hitherto they have yielded but few converts to * Hist, of Prop, of Christianity, &c., vol. ii., p. 345. \ Proceedings of the South India Missionary Conference, p. 18 (Madras, 1858) \ The Church Missionary Society give, in 1862, this amusing account of the " spiritual agents" employed by them in the Tinnevelly district : " Their want of conscientiousness in reference to getting into debt ; their occasional ti- midity in reference to speaking the exact truth ; and, in some cases, their too much thought about their salary, . . . these are defects which, to speak gen- erally, we still discover in them." Report, p. 152. It is impossible not to admire this new definition of lying as " timidity in reference to speaking the truth." The praises lavished on these " spiritual agents," in the same report, appear to illustrate this kind of timidity. Travels in India, by Leopold von Orlich, vol. ii., p. 137. j India and the Gospel, Lect. v., p. 232. [ Six Years in India, vol. i.. ch. ii., p. 75. ** India and the Gospel, Lect. vi., p. 324. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 339 Christ ;"* and in 1862 the Church Missionary Society once more lament, in their official report, " the smallness of the success hitherto granted to the mission. "f Of Northern India Dr. Hoffmeister, who accompanied Prince Waldemar of Prussia in the campaign against the Sikhs, says, " Though the natives come, apparently only from curiosity, to the church, and send their children to school, not one of them, how- ever, has been baptized as yet."$ In 1862, the Baptists, though not the least boastful of the sects, add once more, " The Gospel has been proclaimed very widely around us. At present we do not see the fruit. " " In the whole of Northern India,' 1 says Mr. Montgomery Martin, in 1862, "out of one hundred million people, there are not twenty thousand even nominal converts," while there are two hundred and twenty Protestant ministers.! Of Southern India, the chief field of Protestant effort, a capable Protestant witness thus speaks, in 1860 : " The conclu- sion to which we have come is this either that missionary operations have already reached and passed their culminating point ; or, at any rate, that there are most unmistakable and undeniable signs that under the present system of operations they will advance no further, but will, on the other hand, in all probability, retrograde, and that speedily." And then this writer expresses the conviction, that u Sawyerpooram and other places, which are now like household words on the lips of per- sons interested in missionary successes, are rapidly sinking to the level of Tanjore and Trichinopoly." Finally, he adds, "After 1846 the onward movement of Christianity in South India seems to have ceased. The harvest was passed, the sum- mer ended. r *f In more remote provinces the facts are still more gloomy. In Nepaul^ a British official informs ns, not a single convert has ever been made by Protestants, though all political influences are in their favor : " but the Eewar families have embraced Christianity Catholicism is their form of Christianity."** Of Scinde we are told, by Mr. Clarkson, that it " has never been trodden by the foot of the Christian preacher ;" while of * India and the Gospel, Lect. v.; p. 231. f P. 67. i Travels in Ceylon and Continental India, p. 474. ^ Report, p. 33. I British India, ch. v., p. 227. 1J Christian Remembrancer, July, 1860, pp. 63-5. In 1862, a Baptist mis- sionary gives this ludicrous report of his operations in Southern India : " I have seen deep convictions in one of our congregations, and anxiety in another, and frequent misgivings in others, but do not know of one decided case of conver- sion in connection with our congregation." Report, p. 43. ** Five Tears at Nepaul, by Captain Thomas Smith, Assist. Political Resi- dent, vol. i., ch. vi., p. 143. 340 CHAPTER III. the Punjab, which, the same writer says, in 1850, "with a Eu- ropean climate arid fertile country, awaits evangelistic efforts," we have the following account, in 1854, from the celebrated Major Hodson, in a letter of the 2d of January, 1854, to his father, the Archdeacon of Stafford : u You evidently do not ap- preciate the state of things in these provinces. There are but two churches in the Punjab ; and there will be an electric telegraph to Peshawur before a church is commenced there, though the station has been one for years. In the first season a large Roman Catholic chapel was built there, and an Italian priest from the Propaganda busy in his vocation. I offered Mr. Clarke," a Protestant chaplain, "all the aid in my power, though I told him candidly that I thought he had not much chance of success here. A large sum has been raised at Peshawur for the mission, but unfortunately they have gone wild with theories about the lost tribes and fulfilment of proph- ecies respecting the Jews, which has given a somewhat vision- ary character to their plans. Mr. C. wanted me to think that these Euzofzai Pathans were Ben-Msrael, and asked me whether I had heard them call themselves so ; and he was aghast when I said they were as likely to talk of Ben d'Israeli."* It may be added, in confirmation of the above allusion to Peshawur, that Captain Hervey complained as late as 1850: "At many of our stations there is not such a building even as a church, while the Papists invariably have some place of worship ;"f and General Parlby notices the same contrast in the following year, when he says, " The Church of Rome has of late years wonderfully extended the field of its operations. There is scarcely a station . . . which is not provided with its chapel and its priests.''^ Colonel Addison speaks, in 1858, of a Mr. Clarke, who was, perhaps, the gentleman referred to by Major Hodson, as having " gone wild" about the Ben-i-Israel. He was sent out by the "Society for the Propagation of the Gospel," and Colonel Addison gives this account of him : " His talents were of the highest order, his zeal w r ell known ; and it was therefore most sanguinely expected that his mission would be crowned with success. After several ineffectual attempts to convert the natives, poor Clarke returned in despair to Calcutta, feeling more than half inclined to start for Europe, so much did he take his repeated failures to heart." Another Mr. Clark, after boasting, in 1862, of soine Punjabee * Memoirs, by his brother, p. 144. f Ten Years in India, vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 47. \ The Establishment, &c., p. 16. | Traits of Anglo-Indian Life, by Lieut.-col. Addison, p. 165 (1853). MISSIONS IN INDIA. 341 Christian soldiers, says : " They are but weak and ignorant ; but in spite of falls and sins, I believe they are improving.""* In presence of such language, one knows not which to admire most, the disciples or their teachers. Hitherto we have heard evidence only with respect to par- ticular cities; let us now introduce the witnesses who record their experience of the general results of Protestant missions throughout India. ' Christianity," says one who was long the associate of Prot- estant missionaries, " makes little or no progress. 1 used to inquire of the missionaries, whenever I had an opportunity, how many Hindoos or Mahometans they had converted during the time of their mission, and in general the answer was one, or sometimes none"\ " A person who has sojourned thirty years in India," says M. Peschier, president of the missionary society at Geneva, " preaching to unbelievers, declares to us that he has not been able to work a single conversion. "J " Whoever has seen much of Hindoo Christians," says a cel- ebrated writer, " must have perceived that the man who bears that name is very commonly nothing more than a drunken reprobate who conceives himself at liberty to eat or drink any thing he pleases." And he adds, that the custom of paying such converts was so universal, that u the slightest success in Hin- dostan would eat up the revenues of the East India Cornpany." Mr. C. S. John, the "Senior of the Royal Danish mission at Tranquebar," confirms this statement, as far as their receiving "support in victuals and clothing."! Mr. Malcolm Lewin tells us, in 1857, that " an inquiry made some years ago at Bangalore, by a deputation from one of the societies in England, resulted in the discovery that the converts and their families were nearly all of them stipendiaries of the mission ;"T and another writer says of the Baptist converts: "The whole of them were rescued from poverty, and procured a comfortable subsistence ~by their conversion"** Mr. Marsh gave to the House of Commons, in a speech already quoted, the following description of Protestant converts in India : "They are drawn from the Chandalahs, or Pariars, or outcasts a portion of the population who are shut out from the Hindoo religion, and who, being condemned to the lowest * Church Missionary Report, p. 136. f Ida Pfeiffer, Voyage Round the World, p. 116. j: Asiatic Journal, vol. xix., p. 230. Edinburgh Review, vol. xii., p. 161. On Indian Civilization, p. 3. The Way to Lose India, p. 17 (1857). ** Observations on the Present State of the E. I. Company, p. 61. 34:2 CHAPTER III. poverty and the most sordid occupations, are glad to procure, by what tho missionaries call conversion, whatever pittance they are enabled to dole out for their subsistence." He added, that all classes are united "in one common sentiment of con tempt for the Pariars, amongst whom they class the Christian missionary and his convert, the pastor and his disciple." Dr. Bryce, a Presbyterian minister, declared, in a sermon preached by him at Calcutta, " Alas ! it may be doubted if at this day the Christian missionary boasts a single proselyte to his creed over whom he is warranted to rejoice;" and another witness remarks upon his words, "this is the opinion of a learned and pious clergyman, delivered to a congregation who possessed ample means of ascertaining its correctness."* "The outcasts have indeed joined the missionaries," says a British official, "and have appeared as of their faith; but the conduct of these outcasts has generally proved that they pro- fessed what they did not feel, and has considerably influenced the higher orders in their prejudices against Christianity ."f " The missionaries long since stated," says Mr. Bowen, " that ' their anxiety to obtain converts seemed to be changed into anxiety about those who were obtained.' "^ " The greater number," we are told by Rammohun Roy, who professed to be a Christian, but denied the Incarnation, under the influence of Protestant neology, " have been allured to change their faith by other attractions than by a conviction of the truth and reasonableness of the doctrine, as we find nearly all of them are employed or fed by their spiritual teachers, and in case of neglect are apt to manifest a rebellious spirit." ' In some places," says the Rev. Howard Malcolm, in 1839, " numerous individuals have openly renounced caste, and become nominal Christians, but without indicating or professing change of heart." || Captain Seely heard a Sepoy, who had been flogged and drummed out of his corps for theft, answer to the reproach " You have lost your caste," by these words; " Have I \ then 1 can always turn Christian.^ And this motive for professing what is called "Christianity" is further illustrated by a writer in 1853, who tells us, " A man stopped Mr. Janvier," a Protestant missionary, "in the bazaar at Loodiana, saying he was willing to be a Christian, and wishing to know how much he would * Missionary Incitement, &c., p. 71. f T'ie Dangers of British India, by David Hopkins, of the E. I. C. Bengal Medical Establishment, p. 27. | Missionary Incitement, &c., p. 66. Defence of the Precepts of Jesus, p. 20. Travels in S. Eastern Asia, vol. ii., ch. i., p. 43. The Wonders of Mora, ch. xix., p. 476. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 343 give? Another came to one of our missionaries, and said, they dressed so cleanly, and fed so well, that he would like to be a Christian."* Nor, as we advance towards the present hour, do we lind the least variation in the evidence. "Most of the people form- ing the congregation," says Dr. Brown, " are Christians only in name."f " The influence of the English missions," says Count de Warren in 1843, "is an absolute nullity; they reckon no other proselytes than orphans whom the missionaries pur- chase, and who, when they grow up, all return to the religion of their countrymen. It must be confessed too that the follow- ers of Christ scarcely manifest more charity or more humility than those of Brahma or Mahomet."^ In 1844, Mr. Wilkinson, a Protestant missionary, noticing the inconvenience of the multiplicity of Christian sects, and the fact that they only win their disciples at each other's expense, relates, that " when the offender finds that his crime has been detected, rather than be openly reproved, he generally goes over to some of the different communities of Christians, in hopes of a reception. " And each sect counts him again as a new convert, and makes his " conversion" the ground of an appeal to the English public for fresh subscriptions. In 1850, General Briggs notices, that of the whole number of nominal converts throughout all the provinces of India, even the missionaries themselves reckon less than one-sixth as "church members ;"|| and in the same year, Mr. Ward, a Protestant missionary, confesses that " the whole number of converts to Christianity," in any sense whatever, is not one- tenth of that claimed in missionary reports.^ While even of these Captain Hervey says: "The converts become worse than they were before the worst characters in our regiments are Christians." And then he adds a fact, of which the im- portance consists in this, that it reveals the secret opinion of the whole English population of India as to the true character of Protestant " converts." "Whenever a native," he says, "presents himself for employment as a servant," if he professes to be a Christian, " he is not taken, because all Christians, with but few exceptions, are looked upon as great vagabonds," that is, in his own words, " as rascal, drunkards, thieves, and repro- * Six Years in India,, vol. ii., ch. iii., p. 78. f Hist. Prop. Christianity^ vol. ii., p. 250. \. L'lnde Anglaise, tome iii., ch. xii., p. 229. Sketches of Christianity in N. India, by the Rev. M. Wilkinson, p. 304. || India and Europe Compared, ch. vi., p. 173. T[ India and the Hindoos, by F. de W. Ward, late Missionary at Madras, ch. xxii., p. 337. 344 CHAPTER III. bates."* And this is so notorious, that the Eev. William Clarkson affirms, in the same year, after long- experience, " It seems as though calls had been reiterated till they had be- come powerless ; but as yet no issue ! Every gate seems to have been shut, every channel dammed up, by which Gos- pel streams might force their way."f In 1851, Mr. Mackenna observes, "the numerous missionaries, although they waste years, and words, and even money, have converted very few ; yet when they have induced one or two apparently to adopt their particular tenets, it is their fashion to make a clamor in the newspapers and by pamphlets, although too frequently they are not secure of their new converts for any length of time."J In 1852, Mr. Campbell says : " It must be admitted that the attempt to Christianize the natives has entirely failed. We have made some infidels, but very few sincere Christians, and are not likely on the present system to make many more." In 1853 for we must pursue the narrative to the end Baron Eric von Schonberg writes thus : " Missionaries announ- cing the conversion of a solitary Hindoo among thousands of un- believers, are themselves frequently members of some straggling sect, and too often the instruments of fanatical bigotry."! "They exhibit the signs of conversion," says Mr. Irving in the same year, " more often by eating beef and by intoxication than by excellence of character. They consequently find a dif- ficulty in obtaining employment even from the English, and either from their necessities or inclination are to be seen, with a Bible in one hand, and a petition in the other, wandering through the country, soliciting the alms of Europeans Their irregularities and lax morality have, on many occasions, shocked the feelings of even their heathen countrymen." And then he notices, in order to expose, an immoral and mercenary fiction, " the convert, such as he figures in the pages of mis- sionary pamphlets at first a heathen, foul with every crime; and then a Christian, redolent with every virtue."!" In 1856, Mr. Walter Gibson quotes this private confession of an American missionary made to himself: "The millions and hundreds of millions in the East pass away, uninfluenced to the slightest extent by European dominion and enlightenment."** * Ten Tears in India, vol. i., ch. v., p. 105. f Lecture \j., p. 221. \ Ancient and Modern India, ch. xxvii., p. 516. | Modern India, p. 208. I Travels in India and Kashmir, by Baron Eric von Sclionberg, p. 195. 1 The Theory and Practice of Caste, p. 146. ** The Prison of Weteweden, &c., p. 399. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 345 In 1857, M. de Valbezen, who appears to affect in religion the cold impartiality which some Frenchmen mistake for great- ness of inind, says : " The preaching of the Protestant mission- aries has not produced the least impression ;" and then he adds that if any change occurred in the government of India, " there are very few indeed of their converts who would not relapse into the gross errors of their native religions."* " It has been justly observed," says an ardent English Protestant, in confir- mation of this statement, " that if we were driven out of the country to-morrow, few vestiges would remain at those places where the English have settled as evidence of their ever hav- ing been under Christian rule."f In 1858, we have the following testimonies : " The converts," says Mr. Minturn, " are few, and mostly of the most degraded classes.":): " The native converts to Christianity," writes Mr. Malcolm Ludlow at the same moment, " I have not even num- bered amongst the distinctively Christian elements, so unin- fiuential are they for the most part" And Sir James Brooke sums up the whole history when he tells the missionary so- cieties of England, " with the Mahomedan you have made no progress ; with the Hindoo you have made no progress at all ; you are just where you were the very first day you went to India, "\ In 1859, Captain Evans Bell says once more: "I doubt whether the missionaries will ever do any good ;"T and Mr. Ludlow adds, "we have to take account of the growing dis- trust of, and dislike to Christianity, on the part of borh Hindoo and Moslem."** In the same year, the ilev. Edward Stor- row, who candidly rejects more than four-fifths of all the nominal converts claimed by Protestantism, says of the rest, " the general character of native Christians, it need hardly be said, is not of a high order."ff In 1860, Mr. Russell continues the record by the grave an- nouncement, that " in despair, many Christians in India are driven to wish and pray that some one or some way may arise for converting the Indians by the sword." JJ And lastly, in 1862, an Anglican chaplain confirms all former witnesses, and flatly * Les Anglais et I'lnde, ch. iii., p. 164. f Narrative of a Journey to India, by Mrs. Colonel Elwood vol. ii., Letter liv., p. 109. \ From New York to Delhi, ch. xviii., p. 179. British India, vol. i., p. 102. f Speech at Liverpool ; The Times, September 29, 1858. *|" The English in India, p. 185. ** Thoughts on the Policy of the Grown towards India, Letter xvi., p. 214. ft India and Christian Missions, ch. iv., pp. 73, 79. |j Diary in India, vol. ii., ch. viii., p. 150. 34:6 CHAPTER III. closes the series by frankly recommending his co-religionists to give up India altogether^ and try their fortunes in China. The former country, he says, " like its own sands, has drunk up so much of our missionary labor, and like them has yielded so little."* Such, by their own confession, have been the results of all the missionary efforts of twenty-two Protestant missionary so- cieties in India, employing nearly one thousand agents, com- manding unlimited temporal resources, arid assisted by a com- bination of every human advantage which could facilitate the* prosecution of such a work. Once more they confess that they have failed. " It is enough," says a leading organ of Angli- canism, in 1860, " to break the heart of any one who ever hoped to see India evangelized by means of the English Church. "f Perhaps such a history might have suggested something more than barren lamentations, especially to men who coulcl thus describe all its phases. " It makes the heart ache to read the history of Protestant missions in India for nearly two hundred years. Over and over again, at Tranquebar, at Trichinopoly, at Vellore, at Tanjore, and a hundred other places, we meet almost invariably the same melancholy story. The Gospel is preached by holy and devoted men, like Schwartz, and Kohloff, and Ziegenbalg" not one of whom believed in Anglicanism, though this writer is obliged to name Lutherans and Calvinists in default of others " for a little while all seems to flourish ; then comes, first a period when no further advance is made, then deeper stagnation, the death of the old foreign pastors, then a grievous decline, and last the complete extinguishing of the native Church in that particular spot, or else its sinking into tor- pidity resembling a state of living death, and the removal of its candlestick out of its place.":}: It is a Protestant who narrates with so much accuracy the failure of Protestant missions in India, and who seems to have suspected, at least for a moment, its true explanation : u Is not the truth this," he asks, though apparent- ly without pausing to answer his own question, " that the Angli- can Church has forgotten to work after the apostolic model ?" Once more we have traced a contrast. In China, an English * How we got to Pekin, by the Rev. R. J. L. M'Ghee, Chaplain to the Forces, ch. xiii., p. 291. f Christian Remembrancer, July, 1860. | Ibid., October, 1859, p. 377. It is shocking to find an Anglican missionary using such language as the following. The Rev. H. Baker, in an address as remarkable for intellectual feebleness as for moral insensibility, tells the world, " We would humbly hope that our infant Churches are not far behind those established by the Apostles themselves, at Corinth, Ephesus, or Colosse." Proceedings of the South India Missionary Conference, p. 296. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 347 writer has proclaimed what he calls " the unwelcome truth," that it is only the Catholic missionaries who succeed, while Protestantism " does not find acceptance" with its people. In India, as a writer quoted by Mr. Mill in his well-known history affirms, " the Protestant form of worship is little adapted to the narrow and contracted ideas of the Hindoos," though it is notorious that the Hindoo has a more logical and subtle mind than any pagan race now existing, and that he constantly con- founds the Protestant missionary in the discussions which the latter sometimes provokes, but always to his own disadvantage. "The Koman Catholic," adds the same writer, "lias certainly been more successful in calling these deluded children to its bosom. "* We shall find the same singular language employed, to explain this perpetually recurring fact, in many other lands. Yet as an experienced witness remarks, "even the poor Hindoos are as astute naturally as if educated ;"f and a Protestant missionary, who observes that they are " excessively fond of metaphysical discussion," confesses that while " the Pundits of India are undoubtedly the most intellectually cultivated and morally responsible class in the community," they are also " by far the most unimpressible."^: It is not, then, by want of capacity in the Hindoo race that the failure of Protestantism can be explained ; and moreover, if Protestantism were the true form of Christianity, it would be " adapted" to the wants of all mankind. "For the word of God," as the great Apostle declares, " is living and effectual, and more piercing than any two-edged sword. " It is the word of man which is feeble and ineffective, and " little adapted" to prevail against the super- stitions of Hindoo or Chinese. We shall see, in the course of these pages, that " the Protestant form of worship" has been rejected by the heathen in every other land, as peremptorily as in India and China ; and that of all the same account may be given which an Anglican writer gave not long since, in the pages of the Times newspaper, when he provoked the anger of less candid co-religionists by frankly confessing, that "the great Christian movement in India has been hitherto Roman Catholic" a fact proclaimed in earlier times by an English writer, who founded upon it a hope not destined to be realized, when he exclaimed, in words already quoted, " The Catholics, ages back, have converted numbers in India ; why then should Protestants despair ?" t * Sketches of India, ch. vi., p. 86. f A Glance at the East, by a retired Bengal Civilian, p. 12 (1857). $ India and Christian Missions, by the llev. Edward Storrow, ch. ii., p. 25; ch. iii. p. 50 (1859). Heb. iv. 12. 348 CHAPTER III. RESULTS OF EDUCATION. Thus far we have seen that Protestantism has utterly failed to propagate Christianity in India, but this would be only an imperfect account of its real influence in that land. Would that the results of its presence had been simply negative! In China it created, after fifty years of labor, the blasphemous sect of Tae-ping ; in Hindostan it has begotten a generation of atheists. When the agents of English and American religions, who at least are not deficient in energy, discovered that sermons and tracts, bishops and missionaries, were perfectly ineffective, they resolved, with characteristic tenacity of purpose, to call into action a new system si propaganda, and to inaugurate a vast and elaborate scheme by which they still hoped to convert defeat into victory. Having failed to convert the Hindoo by Bibles or preaching, they resolved to try the effect of education. When we have learned what they have attempted in this way, and with what results, we shall have completed our task, and exhausted the whole field of Protestant agency in India. Many years ago, and the fact is worthy of notice, intelligent observers in India were already anticipating that the educa- tional projects of the missionaries would prove as futile as their preaching. "If the natives abandon Mohammedanism and Hindooism," said one who spent a life in that land, " are we quite sure that they will embrace Christianity ?" " May we not produce," he added, "a kind of negative religion, an indif- ference to all positive creeds, and a recklessness of every form of devotion?"* We are going to hear the answer to this question. " Experience has proved," says an eye-witness in 1857, " that scholars in the Indian colleges, who would take honorable rank in the universities of Europe, relapse, as soon as they quit the colleges, into the degrading practices of the very religions which their enlightened judgment secretly condemns. The colleges of India receive fanatical idolaters, they disgorge only hypocrites."f This melancholy truth we shall now prove by such an accumulation of Protestant testimony as to render all doubt or hesitation impossible. The expenditure on native education in India in the year 1860, was three hundred and twenty-four thousand eight * Thirty Years in India, by Major H. Bevan, ch. xiv., p. 239 (1839). f Les Anglais et I'Inde, cli. iii., p. 169. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 349 hundred and fifty-seven pounds, and the number of native pupils nearly five hundred thousand. As early as 1836, there were already in a single province " thirty institutions for the education of youth, at a total expense of thirty-five thousand five .hundred and nineteen pounds eleven shillings."* In the following year they had increased to thirty-eight, which cost rather more than one thousand pounds each. Since that date, they have multiplied in all directions ; for besides the govern- ment institutions, every sect has its own, and they are estab- lished, as in lieber's time, in opposition to each other. In 1854, we are told that " there are now in Bengal five govern- ment Anglo-vernacular colleges, and zillah schools have been established in almost every district." Again, " in the Presi- dency of Bombay the character of the education conveyed in the Anglo-vernacular colleges is almost, if not quite, equal to that in Bengal. w t While of Madras we are told, that, in 1853, there were two thousand pupils receiving daily instruction in three missionary schools,":): to say nothing of many other institutions of a similar class. In the single city of Benares there were " fourteen mission schools." From these examples we may judge what the united efforts of the government, and of twenty-two rival societies, were likely to have attempted in other parts of India. In addition to their own resources, they have, in one instance at least, appropriated those of Catholics. "The La Martiniere School of Calcutta, the annual income of which can be little short of ten thousand pounds, was founded and endowed exclu- sively by a Catholic, the late General Lamartine. It was well known that the general's intention was to found and endow an establishment for Catholic education, yet the principles on which this school is conducted are such that no Catholic can profit by it!" And now for the results of Protestant educa- tion, whether imparted by the civil power, or by the missionary bodies. "It is the universal confession," says Dr. Grant, "that but very few of the children so educated embrace the Christian faith."|| Other witnesses, better acquainted with the facts than this Anglican clergyman,' will now tell us, that the native pupils not only decline to adopt the religion of their teachers, but learn, almost without exception, to abandon all religion whatever. * Travels in India, by Leopold von Orlich, vol. ii., p. 267. f Parliamentary Papers, vol. xxxvii., p. 17 (1854). | Mead, The Sepoy Eevolt, ch. xxiii.. p. 308. Notes on the Present Position of Catholics in India, by the Rev. W. Strick- land, p. 18 (1853). \ Lecture iv., p. 254. 350 CHAPTER III. " A very important question," says the Lutheran Yon Orlich, in 1845, u is: What influence has education produced on the religious sentiments of the Indians ? It has hitherto appeared, that the young people grow up as deists, and in some cases, have even converted their parents and relations to deism /"* yet, " with very few exceptions, neither they nor their families have neglected the religious usages of their ancestors." " This asser- tion," we are told, " is painfully corroborated by the Rev. J. Weitbrecht, and by other highly credible authorities." Mr. Weitbrecht's own words are these : " There are instances on record of Hindoo fathers forbidding their sons to visit the Cal- cutta College, on the ground that all the pupils who attain some proficiency become nasticks, i.e., atheists "\ If it be asked, why any native students are induced to fre- quent institutions of which these are the admitted fruits, Von Orlich answers, " Only in the prospect of obtaining a situation, and the majority belong to the lower classes." And this is con- firmed by all Anglo-Indian writers. " It has opened to them a new source of honorable livelihood," says Mr. Johnson.;); "In the Byculla schools," we learn from another w r riter, " after attaining a certain age, the male pupils are apprenticed to various trades, and the females marry, or obtain situations as servants. " In the Bengal Medical College " each student costs the State one hundred pounds per annum," while that of civil engineering affords the only chance of success to native en- gineers, "for whom the demand is yearly augmenting."! But these considerations do not always affect the children of high-caste parents, many of whom are conveyed to school in their carriages, and become pupils solely for the sake of acquir- ing knowledge and intellectual training. "In Hindostan," as Mr. Arnold well observes, "the Brahmin has had the sagacity, in losing his priestly ascendency, to seize upon that which educa- tion can confer, and our English schools and colleges are crowded with his caste-fellows."T But Anglo-Protestant education has had the same effect upon them as upon all the rest. "The results have been," says Mr. Knighton, "great intellectual acuteness, and total want of moral principle ; utter infidelity in religion, combined with an enthusiastic worship of reason and money."** a Even under the most favorable circumstances/' * Travels, &c., vol. iii., p. 276. f Missions in Bengal, ch. v., p. 219. | The Stranger in India, vol. ii., ch. iii., p. 137. ^ A Year and a Day in the East, ch. iii., p. 49. | Martin, British India, ch. v., p. 233. 1 The Marquis of Dalhousie's Administration of British India, by Edwin Arnold, M.A., vol. i.. ch. xi., p. 348. ** Tropical Sketches, preface, p. vii. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 351 says Sir Emerson Tennent, " the results have been deplorably meagre in relation to conversion from the native superstitions."* Out of seventeen thousand three hundred and sixty pupils in schools maintained at the public expense, only three hundred and thirty-six even professed, in any sense whatever, the official religion,f and we know what the profession was worth. Nor is there any distinction whatever between the influence of government and of missionary education, though the latter is imparted by professing Christians, while u the ordinary native teachers of the government schools are usually bigoted Hindus or deists, largely imbued with the spirit and the principles of Paine." J "Missionary schools," we are told by a high author- ity, " do not make more converts to Christianity than Govern- ment schools. A most zealous missionary in India assured me, with tears in his eyes, that, after twenty -five years' experience, he looked upon the conversion of the Hindoos, under present circumstances, to be hopeless, without the interposition of a miracle." Yet the pupils in these schools read the Scriptures daily for years, and receive with perfect submission whatever lessons their teachers propose to them ! Thus a Presbyterian writer, who was for six years the associate and advocate of Protestant missionaries, records of Dr. DufFs Free Church College at Calcutta, " Out of one thousand pupils only about twelve are professed Christians ;" although, " when they can understand English, they are instructed exactly as Christian boys would be in fact, they are better instructed in Chris- tianity than half the young men at home." At Baranagar, we are told by the same writer, the pupils " displayed a perfect knowledge of all the doctrines on which they were questioned, especially the cardinal point of justifica- tion, which they explained in the clearest manner "\ Yet not one of them was a Christian, nor had the slightest intention of becoming one. At Benares, where there are fourteen missionary schools, " all the boys read the New Testament Not one con- version has ever taken place in this school." " Coimbatore," says the Calcutta correspondent of the Times, in 1862, of which the inhabitants lately petitioned the govern- B ment " to pay priests to bring down rain," " has belonged to us for eighty years, yet its darkness is as dense as an African hamlet's, where the white man has never been. And this is * Christianity in Ceylon, ch. vi., p. 276. f Parliamentary Papers, vol. xxxviii., p. 176. i Storrow, ch. iii., p. 51. The Times, November 24, 1858. | Six Years in India, vol. i., ch. ii., p. 84. 352 CHAPTER III. more or less true of all the masses of India, for we have never begun to educate them."* Of the " Robert-Money Institution" in Bombay, having six- teen teachers, and " scholarships" worth about eighty pounds each per annum, this is the official report: "I see no evidences that the hard crust of unbelief has been broken up ..... I see no symptoms that it is about to be broken up in the minds of ' At Bombay, " no conversions have as yet taken place at the Established Kirk's school." Yet the scholars were not only' diligently catechized, and instructed in the Bible, but taught to quote the usual array of texts against " the Romanists who worship images." Of the American schools in the same city, the missionaries themselves reported thus to their employers some years ago : " The schools are well attended. Many of the children learn rapidly. We cannot cheer your heart by telling you of the conversion of any of them."J In the "American Madura Mission," as the Rev. W. Tracy confesses in 1858, after thirty years' toil, and an average attend- ance of nearly four thousand scholars at a time, all instructed in Protestantism, and " expected to attend religious service on the Sabbath, few, if any, conversions occurred, either among the scholars or masters. " At Loodiana, we are told by Mrs. Mackenzie of 'baptized children, " none of whom had any acquaintance with the Gos- pel." It is true that she adds, that many of the u so-called Christian children" of Europeans in India have still less. Of another establishment in the north of India, the same witness observes : " The orphan school here is really disheart- ening to the missionaries. Mrs. Rudolph told me that she had taught them Scripture history until she was quite weary of re- peating it." Yet these orphan schools, which exist in various parts of India, were the latest experiment of Protestant missionaries. Baron Von Schonberg relates that at Secundra, in a season of famine, " six hundred children were purchased for eighteen hundred rupees, which certainly was not an exorbitant price."! But the same deadly blight which has withered every other scheme fell on this ; for Mrs. Mackenzie assures us, that "children baptized in orphan schools often turn out ill, and then bring much greater discredit on the Christian Church * The Times, November 28, 1862. f Report of Church Misximiary Society, 1862, p. 69. Foreign Missionary Chronicle, June, 1833, p. 45 (Pittsburgh). | Proceedings of the South India Missionary Conference, p. 20. I Travels in India and Kashmir, vol. i., cli. x., p. 193. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 353 than would be possible if they had never been nominal mem- bers of it." Other writers report, as we have seen, that these orphans invariably return to the religion of their parents, and generally display worse qualities than those who have never received missionary instruction. And so well known are these frightful results of Protestant education in India, that even the men who are most concerned to hide the unwelcome truth are constrained to admit it. Thus Dr. Bickersteth, at a meeting of what is called the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, confessed of the Hindoos : " They unlearn their own superstitions, but they do not learn the Gospel of Christ. They become, in fact, intellectual, accomplished un- believers." 41 And it is to England, and to her emissaries, that this people, once conspicuous among all heathen nations for deep religious instinct, owe this irreparable calamity. " Per- haps it is not known," said Dr. Samuel Wilberforce, in 1855, " that there has been a greater reprinting in India of the de- istical works which have been published in this country than was ever known to be printed in this country."f And this is confirmed by a communication sent from India to the American Board of Foreign Missions, which reports that, " probably no English works are read more among the native population than those of infidel writers:";): so that when the Parsis of Bombay had, not long ago, a public controversy witli certain Protestant missionaries, their chief advocate "endeavored to refute Chris- tianity by using the arguments which Yoltaire employed against Catholics." The Hindoo, more logical than his feeble teachers, turns against Christianity the very weapons with which they would arm him against the Church. "Why should we become Christians," is the argument which they ingeniously retort upon missionaries who never open their mouths without reviling the Catholic faith, "when you tell us that three-fourths of the Chris- tian world have adopted a creed no way superior to our own ?"J The remaining chapters of these volumes will more and more confirm the fact, already proved for China and India, that Protestantism is everywhere generating in pagan lands worse evils than those which it seeks to remedy. " In almost every part of India," says the Kev. Mr. Percival, " the spread of the English language and literature is rapidly altering the phases of the Hindoo mind, giving it a skeptical, infidel cast."T " Prot- estant education," observes a native teacher employed by one * The Times, October 25, 1858. f lUd., October 27. \ History of the American Bible Society, ch. xxvii., p. 247. 4 Mohl, Rapports f aits d la Societe Asiatique, tome ii., p. 45. I Thirty Years in India, by Major H. Bevan, vol. ii., ch. xiv., p. 240. if The Land of the Veda, ch. xx., p. 472. 24 354: CHAPTER III. of the sects, "has unsettled the minds of thousands of young men in the religion of their ancestors, a thing in itself not to be deplored ; but it has sent forth hundreds of others as confirmed infidels."* "The schools form admirable champions of tem- poralities," says an experienced observer, speaking of all " under the clergy of different denominations," " and nothing else"\ " Results, as they have hitherto manifested them- selves," says the Rev. Mr. Clark son, " are unfavorable, not only to the Gospel, but to the principles of natural religion." And then this missionary continues as follows : " Some have argued that the Indians, by receiving an education which undermines their superstitions, are being prepared for the reception of Christianity. We believe that they are being Erepared for occupying a position extremely antagonistic to it. everal documents from missionaries at Bombay, Poonah, Su- rat, Calcutta, Delhi, Madras, and Benares, corroborate all that I have here stated None can doubt that infidelity, in its most absolute sense, is on the increase. There is no connection between the natives ceasing to be Hindoos, and becoming Chris- tians^ " Nana Sahib," says Mr. Bruce Norton, in 1858, " has been called ; a specimen of an educated native' and perhaps, morally, he is so." And this is the language of all the witnesses, of whatever class. " A missionary may write home," observes a well-known authority, "that he has made a Christian, when, in reality, he ought to state that he has destroyed a Hindoo."] " We find a Hindoo," said Mr. Leith, before a committee of the House of Commons, " and we leave an atheist. J T " There is little doubt," is the declaration of another writer, " that the present generation of educated natives will become deists."*' 35 ' " It seems to be universally admitted," we learn from Miss Martineau, " that the whole intelligent population which has been lifted out of the indigenous system of thought by education has no religion whatever, ."ff u The educated native," the House of Lords was lately assured, " is either a hypocrite or a latitudinarian, with the heart of an atheist under the robe of an idolater," and " the greater body are but too surely tending to a state morally lower than that from which education rescued them."i$ Lastly, a * A Sermon, by Narayan Sheshadri, p. 40 (1853). Observations on India, by a Resident there many years, p. 33. India and the Gospel, Lect. v., p. 279. Topics for Indian Statesmen, ch. xii., p. 375. Edinburgh Review, vol. xii., p. 177. Quoted by Mr. Bruce Norton, ch. xii., p. 355. ** Stocqueler, Handbook of India, p. 532. ff Suggestions towards the Future Government of India, p. 110. # Speech of the Duke of Marlborough, The Times, July 3, 1860. MISSIONS IN INDIA. 355 native " scholar of the Elphinstone Institution," in which " every boy is made thoroughly conversant with the Holy Scriptures,"* reveals this horrible result of Protestant education upon the mass of pupils, of all classes, throughout Hindostan : u They have no more faith in Jesus Christ than in their own religion. They 'believe the Jesus of the English and the Krishna of the Hindus to be alike impostors"-^ CONCLUSION. There is something in these appalling facts which defies com- ment. If every Protestant missionary in India had been, from the first, such as Middleton, or Kiernander, or Buchanan, even then we might have marvelled at results at once so uniform and so deadly. But among the agents of Protestant societies there have been men, of various sects, who sincerely desired to do good, and who were qualified, both by education and by personal character, to exert a certain moral influence upon the Hindoo. Yet they can only create deatli ! It is in the air, and under their feet. It exhales from their lips, and is generated by their touch. Even the Hindoo, the most profoundly religious of all non-Christian races, loses every vestige of faith as soon as he opens his ears to them. The man who yesterday was absorbed in prayer, or lacerated his flesh to propitiate a god whom he feared without knowing, to-day laughs aloud both at Christ and Vishnu. In the interval, a Protestant missionary has passed by him, and he has become another man. For years he grows up under his guidance and instruction ; he studies with him the mysteries of Christian doctrine; he penetrates the secrets of European science ; and when at last his pupilage is over, and he closes behind him the door of his school, he is found to be only a sensualist and a blasphemer. Whence this horrible blight ? Whence this contrast between the Hindoo, taught by the missionaries of the Cross, and clinging with invincible constancy to the faith of Christ through every trial which can befall him, "really and truly Christian" as even a pagan native has told us ; " insisting," as Sir William Sleeman reports, even when employed by the English, " upon going to Divine service at the prescribed hours :" and sometimes display- ing, as Father St. Cyr observes, the crowning grace of religious vocation ; and the same Hindoo, moulded from infancy, fash- ioned and instructed by the Protestant minister, only to become * Life in Bombay, ch. xii., p. 237. f Six Years in India, vol. iii , ch. viii., p. 277. 356 CHAPTER III. at last more guilty and more profane than he was before? This is a question which we shall examine with more advan- tage, when we have traced the same fact in every other region of the earth. And now, if any have hitherto doubted, in good faith, what was the real character of the great outbreak of the sixteenth century, and whose work it was designed to do in the world, here is one more fact which may assist their judgment. Once more we have seen the Church and the Sects in action. Once more we have applied the Divine rule, By their fruits ye shall know them. We have seen what the Catholic missionaries in India have been, and what they have accomplished ; we have seen also by what methods - the Protestant emissaries seek to approach the Hindoo, and what is the fruit of their work. Powerless to win the heathen to the Christianity which their own example, their shallow and incoherent philosophy, their worldly maxims, luxurious habits, and mutual conflicts and jealousies, have taught him to despise, they have been only too successful in impeding the work of those who alone could have set the captive free, and in adding to the original vices of the Indian the new crimes of hypocrisy, intemperance, and unbe- lief. They have taught him indeed that his gods are impostors, but only by convincing him that their own are no less so. This, as they freely admit, is the beginning and end of all their influence upon him. The reader has, then, before him the materials upon which to exercise once more that judicial function which it deeply con- cerns him to discharge with deliberate care ; and as he reviews the facts which have now been related, and the amazing con- trast which they reveal, will perhaps approach the consideration of the same history in other lands with a deepening convic- tion, that we have fulfilled our promise of inviting him to " a new controversy, differing from all others in this, that God has already taken it out of the hands of men to decide it Himself." CHAPTEE IY. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. IT will be expedient to confine within comparatively narrow limits the history of Christian missions in this island. The brief period subsequent to the establishment of British au- thority, though that rule dates only from the commencement of the present century, will more than suffice to afford us abun- dant illustrations of the contrast which we have already traced in other regions. A Protestant missionary society, assembled on a solemn oc- casion, and moved by an unwonted impulse of candor, appre- ciated in the following terms the work of the three great Pow- ers which have held sway, either together or in succession, in the land of spices and pearls. " The exertions of the Roman Catholics in the conversion of the natives having been greater than those of the Dutch, and those of the Dutch having greatly exceeded the British, it is in the same proportion that the three classes possess a permanent influence over the native mind'."' The admission is not without value, especially from such a source, but it might have been more complete. The influence of the British, as far as religion is concerned, has yet to be acquired ; that of the Dutch, so long supreme in the island, has vanished without leaving a trace ; while that of the Catholics, which preceded them both, has survived the dissolution of the one, and gained its peaceful triumphs in spite of the jealous hostility of the other. These three positions we shall now establish, by the evidence of Protestant witnesses of many creeds and various social position, but all familiar, from per- sonal observation and scrutiny, with the facts which they record. * Report of the Society for Missions to Africa and the East ; 10th Anniver- sary, p. 79. 358 CHAPTER IV. ^ The first period of the history of Christianity in Ceylon we will dismiss, for the sake of brevity, with a few words. The Catholic missionaries in this island during the whole epoch of the Por- tuguese dominion, were such as we have already seen them in China and India ; and there is perhaps no need to describe again a type of character, or to recount the details of an apos- tolic warfare, with which by this time we are sufficiently fa- miliar. St. Francis was one of their number, and where he was we may be sure the angels were not far distant. In his gracious form the Cingalese recognized a prophet of the true God, and by his companions and their successors thousands were converted to the faith. " Illustrious examples of pious devotion to the Saviour's cause," says a candid Wesleyan mis- sionary in Ceylon, " were furnished by the missionaries of the Koman Catholic faith."* Jesuits, Franciscans, and Oratorians rivalled each other in wisdom and charity ; and so solid was their work, here as elsewhere, that neither afflictions nor tempta- tions, neither the cruel persecutions of the Dutch, nor the more dangerous enticements of the English and Americans, have had any other effect upon the Catholic natives than to prove, as Protestants will presently assure us, their invincible constancy. Ceylon, like every other land in which the faith has been planted, was fertilized by the blood of martyrs. As early as 1546, men who had come from distant lands with the message of peace found here a glorious death. In 1548, one of the kings of the island was converted, and the Franciscans already num- bered twelve thousand native Christians in Columbo."f In 1602, the sons of St. Francis welcomed a new band of auxiliaries, de Guzman, de Mendoza, and other Fathers of the Society of Jesus, who came to share the burden of their toils. In 1616, Fathers John Metella and Louis Pelingotti of that society, having penetrated into the interior, yielded up their lives in testimony of the truths which they preached. Four new vic- tims hastened to offer themselves in their place. Sociro was the first captured, and the first martyred. In the following year, 1628, Matthew Fernandez and Antony Pecci embraced the same lot. And the heathen, as a modern historian observes, were not the most implacable enemies of these generous apostles. De Lyma and Moureyra were attacked at sea by the Dutch, and their vessels burned. Moureyra, having cast himself into the waves, was pursued by the Calvinists, and killed with harpoons. Antony de Vasconcellos, who had resigned the highest dignities to embrace the apostolic life, died by poison in 1633 ; and in the * A Narrative of the Mission to Ceylon, by the Rev. William Harvard, introd., p. 63. f Henrion, toine i., 2de partie, p. 465. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 359 following year, Andrada perished in the same manner.* And these generous martyrs were succeeded by others, who in their turn fought the good tight, and were able to inspire even the effeminate Cingalese, as Baldseus confesses, in words which shall be quoted hereafter, with courage enough to welcome the same fate. Let us hasten at once to later times, and to events of which we may accept the history from Protestant witnesses. Mr. Pridham, a recent writer on Ceylon, whose sentiments may be inferred from his own avowal, that he greatly prefers " the tenets of Buddhism," with all its madness of idolatry and superstition, " to the insensate and infinitely more debasing tenets of Rome," that is, to the religion of Fenelon and St. Francis Xavier, will first give us his valuable testimony. It is curious to see this gentleman forced, by a power which even prejudice so intense could not resist, to utter blessings when his mouth was filled with curses. Mr. Pridham, then, thus describes one of the later Catholic missionaries in Ceylon, the Oratorian Father Yaz : " He went about from place to place, through swamps and jungles, making many converts among the heathen by the austerity of his manners. His voluntary poverty was such that he would not accept money ; his modesty such, that in confessing women he would avert his eyes ; and his temperance such, that besides frequently abstaining from food, he lived on the coarsest diet. Catholicism appeared to revive throughout Jaffna, and the Dutch attributed it to the revival of some Jesuit in disguise." But the Dutch, whose only argument was violence, caught the Oratorian, and shut him up in prison. Here, says Mr. Pridham, " he applied himself to the study of Singhalese, in which he made himself a proficient." Prisons, it seems, are but a clumsy mode of fighting against God, as the Jews found when they had taken Peter captive. Like him, Father Yaz became free again ; and as a deadly pestilence was now raging, Mr. Pridham, who thinks the religion of Yaz "more debasing" than even Buddhism, tells us what he did next. " He followed the sick into the jungles, and building huts as well as time and place would permit, there sheltered them from the elements and the attacks of wild beasts ; in a word, he contrived to supply every want, temporal and spiritual, performed the most menial services, opened hospitals in the deserted houses, and dared every thing for their relief. The result was that numbers who were cured joined the Church, and had their children baptized. The admirable conduct of Yaz gained him the con- fidence of the king, who was only prevented from rewarding * Cretineau Joly, tome iii., ch. iv., p. 250. 360 CHAPTER IV. him by being assured that he was too disinterested to accept any thing." But Mr. Pridham was not permitted to stop even here, and so he continues his instructive narration as follows : " To relate all the undertakings of Padre Yaz, and to unfold the full tale of his energy, boldness, austerity, and devotion, would be incompatible with our design ; suffice to say, that the Dutch were never able to eradicate the faith thus planted by his courage, and Catholicism continued to increase in Ceylon till it arrived at its present position."* Such were the evangelists who labored in Ceylon. If their Master had not blessed them and their work, Christianity would be only an idle fable. But He suffered them and their spiritual children to be assaulted by the enemy, like their brethren in other lands, because He knew they could bear the trial. It was the Dutch Calvinists whom the Evil One employed as his instruments to vex and torment them ; let us see how the Protestants of Holland fulfilled their mission, and with what results. The Dutch have not acquired a high reputation, even among their co-religionists, as judicious or successful missionaries. "I never saw such cold, calculating people," says Dr. Joseph "Wolff, " as the members of the Dutch Missionary Society. "f And as he saw more of them, the impression was only confirmed ; for at a later period he once more declares, "There is scarcely any- where such a lukewarm set of people as the members of the Dutch Bible and Missionary Societies ; they are as watery as their country." Even their own countrymen seem to have avowed the same opinion, for the captain of a Dutch ship of war told him in confidence, " Our missionaries in the Dutch colonies made many converts, but government would not per- mit them to convert any more, for when they were converted, they got drunk, and refused to work on Sunday."J But Dr. Wolff is not alone in his unfavorable estimate of Dutch missionaries. In India, in the great Indian Archipelago, in Ceylon, in South America, everywhere and always, they b^ve been the same, and have provoked the same comments. Even in Japan, where they so long possessed a kind of commer- cial sovereignty, their real character appears to have been accurately discriminated. " The Dutch assured the Japanese," we are told by Golownin, that they were no Christians^ and obtained permission to trade with them." "I took the * Ceylon and its Dependencies, by Charles Pridham, Esq., vol. ii., app., pp. 808-11. f Journal, p. 39. ; Ibid., p. 14. Recollections of Japan, by Captain Golownin, ch. iii. (1819). MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 361 liberty," says Count Benyowski, who visited that country towards the close of the eighteenth century, " to ask the king whether he thought the Hollanders were Christians ; and he replied, that merchants had no religion, their only faith con- sisting in getting money, while they gave themselves very little trouble about the belief of a God."* Their direct missionary efforts have produced just the results which the spirit imputed to them by this sagacious monarch would be likely to secure. Thus Mr. Kolif, though a native of Holland, tells us, that in their island of Damma, "by far the greater portion of the in- habitants are either heathens, or individuals once Christians, who have returned to their former habits ;" while of the Arm islands the same witness unwillingly reports, " Our religion has retrograded, while Islamism has advanced considerably. "f The same facts are repeated, with exactly the same com- ments, by many English writers, in spite of their religious sym- pathies. Of Batavia, where the Dutch converts have long en- joyed " a translation of the whole Bible," Dr. Morrison writes as follows : " It is painful to remark that the native Christians of this city, if such they can be called, are sunk in deplorable ignorance and vice, and in no way remarkably distinguished from their heathen brethren, except by the formal abandon- ment of idolatry, and the equally formal adoption of the Christian name." The same Protestant historian confesses, that although u in Amboyna and the surrounding islands there were upwards of fifty churches," the inhabitants having been u compelled by law" to profess Christianity, "they were, after all, but baptized pagans ;" and he adds, " it seems an absolute burlesque upon the New Testament to speak of the mass of the Dutch converts in Amboyna as Christians. "$ In 1853, Mr. Gerstaecker reports once more, that the Ma- hometans are in every respect, superior to the so-called Christians. He even affirms that the results of " conversion" have been, "in almost every instance," so deplorable, especially in the augmentation of immorality, that "Government does not like to see missionaries go amongst the people, and if it does not prevent their teaching, most certainly does not support it." Lastly, Sir John Bowring and Mr. Oliphant confirm, with ample details, these gloomy statements. "The interests of trade," says the former, contrasting the worldly spirit of the Dutch with the religious zeal of the Spaniards, "have ever * Trawls of Comte de Benyowski, vol. i., p. 399 (1790). f Voyages of the Dourga, by D. H. Kolff, ch. vi., p. 93 ; ch. xii., p. 195. \ The Fathers of the London Missionary Society, by John Morrison, D.D., vol. i., pp. 71, 75. Voyage, &c., vol. iii., p. 257. 362 CHAPTER IV. been the predominant consideration among Dutch colonizers."* " In carrying out their ruthless policy against the Christians," observes Mr. Oliphant, " the Japanese always found in the Dutch ready and willing assistants." It was the latter who " bombarded, at the behest of the Japanese government, thirty- seven thousand Christians, who were cooped up within the walls of Samabarra." And these eager Protestants, who not only denied that they were Christians themselves, but gladly assisted pagans in slaughtering those who were, have failed in securing the very prize for which they committed crimes almost unparalleled in human annals. At home, they have seen the fairest provinces of their kingdom severed from them ; while in Japan, "they have not even had the profits of a lucrative trade to console them for the ignominy with which they have been treated ; on the contrary, it has steadily diminished in propor- tion as the indignities to which they have been exposed have increased. "f Mr. Southey will tell us hereafter that their con- duct, and its results, were .exactly the same in South America; and Dr. Hartwig, noticing their " insatiable greed," observes that in the Moluccas, where " the natives were treated with unmerciful cruelty, and blood flowed in torrents to keep up the price of cloves and nutmegs," they have lost the monopoly which they strove to retain by such means, and " the ports are thrown open to the commerce of all nations.";); Mr. Temminck, who has written an enthusiastic apology of Dutch government in the East, declares, as if he desired to redeem their sullied reputation, that " religious toleration" makes their Indian possessions a "terrestrial paradise. r We shall see immediately that Ceylon, under their government, formed no part of this apocryphal paradise ; bur, before we return to our immediate subject, let us add, in conclusion, the following impressive statement, by an energetic American Protestant, of what the Dutch have really done in the Indian Archipelago: "For two hundred years and more, three millions of Christian Dutchmen have been the masters over seven gen- erations of about iifteen millions of Mahometan and Pagan Malays, Javanese, and other races of the Archipelago, not less than one hundred millions in all ; and for what purpose? To fill the coffers of stolid men of Amsterdam and Rotterdam!" * Visit to the Philippine Islands, ch. v., p. 94. \ Lord Elgin's Mission, vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 49. " The Dutch merchants have been allowed to fatten and become rich, under laws and restrictions so humili- ating that the contempt of the Japanese for a Hollander is not to be wondered at." Niphon and Pec?ieli, by E. Barrington de Fonblanque, p. 173. \ The Tropical World, by Dr. G. Hartwig, ch. xx., p. 228. Possessions Neerlandaises dans I'lndeArchipelagique, par C. J. Temminck, tome i., ch. ii., p. 214 (1846). MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 363 The whole fruit of their conquests in the East, he says, is this, " that after two hundred years the natives display the same ignorance of the religion which their masters profess to be- lieve."* Even literature and science owe them but little, for as the learned orientalist Mohl complained, in 1844, to the Asiatic Society of France, " We are still using the Japanese frammars and dictionaries published two centuries ago by the esuits, and the Dutch do nothing."! And now let us see what they did in Ceylon. In this island, as in Western India, the Dutch succeeded the Portuguese, from whom they wrested the possessions which they were themselves destined to forfeit in turn to the English. These children of Calvin found their new territories peopled by Catholics. " The island of Ceylon," says Mr. Irving, with some exaggeration, " is said to have been so completely Roman Catholic when it came into the possession of the Dutch, that, unable to convert the natives to Calvinism, they took measures to promote idolatry . . They are said to have sent to the main- land for priests to re-establish Buddhism !"^ But this singular policy, with which these ardent Protestants inaugurated their reign in Ceylon, need not surprise us. We have seen even Anglicans, both lay and clerical, confessing that they prefer the Hindoo or Chinese idolater to the disciples of St. Francis, St. Augustine, and St. Paul. Let us continue, by the help of Protestant writers, the history of Dutch Calvinism in Ceylon. "It cannot be predicated in favor of the Dutch,'- says Mr. Pridham, whose information will be very useful to us, " that they entered upon the task of propagating the Reformed religion either with equal ardor or from similar motives to the Portu- guese." Mr. Hugh Murray told us exactly the same thing of the Bnglish in India, and we shall hear it again in future chap- ters of this history. But the Dutch, finding Buddhism an impotent ally against Catholics, proceeded to try the plan which has cost Protestant missionaries such enormous sums in every heathen land. They could not convert the Cingalese by argument, but they might perhaps do so by bribes. " The Dutch went about the business coolly," says Lord Yalentia, " and held forth the temptation of requiring the profession of the Protestant faith as a qualification for all public offices. " " They sought," we are told by Mr. Christmas, who is of the school of Mr. Pridham, for we are compelled to employ wit- nesses of this class, " to bribe the Cingalese to adopt Dutch * The Prison of Wetevreden, &c., by Walter M. Gibson, pp. 133, 446. f Rapport, 10 Juillet, 1844, p. 70. \ The Theory and Practice of Caste, ch. v., p. 130. Travels, vol. i., cli. vi., p. 201. 364: CHAPTER IV. Presby terianism by the offer of places and situations."* The offer was accepted,but with such results as migh t have been an ticipated. Thousands of Cingalese became Protestants, without ceasing to be Buddhists ; and, as the universal hypocrisy and corruption which such conversions generated only added new crimes to those which were indigenous in Ceylon, Lord Yalentia remarks truly, that " many of the vices of the Cingalese seem to be the crea- ' tion of their late masters." But we must hear other witnesses. A Dutch Protestant, who visited the island shortly before his countrymen were dispossessed by the English, gives this frank description of them : " So far from making any account of the Dutch, the inhabitants of Ceylon treat them with a kind of contempt ; but the Dutch have the prudence to overlook such trifles, minding the main chance, the amity of the King of Candy, that he may not take it into his head to break with them, which would be a very sensible wound to their commerce in this charming island."f A Baptist missionary, who notices the significant fact, that "the Portuguese left most people, the Dutch most buildings," thus estimates, in 1852, the results of their missions. "The Dutch filled their territories with Christians who knew nothing of Christianity except the name. It is not uncommon even now for a native to say, in the same breath, that he is a good Christian and a good Buddhist.":): Dr. John Morrison, the historian of the London Missionary Society, thus describes the Dutch Missions. " Of these missions it is difficult to speak in terms of high commendation, on account of the loose and unscriptural principles on which they were conducted. Though they increased to a large extent the nominal territory of Christianity, it is much to be feared that they did but comparatively little towards the real conversion of the heathen world." And then he describes their method. " All that was required by the Dutch divines of a Cingalese convert, prior to baptism and admission into the Christian Church, was, that he should be able to repeat the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments ;" announcing at the same time, " that no native should rise to rank in the army, or be admitted to any employment under the government, unless he professed himself a member of the Protestant Church." The Cingalese, Dr. Morrison adds, "pressed into the communion of so profitable a faith." The Dutch no longer needed to stimu- * The Hand of God in India, p. 111. f A Voyage to tJie Island of Ceylon in 1747, by a Dutch Gentleman, p. 18, English edition. i Missionary Tour in Ceylon and India, by Joshua Russell, ch. ii., p. 11 (1852). Vol. i, p. 66. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 365 late the progress of Buddhism, in order to spite the Catholics ; it was enough to induce a Cingalese to profess himself a Prot- estant, and his adhesion to Buddhism was effectually secured. Calvinism accepted this compromise, and by the close of the seventeenth century, " the Dutch ministers in Ceylon had baptized three hundred thousand of the inhabitants." It is true, as we shall see immediately, that they were pre- cisely such " converts " as Protestantism had made in China and India, that they still practised all the rites of heathenism, and were a scandal even to their own countrymen by the new vices which they now displayed. But still these nominal con- versions continued during the whole period of the Dutch occupation. At one time by constraint and violence, at another by an organized system of bribery, of which the details were prescribed by legislative enactment, they multiplied the disciples of the "reformed religion." And the masters of Ceylon were content with a process which produced such satisfactory numer- ical results, though it made Christianity a by-word among the heathen, an object of hatred to those who affected to em- brace, and of scorn to those who openly rejected it. u The vices, the cupidity, and the flagrant immorality of the Dutch administration, as well as of their private conduct," says M. de Jancigny, "tended necessarily to cast discredit upon their official profession of faith."* At length the inevitable hour of their downfall arrived, and then was revealed, to their con- fusion and dishonor, the result of their presence in Ceylon. But that result is too curious and instructive, as well as too characteristic of the real influence of Protestant missions in pagan lands, to be dismissed with a passing allusion. The Dutch had two main objects during their occupation of Ceylon, both of which they pursued with a keen avidity and an unscrupulous injustice second only to that which distinguished their commercial traffic; the first was to force the natives to become Protestants, the second to crush or extirpate the Catho- lics. The first aim was partially accomplished, after a fashion which shall be more fully described presently ; the second utterly failed. But we must take the history of that failure from Protestant witnesses. Sir Emerson Tennent, the highest authority on all which concerns the island of Ceylon, and whose well-known work is justly commended by a Protestant minister as u very impartially drawn up," writes as follows. " In 1748, it was forbidden to educate a Roman Catholic for the ministry, but within three years it was found necessary to repeat the same prohibition, as * Ceylon, par M. de Jancigny ; V Univers Pittoresque, tome viii., p. 653. 366 CHAPTER IV. well as to renew the proclamation for putting down the celebra- tion of the Mass. Notwithstanding every persecution, however, the Roman Catholic religion retained its influence, and held good its position in Ceylon. It was openly professed by the immediate descendants of the Portuguese, who had remained in the island after its conquest by the Dutch; and in private it was equally adhered to by large bodies of the natives, both Singhalese and Tamils, whom neither corruption nor coercion could induce to abjure it."* Yet both were freely used, though with no other result than to show, that the pastors of this persecuted flock were worthy of their vocation, and that their courageous disciples were not unworthy of them. " The Roman Catholic priests made their way into the low country, visiting in secret their scattered flocks, and administering the sacraments in defiance of \heplakaats and prohibitions of the government." And so the battle went on. But the issue of such a conflict could never be doubtful. Sir Emerson Tennent tells us what it was. Father Joseph Vaz, to give only a simple example, " in an incredibly short space of time added to the Church upwards of thirty thousand converts from the heathen." In vain they bound the apostle in fetters, martyred his disciples, or con- demned them to the galleys for life. In vain they devised those ingenious cruelties which forced even a Protestant minister to exclaim, in spite of his hatred of their Catholic victims, "Their blind, pharisaical vindictiveness can only be cordially abhorred. "f But this was their method of conversion, and they knew no other. The persecution never slacked; "but the proclamations of the government," we are told, "were either too late to be eifectual, or too tyrannical to be carried into force ; and in 1717, only two years after a renewed procla- mation, the Roman Catholics were in possession of upwards of four hundred churches in all parts of Ceylon." Still the Dutch pursued their policy of savage repression. They had already prohibited all education to Catholics, and now they forbade them, under terrible penalties, " either to marry or bury ;" and finally, as it was possible to improve still further this too lenient code, "freedom was conferred upon the children of all slaves born of Protestant parents, whilst those of Roman Catholics were condemned to perpetual servitude.":): Such are the counsels which the Enemy of man suggests to the agents whom he employs to do his work. But they come to naught, in Ceylon as elsewhere ; and the Protestant historian of Christianity in this island frankly confesses, that they only * Christianity in Ceylon, ch. ii., p. 42. \ Romanism in Ceylon, by the Rev. Edward J. Robinson, p. 17 (1855). i Sir E. Tennent, ch. ii., p. 53. MISSION'S IN CEYLON. 367 confirmed " the rising ascendency of the Roman Catholics, whose numbers had actually increased under persecution. They had churches in every district, from Jaffna to Colombo ; and in 1734 they extended their operations to the southern province, and with such, success, that the Presbyterian clergy of Galle, distracted by the impracticability or apostasy of the natives, gave way before this accumulation of hostile influences ; from 1745 the district was left for some years altogether without the services of a Protestant minister."* It is very satisfactory to have a Protestant narrator of so remarkable a history ; but he has more to tell us. All the penal laws, futile as they were in their effects upon men whose faith made them invincible, were still in force. The government still compelled Catholic parents, wherever they were within reach of the iron hand of the jailer, or the scourge of the policeman, to send their children to Protestant schools. By 1750, however, the native Christians had become strong enough to protest openly against this barbarous tyranny, and they publicly pre- sented a petition to the authorities, in which they complained that they were compelled by violence " to send their families to be instructed in doctrines which they rejected." They confessed that if, in the towns, they had hitherto submitted, it was only from fear of the merciless penalties ; but that whenever, by a violence which they could not resist, their children had been " baptized by the ministers of the Reformed Church, they were in the habit of having the same children baptized a second time by a clergyman of the Church of Rome." The " Consistory of Columbo," composed of Protestant ministers, urged the govern- ment peremptorily to reject this humble prayer of Christian fathers and mothers, who presumed to have a care for the souls of their little ones. They went still further, and besought the government to deny, by virtue of its supreme pontifical autho- rity," the validity of baptism administered by a Catholic priest ;" and to declare that " none but Protestant headmen should be invested with authority in the different districts." The civil authorities desired nothing better than to comply with this demand, but there was a difficulty through which they could not see their way, and which they proposed in despair to the Protestant ministers ; they would gladly appoint only " Prot- estant headmen," they said, but where could they find them ? " It was practically impossible," the government sorrowfully replied, "as the number of Protestant converts had become too scanty to afford a sufficient field for selection. "f The " Con- sistory of Columbo" had asked for too much. P. 58. p - 61 - 368 CHAPTER III. However, " the prayer of the Eoman Catholics was rejected,' 1 and it was not until the Christian natives rose in insurrection for though it is sometimes a duty to suffer persecution for the faith, it is sometimes also a duty to resist it that the frightened government gave way. The enemy was already knocking at their doors, and their long reign of cruelty and fraud was draw- ing to a close. As early as 1756 the English had made them- selves masters of the whole coast of Ceylon, and in 1796 the colony was annexed to the British crown. But before we speak of the new form of Protestantism which was now to be intro- duced, and of its fortunes in Ceylon, let us see what the English conquest revealed as to the final results of Dutch missionary operations in that island. They boasted that they had induced multitudes to embrace their religion. Let us inquire how far the assertion was true. BaldaBiis, the most celebrated, and apparently the most upright of the Dutch missionaries, u candidly states," as Sir Emerson Tennent remarks, that his converts were only " Chris- tians in name," sine Christo Christiani. " They could refute the Popish errors concerning purgatory, the mass, &c.," says this Calvinist missionary, but unfortu- nately their religion was confined to such negative formulae ; for, as Baldseus reluctantly admits a few pages later, " though they bear the name of Christians, they still retain many of their pagan superstitions."* And his testimony is the more valuable because he was describing the fruits of his own labor. He could teach them, he admits, to argue against some of the most sacred doctrines of Christianity, but he could never persuade them to accept even those meagre and distorted fragments of it which constituted his own religion. Like the Protestant mis- sionaries in India, he could plunge them into the pit of atheism, but all his efforts could never draw them out again. Yet even such confessions hardly prepare us for the prodigious facts which are unfolded in the following statement of the Kev. Mr. Palm : " Of one hundred and eighty-two thousand two hundred and twenty-six natives enrolled as Christians at Jaffna, but sixty-four were members of the Church," he means the Protestant Church ; " of nine thousand eight hundred and twenty at Manaar, only five were communicants ; and in the same year (1760) at Galle and Matura there were only thirty-six members, out of eighty-nine thousand who had been baptized !"f It appears, therefore, from this remarkable statement, that out of more than two hundred and eighty thousand nominal Christians, * In Churchill's Collection of Voyages, vol. iii., p. 737. f Tennent, ch. ii., p. 65. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 369 who had all received baptism, not more than one hundred and five were regarded, even by teachers who had so many motives for exaggerating their number, as Christians in any sense what- ever. But even this is not all. We have seen that thousands of the natives of Ceylon, moved partly by the attraction of bribes and partly by the fear of persecution, enrolled themselves as Prot- estants, while in secret they continued to practice their own idolatries ; but there is still a fact to be noticed, of which the force and gravity would only be impaired by any reflections which we could offer. While in health, the Buddhist affected to be a disciple of the " reformed religion," and even assumed the character with tolerable success ; but when sickness or peril overtook him, his conscience, upon which Protestantism had failed to exert even the faintest influence, began to reproach him, and he hastened to appease the gods whom he had of- fended by the semblance of adhesion to a worship which in secret he despised. "A large proportion of these nominal Christians," says Sir Emerson Tennent, and the statement is once more repeated even by Protestant missionaries in 1862, " have been betrayed into apostasy in times of sickness and alarm." We shall see, before we conclude this chapter, what manner of men the Catholic natives have proved, and how they have maifested the effects of true conversion ; but now we are speak- ing of those whom the Dutch admitted into the ranks of Prot- estantism. " It is a remarkable fact," says a writer who has been already quoted, " that notwithstanding the hundreds of thousands of Singhalese who were enrolled by them as converts, the religion and discipline of the Dutch Presbyterians is now almost extinct among the natives of Ceylon ! Even in Jaffna, where the reception of those doctrines was all but unanimous by the Tamils, not a single congregation is now in existence of the many planted by Baldseus, and tended by the labors of Yalentyn and Schwartz." The religion, he adds, and here we may conclude this sketch of Dutch missions in Ceylon, " has long since disappeared almost from the memory of the natives of Ceylon."* And now we come to the English epoch, and to the mission- aries of the Established Church and of the various sects which she has begotten. The English had scarcely begun the administration of their new conquest when they perceived, with that infallible good sense which rarely deceives them when their interests are at stake, and which enables them to restrain their docile bigotry * Tennent, ch. ii., p. 71. 25 370 CHAPTER IV. even in its fiercest mood, that Ceylon would not be worth hold- ing on Dutch principles, and could not be governed by Dutch maxims. They gave religious freedom to Canada, as Burke remarks, because they feared to lose it ;* they refused it to Ireland, because she was within arm's reach. In Ceylon they wished to pursue their commercial operations in peace, and the Catholic natives had shown that they could neither be bribed nor terrified. Still there was a momentary conflict between prudence and prejudice, and it was not till 1806, under the government of Sir Thomas Maitland, and at the urgent solicita- tions of the Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Johnston, that the old persecuting laws were finally repealed, and religious toleration proclaimed.. After ten years' hesitation, they thought it best for their commercial interests to leave the Catholics alone. The first fact which occurs in the history of the English period is perhaps the most curious in the whole chapter. Ex- pecting, from their experience of the past, to be still persecuted by the government, the Dutch "converts" now lost no time in announcing themselves, by way of precaution, as English Prot- estants, to the number of three hundred and forty-two thou- sand ! " Mr. Lambrick, the first Church of England missionary at Cotta, recounts that he one day asked a native of Cotta of what religion he was, and the answer was, Buddha's. So then you are not a Christian ? Oh, yes, to be sure I am ; I am a Christian, and of the Keformed Dutch religion too."f But as soon as they comprehended that the Dutch reign was over, they transferred their allegiance to that new religion which they now heard of for the first time. It was always safe to be of the religion of their masters. When, however, they ascer- tained, by the new enactments, that they were " no longer to be paid for apostasy," and that " a monopoly of offices and public employment" was not to be reserved for the submissive professors of the State religion, they showed at last their real character ; and then was enacted onb of the most notable scenes in the annals of Protestant missions. The hour of freedom had come for these poor Cingalese, and while the Catholic natives steadfastly adhered in this new era of tranquillity to the faith which they had professed through long years of torment and suffering, the so-called Protestants flung away with joy the hated disguise, and the Church of England lost her three hun- dred and forty-two thousand members before she had even time to count them. " Almost with greater rapidity than their num- bers had originally increased, they now commenced to decline. * " Government itself lately thought fit to establish the Roman Catholic re- ligion in Canada." Works, vol. ix., p. 221. f Tennent, ch. vi., p. 313. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 371 In 1802, the nominal Protestant Christians amongst the Tamils of Jaffna were one hundred and thirty thousand ; in 1806, Bu- chanan, who then visited Ceylon, described the Protestant reli- gion as extinct"* We have seen that at the same moment Dr. Claudius Buchanan described the Catholic churches of Ceylon as thronged with worshippers. " The whole district," he says, speaking of Jaffna, "is now in the hands of the Romish priests from the college at Goa."f It was, no doubt, an unwelcome fact, but he was obliged to confess, " they have assumed quiet and undisturbed possession of the land." "What then had be- come of the three hundred and forty-two thousand Protestants? Sir Emerson Tennent supplies the answer: "Vast numbers had openly joined the Roman Catholic communion, to which they had long been secretly attached, and the whole district was handed over to the priests from the college of Goa." In the other districts the defection " was equally deplorable, and numbers of Protestants were every year apostatizing to Bud- dha." Finally, " within a very few years, the only Christians who were to he found in the peninsula were the members of the Church of Eome^\ The English Protestants, then, for we have heard enough of their predecessors, to whom the Dutch had bequeathed a doubtful heritage, which had already vanished when they put forth their hands to grasp it, did not gain much by the legacy. They had no alternative but to begin the work anew, and this time with other weapons, and by a different process. It was too late for persecution, even if they had wished to try that feeble and exploded method ; and moreover, the new race of preachers was more humane than the terrible u Consistory of Columbo." They resigned themselves, therefore, to the employ- ment of milder means. At first the Church of England, by an unusual privilege, had the field all to herself; but wherever she is, the unwelcome forms which dog her steps in every land, the diros fades of her kinsfolk and rivals, are sure to appear sooner or later in their accustomed procession. And so, before many years had elapsed, all the sects which we have seen striving, with feigned words of amity, to trip up each other in China and India for the instruction and amusement of the heathen, were gathered together in Ceylon. Each had its own partisans, whose eager sympathies followed it across the sea, and who , * Tennent, ch. iii., p. 86. f Christian Researches in Asia, p. 44. i P. 86. Captain Knox, who was four years a prisoner in Ceylon, noticed of the Catholic natives, that their religion " bred in them a kind of love and affection towards strangers, and men shall hear them oftentimes upbraiding the highlanders for their insolent and rude behavior." Captivity in Ceylon, ch. ii., p. 159 (1818). 372 CHAPTER IV. never ceased to transmit to it from their remote dwellings the gold without which it would have refused even to attempt a task in which gold was to be the chief agent. The Americans alone, as Lord Torrington has told us, had received long ago one hundred thousand pounds, and they have received a good deal more since. What the others have absorbed we need not stay to calculate. It is probable that in this one island Prot- estantism has expended, how vainly we shall hear presently, as much as would suffice to. maintain all the Catholic missions throughout the earth for a quarter of a century. But Protest- ant missions, we know, are expensive, and their agents would smile with pity at the indecent poverty of St. Paul, who lived on alms and had apparently only one cloak, or of his Catholic successors, who have often none at all. It would, however, be unreasonable to expect that respectable fathers of families, having complicated social duties to discharge, should condescend to the meagre outlit with which apostles have braved the longest voyage. When St. Francis was preparing to start for India, St. Ignatius made him accept a waistcoat, on discovering that he did not possess one : it is true that he took off his own to supply the want. Yet St. Ignatius, unlike the agents of English or American religions, who seek to mend their fortunes by assuming the title of " missionaries," " was of a race so noble that its head was always invited to do homage by a special writ,"* even in the proud court of Spain. The scantiness of apparel which such men accept would be alto- gether incongruous and unseemly if proposed to missionaries of the modern school. It is their own friends who protest most warmly against the unjust demand; and not content with repu- diating on their behalf all claim to the apostolic character, de- clare, with almost perplexing frankness, that they too easily yield to the seductions of covetousness and luxury '. " In India I supported the missionaries," said Mr. Leith in 1853, and the House of Commons printed his words ; " but I say that they have not followed the Gospel. Christ said, ' Leave all and follow Me ;' they say, ' Take all, and follow Me.' " The state- ment is harsh, but apparently true, and not less true in Ceylon than in Hindostan. An historian of Protestant missionary societies, who chronicles with impassioned eulogy all their works, thus depicts their mode of life in Ceylon. "A poet's- imagination could scarcely conceive a spot more suited for the residence of a Christian missionary." Perhaps you conclude that he is noting the facilities which its position offers for the conversion of the neighboring pagans ? He has no such * Eanke, book ii, ch. i., vol. i., p. 121. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 373 thought ; he is only contemplating with wistful admiration the " spacious lawns"* with which the missionary mansion is adorned, and all those picturesque and attractive appendages which sometimes provoke the surprise of the heathen, but rarely their respect. Let us not inquire, however, too curiously into the domestic life which is deemed an appropriate mode of existence for a Protestant missionary, in Ceylon as elsewhere ; or at least let us be content to take the account from their own associates, who know more about it than we do, and are more impartial witnesses. The Rev. Howard Malcolm, who visited Ceylon among other places, and was deputed by the American Board of Foreign Missions to report on the operations of his missionary brethren, fulfilled this part of his inquisitorial functions in these words : " Rulers and princes, at some stations, are unable to live as the missionaries do. It is altogether undesirable to see carved mahogany sofas covered with crimson silk, engravings, cut glass, silver forks, &c., in the house of a missionary ; the house itself resembling our handsome country-seats ! . . . . Several missionaries have confessed to me that, on their first arrival in the East, they were shocked at the style in which they found their brethren living. Yet they had been carried away by the .current. And so, generally, will be their successors. "t We comprehend, therefore, that even the ample largesses of the generous subscribers at home, profuse and abundant as they are, are not superfluously liberal. Protestant missions, we have already observed, are expensive. But other witnesses, less reserved than Mr. Malcolm, and writing for the public rather than for a missionary board, are willing to introduce us into the interior of the pleasant " country houses" in which he was a familiar guest, though he prudently leaves his readers at the door. These unofficial visitors afford us an opportunity of contemplating their opulent hosts in the tranquil repose of their daily life. The scenes which they reveal are worth noting. "In Persia, China, India, every- where" says one who dwelt amongst them in many lands, " I found them living quite differently from what I had imagined. They live quite in the manner of opulent gentlemen, and have handsome houses fitted up with every convenience and luxury. The missionaries repose upon swelling divans, their wives preside at the tea-table, their children feast on sweetmeats and confectionery; in short, their position is one incomparably pleasanter and freer from care than that of most other people ; * Smith's History of the Missionary Societies, vol. ii., p. 641. f Travels in S. Eastern Asia, vol. ii., p. 819. 374 CHAPTER IV. they get their salaries punctually paid, and take their places very easily." The picture is too instructive not to merit closer examination. "In places where several missionaries are settled, they have what are called 'meetings,' three or four times a week, sup- posed to be devoted to business, but which are little else than parties at which their wives and children appear in tasteful dresses. At one of the missionaries' houses the meeting will be a breakfast, at another a dinner, at a third a tea-party ; and you will see several equipages and servants standing in the court-yard. There is, indeed, on these occasions, some little talk of business, and the gentlemen remain together perhaps half an hour discussing it ; but the rest of the time is passed in mere social amusement."* It is satisfactory to know that, by the alms of worthy persons who suppose they are assisting to convert the heathen, the revenues of the missionary societies steadily increase. They have evidently need of all their wealth. Let their subscribers, however, only continue faithful, and there is no danger lest the peaceful enjoyments of their agents should be curtailed, or their pleasant career compromised. f It is true that among the multitude of so-called missionaries, who owe to the imprudent generosity of their English or American co-religionists the luxuries which they would never have tasted at home, some few are found of a different order. They may appreciate as keenly as the rest the enjoyment of ease and opulence, of " mahogany sofas," and " silver forks," but they have at least occasional aspirations after better things. Their zeal may be as unprofitable, and their piety as eccentric, but they do not consume their time wholly in " mere social amusement." Yet' it may be doubted whether their religion does not present a still more repulsive picture than the osten- tatious worldliness of their companions. Mrs. Win slow, the wife of one of the most conspicuous of their number, and herself " a distinguished female missionary," gives us this account of the class referred to : " Yesterday, at this station, Mr. Winslow had scarcely begun his sermon, when it was evident that the Holy Spirit was near. He had some overwhelming views, which for a time rendered him unable to * Ida Pfeiffer, Voyage Bound tJie World, pp. 221-2. $ f There does not appear to be the least danger of either. " Rumors some- times reach us," says the Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, in 18G2, " of comfortable dwellings, and conveniences of life enjoyed by missionaries abroad. Your Committee are not careful to answer such charges. They know the temper of their men, and that, when called upon to ' endure hardness,' they will not be found wanting. To God be all the praise !" And then they " rejoice to see the plummet in the hand of our Zerubbabel," and so bring their report to an end. P. 230. The agents of the Church Missionary Society are evidently in no danger. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 375 speak. It was a solemn place." And this was nothing un- usual. " At Batticotta, in the afternoon, the Holy Spirit came down with power, and filled all the house where we were sit- ting. The brother who first led in prayer was so much over- come as to be unable to proceed. It was not common prayer, but wrestling with the Angel of the Covenant, with strong cry- ing and tears. Every thing was awfully solemn, such as language cannot describe. We came home exceedingly exhausted."* The Rev. D. Hallock, this lady's biographer, has recorded other examples of the same kind of spirituality. A little child, a son of Mrs. Winslow, was supposed to have indulged in pre- varication, perhaps about its portion of " sweatmeats and confectionery." It was not by any means certain; but Dr. Hallock says, " she thought he told her a lie." TJpon this, Mrs. Winslow, with an eye to the religious public on the other side of the ocean, and perhaps also to the somewhat exacting " directors" at home, takes her pen, and writes as follows in her official journal : " I before knew that he was a sinner, but now it was a reality. That I had borne a child who was an enemy to God, a rebel, an heir of hell, was humbling, over- whelming. Immediately I resolved to give the Lord no rest until this brand should be plucked from the burning." If we compare this type with the more numerous class who are content to live in the manner of opulent gentlemen, and who affect no higher degree of piety than their mode of life will conveniently support, we shall perhaps find it difficult to decide which has the least title to our esteem. Even cupidity and effeminacy are hardly more distasteful to a Christian than the dull fanaticism which confounds the frailty of a child with the deliberate malice of a sinner, and the vanity which mistakes its own babblings for the utterances of the Holy. Spirit. But it is time to inquire what they have actually accomplished towards the conversion of Ceylon. They will tell us themselves. They do not always conceal the truth, seldom, except under compulsion, or when writing to their official employers, who would promptly resent all superfluous and unprofitable candor as a perfectly useless indiscretion ; and so, in their moments of frankness, they thus describe the character of their converts, and the manner in which they are recruited. " I have reason to believe," says the Rev. Mr. Percival, in 1854, " that converts have, in some cases, been again and again baptized by the same minister, being presented by a mercenary catechist on special days, to swell the number of candidates, and induce the belief * Biographical and Historical Sketches of Distinguished American Mission- aries, edited by H. W. Pierson, A.M. ; pp. 147-150 (1852). 376 CHAPTER IV. that the work of conversion was steadily advancing." And then he explains the secret motive of these ingenious catechists. " One so zealous and successful could not but be well reported, and eventually as certainly benefited by promotion."* The annalist of Protestant attempts to convert the heathen, though anxious to exaggerate their success, writes as follows of their result in Ceylon. " This mission has now been carried on for between thirty and forty years with much fewer trials and hindrances than most of the society's missions, yet its progress has been small as regards its great and primray object, the con- version of souls to Christ. Perhaps an utter indifference to all spiritual religion, rather than hypocrisy, describes the state of heart of most of the nominal converts."f And this account is confirmed, with graphic brevity, by another Protestant histo- rian of missions in Ceylon. " Heathens, Mahometans, and Ro- man Catholics," says Dr. Smith, who always ranks these three classes together, as identical in their spiritual state, " were all bigoted to their respective systems ; the greater part of the Prot- estants were perfectly indifferent about the religion which they professed."^: And presently he declares of the Protestant con- verts, " They are Buddhists in belief, but politically Christians." Heber, who visited Ceylon officially, had long before re- marked in his mild phrase, "There is among the Cingalese and Tamul population a very large amount of nominal Christians ;" but it was reserved for later travellers to reveal their true char- acter. The English, we shall see, were destined to be, if possi- ble, even less successful than the Dutch, though they imitated their policy so far as to hold out temporal rewards as an incen- tive to conversion. The Rev. George Bissett, the secretary of the " Columbo Auxiliary Bible Society," reported with satisfac- tion to the parent society, " far from any disgrace attaching to those who are converted to Christianity," as in India, " their private reputation is increased, and their political capacity enlarged ; new situations of rank and emolument are brought within their reach, and the native Christian may aspire to a promotion from which the heathen, under this government, has been long excluded."! The Cingalese, however, declined to embrace Anglican Protestantism even on these favorable terms. The proffered liberalities of the English were still less persuasive than the brutal menaces of the Dutch, except in the case of famished and degraded outcasts, who now compose the Protest- * The Land of the Veda, ch. xvii., p. 406. [ Hist, of Prop, of Christianity, vol. p. 365. i Hist, of the Missionary Societies, vol. ii., p. 479. Indian Journal, vol. ii., p. 246. | Owen's History of the B. and F. Bible Society, vol. ii., p. 272. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 377 ant congregations of Ceylon, and who are thus described even by their masters and teachers. " The greater part of the Cingalese whom I designate nominal Christians of the reformed religion," says Mr. Har- vard, a Wesleyan missionary, " are little more than Christians by baptism. They have no objection to the Christian religion," aiid so they baptized them, " but for their amusement are apt to attend the Buddhist festivals. Numbers of them make no difficulty in asserting that they are both Buddhists and Chris- tians"* But they are not always so candid. Sometimes they think it more prudent to be Protestants in public, and Buddhists only in private. "Amongst those who profess Christianity," says Colonel Forbes, " considerable pains are taken to conceal the unhallowed rites which they secretly practise."! " I consider the return officially made to the government altogether ridicu- lous," says Colonel Campbell, speaking of the Church of Eng- land missionaries, " but the Cingalese have shown great readi- ness to assist these reverend gentlemen in building their houses." And then he gives a particular instance : " The village where these gentlemen reside contained one thousand six hundred and forty-four nominal Christians, but the greater part of them were Christians in name only most of them continue to worship devoutly, or rather to fear, the host of devils they firmly believe in.";}: "A converted Buddhist," says another British officer, "will address his prayers to our God, if he thinks he can obtain any temporal benefit by so doing ; but if not, he would be just as likely to pray to Buddha, or to the devil." " Nominal Christians often join in idolatrous devotional exercises," says another Protestant official, "with apparently as much zeal as the professed Buddhist." || Mr. Sul- livan, a capable and impartial witness, notices the still more singular fact, that they will pass in the same hour from the Protestant service to the abominations of their own idolatry, so little impression has the former produced upon them. " The Cingalese," he says, from his own observation, " will attend chapel, listen with attention, and apparently assent with under- standing, but he will go from chapel to his idol, from the preach- ing of Christianity to the abominations of his degrading profes- sion, without the slightest trace of change effected P'T " It is a * Narrative, &c., introd., p. 61. Recent Disturbances in Ceylon, p. 39 (1850). Excursions in Ceylon, vol. i., ch. vi., p. 121. Baker's Rifle in Ceylon, p. 85. Ceylon ; an Historical Sketch, by Henry Marshall, F.R.S.E., &c., p. 236. A Visit to Ceylon, by Edward Sullivan, ch. vii., p. 75. 378 CHAPTER IV. subject of general regret to the missions," says Mr. Bennett, an enthusiastic advocate of the missionaries, u that, although in the immediate neighborhood of a nominally Christian popula- tion, scarcely one native family out of a hundred, unless imme- diately connected with them, abstains, on religious principle, from the ceremonies and practice of devil-worship."* And all these witnesses, who thus disclose the incurable impotence of Protestantism, are themselves enthusiastic Protestants. Let us turn from these official writers to the missionaries themselves, who thus confirm their unwelcome evidence. The Rev. James Selkirk, a Church of England missionary, reports of his colleague Mr. Browning, that u the multiplicity of his labors, and the little success he met with, were such as freatly to depress Mr. B.'s mind." But Mr. B. and his friends ad other vexations. "We are constantly pained," adds Mr. Selkirk, "to behold vast numbers infatuated by the mummeries of Popery. "f It was, no doubt, trying, but the contrast might have suggested other emotions than empty regret or restless mortification. " The Church of Rome, here as elsewhere," observes Sir George Barrow, " sweeps into its fold all it can get." J Appar- ently the Church of England tried to do the same, and no one blames the attempt ; but why should it be laudable when it failed, and criminal only when it succeeded? "The Roman Catholic priests," says Captain Percival, " with their usual in- dustry, have taken advantage of the current superstitions to forward the propagation of their own tenets. " He does not explain his meaning, nor need we attempt the unprofitable task ; but he also is very angry at the " vast numbers" of their converts, whose real character and manner of life other Prot- estant witnesses, quite as prejudiced as Sir George Barrow and Captain Percival, but somewhat more candid, will describe to us presently. Meanwhile, let us hear Mr. Selkirk again. " Very few of the heathen," he says, "i. e., native Kandyans, could be induced to come to hear the w r ord preached, or, if they came for a short time, to be regular in their attendance." This was in 1826 ; let us see if things improved as time went on. In 1827, "there were several things to discourage. Some of those who were communicants were seldom at church, except on that particular Sunday on which the Lord's Supper was administered," which was probably very rarely. But they did * Ceylon and its Capabilities, by J. W. Bennett, Esq., F.L.S., late Ceylon Civil Establishment, ch. vii., p. 61. f Recollections of Ceylon, by the Rev. James Selkirk, ch. vii., p. 201. t Ceylon, Past and Present, by Sir George Barrow, ch. vii., p. 168 (1857). Account of the Island of Ceylon, ch. ix., p. 226. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 379 not always come even then. " On one occasion there was not one of the communicants present, though notice had been regularly given the Sunday previous." And these were the flower of their converts. Years pass by, and still no improvement is recorded. " The Buddhists," Mr. Selkirk sadly relates, " remain prejudiced and bigoted to their own system of error. The Roman Catholics continue steadfast in their perversions of the Scriptures, and adherence to vain superstitions ; and the majority of Protestant Christians, both European and native, are lamentably indiffer- ent to vital godliness."* Is it possible to avow more candidly that Protestantism is the least influential form of religion known amongst men ? In 1830, " the state of things had not much altered for the better." In 1835, for we need not give the whole dismal history year by year, " out of flve hundred and eighty souls, in one hundred and twenty-three families," this was a Church of England mission, " eighty children were unbaptized, and in between thirty and forty families, the parents were living together unmarried. By far the greater part of the whole visited are utterly careless, and live as if they had no souls, and act as if they believed with their heathen neighbors that there was no God."f Yet these were the " converts," who furnished the materials for " annual reports," and whose instruction and maintenance costs England every year a king's ransom. Again; of the "nominally Protestant Christian population of the southern and middle parts of Ceylon," he says, "the worship of the devil is still practised among them.";): Once more ; if any one doubts the accuracy ot Colonel Campbell's frank statement that " the return officially made to the government is altogether ridiculous," let him weigh the following really horrible account of the same Protestant missionary. " The government native preachers, called Propo- nents, have sometimes baptized two or three hundred infants and elder children at a time." They are paid, it seems, in proportion to the number, and therefore lay hold of all they can catch, employing as " sponsors" any one, pagan or not, who may be passing by ; while these official baptists, who save the missionaries much labor, are themselves, says Mr. Selkirk, * Recollections, &c., ch. vii., p. 204. + P. 217. | A Wesleyan minister makes the following singular report on a mission of his community at Dondra : " We conversed at length upon the state of the mission, and found that it had been injured by extreme jealousy of demon- worship on the part of one of our agents." We cannot suppose that he cen- sured the jealousy, nor understand how it could be "extreme." Australia, with Notes by the Way ; by F. Jobson, D.D., ch. iii., p. 73 (1862). 380 CHAPTER IV. "persons as ignorant of Christianity as if there were no such religion in the world, and who perhaps have never been bap- tized themselves." And then, as if this deplorable caricature of Christian missions were not sufficiently complete, he adds this frightful fact : "Indeed, almost all the Buddhist priests in the maritime provinces are persons who have been baptized in their infancy"* It appears, moreover, that not only have multitudes of Bud- dhist priests received Protestant baptism, and therefore been celebrated as converts at English missionary meetings, but that others, who have not enjoyed the same advantage, are fully recompensed by more appreciable benefits. " The govern- ment," says Mr. Bennett, in 1843, "allows a monthly stipend to forty-two Buddhist priests."f And twelve years after, Mr. Baker is still able to notice the same amazing facts. " In Ceylon," he tells us, " we see a protection granted to the Buddhist religion, while flocks of missionaries are sent out to convert the heathen ! We even stretch the point so far as to place a British sentinel on guard at the Buddhist temple in Kandy, as though in mockery of our Protestant church a hun- dred paces distant.":): And these have been the only results, beyond the luxurious maintenance of a vast number of missionaries and their families, of all the Church of England and other Protestant missions in Ceylon, up to the present hour. In 1849, Mr. Pridham, who, it will be remembered, prefers Buddhism to the Catholic faith, gives this report : " The results of the Church of England mission have been almost entirely of a negative character. Christianity itself has made but lee-way" And this eternal sterility, which marks all the operations of the Church of Eng- land, not only in Ceylon, but in every other land, is still more significant when we consider that her missionaries, some of whom are of course educated and zealous men, have in several cases convinced the Buddhists of the irrational folly of their religious tenets. "Its ministers," as Mr. Pridham observes, " have succeeded in sweeping away a vast mass of the preju- dices which formerly confronted them." Yet they can only succeed in making them infidels, never in making them Chris- tians. They persuade them sometimes to reject the religion of Buddha, but cannot induce them to accept their own in its place. They can destroy, here as elsewhere, but have not yet learned how to build up. * P. 515. f Ceylon and its Capabilities, ch. li., p. 415. I Eight Years' Wanderings in Ceylon, ch. xi., p. 352 (1855). Ceylon, &c., p. 441. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 381 It is so great an advantage to be assisted to a knowledge of these instructive facts by such a witness as Mr. Pridham, just as in our inquiry about India we received so much valuable aid from Mr. Kaye, that we will refer to him once more. We have heard Protestant missionaries denouncing with consider- able energy their own converts in Ceylon, but it appears that the day arrived when they were inclined to retract their former censures, riot as unjust, but as weak and insufficient. "A minute and careful examination of the native converts gener- ally," says Mr. Pridham, "has led even the missionaries to form a less favorable opinion as to their sincerity than they formerly entertained."* And the Rev. Mr. Tupper confirms this gloomy conclusion in 1856, w^hen he says, that " all accounts agree in reporting unfavorably of the state of Christianity among them. Every one whom I asked said it was generally a hollow profession."t The}^ did not say so in writing home to their employers, who would have refused to receive such imprudent confessions, but they relieved their minds by saying it to everybody else. Mr. Tupper considers, however, that in spite of the unvarying experience of the last sixty years, and the possession of every temporal and political advantage, they are not without motives "to encourage missionary work," a conclusion which we shall presently see additional reasons for declining to adopt. In the same year, 1856, the Rev. Dr. Hawks, who examined all the facts on the spot with a candor not unusual in Ameri- cans, says, "There are missionaries of various sects engaged in efforts to evangelize the native heathen, but with what success did not appear ."$ And this is the language of every Protestant writer, except a few of that class who, in the words of an impartial witness, " become missionaries from interested motives, and whose re- lations of conversions and victories in the spiritual warfare are, to any one who has visited the scene of their exertions, as un- founded as they are mischievous." Mr. Baker also, than whom no traveller has enjoyed better opportunities of judging, honestly admits, in 1855, after more than half a century of missionary exertion, " the stationary, if not retrograde, position of the Protestant Church among the heathen ;" and eloquently laments that England should have ruled so completely in vain over " the conquered nations (of the East), w T ho have been sub- *P. 442. f Out and Home, by the Rev. W. G. Tupper, M.A., p. 128. \ American Expedition under Commodore Perry, by Francis L. Hawks, D.D., ch. iii., p. 120. Sullivan, ch. vii., p. 75. CHAPTER IV. t ject to her for half a century, but know neither her language nor her religion."* In 1857, for lapse of time brings no change, Mr. Binning, a vehement Protestant, repeats once more that " Christianity has, as yet, gained but little footing among the natives of this island," and that "the work of evangelization seems to be scarce begun,"f after the toils of half a century ! Mr. Sullivan also declares, from his own experience and observation, " sup- ported by the testimony and opinion of unprejudiced persons, whose long residence amongst them has made them acquainted with all their habits, that scarcely one real convert, whose be- lief is sincere and lasting, annually rewards the labors of the hundreds who are engaged in the spiritual warfare." And this fact he proclaims because, he says, "it is the duty of travellers to offer the fruits of their experience, and to expose the almost utter uselessness of a system that .... squanders sums which, if expended at home, would bring to perfection fruit that has been implanted in a good soil, "if In 1858, an Anglican missionary in Jaffna says, "In looking at the present state of the people, they seem very careless and depraved ;" but he consoles himself with the reflection that "when the spirit of the Lord shall be poured out" great things may be expected. Perhaps all further evidence of the character and results of Protestant missions in Ceylon may be deemed superfluous, but we must not conclude without quoting the testimony of BO capable and impartial an authority as Sir Emerson Tennent. All his sympathies were with the men whose failure he thus describes. " The clergy of the Church of England are indefati- gable in their labors amongst the heathen ; but although the section of the peninsula which is occupied by their mission con- tains a dense population of upwards of thirty thousand Tamils, the number who ordinarily attend their ministrations seldom exceeds an average of twenty individuals. "\ And this is con- firmed by a writer, formerly an Anglican missionary in Ceylon, who repeats, in 1848, the statement of another Anglican clergy- man, " a man of great uprightness and untiring zeal in his work," who declared in his presence, " I do not believe that there are six real converts in the whole island. "Tf The Americans also, by far the most energetic in their Tears, &c., ch. xi., p. 351. Two Tears' Trawl in Persia, Ceylon, &c., by Robert B. M. Binning, Esq., vol. L, ch. vii., p. 101. | A Visit, &c., ch. vii., p. 76. Proceedings of the South India Missionary Conference, p. 62. IChi-istianity in Ceylon, ch. iv., p. 168. 1 Dublin Review, vol. xxv., p. 104 (1848). MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 383 methods of operation, confess, that after all their enormous ex- penditure, and " after thirty years of toil and devotion, they have enumerated not more than six hundred and eighty nominal converts, who have been, at one time or other, received into communion with their churches ; and the number now in con- nection with them is but three hundred and fifty -seven !" This is certainly a feeble result compared with the three hundred thousand whom the Dutch reckoned, especially as even the fidelity of these is extremely doubtful and precarious. " Of the whole number," adds Sir Emerson Tennent, " one-seventh has been eventually excommunicated for their relapse into heathenism, and even of the remainder the missionaries modest- ly remark that the proportion who are 'real Christians' can only be known to God."* " The Church of England mission- aries," he repeats, " speak with equal humbleness of their own labors during the past." A curious example of the real character of'the so-called con- verts is furnished in the official reports of the American Board of Foreign Missions, in the year 1837. " During the year," they inform their subscribers, " forty-nine were received into the churches, and twenty -four were excommunicated, "f If, lastly, we inquire what the Wesleyans, whose published reports are far from manifesting the same spirit of humbleness, have effected, there are not wanting Protestant witnesses to tell us. " It is certain," says an English officer, who appears to have been much struck by the " superabundance" of mission- aries of this active sect, "that their exertions and privations are greatly exaggerated. Their religious zeal seems directed to the inculcation of their own peculiar tenets, rather than to the general diffusion of the light of Christian knowledge. Instead of constantly visiting and residing at the various out-stations, where the bulk of the uninformed population dwell, they con- fine their wanderings within the limits of the most desirable places of residence in the island. "J This infirmity we shall find imputed to them in other regions also, and especially in New Zealand and America. But it is fair to the Wesleyans to admit, that this avoidance of hardship is no distinctive peculiarity of their sect. A Prot- estant writer, who spent eight years in Ceylon, and who de- plores very candidly " the enormous sums hitherto expended, with little or no results, upon missionary labor," gives us the following information. "For many years I have traversed the wildernesses of Ceylon, at all hours and at all seasons. I have P. 170. P. 282. Rambles in Ceylon, by Lieut, de Butts, ch. xiv., p. 279. 384 CHAPTER IV. met many strange things during my journeys, ~but 1 never recollect having met a missionary" He means a Protestant missionary, for he continues thus : " Nevertheless, although Protestant missionaries are so rare in the jungles of the in- terior, and, if ever there, no vestige ever remains of such a visit, still, in spots where it might be least expected, may be seen the humble mud hut, surmounted by the cross, the certain trace of some persevering priest of the Roman faith. These men dis- play an untiring zeal, and no point is too remote for their good offices. Probably they are not so comfortable in their quarters in the towns as the Protestant missionaries, and thus they have less hesitation in leaving home."* The explana- tion is somewhat inadequate, but let us return to the Wes- ley an s. The Rev. Dr. Brown has described their operations, espe- cially those directed by a certain Dr. Coke, who seems to have been a sort of ruler among them. " The schools which were so numerous," he says, u and so numerously attended, were, after some years, found to be in a very inefficient state, and to have done little good. In some places the congregations con- tinued good, but in Columbo and others of the principal sta- tions, they fell off greatly ; they were small, fluctuating, and very discouraging. Even the children educated in the schools, when they grew up, frequented the idol temples, and scarcely a youth was to be seen at chapel, unless he was still a scholar. Disappointment, in short, was felt in every department of the mission. "f An interesting example of the facts noticed by Mr. Baker, and of the presence of a devoted Catholic missionary " in spots where it might be least expected," occurs in the narrative of Dr. Scherzer. Advancing with his companions through the primeval forest, " along a beautiful path, beneath cocoa palms, tree-like ferns, and broad-leaved bananas," they find them- selves before the hidden dwelling of Father Miliani, an Italian Benedictine, and director of " the Catholic mission of Saint Sebastian de Makun." " The latter, a tall, stately figure, with handsome features and cultivated manners, received us most cordially. Father Miliani has already lived many years in this country, and ministers to a Christian community of more than one thousand souls. Our priestly host was greatly respected by the Cingalese.":): In consequence of the failure of preaching and Bible distri- * Baker, p. 360. f Hist, of Prop, of Christianity, vol. i., p. 515 (1854). | Voyage of the Nova/ra, vol. i., cli. viii., p. 369. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 385 butions, the plan of schools was tried, as in India, by all the sects, and with precisely the same results. They could make atheists, but they could not make a Christian. " In Jaffna," we are told by Sir Emerson Tennent, " while the educational labors of the American mission have produced almost a social revolution throughout the province," it appears that their schools were organized with skill, and maintained at enormous cost, "the number of their nominal converts has barely exceeded six hundred, out of ninety thousand pupils !" And again, speaking of the general results obtained by all the sects, through the agency of literary or educational efforts, he thus appreciates the costly failure : " As an instrument of conversion to Christianity, the press has hitherto been productive of but limited success in Ceylon. The moral results have been limited and unsatisfactory, though industriously applied to the multi- plication of the Scriptures and Scriptural tracts, and to the preparation of school-books for the educational establish- ments."' 5 ' The Americans appear to have surpassed all others in prodigal expenditure. " The boarding-school system," we learn from an official report, "has been carried to a greater extent than in any other field to which the Board has sent mis- sionaries." The contributions forwarded from the United States, in the single year 1858, ranged from twenty to three hundred and fifty dollars for each pupil in the Batticotta school ; yet, in spite of a liberality which it is difficult to estimate but impossible not to admire, not one per cent, of these favored pupils, though instructed with energy and skill during a long series of years, has made even a nominal profession of Chris- tianity ! Wealth, talent, and perseverance, combined with unquestionable humanity and benevolence, have utterly failed to obtain results which Divine grace alone, without these human aids, has power to accomplish. In Ceylon, as in every other land, Protestant missionaries have employed a leverage power- ful enough to move a world, and after the convulsive efforts of half a century have not succeeded in lifting a straw. They tried also, as a last resource, and in this the various sects appear, as usual, to have competed with each other, hospitals, orphanages, and other eleemosynary institutions, which are thus alluded to by Captain Laplace, who commanded the Artemise on her voyage of scientific discovery. "The numerous philanthropic institutions, destined to propagate Christianity and civilization among the natives, the charitable * Ch. vi., p. 263. The reports are of this kind. " Columbo boarding-school for native girls : the girls are well-behaved, but that any in the school at present are subjects of grace, I do not think." Seventieth Report of Baptist Missionary Society, p. 49. 386 CHAPTER IV. establishments, in which a few sufferers find relief in their mis- fortunes, only serve to hide from the eyes of the vulgar the wretched condition in which the population of Ceylon languish, although their destiny has been confided for many years to that which claims to be the most philanthropic nation in the civil- ized world."* Several years later, in 1861, this verdict of a French travel- ler is once more confirmed, with equal energy of expression, by a scientific German. " With all its development," says Dr. Karl Scherzer, after describing the industrial enterprise of the Anglo-Cingalese, " European industry has, in this quarter, ex- ercised but an obscure influence ; and thus far has been pro- ductive of but small results as a civilizing element among this population, which has hitherto shown itself so little disposed to accept the Christian form of civilization."f Finally, in 1862, that we may continue the narrative to the present hour, we have such confessions as the following, as to the final result of their own work, by Protestant missionaries of various denominations. Of the Anglican mission at Baddagama, commenced in 1819, and supported by unlimited resources, and the countenance and favor of the civil authorities, the Church Missionary Society sadly observe, " A congregation of fifty-three adults is indeed but a small result after forty years' unremitted labor!" And even of these fifty-three, the remnant of all who, at any time, have received the " pecuniary advantages" which, as the same report admits, " foster a weakly and torpid Christianity," the missionaries only venture to say, " the members generally are, in outward conduct at least, satisfactory Christians." From Kandy, commenced in 1818, and conducted with every temporal advantage, the Anglican missionary, Mr. Oakley, reports thus : " My work, as in former years, has been chiefly among those who are nominally Christians," though he admits that they "for the most part were baptized in infancy," and have received the precepts of Anglicanism for forty-four years ! His colleague, the Rev. Mr. Parsons, announces that the na- tives have even begun to " establish heathen schools," which "retard our present apparent success," thus making matters worse than before ; but he is sanguine enough to affirm that it is only a temporary discouragement, because " the Buddhist theories taught 'will be met with counter-instruction, and Prot- estantism will at length succeed, when it shall please God to pour out his Spirit." * Voyage de I'Artemise, tome iii., p. 78. f Voyage of the Nonara, by Dr. Karl Scherzer; vol. i., ch. viii., p. 394. English edition. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 387 Lastly, from the Jaffna district, where they commenced operations in 1818, and acknowledge at least one church " liberally erected by government," the Anglican missionaries present the following modest account : " There is not very much of a definite character to report on." They console themselves indeed, for they are easily comforted, with the reflection that " a vast amount of Gospel truth has been made known ;" but they confess in the same sentence, " there has been no very marked success in the conversion of the heathen." Yet they have enjoyed, for nearly half a century, every aid and appliance, except the blessing of God, which it was possible to imagine or desire, and admit that they have " one hundred and seventeen seminaries and schools," and employ, in addition to the missionaries, " one hundred and fifty-one native lay agents." And the effect of this vast machinery is recorded in the humili- ating confession, that " there is not very much of a definite character to report on."* In presence of such facts, uniform in every land, and in each succeeding generation, there is reason for surprise that none of these Anglican clergymen appear even to suspect, that their continual failure may be due to want of vocation and mission, and that they possibly belong to that class of whom the Lord of Missions has said, " I did not send them, yet they ran : I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied." The "Wesleyans, who appear to be chiefly occupied in fighting with the Anglicans, and in striving, with scanty success, to corrupt the Catholics, give us the following information. In one place near Columbo they lament " peculiar trials, from the opposition of the High Church party, arid from the tendency of some hearers to resort secretly to heathen ceremonies in times of affliction." In another, " twelve persons have been added to the society, but the loss by deaths, secessions, &c., has been somewhat greater" They are also " much pained at finding that some of our members, who follow their occupations at Kandy during a part of the year, return with diminished piety, and others cease to be members." Stability is not a character- istic of Protestant Cingalese. At a third place, " Our work is much opposed by Buddhists and Romanists, and some of our members .... become unsettled, or indifferent to religion in general." At a fourth, " A worldly spirit has appeared in some of our people." At a fifth, while some pagans " are anxiously inquiring after the truth," or after the money of the Wesleyan Missionary Society, " it is a matter of great sorrow that two or three oi'our members participated in heathen ceremonies, and * Church Missionary Society's Report, 1862, pp. 177-185. 388 CHAPTER IV. were consequently expelled." At a sixth, " The too general neglect of the class-meeting," which the natives apparently find insupportable, "is cause of much anxiety." At Jaffna, "The services were blessed to several," but there is not a hint that they became Wesleyans. At Trincomalee, "During the year there have been three adult baptisms, and one recantation of Romanism," so that they could say, " The work of God has of late assumed a favorable aspect ;" while at Batticoloa, where "four heathens have been received into the Christian Church," until they get tired of it, their triumphs compel them to exclaim, "We have been blessed with a rich sense of the presence of our God."* And this is about the sum of all which they have done in Ceylon up to 1862. The Baptists have been quite as successful as the Anglicans and Wesleyans. At Columbo, " during the year three only have put on the Lord by baptism The congregations have been about as usual, but the success is small." At Grand Pass, their missionary says, " I am constrained to acknowledge that, in the absence of any striking events, we have enjoyed many rich blessings, and the manifestation of heavenly grace has been fully granted. One only has been baptized and added to the Church during the year." At another place, "fowr have been baptized, and one received, three died, and two were excluded." If we understand the figures in this case, the year's progress is represented by zero. At Tombowille, " there are some Church members, but they are almost lifeless Christians. We must pray for them earnestly." But they had a triumph here of another kind, for " some Wesleyans are searching about our solemn immersion." At Hendella, which " abounds more with Roman Catholics than others," " the congregation is a little more increased than before." What it was before is not stated, but now, the missionary adds, " the members of the Church are three" In another populous district, "Though I preach the Gospel continually, in these and the neighboring villages," says the Baptist emissary, "the progress is very slow." Of some of his flock he says, although all were baptized, " their actions are not different from the other heathen. Others, deceived by the Catholics, will not come to our chapels, nor will they permit their children to come to our schools Four men are seeking to be baptized ; two have been excluded, and one died." As this gentleman observes, " the progress is very slow." Another of their agents reports thus : " The disturbances of the Catholics are very great from time to time ;" which appears * Report of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, 1862, pp. 16-33. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 389 from the immediate context to mean that his precarious disciples u received the advice of hinderers," and learned to despise "our solemn immersion." From another place the Baptist Missionary Society receives this disheartening narrative: " The Gospel goes every day to knock at the doors of men, to bring them from darkness to light, but the ungodly oppose their reasonings. They call darkness light." And then he gives a very curious explanation. The Anglican natives say, " Our ministers are authorized by the English government, and if we go to another place of worship, we are disgraced by them. Others say, we belong to the Church Missionary Society ; their schools are in our gardens ; our children obtain food and clothing from them, and we can obtain all our wants, and therefore it is better than coming to your churches. Others say, we are Buddhists, and worshippers of gods and goddesses. It is the principal religion. We submit to the regulations of the government, and can more- over get our children baptized" without ceasing to be Buddhists ! Lastly, " Some say, we belong to the Church of Rome. Our congregations are large. Our places of worship are many and beautiful, and the miracles are wonderful ; w r hy then should we give them up ?" And so " the progress is very slow," and the missionary concludes with this impressive summary of his work : " During last year I had twenty -five candidates ; out of that number six died, seven ran away, six are wavering back- wards and forwards, and six are standing still as candidates." Yet the Baptist Missionary Society are very cheerful and con- tented, and it is a proof both of the liberality and the discretion of their subscribers, that " the income of the society for the present year is the largest the society has ever received."* And now that, by the aid exclusively of Protestant witnesses, we have traced the history and results of Protestant 'missions in Ceylon, Dutch, American, and English, it only remains to inquire, in conclusion, what the Catholic missionaries have done, and what sort of converts they have rescued from the cruel bondage of Buddhist superstition and idolatry. The same witnesses will tell us. We have heard already, from Protestants of various classes, not only that " vast numbers" of the natives of Ceylon have been converted to the faith, and, as Mr. Selkirk lamented, are being "daily converted," but that, in the words of Sir Emerson Tennent, " neither corruption nor coercion could induce them to abjure it." "Their numbers actually increased under per- secution," says the same writer ; " they continue steadfast in their adherence" to the faith, says Mr. Selkirk, though up to * Seventieth Report of the Baptist Missionary Society, pp. 46, 51. 390 CHAPTER IV. 1848 there were only thirty Catholic missionaries to serve four hundred churches, and nearly two hundred thousand Chris- tians ; they are "bigoted" to their creed, adds Dr. Smith, by which he means constant and inflexible. Baldseus had confessed long before, that "the most cruel persecutions of the kings of Jaffnapatam could not shake the faith of the Catholic converts," though, as he observes, " they baptized many of the new converted natives with blood, after they had received the baptism by water."* And the history continues the same to the end, for Sir Emerson Tennent declares that " their ranks are said to be daily increased by an accession of fresh converts from the heathen. "f Nor has any Protestant writer ventured to give any other account of them. The Catholic missionaries, they complain with one voice, succeed in winning the allegiance of their hearts and souls, while their unsuccessful rivals only reckon converts who deride their religion, even while they nominally profess it, go out from a Protestant sermon to " worship devils," and boast that they are Buddhists and Christians at the same time. "The ascendency exercised by the Romish priests over the minds of their flocks," says Mr. Pridham, " is very complete in the places where that religion chiefly obtains, far exceeding that of their Buddhist predecessors." The Rev. James Cordiner, Protestant chaplain to the garrison of Columbo, sorrowfully records that " a great body of the inhabitants now continue voluntarily firm in their adherence to the Church of Rome." Of the Catholic clergy he candidly confesses, " They are indefatigable in their labors, and are daily making proselytes. Their chapels, built and endowed by the contributions of the natives" not of the government nor of the missionary societies " are neat and well-furnished. ";): And they are continually building new ones. Fifteen Catholic churches were in progress of erection in 1857, in the single province of Jaffna. "It is unquestionable," says an official writer, already quoted, who had noted all these facts, " that the natives became speedily attached to their cere- monies and modes of worship" that is, to their faith and practice, to call things by their proper names " and have adhered to them with remarkable tenacity for upwards of three hundred years. " Such is the first feature in the contrast between Catholic and Protestant converts in Ceylon ; but there are others still more * In Churchill's Collection, vol. iii., p. 716. j- Ch. iii., p. 115. \. A Description of Ceylon, bythe Rev. James Cordiner, A.M., vol. i., ch. v., p. 154. Sir E. Tennent, ii., 68. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 391 worthy of our notice. " One remarkable circumstance is ob- servable in their converts," says Sir Emerson Tennent, " that the number of nominal Christians is infinitely smaller amongst the Roman Catholics than amongst the professors of any other church in Ceylon."* But this is too momentous a distinction to be left to the testimony of a single witness, however competent and impartial. We could hardly have ventured to anticipate that Protestants would exalt the superiority of Catholic converts, yet Providence has arranged this also, and in using them to proclaim their numbers to the world has forced them to confess their virtues at the same time. It is a Wesleyan missionary, full of the most extravagant prejudice, so that he is not ashamed to call an image of Our Lady and the Infant Jesus, "a female idol with a child in its arms !" who thus describes, in obedience to a power of which he was unconscious, the Catholics of Ceylon. "It is but justice to this class of native Christians to state, that in general they are more detached from the customs of the pagan inhabitants, more regular in their attendance on the religious services of their communion, and their general conduct more consistent with the moral precepts of Christianity, than any other religious body of any magnitude on the island. "f But this gentleman was so impressed by their marvellous constancy, under all trials and temptations, that he could not restrain his reluctant admiration. The following example might well excite the astonishment of one who was familiar only with Protestant converts. "More than two centuries," he says, "after the Por- tuguese had been driven out, two small colonies of Roman Catholic Christians, the fruit of the Portuguese mission, were discovered embosomed in the Kandyan jungles. Though un- supplied with priests, they had continued a separate people, and preserved their attachment to the Christian name and ordinances. A copy of the New Testament, translated into the vernacular tongue by an European Catholic priest, was found in their possession ; and notwithstanding the errors of their system, the author cannot but avow his conviction, that such a translation, in connection with the singular preservation of the congregations referred to, furnishes a strong presumption of the purity and sincerity of those who laid the foundation of the work. ";j; Certainly so wonderful a fact might well suggest this conclusion, and we have reason to be surprised that this was all the effect it produced. The superior morality of the Catholic natives was also gen- erously attested by Sir Alexander Johnston, Chief Justice of * Sir E. Tennent, iii., 96. f Harvard's Nawatice, introd., p. 67. J Ibid., p. 64. 392 CHAPTER IV. Ceylon, who honorably confessed to the Archbishop of Goa, " that in a circuit he had lately made through the island, there was not a single Catholic brought for trial." All the Protestant witnesses appear to notice with surprise, some with peevish displeasure, another striking contrast between their own adherents and the disciples of the Catholic faith. Sir Emerson Tennent, after deploring "the trifling aggregate con- tributions" of the Protestant converts, says, "The Roman Catholic converts are by far the most willing to contribute from their own means to the support of their clergy and churches, and their donations for these purposes are on a scale of extreme liberality." And this liberality is displayed by all ranks alike ; although, as Mr. Bertolacci observes, "poverty prevails in Ceylon more than in many other countries, because there are so very few manufactures carried on in it."* "All the fisher- men," says a Presbyterian writer, " are said to be Roman Catholics, and the tithe they pay to be worth ten thousand pounds a year."f " Many of the Romanist churches in Colum- bo," says Mr. Pridham, " have been built from the funds wrung from the earnings of the devoted fishermen." He says " wrung," though he knows the gift is one of voluntary charity, and does not stop to consider what makes them " devoted." Mr. Selkirk, though not less influenced by angry prejudice, says, "The Ro- man Catholics of the fisher-caste are building a new church at Negombo entirely at their own expense. They refuse to take money, which people of other castes, though Roman Catholics, are willing to subscribe. They give up the produce of their fishing one day in the week for this purpose."^: Mr. Selkirk, though a missionary, calls this " a specimen of the zeal of the Roman Catholics which might put Protestants to the blush." Mr. Robinson also, though he loses all self-possession when he speaks of Catholics, was so struck by the same class of facts, that he uses exactly the same expression : " The zeal of some of the poor Roman Catholics in Ceylon might put many Eng- lish Protestants to the blush. " We shall presently hear even a pagan Cingalese making the same remark. It is worthy of notice, and a sufficient refutation of Mr. Pridharn's unwise calumnies, that the natives, from whom their Catholic pastors have no need to "wring" the contributions * View of Ceylon, by A. Bertolacci, Esq., p. 205. f Six Years in India, by Mrs. C. Mackenzie, vol. iii., ch. iv., p. 110. | Recollections, &c., p. 391. Romanism in Ceylon, p. 163. The contrast may well irritate the Protestant ministers. The Rev. Mr. Parsons, an Anglican missionary who has been thir- teen years in Ceylon, reports in 1862 : " That they must pay for the support of Christianity themselves, is a lesson the (Protestant) Singhalese everywhere are slow to learn." Church Missionary Society's Report, 1862, p. 178. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 393 which their zeal spontaneously offers, will sometimes build churches even in places where there is no Catholic missionary, in the hope that their unsolicited munificence may induce one to compassionate their need ; and the writer who records this striking and unexampled fact, and who once lived amongst them, says, " We know of a single priest, who, under not extra- ordinary circumstances, baptized more than one hundred and twelve adults in the course of one year."* But besides building churches out of their poverty, and at the instigation solely of their own pious zeal, we learn from Protestants to "Whose honor they dedicate them. It appears that Mr. Selkirk, in spite of his dislike of the " mummeries of Popery," sometimes ventured to enter the Catholic churches. " Of course I could not understand the service," he says, " but the name of 4 Maria' came often over, and some of them repeated at intervals the name of ' Jesus,' in a very feeling manner, and smote their breasts, crying out, ' My sin, my great sin.' " We who do " understand the service" have no difficulty in comprehending, even from this defective account, what these good people were doing, and Whose praises they were celebrating. And now we have sufficient Protestant evidence of these facts, that the Catholic natives of Ceylon exist everywhere in great numbers ; that new conversions occur " daily ;" that nothing can seduce their constancy, and that they are moral, diligent in prayer, subject in all sincerity to their pastors, and profuse in sacrifices and alms-deeds. It is not from Catholic witnesses, to whom we have no need to apply, that we learn this, but from men who record it with grief and dismay. We cannot be surprised then to learn, and this may be our final observation, that even the heathen Cingalese, both educated and ignorant, easily discriminate between them and the nominal Christians of the Protestant sects. The journal of "Bishop Chapman of Columbo," of the year 1850, for all the facts we have noticed remain unchanged up to the present hour, records the following instance of the es- timate which the heathen themselves have formed of the results of Protestant conversion. A Kandyan chief, invited by an Anglican missionary to allow his son to be baptized, gave him this answer : " What ! would you have me make him a drunkard ?"f Another Protestant writer, in 1854, gives a recent example still more curious and instructive, and one which will render all further testimony superfluous. * See Dublin Review, vol. xxv., p. 106. f Colonial Church Chronicle, vol. v., p. 269. 394 CHAPTER IV. Mr. Knighton, who was familiar with the interior as well as with the maritime provinces of Ceylon, relates in his interest- ing work four conversations which he had with an educated Buddhist, Marandhan, a Kandyan colonel, who was " a fine specimen of his class," and whom he endeavored to convert to Christianity. Marandhan remarked to him that he had ob- served " the rancorous hatred between Protestants and Roman Catholics," and continued thus : " Well, with respect to these two great bodies of Christians, I have observed this and I am sure you will not be offended at my mentioning it." Knighton. " Certainly not ; any observations of yours on the subject I should be glad to hear." M. " Well, this : Protestants talk, most of their religion ; Roman Catholics believe most. The former seem more enlight- ened on the subject; the latter put their trust in Christianity more firmly and more unhesitatingly. J^fany of the former seem to be skeptics, and none of the latter. Of this, too, I feel certain, that, generally speaking, the latter will make more sacrifices for their religion than the former." The Kandyan, who was apparently a keen observer, and whose remarks upon the contrast which he had detected go some way towards explaining the failure of Protestant missions in all lands, then instanced a recent case, an abortive attempt to collect subscriptions for a Protestant missionary from among the planters, and went on thus : " Considering the number of planters in this province, how small a proportion was willing to aid the original purposes of the scheme in carrying it out ! I saw the list in the news- paper, not one-twentieth part of the entire planting population, and yet all had been applied to ! Now, had they been Roman Catholics, instead of Protestants, do you think that result would have followed ?" K. " Probably not. The unhappy disunion amongst us was the cause, however, of the failure of the scheme." M. " Another result of private judgment !" K. " Perhaps so. We are wandering, however, from Bud- dhism."* The conversation was apparently taking an un- pleasant turn, and Mr. Knighton hastened to divert it into a safer channel. He found it easier to attack Buddhism than to shield his own religion from the assaults of so intelligent an adversary. We have been told that the heathen in other lands are quite as observant of " the unhappy disunion" which is the charac- teristic of Protestantism as the natives of Ceylon. The Chinese * Forest Life in Ceylon, by W. Knighton, M.A., vol. ii., app., pp. 411, 412. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 395 replies to the missionaries of the various sects which present their conflicting religions for his acceptance, " You must have as many Christs in Europe as we have gods in China ;" and the Hindoo says, as Mr. Le Bas told us, " I should like your Christianity better if there were not quite so many kinds of it." Let us hear what Protestant writers relate of the same mode of reasoning in Ceylon. "I cannot but regret," says Major Forbes, "the numerous and perplexing divisions of the Christian community."* He had seen what were their bitter fruits, which a more philo- sophical writer thus describes at large for the admonition and instruction of his co-religionists. "A serious obstacle to the acceptance of reformed Christianity by the Singhalese Buddhists has arisen from the distinctions and differences between the various churches by whose ministers it has been successively oifered to them. In the persecutions of the Roman Catholics by the Dutch, the subsequent supersession of the Church of Holland by that of England, the rivalries more or less apparent between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, and the peculiarities which separate the Baptists from the Wesley an Methodists all of whom have their missions and representatives in Ceylon the Singhalese can discover little more than that they are offered something still doubtful and unsettled, in exchange for which they are pressed to surrender their own ancient superstition. Conscious of their inability to decide on what it has baffled the wisest of their European teachers to reconcile, they hesitate to exchange for an apparent uncer- tainty what has been unhesitatingly believed by generations of their ancestors, and comes recommended to them by all the authority of antiquity; and even when truth has been so far successful as to shake their confidence in their national faith, the choice of sects which has been offered to them leads to utter bewilderment as to the peculiar form of Christianity with which they may most confidingly replace it."f If the experi- ence and observation of Sir Emerson Tennent had issued only in this pregnant statement, it would have been impossible to over-estimate its value. We have already seen, in reviewing the history of Protestant missions in other lands, and we shall meet with fresh examples in every chapter of this work, that the most evident effect of * Eleven Years in Ceylon, by Major Forbes, vol. i., ch. v., p. 112. Dr. Jobson, who was deputed to visit the Wesleyan missions, says, " I was sorry to learn that high ecclesiasticism had of late cruelly sought to disturb native converts by the introduction among them of foolish questions on priestly authority, and the validity of the sacraments." Australia, &c., ch. iii., p. 79. f Sir E. Tennent, ch. v., p. 196. 396 CHAPTER IV. the presence of Protestant missionaries in pagan countries is to render their conversion impossible. The instincts of human nature suffice to condemn a form of religion which cannot unite even its own disciples in a uniform profession ; and the heathen only smiles at the pretensions of a doctrine in which he detects the inconstancy, contradictions, and incoherence which betray even to his dull eye its earthly origin. He knows that what- ever be truth, this it cannot be. And Protestant travellers, affrighted by the unwelcome portent which confronts them at every step in their wanderings, have contended with one another in uttering cries of warning, rebuke, or entreaty, which attest indeed the mortal influence of the evil they deplore, but do not even suggest a remedy. '* In Ceylon and in India," says one who had visited many lands, and brought away the same sor- rowing conviction from each, " the Protestant Church has no chance in competition with the Roman Catholic. The import- ance of the precept, ' In veste varietas sit, non sit scissura^ is fully recognized by the latter Church, which admits of no schism to affect its form of worship, thereby offering a marked contrast to the varied forms and conflicting doctrines of the Protestant faith, that not only weaken and nullify her at home, but utterly confuse and astound the ignorant heathen abroad."* And another writer, for all who have no private interest to serve use the same language, after noticing that the only con- verts made in Ceylon are Catholics, thus explains the sterility of the Protestant missions: "Among the confusion arising from our multitudinous sects and schisms, the native is natu- rally bewildered. What with High Church, Low Church, Baptists, "Wesley ans, Presbyterians, &c., &c., &c., the ignorant native is perfectly aghast at the variety of choice."f And now we may ask, since it is the only inquiry which remains to be satisfied, what explanation do Protestants offer of this new example, attested \>y themselves, of the contrast between. Catholic and Protestant missions to the heathen ? Most of them, it appears, maintain in this case an absolute silence, and are content to acknowledge a fact which the researches of their own friends have disclosed. They proclaim the complete and unchanging success of the Catholic, the per- petual failure of the Protestant missionaries, and then they are silent. But Sir Emerson Tennent, though too upright and intelligent to countenance any disingenuous pleadings, and though he sharply rebukes both English calumny and Dutch cruelty, is of too ardent a temper not to attempt at least some * A Visit to Ceylon, by Edward Sullivan, ch. vii., p. 78. f Baker, Eight Years, &c., ch. xi., p. 361. MISSIONS IN" CEYLON. 397 solution of the problem. He puts aside, first of all, as might be expected in such a man, the immoral fictions of writers like Hough and Cordiner, who try to obscure an unwelcome fact by boldly asserting that the Catholics " compelled the natives of Ceylon to adopt their religion." " I have discovered nothing," says Sir Emerson, " in the proceedings of the Portuguese in Ceylon to justify the imputation of violence and constraint ; but unfortunately as regards the Dutch Presbyterians, their own records are conclusive as to the severity of their measures, and the ill success by which they were followed." But if the earlier Catholic missionaries disdained such criminal and profit- less measures, even when the civil authorities were, in some instances, men of their own faith, much less could they dream of adopting them during the last two centuries, when they were themselves the objects of ceaseless and unsparing perse- cution. Yet it is precisely during the latter epoch, under the Dutch and English governments, that their successes have been most conspicuous. We are not surprised, then, that a writer like Sir Emerson Tennent should refuse to adopt an explanation at once so inadequate and so arbitrary. He suggests, however, in grave and temperate language, two considerations, which appear to have impressed his own mind, and which deserve our respectful notice. The inflexible stability, as well as the superior morality of the Catholic natives, may, he thinks, be partly attributed to " the overruling influence of the Confessional, and the unin- termitted control which it exerts over the feelings and the actions of its votaries." And then he adds, " In fact, if any evidence were wanting to substantiate the real ascendency thus acquired and maintained by the Church of Rome, it would be found in the munificence with which the natives contribute habitually for its support." With this statement we find no fault. No doubt the Sacra- ment of Penance produces the same healing effect in Ceylon as in other lands. No doubt they are happy who taste its salutary- power, whether in Ceylon or elsewhere. But the use of this sacrament is the effect, not the cause of conversion. Men seek the tribunal of penance when their consciences are enlightened ; they abhor it while enslaved by self-love. They come to it of their own free will, moved by Divine grace, and the deep searchings of the heart. But so far is the "overruling in- fluence of the Confessional" from explaining the conversion of pagans, though it may partly account for their subsequent constancy and virtue, that it would be more reasonable to regard it as an additional impediment to their adoption of a religion which imposes, upon all its disciples alike, so whole- 398 CHAPTER IV. some but mortifying a discipline. The confessional, Sir Emer- son Tennent may be assured, makes men excellent Christians when once admitted into the Church, but it deters no small number from entering. The Sacrament of Penance has forti- fied the Cingalese in the practice of religion, but it was not the Sacrament of Penance which first led them to embrace it. The second suggestion of this excellent writer has less claims to our respect, it is the " gaudy ceremonial" of the Catholic Church, he says, which has retained the Cingalese in her com- munion. But let us quote his own words. " There is palpable evidence to establish the fact, that once enrolled as Roman Catholics, the imagination of the Cingalese became excited, and their tastes permanently captivated by striking ceremonial and pompous pageantry." This is a common Protestant expla- nation of the triumphs of Catholic missionaries. It has been applied to their work in all parts of the world. It was this, says Count Hogendorp,* which fascinated the Japanese. He says it boldly, as if no one could deny it, though he very well knew that tens of thousands of Japanese were converted by men who had no other earthly possessions than a cassock, a crucifix, and a breviary. And what is true of Japan is equally true of every other pagan land. Does Sir Emerson Tennent suppose that Eather Joseph Yaz, for example, when a fugitive in the swamps and jungles of Ceylon, converted thirty thousand idolaters by " pompous pageantry ?" Did St. Francis Xavier, whose ecclesiastical apparatus was limited to a hand-bell and a catechist, convert seven hundred thousand souls by " gaudy ceremonial ?" Did the venerable John de Britto gain his tens of thousands in the forests of Marava by the splendors of an imposing ritual ? Was it by the aid of such accessories that the martyred apostles of China and Corea, whose churches were huts and their vestments rags, won their triumphs ? Was it "pageantry" which rescued one million five hundred thou- sand South American Indians from the worship of demons ? Was it " ritual" which caused the Holy Name to be adored on the banks of Lake Huron, by the borders of the Ohio and the Mississippi, and again, at a later date, on the plains of Oregon and in the valleys of the Rocky Mountains ? Is it by a " gaudy ceremonial" that the Franciscans are at this moment renewing their ancient victories in the far interior of Brazil, or the Lazarists in Syria, or the Jesuits in Columbia, or the Marists in the islands of the Pacific? What, then, shall we think of a cause which strives to cloak its eternal humiliation, and to excuse its perpetual misadventures, by a plea which it knows to * Coup d'att BUT Java, par le Comte de Hogendorp, ch. xi., p. 389. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 399 be false, and by attributing the conquests which it vainly envies to means which it was absolutely impossible to use, and which would have been utterly inadequate and ineffectual even if they had been employed ? The solitary explanation which Protestants venture to sug- gest of the triumphs of Catholic missionaries, attested in every land by their own witnesses, but everywhere denied to them- selves, deserves further consideration. Let us examine it once for all, that we may not have to notice it again. It is their only argument ; and yet it is at variance, not only with his- torical facts, but even with the universal practice of man, both heathen and Christian, and with the instincts of his nature. And first, it is at variance with facts. There is not so much as one example, literally not one, in the whole history of missions, of the heathen being attracted towards the Catholic religion simply by its ritual accompani- ments. Only wilful ignorance, or incurable petulance, could attribute the conversions in India or China to such a cause ; while in every other land in which missionary operations are now in progress, the poverty of the Catholic evangelists has become a proverb. In the islands of the Pacific, of which we shall have to speak hereafter, we hear of Catholic missionaries wanting even the common necessaries of life, and of their bishop using "the backbone of a whale for his episcopal throne." In America, even at the present day, they have not always food to eat; though in some provinces, as in Texas, Oregon, and California, it is habitually of the coarsest kind. In South America, they willingly share the life of the poor Indian, who honors them in spite, perhaps because, of their apostolic poverty ; and obeys them, as his fathers obeyed theirs, with loving reverence. An American Protestant, who not long ago visited the valley of the Amazon, in whose distant solitudes he encountered Catholic missionaries whom he describes, with generous enthusiasm, as the very ideal of apostolic teachers, makes this observation: "I was amazed at the poverty of the church, and determined, if I ever went back, to appeal to the Roman Catholics of the. United States for donations."* And this is confirmed by an English officer, who traversed the same remote regions, where he found Catholic missionaries honored with " the greatest respect and deference," even by natives who " showed no deference to any one but the Padre," but where he describes almost every church which he saw, from the Andes to Para, as little better than " a huge barn,."^ Yet we are * Lieut. Herndon's Valley of the Amazon, ch. xi., p. 225. f Narrative of a Journey from Lima to Para, by Lieut. W. Smyth, ch. viii., p. 148 ; ch. xi., p. 213. 4:00 CHAPTER IV. asked to believe that the Church wins souls to God only by the fascinations of a " gaudy ceremonial." But this popular explanation contradicts, not only the facts which are admitted and proclaimed by every competent wit- ness, but also the most notorious phenomena of heathen life. The pagan, though he has reared many a gorgeous temple, and decorated it with such skill as his knowledge of art allows, has never even conceived the idea of devising a specious ceremonial as a substitute for a more active and intellectual worship. Everywhere he retains, in spite of his fall, the primitive tra- ditions of sacrifice, prayer^ and mortificat-ion. The very Hindoo would despise the imposture of a hollow ecclesiastical pageant- ry. He does not even worship idols, if we may believe Prot- estant writers, but "symbols of the Almighty's power ;"* and Sir William Hooker affirms generally of the Buddhist devotee, that he " attaches no real importance to the idol itself. "f His worship is dernonology, but still it is worship. He comprehends, unlike the Protestant, those great principles which the latter alone of all mankind seem to repudiate in their practice, the sovereign rights of the Creator over his creature, the obligation and efficacy of penance in a fallen race, and the principle of sacrifice as the essence of worship. Hence it is easier to convert him than the children of Luther and Calvin, who have lost even these primary.notions. The disciples of Buddha and Confucius, of Brahma and Mahomet, nauseate, in spite of their spiritual penury, the sapless food of pageantry arid ceremonial, as in- capable of appeasing the famine of their souls. And they have shown, in many a land, that they know how to discriminate between the solemn ritual which veils and symbolizes the august mysteries of the Christian Altar, and those chill forms of Prot- estantism which symbolize nothing; dreary accompaniments of a religion whiph rightly eschews ceremonial, because it has nothing to hide and nothing to reveal, because it begins and ends with man, and contains no deeper mystery than the vary- ing accents of the human voice. And thus it comes to pass, as we have read in this chapter, that the heathen will hurry imme- diately from a Protestant service to the adoration of his own divinities, because he has detected that in the former there was not even the semblance of worship. He has hardly been con- scious that so frigid a ceremony, in which he has seen only a man reading out of a book to other men, often without much sign of interest on either side, had even the pretence to be a religious service. He has perceived in it nothing but a tedious and unmeaning formality, which he has deemed, like the Hindoo, * The Wonders of Elora, cli. xiv., p. 347. f Himalayan Journals, vol. i., ck. xiv., p. 324. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 401 only a new eccentricity of his incomprehensible rulers. Yet he has confessed at the first glance, on entering the humblest Catholic oratory, that there men were offering worship. In both cases his instinct has guided him aright. There is no form of religion in the world, as De Maistre has shown, save only Protestantism and Islamism, of which sacri- fice is not the chief act. Even u to the Hindoo," as a learned English writer observes, " the ideas of a Sacrifice, an Incarna- tion, and a Trinity are already familiar :"* so that when the true notion of these divine mysteries has been unfolded to his consciousness by men whose manner of life corresponded with his own conception of what befits a teacher of religion, he fell on his knees and adored, confessing the supreme majesty of that tremendous Altar and Sacrifice by which, as the last of the prophets had foretold, the name of God should become " great among the Gentiles"^ This is the secret of conversion, and not the ritual, which does but feebly minister to it. Our own feelings and emotions, however pure, and our own supplications, however ardent and unceasing, can never, as Moeliler observes, be worthy of God, nor constitute an act of worship, even when united to those of the saints and angels, at all proportioned to His Sovereign claims. It is only Cath- olics who are able to offer true worship. " Christ, the Victim, in our worship, is the copious inexhaustible source of deepest devotion,";); and one Mass infinitely surpasses in efficacy all the prayers that ever were, or ever will be, offered by creatures. u Thou alone knowest," said St. Gertrude to our Blessed Lord, " with what energy of love Thou dost daily offer Thyself to God the Father upon the altar." On the other hand, the manifold religions of the so-called Reformation, which are purely human both in their origin and in their rites, and upon which the heathen looks, in every land, either with unmoved apathy or with angry contempt, are thus described even by their most eminent advocates. " The char- acteristic badge of the Protestant world," says Menzel, " is religious indifference. Every thing depends in the Protestant form of worship upon the -preacher for the time being. For the Catholic, all his churches are alike, and he conducts his devo- tion without the priest, as it makes but little difference what priest officiates," since all offer the same Adorable Sacrifice. * Life of Saber, Emperor of ffindostan, by R. M. Caldecott, Esq., p. 336. f Malacliias i. 11. | Moehler. " There we behold the Incomprehensible Majesty of the Most High com- passed with a worship equal to Himself, as deep and broad and high and boun- tiful as His own blessed Self. There we see His infinity worshipped infinite- ly " F. Faber, The Creator and the Creature, ch. iv., p. 226. 27 402 CHAPTER IV. " Hence there prevails, if I may so say, an undisturbed equa- nimity of devotion everywhere among the Catholics. Among the Protestants, however, every thing depends upon the personal character of the preacher; for his sake alone, and only when he is present, do people go to church ; people regard him alone, are concerned with him alone, because nothing else in the Protestant church attracts attention."* He only stops short of the confession, which could not be expected from him, that this is the very apostasy predicted of old, which should set up man in the place of God, and having " taken away the Daily Sacri- fice" should bring in " the abomination of desolation. "f And we have seen that such an impression exists even in the heathen mind with respect to it. Everywhere they doubt whether Protestantism be really a religion at all. " They marvel," says Mr. Forbes, " whether the English have any religion." The Persians, Mr. Walpole and others tell us, make the same remark. The Turks, as Mr. Warburton noticed, call them " the prayeiiess." The Chinese, as Dr. Morrison com- plained, " are irreverent, and laugh." The Kurds claim the English as co-religionists, because " they keep no fasts and say no prayers ;" and even the Druses, the atheists of Syria, have learned to consider the Protestant religion, as we shall be told hereafter, " a species of freemasonry which very much resembles their own." Why, then, does Sir Emerson Tennent attempt to explain the success of Catholic and the failure of Protestant missionaries by a suggestion which deals only with the surface of things, arid leaves their substance untouched ? The true ex- planation lies deeper. It is not a question of ritual, but of doctrine. The Catholic succeeds, not only because his vocation, his gifts, and his faith, are all from God, but because he can erect an Altar on which He is really present / the Protestant fails, because even the heathen detect that he is only a man like themselves, and though he affects to be the minister of a Divine religion, can entertain them with nothing more divine than the sound of his own voice. One more observation we may offer, before finally quitting a subject to which it will not be necessary hereafter to recur. If there be in the world a class of men who, in a certain sense, are absolutely indifferent to " ceremonial," although obliged to use it, and who in celebrating the mysteries of their holy religion are al- most unconscious of its presence, the Catholic belongs to that class. * German Literature, by Menzel, vol. i., p. 147 (ed. Felton). The Duke of Argyle confesses, in a work which was probably intended to be a defence of his, own communion, that " the entire devotion of the congregation is depend' ent! upon the will of the preacher." Quoted by Dollinger, p. 194. f Daniel xi. 31. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 403 Whether he assists at the Holy Sacrifice, which constitutes the chief act of his religion, or at any other of the Divine offices which attract him with irresistible power to the house of prayer, his eye and heart are fixed, not on sensible objects, but on that Awful Presence stupendum supra omnia miraculum which at one time is veiled in the tabernacle, at another manifested to the gaze of the faithful. Vestments, music, and incense what- ever meets the eye or ear he hardly notes, for there is some- thing there which speaks to the soul, and taxes all its powers. Let the accompanying ceremonial be meagre or imposing, it is with the mind of a Christian, riot of an artist, that he marks its presence ; all he asks is, that it shall not distract him the rest, in the presence of those stupendous mysteries, is of little import. Like Mary and Salome, he is thinking of the Body which he has come to adore, not of the " sweet spices" which he has brought to anoint it. He provides, indeed, out of reverent love, the u fine linen," the " myrrh and aloes,"* and whatsoever else his devotion may inspire or the Church appoint, for in this august action she leaves nothing to human caprice or invention ; but all these accessories of his worship, from the least to the greatest the cloud of incense, the blazing lights, the swelling choir, and the jewelled robes have no worth and no significance but as offerings to Him who gives them all their value by deigning to accept them. u All these are signs and symbols ; for the devotion to the Blessed Sacrament is the adoration of the Uncreated Majesty. . . . Verily there is no pomp but that of a believing and loving heart, which pays welcome or respectful court to this Sacramental King. When we gaze, therefore, upon the white robes of the Immaculate King, the lights and flowers of the sanctuary seem to fade away, and there open before the eyes of faith interminable regions of various splendor and consummate beauty, over which as Man He is at this moment wielding His far-reaching sceptre of dominion. "f It is true that this is not the idea which Protestants entertain of Catholic worship, but Protestants are hardly competent judges in such a matter. For them, who consistently despise "ceremonial," because they abolished long since the Daily Sacrifice, and cast the Altar to the ground, only that which meets the eye and ear has any meaning, and even this they pervert or misconceive. When Mr. Selkirk enters a Catholic church in Ceylon, and tells us, " of course I could not under- stand the service," he accurately represents the qualifications which Protestants bring to the critical examination of Catholic * S. John xix. 39. f Father Faber, The Blessed Sacrament, book iv., sec. ii., p. 432. 404 CHAPTER IV. worship. When Dr. Clark notes the breathless devotion of a congregation in Seville cathedral, and then adds with contempt, that it was some "picture," which his roving glance had detected, that they were really worshipping,* he knew not that he was probably the only person in that silent throng who was even conscious of its presence. When another Episcopalian clergyman goes to a High Mass at St. Peter's, celebrated by the Sovereign Pontiff, and then hurries home to write in his journal, " Alas ! no religious feeling could for a moment be con- nected with it !"f he only proves that he was looking for man, and listening for man's voice, where the company of the faithful saw God alone.J It is ever thus with spectators of this kind. Like the Jews who thronged the streets, going up to the Passover, they see a child seated on an ass, and a Maiden by His side ; but they hurry on, and know not that it is the Lord of Heaven and His Immaculate Mother whom they have just passed by. The "Sacramental King" is as effectually hidden from the sectary, as the Incarnate God was from the Jew. They wander into the temple, they hear the music, and see the lights, for they can exercise sensual functions, but of what is really going on in that place, what mean those bended knees and downcast eyes, why that ministrant is covered with cloth of fold, and demeans himself like one standing in the court of eaven, all this is as completely hidden from them as if the Cross had never been lifted up on Mount Calvary, nor the Pure Oblation known amongst men. And so they smile on one another, and then go home, like Mr. Selkirk, to talk of " the mummeries of Popery." So utterly unconscious are they of that ineffably magnificent Mystery which is the joy and life of all other Christians, and so effectually have they banished God even from their temples, in order to enthrone man in His place, that they can only scoff while men who have known Him from their childhood upwards are holding their breath in His * Glimpses of the Old World, lay the Rev. I. A. Clark, D.D. f Memorial of the Holy Land, by the Rev. George Fisk, p. 25. \ Even in their rare contemplations of Heaven, they still see only man. " In Protestant Christendom," says an American writer, " the heart of the millions is not reached by the prospect commonly presented to them of eternal life." Foot- falls on the Boundary of another World, by Robert Dale Owen, formerly Amer- ican Minister to Naples ; book vi., ch. i., p. 362. " The recognition of friends in the next world ;" " The renewal of intercourse with departed friends;" such are the customary titles of Protestant discourses on Heaven. About God their theology is silent. ' " I die happy," said a well-known Anglican clergyman of the High Church school ; " lam going to see Hugh James Hose and Bishop Otter" The only thing which they never think about in their dreams of Heaven is the Beatific Vision ! The Anglican conception of union with God seems hardly to rise above the " happy hunting-grounds" of the Red Indian. But it is not wonderful that men who have invented altars on which there is no Tabernacle should make to themselves a heaven in which there is no God. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 405 presence, so deeply absorbed and entranced by that coming amongst them of the Holy One, though His majesty be clouded by the sacramental veils, that they forget, not only music and incense and vestments, but even the intrusion of these jesting critics, who with unbent knee and head erect, in all the wisdom of complacent ignorance, are passing sentence upon them. If it were possible for aliens to know, for one brief hour, what is the presence of God in the Church, and how it is manifested, they would comprehend at last, that the u ceremo- nial" which they deem so important an element in Catholic worship has no charm either to beguile Christians or to convert the heathen. They would learn also to rebuke and detest the light judgments of foolish men, whom the Prince of the Apos- tles calls, in terrible words, which only an Apostle might use, " irrational beasts, blasphemin gthose things which they know not."* And now we may conclude. We have heard enough of the history of religion in Ceylon, and of Protestant comments upon it. The evidence which might have been obtained from Cath- olic sources has been excluded, in spite of its interest and importance, because it is proposed in these volumes, for obvious reasons, to leave historical proofs to Protestants alone. It is from them we have learned how the native Catholics of Ceylon have resisted, during three centuries, both the savage assaults of persecution and the politic benevolence of heresy. From them also we have learned what is the character of their own converts, and how exactly they resemble those whom they have gained in other lands. We may be satisfied with their unwilling testimony; and if we add, in conclusion, a few words from one whose name is honored in many a Christian house- hold throughout Ceylon, it is only as an example of the reve- lations which we might have obtained abundantly from similar sources. In December, 1852, Bishop Bettachini, the Yicar Apostolic of Jaffna, gave the following account of occurrences within his own vicariate, which includes only the northern portion of the island. u The number of conversions, of Gentiles and Protest- * Peter ii. 12. Since " the Blessed Sacrament is the greatest work of God, the most perfect picture of Him and the most complete representation of JeSus, it must needs follow that it is the very life of the Church, being not only the gift of Jesus, but the very living Jesus Himself. ... It is the central devotion of the Church. All others gather round it, and group themselves there as sat- ellites ; for others celebrate His mysteries, this is Himself. It is the universal devotion. No one can be without it, in order to be a Christian. How can a man be a Christian who does not worship the living presence of Christ?' Father Faber, The Blessed Sacrament, book iv., sec. vii., p. 541. 406 CHAPTER IV. ants, during the past year, amounts to five hundred and one." Of Trincomalee, he says: "It is the residence of a Lombard priest, Dom Yincent Cassinelli, who is much esteemed by all parties. A considerable number of conversions from Prot- estantism is made here every year, so many indeed, that the Methodists, who had a station here, have been obliged to give up the contest for want of proselytes." Of Chilan, this is" his report : " A large church, with three naves, is in course of erection here, sufficiently spacious to accommodate five thou- sand persons." There are no contributions from missionary societies, nor gifts from official patrons, but religious zeal sup- plies their want. "Men and women," says the bishop, "boys and girls, have set to work with incredible zeal. The Judge of the district, who is a convert from Protestantism, has given upwards of forty pounds as his subscription. The chief merit of the work is due to Dom Froilano Oruna, a Spanish Bene- dictine, who has acquired marked influence over the popula- tion." Of the mission of Yaligamma close to Jaffna, the bishop notices, that though the Protestants have immense institutions, "an extensive printing establishment, a large college for the education of boys, a large seminary for girls, in both of which pupils are received gratuitously, ninety schools, two doctors, eight or nine ministers, and several catechists," who are all maintained by subscriptions from England and America, the results, by their own admission, have been so nugatory, that "it is probable they will soon disappear altogether." Lastly, he thus mentions their attempts to corrupt the Catholic natives, by offers of books and money. " When the Protestant minis- ters visit them, to distribute their books to them, these good Christians not only reject with contempt the poison offered to them, but often confound the distributors by various embar- rassing questions, which render the apostles of error, who are at a loss to answer them, objects of scorn."* The facts referred to by the bishop in these extracts are once more confirmed, in 1860, by an authority who shall be our last witness. "From the latest published reports of the Protestant missionary societies, it appears that the Protestant native converts, of all sects, in the whole island, amount only to four thousand two hundred and fifty-nine." And even this scanty number is constantly diminishing, in spite of the various attractions held out to them. Thus in the single vicariate of Columbo, in the course of the year 1857, four hundred and eleven adult Protestants were received into the Church ; in 1858, four hundred and twenty-two ; and in 1859, two hundred * Annals, vol. xiv., p. 164. MISSIONS IN CEYLON. 407 and eighty-nine ; making a total of one thousand one hundred and twenty-two adult Protestant converts in three successive years, in one only of the ecclesiastical provinces into which Ceylon is divided.* Once more we have applied the divine rule, By their fruits ye shall know them. Let the reader, who will have observed that all our evidence has been derived from Protestants, con- demned to awaken the conscience of others by publishing facts which produced no effect upon themselves, draw his own conclusions. It is no new thing that Almighty God should employ the enemies of the Church to proclaim their own humiliation and her glory; but it seems to be His will, not only that the hopeless sterility of Protestantism, in spite of the talents and even the virtues of some of its professors, should be everywhere manifest, but that everywhere there should be a Protestant historian to detect and record it. They will accom- pany us in all the lands which we have still to visit, and in each they will tell us the same tale of wealth idly wasted, and labor leading to nothing. Everywhere they find God absent from their councils ; everywhere they proclaim the dreary void which that absence creates. Missionaries, tourists, and officials, go forth from England or America, in the gayety of their hearts, to chronicle the baneful influence of the ancient faith, and to sing the triumphs of the new ; and when at last their books are published, the world is amazed to find, that they have unconsciously obeyed the inspiration of God rather than of their own hearts, and that the glories of the Cath- olic Church are divulged by her most unscrupulous enemies, and the impotence of Protestantism elaborately proved by the most enthusiastic of its own disciples. * Madras Catholic Directory for 1860, pp. 178-180. CHAPTER V. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES WE have now, for the first time, to speak of regions in which by a singular exception, the Protestant preceded the Catholic missionary. In Australia and New Zealand, during a long course of years, the agents of English missionary societies con- ducted their operations in the presence of friendly witnesses alone. No competitors were there to impede their free action, no rivals to dispute their influence. Three nations of pagan and uncivilized men, whose lands seemed to have long invited a new possessor, had opened their gates to England and her emissaries. "With unlimited resources, and backed by the whole power of one of the greatest empires on earth, they had only to reign in peace, and command these deserts to revive and flourish, like a field on which the dew of heaven has de- scended. Here, at length, was an opportunity of showing what the " reformed religion" could effect, in a sphere where its dominion was supreme and un con tested, towards the conver- sion of the Gentiles. It had often boasted its power : the mo- ment had arrived to test it. Australia, New Zealand, and Tas- mania were added to the long catalogue of Britain's colonial conquests ; let us see whether she has played in them a nobler part than in India or Ceylon. We should only echo the complaint of her own sons, if we were to say, that of two out of the three England has made a moral cesspool. But this familiar reproach, which, on the one hand, is harsh and unjust for want of due limitation, on the other, takes no account of far more real crimes than those which it too hastily condemns. It was surely no unpardonable offence, unless we deny the fundamental maxim of Roman jurispru- dence, to banish from the society which they had outraged the felon and the homicide. But it was cruel and impious to treat these unhappy outcasts like brutes condemned to the slaughter, and to provide for them, in the land of their exile, only shambles MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 409 and an axe. More than any of the sons of men they needed for it was all which now remained to them the hope of reconciliation, and the promise of the future. Their bodies they had forfeited, and could henceforth move hand or foot only at the bidding of the taskmaster ; but their souls were free, and in that freedom they could still seek after union with God. still propitiate a Judge who wipes away the tears which He has caused to flow, and in the very act of chastising has already begun to pardon. Yet the first ship which bore away its freight of despair, of bruised hearts, and woful memories, and fearful expectations, would have left the shores of England without even a solitary minister of religion, but for the timely remon- strance of a private individual ! The civil authorities deemed their work complete when they had given the signal to raise the anchor and unloose the sails the rest was no concern of theirs. Half a century later, the same disgraceful fact recurred. u An oversight equally remarkable took place," says Judge Burton in 1840, u upon the recent expedition to Port Essing- ton." On this occasion also, " H. M. 8. Alligator sailed from England with upwards of five hundred souls, unprovided with any minister of religion."* But this is not all. In Australia, as in India, they neither provided ministers themselves, nor would suffer others to supply the defect. Among the emigrants to the new continent were some of those children of Ireland, whom Providence seems to have dispersed through all the homes of the Saxon race, that they might one day rekindle amongst them the light of faith which their own long misfortunes have never been able to quench. To these exiles it was necessary to convey the succors of religion. The first Catholic priest who arrived in Australia on his mission of charity, and whom the policy of self-interest should have persuaded^ the authorities to greet with eager welcome, was treated with derision, and "was directed,"^ as one of his most energetic successors relates, " to produce his 6 permission,' or hold himself in readiness for departure by the next ship."f He was alone, and therefore a sate victim ; and though, as the latest historian of the colony observes, ''his ministrations would have been not less valuable in a social than in a religious point of view, he was seized, put in prison, and subsequently sent back to England,";): because his presence was irksome to men who seem to have felt instinctively that * State of Religion and Education in JV. S. Wales, p. 72. \ A Reply to Judge Burton, by W. Ullathorne, D.D., p. 10. j History of New South Wales, by Roderick Flanagan, vol. i., ch. iv., p. 215. 410 CHAPTER V. his proffered ministry was the keenest rebuke of their own cruelty and profaneness. But we need not pursue the details of a history which is absolutely uniform from its opening to its finat chapter, and which contains only two facts the one, that not even a solitary native of Tasmania or New Holland has ever been converted to the faith ; the other, that the aboriginal tribes of the first have utterly ceased to exist under British rule, while those of the second are rapidly dying out. Such, as we shall see more fully hereafter, has been the invariable destiny of the savage, in Australia, in North America, in South Africa, in Polynesia wherever he has found Protestant masters ; while in the Philippines, in Oceanica, and in Western and Southern America, he has dwelt in peace and prosperity, nay, has increased and multiplied under Catholic rulers. Let us briefly trace this history in Australia, and the influence of Protestant missions, conducted with every advantage which power and wealth could impart, upon her aboriginal tribes. The subject is meagre, and need not detain us long. A few characteristic facts will suffice. They are Protestant witnesses who will tell us once more the familiar tale of worldly and covetous missionaries, of the immorality of the English colo- nists, of money squandered in vain, and of final and admitted failure. Dr. Lang, the Protestant historian of New South Wales who reports, in 1852, '* There is as yet no well-authenti- cated case of the conversion of a black native to Christianity" will assure us that this result is not due to insufficiency of tem- poral resources. "In the year 1828," he says, " when the whole population did not exceed thirty-six thousand five hundred and ninety-eight (of whom about one-half belonged to other commu- nions), the cost of the Episcopalian establishment of the colony exceeded twenty-two thousand pounds !" And apparently even this failed to satisfy the class amongst whom it was distributed. " Accounts of the most discreditable character were trumped up by individual chaplains, who had ample salaries and allowances of every description besides. In this way the two Episcopalian chaplains in Sydney presented, one an account for seven hundred pounds, and the other an account for five hundred pounds, which were both paid them, in addition to all their regular and accustomed demands."* Archdeacon Scott, he says, after failing in business in England, then acting as a clerk or secre- tary, finally merged into an ecclesiastical dignitary, and was sent out with a salary of two thousand pounds. And though * History of New South Wales, by John Dunmore Lang, D.D., vol. ii., ch, xi., p. 465 (1852). MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 411 these revelations may be fairly attributed to sectarian animosity, this Presbyterian witness is at all events perfectly candid, and does not conceal " the cold-blooded and unnatural indifference which, I am sorry to acknowledge, the Church of Scotland evinced at that period, and for many years thereafter, to the moral and religious welfare of her people in the colonies." Perhaps the excessive opulence of the Episcopalian clergy may partly account for certain characteristic facts which we may notice at once for the sake of getting rid of them. When Dr. Broughton, who was their bishop, was examined by a committee of the House of Commons as to his success in converting the aborigines, the following opinion was elicited from him : " Have you found it absolutely impossible to instil into their minds any adequate idea of the Deity and of Christianity? Of Chris- tianity, certainly, I should say."* It is only fair to the Wesleyan witnesses before the same committee to say, that they emphati- cally repudiated this opinion, and apparently with reason. A scientific writer, who had examined the question as a physiolo- gist, gives his verdict in favor of the Wesleyans. ''Examina- tion and comparison have shown," he says, alluding to the physical characteristics of the Australian race, " that instead of peculiarities, strong analogies are found to the skulls of white men."f And another capable witness confirms this dictum of science by the conclusive fact, that there was not wanting evi- dence of distinct "religious traditions" among thein.J Indeed, a large number of writers on Australia appear anxious to refute the discreditable plea of Dr. Broughton. " They are as apt and intelligent," says Sir George Grey, who had carefully studied their habits and character, " as any other race of men I am acquainted with." "Their belief in spirits is universal," we are told by Mr. Angas. "Certain it is," says Mr. Marjori- banks, "that they believe in the immortality of the soul, and the existence of evil spirits."! " The very term by which they denote the evil spirit," says Dr. Latham, " belongs to the Oceanic Pantheon in general.' ; T "There is no doubt whatever," observes M. de Eienzi, after careful investigation, " that the Australians are capable of being civilized."** " There is some reason to think," adds Mr.' Bennett, "that the aborigines believe * Parliamentary Papers, vol. vii., p. 14, Cf. p. 201. f Physical Description of N. 8. Wales, by P. E. de Strzelecki, sec. vii., p. 335. t Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, by George French Angas, vol. ii., ch. vii., p. 224. Journals of Two Expeditions in Australia, vol. ii., ch. xviii., p. 374. f Travels in New South Wales, by Alexander Marjoribanks, ch. iv., p. 92. 1 The Ethnology of the British Colonies, ch. v., p. 222. ** Oceanic, par M. G. L. Domeny de Rienzi, tome iii., p. 517. 412 CHAPTER V. in the metempsychosis ;"* an opinion confirmed both by Mr. Parker, who held the office of Protector of Aborigines, and by Mgr. Salvado, who has dwelt among the tribes of the interior, and gives conclusive proofs of their remarkable aptness. f " The work of evangelizing them may be unpromising," says Mr. Young, a Wesleyan missionary, "but it presents no greater difficulties than those which, in other parts of the heathen world, have been overcome.";): Finally, Mr. Gerstaecker, an experienced German traveller, in proving the "abilities and talents " of the Australian native, gives this decisive example. He visited a school, in which native children not only " read the New Testament with a great deal more expression and emphasis than children commonly exhibit in English village schools," but afterwards gave an explanation "which proved the excellent memory of the children. " Here was surely some material to work upon. Dr. Broughton, however, had decided that he and his wealthy colleagues could do nothing with such people. We may, therefore, put aside the Episcopalian clergy, but not without noticing two facts which identify them with their class in every other land. Dr. Broughton, who thought the Australian incapable of receiving truths which are addressed equally to every creature of God, was more solicitous about the progress of the Catholic religion in New South "Wales than about the conversion of savages; and distinguished himself chiefly by sending home fretful protests against the " schismatical" Archbishop of Syd- ney, for using a title which Dr. Polding had received from the successor of St. Peter, and Dr. Broughton from the successor of Henry YIH. The Catholic prelate took no notice of his invectives, which hardly provoked any other comment than the remark of a French writer in the Correspondent^ that " an Anglican charging a Catholic with schism is like Ishmael call- ing Isaac a bastard. "|| * Wanderings in N. 8. Wales, by George Bennett, Esq., F.L.S., F.R.C.S., vol. i., ch. v., p. 131. f Memoir es historiques sur VAustralie, par Mgr. Rudesindo Salvado, 3me partie, p. 258 (ed. Falcimagne, 1854). \ The Southern World, ch. v., p. Ill (1854). Voyage, &c., vol. iii., ch. ii., p. 88. In 1836 "the missionaries at Welling- ton Valley reported that amongst the blacks there was a general idea of a Creator," that " they believed in the immortality of the soul," and also in " an order of beings superior to man." Flanagan, vol. i., ch. viii., p. 515. I The people of the colony, however, presented a petition to the Queen in 1841, condemning his " spirit of sectarianism," and "'praying the removal of that personage from the Legislative Council ;" and when the Catholic cathedral was projected in Sydney, "Protestants subscribed liberally, and the Governor, with the advice of all the magistrates, promised to give from the public cof- fers a sum equivalent to that which might thenceforward be made up by private donations." Flanagan, vol. i., ch. iv., p. 223 ; vol. ii., ch. i., p. 31. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 413 The second fact referring to Dr. Broughton and his colleagues is the following. It appears that there was, not long ago, a sort of conference of Protestant bishops at Sydney, at which a majority expressed a quasi-official opinion in favor of the doc- trine of Baptism, the adoption of Avhich they cautiously recom- mended to their ecclesiastical inferiors. The " clergy of Aus- tralia," however, immediately resolved that u the construction put by the bishops, if imposed, would be tantamount to a new article of faith I" The laity also protested against the innova- tion, while the clergy of Van Dieman's Land solemnly address- ed their bishop to record " their regret, that after the decision of the Privy Council, and two Archbishops," he should entertain such unsound views.* In the presence of such facts we have surely no reason to marvel when Count Strzelecki informs us, that " the attempts to civilize and christianize the aborigines have utterly failed.' 1 '\ When we have mentioned one or two examples of the efforts made, and of their results, the tale will be complete. " Efforts prodigal indeed in zeal and money," says Colonel Mundy, speaking of the Australian native, " have been made to civilize and christianize him, but they have hitherto met with signal failure." The colonel then quotes a missionary report, refer- ring to " the greatest of all the mission stations on this con- tinent," at which large sums had been expended, during nine successive years, in feeding, instructing, and preaching T;o the natives. " Among all those young men," says the report of the year 1842, " who for years past have been more or less attached to the mission, there is only one who affords some satisfaction and encouragement.";): And the results of all this care, and of an education prolonged through many years, are still more darkly depicted by Mr. Hood, in the following year, 1843. " It is said that cases have occurred of persons who, when young, had been educated at the mission, murdering their children in after years." M. de Rienzi mentions the case of one who was brought up from childhood by a benevolent Englishman, sent to England, and exhibited at many public meetings as a specimen of the success of Protestant education ; * New Zealand and its Inhabitants, by the Rev. Richard Taylor, M.A., ch. xx., p. 304. A Wesleyan minister relates, with undisguised complacency, in 1862, that " the bishop was sadly chagrined when I was in Sydney, to find by a legal decision against him in the highest colonial court, that he could be excluded by an objecting clergyman from a church in which it had been pub- lished the bishop would hold a service for ordination !" Dr. Jobson, Aus- tralia, ch. vi., p. 163. Anglican church discipline does not seem to improve in the colonies. I- Physical Description, &c., sec. vii., p. 350. j: Colonel Mundy's Australasian Colonies, vol. i., ch. vii., p. 241. Australia and the East, by John Hood, ch. vii., p. 207. 4:14 CHAPTER V. but who, on his return to the colony, fled to his native forests, where he lived in a state of nudity, and was finally executed for rape.* " Numberless instances are quoted," says a Wes- leyan minister in 1862, "of education and employment of the aborigines by European colonists ; but almost in every case the native child or servant has gone back to the wild tribe to which he or she belonged, and sunk back into barbarism. "f " No instance has been known," says another eye-witness, in 1849, " of their receiving the tenets of Christianity." Yet, he adds, as if he desired to prove that their instructors were only human agents, to whom God had refused every super- natural gift, that some of them were educated with so much success as " to act as policemen, and are very efficient.":): Another expensive trial was made in the mission of Lake Macquarie. "The great cost of this mission," says Dr. Lang, " and the peculiarly unpromising character of the field, very speedily induced the society to abandon it." In 1837 the mission at Moreton Bay was established under two German missionaries " and eighteen lay missionaries." Though aided by the government, it was only saved in 1842 from extinction by "an appeal to the public," and twenty years later it was once more admitted that its results were " inappreciable."] Another case at Lake Colac, in which the Wesleyans were agents, is thus described by Mr. Byrne, in 1848 : " An exten- sive tract of land, and annual assistance in the shape of a money-grant, was afforded by the government, the total amount of the latter, since 1836, approaching five thousand pounds. But here again the Executive recognized the inutility of all attempts for the civilization of the aborigines ; and the grant to the Colac mission is now only one hundred pounds per annum, a sum that merely enables it, under the superintendence of the Rev. Mr. Tuckfield, to linger out its existence without a hope of any advantage being obtained by it."Tf Indeed, Mr. Young, a Wesleyan minister, confesses, six years later, that " the work had to a great extent been abandoned as a hopeless undertaking." " In Victoria, many thousands of pounds were expended in forming 'establishments for the moral and religious instruction of the native youth. They were well clothed and lodged, &c. * Oceanic, tome iii., p. 507. f Dr. Jobson, Australia, &c., ch. vii., p. 200. J Rambles and Observations in N. 8. Wales, by Joseph Phipps Townsend, ch. vi., p. 103. History ofN. 8. Wales, vol. ii., ch. xi., p. 507. r Flanagan, vol. ii., ch. i., p. 57. l" Twelve Years' Wanderings, &c., vol. i., p. 867. MISSION'S IN THE ANTIPODES. 415 but the result was a sad and painful failure. The worthy instructors were baffled at every point, and after nearly nine years of ardent efforts in the Christian cause, they were com- pelled to abandon the field in despair." The only effect, this friendly witness adds, of all the feeding, clothing, and instruct- ing, was this : "The natives became fat, lazy, and disobedient, and declared most emphatically that ' too much blendy hard work was no good for blackfella ; irn only good for whitefella, cos he blendy like it.' " * As early as the year 1842, "the expenses of every mission to the aborigines within the colony" (New South Wales), says one of its historians, " amounted to fifty-one thousand eight hundred and seven pounds. We must honestly say that little or no value has been rendered for it." He quotes also a mis- sionary who made the following singular report : " In whatever direction I go, even at a distance of forty or sixty miles, the parents conceal their children as soon as they hear that a mis- sionary approaches their camp ; and when I have come upon them by surprise, I have the grievance to observe these little ones running into the bushes or into the bed of the river with the utmost rapidity."f But these discouraging facts were not always so candidly admitted. If the natives avoided the missionaries, the latter did not on that account abandon their lucrative functions. A few years ago the colonial journals related, with appropriate comments, the case of a Protestant clergyman, who regularly received during some years a grant towards the support of a mission which he was supposed to be conducting in the interior, and of the progress of which he forwarded annual reports, but who was accidentally discovered at last to be engaged in the peaceful pursuits of agriculture, which his stipend as a mission- ary had sensibly aided, and to be the pastor of a " mission" which had no existence whatever, except in his own ingenious reports. We must not conclude without citing at least one official testimony to the failure of all missionary projects in Australia. In 1849 a committee of the colonial council was appointed "to inquire into the condition of the aborigines." After reporting that all former schemes had proved abortive, " they recommended the abolition of the protectorate as having failed ; . . . they advised the house that it was useless to form new reserves, as recommended by the Secretary of State ; the edu- * Thirty-three Tears in Tasmania and Victoria, by George Thomas Lloyd, ch. xviii.. p. 453. History of N. 8. Wales, by J. H. Braim, Esq., Principal of Sydney College, ch. vi., p. 237. f Hit vol. ii., 416 CHAPTER V. cation of adults they thought to be hopeless, and the young could be educated only by a compulsory sequestration from their relatives and tribes." And then they added this re- markable statement : "Without underrating the philanthropic motives of her Majesty's government in attempting the im- provement of the aborigines, much more real good would be effected by similar exertions to promote the interests of religion and education among the white population in the interior of the colony, the improvement of whose condition in these respects would doubtless tend to benefit the aborigines."* We have now heard enough to prepare us for the final account which is given in 1853 by Mr. Gerstaecker, who says, "The missionaries have given up the work of conversion in despair;" and in 1858 by Mr. Minturn, who declares, "All missionary efforts among them have failed ; they are, in fact, rapidly dying away, and disappearing before the white race ;"f and in 1862, by Dr. Jobson, who adds, "They have persistently withstood all attempts to civilize and christianize them ;"f and lastly, in 1863, by Judge Therry, who once more observes, " The problem has still to be solved of bringing even a single aboriginal of New Holland within the pale of civiliza- tion.'^ And this is the only result, as far as the natives are con- cerned, of the English dominion in Australia. They had a nation to convert; they have only created a desert. "Another ten years," says Mr. Byrne, " and an aboriginal native will be as great a curiosity in Sydney, or within the boundaries of the colony, as he is at present in Europe. "| Of the same fact in Yan Dieman's Land, we are told, "the extermination of nearly a whole race has been the work of twenty years."!" When the English first arrived, " the natives evinced the most friendly dispositions towards them," and their confidence was repaid by indiscriminate slaughter, directed by the governor of the colony.** A single military expedition, destined to destroy them en masse, cost thirty-two thousand pounds, and failed. At length they perished to the last man, starved or murdered, having learned from their Saxon lords only a new catalogue of unfamiliar crimes, and filled with an impotent but " insatiable * Flanagan, vol. ii., ch. iv., p. 219. f From New York to Delhi, ch. iii., p. 24. % Ch. vii., p. 198. Reminiscences of New South Wales and Victoria, by R. Therry, Esq., ch. xvi., p. 292 (1863). \ Vol. i., ch. v., p. 279. 1 The Catholic Mission in Australia, by W. Ullathorne, D.D., p. 47. ** Thirty-three Years in, Tasmania and Victoria, by George Thomas Lloyd, eh. ix., p. 213 (1862). MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 417 desire to shed the blood of the pale-faces indiscriminately, and without a shadow of mercy." Of the new colony of Victoria, Mr. "YVestgarth says, that whereas in 1831 there were from twenty thousand to twenty- five thousand natives ik within the limits of tho present Vic- toria," they have dwindled away so rapidly under English rule, that u they now stand at two thousand live hundred for the whole of Victoria," nine-tenths having perished in twenty years, and that even this feeble remnant has been relegated to a barren tract "useless to the colonist."* In 1863 we learn that this number was still further diminished, that "habits of intoxication are on the increase, and there seems little hope of any great improvement in the condition of this race.'-f Lastly, of New Zealand, Mr. Paul says : " the New Zealand- ers are annually on the decrease, and will no doubt in the course of time, perhaps forty or fifty years, become nearly if not entirely extinct ;"J a fate which Lord Goderich reported to Governor Bourke was inevitable, though, he added, it was impossible to speak of it u without shame and indignation." " It seems, indeed," says the Rev. Dr. Lang, with great com- posure, in reviewing these results of Protestant colonization, " to be a general appointment of Divine Providence, that the Indian wigwam of North America, and the miserable break- wind of the aborigines of New Holland, should be utterly swept away by the flood- tide of European colonization, . . . and the miserable remnant of a onc, j hopeful, race will at length gradually disappear from the land of their forefathers."! Yet there are lands, as we shall see hereafter, in which the wigwam of the Indian still stands, except where it has been replaced by a more solid edifice ; and in the Catholic islands of Oceanica, as well as by the banks of all the rivers which flow from the Andes to the ocean, by the Amazon and the Oronoco, by the Rio Negro and the Parana, and the thousand tributaries which mingle with their mighty streams, his race dwells in peace, and calls upon the true God. Even in the northern con- tinent, where the Indian in contact with Protestantism "has not ceased to degenerate," as M. de Tocqueville observed, and. * Victoria and tlie Australian Gold Mines, p. 51. f The Wines, January 28, 1863. j: Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, by R. B. Paul, p. 252 (1857). New Zealand ; its Advantages and Prospects ; by Charles Terry, F.R.S., F.S.A., p. 112. " Within the first two or three years after the establishment of the society's settlement at the Bay of Islands, not less than one hundred at least of the nati/es had been murdered by Europeans in their immediate neighborhood." The British Colonization of New Zealand, published for the JN'evv Zealand Association, p. 167 (1837). | History of N. 8. Walw, vol. i., ch. ii., p. 26. 28 4:18 CHAPTER V. where the savages diminished by seventy-four thousand between 1850 and 1856; the populations under Catholic influence, as we shall learn in a later chapter, " still thrive or increase" and an American officer could report to his government " the pro- digious work effected by the missionaries in the far West, and even declare of one of the most powerful tribes, *' They are hardly Indians now." But in these cases, of which we are hereafter to speak, the teachers of the savage were men who carried with them from Europe no treasures but the Cross of Christ and the Gospel of salvation, and therefore were able, as we shall see when we trace their history, to gain millions of barbarians to such a degree of civilization and prosperity as excited the admiration even of a Sou they and a Voltaire. We have now exhausted the religious history of Australia, as far as the natives are concerned, and have no motive to inquire curiously about its other inhabitants ; yet a few words may be added upon them also, before we pass to the missionary annals of New Zealand. Dr. Lang has described, with his accustomed frankness, both the clergy and the people ; though we may well believe there are some exceptions to the character which he depicts. Of the missionaries he gives this report : " There were instances repeated instances of men, who, although it was known that their characters were blasted at home, were never- theless recommended as fit and proper persons for the colonial field."* And the people appear, if we in ay believe his account, to be worthy of such pastors. Mr. Lancelott,f and other writers on the Antipodes, deplore in energetic terms the profound im- morality of " the most influential citizens ;" while Dr. Lang thus speaks " of the higher classes of colonial society :" " Even their profession of Christianity is unquestionably far more hurt- ful than beneficial to the cause of pure and undefiled religion. In short, the influence of no inconsiderable portion of the higher classes in ]ST. S. Wales has all along been decidedly unfavorable to the morals and religion of the country." "The extent to which the laboring classes of emigrants become contaminated," observes Mr. Henderson, in 1851, "is immense Education, in most cases, is in a most lament- able state ; in fact, in the greater part of the country there is none, except what parents themselves can bestow.":): Within the nineteen counties, to say nothing of the districts beyond the boundaries, men live and die, and children are reared, without any degree of religious instruction. " "Of the language in * Vol. ii., ch. xi., p. 492. f Australia as it is, by P. Lancelott, Esq., vol. ii., ch. v., p. 72. I Excursions in N. 8. Wales, by John Henderson, Esq., vol. ii., ch. xi., p. 288. Phipps Townsend, ch. vii., p. 140. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 419 Australia among the laboring classes," says the Rev. Berkeley Jones, in 1853, " the reader can form no conception. Such swearing, cursing, and obscenity, were never equalled by any thing which you may have accidentally heard."* This applies to N. S. Wales : while of Van Dieman's Land, Mr. Puseley re- ports, in 1858, that " the number of offences committed in the city of Hobart, with a population of only twenty-three thou- sand, exceeds by fifty per cent, that of Liverpool, with its two hundred and ninety-six thousand inhabitants ;"f and Mr. Jones relates of Melbourne that " no one who values life ventures about after sunset," because " the insolence and power of the wicked is so dominant.":): Nor does it appear that the higher classes contribute by their influence or example to counterbalance these evils. " I was greatly surprised," says a Protestant writer, in 1862, " to find how thinly most of the churches (of the Church of England) were attended, and how many people there were in Australia, even amongst the educated, and those in a good position, who never entered a place of worship ;" and this is the case, not only with the native colonists, but " even many of those who from habit, if not from a better motive, have been regular in attend- ing public worship at home." On the whole, Protestantism does not seem to have redeemed in Australia its misadventures in other lands. It has failed, in spite of every temporal advantage, to convert even a solitary pagan ; while its own professors, in large numbers, have prac- tically abandoned Christianity. And Protestants have not omitted to contrast these results with those which mark the influence of an older and purer faith. Thus Dr. Lang is angry with Sir Thomas Brisbane, who must have been the most candid of Australian governors, because he bluntly replied to a " Presbyterian memorial" for public aid, on the ground that it was given to Catholics, that " it would be time for the Presby- terians to ask assistance from the government when they showed they could conduct themselves as well as the Roman Catholics of the colony."|| Mr. Hood, also, a perfectly impartial observer, ventures to suggest to his- co-religionists, that " the Protestant population will do well to imitate their Roman Catholic breth- ren in their exertions on behalf of the rising generation ;" and whereas Mr. Henderson has told us that education amongst the Protestants is at the lowest ebb, Mr. Hood candidly observes, * Adventures in Australia in 1852 and 1853, by the Rev. H. Berkeley Jones, M.A., ch. xi., p. 149. f Australia and Tasmania, by D. Puseley, p. 196. J Ch. xxi., p. 299. Three Years in Melbourne, by Clara Aspinall, ch. x., p. 130. Hist. N. 8. Wales, vol. ii., ch. xi., p. 461. 420 CHAPTER V. " the Roman Catholic Church, with its usual exemplary zeal, has pushed schools and seminaries into every corner of the colony/'* ^They lose none of their members," says Mr. Braim, with evi- dent regret, u nor abate any of their zeal." Dr. Jobson laments that in Western Australia also, " the Roman Catholics support high-class school establishments, to which Protestants send their youth, perhaps too confidently, for education. "f Finally, Colonel Muudy makes the* following observation upon those incessant religious divisions which are not less con- spicuous in the Antipodes than in China, India, Ceylon, and every other land in which the new religion lias displayed its multitudinous forms. " The Roman Catholics here, as gener- ally in these colonies, appear to have increased in number and consequence at a much greater ratio than other denominations. The reason is obvious. Union is strength. The Protestants are split into sects every man must set up a creed for himself."^ If there is a fact still more remarkable than these ample and almost perplexing confessions of Protestant writers in every land, of which we have already heard so many, it is surely the singular composure with which they offer their evidence, and then turn away as calmly as if they had been recording only the averages of a price-current, or the variations of the thermometer. They are loading with infamy their own religion, and do not even seem to be conscious of it. They address to more thought- ful and anxious hearts the most formidable admonitions which man's experience can offer or receive, and recite them with cool monotonous indifference, as if they had no meaning or signifi- cance. They suggest to others deep counsels and prompt action, remaining themselves indifferent and unmoved, ready to repeat to-morrow without emotion the avowals which they made yes- terday without regret. The only Protestant admission of success on the part of Cath- olic missionaries in civilizing the natives, after the long and fruitless efforts of their unsuccessful rivals, is recorded by a candid American writer in these words: u The Roman Catholic clergy have a native missionary establishment at Victoria Plains, where they make the natives useful by taking every means of civilizing them. A very good feeling exists between the natives and the Roman Catholics." Mr. Townsend also remarks that ''the beneficence of the Roman Catholic clergy, and that of the Sisters of Charity, is very great."! * Australia and the East, ch. x., p. 325. f Australia, &c., ch. vii., p. 194. | Australasian Colonies, vol. iii., ch. ii., p. 42. Voyages to India, China, &c., by W. S. Bradahaw, ch. vi. ] Ch. xii., p. 271. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 421 Yet the Catholic missionary, here as elsewhere, had to contend with that almost insuperable obstacle, found only in pagan lands tenanted by Protestants, the contempt or aversion of the heathen for a religion which he had already learned to despise before the professors of a holier creed presented themselves to him. If the Apostles had appeared everywhere, each accom- panied by a lady, and most of them by a group of children ; eagerly solicitous, like other men, about money, luxury, and ease ; contradicting one another in every discourse, and distin- guished from their pagan hearers only by the profession of truths of which their own daily life was the most effective refutation in other words, if they had been Protestant mission- aries Christianity would hardly have extended outside the walls of Jerusalem, and would not have attracted much attention within them. In spite of the formidable difficulty which apostles must now expect to encounter in all lands, and especially in those which are under the dominion of England, the Benedictines have com- menced in Western Australia one of those generous undertakings so often initiated by the first followers of St. Benedict, in con- verting the ancient barbarians of Europe. On the 2d of June, 1859, more than forty Benedictines the first Vicar-General of Australia, now an English bishop, had been a member of the same illustrious order attended, under the guidance of Bishops Serra and Salvado, at the solemn benediction of a new monas- tery in the district of Perth. From that hour hope dawned upon the native of Australia. Bishop Serra has lately com- municated to his friends in Europe this account of the present condition of his community. " The example of their habits of industry has already been followed by many natives, who, abandoning their erratic life, have turned their attention to the cultivation of the soil, and are now Living upon its produce. Moreover, as every Benedictine foundation is traditionally known as a nursery of learning as well as an asylum of penance and prayer, a college has been established under the direction of the fathers, and, amongst the pagan youths who have, been gratuitously received as pupils, three young Australians have already been sent to Rome to complete their education."* Perhaps this remote colony of England, hitherto abandoned to titter darkness, may be destined to receive from the children of St. Benedict the same inappre- ciable blessings for which the mother country is indebted to the family of the same glorious Saint. Even the Protestant inhabitants of the colony appear to * Annals, May, 1860, p. 120. 422 CHAPTER V anticipate, without deriving any satisfaction from the prospect, that the Benedictines will not labor in vain. Thus a colonial journal quotes with disapprobation a recent letter of the Superior, " as showing the untiring and unsparing energy of the Church of Rome in proselytizing within the territories of Great Britain." Considering that Great Britain has done nothing for the inhabitants but deprive them both of their lands and their life, the complaint seems a little unreasonable. " Our plan of proceeding," says the bishop, as quoted by the Protestant journalist, " is as follows : "We shall join the first savage tribe which we meet ; w T e shall go with them, and share their nomad life, until we are able to lix them in some favorable situation, when we propose to teach them, by our example, how to obtain their subsistence by agriculture. When we have thus attached them to the soil, we shall begin to speak to them of religion, and initiate them in ecclesiastical knowledge, in order that we may find in the sons of Australia future missionaries who may assist us in instructing their still savage brethren. When we have the good fortune to see new fellow-laborers arrive from Europe, we shall locate them in the monastic huts already established, leaving them to bestow their labor on the tribes already attached to the soil. This will leave us at liberty to advance further into the interior, and to win other tribes to the faith of Jesus Christ. If we can in this manner establish a chain of monasteries, the conversion and civilization of Australia will be complete." A still later account by Mgr. Salvador informs us that these hopes had begun to receive their accomplishment. " The natives only laughed," he says, " when they first saw the monks ploughing and sowing ; but when they gathered in the first crop, these agricultural toils appeared to them worthy of imita- tion." And whereas Protestant missionaries relate, that the native children run away, or hide themselves, at their approach, the Benedictines commend both the zeal with which their parents send them for instruction, and the remarkable aptness of the scholars. They record also that five Australians had already left for Europe to complete their studies, and add the astonishing fact, that two others had actually been admitted as novices in the convent of the Most Holy Trinity della cava, in the kingdom of Naples.* On the Feast of the Epiphany, 1863, a composition was recited in his own tongue, by an Australian native student, before the college of Propaganda. On the whole we may conclude that Bishops Serra and Sal- vado would not agree with Count Strzelecki, who was acquainted * Memoires Hisioriques sur I'Awtralie, 2me partie, pp. 145, 198. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 423 only with Protestant missions, that "all attempts to civilize and christianize the aborigines have utterly failed ;" nor with the Rev. Mr. Young, that " it is a hopeless undertaking ;" nor with Mr. Gerstaecker, that " they have given up conversion in despair;" nor, least of all, with Dr. Broughton, who assured the House of Commons, that u it was impossible to instil any idea of Christianity into them." NEW ZEALAND. And now let us cbme to New Zealand. In reading the ac- counts which Protestant writers of various sects have given of the history of their own religion in this colony, our first im- pression is one of astonishment. So eager do they seem to proclaim to the world the turpitude of the very men whom they profess to esteem as the preachers of a " scriptural " faith, that we are compelled to remind ourselves, from time to time, as we listen to their scornful invective, that they are partial and reluctant, not hostile or prejudiced witnesses. It seems incredible that writers of so many creeds and classes, but all more or less warmly interested in the success of Protestant missions, many of them ardent advocates of the missionaries, and not a few their personal friends arid associates, should have consented to make revelations which are certainly without par- allel, except perhaps in the records of the same class of agents in South Africa and Polynesia. The story of Protestant missions in New Zealand opens after this manner: "I have a manuscript account," says one who belonged to the class which he describes, " which I drew up my- self, from unquestionable authority, so early as the year 1824, of every missionary that had set foot in New Zealand up till that period, as well as of every important transaction which had occurred till then in connection with the New Zealand mission."* It is not often that history is written by a witness at once so competent and so impartial, and it is impossible not to antici- pate with some curiosity the results of such careful observation. He goes on thus, addressing himself to Lord Durham, who at that time held high office under the crown of England: "I am confident, my lord, it would be impossible to find a parallel, in the history of any Protestant mission since the Reformation, to the amount of inefficiency and moral worthlessness which that record presents. Indeed, Divine Providence appears to have frowned upon the New Zealand mission all along, and blighting and blasting from Heaven seem to have rested upon it even uiitfl * New Zealand in 1839, by J. D. Lang, D.D., p. 30. 424 CHAPTER V. now." And then he adds these examples from his manuscript record, in order to justify such a denunciation. u The first head of the New Zealand mission was dismissed for adultery ; the second for drunkenness; and the third, so lately as th-Q year 1836, for a crime still more enormous than either"* This account was published in 1839, and other witnesses will presently carry it on to our own day ; meanwhile, let it be noticed that Dr. Lang finishes in 1839, as he began in 1824. u There is still," he says, " a most flagrant abuse tolerated and practised by the great majority of its members, of sufficient magnitude to neutralize the efforts even of a whole college of apostles." Such is the dark opening of a history which resembles rather the shameful records of a criminal calendar than the annals of Christian missionaries. In New Zealand, Protestantism was alone, free to develop according to its nature and instincts. Let us see what it became, and what it has done for the noblest race of barbarians in the southern hemisphere, during the half century of its uninterrupted intercourse with them. A Protestant naturalist and physician, Dr. Ernest Dieffenbach, declares, that " of all the natives of the Polynesian race the New Zealanders show the readiest disposition for assuming a high degree of civilization.''! It was permitted by Providence, for reasons which we cannot penetrate, that the Christian religion should first be announced in this promising Meld by the agents of Protestantism. The mission of New Zealand was founded by Mr. Marsden in 1814, after unsuccessful attempts by others in 1800, and 18074 " He was originally," we are told, " brought up as a blacksmith ;" but became ultimately an Episcopalian minister in N. S. Wales, where for many years he combined the two functions of preacher and agriculturist. Having amassed a considerable fortune as a sheep-farmer, without prejudice to his spiritual character, and having acquired a very accurate knowl- edge of the value of land, of cattle, of crops, and of a good many other things, he seems to have paid a visit to New Zealand on behalf of the Church Missionary Society. The directors of that institution showed considerable discrimination in the choice of an agent who knew, by long experience, how to blend together in a prolific union the arts of the clergymen and the farmer. His first step proved that they were not deceived in him, and Mr. Marsden inaugurated the nascent mission by purchasing * New Zealand in 1839, by J. D. Lang, D.D., p. 30. f Travels in New Zealand, by Ernest Dieflcnbach, M.D., vol. ii., ch. ix., p. 139. Ne The Gospel in New Zealand, by Miss Tucker, en. iv., p. 36. New Zealand, by Edward Brown Fitton, ch. i., p. 17. n. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 425 two hundred acres of land, chosen by himself, for twelve axes.* The transaction was perhaps not apostolic, but the directors of the Church Missionary Society would have smiled at so un- reasonable an objection : it was not even honest, for the poor savages, as they* afterwards complained, did not know the value of their land; but it was an excellent bargain, and a very good beginning of the New Zealand mission. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Marsden's felicitous contract suggested to others, quite as capable as himself of appreciating the keen negotiation, a spirit of eager commercial enterprise which soon led to very notable results. The Episcopalian and Wesley an clergy, who now congregated with startling promj>- titude in this land of promise, rivalled each other in " pur- chases," the fame of which traversed half the globe, and began to fill the ears of busy and thoughtful men in the marts and cities of England. It penetrated even the courts of la\v, and found an echo within the walls of parliament. This was the term of its progress ; for then arose such an outcry of many voices, such a chorus of mingled laughter and indignation, that the government had no alternative but to adopt instant meas- ures to thwart the exorbitant cupidity of the missionary socie- ties and their agents. A little later, and a large part of the soil of New Zealand would have passed into the hands of the Church of England and Wesleyan missionaries. Let us ex- amine, solely by the aid of Protestant witnesses, the process by which this appropriation was being gradually effected, until the hour in which it was fatally checked by the inexorable edicts of the Colonial Secretary. We have seen that the acquisitiveness of which we are about to trace the results was first manifested by Mr. Marsden, the founder of the New Zealand mission. His example was fruit- ful ; and only five years later, in 1819, as we learn from Dr. Morrison, the historian of the London Missionary Society, "five missionaries and artisans" they not unfrequently cumulated these professions " purchased thirteen thousand acres for forty- eight axes."f For thirty years this lucrative commerce con- tinued ; the parties to the contracts being, on the one side, men who called themselves missionaries, and on the other, ignorant and inexperienced savages, to whom they had introduced them- selves as messengers from God. u ln many cases," says Mr. Terry, " the natives were quite unconscious of what they had really conveyed by these ready-made deeds; . . . tracts of land larger than counties in England were sold or conveyed for coru- * New Zealand, by J. L. Nicholas, Esq., vol. ii.. ch. vii., p. 193. f TIM Fathers of the London Mixisionary Society, vol. ii., app., p. 598. 426 CHAPTER V. paratively a trifle, on half a sheet of paper. Already thirty- two millions of acres are claimed."* Between 1830 and 1835, at Hokianga and the Bay of Islands alone, " twenty-seven square miles were purchased by missionaries"^ " At first," Mr. Byrne informs us, " thtse purchases were made for little more than a nominal consideration ; a few beads, a musket, some blankets, and a little powder and ball, were sufficient to purchase tracts which were measured, in the language of the missionaries, by miles.""^ Let us give a few examples of a covetousness which is described by rrotestant writers as so eager and unscrupulous, that even when detected it knew not how to blush, and which, when finally baffled arid rebuked, and compelled in many cases to disgorge its prey, resented the loss of its spoils rather than the public exposure of its fraudulent greed. Among the many missionary claimants up to 1841 were the Rev. J. Matthews, for two thousand five hundred and three acres ; the Rev. R. Matthews, for three thousand acres ; the Rev. T. Aitken, seven thousand six hundred and seventy acres; Rev. "W. Williams, eight hundred and ninety ; Mr. Clarke, nineteen thousand ; Mr. Davis, six thousand ; Mr. Fairburn, twenty thousand ; Mr. Kemp, eighteen thousand ; Mr. King, ten thousand three hundred ; Mr. Shepherd, eleven thousand eight hundred and sixty ; and finally, for we cannot reckon them all, the Rev. H. Williams, at first for eleven thousand,! and afterwards, as Dr. Thomson reports, for twenty-two thou- sand acres. The last-named gentleman should not be confounded with the crowd of obscure competitors in this active commerce. He was conspicuous among the missionaries whom, as Mr. Earp playfully told the House of Commons, " the natives regarded as having done them." "The Rev. Henry Williams, the chairman of the Church mission in New Zealand," we are told by Mr. AVakefield, " under the pretence of securing a piece of land for a native teacher, had obtained an assignment to himself of forty acres of the best part of the proposed site."|| And he appears to have displayed similar talents during a long series of years. In 1852, Dr. Shaw relates that he passed ''miles of barren district" in the neighborhood of Auckland, the unpro- ductiveness of which he found, on further inquiry, was due to the * New Zealand, &c., p. 73. f The Story of New Zealand, by Arthur S. Thomson, M.D., vol. i., p. 268. \. Twelve Years, &c., vol. i., p. 48. | Terry, p. 122. f Adventure in New Zealand, by Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Esq., vol. i., ch. vii., p. 190. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 427 speculative schemes of its reverend owner. "It was explained," he adds, "from the fact of an Archdeacon Williams, one of the missionaries, who had got possession of it, and would not sell it ; thereby putting an end to cultivation and rural industry in that part of the country."* Dr. Lang speaks of a Rev. Mr. Williams, whom he calls " the ordained head of the New Zealand mission," who became ultimately an Anglican bishop in that colony. If it was the same individual, his career may be regarded as a pleasing example of continuous and progres- sive prosperity. But Mr. Williams, if never surpassed, was sometimes equalled by his missionary colleagues. "Mr. Shepherd," we learn from a Protestant historian, " bought a large tract of eligible land, having a frontage of from four to five miles on one of the navi- gable rivers in the Bay of Islands, for two check shirts and an iron pot."f Mr. Marsden, if his life had been prolonged, would have been tempted to envy his successors. But Mr. Shepherd was not satisfied with one such bargain, and knew how to ac- complish still more brilliant operations, when spiritual engage- ments left him leisure, by the aid of check shirts and iron pots. He has, we are not surprised to hear, "another estate towards the North Cape, where he is at present stationed as a mission- ary." Indeed, the success of these gentleman has been so com- plete, that we are told of Mr. Fairburn, Mr. Williams, and others, that the very timber on their ample estates was "worth half a million sterling." These examples of the skill of Christian missionaries in the discharge of their profitable stewardship are instructive, and it is only too easy to add to their number. The Rev. Richard Taylor, who has written a book about New Zealand, full of unction and running over with texts of Scripture, is thus described by Mr. Wakefield, in 1845: "The Rev. Richard Taylor, who only went to New Zealand in the year 1838, was a claimant before the Land Commissioners of fifty thousand acres of land !"J In Mr. Taylor's book we only read of his zeal for the Gospel, and his tender interest in the salvation of the natives. It is true that he soon abandoned the care of their salvation to other people ; but perhaps this \vas only because so extensive a landowner might reasonably aspire to greater dignities at home. It is true also that, ultimately, the decision of the authorities deprived the ex-missionary of more than forty-eight thousand acres of his claim ; and Dr. Thomson * Notes of a Ramble in Australia and New Zealand, in 1852, by John Shaw, M.D., F.G.S., p. 289. f Lang, New Zealand in 1839, p. 34. j Adventure, &c., vol. ii., ch. xiv., p. 344. 4:28 CHAPTER V. notices that a well-known periodical " suggested he should have his picture hung up in the Church Missionary Society's hall, with the words 4 fifty thousand acres' under it."* Yet if you read his book, you will be almost tempted to think that he went to New Zealand to preach the Gospel to the heathen. The Rev. William Yate, also a " Church missionary," de- serves our particular notice. He, too, has written a book on New Zealand. Three missionaries, he says, were sent to that colony with an annual allowance of five hundred pounds, an income which he considers despicable, and is surprised they should be expected to do any good with such " necessarily in- adequate means." Yet such a sum, which would suffice to maintain twenty-five Catholic missionaries for a year in China or India, was surely recompense enough for men who had so many other means of adding to their income, and of whom their colleague thus speaks: "So far did some of them dishonor the self-denying doctrines of the Cross, which they had been sent here to teach, that no less painful a plan could be adopted than an ignominious erasure of their names from the list of the society's laborers."t Mr. Yate's own admiration of the same self-denying doctrines was no doubt perfectly sincere ; and it, was probably before he had learned to value them that he permitted himself some occasional relaxation of their strictness, after a manner which was thus revealed to a committee of the House of Commons. Mr. Yate used to prohibit the natives, the House was informed, from selling their pork to the whalers, not from any unkind feeling towards those adventurous mariners, but because he preferred to buy it himself at one penny per pound, and then to sell it at fi ve.;f The sentiments which Mr. Yate expresses in his book justify us in assuming that he afterwards regretted his transactions in pork, which he probably felt had been more advantageous to himself than to the whalers whom he mulcted, or to the natives whom he instructed so persuasively in " the self-denying doctrines of the Cross." Such, according to their owii testimony, were the Protestant missionaries in New Zealand for more than thirty consecutive years, and such the examples which they afforded to its abo- riginal inhabitants. These were the Eiccis, the Verbiests, the de Brittos, and the Xaviers of Protestantism. In 1842, Mr. * Vol. ii., p. 156. f An Account of New Zealand, by the Rev. William Yate, ch. iv., p. 168, 2d edition. \ Parliamentary Papers. Mr. Earp's evidence, vol. vii., p. 156. Mr. Earp told the committee, " That has been the case a great deal in the past history of the missionaries." MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 429 Heaphy still deplores in energetic terms " the rapaciousness of the missionaries."* In the same year Mr. Terry reproaches- them with the fact, that u many of the missionaries are now possessors of very large property. "f As late as 1845 we find a member of the Legislative Council once more lamenting that " many of the Church missionaries undoubtedly are traders and land-jobbers. ";{: "' Scarcely one of the servants of the Church Missionary Society," they were all Anglican ministers, says Mr. Waketield in the same year, " has been free from this blemish of self-interest. " And this is the language of all the witnesses of every sect. "The missionaries of the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand," says Dr. Lang, u have actually been the principals in the grand conspiracy of the European inhabitants of the island to rob and plunder the natives of their land."] Yet we shall presently find these " traders and land-jobbers," riot only speaking complacently of themselves as devoted and self-denying missionaries of the "Dross, but reviling their Catholic rivals in terms which only such men could use, and opposing them by arts which only such men could employ. Some, no doubt, were better than others ; but all the au- thorities represent the Church of England missionaries as the least scrupulous of any. When Mr. Earp was examined by the House of Commons, and asked by Lord Jocelyn if there was any difference of character " between the Wesleyan and Church missionaries," he replied, " There is nothing to choose between them. I think the Church missionaries have the predominance ; they have made much larger speculations in land than the Wesleyans." Yet some of the latter had proved formidable rivals to Arch- deacon Williams, Mr. Shepherd, Mr. Taylor, and the other Episcopalian clergy. Dr. Latfg tells us that Mr. White, a Wesleyan missionary at Hokianga, was obliged to retire in consequence of detected " immorality," and adds, "this reputa- ble individual is now a merchant of the highest class." JSfor does any amount of exposure correct the frailties of these singu- lar missionaries. As late as 1850, for time, which changes all human things, does not change them, we have the following curious account of the Rev. Walter Lawry, " General Superin- tendent of the Wesleyan mission at Auckland." It is one of his own colleagues who thus describes him : * Narrative of a Residence in various parts of New Zealand, by Charles Heaphy, ch. i., p. 5. f New Zealand, &c., p. 180. New Zealand and its Aborigines, by William Brown, ch. ii., p. 89. Adventure in New Zealand, vol. ii., ch. xvii., p. 449. New Zealand, p. 83. 430 CHAPTER V. " He lends money, and now has money out at the modest interest of twenty per cent." It is his delight, he adds, " to watch the market, and to buy, sell, lease, and mortgage to the best advantage; so that he is now owner of land and houses, and one of the wealthiest men in Auckland." What follows is Gtill more impressive : " He is doing as much business as ever ; almost every week we hear of some fresh purchase or sale. . . . He now talks of going to England. He is a graphic narrator, and has a fund of interesting material, and may produce a good impression on behalf of these missions. But I pray God we may see his face no more, unless he get reconverted."* In the next chapter we shall find Mr. Lawry, as we might have anticipated, invoking maledictions upon Catholic missionaries, and quoting Holy Scripture against them. Even in 1857, nearly fifty years after Marsden made the first missionary contract in New Zealand, Mr. Hursthouse thus describes his Anglican successors. If he uses the language of jest and irony who can blame him? "It appears that the Church missionary gentlemen had come to like New Zealand. The natives were still addicted to cannibalism and to preserving each other's heads ; but the natives were ' missionary Chris- tians,' attentive in chapel, and not bad workmen in the glebe. Their lines had fallen in pleasant places. Liberal of the society's converting blankets and tobacco, they had already acquired for their thirteen confederated chiefs some three hun- dred thousand acres of land."f " Several missionaries," Mr. Bidwill had previously observed, in 1841, " claim tracts of from one to six hundred thousand acres in different parts of the country.":): In 1845, Mr. Hawes told the House of Commons, that, besides being land-jobbers, " they had, at least some of them, become more or less traders also." And so notorious had their character now become, that Mr. Charles Buller, writing officially to Lord Stanley, did not hesitate to speak of them as men who would not dare even to offer any defence of their own conduct. " The missionaries are not in a state to encounter public discussion of their past proceedings, and would entertain any terms offered to them in a very mitigated spirit. "|| They had become at last a jest and a proverb ! * A Voice from New Zealand, by Rev. Joseph Fletcher, Wesleyan Mi*, eionary at Auckland, pp. 2, 3. f New Zealand, the Britain of the South, by Charles Hursthouse, vol. i., ch. i., p. 37. i Rambles in New Zealand, by John Carne Bidwill, p. 86. Report of the Debates of the House of Commons on the State of New Zea- land, p. 115. \ Eighteenth Report of the Directors of the New Zealand Company, p. 42. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 431 Finally, even Dr. DiefFenbach, their familiar friend and con- stant advocate, was constrained, by liis own experience and observation, to speak as follows of men whom he desired only to praise : " The Church missionaries in the Bay of Islands possess large properties in these districts, which is perhaps the reason that they have not long ago gone into the interior, where they would have been far more usefully employed than in the Bay of Islands, which is principally a shipping- pi ace. Some of the stations occupied by them are nearly deserted by the natives, and they have therefore no congregations, unless they choose, like St. Antonio, to preach to the fishes." But in default of congregations they had their estates, which they prob- ably considered a satisfactory compromise. " Their efficiency would undoubtedly have been greater," Dr. Dieffenbach mildly observes, " if they had shared the adventurous spirit of the settlers, and had lived amongst the interior tribes." But such a life had no attractions for them, and " the consequence has been that many of the older missionaries have become landed proprietors ; and many, by other pursuits, such as banking or trading with the produce of their gardens or stock, have become wealthy men. . . . Some of these persons are now retiring on their property"* Their sons, also hereditary merchants, learned to imitate the virtues of their fathers, and " the rela- tives of the Church missionaries," Colonel Mundy relates, " contracted for the supply of provisions" to the army and fleet, " and their sons did undoubtedly reap a rich harvest.''f Such is one of the most characteristic chapters in the history of Protestant missions. We shall find many like it in the lands which we have still to visit, as we have already found others in China, India, and Ceylon ; but we will only so far anticipate the evidence which has still to be adduced as to observe here, that the same witnesses whom we have just heard will tell us presently, in spite of vehement prejudices, that the Catholic missionaries in this land have been conspicuous for the evan- gelical purity, zeal, and disinterestedness which .they vainly searched for in their Protestant rivals. To these true apostles of Jesus we owe an apology for even comparing them, though by way of contrast, with such emissaries as England has sent to New Zealand during fifty years, to represent her religious opinions. Yet these men professed to be " missionaries of the Gospel," and teachers of the " self-denying doctrines of the Cross." Most of them have written books exalting their own apostolic triumphs, and challenging the admiration of their * Travels in New Zealand, vol. ii., ch. v., p. 75. f Australasian Colonies, vol. ii., p. 222. 432 CHAPTER V. partisans at home. How far they deserved it we have seen from their own confessions or the narratives of their friends. Perhaps even their warmest advocates though they have eagerly read the romantic biographies in which such men as Marsden, and Taylor, and Yate, and Leigh, and many others, are depicted as u angels of light" may at last comprehend their true character and the hoilowness of their religious pro- fession, if they will only refer to the Acts of the Apostles, and contemplate for a moment the model there exhibited of the Christian missionary. Let them at least interrogate their own hearts, and say whether the men by whose labor God has in various ages converted the heathen to the knowledge of His Son were ever such as these? Let them tell us whether they can imagine St. Paul claiming thousands of acres in Thrace, or an estate in the suburbs of Corinth ; St. Barnabas bartering domestic utensils for a vineyard in Cyprus; St. Augustine robbing the Saxons of their pork to sell it to the Welsh ; St. Boniface lending money at twenty per cent, on the banks of the Danube ; or St. Francis Xavier a thriving cattle-dealer on the shores of the Persian Gulf? In this lamentable history there is, however, one consolation. The day of retribution came at last; and England nobly disavowed, by the voice of her rulers, the turpitude of her missionaries in New Zealand. Some of them indeed had anticipated the coming storm, and " retired on their property ;" but their cupidity, as Mr. Brodie notices, led to " the enactment of a law declaring all titles to lands purchased from natives invalid."* Many who were striving to emulate their prosper- ous predecessors were rudely interrupted in their dreams of wealth, and even compelled to abandon the prey which they thought they had secured. " Many of the purchases," says Mr. Chamerovzow, though he includes the colonists as well as the missionaries in his reproaches, "have since been declared invalid by the local government, being repudiated by the native owners on the plea of inadequate compensation, wilful double dealing, or actual fraud. "f " The Church of England missionaries," says a writer in 1860, for it is a notable feature, as we saw in India and China, of Protestant missions, that their latest annalists are as full of rebuke as all who preceded them, k% claimed two hundred and sixteen thousand acres of land ;" and the arts by which the reverend claimants had appropriated them are sufficiently revealed by the fact that the final judicial award compelled them to resign one hundred and fifty thou- * Remarks on the PaMand Present state of New Zealand, by Walter Brodie, p. 52 (1845). f The, New Zealand Quttfion, by Louis Chamerovzow, ch. i. t p. 4. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 433 Band! "Archdeacon Henry Williams and some others," adds the same authority, were at length admonished, but not till it was found that the English public would no longer tolerate their proceedings, " that they must either give up their exces- sive grants of laud, or leave the service of the mission. The Archdeacon chose the latter course. When he had suffered suspension for five years, he was restored" to become once more a guide to the heathen, and an ornament of the Anglican Church in New Zealand. The missionaries had now no alternative but to be content with their salaries, and to trade or speculate only through the agency of others. But the societies at home had prepared at least a partial compensation, by arranging that the wealth of their agents should vary as the number of their children ! The tariff of missionary rewards, we learn from Dr. Dieffenbach, was on the following scale: " When the question of providing for the children of the missionaries was brought before the com- mittee of the Church Missionary Society in London, two hun- dred acres for each child was thought to be a liberal allowance." He adds that "ten acres of arable land must be regarded as sufficient for all reasonable wants of an individual." But we have seen that the revenues of the missionary societies are large, and the benevolence of their subscribers inexhaustible.* One circumstance only remains to be noticed. The too pros- perous career of the missionaries in New Zealand attracted attention, as we have observed, even in the assembly of Parlia- ment. In a debate which took place in the House of Commons in 1845, "the conduct of the Catholic missionaries," of which we shall hear more presently, was contrasted by more than one speaker with that of the Protestants. The late b'ir Robert Inglis, the official apologist of the Church of England on all occasions and against all adversaries, offered to the House of Commons this explanation. " It must always be recollected," he said, " that, after no length of time, could the Roman Catho- lic missionaries have to provide for families." The same thing,, happily for the progress of Christianity, was true of the first Apostles; but it was not to be expected that Sir Robert Inglis should introduce this consideration to the notice of the Mouse. - A more candid and better informed critic, who had seen both classes of missionaries at their work, while he laments that the Protestant teachers " were very censurable,'' adds the very reflection which Sir Robert Inglis prudently suppressed. "The Roman Catholic missionaries, Dr. Thomson remarks, * In like manner, " the Chaplains of New South Wales were gratuitously preaented with one thousand aix hundred acrea per child. Excursion in jMcto Zealand, p. 50. 434 CHAPTER V. " would not take advantage of the trade ; for the missionaries of this Church in other countries have generally obeyed the spirit of the holy injunction to the first Christian missionaries in the world : 'Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money, neither have two coats apiece; 5 " a contrast which we have seen emphatically traced by another witness, when he told the House of Commons, " Christ said, Leave all ; they say, Take all." And now that we are sufficiently acquainted with the mis- sionaries themselves, it is time to inquire what has been the result of their labors. In the first place, it is undeniable that a large number of the natives have gradually been induced, like the Cingalese during the Dutch occupation, to profess a nominal Christianity. Irresistible motives have conspired to provoke their external acquiescence in the religion of their masters. From them they have learned many European arts, tending to augment their ease and enjoyment; and "their fine intellect enables them at once to perceive the great value of these crafts."* From them they learned the value of land, and of its products, for which they quickly understood the strangers would be their surest customers. "The success of the mission- aries in New Zealand," observes Mr. Brown, "is chiefly refer- able, not by any means to a wish on the part of the natives for religious instruction, but to their hope of selling their land, building houses, or general trading. "f The same observation has been made by many other writers. " Utilitarian motives," says Colonel Mundy, "have undoubtedly been very powerful auxiliaries to their reception of the Christian faith. "f " The greater part of the so-called Christian natives," Mr. Carne Bidwill informs us, "have only been attracted to become converts by the easy mode of life which they enjoy at the missionary establishments.'^ "They seem to understand little, and to care less, about the principles of the Christian creed," says another independent witness, but they appreciate the " many useful arts" which the missionaries can teach them, and easily understand that it is " their policy to support and encourage the missionaries."! " Many have been the supposed converts to missionary instruction," says Mr. Polack in 1840, " from the craft/ feeling of bettering their present condition. ''T * Brown's New Zealand, ch. ii., p. 60. | P. 90. \ Australasian Colonies, vol. ii., ch. iv., p. 133. Rambles in New Zealand, p. 36. | Rocings in the Pacific, by a Merchant long resident at Tahiti, vol. L, ch. ix., p. 227. Tf Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders, by L S. Polack, Esq., vol. ii., ch. xxii., p. 235. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 435 " We re growing old," is an expression which Mr. Wakefield sometimes heard amongst them, "and want our children to have protection in people from Europe."* " The natives," says Mr. Hay, " are anxious to be placed under the protection of British law, and would he willing to receive any person vested with power to enforce it."f " All," says Dr. Thomson, " looked upon the missionary and his effects as their own property.":): And so well was this understood by the authorities in New Zealand, that when a new tribe announced their adhesion to the mis- sionary party, Mr. Forsaith, who held the office of "Protector of Aborigines," contented himself with reporting to the local government that it had "nominally embraced Christianity. " What the profession was worth we shall see presently. It is evident, then, that far from encountering even, the pre- liminary difficulties which commonly impede the progress of missions in heathen lands, every thing tended in New Zealand to promote and accelerate it ; so that Mr. Brown reproaches the missionaries, with apparent reason, that "they have themselves to blame that success has not been much greater." Every human aid which could promote that success was freely placed at their disposal. If a new mission is to be opened, the governor does not disdain to accompany the missionary in person, and goes to induct him, surrounded by such pomp and circumstance as his quasi-reg&l office permits;! and thus forci- bly admonishes the "line intellect" of the natives that the power which they may never more hope to resist, and from whose patronage alone they can henceforth expect grace and favor, is permanently enlisted on the side of their Protestant teachers. To them they must now look for prosperity, for in- struction in domestic arts, and even for daily employment. The very agents selected from amongst the natives as " cate- chists" or " assistant preachers" are thus described by Mr. Wakeh'eld. "The principal teachers under the missionaries are generally their house-servants at the same time, black their shoes, clean their windows, make their beds, groom their horses, and cook their dinner." And we cannot be surprised that barbarians whose acuteness has become a proverb, and who enjoy daily opportunities of exercising it, should reflect seriously upon the ample resources which they perceive to be at the disposal of their masters. They may be ignorant of the exact * Adventure in New Zealand, vol. i., ch. iv., p. 73. f Journal of tlie Royal Geographical Society, vol. ii., p. 134. i Vol. i., p. 316. Parliamentary Papers, vol. xxx., p. 173 (1846). | See Sir George Grey's Overland Expedition from Auckland to Taranatci, 1850. 436 CHAPTER V. annual revenue of the various missionary societies, but they have detected that it is large enough to justify the shrewd cal- culation, that even the generous living o'f the missionaries will not wholly exhaust it, and that a considerable surplus will be applicable to their own wants. It was remarked by Mr. Terry, in 1842, that " at the enor- mous annual expense of above fourteen thousand pounds, in the twenty-fifth year of its establishment in New Zealand, the Church Missionary Society only provided for the religious and scholastic instruction of the aborigines eight missionaries, and sixteen catechists."* Many years later, we are told by Dr. Selwyn, of whom we shall have to speak more fully hereafter, that the result of one appeal for pecuniary contributions to the New Zealand mission was this, that "the post for some days seemed to rain bank-notes, "f The Wesleyans also, as the Eev. Mr. Turton relates, had spent eighty thousand pounds before 18444 Lastly, the Canterbury settlement, the latest missionary enterprise in this colony, was conducted from its very origin with such careful financial forethought, that " one-third of the entire proceeds of the ' land sales ' is appropriated," we learn from Mr. Hursthouse, "to religious and educational purposes ;" and in 1850 the projectors cheerfully estimate their eventual share from this source at one million sterling. | The natives, then, had manifold and urgent motives for close alliance with the Protestant missionaries. So clearly did they perceive that they had every thing to gain and nothing to lose by the nominal profession of Protestantism, that considerations of interest overcame, in the case of large numbers, the repug- nance with which the avarice of the missionaries had inspired them. It was indeed strongly suspected, as Mr. Tyrone Power observes, that " a struggle for temporal advantages" chiefly influenced the latter.;! or, as Dr. Dietfenbach relates, "that the missionaries sought to convert them only with a view to their own aggrandizement ;"** but if the natives could share in the benefits by which a more active commerce was sure to be accompanied, they were willing to overlook this defect in their religious teachers, and even to do their best to imitate it. In this, as all the witnesses affirm, they were entirely successful. * New Zealand, &c., p. 189. f f lhe Melanesian Mission, by G. A. Selwyn, D.D., Lord Bishop of New Zea- land, Letter i., p. 51 (1853). | Brov/n's New Zealand, app., p. 273. New Zealand, &c., p. 155. \ Canterbury Papers, p. 7 (1850). T[ Sketclws in New Zealand, by W. Tyrone Power, D.A.C.G., ch. xvii., p. 147 (1849). ** Travels, &c., vol. i., ch. viii., p. 169. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 437 The natives still said, indeed, and sometimes even in the pres- ence of the missionaries, that " their only reason for coming to New Zealand was that it was a better country than their own."* But this conviction did not deter them from profiting by their instructive example. With what fatal results that example has been attended is sufficiently revealed in the following passages. u They have become covetous, suspicious, and unfortunate," says Dr. Dieffenbach, the friend and associate of the Protestant missionaries. "They have lost a great part of their hospitality and politeness, and their refusing aid when the stranger is most in want of it, or exacting exorbitant recompense for it, makes travelling now very annoying." Mr. David Rough, another Protestant traveller, who was on a certain occasion the guest of "Archdeacon Brown," relates that "the demands made were so exorbitant," even for the smallest services, that his host lent him " his own men rather than suffer us to submit to imposi- tion." And so little ashamed were these " Christian" natives of their new vice, that, as Mr. Rough adds, they openly boasted of " their success in exacting high pay."f In 1862, Mr. Hod- der,who relates that "few of the natives have any partiality for the English settlements," which they only visit for the purposes of gain, laments that this greedy and mercenary spirit was more apparent than ever.:f " Instead of enjoying themselves with song and the merry dance, as formerly," says Mr. Brown, "they are absorbed in thinking of their next bargain with the Europeans." " How is it likely," asks another Protestant writer, " that their avarice should be subdued, when they saw those people who came to preach the Gospel grasping to obtain large landed property, and those who were guilty of downrignt vice?" : It appears, too, that they had already learned to quote the Protestant Bible in defence of their greed and impurity. Mr. Fox gives examples, in 1851, such as the following. " One of them, whom the governor was upbraiding with having sold his land three or four times over to different parties, justified him- self by quoting the passage, 'After thou hadst sold it, was it not thine own?' And a very intelligent native, to whom I was pointing out the impropriety of having three wives, replied, 4 Oli, never mind, all the same as Solomon !' A much more serious misapplication of the Scripture occurred during the late war, when many of them tore up their Bibles to make wadding * Dr. Lang's New Zealand, p. 42. f Narrative of a Journey through part of the North of New Zealand, by David Rough, p. 18. Memories of New Zealand Life, pp. 33, 67 (1862). Letters from Wanganui, p. 39 (1845). 438 CHAPTER V. for their guns."* Even the native " preachers," whom the mis- sionaries somewhat imprudently deputed to represent them in the interior, and who were, of course, the flower of their u con- verts," "raised a very considerable income," we are informed by Mr. Shortland, " in the shape of iron pots, boxes, blankets, and fire-arms, as fees for performing the ceremonies of marry- ing, burying, &c."f It would be easy to multiply these melancholy statements, which for the honor of our race and nation we would have gladly suppressed, if they had not been already recorded by a crowd of Protestant writers ; but we may content ourselves with adding the testimony of Mr. Waken' eld, than whom no writer on New Zealand has enjoyed better opportunities of estimating the native character, and the effects of the Protestant missions upon it. "The most disagreeable and saddening remark," says this intelligent writer, " which I made was this, that the na- tives appeared to have entirely abandoned their primitive and beautiful hospitality, the great redeeming point in the character of the most ferocious and treacherous heathen native, whom no influence of any sort has yet changed for the better, or pervert- ed from the customs of his fathers. Every village (of the ' Christians') reminded me of the i touters' on the pier at Boulogne, seeking to pounce on an unfortunate traveller. In- stead of the former dignified reception, with a house assigned you by the chief, the whole population rushes at you; but you soon find that, whichever you may choose, you have to pay for each small kit of potatoes, for the carrying of water, or of fern for your bed, and even for every stick of firewood before you are allowed to burn it."J And this account is confirmed, in 1859, by the latest writer on New Zealand, who, while noticing that even at that date " their religion consisted more in words than deeds," still adds the same sign of declension, " that Christian natives were less given to hospitality than the hea- thens.'^ What they have become at last,we shall learn at the close of this chapter. Such, as their own friends attest, is the first and most obvious result of the action of Protestant missionaries upon the natives of New Zealand. Let us inquire in the next place, and still from the same impartial witnesses, what is the nature of the religion which they have been induced to profess, how far it resembles Christianity, and what influence it exerts over their * The Six Colonies of New Zealand, by William Fox, p. 83 (1851). f The Southern Ztistricts of Neio Zealand, by Edward Shortland, M.A., p. 268 (1851). t Adventure in New Zealand, vol. ii., ch. xiv., p. 358. Dr. Thomson, vol. ii., p. 164. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 439 habits and character. As the evidence is copious, and, in spite of the diversity of the witnesses, absolutely uniform, it will, per- haps, be most convenient to follow the order of dates. Dr. Lang has traced for us the results of Protestant missions in New Zealand up to 1839; other authorities, equally competent and unexceptionable, will carry on the history to the present hour. Already, in 1832, a writer in the Asiatic Journal, after a review of some of the facts which we have been considering, pronounced this verdict upon the missionaries in New Zealand and the islands of the South Sea. "We have come to the painful conclusion, that the presence of the missionaries in New Zealand and Otaheite has been productive of more mischief than good."* And in the same year, Mr. Earle, who indig- nantly reproaches their worldly and uncharitable lives, and exposes the real character of their " converts," emphatically declares, " I never saw one proselyte of their converting."f In the year 1835 we come to Mr. Yate, a Church of England missionary, whose operations as a dealer in provisions have already been noticed. Here is a conversation which he relates between himself and one of his male converts. Mr. Yate. " What is the new heart like ?" Answer. " Like yours ; it is very good." " Where is its goodness?" Answer. " It is altogether good ; it tells me to lie down and sleep all day on Sunday, and not to go and tight." " When did you pray last?" " This morning." "What did you pray for?" " I said, O Jesus Christ, give me a blanket, in order that I may believe."^: this view of the proper objects of prayer seems to have been universal with Protestant New Zealanders. Here is a letter which Mr. Yate received from one of his neophytes, and his book contains similar specimens of their epistolary style. " Mr. Yate, how do you do? Sick is my heart for a blanket. Yes, forgotten have you the young pigs I gave you last summer. My pipe is gone out, and- there is not tobacco with me to iill it: where should I have tobacco? Remember the pigs which 1 gave you ; you have riot given me any thing for them. I fed you with sucking pigs; therefore I say, do not forget. " Mr. Yate was evidently doomed to be reminded of an animal with which his missionary career had made him too well acquainted. * Asiatic Journal, vol. viii., p. 106. New Series. f Nine Months' .Residence in New Zealand, By Augustus Earle, p. 201. Account of New Zeidand, ch. v., p. 222. P.271. 440 CHAPTER V. Advancing to 1840, we come to Mr. Polaek, and to the care- ful and minute account which he has given of New Zealand and its inhabitants. " The attempts to instil a real belief in the Christian religion into the minds of the benighted natives," he says, "has hitherto decidedly failed," after an experiment which already lasted twenty-six years, aided by every human advantage which it was possible to possess. Not a few, he adds, have professed Protestantism, with the hope of " bettering their present condition ; but almost in every instance, where a contrary conduct insured present benefit, the adults have renounced their lately received opinions, and held aloof from their instructors."* In 1841, we have three witnesses, of very different characters, but all conversant with the natives and with their habits. Mr. Bidwill, though a friend and advocate of the missionaries, says, " I have certainly observed that the ' missionary' natives are the most impertinent and least willing to work."f Mr. Bright, a member of the medical profession, is more emphatic. The converts, he says, "keep the Sabbath," go to church, and even "subscribe to the Church and Wesleyan missionaries;" and then he adds, "they are, however, no more honest in their general transactions than the rest;" and again, "the slight hold religion has of them is frequently attested by their aber- rations under common temptations." Once more: "I should say that more than one-fourth of the native population can read and write their own language, and that they have a sense of moral obligations. Further I would not give them credit, as it is doubtful whether piety has entered the soul.";): Lastly, a Catholic missionary, the Abbe Petijean, who visited the natives at Wangarora this year, whom he found " almost entirely Prot- estant," and making habitually the most ludicrous perversions of the Bible, says, " Will it be believed that these poor people did not know that there is one God in Three Persons ; that the Word became Man and died for us ; yet their teachers have been in New Zealand for more than twenty years !" In the following year, 1842, Dr. Dieffenbach, though he endeavors to make the best possible case for the missionaries, gives this account of the effects of Protestant conversion. " Instead of an active, warlike race, they have become eaters of potatoes, neglecting their industrious pursuits . . . and they pass their lives in eating, smoking, and sleeping." In several places he indicates that they retain as Protestants their pagan * Manners and Customs, &c., vol. ii., ch. xxii., p. 235. f Rambles, &c., p. 20. i A History of New Zealand, &c., by John Bright, M.R.C.S., ch. vi., p. 127 Annals, vol. ii., p. 154. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 441 customs, and that they exhibit the influence of their new reli- ion chiefly by a superstitious and irrational observance of the abbath, which "the ill-judged directions of the missionaries"* have taught them to regard as the capital tenet of Christianity. At the same date, Mr. Heaphy, who had visited the various provinces of New Zealand, thus recounts the results of his ob- servation. " I estimate the good which the missionaries have done as about the same which would have resulted from the settlement, for the same period, of a like number of respectable settlers of various avocations, with the exception that the settlers would probably have taught the natives many useful arts, and introduced industry amongst them, which the mis- sionaries have not." And presently he adds, "Much of what the missionaries have endeavored to teach the New Zealanders has had any but a good effect upon them."f In 1843, Mr. King, an unusually candid missionary, says: " The number of natives under Christian instruction is very large, but the number of those who are decidedly Christian is very small. "$ Yet twenty-nine years had now elapsed since the Protestant missionaries entered New Zealand, and they had to deal with perhaps the most apt and intelligent race of bar- barians in the world. The year 1845 furnishes six witnesses. The American Com- modore Wilkes, who commanded the United States exploring expedition, relates, that "perhaps those who have become somewhat attached to the Christian religion may be a little, improved," but he confesses that he only heard of a solitary instance of such improvement. " The missionaries of the Epis- copal Church," he adds, " appear to keep aloof from the natives, and an air of stiffness and pride seems to prevail. They appear to be doing but little in making converts. Most of the natives have morning and evening prayers, but their practices and char- acter show any thing but a reform in their lives." Mr. Brodie notices in the same year, as a proof of the feeble influence of Protestantism, that Dr. Selwyn and his colleague Dr. Williams tried in vain to prevent their own followers from fighting.j Mr. Brown at the same date observes, and his position gave him unusual opportunities of judging, that "the Church mis- sionaries in particular' meaning the Episcopalians "have not found their way to the hearts of the natives, and are not so * Travels, vol. i., ch. vii., p. 110. J Narrative, &c., ch. v., p. 52. Polynesia and New Zealand, by the Right Rev. M. Russel, ch. x., p. 361 edition). United States Exploring Expedition, by Charles Wilkes, U.S.N., vol. iii., ch. xii., pp. 400, 401. | Remarks, &c., p. 89. 442 CHAPTER V. much reapected as they ought to have been. One powerful cause of this has been their adoption of a peculiarly hard and illiberal system of dealing with the natives in commercial matters, which has produced a highly unfavorable contrast in this respect with the conduct of the other settlers."'" Thirty years, it seems, had effected no change in their character. Mr. Wakefield confirms, in his well-known work, the same facts. Of the so-called Christian natives lie says, " they ap- peared to be tamed without being civilized ;" and he gives ex- amples of the imprudent boasts and exaggerations by which the missionaries too often attempted to deceive their supporters at home. Hongi and Waikato, two New Zealand chiefs, were sent over and exhibited by them to English audiences as " perfect and very devout Christians;" but as soon as the former, enriched by the presents of his credulous admirers, returned to his own country, " he appeared in his true character as an ambitious and blood-thirsty warrior." One of his first acts \vas to destroy " the Wesleyan mission at Wangaroa." But without multiply- ing these characteristic details, let it suffice to quote the follow- ing impressive statement, in which Mr. Waketield appreciates the historical results of Protestant missions in New Zealand : "It was a matter of constant observation, among all classes of settlers, that the results of the missionary system of instruction were not by any means satisfactory. At Wellington no less than at Wanganui, and at other places where there were no white settlers, this fact began to startle the impartial observer. The only good result that appeared to have been obtained, was the strict and rigid adherence to the mere forms of the Chris- tian religion. But it was hardly a matter of doubt that the conversion penetrated no deeper than the mere forms. As a body, they were distinctly inferior in point of moral character to the natives who remained with their ancient customs unchanged. . . . At some places, such asPatea, where their religious enthu- siasm was carried, in form, to the most extravagant pitch, they maintained the very worst character for honesty, and courtesy to a stranger. It must be remembered that no white man had dwelt there. The missionary system had therefore enjoyed a fair trial, without the interference of civilization. "f In the same year, another Protestant witness writes as follows from Wanganui : " I state my belief that the missionaries have done very little, if any thing, towards the improvement of either the civil or moral condition of the Maoris. It will be urged that the natives must be better than before, as they are nearly * Ch. ii., p. 84. f Adventure, &c., vol. ii., ch. i., p. 11. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 443 all Christians. Truly, as far as the name they are but what else ? 1 appeal to any one who knows any thing of them, whether they are one jot more moral or more civilized than their neighbors the k devils? as the unchristian natives are styled par excellence ; whether, in fact, you would not sooner, at any time, trust or believe a 'devil' rather than a mission- ary?"* Another witness from the same place, and in the same volume, says of the Protestant converts, "Generally speaking, they are distinguished from the unconverted natives as rogues, thieves, and liars."f A third declares that " po- lygamy is still not uncommon, the principal chief at Putiki having three wives, all missionaries.*^ Lastly, still in the same year, Dr. Selwyn tells us of " a na- tive teacher who relapsed into sin," and of a chief who told him that " his own backwardness of belief was owing to the bad aondart of the baptized natives"^ Thirty-one years had now elapsed. In 1S46, Mr. Fitzroy, a friend and companion of the mis- sionaries, reports still more unfavorably. " Religion," he says, fc4 has lost much of the limited influence which was acquired previous to 1.S40." And then he explains his meaning. Hith- erto, the Protestants had at least none but friendly witnesses of their failure in this chosen field of their operations. This advantage they were now losing forever. " Roman Catholics," Mr. Fitzroy adds, "have entered the field which was exclusively Protestant till 1838. **| It was apparently high time, and we shall see presently what welcome they received. In 1817, .Mr. Angas, a friend of Dr. Dieffeubach, still notes the force of the old superstitions, and records that "even those natives who have embraced Christianity," are subject to their influence, and especially to "the dread of the supposed power of witchcraft.''^" In 184r!f, such a history should be pursued to the end, a British officer visits New Zealand on service. He is amazed to find himself lighting against " Protestant natives," of whom he probably knew nothing but from the florid narratives of mis- sionary records, and this is his reflection upon the curious fact: u It appears to me unaccountable, but it is nevertheless true, that nearly the whole of the natives who took part with John lieki against the government in the .Bay of Islands were 1'rotr * Letters from Wanganui, p. 8. f Ibid., p. 35. j Ibid., p. 21. tj Church in the Colonies, Number vii., p. 44. j| Remarks on New Zealand in 184G, by Robert Fitzroy, ch.vii., p. 63. *|[ tiacagc, Life, &c., vol. i., ch. ix., p. &il. 4AA CHAPTER V. estants"* He does not, however, notice the curious fact, that on the very day previous to that on which Heki and his fol- lowers attacked the British force, slaying their commander, and forcing them to retire, these Anglican disciples had attended a religious service conducted by a Protestant Archdeacon.f lieki himself was a notable specimen of the influence of Protestant " conversion," and deserves a moment's notice. " This man was educated by the missionaries," says Dr. Thomson, " and had acquired a deep knowledge of the Bible ; he was baptized in the presence of the British Resident, and the tears he shed on the occasion showed how keenly he felt the solem- nity of that Sacrament." And what was the effect of Protest- antism upon this noble savage, " whose mind was of the order found in the front rank of intellectual progress?" Here is the answer. " He fell back into heathenism, and took delight in religious disputes ; he argued against the truths of Scripture, and confounded Christians with their own weapons." And that the miserable form of Christianity presented to him, and es- pecially its incessant divisions and the malice displayed in them, produced this effect, is proved by his own expressive taunt : " One bee-hive is very good, several are troublesome.' 5 ^ In 1850, Mr. Brunner thus describes the Anglican mission at Taramakau : "The natives here are members of the Church of England, and attend service regularly ; but they appear to be very ignorant of its nature or meaning. " The year 1851 supplies three valuable witnesses. The first is Mr. Shortland, a friend of Dr. Selwyn, and apparently him- self a missionary. This gentleman gives us a description of the higher class of " converts," whose special merits had earned for them the lucrative distinction of being employed as assist- ant preachers of Protestant doctrine, and by the aid of whose superior intelligence it was proposed to act vigorously upon the native mind. Mr. Shortland employs one of them, who had been "educated in the house of an English missionary," to preach for him on Sunday. It was a rash experiment. " I afterwards saw cause," Mr. Shortland observes, " to regret that I had not dissuaded him from undertaking an office he was little qualified to discharge." Of another "native preacher" of the same class, he says, " as parts of his composition were often very absurd, I thought it right to forbid him the use of extemporary prayer, and to confine him to our old forms." But it was only * Reminiscences of Twelve Months' Service in New Zealand, by Lieut. H. F. McKillop, R.N., p. 86. f Flanagan, vol. ii., ch. iii., p. 115. \ Dr. Thomson, vol. ii., p. 96. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, vol. xx., p. 358. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 445 by threatening to dismiss him altogether, which would have involved the loss of his salary, that he restrained his dangerous improvisation. Speaking generally of the whole class, he writes as follows: "The missionaries anticipated good results from sending out the best-instructed of their young converts as preachers and missionaries among the more distant tribes, whom they were unable themselves to visit. The attempt seemed at first crowned with extraordinary success vast numbers being daily added to the body of professing Christians and very favorable reports on the subject were constantly forwarded to the society in England. But after a year or two it was discov- ered that great abuses had been introduced into the practice of the Christian religion by these native missionaries."* Mr. Shortland has told us, what we might safely have assumed, that only the " best-instructed" were employed in these func- tions and these were the best ! We have already seen that they " raised a very considerable income," by levying contri- butions in kind from the flocks intrusted to them by the English missionaries. Mr. Fox, in the same year, gives further examples of the veracity of the missionary reports, and of the real character of missionary converts. " An intelligent clergyman," he says, describes Rauperaha, one of the most conspicuous of these con- verts, as "now to be seen every morning in his accustomed place, repeating those blessed truths which teach him to love the Lord with all his heart." We can imagine the sensation which this pleasing picture would create at a missionary meeting in England, and the lavish donations which it could not fail to provoke. Unfortunately, however, the virtues of this eminent con vert existed only in the imagination of the " intelligent clergy- man." Only " a lew days before his death," Mr. Fox tells us, " two settlers called to see him. While there, a neighboring missionary came in, and ottered him the consolations of religion. Rauperaha demeaned himself in a manner highly becoming such an occasion ; but the moment the missionary was gone, he turned to his other visitors and said, ' What is the use of all that nonsense ? that will do my' belly no good.' He then turned the conversation on the Wanganui races, where one of his guests had been running a horse, f Captain Cruise relates a parallel story of the chief Tooi, who had been long in England, where he was exhibited as a model convert;^ and Mr. Hursthouse informs us that his fellow-christian Rauperaha used to say of * The Southern Districts of New Zealand, p. 268. f The Six Colonies, p. 73. \ Captain Cruise's Journal, p. 38. 446 CHAPTER V. Captain Fitzroy, the governor, who was as easily beguiled as the intelligent clergyman, "he is soft, he is a pumpkin." Mr. Fox sums up his own observations in these remarkable words : * I am often asked what the effect of the influence of the missionaries has been. My answer is Up to a certain point, beneficial ; beyond that, injurious in a very high degree" Of their converts he gives a description worthy of careful study, and which we only omit for the sake of brevity. Our last witness for this year, the thirty-seventh of Prot- estant efforts in New Zealand, is a gentleman engaged in commercial pursuits, and who gives, from actual observation, an account of the missionaries themselves which we can hardly venture to quote in full. "It is right that the world should know,' 7 he says, "that there have been as many wolves as shepherds amongst the folds." And then he continues thus : " I esteem and venerate holy men who act according to their profession, and am aware that no man is infallible; but when one yields to the 'old man' the corrupt portion of his nature, and finds himself incapable of subduing his sensual passions, let him resign the sacerdotal character, and not doubly pollute his soul and body, bringing contempt on the missionary cause, and standing forth to the heathen a mocking comment on the Word of God." We can hardly be surprised when this gentle- man adds and the examples of Rauperaha, Hongki, and other chiefs may assist us to believe him that " instead of improv- ing the native character, the missionaries have superinduced, upon their other bad qualities, hypocrisy of the deepest dye. I speak dispassionately when I say, that I conscientiously be- lieve the moral character of the natives has not been improved by missionary intercourse."* We have almost exhausted our witnesses. In 1851, another Protestant traveller thus describes a scene in a church. " The service consisted in singing a psalm, rapidly reading a chapter, and as rapidly reading some of the Church prayers. I fancied I saw a resemblance to the lifeless formality with which some of our cathedral daily services are attended. "f We almost expected this familiar image. In the same year we have one of those conclusive testimonies which leave nothing to be added. The Rev. Robert Young, who went to New Zealand as a " deputation" from the Wes- leyan Society, and had 110 personal interest in the work which he was only charged to examine and appreciate, thus describes its real character, exactly forty years after it had been com- * Rowings in the Pacific, vol. i., ch. ix., p. 233. f A Summer'* Excursion in N. Z., p. 178. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 447 menced by Marsden's advantageous purchase. " In many cases their Christianity is merely nominal. They feel not its saving power."* In 1855, an English lady, of a class which only exists in England and America, produced a book which she entitled " The Gospel in New Zealand." It need not detain ns long. When the natives scoff at her missionary friends, whom she depicts as at least equal to the first Apostles, she calls them " barbarians, whose extermination seemed far more desirable than their conversion" a sentiment in which zeal seems to triumph over charity. But she says other things more worthy of notice. Speaking of an epoch more than twenty years subsequent to their establishment, she relates how "the mis- sionaries mourned over the unfruitfulness of their labors as to the conversion of souls," and then comes the following passage, in which we might suspect a lurking irony, if she were capable of jesting on so grave a subject : " It had been comparatively easy," she remarks, " to dig their fields and plant their gar- dens, and it was pleasant to gather the abundant produce, to drop a peach-stone into the ground, and ere long to enjoy the delicious fruit ; but" and then she confesses, in a language peculiar to herself, that their spiritual husbandry was much less fruitful. Let us hear this lady once more. In spite of her wish to represent her missionary friends as almost more than mortal in their virtues, she draws but a gloomy picture of their success, and terminates her lamentations with this characteristic dis- course. "The dangers of Popery are added to -those of world- liness ! Tiie efforts made by this false religion are unceasing ; and though in those districts that have long had the blessing of Scriptural teaching, they have failed in producing much lasting effect," we shall learn more on that subject presently, "yet in the newer districts they have been but too successful among the half-awakened and the remaining heathen, and cause our missionaries much anxiety. "f In 1857, Mr. Paul fitly sums up the history of Protestantism in New Zealand by the usual announcement that " the New Zealanders are annually on the decrease ;" and ventures to , prophesy that the final result of the English rule will be, that " they will become nearly if not entirely extinct. ": And English legislators appear to accept this result as inevitable, and even desirable*. " We have planted England in New Zealand," said one of their number, in a recent debate of the * The Southern World, ch. vii., p. 161. The Gospel in New Zealand, by Miss Tuckei; ch. x., p. 117 ; ch. xx., p. 253. Australia, &c., p. 252. 448 CHAPTER V. House of Commons : " The Englishman will destroy the Maori, arid the sooner the Maori is destroyed the better."* Lastly, in 1859, the whole series is closed by various and pregnant testimonies, of which it will suffice to notice only a few. Dr. Thomson, whose sympathies were all on the side of the Protestant missionaries, thus describes the final result of their labors after fifty years of costly effort. Thirty-six per cent., he says, of the surviving population are still avowed pagans ; while of the nominal Christians this is his candid account : " The Christianity of many of them is a rude mixture of pagan- ism and the cross, an adoption strengthened by superstition more than a conversion. Missionaries will deny this; but Christian natives, suffering under sickness, frequently appeal to their old gods for health" the reader will call to mind the same extraordinary fact in Ceylon, "and healthy Christians dread violating the tapu, lest the gods who watch over that code should punish them with sickness. "f And then he sums up the whole history of half a century in these impressive words : " The work of Christianity in New Zealand is only begun." In the same year, 1859, an official document was published at Auckland, by order of the colonial government, and with the revelations contained in that document we may at length deter- mine, without the risk of error, the real influence of Protestant missions in New Zealand, after an expenditure which we may imagine, but can hardly estimate. And first, this curious paper, which professes to investigate the true causes of the rapid decrease of the native population of the islands, attests the grave fact, that it had already dwindled at that date to fifty-six thousand four hundred and nine.; so that nearly seven-eighths had disappeared, if Cook's estimate were true, since the white man set foot in New Zealand. Secondly, all the witnesses concerned in obtaining materials for the solution of the problem proposed to them are perfectly unanimous on these points, that nothing can now arrest the decay of the population, and that universal immorality and misery are its chief determining causes. u An increasing taste for spirit-drinking," says Mr. Halse, " is prevalent among both sexes, but more particularly with the young, who resort to all kinds of devices to obtain it." " In my opinion," observes Mr. Fenton, by whom the evidence was collected and printed, "the social condition of the Maoris is inferior to what it was five years ago. Their houses are worse, their cultivation ixiore neglected, and their mode of living not improved. The mills * The Times, March 14, 1862. f Vol. i., part ii., ch. iv., p. 317. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 449 in some places have not run for some time, and the poverty of the people generally is extreme. At the same time there has appeared a remarkable activity of mind, directed to the devel- opment of political ideas." ' There is reason to fear," he adds, that nothing can save "a population which has once reached such a state of decrepitude as that exhibited by the Maori in- habitants of this country." Lastly, one of the missionaries, and they are all of one mind, except when writing to their em- ployers, declares, that " the greatest cause of decrease is iincleanness, outwardly and inwardly, in diet, dress, and hab- itation, in body and mind, in all their thoughts, words* and actions" Such have been the effects of Protestantism upon this noble race, and to this climax Dr. Thomson points when he says, " the work of Christianity in New Zealand is only begun."' That work will probably be at length complete when there is no longer a New Zealander in existence, and paganism will have- disappeared when the last pagan has perished from the land. The facts which have now been traced for us by so many Protestant witnesses, each independent of the other, and all recording the results of personal observation, do not require any comment. This was the fruit of half a century of missionary labor. This was all that Protestantism could do, as its own agents confess, with such human aids and appliances as never missionaries possessed before, for perhaps the noblest race of barbarians now extant. To uproot their heathen virtues, which might at least have earned a temporal reward, and to substitute for them new and strange vices indolence, treachery, and avarice; to teach them by their own example, that the Christian religion was so worthless, that even. its minisiers might be types of selfishness, luxury, and worldliness; to abuse their simplicity by mean crafr,and rob them both of their land and its produce,, with a .Bible in one hand and a fraudulent contract in the other;, and finally, to cheat souls which were capable of supernatural virtue by a narrow and superstitious formalism, or corrupt them into systematic hypocrisy; such, as their own associates eagerly attest, has been the work of Protestant missionaries in New Zealand. Yet even this is not all. There was still another evil, the same which has made Eng- land a by-word throughout Christendom, which it was possible to carry across the sea, and transplant even in her most remote dependency. The war of sects, the license of crude and shifting opinion, the strife of texts, and endless discord of opposing creeds it was necessary that New Zealand should possess them all. Fatal gift! against which even pagans would have lifted up the cry of fear and supplication, if they had known what it would bring in its train. But this is the fina-l chastise- 450 CHAPTER V. merit which ages of impenitence have brought upon the heathen world in these last days, and which not even apostles though they were as wise as St. Paul, as mighty as St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, or as fervent as St. Francis Xavier could now avert from them. Protestantism is the last scourge of heathenism. Let us see, before we conclude this history, what the mis- sionaries themselves relate of the effects of religious divisions in New Zealand. " We need not wonder," says Dr. Selwyn, " at the controversies which are raging at home, when even in the most distant parts of this most remote of all countries, in places hitherto un visited by English missionaries," he is speaking of Ruapuke, to which only native teachers had been sent " the spirit of controversy is everywhere found to pre- vail, in many cases to the entire exclusion of all simplicity of faith."* Such is the phenomenon upon which, in conclusion, we must oifer a few remarks. The fact admitted by Dr. Selwyn is illustrated, in still more energetic language, by a multitude of witnesses. Even in the most retired spots, observes Mr. Brunner, in 1850, u though in some places there are only six or seven natives, yet they have separate places of worship Church of England and Wesley an and are always quarrelling about religion."f " Contention, animosity, distrust, and intolerance," says the Rev. Elijah Hoole, "are but the mere outlines of that state of feeling which at present exists among our divided people. The spirit of Christianity is lost in the form, and the very form itself has become the subject of incessant and angry dispute. These, together with other circumstances of a painful character, have contributed to destroy much of that missionary influence which it is of the utmost importance to possess.":): In earlier times they made war on each other in tribes, and now that they are restrained by the strong hand of government, they display their ferocity in sects. " Tribes hereditarily hostile," says Dr. Thomson, " adopted through jealousy different modes of'faith ; and these converted New Zealanders were ready to abuse each other for religious creeds they did not understand, and the precepts of which they daily disregarded." "Schis- matic differences have already arisen among the natives," says Mr. Polack,in 1840, "who have ranged themselves on different Hides. In 1837, a serious tight, during which several persons were shot dead or wounded, arose between the Wesleyan neo- * Church in the Colonies, No. viii., p. 23. Journal of Royal Geographical Society, vol. xx., p. 361. Year Book of Missions, pp. 213, 222. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 451 phytes and the sticklers to the old belief." "I found," says Mr. Shortland ten years later, " that the professing Christians were divided between the Church of England and the Wesley - ans, the two parties being very hostile to each other.'" " The most revolting religious feud was going on at Waimate" Mr. Wakefield relates in 1845, "between near relations in two septs of this tribe Wesleyan and Episcopalian when I passed through the district." " The whole population of natives," he adds, "struck me as being in the most repulsive and pitiable condition. They were all 'missionaries,' but divided in their creeds. The most dreadful religious schisms occurred daily between the nearest relations. And this virulence of dispute, on the most abstruse as well as the most trifling points of religion, both in form and doctrine, I found very much re- placing the strict puritan observances and adherence to absurd exaggerated forms." In the province of Otago, Mr. Paul says that even the colonists fought with " a virulence that turns the sanctity of their professed Christianity into ridicule, and makes religion a subject of discussion for arousing the worst passions of man." " The minds of the natives," Mr. Brown reports, " are per- fectly distracted. The first effect is the rejection of the teach- ing of both parties. It is lamentable, however, to think that the influence of religion has no sooner subdued and eradicated their savage feuds and enmities, than that very religion is con- verted into an occasion of strife and bloodshed. . . The natives are now at open war with each other ; they have forsaken their own animosities for the no less deadly hatred and enmity en- gendered by the teaching of different professors of the same meek and merciful religion ; and unless some effectual remedy be devised for the growing evil, all the good that missionaries have ever done may soon be as nothing compared with the evil which threatens to accompany it." "I had heard that religious differences prevailed to a serious extent," says another writer, " but I did not believe it possible that these differences should lead to such defined separation."* The agents of the missionaries, we are told by one who held the office of Protector of the Aborigines, "busied themselves with making proselytes with more of the native than the Christian spirit, and have caused a schism between the inhabit- ants of almost every settlement, one party styling themselves children of Wesley, the other the church of Paihai. The distraction of their minds thus caused has essentially interfered with their happiness, by producing ill-feeling and separation * A Summer's Excursion, p. 148. 452 CHAPTER V. among members of the same family. This would seem to sug- gest the expediency of not sending missionaries of different breeds, among the same tribe at least, as they must neutralize each other's labors, and may possibly cause an uncertainty of belief in the minds of the natives, ultimately destructive of the cause they seek to promote."* Finally, the Rev. Mr. Turton, a Wesleyan missionary, com- pletes the narrative in these terms : " We have the awful sight of father and son, mother and daughter, hating each other with a mortal hatred. In some cases they are dividing them- selves into separate pas ; in other cases into separate divisions of the same j9#/ and in one village, within eight miles of this settlement, has the party spirit risen so high between near kinsmen that one of these pas has erected a fence across the Kainga, and lined it thickly with fern, not as a break-wind or shelter, but, as he told us, that the one party might not be able even to look upon the other ?\ Such are the gifts of Protestant England to her colonies. To sow in all lands the tares which the enemy has planted in her own, to present Christianity to the heathen as the symbol of confusion and disorder, the fruitful mother of jealousy and hate, to strip the savage of the new virtues which he was ready to assume, and revive the old enmities which he was will- ing to forget ; such is the terrible mission which she has chosen tor herself. It is her own children who fling this reproach at her ; it is her own agents and emissaries, regretting too late their fatal success, who cry to her from every region of the earth, from every island which the sea has cast up to its surface, and seem to pray that her ships may pass far from their shores, and carry elsewhere their cargo of pestilence and death. But the pi-ay er comes too late; the seal is opened, the plague let loose ; t% the waters have become wormwood," and souls shall die u because the fountains of waters have been made bitter.":): Let us return for a moment to the story of New Zealand, that we may bring it to an end. " You Europeans are not even agreed amongst yourselves," said a powerful chief, " as to what is the true religion. When you have agreed amongst yourselves which is the right road, I may perhaps be induced to take it. v Who will cast the first stone at this barbarian, or convict him of error ? " Had there been one uniform creed and priesthood," says Colonel Mundy, as if determined to justify the argument of the savage, "one cannot doubt that the success of the Christian * Parliamentary Papers, vol. xxx., p. 153 (1846). Quoted in Mr. Brown's New Zealand, app., p. 261. Apoc. viii. 11. New Zealand, by William Swainson, H. M. Attorney-general, p. 36 (1856). MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 453 missions would have been incalculably greater perhaps literally catholic, universal, throughout the native population of these islands. The observant Maori cannot be blind to such open and wide schism, nor deaf to the virulence of sectarian ani- mosity." He is, in truth, neither blind nor deaf. If this be your boasted religion, he says, and these its fruits, we are better without it. Even pagans can judge such a mockery of Chris- tianity. "They say, and they are right in saying it," exclaims a Protestant missionary, as if some strong spirit forced the avowal, from him, " that heathenism with love is better than Christianity without it."* We have still to speak of the efforts of an individual whom, for several reasons, it was inexpedient to compare with his com- panions. It would be indecent to confound the respected name of Dr. Selwyn with that of his predecessors and colleagues. Most Englishmen are familiar with his honorable career. Distinguished even in youth by the manly energy of character which made him pre-eminent amongst all rivals both at school and college ; exhibiting all the qualities which compose the highest type of excellence recognized by his countrymen and co-religionists ; Dr. Selwyn had only to make his own choice amongst the various dignities which popular sympathy awards to its favorites. In the army, he would have risen to high command; the bar would have admitted him among its leaders: having selected the ecclesiastical profession, he naturally became a bishop. Anglicanism could not desire a better representative. Let us follow Dr. Selwyn to New Zealand, and see what his talents and virtues have enabled him to effect, after many years of labor, as the acknowledged head, both by character and position, of Protestant missions in that colony. We have seen already that, like Heber and Middletori in India, he contents himself with recording as an unwelcome fact those implacable religious divisions which Anglicanism everywhere generates, but for which he does not even affect to suggest a remedy, and which others declare are mainly due to his own influence. "He has not rested satisfied," says a member of the New Zealand Legislative Council whom we have already quoted, "with promulgating the doctrines of Christianity, but has waged war on his fellow-laborers, by denouncing their teachings as unsound." Dr. Selwyn had perhaps good reason for denouncing his various rivals in New Zealand, and for warning the natives against their version of Christianity ; but as the Episcopalians and Wesleyans had co-operated together as one body for nearly a quarter of a century before his arrival * Mr. Turton, quoted in Brown's app., p. 268. 454: CHAPTER V. amongst them, had always recognized each other as fellow- ministers before the heathen, and had even been accustomed, we are told, during all that period, u to partake of the sacra- ment" together indifferently, his admonition naturally pro- voked two comments ; the lirst, that it came too late ; and the second, that it was a far more severe condemnation of his own Church, and of her capricious inconsistency, than of the Wes- leyan teachers, who at least had the advantage of being always of one mind. We shall presently hear both these arguments urged with great force, and apparently with triumphant effect. That Dr. Selwyn has not succeeded, 'in spite of his eminent natural gifts, in changing the character of the New Zealand ers, any more than Martyn succeeded in India or Tomlin in China, is sufficiently proved by what we have already heard, as well as by his own admissions. " Bishop Selwyn complains," we are told by Mr. Fox, who refers to his own words, " that the missionaries can obtain no hold on the minds of the natives, owing to the loss of influence of the chiefs. They are, he says, c a rope of sand ; the young men escape from all control.' "* Even his own "converts" appear obstinately indifferent to the peculiar tenets which he has endeavored to recommend to them, and especially to the most elementary notions of what he would call u Church principles." Thus Dr. Selwyn, after re- lating that on a certain occasion a native chief insisted upon reading the prayers, while he himself preached the sermon, goes on thus : u This, you will say, was an unusual combination : a New Zealand war-chief reading prayers, and an English bishop preaching ; but you must not at present judge us by the ordi- nary rules of Church discipline."f Most people will be so little disposed to judge this occurrence harshly, that they will see in the concession made to the headstrong chief only a proof of Dr. Selwyn's good sense ; but we may fairly observe that while Catholic missionaries have no difficulty in fixing deep in the hearts of their converts, however rude and uncivilized, all the stupendous mysteries of the apostolic doctrine, Anglicans cannot so much as induce their own countrymen, much less the heathen tribes, to observe even the formal decencies of ecclesiastical discipline. The "war-chief" probably thought himself quite as capable a minister of tsu-ch a religion, which consists only in the utterance of words, as his episcopal colleague, and Dr. Selwyn had no alternative but to. com ply with his humor. No such anecdote, however, will be found * The Six Colonies, p. 59. f C/iurch in the Colonies, No. vii., p. 8. Dr. Selwyn's colleague in Columbia is described as holding " a missionary service, and a native girl interpreting !" Report of 8. P. G. f\ P., p. 90 (1862). MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 455 in the annals of Catholic missions; and the Catholic convert of to-day, though yesterday but a pagan savage, has already been taught by God, both that religion has its sanctuaries, and that he may not dare to intrude into them. As we are now speaking of Dr. Selwyn, not in the character which his many friends justly admire, but in that of an apos- tolic missionary, for this is his profession, we are obliged to notice the following characteristic fact. He is on a journey, not more arduous than common men undertake every day for business or pleasure, but still a journey, and he has left his family behind. A feeling of lassitude comes over him, and he tells us from what source he derived comfort and strength. "I consoled myself with a letter from Mrs. Selwyn, giving an ex- cellent account of herself and William, upon which I took heart."* Let it be freely admitted that such a sentiment is perfectly natural and becoming in the mouth of a Protestant bishop, even though a u missionary ;" but if we would compre- hend all that such language implies, let us try to fancy St. Andrew or St. Bartholomew, or even the most obscure Catholic missionary of the nineteenth century, gravely writing, that being on an embassy from the Most High God, he was re- freshed and " took heart," because he heard good tidings of his wife and family. In such words is revealed the whole differ- ence between a mere man, amiable and educated, but possess- ing only the natural virtues ; and an apostle, tilled with Divine gifts, and deriving from his union with God a higher consola- tion than the purest domestic joys can ever yield. " How shall we preach to the world detachment and contempt of earthly things," said the great apostle of China, in a treatise of almost incomparable eloquence and force addressed to the Literates of that land, " if we do not contend against covetous- ness by holy poverty, and against voluptuousness by chastity ? We resign freely that which is our own, in order to teach the world not to covet what belongs to another; and we refrain even from lawful marriage, to admonish it against forbidden pleasures. There will never be wanting fathers of families, to set an example of domestic virtue, and yet many of these are more occupied in destroying religion than in extending it. Let some at least be altogether given to the latter. We do not respect man for what he has in common with the brutes. To aim at perfection is his true calling. Man can more safely dispense with bread than with justice, and the world would be better without inhabitants than without religion. The import- ance of religion is, then, a sufficient motive with some men to * Church in the Colonies, No. viii., p. 34. 456 CHAPTER V. neglect marriage ; but is marriage so important that we ought to neglect religion for it ? Death itself should not hinder us from following the Divine will; why, then, should the necessity of renouncing marriage do so? Our office is to preach the Faith in all the earth. If we fail in the West, we hasten to the East ; if they refuse to hear us in the South, we turn to the North. We are not tied to one place ; but marriage binds a man and attaches him to his family. Married persons may quit each other no more The members of my Order are ready, at a moment's warning, to carry the Faith to any region, though it were distant thousands of leagues. They have not to provide for a family. They have God for their father, all men for brothers, and the world for a home. A virtue as high as the heavens, as wide as the oceans, is it not far above mere conjugal tidelity ? We do not contemn marriage; they who marry sin not; but we who are missionaries abstain from it, while we readily admit that not all who observe celibacy are saints."* It is curious that, almost at the same moment that Dr. Sel- wyn was " taking heart" in his fatigues, the Catholic bishop of New Zealand, w T hose character Protestant witnesses will pres- ently expound to us, was writing home to his aged mother in France, not to complain of his solitude, or of all that he had left in Europe, but to ask her prayers, the prayers of his own mother, that God would grant him the grace of martyrdom, and let him finish his apostolic career by shedding his blood for his Master. It remains only to allude to Dr. Selwyn's attempts to intro- duce u high-church principles" in New Zealand, and the results to which they have led. He is the first Protestant missionary by whom the experiment has been tried ; and his own mode of action, the comments which it provoked in others, and its final results, are too instructive not to merit special notice. Before Dr. Selwyn's arrival in the colony, the clergy of the Established Church, occupied chiefly in making their fortunes, and caring as little about u Church principles" as the majority of their brethren at home, were hardly to be distinguished, except by their superior wealth, from Wesleyans, Independents, or Presbyterians. The different sects dwelt together in harmony, and were too keenly absorbed by more pressing interests to quarrel about their ecclesiastical distinctions. Dr. Selwyn was of another class ; he had not come to New Zealand to make money, and he had a strong opinion about the "priesthood" and the a sacraments," or at least about two of them. He bade his * Lettres Edifiantes, tome xxv. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 457 clergy tell the natives, for the first time, that the "Weslejans were unauthorized agents, without orders or mission. Then arose that furious strife of sects which has made New Zealand a battle- field from one end to the other, and of which the effects have been described to us by Dr. Selwyn himself. But the Wesley ans were not disposed to retire from a field which they had occupied for a quarter of a century ; they accepted Dr. Selwyn's chal- lenge, and they replied to his arguments after this manner. " For more than twenty years," said Mr. Turton, who repre- sented the Wesleyan body, and who conducted the official cor- respondence with their new and unexpected adversary, " your clergy have invariably co-operated with us. Either they were wrong then, or you are wrong now, unless the Church of England has the privilege of changing its principles every twenty years." The argument was forcible, and hardly admitted of reply ; but Mr. Turton then proceeded to discuss the probable effects of the new " Church principles" upon the natives. " They are shrewd men," he observed to Dr. Selwyn, " and will be sure to ask, Why have we not heard of this schismatical Church before? Is this a new Church of England that has lately sprung up ? And what has this new bishop been doing for the last twenty years, that he could not hasten hither before now to warn us of our danger?" Mr. Turton seems to have felt that he had a strong case, and was determined to make the most of it, so he went on thus: "Your lordship has placed the Church mission, and her past operations amongst the New Zealanders, in a most awkward position. She must either acknowledge herself to have been egregiously wrong in holding the least sympathy with ' schismatics,' or she must defend the course which she has taken for the last twenty years in the exercise of 4 brotherly love' towards the Wesleyans.'** Dr. Selwyn was far too intelligent not to feel the " awkward position" quite as keenly as his Wesleyan correspondent, and appears to have sought escape from it in this way : In public he continued to condemn the Wesley ans, while in private he did just what his clergy had done "for the last twenty years." Familiar as we are with the Church of England, and with her constant betrayal even of the truths which she professes to uphold, it is difficult to realize that such words as the following were written by Dr. Selwyn : " The Wesleyan missionaries received me in a most friendly and hospitable manner, and all our differences of system seemed to be forgotten in the one ab- sorbing interest of the work in which we were all engaged for the conversion of the heathen It was of little eonse- * In Brown's appendix, p. 259. 4:58 CHAPTER V. quence whether these babes in Christ were nourished by their own true mother" meaning, apparently, the Establishment in England and Ireland "or by other faith fid nurses, provided that they were fed only with the sincere milk of the Word."* Elsewhere he says, " I went to the house of Mr. Watkins, Wesleyan missionary, by whom I was hospitably entertained. In the evening I catechized his natives."f But this assertor of "Church principles" could discern and acknowledge "faith- ful nurses" anywhere. " I may confess," he says, writing from another place, " the pleasure which I felt in kneeling down to family prayers in the house of the resident missionary, a min- ister, I believe, of the Independent persuasion, ,"J These are not the only passages of the same kind in Dr. Selwyn's letters, but we need not add to them. The Wesleyans and Independents were probably satisfied that such an adversary was not likely to do them much injury, and that " Church principles" were far more harmless than they had supposed. What Dr. Selwyn's explanation of these contradictions may be we do not stay to inquire. He has only done what Heber and others did before him, and many more will do after him ; but he has added one more proof to the thousands which already existed of the real character of the Anglican Church, and has shown that she only differs from the various sects which have sprung from her in this that while they form each a separate community in order to enjoy the exclusive profession of a particular heresy, she, in the person of her bishops, professes them all at once, and has therefore a right to be astonished that they should have thought it necessary to leave a communion, possessing ample revenues, in which they might have held any opinions whatever, without the superfluous cost of endowing a new race of ministers to teach them. She has had " bishops," like Cranmer and Hooper, who denied the episcopate ; she has "priests" like nine-tenths of her present clergy, who deny the priesthood; and she is so tolerant of the privileges of error, that, after preaching, like Dr. Selwyn, against the enormity of schism, she always finishes, like him, by "feeling great pleas- ure" in going to prayers with schismatics. We can hardly be surprised to learn that Dr. Selwyn, in spite of his energy and ability, has failed, like Middleton and Heber, and other equally conspicuous Anglican ministers, even to correct the infirmities of his own flock. " Bishop Selwyn," says Dr. Thomson, "complained with deep emotion of his flock's lukewarinness, and they whispered, in extenuation of their * The Melanesian Mission, Letter i., p. 17. f Church in the Colonies, No. viii., p. 17. if The Mdanesian Mission, p. 25. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 459 conduct, that they objected to exclusive clerical rule in Church, management. The members of the Roman Catholic Church in New 'Zealand, although strong advocates of political freedom, bowed to the authority of a priesthood they revered, and with whom they regarded it wrong to dispute." Dr. Selwyn, like his brethren at home, was less successful in appealing to the docility of his followers. "The English Church did not flourish, and the reason was obvious. At home it is supported by endowments and dignities which enable the clergy to rule, and make them leaders rather than servants of the laity ; in New Zealand there are few dignities and endowments; and, as the lay members have no faith in the infallibility of their priesthood, they wished to have some share in the management of a Church they as yet chiefly supported."* Dr. Selwyn had recourse to the only measures available to a Protestant bishop. "The bishop, perceiving this feeling, purchased and procured grants of land in the colony for endow- ments." We have seen that, in his own words, it sometimes "rained bank-notes." Arid then he tried another scheme. " He visited England to obtain from Her Majesty a government for the Church in New Zealand." If money and the aid of the State could not remedy the " lukewarmness" of his flock, the case was hopeless. " But the Secretary of State informed him that the settlers had now the law in their own hands, and that a Church constitution, it' necessary, must originate with the colonial parliament." And then he went back and sum- moned, in 1857, " a convention of the English Church at Auckland for the purpose of settling what should be done." Dr. Thomson adds, " No interest was taken in its proceedings by the public ;" and even in the " Canterbury settlement," destined to be exclusively Anglican, the same undiscerning " public," as we shall hear immediately, only interfered to place the Established Church on exactly the same level as all the other sects. Is it wonderful that men who cannot even conquer the lukewarmness or hostility of their own nominal flock, should fail to convert the heathen ? But the proceedings of so distinguished a person as Dr. Selwyn, and the fortunes of " high church" principles in New Zealand, deserve further notice. We have seen that Dr. Selwyn himself actively co-operated in public, in spite of his theoretical views, with men whom he continued to rebuke in private as " schismatics." He did more ; he gave up the whole contest, when he found that he could not prevail, and assigned his reasons for doing so. " The keen-sighted native convert," * Vol. ii., p. 264. 460 CHAPTER V. he told the University of Oxford, " soon detects a difference of system, and thus religion brings disunion instead of harmony and peace." It was necessary, therefore, to affect a unity which did not exist, in order to reassure " the keen-sighted native ;" and so, instead of insisting any longer upon principles which, if they were apostolic verities, should have been main- tained at the risk of life itself, Dr. Selwyn began to consort with Wesleyans and Independents. u Above all other things," he said, u it is our duty to guard against inflicting upon them the curses of our disunion, lest w r e make every little island in the ocean a counterpart of our own divided and contentious Church." The Wesleyans, therefore, were glad to claim Dr. Selwyn, as they had claimed all his predecessors, as a witness to their value as " faithful nurses ;" and one of their number was able to appeal to a still more consoling fact in the following words: "The venerable and truly Christian Bishop of Mel- bourne has publicly stated, that in that form of Christianity designated Wesleyan Methodism, there is a peculiar adaptation to the population of this very remarkable island continent."* Dr. Selwyn had only admitted them to be as good as himself; another Anglican bishop " publicly stated" that they were much better. The assertors of " Church principles" in England, in spite of the zeal and ability of many among them, have not been successful ; in the colonies and before the heathen they have been, if possible, still more unfortunate. In ISTew Zealand they established the Canterbury settlement, with the avowed purpose of displaying to the world the power and efficacy of those prin- ciples. Mr. Oholmondeley relates in 1854, and Mr. Fuller in 1859, the actual result of their operations. If Dr. Selwyn deplored the "lukewarmness" of his followers, the gentlemen at Canterbury had still less reason to be satisfied with the docility of theirs. Even their " land fund," from which, as we have heard, they anticipated so much wealth, has been forcibly diverted, by their own co-religionists, to the support of u schis- matics." " The colonists altered the previous rule," says Mr. Fuller, which gave " the third part of their land fund for the separate service of the Church of England," and peremptorily decided that "the funds voted for educational purposes" should henceforth be distributed, not by a favored sect, but "through the ministers of different religious bodies,"t which was prob- ably much less agreeable to the promoters of the Canterbury settlement. And this mortifying result was accompanied by * Rev. R. Young, The Southern World, ch. xviii., p. 402. f Five Years' Residence in New Zealand, by Francis Fuller, Esq., cli. i., pp. 17, 21 (1859). MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 4:61 another, of which indeed it was the direct correlative the growth of a population which repudiated more and more ener- getically the religious tenets of their founders, " the mass of the people at large," as Mr. Fuller observes, " being decidedly of what are termed Low Church views." u From the first," says Mr. Hodgkinson, speaking of the same province, "the majority of the members of $he Church of Eng- land have opposed all Tractarian doctrines and ceremonies.''* Mr. Cholmondeley, though apparently one of their advocates, goes much further in describing their failure. "The Maoris, as such," he says, " are disappearing ; and the young people look mean, squalid, and sickly, and the children miserable in the extreme." Of the colonists he speaks as follows: "The truth at present is, that there is n<> religious character in the British colonies ; and those are especially indifferent who in the old country belonged to the Church of England." Of Canter- bury he says, u Often when in church at Lyttletori or Christ- church, I have been struck with the English character of the attendance at .Divine worship ; 1 mean, the pretence and hy- pocrisy of the whole thing." And then he adds, u Let our Church remain in her present unformed condition, and the sons of her people will become either Roman Catholics, or Atheists and Materialists."*)- Eight years after Mr. Cholmondeley ventured upon this pre- diction, its reasonableness was once more admitted by an Eng- lish Protestant of another school, who candidly exposes the contrast to which the former only alluded. The Catholics, Mr. Edwin Hodder observes, in 1862, willingly travel several miles every Sunday to assist at the offices of religion. " The regu- larity and patience with which these weekly pilgrimages were performed was most exemplary, as well as the indefatigable ex- ertions of the priests, who paid weekly visits to every family under their charge." On the other hand, he gives this account of the members of the Church of England, whom Mr. Cholmon- deley had judged so unfavorably at an earlier date: u There are hundreds who never enter a church or chapel from one year's end to another, never show the slightest regard to religion or its observances in any form, yet call themselves churchmen. In the census-papers these Nothingarians are called church- men,"^: a mode of reckoning which gires to the Anglican establishment in the Antipodes the fictitious majority which it secures by the same arithmetical process in England. * A Description of the Province of Canterbury, by S. Hodgkinson, M.R.C.S., p. 15 (1858). f Ultima Thule, by Thomas Cholmondeley, ch. xvi., p. 196 ; ch. xviii ,pp. 271, 281 (1854). \ Memories of New Zealand Life, pp. 102, 105. 462 CHAPTER V. We have only one more remark to make on Dr. Selwyn and his missionary career, of which, as his own friends relate, these are the deplorable results. He is willing, we have seen, to hold close communion with the very men whom he calls, in technical and professional language, fautors of heresy and schism, and even to acknowledge them as "faithful nurses " of the heathen; but he has evidently no such spirit of forbearance towards the servants of the Catholic Church. For them he has only bold words of anger. Hear what he says. In one of his journeys he comes to a Catholic mission, so lie takes his pen, and writes quickly, " One of those Hots upon the mission sys- tem a Romanist station"* Whether these words represent his own sentiments, or were only a concession to the prejudices of friends and supporters at home, we cannot tell. In either case they are disappointing. It is sad to hear from Dr. Selwyn language which even many of the least distinguished members of his sect would blush to use, and which are equally repug- nant to truth, piety, and good taste. And now we have only to add a brief account, or rather to quote that which has already been published by Protestant witnesses, of the character of the Catholic missionaries in New Zealand, and the results of their labors. We have no need of partial evidence on either of these points, for they are avowed enemies whom Providence has employed, without their knowl- edge or consent, to furnish ample testimony to both. It is not easy to conceive a more hopeless or impracticable project, as far as human means were concerned, than that which was attempted by the first Catholic missionaries in New Zea- land. Every thing was against them, except the Power in which alone they trusted. For more than a quarter of a century, the only form of Christianity with which the natives were ac- quainted, and which was recommended to then by the irresisti- ble authority of their masters and rulers, was one of which the very existence is a protest against the Catholic faith. And lest this should not suffice to prejudice them against the new- comers, no effort had been neglected by their powerful and wealthy patrons to kindle betimes a feeling of bitter animosity towards them. With unscrupulous fraud they had been repre- sented as the agents of a. foreign State, whose secret object was to seize the islands and kill or enslave their inhabitants. The natives were told, as Mr. Wakeiield informs us, that if the Catholics were once admitted, they would cut their throats or drive them out of their land. In a memorial which they were persuaded, no doubt by the missionaries, to address to Wil- * The Melanesian Mission , p. 19. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 463 liam IV., they said, " We have heard that the tribe of ^Marian is at hand, coming to take away our land;"* and they pray His Majesty to protect them against these formidable pirates! And when at length they arrived, a few defenceless foreigners, scowled upon by the government, and by every authority whom the natives were accustomed to fear ; bringing neither money nor goods, and introducing a doctrine which was hateful to the ruling class, and which began by forbidding covetousness, lying, and impurity to their subjects; is it wonderful that, as Mr. Bright mildly observes, " they were not much inclined" to them? "In their eyes," the same writer adds, "much trade gives respectability of character;" and the first announcement of the Catholic missionaries was, that they would not trade at all, and had nothing to trade with. It was impossible to invite more persuasively the contempt of the natives, or to convince them more effectually that they had nothing to gain, and every thing to lose, by mortally offending their masters and employers in order to propitiate auxiliaries so helpless and destitute as these. The conclusion was obvious, and the natives could not fail to adopt it. Yet the Catholic missionaries, in spite of their weakness and poverty, had one thing in their favor. It is the nature of man, whether savage or civilized, to reverence purity and disin- terestedness. He may be unwilling to imitate, but he cannot refuse to admire them. This is the secret of the triumphs of Catholic missionaries throughout the world. Like the first Apostles, they win their way by wisdom, holiness, and charity. Their virtues have first disarmed the hand which was uplifted to strike them, and then extorted respect for a religion of which they were the truth and evidence. And so in New Zealand, as early as 1842, we learn from Dr. Dieffenbach the significant fact, that in one of the most populous provinces, "the number of converts to each creed is about equal, although the Roman Catholic mission was established so much later than that of the Church of England. "f But we must not anticipate this surprising result until we have first shown by what manner of men, and in spite of what complicated difficulties, it was accomplished. We have seen that the natives had been induced by their Protestant teachers to regard the Catholic missionaries, even * The New Zealand Question, by L. A. Chamerovzow, ch. iii., p. 69. Cf. Colonial Constitutions, by Arthur Mills, Esq., p. 331 ; who relates that " thirty- five chiefs subscribed a declaration, constituting themselves into an Independ- ent State "expressly to resist the anticipated attack of the French, whom they had been told to expect ! f Travels, vol. i., ch. xxvii., p. 407. 464: CHAPTER V. before their arrival, as men of blood, conspirators, and male- factors. The same unpleasant view of their character was still more diligently enforced upon them after they had com- menced their apparently hopeless task. "The Protestant native," says Dr. Dieffenbach, "regard their Roman Catholic brethren as belonging to the devils." Their masters, who could teach them nothing else, could teacli them this ; and it was natural they should attempt to do so, when even a missionary describes them thus, in 1853, not to a native, but to an English audience: "Satan had taken care," says the Rev. Mr. Strachan, " to strengthen all his natural defences by a fresh importation of auxiliaries from France."* The Catholic missionaries, ac- cording to this gentleman, were the agents of Satan. Let us see what other Protestant witnesses say of the character and mode of life of men whom an unsuccessful rival could thus describe. Dr. Dieffenbach, after noticing with evident repugnance the worldly and covetous habits of the men towards whom his own sympathies attracted him, frankly confesses, that, on the other hand, "the humble and disinterested manner of living of the Catholic priests, and the superior education which they have generally received, have procured them many friends both amongst Europeans and natives, and also many converts amongst the latter." And again, "In accordance with the spirit of the Roman Catholic missionary system, they are generally without fixed places of abode, and the bishop, whose diocese extends over several Archipelagoes in the great ocean, is continually travelling from place to place, accompanied by priests."f This is certainly more like St. Paul, who was "in travels oft," not in a commodious yacht,;}: but in the first vessel which came to hand ; and Dr. Dieifenbach, who has told us how the Protestant missionaries preferred to reside in the Bay of Islands, rather than "go into the interior," seems, in spite of himself, to recur again and again to the unwelcome contrast. But he is not the only Protestant writer who indulges in such reflections. Mr. Augustus Earle, who gives a still more unfavorable account of the Protestant missionaries, cannot refrain from instituting a similar comparison. "I have visited many of the Roman Catholic missionary establishments," he says, " and their priests adopt quite a different line of conduct ; they are cheer- * Life of the Rev. 8. Leigh, by the Rev. A. Straclian, cli. xv... p. 439 (1853). f Travels, ch. ix., pp. 163, 169. \ An Anglican clergyman, who had dwelt in the Antipodes, and appears to have been an impartial observer, speaks of the pleasant trips of a certain episcopal tourist as " a yachting cruise among the Polynesian seas." Berkeley Jones, Adventures in Australia, ch. xvi., p. 225. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 465 ful and kind to the savage pagan, polite and attentive to their European brethren ; they have gained the esteem of those they have been sent to convert, and nowever we may differ in some tenets of religious belief, we must acknowledge the success of their missions."* It appears that Mr. Earle, like other travellers, had occasion to deplore the churlish and inhospitable behavior of his opu- lent co-religionists. Thus he notices, with pardonable disgust, that even on a Christinas Day the missionaries shut their doors against him and his party, while travelling in the interior, and that even the savages spoke with contempt of their morose and uncharitable conduct. Mr. Kochfort also, at a much later date, makes the same complaint, and adds, " I must say the Catholic missionaries are generally the more hospitable of the two,"f in spite of the exiguity of their resources. Captain Dillon, who had many opportunities of judging both classes, uses still more energetic language. After noticing the " luxurious style" in which the Protestant missionaries lived, and their "numerous flocks and herds," he relates that a sick and famishing English crew vainly implored relief from these wealthy preachers, who left them "a prey to disease, destitute of solace, mental or bodily, and gasping for a little fresh meat." At length a lay settler sent them a supply of sheep, fowls, and wine, with the ironical message, that " seamen could not expect to participate in the good things of this earth, which were reserved solely for the elect." One of the heathen also, pitying "the sick and debilitated state of the crew," sent them " five large hogs and nearly a thousand pounds of potatoes." " Contrast, reader," adds this honest navigator, " the generous, sympathizing, and disinterested conduct of this heathen with the unfeeling selfish- ness of the saintly preachers who undertake to convert him from the error of his ways !" And then, calling to mind a land which he had lately visited, this Protestant sailor, who was not without notions of Christianity, compares "the conduct of these enlightened professors of the reformed doctrines with the really Christian conduct of the benighted ministers of the Catholic religion at Lima. ' As soon as the news reaches these venerable padres of the arrival of a vessel, they repair on board, and, with the benignity of habitual charity, inquire after the health of those on board." The sick, he says, without distinc- tion of creed or country, are removed to the convents, gratui- tously tended, and finally dismissed with a blessing when they no longer need the charity of men who " feel themselves amply * Nine Months' Residence, &c., p. 171. f Adventures in New Zealand, by John Rochfort, ch. in., p. 28. 31 CHAPTER V. compensated by an approving conscience."* But it is time to return to the same class of missionaries in the Antipodes. The writers on New Zealand have more to tell us about the character of the men whom Mr. Strachan represents, without any misgiving, as the agents of Satan. The leader of the Catholic mission was Bishop Pompallier, a man beloved by all who have had the good fortune to know him, but who, though worthy to be numbered with those apostolic missionaries of whom France has produced so many, " was attacked," as Mr. Wakefield relates, " by both sects of Protestant missionaries in the most intolerant manner." One of his own clergy observes, in 1840, "Scarcely had we quitted the tribe of Mototapn when the Protestant ministers came to sow discord among its members. One of them made an attempt to degrade our ven- erable bishop by giving his name to impure animals. All the natives were indignant at this conduct."f It is interesting to learn how this French prelate, who might have appealed to his own great nation for succor, rebuked by " patient continuance in well-doing the malice of evil men," and finally won the esteem and sympathy of all who were capable of appreciating a courteous gentleman and a devout Christian. '* The gentlemen of the club," says Mr. Wakefield, " and others who had enjoyed his acquaintance, spoke highly of his urbane manners, and his philanthropic views with regard to the natives." He was some- thing better than a philanthropist, who is often only a refined heathen ; but we must leave our witnesses to use their own terms. " Bishop Pompallier," says one whose own accomplish- ments enabled him to admire higher qualities in others, "is a man peculiarly adapted for the purposes of the mission of his Church. By education a scholar, in manners engaging, in countenance prepossessing and expressive, added to sincere and earnest zeal in the cause he has undertaken, ... it may easily be imagined that he creates no ordinary sensation among the Aborigines."^: " I would not attempt," says the Presbyterian Dr. Lang, " to conceal my own serious apprehension of M. Pompallier's success ;" but he is satisfied with expressing his alarm, and does not talk about "Satan." A Sydney journal, on the authority of New Zealand letters, observes at the same date, "The Rev. Dr. Pompallier is said to have made great progress in the conversion of the natives of Hokianga, where the Wesley an mission is ... some of the leading chiefs have * Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of La Perouse, bj Captain P. Dil Ion, vol. ii., ch. v., pp. 321-31. f Annals, vol. iii., p. 26. j: Terry, p. 190. New Zealand, p. 43. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 467 promised his lordship to attend to his new mode of worship."* It was probably these facts of which the authoress of the Gospel in New Zealand spoke, when she said, " they cause our mis- sionaries much anxiety." Happily the motives of their anxiety became more and more urgent as time went on. In 1841, Mr. Bright writes as follows : " With those Maoris to whom the Yicar Apostolic is known he seems popular. He has converted the oldest chief in the Bay of Islands, his sons and people, although previously attendants on the Church mission. "f Perhaps it was such events as this which made Dr. Selwyn describe a Catholic station as " a blot upon the mission system." But Mr. Bright continues: "The V icar Apostolic says he had not been sent to trade, and that he is not a buyer of land." And these were the results of his absti- nence from such questionable pursuits. " When I embarked to inspect a county on the east coast, I was surprised to meet Moka," a chief from the Bay of Islands, " with about thirty of his people, men, women, and children ; during the passage, three times a day, their discordant voices were raised together, chanting the Mass, or some service of the Catholic faith." It was not the Mass ; but that is of no consequence. At Opo-tee-kee also he meets the same phenomenon : " The very children were humming over some portions of Masses in their play. Twice a day the chapel was crowded, chorusing together, although perhaps not twelve of all of them had ever seen the Yicar or his cures.";): So in another district the same writer tells us : " The Yicar Apostolic settled down amongst them, and before he could have attained their language he made converts, of whom most had subscribed to the Church missionaries." Even in the Canterbury settlement, destined to be the exclusive domain of Anglicanism, Mr. Rochfort informs us that " there are many Roman Catholics, and their cathedral is the finest building in Wellington." Mr. Angas too, who is unable to record such facts with com- posure, is not afraid of exciting merriment in his readers by calling New Zealanders "a community of Jesuit natives." " Many of the Taupo natives," he says, " are Catholics ;" and then, unwilling to let their conversion speak for itself, he suggests that it was " with the aid of beads and crosses," and other equally valuable " presents," that the missionary " suc- ceeded in making numerous proselytes to the faith of Rome." Yet Mr. Angas knew, that however the Catholic missionary might surpass his rivals in some respects, the power to bribe * Asiatic Journal, vol. xxix., p. 189, N. 8. f History of New Zealand, ch. vi., p. 126. } Ibid., p. 121. 468 CHAPTER V. was not one of them. At Motupoi also, " the chief is a Roman Catholic ; several of his people have also embraced Popery, and at sunset they performed their vespers in front of the chief's house."* This time Mr. Angas says nothing about presents. Again, at Kororarika, the American Commodore Wilkes notices that the Catholic mission " was making many converts," which he also attributes to " presents," though the value of the crosses, religious pictures, and other donations bestowed on the natives, after their conversion, rarely exceeded the modest sum of one penny. They would hardly have deserted their Prot- estant masters for such a reward as this. Yet even so intelli- gent a writer as Dr. Thomson could seriously suggest this as the true explanation of a phenomenon which lie notices in these words : "It has been observed that Roman Catholic missionaries have converted natives abandoned by the Protestants as hope- less ;"f the secret of their success, he suggests, being " gifts," which were more likely to excite the contempt than the cupid- ity of those to whom they were proffered. Sometimes the writers on New Zealand, inspired by a candor which it is impossible not to admire, venture even to contrast the Catholic and Protestant natives, and always to the advan- tage of the former. Such statements almost exceed what we might fairly expect even from the most upright of our enemies. In 1854, a gentleman who made a tour in New Zealand gives this testimony. He is at Otaki, amidst a Catholic tribe, and says : " The resident priest I heard very well spoken of, and certainly the state of the mill, and every thing connected with it, evidenced the influence of a master mind." The next village he arrives at is a Protestant one, and he goes on thus : " There was a very observable difference in dress and personal cleanli- ness between the natives here assembled and those at Otaki, much in favor of the latter.":): Such testimonies are scarcely less honorable to those who offer them than to the objects of their generous praise. Here is another and still more striking example of the noble candor which sometimes distinguishes our countrymen. Sir George Grey, then Governor of New Zealand, addressed to Earl Grey, in 1851, a dispatch which contains the following words : "The Roman Catholic schools in this country are exceedingly well conducted, and not only reflect great credit upon the Roman Catholic bishop and his clergy, but give them a great claim to any proper consideration which can be shown to thern." * Savage Life, &c., vol. ii., ch. iii., pp. 118, 121. j- Vol. i., p. 816. i A Summer's Excursion in N. Z., pp. 157, 165. | Parliamentary Papers, vol. xlv., p. 12 (1854). MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 469 Perhaps it was in consequence of the encouragement which such language afforded, that some of the native females, taught by Sisters of Mercy, whom the charity of Christ had moved to cross the great ocean, ventured to address a letter to the sovereign of Great Britain, imploring aid for their generous teachers. It was no doubt with regret that succor was re- fused, and the petition unnoticed. It is evident, then, without adding superfluous evidence, that the Catholic missionaries had outlived the dislike, and over- come the opposition of their numerous and powerful enemies. Once more they had accomplished one of those triumphs in which there are victors but no vanquished. With calm pa- tience they had pursued their way, aided only by Him to whom they had dedicated their lives, and esteeming the poverty of Jesus more than the riches of the world. If they had failed to gain a single convert, their very lives would have sufficed to prove the truth of their religion ; for they were pure amidst corruption, patient in adversity, charitable towards all men, and especially towards those who reviled them, and so irre- proachable in their humble and disinterested career that even calumny was abashed in their presence, and dared not sharpen its tongue against them. And so when the evil day arrived, and tribes which had nominally embraced the religion of their rulers thirsted for their lives, and rose up in fierce insurrection against them, the abode of the Missionaries of the Cross was still a sacred spot ; and Colonel Mundy relates that " the missionary station presided over by Bishop Pompallier was the only portion of the town spared by the invaders."* It was on the eve of a conflict, in which Protestant natives fought against their teachers and destroyed their lives and property, that the captain of an En- glish frigate offered a refuge to the Vicar Apostolic, and a shel- ter where he might hide his alarm till the danger was past. The friendly offer was refused, in a letter which announced his intention to commit himself to the guardianship of the savages, and which disowned the apprehension which he was supposed to feel in the apostolic words " I fear nothing but sin." Finally, if we ask for the numerical result of labors begun at so fearful a disadvantage, and continued under every trial and difficulty which could beset missionary efforts, so that success might well seem impossible in a battle where all human means of attaining it were on one side, and none on the other, one of the latest writers on New Zealand has furnished this surprising statement. In 1845, the Catholics were already estimated by Mr. Clarkson as one-twentieth of the population, * Australasian Colonies, vol. ii., ch. vi., p. 179. 470 CHAPTER V. while the Wesleyans, who had been thirty years in the field and had spent vast sums of money, were one-seventh ; but in 1854, the Wesleyans, opposed at all points by the Episcopalians with their enormous wealth and official patronage, had dwindled to one-eleventh, and the Catholics, against whom all had com- bined in a common hostility, had steadily advanced till they had become one-seventh of the whole population.* It appears, however, that even this statement underrates the fact ; for while the Catholic missionaries represent their fol- lowers, good and bad, as amounting to about twenty-thousand, we have seen, by a recent official statement, that the whole number of natives now remaining is only fifty-six thousand and forty-nine, of whom thirty-six per cent, are avowed pagans. The proportions are probably destined to be further affected by the war now raging (1861) in this ill-fated colony, and which will, perhaps, only terminate when all the pagan and Protestant natives have been exterminated. In 1862, Mr. Hodder reckons the surviving aborigines not to exceed thirty thousand !f It is surely a suitable conclusion of the history of Anglicanism in New Zealand, that, fifty years after it began, the natives are found once more in arms against teachers whose influence, in spite of their wealth and the use which they make of it, has only become more feeble year by year, till at length it appears to be utterly extinguished. " Despite the remonstrances of the Bishop of ISTew Zealand, of the most influential clergy, and of those chiefs who still remain loyal, the flag of the self-styled King of the Maoris has been publicly hoisted," both in the settlements of Auckland and Wellington ; and even this significant fact does not fully reveal the final catastrophe, nor exhaust the incidents in the closing chapter of Protestant missions in ISTew Zealand. " Among the most formidable symptoms is the reported tendency to 4 recur to old barbarous customs J and the ' decreasing influ- ence of the missionaries?""^ When we have cited their own admission of both these facts, we may conclude. " The stations on the Waikato," we are told by the Church Missionary Society in 1862, " have all been greatly affected by the excitement of the war ; the schools have been much reduced in their attendance ;" &c. " We have not much to record," says Archdeacon Maunsell, " at least of spiritual things. Political questions seem to absorb all the spare thoughts of the people." " Our members are reduced to less than half," adds the Rev. B. Ashwell. " The demoralizing effects of the war among some of * A Summer's Excursion, p. 14. \ Memories of New Zealand Life, p. 208. \ The, Times, September 14, 1860. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 471 our teachers are seen by their lukewarmness and indifference ; a few have altogether lapsed." At Tauranga, on the East coast, says " the Bishop of Waiapu," " religion is at a low ebb. The people are cold and indifferent, and many who seem to have begun well, have gone back." " Various changes," writes Archdeacon Brown, speaking of " his own district," " have not only diminished the number of natives, but relaxed discipline throughout the infant churches, and in many ways caused the wheels of our missionary chariot to drag heavily onward." " The reports from the Western district of the New Zealand mission," it is confessed, " are of a less encouraging character than those of the other districts. . . . One tribe, the Ngatiruani, have formally forbidden missionaries to visit them. Another cause of discouragement is the return of many individuals to the native customs, of which tatooing is adopted as a token. . . . The effects of religious declension and neglect of the means of grace have been more manifest of late years, as the generation baptized in infancy has grown up in nominal Christianity." It is just the story of the Hindoo converts, who are always said to be more reprobate in proportion to the length of time during which they have enjoyed the advantage of baptism ! From the Northern district, "the aged missionary ; the Rev. Richard Davis, speaks of having entertained a good hope of the progress of Christianity. . . . but these hopes, he states, have been blighted, by the introduction of ardent spirits, and by the various sins to which intoxication leads." Finally, the Rev. R. Taylor, after a residence of twenty-six years in New Zealand, reports as follows to the same society : " The spiritual declension of the natives is, as far as my observation goes, general.' 1 ''* It is characteristic of the shocking unreality of Protestantism, that, in the face of these confessions, collected and published by themselves, the Church Missionary Society, with a solemn mockery of truth which seems to cry aloud for judgment, address their subscribers in these words, with reference to New Zealand : " Such an instance of signal blessing upon the labors of a faithful missionary can scarcely be paralleled in modern times. The mind is carried back to primitive ages, when the Word of God grew mightily and prevailed, and for- ward to the predicted latter season when a nation shall be born in a day."f Such, in its broad outlines, is the history of missions in New Zealand. The very savage, as he reviews in his own mind, or relates to his children, its successive phases, though he may * Church Missionary Society's Report, 1862, pp. 205-213. f Ibid., p. 204. 472 CHAPTER V. care too little about his soul to act upon his convictions, easily detects on which side is truth, on which side God and His holy angels. Two classes of teachers have claimed his attention. In the one he has seen, through a long series of years, and with rare exceptions, corruption, vanity, and worldliness ; in the other, purity, chastity, and a blameless life. " Their continence," says Dr. Thomson, "produced a strange impression on the mind of the natives," accustomed to a different exhibition of the Christian character. With the first comers, as he knows to his cost, have been introduced the myriad evils of confusion and disorder, of shifting and incoherent doctrine, and passionate religious strife; with the last came peace, unity, and love. Finally, while the one could attract only nominal converts whose vices are attested by themselves by appealing to the coarse instincts of worldly interest and the grossest appetites of our nature; the others, obliged to begin by inviting the half- civilized native to abandon even the temporal rewards which he had already earned, and for which they had no recompense to offer him, have yet succeeded in winning him, not only from the darkness of heathenism, but even from his lucrative association with the various sects in which he had been previously enrolled. We are far, however, from asserting that all the native con- verts to the faith are as yet intelligent and consistent Christians, or that all afford unmixed consolation to their pastors. Such a statement would be a culpable exaggeration, which the spon- taneous testimony of their spiritual guides would suffice to rebuke. Some of the converts from the Protestant sects, though they reverence the unwonted virtues of their new teachers, have been too deeply corrupted by previous habits of hypocrisy and fraud to be easily or effectually reformed. Christianity has long since appeared to them a purely nominal religion, of which the professors contrasted unfavorably even with pagans, and whose very teachers and ministers were to them only models of incontinence, cupidity, and injustice. Some also, though rescued from such influences, are but partially instructed; while their pastors, unable to cultivate the whole field which lies be- fore them, resisted by the dead-weight of official authority, few in number, and poor in this world's goods, can sometimes only cast their seed by the wayside, and then pass on, hoping, yet hardly expecting, that they may one day find leisure to watch its after-growth, to tear away the noxious plants which may threaten to choke it, or to bind up the weak stems which may have been trodden under foot. Yet it is pleasant to read the following account of the best class of native converts by one who knows them so well. MISSIONS IN THE ANTIPODES. 473 " I am often moved to tears," says the honored prelate to whom New Zealand owes so much, and whose virtues even his adversaries have so often confessed, " when I see the chief of some tribe come many leagues through the forests to consult me on some point which embarrases the delicacy of his con- science."* Here again we have an example of that powerful "influence of the Confessional" which Sir Emerson Terment remarked in Ceylon, and without whose aid the Catholic mis- sionary knows that all hope of confirming men in habits of virtue is vain and chimerical. " Scarcely have they received instruction in the law of God," Bishop Pompallier continues to say, " when their only study is to conform their conduct to it. With what simplicity do they open their mind to the min- ister of salvation, and \r:th what sincere attachment to us do they return the services we render them. . . . They might be taken, from their dress and appearance, for a band of robbers ; yet they are inoffensive sheep, who follow the footsteps of him whom Jesus has given them as their shepherd." The bishop even adds, that many who are not Catholics have learned how to distinguish between " the trunk, as they call the Catholic Church, and the severed 'branch churches." So little difficulty have the true apostles in winning these rude minds to the comprehension of " Church principles," as well as of the other great evangelical truths with which they are inseparably connected ; w r hile their rivals, busy with cease- less strife, and filling the air with mutual reproaches, fail to teach them even the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the In- carnation, make religion only the occasion of new crimes, the Bible itself an excuse for committing them, and after half a century of unblessed effort, have only forced the reluctant savage to accept a lot more full of calamity and malediction than even his original state, the dread responsibilities of Chris- tianity without its gifts and graces. And lastly, the annalists of New Zealand missions confess, with sorrow and shame, that the natives, familiar with the incessant divisions and unappeas- able conflicts of the Protestant sects, have at length delivered that memorable verdict, so often recorded against Protestantism by the instinct of pagan nations, that verdict which is at, once the measure of its influence, the monument of its results, and the summary of its triumphs, " You have taught us that Heathenism with love, is better than Christianity without it." * Annals. CHAPTEE VL MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. IN that wide waste of waters which for ages have rolled their floods between the Old and ISTew Continents, and where once the sea-bird found no rest for his foot, a hundred islands, cast up from their deep ocean-bed by some convulsive throe, are now securely anchored. Once naked and unsightly, they have long since been clothed with grass, and flowers, and trees. Upon their low hills cluster the dark myrtle and the slender palm ; and through their valleys, rich with spreading ferns, bright rivulets wind their course. Here the sugar-cane and bread-fruit grow untended, and a thousand edible roots, un- known in other climes, lurk in the untilled soil. To these fair islands, sheltered by coral barriers from the ocean wave, men found their way, from what land, when, and how, only the angels know. By what strange migrations they were peopled, history will never tell. This is God's secret. Yet science, which is never more honorably occupied than in the investigation of such problems, has applied its patient induction to this ; and if it has not absolutely determined how the islands of Eastern and Western Ocean ica were peopled, has at least suggested how they might have been. William Yon Humboldt considers that he has established the identity of the Malays and Polynesians ; and Prichard, who adopts his conclu sion, calls the latter " Malayo-Polynesians."* M. de Rienzi, indeed, is certain that they came originally from the island of Borneo. Other writers are of opinion that the natives of some of the Pacific islands can hardly be distinguished from the Caucasian family. But Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson's Bay territories, who reports, in 1847, that " the whole group of the Sandwich Islands is known to be slowly but surely continuing to rise, to be still, as it were, in the throes of * Natural History of Man, sec. 82. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 475 creation," speaks as follows of the origin of the Polynesian, race, whose religious history we are to narrate in the present chapter. "From what country, then, of Asia, did the Poly- nesians spring ? Almost to a moral certainty from some point, or rather points, between the southern extremity of Malacca and the northern limits of Japan."* Many considerations, which need not here be noticed, combine to recommend this conclusion ; yet the origin of the Malays themselves is still un- certain, and while some look for their birthplace on the south- eastern shores of China, Bopp thinks their language derived from the Sanscrit.f From the Polynesians themselves no aid has been received in the discussion of this problem of ethnology ; and the Abbe Caret, referring especially to the Gambier Archipelago, in which he long resided as a missionary, warns us " not to ask of the population of these islands any explicit information con- cerning their origin ; all your questions will remain unan- swered ; on this subject their traditions are silent. Perhaps these tribes had their origin in the remotest antiquity : it takes a very long time for a people to forget the history of its origin. I have heard the best informed of the natives enumerate as many as fifty kings, who are said to have presided, one after the other, in the government of the Archipelago/' One source of information, which existed at an earlier period, and from which a careful inquirer might perhaps have con- structed at least the fragments of a history, has been, in many of the islands, imprudently destroyed, by men whose proceed- ings will be presently recounted to us by competent witnesses. " One fault," says the learned Mosblech, in his treatise on the dialects of Eastern Oceanica, " for which we can never pardon the Methodist ministers" he means the Protestant missiona- ries " is their having destroyed, by an irrational zeal, all the poetic compositions of this people. No one can be blind to the injury which they have thus inflicted upon science and history. The Catholic missionaries, guided by their intelligent chief the Archbishop of Chalcedon, who admirably appreciates not only what belongs to religion but also the things which relate to science, have acted with more caution. ";{: It appears that the mythological, as well as the pastoral and erotic compositions of the natives, some of which were no doubt * Narrative of a Journey Round the World, vol. ii., cli. i., p. 7. " So recent- ly as 1833 the wreck of a Japanese junk on the coast of Oregon showed how, in like manner, across the wider waste of the Pacific, the natives of the Old World may have been borne," &c. Wilson, Prehistoric Man, vol. ii., ch. xx., p. 158. f Mohl, Rapports f aits d laSociete Asiatique, tome ii., ch. i., p. 8. i Notice sur la langue de I'Oceanie Orientate ; Journal Asiatique, tome iii., p. 441, 4me serie (1844). 476 CHAPTER VI. of questionable purity, but which had at least a scientific value, were violently suppressed by their English teachers, and not only suppressed but destroyed. With them perished all the lays and rythmical legends which they had received from their forefathers. What their new masters gave them instead, we shall see hereafter, and how far they have profited by the change. But we must now ent.er, without further preface, upon the wide field which lies before us, and in which we shall once more trace, by the aid of the same class of witnesses, the im- pressive contrast of which we have already seen so many examples. It will be necessary to begin by dividing into groups the island world which we are about to visit, and in this task we have no choice but to adopt the classification which both history and geography prescribe. Of the various groups which we are about to notice, and whose religious annals we shall find to be pregnant with those startling contrasts which urgently invite our consideration, not only because they decisively reveal the respective influence and character of Catholic and Protestant missions, but because they remove to the clear region of historical facts that old con- troversy which is obscure and unprofitable while it turns only upon cunning words and distorted texts, some have been visited by Catholics alone, some have belonged exclusively to Protestants, and others have been occupied by both. In the first, religion has gained its accustomed and undisputed victory ; in the second, enormous expenditure has been attended by uni- versal corruption and admitted failure; in the third, heresy has waged its usual warfare of violence and calumny, has been combated by patient charity and long suffering, and has finally confessed its discomfiture and defeat. This is the his- tory which we are about to trace. Let us begin with the Philippine Islands, and those con- tiguous groups which lie nearest to the mainland, whose happy fortune it was to be discovered by men who labored for God rather than for themselves, and who carried with them wher- ever they went the faith which was the light of their own . souls, and the charity which obliged them to communicate it to others. Argensola, the careful and conscientious historian of these regions, whose intelligent candor has earned the applause, not only of the Council of the Indies by whom he was employed, but even of his English editors, has recounted all the details of that generous apostolate which won the Philippines to the Cross of Christ. * From him we learn how the false Prophet came to be honored even in these remote islands of the East ; MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 477 | how Persian and Arab conquerors carried thither the plague which had enveloped half the world, and from which it is the glory of the Roman See to have saved Europe by that long series of efforts which alone preserved Christendom from the destroying legions who had overflowed the earth from the pillars of Hercules to the wastes of Tartary, and who once threatened to hang up in every temple of Europe the impure banner which they had already planted on Mount Sion. Against such adversaries the first apostles of the Philippines lifted up the Cross, and though they fell, like their brethren in other lands, cut down by the sword of Moslem or Pagan, consumed by fire, or torn into fragments on the scaffold, they conquered even in death. The conflict did not last long ; the decree had gone forth that here the Cross should triumph, and " the false and corrupt memory of Mahomet," as Mendoza simply relates, " was with the Gospel of Christ easily rooted out."* A few words will suffice to describe the events which led to this result. The Philippines were discovered by Magellan, as Gemelli notices in his history of the Ladrone Islands, in 1521, but it was not till a later period that they were subdued and colonized by Spain. The inhabitants of the Ladrone group, for we may speak of them together, since they have a common history, " had no notion of a Deity," we are told by Le Gobien, " nor any religious worship, nor had they any temple, priest, or forms of worship." Their only religion consisted in " some irregular notions of a hell and a heaven. "f Towards the close of the sixteenth century, as we learn from Argensola, more than six thousand Christians had already been martyred in the single province of Ternate, "that so," he adds, "the foundation of our faith may be in all parts cemented with the blood of the faith- ful. They dismembered the bodies, and burned the legs and arms in the sight of the still living trunks. They impaled the women, and tore out their bowels ; children were pulled piece- meal before their mothers' eyes, and infants were rent from their wombs.":): Yet all these tortures were bravely endured by neophytes who had seen their pastors tread the same Via Dolorosa with unfal- tering step, and even children learned to imitate the fruitful example of such teachers. A Portuguese vessel, sailing by the * Historic of the Kingdome of China, vol. ii., ch. xiii., p. 261 ; published by the Hakluyt Society. f History of the Ladrone Islands, in Callander's Terra Australia Gognita, vol. iii., p. 53. \ Discovery and Conquest of the Molucca and Philippine Islands, by B. L. de Argensola, book iii., p. 65 (1708). 478 CHAPTER VI. coast of Amboyna, picked np a crowd of fugitives swimming near the shore, "and having viewed them at leisure," says Argensola, "found that none of them were above twelve years of age. Yet at this same time, when cruelty advanced God's glory, idolaters and Mahometans were converted, and our reli- gious men preached and catechized without any fear of punish- ment, which they rather coveted, and thought themselves unworthy of." He allows, indeed, that many apostatized, overcome by anguish, and this need not surprise us. In 1697, ten of the missionaries had been martyred in the Ladrone Islands, and for a time the rest were obliged to fly, but it was only to return when the storm had passed.* In the island of Saypan, Father de Medina, a man of illustrious birth, was the first martyr, in 1670. In 1672, Sanvitores, also belonging to one of the noblest houses of Spain for these men began by flinging away the wealth and honors which others consume a whole life in endeavoring to acquire was martyred in the island of Tinian. By his first discourse, unaided by the " ceremonial" which is supposed to be so effective in such cases, he won fifteen hundred converts ; and before he died had es- tablished the faith in thirteen islands, founded three seminaries, and baptized fifty thousand idolaters. In 1699, idolatry had almost become extinct in the Ladrone Islands. Surely martyr- dom was a suitable termination of such a career as that of San- vitores, who, it may be added, predicted the future conversion of the islands of Oceanica, though he was only acquainted with two of them, the Pelew and the Caroline groups.f In the Philippines, the success of the missionaries was so complete, that even at the close of the sixteenth century Men- doza could say, "According unto the common opinion, at this day there is converted and baptized more than four hundred thousand souls." In 1598, as an ardent Protestant observes, in his account of the voyage of Oliver Noort, and speaking of what he calls the " Lusson" islands, "There are few Spaniards, and but one priest, which is of great esteeme ; and had they priests enough, all the neighbour nations would be subject to the Spaniards ;" for, he adds, " the Jesuits are in reputation with their converts as demi-gods."^: And this work continued, until, as later Protestant writers will presently tell us, the four million inhabitants of these islands had embraced that Catholic faith from which they have never since swerved. Such is the first chapter in the history of Polynesian missions. How far it resembles the same apostolic work in the lauds * Gemelli, in Churchill's Collection of Voyages, vol. iv., p. 462. \ Henrion, Histoire des Missions Gatholiques, tome ii., 2de partie, p. 539. j Purchas' Pilgrims, vol. i., lib. ii., ch. v., pp. 76, 76. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 479 which we have already visited, and especially in characteristic solidity and permanence, we shall now learn from Protestant witnesses, whom Providence seems to have employed to this end, that their co-religionists might the more readily accept their testimony. The Rev. David Abeel, a Protestant, missionary, who seems to have wandered over the lands beyond the Ganges, searching for something to do and finding nothing, and whose book is simply a record of the triumphs of Catholics and of the choleric disgust with which he witnessed them, thus writes of the Philippines: "The Church of Rome has here proselyted to itself the entire population. The natives have become bigoted Papists. The influence of the priests is unbounded." It is only fair, however, to this gentleman to add, that he considers the conversion of the Philippines, accomplished by such men as Medina and Sanvitores, a remarkable example of "the power of the Beast."* In the year 1858, Mr. Crawfurd, whose writings are well known in this country, and who was formerly governor of Singa- pore, made the following declaration at a public missionary meeting: "In the Philippine Islands the Spaniards have con- verted several millions of people to the Roman Catholic faith, and an immense improvement in their social condition has been the consequence."! "Much credit," says Sir Henry Ellis, in spite of incurable prejudice, "is due to the Spaniards for the establishment of schools throughout the colony, and their unremitting exertion to preserve and propagate Christianity by this best of all possible means, the diffusion of knowledge."^: "It is said," observes the wife of the American navigator, Captain Morrell, "that in Manilla there are more convents than in any other city in the world of its size, and the general voice of natives and foreigners declares that they are under excellent regulations." And then she describes their inmates. "They all seemed full of occu- pation. There is no idleness in these convents, as is generally supposed," and as her own account of the various works accomplished in them sufficiently proves. Moreover, "their devotions begin at the dawn of the day, and are often repeated during the whole of it, or until late in the evening, in some form or other." Altogether, the effect produced on the mind of this lady was remarkably different from that which Mr. Abeel re- cords. "I was born a Protestant," she says, "and trust that I * Journal of a Residence in China, ch. xvi., p. 328. \ Times, 2d December, 1858. \. Journal of an Embassy to China, ch. viii., p. 443. 4:80 CHAPTER VI. shall die a Protestant, but hereafter I shall have more charity for all who profess to love religion, whatever may be their creed."* In 1853, M. de La Gironiere, who spent twenty years in the Philippines, informs us that the present race of missionaries is not unworthy to be compared with their martyred predecessors. Thus he relates how Father Miguel de San-Francisco, a friend of his own, used to collect the young men in his house, four at a time, keep them with him a fortnight under diligent instruc- tion, and then send them in different directions to communicate to others the lessons which they had received from his patient charity. In this way he would contrive gradually to leaven a whole district. M. de La Gironiere also notices the important fact, that while Manilla and its suburbs contain about one hundred and fifty thousand souls, the Spanish and Creole population hardly amount to one-tenth of that number, f In 1845, an American statistical writer addressed to Mr. Ingersoll the following account of the Philippines : "The colony is in a very flourishing condition. Most of the native Tagalos and Horaforos have been converted to the Catholic faith. There are three suffragan bishops in the provinces; one of them, the Bishop of New Segovia, island of Luzon, wrote me in 1837, that his diocese consisted of upwards of six hundred thousand Christian souls.";): Let these facts be compared with the history of Dutch or English Protestant missions in the same part of the world. The remarkable influence of the clergy, in spite of the small proportion of Spaniards to natives, is attested by many writers. In the early part of the present century, M. de Guignes re- marked, from his own observation, that " the European priests are greatly respected by the Indians, who always consult them in their various undertakings, and even about the payment of taxes ;" which agrees with what Mr. Abeel says impatiently of their " unbounded influence." Sir John Bowring, in 1859, con- firms the testimony of M. de Guignes, and once more reports of the clergy, "They exercise an influence which would seem magical were it not by their devotees deemed divine."|| Dr. Ball, an American Protestant traveller, agrees with M. de La Gironiere and others as to the character of the Spanish clergy. Of one whom he met at Manilla, he says, "He has a fund of knowledge on almost every subject, speaks six or seven * Narrative of a Voyage, by Abby Jane Morrell, ch. ii., p. 44 ; ch. v., p. 90. f Vingt annees aux Philippines, par P. de La Gironiere, p. 89 (1858). t Letter to the Hon. Charles I. Ingersoll. &c., by Aaron H. Palmer, p. 14. Voyages d Pekin, Manille, &c., tome iii., p. 391. I A Visit to the Philippine Islands, by Sir John Bowring, LL.D., F.R.S., ch. xii., p. 210. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 481 languages, and has declined an offer of the president of the seminary here, preferring to remain always in the capacity of missionary."* Lastly, that we may hear every kind of witness, and yet not encumber ourselves with superfluous testimony, let us cite one more Protestant writer, who tells us, in 1861, the impression which he had formed of religion in the Philippines, in spite of the prejudices both of creed and country which threatened to warp his judgment. Mr. MacMicking, who spent some years in these islands, where he only partly unlearned earlier preposses- sions, declares of the natives, that "the warriors who gained them over to Spain were not their steel-clad chivalry, but the soldiers of the Cross the priests, who astonished and kindled them by their enthusiasm in the cause of Christ." He confesses also that the suppression of the Jesuits, who were banished from the Philippines in 1768, u was attended with the worst effects to the trade and agriculture of the islands." The people, he allows, are so truly what Miv Abeel calls " bigoted Papists," that 44 religious processions are as frequently passing through the streets as they are in the Roman Catholic countries of Europe." And presently he adds, u The Church has long proved to be, upon the whole, by much the most cheap and efficacious instrument of good government and order ;" while even the common people 4 * very generally learn reading by its aid so much, at least, as to enable them to read their prayer-books or other religious manuals. There are very few Indians who are unable to read, and 1 have always observed that the Manilla men serving on board ships, and composing their crews, have been much of'tener able to subscribe their names to the ship's articles than the British seamen on board the same vessels could do."f Lastly, he admits that the present rulers and pastors of these islands have in no degree degenerated from their ancestors. 44 The enlightened and benevolent government of Don Pascual Enrile, who was Captain-general of the Philippines from 1831 to 1835, and his entire administration, has left behind it the happiest results for the people he governed," a statement confirmed in 1859 by Lord Elgin's secretary, who also visited Manilla, and found that 44 the advanced views of Don Pascual Enrile have in many instances been improved upon, and carried out by the present governor.";): Of the clergy Mr. MacMicking speaks as follows : u Most of the priests I have been in contact with appeared to be thoroughly convinced of, and faithful to, their * Rambles in Eastern Asia, ch xxiv., p. 200. f Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines, by Robert MacMicking, Esq., p. 45. J Narrative of Lord Elgin's Mission, vol. i., ch. v., p. 82. 32 482 CHAPTER VI. religion in its purity" a large concession from a Scotchman. Of "the "present Archbishop of Manilla," he speaks with the utmost respect, and especially of his " piety and good feeling towards all men," though he naturally resents the refusal of Christian burial to Protestants ; and he sums up his frank ad- missions by the following generous account of the modern Spanish missionaries : " These good men have penetrated where soldiers dare not enter with arms in their hands, and in their case truly the sword has given place to the gown, with good effects to all concerned in the reduction of these wild Indians to the Roman Catholic faith, and the arts of civilized life ; for many hundreds of them, nay, I believe thousands, are now peaceful cultivators of the soil, which these good Fathers have taught them how to till, instead of living, as they formerly did, at warfare with mankind, and solely on the produce of the chase." And they continue the same, he says, up to the last hour ; for whereas there are still in the remote mountains of Ylocos and Pangasinan some tribes of pagan Indians, " the well-directed energies of several enthusiastic missionaries, who have as yet only found an entrance among them, are likely to civilize and ameliorate their condition."* Eight years later, Sir John Bo wring, in spite of scant sym- pathy with Catholics or their religion though he always writes with temper and moderation, and confesses that he " found among the clergy men worthy of being loved and honored," relates that in the diocese of Ylocos, in 1859, there were fifteen thousand seven hundred and seventy-five baptisms, and that the number of Christians was three hundred and fifty-seven thou- sand two hundred and eighteen. f Such have been the peaceful'triumphs of religion in that part of Eastern Oceanica which Providence has confided, as if to show her inexhaustible fecundity, to the healing power of the Church, and the fruitful ministrations of her servants. Whole nations of savage men, numbering several millions, have been converted, civilized, and instructed by successive generations of pastors, and have never ceased to repay their apostolic labors by loving confidence, devout and obedient service, and unshaken constancy in the faith. Yet there had been a time when this people, now wholly Christian, had been so completely subject to the dominion of evil spirits, that "mothers at the first mention of baptism concealed their children, or carried them away to the mountains, while the men could not endure so much as to hear * Recollections, &c., ch. xxxiii., p. 290. f Ch. xii., p. 213. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 483 the name of Christ."* And now they reproach by the ardor of their faith the Christians of older churches. Blessed are the feet of the messengers of peace, and blessed the lands to which they bear them. " Beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of them that showeth forth good, that preacheth salvation, that saith to Sion, Thy God shall reign." We are now to pass to other scenes. We do not stay to speak of Protestantism in the Philippines, because it has no existence. " To our shame be it said," observes a British offi- cer in 1859, " there is no Protestant place of worship on the island ; and even the burial-ground is in an unseemly position and condition, and, I believe, unconsecrated."f Let us pro- ceed, then, with our narrative. Thus far we have spoken of evangelists who abandoned all which the natural man craves, home, parents, and kindred, that they might with greater freedom proclaim "the unsearchable riches of Christ." We have now to tell of others, who also assumed the title of " mis- sionaries," but only in order to improve their worldly estate. Each class was successful in the object of its ambition ; the one found toil and martyrdom, the other wealth and repose. SOCIETY ISLANDS. Let us go forth into the wide ocean, leaving far behind us the coasts of Asia, and we shall come to the islands of which we spoke in the beginning of this chapter. They have been called " the latest conquest of modern navigators ;" and it was natural that, lying midway between East and West, they should first be visited by the ships of those sister nations whose vast commerce seeks to link the two hemispheres in one by multiplying the stations between them. England and America, rivals in a traffic which embraces the world, and which is equally honorable to the skill and enterprise of both, have carried their flag to every islet to which the ocean gave access. With their mariners, a hardy and adventurous race, went men of another order, whose ostensible purpose was the conversion of the heathen. It was from England and America that they went forth ; and a writer of the latter nation, who warmly es- pouses their cause, and, unlike most of his countrymen, speaks of the Catholic Church in language which is always trivial and generally indecent, tells us why they went. "The Divine command, 4 Go ye and teach all nations,' " he crudely observes, * Jouvency, Hist. Soc. Jesu, pars 5ta, lib. xxii., p. 666. f Hj Judge Therry, ch. xvii., p. 308. Voyage Round the World, ch. vii., p. 128 (1814). The Western World Revisited, ch. ix., p. 257. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 511 for want of means. In 1844 they had already seventy-nine missionaries in the Sandwich Islands, and had circulated nearly one hundred million pages of printed matter in the Hawaiian tongue.* In 1853, the salaries alone which had been paid to the missionaries up to that date amounted to more than fifty thousand pounds sterling, an expenditure which seems exces- sive, but which is perhaps partly explained by the fact that " nine of the mission families," of which there were forty, " num- bered fifty-nine children. "f The total "cost of missionary enterprise," we are informed, exceeded nine hundred thousand dollars. + The cost of a single " deputation " from the London Missionary Society to their agents in the South Sea was seven thousand nine hundred and twenty pounds, though this pleas- ant expedition was described by the missionaries themselves, irritated by the supercilious vanity of these luxurious tourists, as only "a tour in search of the picturesque. " We are -now to trace the eifect of this enormous expenditure, defrayed mainly by the generous contributions of the Ameri- can people, who have a lively interest in Christian missions, display unbounded liberality in their support, and have cer- tainly a right to ask how far it has accomplished the end which it was designed to promote. But we must first notice a fact, anterior to the operations of the American missionaries, and too significant, as a presage of events which occurred at a later period, to be altogether omitted. In 1819, the year previous to the arrival of the Protestant missionaries, the Abbe de Quelen, a cousin of the Archbishop of Paris, visited the Sandwich Islands, on the occasion of the voyage of the French frigate Uranie, of which he was the chaplain. Among the visitors to the frigate was the chief minister of the king; and this man, after a conference with the Abbe, was converted and baptized. The Cross, therefore, had won its first conquest ; and it is perhaps to this occurrence that we may attribute the phenomenon which the American mis- sionaries remarked with astonishment, the disappearance of idolatry, " as if by miracle," even before they commenced their labors. Mr. Jarves, an American writer, who published in 1843 a history of the Sandwich Islands, apparently with the sole object of defaming the Catholic Church, and defending his countrymen from the reproaches which then began to assail * Religion in the U, S. of America, by the Rev. Robert Baird, book viii., ch. iii., p. 691. f Cheever, The Island World of the Pacific, app. p. 397. t Sandwich Idand Notes, by A. Haole, app. p. 483. ^ Forbes, Unrefuted Charges, &c., p. 31. 512 CHAPTER VI. them from all quarters, affects to regard the success of missions in the South Sea as a struggle for " supremacy " between France and America, and a question of "commercial advantages." And this seems to be a popular view with many of his country- men. Mr. Hursthouse, however, remarks with considerable force, that it was evidently intended to make the South Sea Islands "a select preserve for a handful of missionaries;"* and the statement is confirmed by the proceedings which we are about to relate. It is undeniable that apparent success promptly followed the appearance of the Protestant missionaries. The natives of Hawaii, like those of New Zealand and Tahiti, easily com- prehended the solid advantages which they might derive from association with their new and opulent guests. Even Mr. Jarves admits that ''interest more than intelligence conspired to produce an outward conformity," and that the barbarians accepted the religion of their masters " because their import- ance was increased, and their chance of political preferment better. "f And this view of the subject has prevailed up to the present time. " My subjects naturally wish," said the King of the Sandwich Islands in 1854: ; u to learn the English lan- guage, which is employed in all public transactions.":}: No doubt the words were written for the poor savage by his advisers, who, as we shall see, had long before that date relieved him of the care of all " transactions," both public and private." The missionaries were now installed, and then began, once more, that eager race after wealth and power, cruel, greedy, and unscrupulous, which their own friends have so often nar- rated, but which even they have rarely attempted to palliate. Mr. Bingham was for many years their leader, and Bingham is thus described : "Bingham meddles in all the affairs of gov- ernment," says Kotzebue, " pays particular attention to com- mercial concerns, and seems to have quite forgotten his original situation, and the object of his residence in these islands, find- ing the avocations of a ruler more to his taste than those of a preacher." And again : " That Binghanrs private views may not be too easily penetrated, religion is made the cloak of all his designs. . . . Perhaps he already esteems himself the abso l"re sovereign of these islands." Lord Byron, who was struck by the same facts, observes; " j Mr. Bingham loses no opportunity of mingling in every * New Zealand, &c., by Charles Hursthouse, p. 51. f History of the 8. Islands, ch. x., p. 299. \ Annuaire Historiqiie Universel, p. 238 (1854). | Voyage Round the World, vol. ii.. pp. 255, 261. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 513 business."* Mr. Bingham's example was effectually imitated by his companions, each in his own sphere. " It will hardly be credited," says Captain Sir Edward Belcher, " that one of the chief missionaries took an active part in destroying a con- siderable cane plantation ; that the ground was given for school or religions purposes ; and that the same individual is now cultivating the proscribed cane on the same ground !" This independent witness speaks, in the same page, of " the tyranny of fanatics, who have already caused a disgust for the Protestant creed, and will probably, in the end, be expelled." "No slavery under ihe sun," he adds, "deserves to be ques- tioned so severely as that of the Sandwich Islands." We shall see presently in what it consisted. Sir Edward also tells us a fact which we might have ventured to anticipate, and which we have encountered in other lands, " Several have already se- ceded from the mission, and are enjoying their rich farms."f These men are everywhere the same. Mr. Melville, though a Protestant and an American, confirms the evidence of these distinguished navigators in the following energetic words: "There is something decidedly wrong in the practical operations of the Sandwich Islands missions. Those who, from pure religious motives, contribute to the support of this enterprise, should take care to ascertain that their dona- tions, flowing through many devious channels, at last effect their legitimate object, the conversion of the Hawaiians. I urge this, not because I doubt the moral probity of those who disburse these funds, but because I know that they are not rightly applied. To read pathetic accounts of missionary hard- ships, and glowing descriptions of conversions, and baptisms taking place beneath palm-trees, is one thing ; and to go to the Sandwich Islands, and see the missionaries dwelling in picturesque and prettily-furnished coral-rock villas, whilst the miserable natives are cornmiting all sorts of immoralities around them, is quite another.";): Mr. Wheeler, also an American, could not help remarking the "comfortable houses of the missionaries, built, as nearly as circumstances will admit, in home style ;" while Lord Byron attests, that the men who' were so indulgent to themselves dis- played only rigor towards others. "The missionaries," he says, " forbid the making of lire, even to cook, on Sundays ; they insist on the appearance of their proselytes five times at church every day." And this extraordinary system attained at length * Voyage H. M. S. Blonde, p. 117. f Narrative of a Voyayt Round the World, by Captain Sir Edward Belcher vol i., pp. 2G4, 270. J The Marquesas Islands, ch. xxvi., p. 220. 84 514 CHAPTKR VI. such a character of gloomy severity, except within the imme- diate circle of the missionaries arid the principal chiefs, that Sir Edward Belcher, who judged it as a frank and intelligent Englishman, proposes this question: " Is it reasonable to expect, that the millions inhabiting the islands in these seas can, from a state of the most unlimited enjoyment, be brought by this to believe that the Christian religion is to ameliorate their con- dition, when the very habits and countenances of their would- be pastors are almost distorted by severity?"* The italics are his own. Lastly, Sir George Simpson, also an English Protestant, re- counts his impressions in the following words : " The mission- aries were regarded as the inventors of a servitude such as the islands had never known before ; and, even during our visit, Borne of our party, who were black, found themselves objects of suspicion and fear, till they disclaimed all connection with the ' mikaneries.' "f One of the effects of the ceaseless tyranny under which the Hawaiians were now groaning, and which, as Captain Laplace notices, rendered the missionaries " odious to the greater part of the natives," was a depopulation so rapid, that a prejudiced writer in the Quarterly Review calls it " as unaccountable as it is ominous. "J We have seen, however, and shall yet see more clearly, that it is a law which has no exception in heathen lands tenanted by Protestants. In the Garnbier Islands, occu- pied by Catholics, the population has sensibly increased ; while in the Philippines, so long subject to the same influence, we have seen, by the testimony of Mr. Crawfurd, that "an immense social improvement" has accompanied the presence of the Catholic civil and religious authorities, and the progressive increase of population has followed the usual law in European countries. In the Sandwich Islands, however, where Protest- antism reigned supreme, we find the same frightful declension which has marked its influence in the Antipodes, in North America, in New Zealand, and in Tahiti, where two-thirds of the whole population melted away in thirty years. Already in 1841, Mr. Olmsted, an American writer, reported, that " the de- population of the Sandwich Islands is steadily moving forwards, and unless it is speedily arrested, the total extinction of the nation is inevitable." "The annual decrease of the population" was then, "upon an average, over six thousand."! In 1851, * Narrative, vol. ii., p. 27. f Vol. ii., ch. xii., p. 103. July, 1859. Laplace, tome v., p. 351. Jl Incidents, &c., ch. xx., p. 262. MISSIONS IN OCEANIC A. 515 the Kev. Gustavus Hines, an American Protestant minister, after observing that "the astonishing rapidity of the decrease of the Hawaiian population is perhaps without a parallel in the history of nations," adds, that in the course of four succes- sive years it diminished by twenty-one thousand seven hundred and thirty.* And Mr. Dana, also an American writer, reports at a still later date, that they are now disappearing " at the rate of one-fortieth of the entire population annually. "f Yet the robust vigor of this "doomed people," as Mr. Dana calls them, was wont to excite the admiration of all the early navi- gators ; and forty years ago, Yon Langsdorff, noticing their strength and symmetry, declared that "many of them might very well have been placed by the side of the most celebrated chef-d'ceuvres of antiquity, and would have lost nothing by the comparison."^; And now that we have seen something of the character of the missionaries, of the nature of their operations, and the effect of their presence, let us introduce without further delay, and as usual in the order of dates, the witnesses who will tell us what they have actually accomplished, during their long sojourn, towards the propagation of Christianity, and the social improvement of the natives. We will begin, as before, with Mr. Ellis, in 1829. In this case he was not personally concerned, and therefore revealed the whole truth. " Idolatry had indeed been renounced," he says, referring to the period of his own visit, but " the great mass of the people were living without any moral or religious restraint." Perhaps nine years was too short a period for the desired change. In 1830, Kotzebue gives us an actual specimen of a " convert," the Queen of Hawaii. "I inquired the grounds of her conver- sion. She replied that she could not exactly describe them, but that the missionary Bingham, who understood reading and writing perfectly well, had assured her that the Christian faith was the best. If, however, she added, it should be found un- suited to our people, we will reject it, and adopt another."] It appears from the testimony of a distinguished British offi- cer, at a much later date, that the commonalty of these islands, -though nominally Protestant, had even less Christian feeling than this royal convert. " Not many years ago," says Captain Sherard Osborn, " I heard some Sandwich Islanders singing the * Life on the Plains of the Pacific, ch. xi., p. 210. f Two Years before the Mast, ch. xxviii., p. 174. Voyages, &c., ch. iv., p. 108 (1813). Polynesian Researches, ch. xviii., p. 544. 1 Vol. ii, p. 208. 516 CHAPTER VI. sixty-fourth Psalm, to soothe the heathen goddess, who, they believe, presides over their troublesome volcano."* In 1831, Captain Beechey says: " The residents in Honolulu well know what little effect the exertion of the missionaries has produced ;" and he adds that " the system of religious restraint was alike obnoxious to the foreigners residing upon the island, and to the natives."f In 1832, Dr. Meyen, a Prussian naturalist, travelling with a purely scientific object, and free from all religious preposses- sions, confirms the testimony which we have already received from witnesses as capable and impartial as himself. He also speaks with disgust and indignation of " the doings of the mis- sionaries who oppressed these islands,'* and proves, as an English writer observes, that " almost eve^y thing had certainly deterio- rated^^ "Let us publish it aloud," says this candid 'German, " it is neither the glory of the Supreme Being, nor the zeal of a noble vocation, which has impelled these hypocritical mission- aries to visit these distant shores, but a greedy cupidity, and an insatiable thirst for honors." " Several of them," he adds, " had already amassed a considerable fortune, at the expense of the natives, who by their detestable frauds are reduced to penury ." In the same year, as a still more capable witness relates, on the death of Kaahumanu this "converted" people, "galled with too severe a curb on their habits and inclinations, broke loose in debauchery and every sort of vice. Moral anarchy prevailed not only in Honolulu, but throughout the group. Schools were deserted, the teachers themselves falling away ; buildings for worship were burned. The dark habits of hea- thenism sprang up again, like the heads of Medusa, and in one district at least of Hawaii, idolatrous worship was once more performed. If we may give full credence to accounts which come to us through the missionary party, the islands must for a time have been a pandemonium."] Yet during the whole period, the missionaries, whose mode of life could only be sus- tained by the punctual payment of their salaries, were reporting officially to their employers that their success was complete. In 1833, one of their own witnesses admits, that " in all the islands,"!" though thirteen years had now elapsed, only six hundred and sixty-nine were deemed Christians even by such * The Past and Future of British Relations in China, by Captain Sherard Osborn, C.B., ch. i., p. 48 (1860). f Voyage, &c., vol. i., ch. x., p. 319; vol. ii., ch. iii., p. 101. \ Quarterly Rewew,.vol. liii., p. 330. Annales, tome viii., p. 11. I Hawaii, an historical account of the Sandwich Islands, by Manley Hopkins, Hawaiian Consul-general, ch. xv., p. 224. ^[ Missionary Report, quoted in the Chinese Repository, vol. ii., p. 379. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 517 masters ; and in the same year they confessed, in an official re- port to the American Board : " Great numbers forsook the schools; the congregations on the Sabbath were reduced at least one-half;" and they explain the defection by saying, u Multitudes became Christians in form, never expecting that any thing else could be required of them."* In 1835, Mr. Reynolds, a scientific American Protestant, whose candid evidence about the Catholic missionaries shall be quoted hereafter, says with an air of calm surprise : " The improvement and advancement of these islanders has been con- siderably exaggerated."t In 1838, Dr. Ruschenberger, an American writer of the same class, forgetting national and religious prejudices, writes as follows : " The friends of the missionaries have drawn over- wrought pictures of the prosperity and prospects of the islands. Though we are all ready to accord our praise to the pleasing fictions of a novelist, we expect rigid accuracy from the pen of the divine, and are not disposed to allow him to envelop facts in the glowing language of a poetic fancy." And then he goes on thus : " The missionaries stationed at the Sandwich Islands, as a class, are inferior to all those whom it has been our fortune to meet at other stations during the cruise. Many of them are far behind the age in which they live, deficient in general knowledge, .... and deal damnation, in a peculiar slang, to all whose opinions and course of life differ from their own. This is no sketch of fancy ; and we can only lament there is no power to shield the pulpit from the vulgar spoutings of unlettered ignorance." He adds, however, "I have no doubt the 4 Board for Foreign Missions' sends abroad the best they have at command.";): Yet it was at this very time that these singular missionaries wrote as follows to the society which paid them, and which always rewarded such language : u The strength of religious principle among the people, and their preparation to act from their own convictions of duty, are more manifest than ever!" In 1840, Commodore George Read, an American officer, and Mr. Debell Bennett, an English traveller, record their impression of the, progress of religion and civilization in the Sandwich Islands, by the efforts of more than seventy missionaries, and an expenditure of a quarter of a million sterling. The former observes, with evident reluctance, "I must say, that the mass of the natives, notwithstanding all the efforts of the missionaries, * History of American Missions, by the Rev. Joseph Tracy, p. 242. f Voyage of the Frigate Potomac, ch. xxii., p. 417. $ Voyage Round the World, by W. S. W. Ruschenberger, M.D., ch. xliii., p. 464. 518 CHAPTER VI. appear to be still indolent, licentious in disposition, and quite ignorant of the term virtue."* Yet this very year the mission- aries wrote to their employers in these words : " The past year has been one of signal triumphs of Divine grace ;''f and their employers printed and circulated the report. It is worthy of observation, that, nearly twenty years later, an English Protestant, of a class which is not yet extinct, and whose extraordinary ignorance of the religion of St. Anselm and Sir Thomas More is wonderful even in an Englishman, confesses that he heard a sermon, preached by a "Reverend Mr. Paris," in which the preacher informed his audience, consisting of three or four hundred natives, " that the measure of their iniquities being full, offended Heaven was about to cut them utterly off from the land, that their place might be filled by the children of a worthier race.";}; The poor natives had by this time been robbed of every thing else, and even the mission- aries could find nothing more to steal from them but their land, which, with the help of " offended Heaven," they were prepared to do. Mr. Bennett speaks as follows of what he saw in the Sand- wich Islands : " In worldly matters the missionaries in this group are particularly well-favored ; few of the foreign residents possess better dwellings, or more available comforts." Of Maurua he says, " The females were bold in their amours, and the people generally were more prone to petty larceny than was altogether creditable to their morals." And then he went tc the Lobos Islands, and at St. Lucas Bay he writes thus : " The inhabitants live contented, and consequently happy ; and their conduct towards each other, as well as to ourselves, was equally courteous and hospitable. The women are notable and modest. They profess the Roman Catholic religion." " The Jesuit mis- sionaries," he adds, Protestant travellers always call a Catho- lic priest a Jesuit " would appear to have performed their duty with assiduity and success ; the native Indians, with the excep- tion of a very few tribes, having adopted in a great measure the language, religion, and habits of their civilized teachers." Have we not reason to say that the contrast, always attested by Protestant witnesses, is everywhere the same ? In 1842, the Protestant missionaries in the Sandwich Islands begin at last to confess, in their own peculiar dialect, that "the assiduous efforts of the Papists have not failed of success painful * Around the World, by Commodore George C. Read, vol. ii., p. 309. f Tracy's History, p. 181. i Travels in tJie Sandwich and Society Islands, by S. S. Hill, Esq., ch. xx., p. 329. Vol. ii., -ch. i., pp. 9, 10. MISSIONS IN OCEANIC A. 519 to every benevolent mind ;" and that " Romanism has unques- tionably made some considerable advances, and penetrated many districts where it was before unknown."* A little later they will give us more ample information of its progress. In 1843, we have the unsuspicious evidence of Sir Edward Belcher, who not only asserts that the general influence of the missionaries is ruinous to the character and happiness of the natives, but furnishes the following instructive details. " Is it not strange, with all the influence the American missionaries are said to have over the king, that it is not properly exerted to improve his moral character ? To compass any object having for its end injury to the interests of their own merchants they are keenly awake, . . . yet they permit the pattern, by which all law acquires moral force and energy, to commit sins and inconsistencies, not only without control, but without expressing their opinion in that manly form which they pretend their mission so imperatively demands of them." And then he adds, as if to complete the picture, " Perhaps the greatest excesses are committed within the missionary circle, which includes the king and chiefs. "f Mr. Stewart, himself an American mission- ary, but who was perfectly candid because he had abandoned the work, confirms incidentally this statement of Sir Edward Belcher, when he tells us, that Riho-Riho " attended all the services of the day," though during the week he had been "intoxicated four or five days." He appears at last to have died in that state.J In 1845, Mr. Melville, though an American, says: "JSTot until I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught horses, and evangelized into beasts of burden. But so it is!" And then he goes on to describe u a missionary's spouse, who day after day, for months together, took her regular airings in a little go-cart drawn by two of the islanders. " And this singular fact is confirmed by M. Duflot de Mofras in 1844, who noticed that "the natives now discharge the office of beasts of burden ;"[ and by a correspondent of the Sandwich Islands Gazette in 1839, who relates that he saw u a heavy horse wagon drawn by fifteen females, harnessed like beasts of burden ; and found that they were performing a penance imposed by the missionaries."^ But to return to Mr. Melville. * Missionary Herald, vol. xxxviii., p. 473. f Narrative of a Voyage, &c., vol. i., p. 264. \ Journal of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands, by C. S. Stewart, p. 110. 2d edition. The Marquesas Islands, ch. xxvi., p. 218. j Exploration du Territoire de I' Oregon, &c., tome ii., ch. iii., p. 87. *|[ Quoted in Asiatic Journal, vol. xxxi., p. 48. 520 CHAPTER VI. This vigorous though indelicate writer suras up his observa- tions in these words: " How little do some of these poor island- ers comprehend, when they look around them, that no incon- siderable part of their disasters originate in certain tea-party excitements," he alludes to the " missionary meetings" at home " the object of which is to ameliorate the spiritual con- dition of the Polynesians, but whose end has almost invariably been to accomplish their temporal destruction." But he cites facts also in confirmation of his opinion. When Lord George Paulet, in 1843, released the unfortunate natives from the tyranny of their missionary rulers, and gave them at length an opportunity of showing whether their profession of religion was voluntary, and how far the missionaries had really acted upon their hearts and minds, then was revealed, as in Ceylon and in Tahiti, the true character of Protestant converts from heathenism. "Who that happened to be at Honolulu during those ten memorable days will ever forget them ! The history of those ten days reveals in their true colors the character of the Sandwich Islanders, and furnishes an eloquent commentary on the results which have flowed from the labors of the missionaries. Freed from all restraints of severe penal laws, the natives almost to a man plunged voluntarily into every species of wickedness arid excess, and by their utter disregard of all decency plainly showed, that although they had been schooled into a seeming submission to the new order of things, they were in reality as depraved and vicious as ever."* In 1849, Mr. Walpole, a gentleman whose prejudices against the Catholic religion even the facts which he unwill- ingly records fail to admonish, writes as follows: "The great interest 1 feel for the natives, and my heartfelt desire for their well-being, lead me to deplore much that the mis- sionaries have done ; and happy indeed should I be to hear the grave aspersions they labor under disproved. The bit- ter persecutions, even to death, of natives who for conscience sake preferred to die, rather than betray their Roman Cath- olic faith, and the undenied monetary dirtinesses they are accused of, are grave charges indeed."f We shall hear presently what he says of the Catholics, and of their pas- tors. In 1850, Mr. Berthold Seemann, after noticing, apparently with surprise, that "the majority of the king's counsellors are seceders from the American mission," missionaries converted * Appendix, p. 285. f Four Tears in the Pacific, vol. i., ch. xi., p. 249. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 521 into officers of the State,* adds, that their royal pupil still permitted himself u all kinds of unholy and immoral prac- tices ;"f and in the following year, Mr. Gerstaecker found that, owing to u a severe attack of delirium tremens, he-was not n't to be seen during my whole stay in Oahu." The Kev. Gustavus Hines, an American Protestant mission- ary, whose extraordinary candor we can only attribute to the fact that the Sandwich Islands were not the permanent sphere of his own labor, described with considerable detail the actual results of Protestant missions, after thirty years of uninterrupted effort. It was impossible that the sentence upon them should be pronounced by a more competent or impartial judge; and it required some courage to tell the whole truth. For many years a certain section of American society had been fascinated with romantic tales of the triumphs of Protestantism in the South Sea. One is almost ashamed to quote, even by way of specimen, the language which was addressed to every missionary meeting, and always greeted with enthusiastic applause. " The smiles of Jesus," wrote the Rev. Mr. Green, " on the efforts made to convert the inhabitants of Hawaii have been signal :"; and they immediately sent him five thousand dollars as a reward for words in which the profane and the ludicrous struggle together for the mastery. Yet this was the common phraseology of the missionaries, during a long course of years, in the reports which they forwarded to the United States ; and it was the influence of such reports which extracted from women and children for we can hardly suppose that grown men were amongst the sub- scribers upwards of one million dollars, to be consumed by the missionaries and their families in the Sandwich Islands. Mr. Hines will tell us, though a Protestant, a missionary, and an American, with what effect this prodigal expenditure has * It may be well to notice a single specimen of this class. An English gen- tleman thus describes, in 1854, a voyage which he made with the king. " Strict teetotalism was observed on board, every thing being under the com- mand of Dr. Judd, who was formerly one of the missionaries, but now held the more lucrative office of Minister of Finance." Wishing to take some spirits, " I obtained a glass of water, and walked down into the cabin ; but there was Dr. Judd, not being a good sailor, lying in his berth. ' Do you smoke, Dr. Judd ?' said I, to begin the conversation. ' No, sir, I do not smoke/ answered he, ' but I chew a good deal.' This I did not require to be told, as he lay in his berth all day chewing tobacco, and spitting into a calabash by his side. I thought that if he chewed, I might drink, so I filled my glass of rum and water." Tour Mound the World, by Robert Elwes, Esq., ch. xii., p. 195. An- other of these ex-missionaries, one Richards, who had commenced life as " an itinerant vender," was sent to London and Paris as " Minister Plenipotentiary" of the King of Hawaii ! f Narrative of the Voyage of H. M. 8. Herald, by Berthold Seemann. F.L.S., vol. ii., ch. ix., p. 153 (1853). | Quoted by Strickland, History of the American Bible Society, ch. xxv., p. 211 522 CHAPTER VI. been attended, and he will speak from his own experience and observation. " Notwithstanding all that has been done for their benefit, the state of the native Hawaiians is still truly deplorable" after thirty years of uninterrupted missionary effort ! " To call them a christianized, civilized, happy, and prosperous people, would be to mislead the public mind in relation to their true condition. To an inquiry which I made of the Rev. Lowel Smith, one of the missionaries in Honolulu, concerning the prosperity of the natives, I received this reply : ' The evident tendency of things is downward? Downward it is rapidly, in point of numbers, and if the ratio of decrease shall continue the same for only a few years, it does not require the eye of a prophet to see what will be the result. The epitaph of the nation will be written, and Anglo-Saxons will convert the islands into an- other West Indies."* A little later, Mr. Hines offers this summary of his experi- ence as to the ultimate results of missionary influence. " Religion, in every department of Hawaiian society, however genuine the system which is taught there may be," it is due to him to say, that he does not seem to have even suspected its genuineness, " is of a very superficial character. Of this the missionary residing among them is more sensible than any other man can be, and one of them, in answer to the inquiry, ' How many of your people give daily evidence of being Christian ?' replied, ''None, if you look for the same evidence which you expect will be exhibited by Christians at home.'" And Mr. Hines declares that this account of them is true, "from the hut of the most degraded menial to the royal palace." Yet if the reader will consult the annual " Reports" of the missionary societies, he will find that they never cease to represent the triumphant progress of religion, education, and social order, among these very people, of whom privately the missionaries gave only such accounts as Mr. Hines received from them. Let us hear Mr. Hines once more. u In attending the native churches one is struck with the listlessness and inattention which prevail in the congregation. No matter how important the truths, or how impressive the manner of the speaker, he seems scarcely to gain the hearing of the ear."f Finally, as if he thought that such an account of a mission- ary work continued for more than thirty years, at enormous cost, without let or hindrance, and by people claiming to be the only advocates of u scriptural religion," required the support oi * Life on the Plains of the Pacifa, ch. xi., p. 232. f Ch. xiii., p. 253. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 523 some terrible and conclusive fact, Mr. Hines informs us, that the immorality of this nominally converted people is so shameless and universal, that u it is not an easy matter for an Hawaiian to tell who his father is." Ten years later, for we need not pursue with greater detail a history which never varies in tone or import from 1820 to 1862, an English traveller once more reveals the astounding profligacy of "this much-boasted Christian native population of the Sand- wich Islands." Some of his examples will not bear quotation, and the worst of all are displayed by those who are constant attendants at Protestant worship, and affect, in the presence of the missionaries, the most austere piety. " You find a man," says this Protestant witness, u parading his religion one day to his teachers and his fellows, and selling his wife or daughter the next for a dollar." "If Christianity," he adds, " has ever impressed on their hearts what virtue is, the mark has been very light, and soon obliterated."* Such, once more, has been the fruit of labors continued, during forty years, by nearly one hundred Protestant missionaries. Lastly, in 1862, the testimonies of so many witnesses are finally closed by one whose verdict is, if possible, more un- favorable than any which had preceded it. In 1853, Mr. Gerstaecker had remarked, that the missionaries were still what they had ever been, and that "their estates are among the best on the island;" and in 1854, Mr. Elwes, though their guest and companion, had reported, that they had no success but " in the way of trade, and in looking out for their own interests, for in that they are sharp enough."f But we cannot quote them all. We have remarked, however, as the special feature in the annals of Protestant missions, that, far from recording any improve- ment as time advances and resources multiply, " the latest re- port of them is always the worst." We must not conclude without showing, by one effective example, that this is as true of the Sandwich Islands as of every other region of the earth in which Protestant missionaries have found a home. In 1862, Mr. Manley Hopkins published his history of the Sandwich Islands. This gentleman, who does not conceal his sympathies with Protestantism, was the Hawaiian Consul-gen- eral, and his work is dedicated by permission to Earl Russell, and adorned with a laudatory preface by the Protestant Bishop of Oxford. We could not desire a more experienced or author- itative witness. " The missionaries," says Mr. Hopkins, after a minute ex- * Japan, the Pacific, &c., by Henry Arthur Tilley, ch. xvii , pp. 319, 321. f Tour Hound the World, by Robert Elwes, Esq., ch. xii., p. 189 ; ch. xiii., p. 220. 524 CHAPTER VI. animation of all their proceedings, " clothed and converted the natives, and they produced, not alas! a regenerated people, but a nation of hypocrites" Such is the character of their disci- ples in 1862, while of themselves he observes, "not -a few of their number showed considerable alacrity in the search of wealth, seeking it diligently, and investing it in very remuner- ative securities." But Mr. Hopkins, who cannot be supposed to have made such statements without reluctance, confirms them by the con- fessions of the missionaries themselves, as well as by the official report of Mr. Dana, whose eulogy of the Catholic missions, he observes, was quietly suppressed by the missionary society to whom his report was addressed, lest it should prove " unsatis- factory to the supporters of the mission !" Here are some of the words which his employers declined to print. " I visited," says Mr. Dana, " several churches and schools under the juris- diction of the Roman Catholic bishop, which extends over all the islands of the group. So far as I observed, the missions are successful. The churches are well filled, and the priests bear good reputations for fidelity and self-denial, and several whom I met I found to be men of thorough education. They gained especially in public esteem by their conduct during the terrible visitation of the small-pox a few years ago." Like the prophet of old, Mr. Dana was employed to curse, but found himself constrained to bless. Mr. Willie, another witness quoted by Mr. Hopkins, gives this account of the morality of the people : u It is my frank belief that unless the Hawaiian females can be rendered more pure and chaste, it is impossible to preserve the Hawaiian peo- ple in being." Yet Mr. Bennett has told us of female con- verts of exactly the same class, but instructed by Catholic mis- sionaries, " the women are notable and modest." The Protest- ant teachers appear to have been less successful. "Forty years' assiduous evangelizing," says the Polynesian, in July, 1861, " two entire generations born and bred in the Christian faith public schools in every village religious revivals almost every year prayer-meetings innumerable and yet two-thirds of the abandoned women married persons ! The thing is incredible, were it not attested." Lastly, Dr. Rae, in a series of articles published in the same journal, which is the organ of the government, gives at the same date the following account, both of the contrast between the Catholic and Protestant missions, and of the terms in which it was noticed by his co-religionists: "I do not recollect having been in any mixed company in these islands where the subject of the Protestant mission was introduced, without hearing either MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 525 a sneer, a sarcasm, or a reproach against it. On the other hand, wherever I have been, and with whomsoever I have met, I have never encountered any one, except in controversy, who did not speak in terms of respect of the Catholic priesthood. I simply note a fact it is for the reader to draw the conclusion."* If perchance the reader has by this time forgotten, in follow- ing the course of so different a narrative, the account of mis- sions in the Philippines, conducted by apostles and martyrs, with which this chapter opened, he may now be conveniently reminded of it. "In examining the new social state of the Sandwich Islands," says Admiral Jurien de la Graviere, in 1853, " I was involuntarily reminded of the Indian of the Phil- ippines, joyous and free to this hour under the yoke of the law which he confesses, finding in the ceremonies of religion the recreation which he most prizes, and in the doctrines of his simple faith fewer subjects of discouragement than of hope."f Such, once more, is the contrast between Catholic and Protest- ant missions, between the work of God and the work of man. But that contrast admits of fuller illustration, and it is the main object of these volumes to supply it. We have seen that the later history of Tahiti furnishes further evidence of it ; but that evidence may be supplemented by the still more striking incidents which have occurred in the Hawaiian group, and in the other islands of the South Sea. There was a class of converts of whom Mr. Hines makes no mention, though Mr. Walpole has candidly told us that they resisted, "even to death," all inducements to abandon the Catholic faith. Per- haps Mr. Hines had not mixed with them, or found it embar- rassing to speak of them. Others will supply the defect in his narrative, and disclose the facts which he seems to have wished to suppress. Seven years elapsed from the visit of the Abbe de Quelen to the Sandwich Islands before another Catholic missionary landed on their shores. In 1826, a prefect apostolic, attended by two companions, arrived at Hawaii. The ground was preoccupied, and all human influences were against them, but they imme- diately commenced their mission of mercy. Protestant writers will tell us how they fared, and what was the issue of their labors. The intelligent historian of the Voyage of the Potomac, who saw and conversed with these first missionaries, generously says, and Dr. Meyen uses almost the same words: "They * Hawaii, an Historical Account of the Sandwich Islands, by Manley Hop- kins, Hawaiian Consul-general, ch. xv., p. 224 ; ch. xvi., p. 243 ; ch. xxiii., p. 371 ; ch. xxiv., pp. 386-8-90 (1862). f Revue des Deux Monde*, tome iii., p. 38 (1853). 526 CHAPTER VI. were men of learning, and agreeable manners and conversa- tion, and in all their acts and behavior appeared sincerely pious. Pleased with their manners and instructions, the natives came in numbers to be taught by them, so that the school and place of worship began to be crowded. . . . They never attempted to draw the natives to themselves, except by amiable and kind deportment. Indeed, they were exemplary in all 4 their actions. But their success was too great, and they were ordered to dis- continue their worship. . . . The natives were forced from their houses of worship by native soldiers, ordered by authority. . . . Finally, the missionaries were conveyed to the coast of Cali- fornia, on board a little rickety vessel, and there inhumanly set ashore, on a barren spot, and distant from any settlement !"* The deportation had been effected with such complete success, that one of them died on the passage, and it was only the corpse of the Abbe Bachelot which was carried to land. In this first combat the Protestant missionaries gained an easy triumph. But the day arrived, which they should have foreseen, when they were summoned to justify an action which France was not unlikely to chastise, and which all that was noble in England and America condemned. Their defence contained only two pleas the first, that the violence was the act of the native authorities ; the second, that the Catholic missionaries were justly banished, because "permission from the government to remain had never been obtained, or even asked. "f With respect to the latter statement, we do not read in the Acts of the Apostles that St. Paul was accustomed to "ask permission" from the heathen to preach Christ to them, or that he refrained when forbidden to do so. It is true that it was once made a reproach to the Master Himself, u contradicit Ccesari /" but it was reserved for Prot- estant missionaries to rebuke His servants for presuming to preach the Gospel without having first obtained the permission of that pitiful caricature of Caesar, the King of the Sandwich Islands. Mr. Mark Wilks who eagerly defends them, and observes, with a well-timed pleasantry, that their Catholic rivals "were conveyed to the diocese of California" gravely affirms, that the latter ought to have obeyed the Polynesian magistracy, and that it was " shameless effrontery to set its laws and police at defiance.";): The Jews, who imprisoned St. Peter and scourged St. Paul, were probably of the same opinion, and chastised the "shameless effrontery" of those Apostles with the * Reynolds, ch. xxii.. pp. 417-18. f Refutation of the Charges brougJit ty the Roman Catholics against the American Missionaries at the Sandwich Islands, p. 14 (Boston, 1843). \ Tahiti, &c., by Mark Wilks, p. 10 (1844). MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 527 same energy which Mr. "Wilks applauds in the Sandwich Islanders. With respect to the plea that it was " the authorities who banished them, we may leave the answer to Protestant writers. Dr. Ruschenberger, who had discussed the matter with Bingham, who was the real "government," writes with the candor of an* educated and liberal American. "A leading member of the mission told me," he says, " he had no doubt but that answers which he gave to questions on the subject by the chiefs had very considerable influence upon their determi- nation It is clear to my mind that the missionaries em- braced every opportunity to present the Roman Catholics in the hideous aspect in which they themselves view them. I am convinced that the missionaries were the cause of their expul- sion."* Sir George Simpson also says : "Some of the Protest- ant missionaries were, beyond all doubt, chiefly responsible ;" and he adds that it was not bigotry alone which influenced them, but that "there is strong reason for suspecting that their real motives were in a great measure secular."f Mr. Gerstaecker, though unfriendly to the Catholic missionaries, declares without hesitation of the same proceedings, " the Protestant preachers, in their mad, intolerant zeal, excited the easily moved natives more and more by their sermons ;" and he evidently agrees with Sir George Simpson as to their motive. The conflict, of which we have seen other examples, had now commenced in earnest, and was sustained on the part of the Protestant missionaries by actions which we should have refused to credit, if they were not attested by their own friends. It seems impossible that the scenes which we are about to describe should have been enacted in the nineteenth century. From the hour in which the "little rickety vessel" bore away to California the exiles, of whom only two were destined to reach it alive, and who were inhumanly exposed to such a fate, as Protestants tell us, for no other crime than this, that "their success w r as too great." Hawaii and all the islands of the group were filled with the loud clamor of their enemies. Europe was many a league across the sea, and the avenger seemed to tarry. And so from every hill and valley went .up the cry of rage and malice against the Catholic missionaries, whose virtues were a perpetual rebuke, like the calm face of Mordecai standing in the gate ; as well as against the converts who had dared to follow them for their wisdom, and to love them for their truth. Protestant writers, generous and upright men, declare with one accord, that nothing * Ch. xliii., p. 474. f Vol. ii., ch. xii., p. 115. i Vol. ii., ch. vii., p. 236. 528 CHAPTER VI. could surpass the atrocity of calumny and invective of which they were now the victims. Every pulpit resounded with the maledictions heaped upon them ; and even the native teachers, hired for wages to repeat the lessons of their masters, hurried hither and thither to re-echo words which they neither believed nor understood. Mr. Cheevers, exulting in the excesses which he records, recites the following extract from a sermon, probably of his own composition, preached by a " native assistant mis- sionary :" " Believe not that the Pope is God ; he is nothing but a man, whose dwelling-place is in Rome."* Such were the instructions offered to the people of the Sandwich Islands, in spite of their urgent need of other precepts, day after day, and hour after hour, by lips whose accents had long tilled them with terror and dismay. They might mock Christianity by their lives, and outrage every enactment in its moral code, so long as they consented to frequent the Protestant chapels, and forfeit their land and their goods to Protestant missionaries; but they must at least hate the Pope, and learn to revile his ministers, even when inviting them to virtue. Let crime reign through all the land, as Mr. Hines says, " from the hut of the most degraded menial to the royal palace ;" but let not the hated rivals who had shown that they could break its spell gain a footing amongst them ! Bat it is time to speak of events which, though cruel and barbarous, it is impossible to regard with unmingled regret, because they served to reveal the character of the Catholic converts, and prepared the way for the final triumphs of the religion w T hich had made them what they were, it was by their sufferings, according to the immutable law of Christian missions, and by the constancy with which they endured them, that thousands were led to embrace the faith which had in- spired so much courage and fortitude. Long before the decisive act which led to the death of the Abbe Bachelot, the measures which the Dutch adopted in Ceylon, and the English in Tahiti, had been employed by the Americans, not without indignant protests from their countrymen, throughout the Sandwich islands. M. Bachelot himself, not long before he com- menced his last and fatal voyage, wrote thus to his friends in Europe : " Our Christians continue to be persecuted, but in the chains with which they are loaded their attachment to the faith seems to redouble. After years of seduction and violence, during which our enemies left no means un- tried, there has not been a single example of apostasy amongst them" Even the examples which we have already seen of * The Island World of the Pacific, p. 157. MISSIONS IN OCKANICA. invincible constancy in the inhabitants of China, India, and Ceylon, hardly prepare us for such a display of fortitude in the Sandwich Islanders. But grace produces everywhere the game fruits. M. Bachelot continues as follows : "The mode of puiiibiuneiit now adopted is to have the Catholics conducted in chains to the public necessaries, and to oblige them to remove with their hands the most disgusting ordures. The triumph which the Methodists seem then to enjoy consists in listening to the railleries of which the Catholics are the objects. They, however, support all with joy, because, they say, 4 religion is our only crime.' "* And when this tale reached Europe, confirmed by Protestant testimony which we will presently quote, it awakened that righteous indignation of which Captain Laplace was the worthy instrument, and filled the sails of the frigate Artemise, which bore freedom to the Hawaiian Catholics, in 1839, after thirteen years of oppression and servitude. " History will record," said an eloquent French voice, " that men who dared to call themselves ministers of a civilizing religion, in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the face of heaven and earth, condemned Christian females to gather up daily with their hands the ordures of a garrison !" And these were not the only tortures inflicted by the Protest- ant missionaries upon the Hawaiian natives, who dared to be- lieve in the midst of infidelity, and to be virtuous when sur- rounded by corruption. They were beaten, imprisoned, worn out with heavy labor, and sometimes starved, but all in vain. A Catholic woman being cruelly beaten with a stick, because she refused to attend the Protestant worship, her husband made this observation, worthy to be compared with the historic words of the early confessors : " Before I became a Christian I should have thought it no harm to revenge my wife, by killing him- who struck her ; but I was silent, and recollected that the first Christians did not complain when their limbs were cut oif, and that they offered their bodies to the flames for Jesus Christ." And M. Bachelot, who relates this anecdote, adds, " Many of the natives were so touched by this example of truly Christian patience and resignation, that they have asked to be instructed, notwithstanding the dangers to which they are exposed from the Protestant ministers. ' He tells us also, that " the English' Consul," a worthy representative of his great nation, "mani- fested his sympathy for the prisoners." Some he took under his immediate protection, but his generous aid came too late, for "many of them died shortly after, victims of the hardships they had endured."f * Annals, vol. i , p. 853. f Annals, vol. i., p. 355. 35 530 CHAPTER VI. It is not to be supposed that such incidents could occur without exciting the lively indignation of the residents in these islands. The mission of Captain Laplace, we are told, was welcomed by them, and "they enthusiastically applauded his proceedings." " We are willing to hope," they said, in a formal address to that officer, "that the horrifying realities of persecution and torture for conscience sake, by your firmness and justice will have been forever crushed."* And they declared, 'in one of the local journals, "We hesitate not to accuse the mission- aries of being the great first cause of all these persecutions of the Catholics. "f We have seen, too, in what terms they are noticed both by English and American writers. Sir Edward Belcher has told us that " the tyranny of fanatics," ' illiterate fanatics," Mr. Forbes calls them, " with cargoes of Bibles and religious tracts,";): inspired " disgust" in men of all classes^ M. Casimer Henricy, one of the officers of the Artem.ise, who " mingled with the natives day and night in their huts," dis- covered that "the missionaries are cordially detested by the pop- ulation. Their insatiable cupidity has made them objects of horror. Ferocious oppressor^, shameless monopolizers, traffick- ing in the Word of God, they have procured for themselves a concert of curses." But they were wearing out the patience both of God and man, and the hour of their humiliation was at hand. An American Protestant writer informs us, in 1854, that when they ventured to confirm their failing dominion by the extreme measure of forcibly expelling the Catholic missionaries, so great was the sympathy in favor of the latter, that " their stay was encouraged by the English and French officials. " And so universal had this feeling now become, even among the better class of Protestants, perhaps because they found their com- mercial pursuits frustrated by the jealousy of the missionaries, who aimed at keeping the whole trade of the islands in their own hands, and after robbing the natives endeavored to ruin their own countrymen, that even the local journals began to espouse the cause of the Catholic victims. In the Protestant Gazette of the Sandwich Islands, of the 29th of June, 1839, the year in which M. Bachelot perished, the following anec- dote is narrated : Two native women being " accused of the crime of Catholicism," one of them was suspended from the branch of a tree, " her toes scarcely touching the ground," the other to a projecting beam of a house, "her feet tied with a * The Sandwich Islands, by Alexander Simpson, Esq., late H. M. Acting Consul, ch. iii., p. 18 (1843). | Ibid. ch. iv., p. 30. t California, by Alexander Forbes, Esq., ch. v., p. 237. Sandwich Island Notes, by A. Haole, p. 55 (1854). MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 531 chain." For eighteen hours they were left in this condition when they were forcibly delivered by some Europeans, in an almost lifeless state. One of these charitable persons had previously gone to inform Bingham, the missionary dictator of Hawaii, of what was taking place. Mr. Bingham, we are told, "came in his coach, but contented himself with observing, that *he would not interfere with the execution of the laws of the country.' In saying this, he put his horses to the trot, and drove off."* Yet Mr. Bingham has written a book, filled with Scripture texts, from Genesis to Revelations, and cele- brating his own exploits, not as a ruler or a merchant, but as a preacher of the Gospel and a minister of Christ. And now let us record the final result of these extraordinary proceedings. In July, 1839, Captain Laplace arrived, and Mr. Bingham and his friends were informed, in accents which they could not mistake, that the Catholic natives of Hawaii had found a protector, strong enough to defend the oppressed and to chastise the oppressor. The patient constancy of thirteen years was now to receive its due reward. "The natives who had been victims of persecution," says Captain Laplace, " and had confessed their faith amidst the most cruel treatment, now manifested the utmost joy." But in the Sandwich Islands, as in the other groups of the South Sea, they w r ere as moderate in the day of triumph as they had been resigned in adversity. When the captain of the frigate Allier resolved to make an example in the island of Futuna, where Father Chanel, a French missionary, since Beatified, had been cruelly murdered, it was Bishop Pompallier who solemnly protested against the threatened vengeance, de- claring that they had no need of human justice, and that they would perish to the last man rather than invoke its aid. And when the ship had departed, her gallant crew more filled with admiration of the missionaries than hatred of their cowardly oppressors, Bishop Pompallier remained among the sanguinary tribe, till he had converted the King of Futuna and the assassin of the blessed Father Chanel, and baptized one hundred and fourteen of his subjects with his own liand.f At the present day, Futuna is said to be not only wholly Christian, but to present the most extraordinary example in the Pacific of com- plete and effectual conversion, in its largest sense4 But it was not the Catholic natives only who were now re- leased from their bonds, and able at length to worship the God of Christians in peace and security ; the Protestants also, profit- * Quoted in the Annals, vol. i., p. 530. j Annals, vol. iv., p. 831. | New Glories of tJie Catholic Ghurch, ch. v., p. 254. 532 CHAPTER VI. ing by the interference of Lord George Paulet and others, threw off the hated yoke of the missionaries, and solaced their long pri- vations by one immense and frantic debauch. They also had a season of joy, but it was the joy of animals, not of Christian con- fessors, who had earned, by patient endurance in trial, the right to sing a canticle of praise and thanksgiving. And now the con- ditions of the conflict which had lasted so long were no longer the same. The missionaries of the Cross went about their work in peace, and Protestants will tell us how they prospered. They were still feeble in all human resources, but upon these they were not accustomed to rely. The Yicar Apostolic of Eastern Oceanica wrote gayly from the Gambier Islands, in 1837, in these words : " During the first years of the mission we lay upon hurdles, and had no other seats than blocks of stone, or trunks of trees. I administered baptism in one of our chapels to eighty persons, and during the ceremony used for my episcopal throne the backbone of a whale."* "The priests are fortunate," he added, "when they can find time to mend their clothes and wash their linen." And six years later, in 1843, when the bishop visited Fathers Chevron and Grange at Tongataboo, " the destitution in which we found them drew tears from our eyes." At Wallis also, " we found Father Bataillon," afterwards bishop, " without hat and without shoes, having only miserable clothes in rags."f And then they embraced, like St. Paul and his fellow-missionaries, and went on their way rejoicing. They had reason to rejoice, for all their desires were accom- plished ; and in bringing this chapter to a close, we will now briefly describe the results which they have already obtained. Let us begin with Honolulu, because it is the principal city of that Hawaiian group which Protestantism had made its own, but in which Catholics had purchased, by patient suffering, the right to a final and undisputed triumph. In 1847, Sir George Simpson, a Protestant writer, and a British official, who had closely watched their operations in other lands, gives this report : '" In addition to being engaged in build- ing a large cathedral, the reverend Fathers kept two schools, * Vol. i., p. 233. f Vol. vi., p. 28. Dr. Sclierzer, noticing " the great resources at the disposal of the Protestant missionaries" in the Pacific, their " dwelling-houses imported ready-made," and their enormous expenditure, exclaims, " What a gratifying contrast to the wretched appliances with which Catholic over-sea missions are compelled to eke out a precarious existence." Voyage of the Novara, vol. ii., ch. xvi., p. 565. " Do not possess gold," was the injunction of our Blessed Lord to the first Christian missionaries, " nor silver, nor money in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, nor two coats, nor shoes, nor a staff." St. Matt. x. 9, 10. The equipment of Protestant missionaries, as Dr. Scherzer remarks, is " in gratifying contrast" with thee-e " wretched appliances." MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 533 which were attended by about nine hundred young people of both sexes, natives and hall-breeds ; and many of the pupils had made great progress in various branches of education, while a few of them spoke French with considerable fluency. The new faith was daily extending its influence among tJie natives, through the untiring zeal of its teachers; but though it was no longer exposed to legal persecution, yet it was still subjected to the rude anathemas, spoken and written, of the Protestant mis- sionaries. We had a good deal of intercourse with the priests, visiting their schools and occasionally attending their chapel, and were, on the whole, strongly prepossessed in their favor."* Perhaps it is due to this generous Protestant to confirm his account by at least a specimen of the language which the baffled missionaries now habitually used. At an earlier period, while they still hoped to banish the Catholic missionaries by violence, they had gravely reported to their employers : " It is matter of devout thankfulness that the islanders are so well prepared for these events by the extensive prevalence of piety among them," though they probably smiled at one another as they wrote it. A little later, they begin to change their tone, and tell their paymasters, " We are unable to measure the disastrous conse- quences which have resulted, and which will continue to flow, from the introduction of" the Catholic missionaries, "and their efforts among this people. We mourn that any of our flocks 4 are so soon turned aside into another gospel,' but this has been permitted by the great Head of the Church for wise and holy purposes." At last they lay aside all restraint. " They have wandered after the Beast," is now their account of the natives who were deserting them in thousands. "As the Man of Sin advances," they say in one of their official reports, "he develops more and more of his real character But his days are numbered: his bounds are fixed; beyond these he cannot pass." If they purchase the temporary return of one or two of their fugitive disciples, they cry out, " They have escaped out of Sodom !" And then these men, fed with the spoils of their un- willing hearers, and whose own religion was perhaps the least attractive caricature of Christianity which the world has ever seen, say of the Catholic Faith, " The spread of this heresy amongst us has a tendency to humble our hearts, "f Sir George Simpson does not appear to have done them any injustice. A little earlier, Mr. Forbes, also a Protestant writer, con- trasting with much animation the two classes of missionaries, whose proceedings he also had diligently and honestly compared * Vol. ii., ch. xii., p. 113. f Missionary Herald, vol. xxxviii., pp. 480-81. 534: CHAPTER VI. in various regions, commends the paternal wisdom of the Catholic pastor, " indulging the innocent foibles and propensi- ties of the natives ;" and then notices " the sour, ascetic Meth- odist, who takes from his own followers," but not from himself, " all their pastimes and pleasures ; but it must be admitted," he adds, " that the contrast in the numerical results of their conversions is no less striking." The Protestant, this traveller says, " takes away the few comforts the poor savage enjoyed and what does he give him in return ? Why, he promises him, that if he lay aside the song and the dance, foregoes all pleasure and mirth, puts on a sour instead of a laughing countenance, attends to the rhapsody of the preacher then he promises, that he may perhaps escape from being damned forever, and avoid passing his eternity amid tire and brimstone prepared for him in the world to come."* And this somewhat grotesque picture, as Dr. Huschenberger allows, " is no sketch of fancy," but an exact image of what met the eye and ear of English and American travellers, wherever they directed their course among the islands of the Pacific. In 1849, we have the testimony of Mr. Walpole, who arrived after the epoch of persecution had come to an end. After describing the Protestant church, he says, " In the town now stands a Roman Catholic cathedral," the building of which Sir George Simpson had marked the rapid progress ; " and I much fear the congregation of the one tends dcvlly more and more to the other. Of the Abbe, who is at the head of the Roman Church here, no eulogy would be too high. Their schools are excellent, and they invite scrutiny They have now about twdve thousand converts / one hundred schools; three thousand pupils. Most earnestly is it to be hoped, that by strict purifi- cation of themselves, and more strenuous exertions towards the natives, the teachers of the pure Gospel will endeavor to regain the ground they have lost."f And now we have heard enough of the Sandwich Islands. Here was the result of thirty years of Protestant effort, and to this bitter humiliation, the scorn and compassion of their own friends, the " teachers of the pure Gospel," as Mr. Wnlpole calls them, had come at last. " In this single island," says a Catholic missionary, and after hearing so many Protestant wit- nesses, we may well claim to listen to one at least of our own, "more than live thousand persons have, within twelve months, forsaken the ways of error to follow those of truth." And then * California, p. 244. f Oh. xi., p. 249. Cf. The Natural History of tJie Varieties of Man, by R. G. Latham, M.D., p. 201. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 535 he speaks, not with anger, but with a kind of gentle compas- sion of his mortified rivals reaping at length the fruits which they had improvidently sown ; and seems almost to pity men who, "after such vast sums had been expended during many years, saw what they used to call their Model-Mission more than half overturned, in so short a time, by a few poor mission- aries, destitute of every thing, and without any other support than the Cross of their Divine Master." And if the evidence of this victim of their cruelty be deemed insufficient, here is their own account, addressed to the missionary society in America, of the same facts. In 1845, they had confessed, "the number of Hawaiians baptized by the Roman priests is twelve thousand five hundred, besides some in a course of preparatory training ;"* and at another date they gave the following details. "In the, districts of Koria and Waimea on Hawaii the Papists number many converts and boast great things. On Kanai the excitement in consequence of the spread of Romanism is considerable. Two priests are there laboring with indefatigable zeal, and we are sorry to say they have a good deal of success. . . . On the Niihau, where there is a population of about one thousand, it is said a considerable number of the people have joined them. On Oahu they number many followers, and in the districts of Waialma, Waianae, and Koolauloa it is thought that nearly one-third of the population have gone after them."f WALLTS AXD GAMBIER ISLANDS. But it was not only in the Society and Sandwich Islands, with whose religious history we are now sufficiently acquainted, that the Catholic missionaries had defended their Master's cause. In the Philippines, as we have seen, they had carried His cross triumphantly through the ranks of Pagan and Ma- hometan legions ; in all the other groups they had used it as a sword to resist the cruelties of mercenary zealots. And every- where the result was the same. From Tahiti, we have been told, they were transported to the savage shores of Wallis Island, where it was hoped they might find an obscure and un- known grave. Yain project ! and cruel as it was vain. In 184-1, Father Bataillon could report, that "out of two thousand three hundred inhabitants which the island of Wallis contains * United States Amencmi Board for Foreign Missions, Reports, p. 186. f Missionary Herald, vol. xxxviii., p. 473. 536 CHAPTER VI. two thousand are already converted." And in the following year his report is in these words. "The bishop, Monseigneur Pompallier, is about to quit ns, after having baptized and con- iirmed all the inhabitants of the island. Glory and benediction be given to the infinite mercy of God ! Thanks be rendered to Mary, our august Queen, to whom, immediately on my arrival in the island, I consecrated it. This island, but lately aban- doned to the most ridiculous superstitions, to the grossest vices, now adores the only true God, the Creator of heaven and earth, and the one only Saviour, Jesus Christ, His Son. The conver- sion of Ouvea is, in my opinion, one of the greatest prodigies of our time. It was, according to the account of everybody, the wickedest island of Oceanica. . . . How great is God in His works ! How do the weakest instruments become strong in His hands ! " In the same year, Father Chevron, whose apostolic destitu- tion forced tears from the eyes of his bishop, says : " A living faith, an ardent charity, extreme delicacy of conscience, and an insatiable avidity for the Word of God, such are the virtues which we see flourishing here. The natives pass half their nights in prayer, in mutual instruction, in the singing of canti- cles, and in reciting the rosary. Their ardor in the exercise of piety is solely the effect of grace." Towards the close of the same year, Father Yiard, afterwards bishop, mentions that sixty natives of Wallis, who had been absent two years, and had been baptized by Protestant mis- sionaries in another island, returned, under the guidance of a chief who was the brother of the king. They were full of malice and calumnies against the Catholic religion, of which they knew only what the Protestant ministers had told them ; but Father Viard adds, "Several of these erring islanders have already been converted." Of the king himself, Father Chevron relates that he said to Bishop Bataillon, "I thank thee for thy affection towards me. I was ignorant. I repulsed thee. I wished to drive thee away. But thou didst love us. Thou hast taken patience ; thou hast suffered much. I thank thee. In say- ing these words large tears filled his eyes. How powerful is grace! Platens est Deus de lapidibus istis suscitare filios Abrahm" At the end of 1861, w r e have the following report by Bishop Bataillon on the islands of Ouvea and Futuna, in which he had just terminated his second arduous visitation of the whole of his vast diocese: "The general state, thank God, is more satis- factory than ever. Paganism is forgotten. Christian customs have been adopted ; the benefits of civilization, without its vices, are progressing slowly and steadily." At Ouvea, after a spirit- ual " Retreat," conducted under the eyes of the bishop, " eighteen MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 537 hundred, which number included every adult on the island, without one exception, received Holy Communion."* In the Gambier Islands equally auspicious results followed the patient labors of the missionaries. A few words will suffice to describe them. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was offered for the first time in this group on the 15th of August, 1834 ; and by the 9th of May, 1835, almost all the inhabitants had been converted and baptized. In 1851, a Protestant writer, a friend of Mr. Pritchard of Tahiti, thus attests, in characteristic language, this surprising fact. " Within the last seven years, three French missionaries, of the Papal persuasion, have estab- lished themselves upon the island of Mangareva; and the control they have contrived to acquire over the simple inhabi- tants must be seen to be believed ; it is so absolute, that their very movements appear to be guided by what the missionaries would think of them."f It was not to be expected that this gentleman should notice, what he probably did not know, that in these islands is wit- nessed one of those marvellous triumphs of religion, which Protestants do not pretend to emulate even at home, much less among savages, and which only the immense power of Divine grace can explain. In 1841, six years after their con- version, these islands had already produced a large number of those peculiar " spouses of Christ," whose glorious privilege it is to be united to Him by a kind of sacramental marriage. "They now amount to fifty-three, and are entirely separated from the rest of the natives. For nearly five years they have continued to live in the most edifying manner. Five schools are kept by them in the great island ; amongst the boarders are all the young girls of the royal family ."J Who will refuse to praise God for such a fact ? the crowning token and evidence of the working of His Holy Spirit. A false religion can indeed produce, at particular epochs, a few simulated "religious," of whom the best always end by becoming Catholics ; while the rest are of that class of whom the great Bishop of Hippo speaks as " hcereticce sanctimoniales" and whom, with all the weight of his great authority, he solemnly charges to bear in mind that "an obedient wife is better than a disobedient virgin. " * Annals, ch. xxiii., p. 350. The bishop adds, "Our fellow-passengers are generally English Protestants, who, far from being disagreeable to us, are, on the contrary, most obliging and courteous." f Rowings in the Pacific, vol. i., ch. XL. p. 284. "In modo che nel 1888 non eravi piii un pagano." Wittman, Storia Unwersale delle Catioliche Mimoni t vol. i., cap. iv., p. 162 (Milano, 1843). \ Annals, ii., 255. In Psal. xlv., torn, iv., p. 564. 538 CHAPTER VI. " I am sure," says the Vicar Apostolic, in a letter to the Superioress of the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Paris, "that }ou would recognize in the greater number of these young persons sufficient obedience and piety to form excellent novices. I know not whether you have amongst your own children any of more grave or modest deportment. We do not seem to attach any importance to their pious assemblies, but we often admire the virtue and angelic purity of these young hearts which have received in baptism a new creation. Of what is not the grace of Jesus Christ capable!" It is not surprising that missionaries who could convert even the pagan savages of the Pacilic into humble and devout re- ligious, capable of choosing Mary's " good part," and of dwell- ing alone, in secrecy and silence, at the feet of Jesus, should find no difficulty in teaching the same class those ecclesiastical principles which the best order of Protestant ministers pro- claim in vain to educated hearers in England and America. A young native of Oahu, who had made some progress in Latin composition, wrote' a letter to the Superior of a religious com- munity in Paris, in which, after contrasting the success of his Catholic teachers with the convulsive but sterile efforts of the Protestants, he added this explanation : "It is because the net of St. Peter is lit to catch the tish. The net of the heretics takes nothing, because Jesus Christ does not assist their fishing, and has not entered their bark."* Such is the reflection of a converted savage on the contrast which only Divine grace could have taught him to appreciate. In the island of Akaman, Father Honore Laval relates that a chief who had heard that a Protestant missionary was coming from another island, informed him how he proposed to deal with the expected emissary: "I will ask him who sent him? If he does not say, l Gregory,' " the Pope who had sent the French missionaries "I will say, Begone, you are no missionary of Jesus Christ. I shall ask him, in the next place, to whom do those children and that woman belong? He will answer, They are mine. Begone, I will say, you are no missionary. Jesus Christ had no wife, and his missionaries have none. We are the children of Peter, and you are only a man like us/'f It is probable that this worthy chief was wholly ignorant of the fact that he was closely following the advice of no less a person than St. Francis of Sales, who, long before the Gambler Islands had been discovered, gave this exhortation from his pulpit: iw O mes freres, tenez cette preuve pour fon dam en tale, et demandez a * Annals, ii., 258. f Annales, tome ix., p. 156. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 539 cenx qui vous veulent retirer du sein de PEglise: Quis te misit?"* 8AMOAN GROUP. The Samoan mission has found a sufficiently candid historian in a gentleman who witnessed its origin, and described, twenty years later, its climax. The first results of Protestant teaching in this group, according to the Itev. George Turner, who writes on the whole with creditable sobriety, were precisely what might be expected from the influence of a purely human religion, which borrows from Christianity only words and names, and offers to its neophytes precepts divorced from doctrines, and doctrines which lose all their power and signifi- cance, because others, with which they are divinely interwoven, are suppressed or denied. The Samoans, or at least a fraction of their number, consented to abandon paganism, but in accept- ing wliat they called the "foreign" religion, claimed the right of subjecting it to indefinite modifications. In this respect they may be said to have become genuine Protestants. " Don't speak to me," was a common retort of the earlier disciples, when the missionaries attempted to restrain their exuberant fancy, " i have got a foreign religion as well as you. Mine is as good as yours. Attend to your own soul, I am attending to rnine."t One of them, who spent a year or two, after his " con- version," on board a whaling-ship, returned to his island with a large accession of the self-esteem which foreign travel some- times creates. " He, too," says Mr. Turner, whose companions were considerably embarrassed by these rival teachers, " must set up his foreign religion. Although further from the truth than ever, this fellow got a surprising number of adherents." After a while they professed to have our Lord among them, "dwelling in the body of an old woman," and by other blas- phemous absurdities did credit to their profession of Protest- antism. And so incapable was the feeble religion of which Mr. Turner appears to have been the chief exponent of exor- cising the fantastic spirit's which it had awakened to activity, that twenty years later, by his own confession, their power still baffled his art. "To this day" he says, after receiving Protestant counsels for a quarter of a century, " some of the people are still led on, by native religious pretenders, into all * Sermon pour le Dimanche de la Septuagesime, (Euvres, tome ii., p. 56. f Nineteen Years in Polynesia^ by the Kev. George Turner, of the London Missionary Society, ch. xi., p. 109. 640 CHAPTER VI. sorts of extravagances and absurdities, the blind literally lead ing the blind." It is impossible to read the volume published by this gentle- man, without seeing, on the one hand, abundant tokens of amiable feeling and benevolent intention, and on the other, undesigned evidence of the incapacity of such human graces to effect the conquest of souls. It is enough to refer to his own candid summary, in .1861, of the results actually accomplished, after twenty years of unceasing effort and immense expenditure. Ten Protestant missionaries, working simultaneously, with unlimited material resources, and aided by an army of two hundred and thirty-one "native teachers or assistants," whose services they were rich enough to recompense, schools estab- lished in every district, with solid inducements to invite attend- ance, and other institutions created by the lavish contributions which constantly flowed in from English sources, such was the machinery employed during tw ? enty successive years for christianizing the Samoan islanders. And this, according to Mr. Turner's own account, was the final result. Out of a gross population of sixty -five thousand five hundred souls, forty-five thousand seven hundred and fifty-seven were still avowed pagans ! While of the rest, who professed different modifica- tions of the " foreign" religion, including " all sorts of extrava- gances and absurdities," this missionary adds, " of these there are six hundred and forty-five church members !"* We should like to ask this candid witness, who gives such a narrative of his own work, and would be sure to speak truth- fully of that of others, whether he ever met a Catholic convert in Polynesia who had invented a religion for himself, or who undertook to teach his teachers ? and whether he knows a sin- gle island, evangelized by Catholic missionaries, in which, after the toil of twenty years, there remain ninety-nine hundredths of the population unconverted? FIGIAN GROUP. In the Figian Islands, of which the proposed cession to the Crown of England has lately excited some interest, missionary operations were commenced by the Wesley ans in 1822. After the labor of forty years, and an expenditure of eighty thousand pounds, Colonel Smythe reported officially to the Colonial Secre- tary, in 1861, that " of the native population, less than one-third * Nineteen Tears in Polynesia, by the Rev. George Turner, of the London Missionary Society, ch. xi., p. 106 ; cli. xxxv., p. 533. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 541 profess the Christian religion ; among the remainder cannibal- ism, strangulation of widows, infanticide, and other enormities, prevail to a frightful extent." Of the nominal converts, it is not easy to form any exact es- timate. Mr. Berth old Seemann, a warm advocate of the mis- sionaries, speaks in general terms of their " success," but does riot quote a single fact, beyond the partial abandonment of bar- barous customs and occasional attendance at chapel, which can be taken to prove it. On the contrary, while he notices that "many of the most efficient teachers employed by the mission- aries are Tonguese," natives of Tonga, he adds that, u their conduct has often been in direct contradiction to their profession of Christianity." He heard one of the most active of their number preach, and observes: " It would have been hardly pos- sible to preach a more impracticable sermon, or exhibit worse taste or less discretion." Yet this man was what he calls an " accredited" Protestant missionary. The chief, Ritova, Mr. Seemann says, "had evidently sought to arrive at some solution respecting the conflicting views rival denominations presented to him," but had not yet found it. The population of Kadaou, he relates, "have nominally become Christians," and this seems to be what he understands by " success." The people of Buretu, he adds, " embraced Christianity, but when at a subsequent date the town rebelled against Ban," the capital of Figi, "they became apostates ; nor did the restoration of peace make them relinquish their pagan religion, and they had, at the time of our visit, one of the finest temples in the whole group." Kuruduada, " the great chief of Navua," though he rather favored than op- posed Christianity, told Mr. Seemann that " there were very few true Christians in the group, and he hated hypocrisy." Finally, after describing the total failure of the Protestants at Rotuma, and the apostasy of their few disciples, he adds, "The French have been more successful in the neighboring island of Fotuna, where the Roman Catholic priests established a flourishing mission. On the whole, we seem to encounter in this group the usual facts, immense cost, and superficial success ; and while Mr. Seemann notices that the Wesleyan Missionary Society derive a revenue of one thousand two hundred pounds a year from the sale of cocoa-nut oil, he adds the characteristic statement, that "Mr. Binner, Wesleyan training-master, owns large tracts of land, and a great many small islands."* * Viti : an Account of a Government Mission to the Figian Islands, by Bei* thold Seemann, Ph. D., F.L.S., F.R.G.S., cli. ii., p. 35 ; ch. vi., p. 105 ; ch. viii, p. 185 ; ch. xv., p. 266 ; ch. xx., p. 411 ; app., pp. 422-428. 64:2 CHAPTER VI. OTHER ISLAND GROUPS. We have almost completed our history, in which there is no variation from the first to the last page. In the Marquesas, Dr. Russell confessed, in 1843, that every Protestant effort had ended in utter failure; and Mr. Melville repeats, in 1846, " The Protestant missions appear to have despaired of reclaim- ing these islands from heathenism." Of the Church of England mission to the Falkland Isles Mr. Parker Snow says, in 1857, after a fruitless expenditure of ten thousand pounds, " I could not shut my eyes to the fact that the mission was a failure."* And this gentleman, who was a principal agent of the mission, was compelled, by his own ob- servation, to conclude that u the w r hole missionary work seems to be a strange compound of piety and irreligion. f At Nukahiva, where Dr. Coulter found three American mis- sionaries in 1844, " the insults of the natives were scarcely en- durable, and I was afterwards told that they were obliged to leave it."f At Upolu, in the Navigator Islands, Mr. D'Ewes, after noticing the absence of Protestants, describes " the Catholic cathedral with a large establishment and school attached to it that appeared to be well attended. " The London Missionary Society, however, inform their sub- scribers, in 1862, that the only real Catholic converts are those u who wish to belong to a religion that does not forbid certain wicked practices which they like, and a few proud, wicked chiefs, who wish to distinguish themselves as the leaders of a party." On the other hand, their intelligent missionary in- forms them that he is progressing as follows : " I have talked within the last few weeks with no less than ninety-two can- didates. What a glorious harvest of souls, if they were all truly ^converted to God ! But, alas ! very many of them have been dismissed with a sigh, mingled with a hope that they will increase in Scriptural knowledge." Another missionary gives this report, in 1862, of Tutuila, an island in the same group : u Some few additions have been made to the churches, and also to the classes of inquirers ; but * Two Tears' Cruise off Tierra del Fuego, vol. i., ch. xviii., p. 271. f See Patagonian Missionary Society, p, 8. % Adventures in the Pacific, by John Coulter, M.D., ch. xv., p. 242 (1846), China, &c., ch. vi., p. 170. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 543 amongst the Church members generally there has been a man- ifest lack of spiritual life and vigor."* In the Solomon Islands, where Bishop Epalle was martyred on the 16th of December, 1845, we might trace the same facts ; and so well was the invariable contrast between the two classes of missionaries understood, even by American Protestants, that Captain Porter, who visited Madison's Island, where he char- itably endeavored to " explain to the natives the nature of the Christian religion," frankly says, " Had a Catholic priest been with me at the moment, he might have made converts of every individual in the valley. "f In the great island of Madagascar, where Protestantism was represented by Mr. Ellis, the reports furnished by that gentle- man rival the most elaborate fictions of missionary literature. It is true that he does not cite a solitary witness of his triumphs, which are attested by no testimony but his own complacent narrative. At length we are able to appreciate the accuracy of his story. " He boasted everywhere," says a well-known German traveller, in 1861, who fortunately visited Madagascar, and obtained the admission to the royal presence which Mr. Ellis ardently coveted, "of the favorable reception he had met with. . . . This favor was so great, in fact, that after a stay of scarcely four weeks at Tananariva, he received a peremptory order to depart" In vain he humbly remonstrated, urging piteously that " the fever season was not yet passed." Neither this nor any other plea availed, and the triumphant missionary hastened to England, to write a history of his victories in Mad- agascar, and to raise fresh subscriptions. At home Mr. Ellis was as successful as gentlemen who possess his intimate knowl- edge of the English character usually are. But in Madagas- car he and his companions appear to have left an evil reputa- tion behind them. "The English," says the same capable witness, " had made themselves so hateful, not only to liadama, but to the people, that every thing false and mendacious used to be called 'English: "J In 1862, the society which employed Mr. Ellis, and profited by his eloquence, seem to have comprehended that future rev- elations might contrast unpleasantly with their jubilant reports.. and that it would be prudent to qualify their too-confident pre- dictions. They announce, therefore, for the first time, that their prospects, " though bright and cheering, are not cloudless." And then they unfold the nature of their apprehensions, * London Missionary Society's Report, p. 55. ruise to the Pacific Ocean in the U. 8. Frigate Essex, vol. ii., ch. xv., p. t Cr The Last Travels of Ida Pfeiffer, pp. 132, 230 (18G1). 544 CHAPTER VI. " Already both Popery and infidelity are there and active ; and no opportunity will be lost of misrepresenting and withstanding the teachers of God's pure truth" that ^, the agents of the London Missionary Society. "Let us then," they continue, " make the Christians of Madagascar the special subject of our earnest prayer, that He, ' who holdeth the seven stars in His right hand, and walketh in the midst of the seven golden can- dlesticks,' may preserve their light pure and glorious amidst the superstitions of Antichrist and the darkness of heathenism."* It is not impossible that the writer of this well-turned phrase may have heard that the most confidential counsellors of Radama at this moment are the Catholic missionaries, that he is himself their most fervent disciple, and that he has lately addressed a letter to the Sovereign Pontiff, soliciting his apostolic benedic- tion for himself and his people. The island of Borneo must not be altogether omitted, because it is represented, apparently with truth, as an exception to the general success of Catholic missions. Our only witness is an official writer, Mr. Spencer St. John. " Signor Cuarteron," he relates, who supplied and controlled the mission funds, " was totally unfit to conduct so important an undertaking." Yet the missionaries who consented to labor under such a president were evidently, by Mr. St. John's own account, workmen of the usual class. The eldest, Father Reyna, he says, " was one of those remarkable men occasionally found among the mis- sionaries of the Romish Church, of the most pleasing manners, winning address, and acute mind, and yet he was sent with four companions to New Guinea, where three of them were killed and eaten by the inhabitants, while he escaped in shat- tered health to die shortly afterwards." Such men would have probably labored with more success, if they had remained in Borneo. On the other hand, here is Mr. St. John's account of the Protestant missionaries in the same island, with whom he was connected by the strongest ties of friendship and sympathy. Every temporal and political advantage, he frankly confesses, was on their side. "The missionary is heartily welcomed at every station" by the government officials, and " the very fact that many of the missionaries have accompanied the govern- ment officers on their official tours has not been lost on these tribes." In spite of these customary advantages, here is their history as narrated by Mr. St. John. "Ten missionaries out of fourteen have abandoned their duties iu Borneo !" Mr. St. John cannot explain this singular exodus. * Report of tlie London Missiona^ Society, p. 46. MISSIONS IN OCEANICA. 545 " Of all the officers in the Sarawak government service," he observes, " who have been employed there during the last four- teen years, I only know of one who has abandoned his position, and that one under peculiar circumstances ; while, as I have said, five-sevenths of the missionaries have left their posts, though their work is not harder, certainly not nearly so dan- gerous, as that of the officers, and is as well paid." Of one who remained, and who seems to have been his personal friend, he speaks warmly, for the zeal and judgment which he displayed in dealing with the natives ; but, he adds, " that his teaching has made any marked difference in their conduct I do not suppose," and that but for his "little success," with all the government authorities to back him, " we should have to pronounce the Borneo mission a complete failure."* Lastly, even a secretary of the London Missionary Society confesses of another island, far distant from Borneo, " "With regard to Mauritius, the only party increasing rapidly is the Roman Catholic. "f The facts, then, are everywhere the same, and everywhere there is a Protestant witness to reveal them. CONCLUSION. We have now examined with sufficient, perhaps with exces- sive minuteness, the history of missions in Oceanica. Upon that history we need offer no comment. Protestant writers have sufficiently performed that task, and have even accepted, at least in part, some of the practical conclusions which it suggests. It is from them we have learned both the virtues of the Catholic missionaries, and the vices of their rivals, the constancy displayed by the converts of the first, and the im- morality and misery of the nominal disciples of the last. As early as 1843, Mr. Jarves, the anti-Catholic historian of the Sandwich Islands, was already lamenting that " from present appearances it is to be presumed that Roman Catholicism will eventually settle into a flourishing sect." Mr. Olmsted, a gra- ver but equally prejudiced writer, had also told his American readers, that the Catholic missionaries had " gained a perma- nent tooting upon many of the islands of the Pacific ;" and had added, with unconcealed regret, his own opinion, that " their * Life in the Forests of the Far East, by Spenser St. John, F.R.G.S., &c., &c. vol. i.. ch. i., p. 21 ; vol. ii., ch. xiv., pp. 8G9, 375 (1862). f Tour in & Africa, by J. J. Freeman, ch. xvi., p. 387. 546 CHAPTER VI. religion is destined to have the ascendency in most of these islands." We have seen how these anticipations were gradually accom- plished, throughout all the islands of the South Sea, in spite of persecutions prolonged through many years, and of cruelties which would have been more consistent in Chinese mandarins than in Protestant ministers. " It is not difficult to see," ob- serves Mr. Hopkins in 1862, " that the Roman Catholic Church, with its open doors, free sittings, daily mass and vespers, its corps of teaching and visiting nuns, its sacramental system, its worship addressed to the mind and heart through the eye and ear, as well as by the word to the understanding, . . has strongly enlisted the almost vacant native faculties."* The whole narrative is now before us, from that great "manifestation of pious zeal" which was displayed in the voyage of the ship Duff, whose passengers, w r e have been told, exhibited religion " in her native purity," to the death of the Abbe Bachelot, and the final humiliation of his assassins. " From exclusive missionary influence," says Mr. Hopkins, under which they so long groaned, " the Hawaiian nation has escaped." The inhabitants of other groups, we have seen, have finally cast off the same control. The reign of missionary dictators, who could only make Christianity hateful, is over, and the earthly weapons which they wielded have broken to pieces in their hands. With the past, then, thanks to the candid histories of Prot- estant travellers, we are sufficiently acquainted ; and if we de- sire to look into the future, the actors in these varied scenes are themselves willing to assist us in the attempt. It is a Protestant missionary who assures us, in language worthy of himself and his cause, that " the natives of the South Sea Islands appear to be a people upon whom the Mother of Har- lots" that is, the Catholic Church " shall operate for the' purposes of superstition and error. r f It is thus that he con- fesses the unwelcome fact, which even he can no longer deny, that the battle is over and the victory won. And then this Protestant witness adds, in words with which we may more fitly close this instructive history than by any observation of our own, that as he and his companions failed to convert the natives while they were heathen, their only remaining hope is to corrupt them now that they are Christians. He admits indeed that this will be considerably more difficult, and does not affect to be sanguine of success ; but he is willing at least to reveal the * Hawaii, &c., ch. xxiv., p. 387. f Friendly and Feejee Islands, p. 133. MISSIONS IN OCKANICA. 547 final issue of Protestant missions in Oceanica, and the real character of those who took part in them, in these notable terms : " Unless we bestir ourselves, the probability is, that we shall have to convert many of the South Sea Islanders from Popery, instead of from Heathenism, which is much more dif- ficult and dangerous." CHAPTEK VII. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. MORE than a thousand years after the Roman Empire had passed away, the land of Africa a name which once included only the provinces of Tunis and Tripoli was still to the inhabitants of Europe only the narrow but fertile region which stretched from Egypt to Morocco. Of the vast continent which extended in an unbroken line nearly five thousand miles towards the south, far away beyond the Atlas mountains, beyond the Great Desert, beyond the sources of the Nile, the Niger, and the Senegal, Europe had no knowledge. And when, at length, in the fifteenth century of our era, the mariners of Portugal weathered with slow and hesitating course the capes which had barred the way to all former navigators ; planted colonies on the banks of the Eio Grande and the Gambia ; won for their king the new title of "Lord of Guinea;" established their apostolic missionaries in the heart of Congo ; and finally, under the guidance of Bartholomew Diaz, gazed with wonder and awe on the u Stormy Cape," which from that moment became to all Europe the " Cape of Good Hope ;" even the boldest would hardly have ventured to predict that the flag of Portugal would soon be carried past it in triumph by Yasco de Gama, on his return from the Indies, in the last year of the fifteenth century. It is of this land, of which every bay, and gulf, and promontory have since become familiar to us, that we are now to speak. In attempting, however, to trace the outline of the history of missions in this vast continent, we encounter for the first time a difficulty from which there is no escape. In the narrative which we have now to present, there can be neither unity nor connection, because there is none in the regions to which it refers. The four extremities of Africa, corresponding with the cardinal points, have been hitherto as completely isolated from one another, as though the united waters of the Atlantic and MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 549 Pacific were spread between them. Egypt is almost as effec- tually separated from Guinea, Morocco from Abyssinia, Tunis from Kaffraria, Angola from Natal, as though the Andes had been piled on the Himalayas to part them asunder. It is not one nation or people of which we have now to speak, but many ; distinct in their origin, their history, and their customs. In one respect only they seem to have a common destiny. When the prophet of old proclaimed the curse of the Avenger upon Egypt and Ethiopia ; when he said to the first, " I will deliver Egypt into the hand of cruel masters,"* and to the second, " Woe to the land which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia ;"f the malediction was not for a time, but for ages and genera- tions, mighty enough to overleap the frontiers of many lands, and to run like a consuming fire through all the wide plains of Africa, from the Red Sea to the Atlantic, and from the mouths of the Nile to the Indian Ocean. And so enduring, as it seems, has been this ancient curse thougji we are sure it has changed its character since the coming of the Redeemer that even at the present hour it appears a kind of paradox to speak of re- ligion in connection with Africa, as palpable as if we were to search for the snows of the Caucasus, or the cool streams which they discharge, in the burning sands of the Sahara ; so that we are almost tempted to turn away with doubt and fear from any inquiry into the religious annals of a land whose history seems to be summed up in this one fact that it is still, after a thou- sand years, the home of the Moor, the Negro, and the Kaffir. Yet even here we shall trace once more the contrast which it is our purpose to illustrate in all lands ; even here we shall see, as we have seen elsewhere, the unchanging beauty and power of the Church, the feebleness and confusion of the Sects ; even here we shall learn what mariner of men they are, and what they can accomplish, who bear a Divine commission ; and, also, what comes of pretending to do an apostle's work without an apostle's vocation. MOROCCO. Let us begin with the northern provinces Algiers and Morocco, the Numidia and Mauritania of the Romans; Tunis and Tripoli, the Africa Propria, whence Carthage sent forth her fleets against the mistress of the world ; and Egypt, where even now the promise begins to be fulfilled which said of old, " In that day there shall be an altar of the Lord in the land of * Isaias xix. 4. f xviii. 1. 650 CHAPTER VII. Egypt." A few words, however, must suffice, for we have hereafter to pursue our way round all the long coasts of Afri- ca ; and it is not here that the Cross has won its accustomed triumphs, nor the Church her wonted victories, though here St. Augustine preached, and St. Louis died. " With St. Aus- tin," says a modern writer, "the Church of Africa expired."* Already, in the third century, schism and heresy, sure precur- sors of final apostasy, had spread like a plague along the southern shores of the Mediterranean ; till in the sixth, the avenging hordes came out of Arabia which in the fifteenth were to vanquish the last Constantine in the capital of the Western Empire, and barbarism swept away in a common de- struction both religion and civilization. It would be beside our purpose to offer even a sketch of the earlier history of these ill-fated provinces. Corrupted almost from the beginning by heresiarchs of every school, at one time overrun by Donatists ; at another convulsed by the Arian ex- cesses ; or cruelly scourged by the Vandal kings, with whom the Donatists leagued themselves out of hatred to the Church ;f or yet more grievously chastised by the Arab inundation under the Caliph Omar in 547, till one hundred and fifty years later the Roman name was finally effaced from Africa, and the Moors embraced the religion of their Arab conquerors, these unhap- py lands are still paying the penalty of guilt not yet absolved ; and, even at the present hour, with the exception of a single region, are the special field of that "great and momentous struggle between Islamism and Paganism":): of which Africa has been the most remarkable theatre during nearly a thousand years. If, however, the provinces of North Africa have not yet been reconverted from the Mahometan apostasy, it has not been for want either of apostles or martyrs. Thirty-nine houses of Trinitarians were founded in England in the twelfth century, whose members were bound by vow u to gather and carry alms into Barbary for the redemption of slaves." In the single year 1261, more than two hundred Franciscans were martyred by the Mussulmans ; and not long after, as if this were an incomplete sacrifice, one hundred and ninety Dominicans received from the same hands the baptism of blood. || We. may not stay to relate their history. They knew what destiny awaited them; yet from Lyons and Genoa, from Rome and Naples, they hurried to * L'Afrique Chretienne, par. M. Jean Yanoski, p. 45. f JEKstoire de la Domination des Vandales en Afrique, par Yanoski, p. 85 Earth, Travels in Africa, preface, p. 22. The Pillars of Hercules, by David Urqukart, Esq., M.P., ch. ii., p. 286. Henrion, tome i, en. vi., p. 81. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 551 the battle-field, content to shed their blood that others might one day gain the victory, of which that blood was to be the price. Forty years earlier, in 1219, St. Francis of Assisi left Ancona on the same errand ; but though even the ferocious Moslem bowed in reverence before him, and declared that "God alone could have formed such a man" he gained admirers only and not disciples ; and at length was forced to admit, in spite of the charity which filled tyis soul, that their hour was not yet come, and to speak to his fellow-laborers those memorable words, " Away from this place ; let us fly ; let us fly far from these too humane barbarians, whom we can neither compel to adore our Master, nor to persecute us who are His servants."* Yet Africa was not abandoned by Christian charity, ever as ingenious in repairing defeats as patient in enduring them. In 1630, the Franciscan John de Prado, still honored as the Eatron of Tangier, sealed with his blood the new mission which e had founded, and of which a living writer observes, " There is nothing more sorrowful, from the beginning to the end, than the history of this mission, perpetually destroyed, yet perpetu- ally springing up again from the ashes of the martyrs."f In 1646, the institute of the Lazarist Fathers, who are now scat- tered through the whole East, from the banks of the Nile to those of the Yellow Sea, was founded by St. Vincent of Paul. Other religious societies had preceded it, and it was to the Fathers of the Order of Mercy that the captive Cervantes, while planning in his dungeon the liberation of twenty -five thousand Christian prisoners, owed his own redemption from the Moors. if But of all the missionary communities which have chosen Africa for the field of their labors, none have surpassed the children of St. Vincent ; who, as Count St. Marie relates in 1845, not only " rendered important services to commerce, but many of them acquired great influence with the Deys, who often ap- pealed to them for counsel in questions of difficulty. Their influence has protected the Christians from much misery." And another Algerian authority notices the still more striking fact, that when France, in a moment of delirium, cast out the family of one of her noblest sons, Tunis afforded them protec- tion and succor. " The venerable establishment founded by St. Vincent of Paul," says Baron Baude, " received protection from the Divan when, in an access of stupid impiety, the Con- vention destroyed it. A Catholic church was consecrated at * " Les Maures sont les homines les plus doux de la Barbaric." Alger, par M. P. Rozet, p. 9. f Le Maroc, par M. Godard, p. 16. % Algeria, Past and Present, by J. H. Blofeld, Esq., p. 297. Algeria in 1845, by Count St. Marie, ch. v., p. 185 ; English edition. 552 CHAPTER VII. Tunis, and the ministers of the Dey contributed sixteen thou- sand piastres towards its construction."* Even in Morocco, it was not till the year 1822 that the Franciscans were finally restricted by the Sultan to Tangier, and that the Catholic Church ceased to be represented through- out the empire, except by a single religious of the province of San Diego in Andalusia. "The revolutionary follies from which Spain has failed to preserve herself have caused this re- sult," says a French missionary, filled with the generous ardor of his order and nation : " and if the province of San Diego has no longer strength to cultivate the heritage of its fathers, more energetic workmen will receive from tlie Holy See its abandoned patrimony. "f But we must revert for a moment, before we consider the actual state of religion in North Africa, to an earlier epoch. The story of the combats of the children of St. Dominic and St. Francis, by whose blood the sterile soil of Africa was so often moistened, and to whom its future conversion will be mainly due, need not be recounted here. Whatever divine char- ity could inspire, or superhuman valor attempt, was dared by men who were so little discouraged by what seemed perpetual failure, that it was the sure promise of tribulation which most powerfully attracted them to this thankless land. Some were captured even before they could touch its shores ; others fell almost within sight of the vessel which they had scarcely quitted ; while the rest carried hope and consolation to many a captive whose bonds they lightened by sharing them, or wasted away in dungeons which their presence converted into sanc- tuaries. And the toils of these victims were not in vain, though the Moslem thought their defeat final, and the world deemed their work madness. The Church will yet reap the harvest of which they planted the seed. It is to what they did while on earth, and perhaps still more to what they have done since they quitted it, that we may attribute the blight which has now fallen upon Islamism, once so arrogant and mighty, and the ignominy and decrepitude in which the mortal enemy of the Cross is pining away before the eyes of Christendom, no longer united, in arms or in faith, against the common foe. The dead have won the victory of which the living are to gather the spoils. And already, as we shall see more fully when we enter the lands which lie to the east of the Nile, the blood of the martyrs is yielding its accustomed fruit. If St. Francis fled away from * L'Algerie, par le Baron Baude, ex-Commissaire du Roi en Afrique, tome ii., p. 363. f Le Maroc, p. 18. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 553 a people who offered to himself the homage which they re- fused to his Master, the children of St. Francis have at this clay altars at Jerusalem, at Bethlehem, at Nazareth, " wherever the history of the redemption has left a memorial." This has been their reward. And {he same recompense another saint seems to have won for North Africa. When St. Louis lay on his bed of ashes, assisted in his last moments by the Bishop of Tunis, and exclaiming with his latest breath, "For the love of God let ns obtain the preaching of the Gospel in Tunis ;" in that hour, as a Christian writer of our own age observes, " he obtained for France the privilege of one day regenerating Africa."* Let us see how far France has fulfilled her mission, *and with what prospects of future success. ALGERIA AND TUNIS. Once more we shall be able to refer, as in former chapters, to Protestant writers, whom Providence seems everywhere to employ to this end ; and our first witness is an eminent clergy- man of the Established Church, widely known amongst his countrymen as an able and learned writer. This gentleman will inform us, with the candor which might be expected in so distinguished a person, that the Church still produces in the nineteenth century exactly the same class of evangelists whom St. Augustine led in the fifth and St. Francis in the thirteenth. Of the See of Algiers, and its two first occupants, Mr. Blakesley speaks in the following terms: "The See has since its constitution been filled by prelates of great zeal and intel- ligence, and the influence of the clergy has done much towards improving the character of the European part of the popula- tion." Their first efforts were directed, as charity required, to the amelioration of that vagabond class of soldiers and adven- turers who swarmed in Algeria from the earliest period of the invasion, and whose coarse immoralities were a scandal even to the natives ; so that the Kabyles, as Colonel Walmsley notices, were accustomed to say of the French, " they do not follow the doctrines which they profess. "f They might well say it, considering the character which even French writers have given both of the military and civil colonists of Algeria. Not only the common soldiers, by their boastful impiety, have too often shocked both the Moor and the Arab; but even amongst the officers, as Count St. Marie * Baron Henri on. f Sketctie* of Algeria, by H. M. Walmsley, p. 138 (1858). 554 CHAPTER VII. relates, "there are few examples of honorable conduct" If France has done more than any modern nation to promote the glory of God, she has also done more to outrage it. " Since your religion is so noble and beneficent," said Abd-el-Kader to the Vicar-general of Algiers, u why do not the French observe it?"* And the answer which some of them have made to this reproach is a cynical jest, such as the following: "Depuis Teveque et le procureur-general," says M. Pellissier, "jusqu'au sacristain et an garde champetre, on pourrait a la rigueur se passer de tout en Algerie, mais on ne saurait se passer de l>armee."t , It was with the embarrassments resulting from the profane- ness of his own countrymen that the first bishop of Algiers had to contend, and amongst his greatest difficulties his successor still reckons u des discours d'une infernale perversite tenus aux indigenes.";): So notorious was the misconduct of the French soldiery, and especially of their officers, that the Shereef Kebir, who had fought them, said to Mr. Richardson, "The French are a people without religion, or faith in their words and prom- ises,'^ so easy is it for one immoral and unbelieving class to compromise a whole nation, and to neutralize the labors of apostolic men, whose teaching is frustrated by their impiety, and whose example is nullified by their vices. It was in the hope of applying some remedy to these evils, that Marshal Bugeaud commanded the attendance of the troops at public worship, "to secure the respect of the Arabs;"] but the influ- ence of this eminent person seems to have been exerted in vain, since an English traveller informs us, in 1860, that he actually heard General Desvaux deliver an address at Tuggurt, from the pulpit of a mosque, in which he exhorted his hearers to " re- turn thanks to God and the Prophet for the blessings which France has brought you."T It is fair to add, that French sol- diers do not always perform so scandalous a mission.- Even the civil administration, infected by the spurious lib- eralism of the age, and adopting the maxims of government which modern statesmen have consented to borro\v from Prot- estant sources, has often been openly hostile to the progress of religion. The Sisters of Charity were ordered to remove the crucifix from their hospitals, a command which they refused to obey, lest the sensitive conscience of the Arab should be * Annals. \ La Colonisation Militaire en Algerie, par E. Pellissier, p. 18. J Lettre Pastorale de Monseigneur Pavy ; Orateurs Sacres, tome Ixxxiv., p. 1082 ; Ed. Migne. Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa, vol. ii., ch. xiii., p. 229 (1853). } Urquhart, Pillars of Hercules, ch. vi., p. 98. TT TJie Great SaJiara, by H. B. Tristram, M.A., &c., ch. xix., p. 326. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 555 wounded ! and a formal censure was addressed by the Minister of War to the Bishop of Algiers, in 1846, for not repressing efficaciously the " proselytizing schemes" of the Sisters,* which consisted in recommending their dying patients to have a care for their souls. As late as 1850, the celebrated Pere de Ravignan presented a memorial to the minister, in which he solicited liberty to preach the Gospel to the Arabs, and the petition appears to have received no reply, f It was in the midst of such discouragements that the first Algerian prelate commenced his formidable mission ; while two priests in Algiers, one at Oran, and another at Bone, comprised in 1839, as Mr. Blakesley remarks, " the whole of the ecclesi- astical establishment in the French possessions of North Africa." Within seven years, however, the bishop, Mgr. Dupuch, " had established, almost entirely at his own cost and that of his friends, forty-seven churches and chapels, and forty almonries, hospitals, prisons, penitentiaries, and other in- stitutions, which employed thirty-nine regular and three super- numerary priests, besides a large number of Sisters of Charity." A French authority observes that, by the year 1846, he had ninety-one priests, sixty churches, and one hundred and forty Sisters of various orders.^ Such were the works of the first Bishop of Algiers, of whom the great leader of the Arabs, even when flying from the French arms, said to the Abbe Suchet, " I know all that he has done for Algeria, and have a great veneration for his person. " So universal is the admission both of his private virtues and of the success of his labors, that M. St. Marc Girardin could say, with general approval, " Of all our establishments in Algiers, the strongest and most efficacious is the bishopric."! " M. Pavy, the successor of M. Dupuch, carried on the work which the other had begun with no less tact than vigor, and so far as French power -is consolidated in Northern Africa, it is mainly due to the moral influence of the clergy." And then Mr. Blakesley, a witness as capable as he is truthful, describes, as far as a stranger could, by what process that influence was acquired. " They operate upon the natives, not by formal attacks upon their creed, but by those works of charity which * La Colonisation de I'Algerie, par Louis de Baudicour, ch. vii., p. 265 (1856). f Vie du R. P. Xamer de Ravignan, par le P. A. Ponlevoy, tome ii., p. 160. " J'ai tenu en mes mains, j'ai copie, et je pourrais produire un rapport oft Ton demande enfin au gouvernernent de proteger les malades centre le zele fana- tique du pr6tre qui les tue." Les Fran$ais en Algerie, par Louis Veuillot ; ch. xix., p. 267 (1845). \ Nistoire de la Conquete d'Alger, par M. Alfred Nettement, p. 624. | Annals. \ Quoted by the Rev. Thomas Debary, The Canary Isles, &c., ch xxiv., p. 301. 556 CHAPTER VII. are common to Christianity and Islam, and which more than any other religious act are appreciated by the votaries of the latter. The hospitals especially, into which the Moslem popu- lation is freely admitted, and the service of which is, in many cases, performed by females of one or other of the religious orders, exercise a powerful influence, and most deservedly so, over the conquered race. I visited one of these the civil hospital at Oran and was exceedingly struck with the appear- ance of cleanliness, order, comfort, and even cheerfulness, which reigned throughout. The calm demeanor of the Sisters seemed to be felt like a sunbeam in the chamber of death. There was no sourness of look, no parade of self-devotion, no expression of the least wish for any thing but more ample space to enable them to receive all the patients that offered. I talked of the unhealthiness of the summer season, when the wards would be full of fever patients ; but I could not elicit a word implying that they themselves would then be exposed to greater risk, or compelled to greater labor. The Apostle's exhortation to let works of mercy be done with cheerfulness came forcibly into my mind, when I thought of the conventional unction in which the philanthropists of London platforms are wont to indulge."* Other Catholic institutions receive from Mr. Blakesley equal- ly generous notice, and especially the orphan asylums origin- ated by Pere Brumault, of the Society of Jesus, and conducted with the most auspicious results, in spite of the vexatious meddling of the administration, which tried to extort from him a pledge that he would not convert the orphans to Christianity! The Marechal Bugeaud, to whom he appealed, decided that as he was the real father of the poor outcasts, he had a right to do as he pleased " with his own children ."f In 1850, he had two hundred and seventy orphans under his charge ; in 1855, they had increased to four hundred and ninety. Finally, Mr. Blakesley observes that in the first fifteen years of the French occupation, in spite of the decay of noble tradi- tions once dear to the heart of France, the civil administration, learning wisdom from experience, had provided thirty-seven new churches, " independently of others due to private efforts," and that within the same brief period the ecclesiastical estab- lishment had increased to four vicars-general and about one hundred priests, a number since largely increased. Thus far France has proved that she is not unequal to the mission which Providence has imposed upon her. A century of revolutions may have changed her who once rejoiced to be " the most Christian" nation, too many of her sons may have * Four Months in Algeria, pp. 43-48. f De Baudicour, ch. vii., p. 292. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 557 embraced the impious maxims of a shallow and inept philosophy even her soldiers, throwing away the banner of the Cross under which their fathers fought, may have proved that the same men can be physically brave and morally cowards, can face with a smile the assault of an enemy while they meanly cringe before the sarcasm of a comrade ; but France is still mighty to atone for the crimes of her apostate children, still rich enough in the treasures of grace and wisdom to supply the demand which daily reaches her from every land for evangelical laborers ; and here is one more proof of her inexhaustible strength, one more company of that incomparable phalanx which she offers, even in the nineteenth century, for the service of the Church. " On the spot where the battle of Staoueli was fought and won by the French," says a recent English writer, " a large convent now stands," fit memorial of a victory which gave to North Africa the first promise of Christianity and civiliza- tion. That convent and its inmates are thus described in 1857 by another witness, an Anglican clergyman, candid enough to avow the impressions which they produced on a heart suffi- ciently delicate and refined to appreciate them. "The establish- ment at Staoueli," says the Rev. Mr. Davies, " is remarkable enough in its features to require no surreptitious aid to render it an object of the deepest interest to every thinking mind, and it is impossible for any one to visit it without pleasure and ad- vantage to himself." Mr. Davies was admitted into the chapel of the convent, and thus describes what he saw : " Never was devotion more fervid and fixed than theirs appeared to be ; not an eye was lifted nor a muscle moved to indicate that our presence distracted their thoughts; body and soul were en- gaged together profoundly in the great work of adoration. The contemplation of this solemn scene has left its impression on our memories, and we pray for abstraction in prayer like that of the monks of Staoueli." And these monks, whose " in- dolent" and "useless" lives have long formed one of the world's most popular jests, " have established," as Colonel Walmsley tells us, " one of the finest model farms in Algeria ;" and have even completed, as Mr. EUakesley adds, " the collection of a series of important meteorological observations." Devotion, agriculture, and science are the occupations of the community at Staoueli ; and Mr. Davies was probably not mistaken when he inferred from " their mild and smiling countenances, which indicated nothing but rest and sweet contentment," that " it was that l peace which passeth all understanding' which these men so unmistakably enjoyed."* * Algiers in 1857, by the Rev. E. W. L. Davies, M.A., Vicar of Ardlingfleet* p. 63. 558 CHAPTER VII. Such are the men whom France sends to do the work of God in Algeria. That they will ultimately succeed in their holy mission we may reasonably believe : and already the tokens of success are becoming manifest both to Christian and Mussul- man. The very legends of the Arabs, and those mysterious predictions which in all ages have issued even from pagan lips, announce the future triumph of the Christian law. Not only in Algeria, but even throughout the Sahara, such ominous voices are heard, declaring the coming fall of Islam. " This is so general an idea," says a recent African traveller, " that even the ignorant Mahomedans of the East firmly believe that the Amhara, or Christian population of Abyssinia, will at a fu- ture time seize Mecca, and destroy the temple."* One hundred and thirty years ago, as General Marey notices, the French in- vasion was prophesied by the Hadji A'issa, a marabout of La- fhouat ; and the prophecy, which was repeated to the general y a lineal descendant of Aissa, contains, amongst others, the following verses : " A Christian army, protected by God, advances towards us." " The power of the Christians will have no limits." " The Mosques will be abandoned." " The religion of the faithful is dead at Algiers."! A succession of remarkable events has conspired to confirm these anticipations. One of the earliest converts was the wife of the Bey of Constantina, as one of the latest has been a daughter of Abd-el-Kader, now a Sister of Charity ; and though hitherto insignificant in number, almost every class Arabs, Moors, and Jews has proved itself open to Christian influence. But it is the gradual and almost universal destruction of ancient prejudices, and the tardy recognition of the immense superi- ority of the Christian race, which more especially claims at- tention. By the year 1843, three mosques in the capital had already become Catholic churches ;J and when the central mosque of Algiers was solemnly blessed for Christian worship, it was the Mufti Ben Ekbati who said to General Count D'Erlon, in words of which it is impossible not to feel the sig- nificance : " Our mosque will change its worship without chang- ing its master, for the God of the Christians is also our God." The change of feeling which such notable words imply, is * Trowels in Southern Abyssinia, &c., by Charles Johnson, M.R.C.S., vol. i., ch. xvii., p. 267 (1844). f See Algeria and Tunis, by Captain J. Clark Kennedy, vol. i., ch. xi., p. 236 ; and Algerie, par M. E. Carette, pp. 121-122. t Algeria, by J. Reynell Morell, ch. v., p. 84. St. Marie, ch. v., p. 192. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 559 manifested in a thousand ways. Already " the Arabs of Al- geria," says Count Saint Marie, "respect the Catholic priest as much as they do the marabout." He notices also the extraor- dinary affection displayed by the Arab and Moorish students at El Biar towards the Jesuits, and especially towards Father Brumault, the founder of that institution, from which the bishop hopes hereafter to obtain a native clergy. " It is but justice, adds this writer, " to the Jesuits, to say, that their conduct in this land of misery and suffering is admirable. . . . There is no calamity which they do not endeavor to alleviate; and the* French soldiery, though little inclined to bigotry, respect these men for their uniform courage and devotedness to the cause of humanity."* Even English Protestants, in spite of their distaste for the religion which alone forms such men, are constrained to utter a cry of admiration in contemplating their virtues. " The Padre Guiseppe," says the daughter of a British Consul-general at Algiers, " was born of a high and noble family," but concealed his name with so much success, that "I believe it was never heard in the land of his voluntary exile." u From the instant he set his foot on the shore of Algeria, in the habit of a religious order, his every moment had been devoted to the service of his unfortunate brethren." In that service he expended " the pro- duce of the sale of all his great landed estates," and then his life. Such was his " charity, holiness, and exceeding humility, that the Mahomed ans undeviatingly showed him the greatest respect, and spoke of him with scarcely less admiration than the Christians." Thrice he was stricken with the plague, but recovered, so that " the Moors used to think he had a charmed life." The furniture of his cell was " a straw paillasse" and when a friend of the narrator sent to the old man, who had abandoned honors and wealth to follow Christ, a supply of mattresses and linen, they were secretly given away to " two poor suffering old slaves." lie died at eighty years of age. "May my life," says this lady who still finds courage to lament " the great dereliction of the Church of Rome," " be influenced by his holy example, and may my death be like his! . . . My parents were never happier than when they welcomed him to their house ; indeed, I believe the whole family felt as if a particular blessing rested upon it, whilst he was under its roof."f But we may not linger in one province, since so many others remain to be visited. " Nothing," says a learned English writer, * Ch. viii., p. 276. f &ix Tears' Residence in Algiers, by Mrs. Broughton, ch. x., pp. 189-195. 560 CHAPTER VII. "can prove more clearly that France is now mistress of Alge- ria," than the fact, of which he gives striking examples, " that she maintains her authority by other than military force. What that force is, the traveller who knows the Arabic lan- guage, and is able to have free intercourse with the native population, can easily ascertain." It is, he adds, the palpable benefits of French rule, and the " contrast of the past with the present," which have " thoroughly reconciled the Arabs to their new masters. The Hindoo, we have been told, says at this day to his English rulers, " Day by day the estrangement between us is becoming more and more complete ;" but the Arab of Al- geria reasons thus with his fellow Arab of Tunis, or Morocco. " l We hare our freedom,' said a French Sbahi, in my hearing, to ITamed, ' and we appreciate it. I feel that I am a man, and I endeavor to act as such. . . But in your country, what are you? Yon are reviled and ill-treated by a parcel of ignorant and das- tardly Mamlooks, and you are kicked about like a dog We are, it is true, under the dominion of Nazarenes, but they are honorable men ; whereas you are under the scum of Naza- renes, Greek renegades, perfidious Mamlooks, a destructive legacy of Turkish treachery, infamy, and usurpation."* "Closer acquaintance," adds a German Protestant, "has greatly conciliated the Mussulmen to their antagonists in faith, and they do not now consider the presence of Christians as desecrating their places of worship." And he sums up his candid reflections with this comparison : "A great improvement in the lot of the Algerine Arabs has been the result of their con- quest by France In a moral point of view, the French have some right to be satisfied with the results of their rule in Algeria, when contrasting what they have done in twenty-three years with England's century in India !"f * Ruined Cities within Numidian and Carthaginian Territories, by N. Davis, ch. vii., pp. 159, 163, 170 (1862). An Arab chief, " famous, among other ex- ploits, for the massacre of the French garrison of Biscara," and " determined either to expel the invaders or die in the attempt," confessed to Mr. Davis in a later interview, " that the French conquest was so thoroughly secured, and that the Arabs generally were so perfectly satisfied with the change" that he had abandoned every hostile intention. P. 222. f The Tricolor on the Atlas, from the German of Dr. Wagner, by Francis Pulszky, ch. x., p. 401. " Autrefois le marabout seul pratiquait la culture des lettres. L'homme d'epee, comme nos barons du moyen age, avait tout savoir en mepris Les arabes se sont apercus que 1'instruction etait un titre a nos favours. Nombre d'entre eux, enfin, se sont dit avec une resignation melancolique ces paroles que j'ai recueillies un jour : ' Autrefois nous pouvions vivre avec 1'ignorance, car le calme et le bonheur etaient parmi nous ; mais dans ces temps de perturbation que nous sommes obliges de traverser, il faut que la science nous vienne en aide.' Ainsi notre influence accomplit lente- ment, jusqu'au sein du desert, cette osuvre civilisatrice," &c. Lea Mceurs du Desert, par le General E. Daumas, p. 384 (5me edition). MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 561 Let ns quit Algeria, and going eastwards we come to the province of Tunis. Here also the influence of Christian France is yearly increasing. When the last new church was built, the Bey refused to sell the site for which application had been made to him, but insisted upon presenting it as a free gift.* Here the Abbe Bourgade, the author of the Soirees de Carthage, " has succeeded by his evangelical zeal in erecting a hospital at Tunis, from charitable sources alone, for the poor Christians." He has also founded "the European college, under the direction of zealous and learned missionaries, where the Mussulman and Jewish children are instructed together with the Christian," to the astonishment of all who witness so unexpected a triumph over the most inveterate passions and prejudices. Lastly, when the Bey, Ahmed Pacha, visited France in 1846, he addressed these parting words to the attendants who assisted at his embarka- tion. u Others have aspired to the title of 'pilgrim of Mecca,*" let mine be hadgy framdgy, ' the pilgrim of European civiliza- tion.' "f Is the prayer of St. Louis about to be accomplished ? One does not expect to find Protestant missions in North Africa, and the only attempts which appear to have been made are thus described. "A station was occupied at Tunis by Mr.. Ewald and others, from 1829 to 1846, under the London society. It has since been abandoned.";): Mr. Ewald himself relates, with cautious indignation, that he had previously been forced to quit Algiers by the peremptory orders of the Due de Rovigo against Protestant preaching. He consoles himself, however, with the assurance, that "many a son of Abraham had been made acquainted with the Redeemer," an assertion which presently dwindles into the statement, that u several hundred copies of the Holy Scriptures had been circulated,"! which our knowledge of the effects of Bible distribution does not permit us to accept as an equivalent fact. The year after Mr. Ewald departed from Tunis, where he only repeated his Algerian experience, a fresh attempt was made by some Scotch missionaries. Mr. Margoliouth reported to Lord Palmerston, in 1847, that they had established two important schools, from which great results might be expected, and that they were about to " erect an edifice" for a church, which, he cheerfully anticipated, would effectually stop " the taunt in the mouths of the French Roman Catholics against British Prot- estants." The result was not in accordance with his hopes. A * Description de la Regence de Tunis, par le Dr. Louis Frank, 2de par tie. th. xviii., p. 205. f Dr. Frank, p. 214. I The Land of the Morning, by H. B. Whitaker Churton, ch. ix., p. 155. Journal of Mixxionary Labors, &c., by Rev. F. C. Ewald, introd., p. 7. 87 562 CHAPTER VII. few disciples were collected, of the same class which China and Hindustan have furnished to British missionaries, but of such extreme irregularity of conduct that they fell under the observa- tion of the native authorities ; and when their teachers appealed to Sir Thomas Reade, the Consul-general, that officer, whose religious prepossessions did not blind him to the real character of these "sons of Abraham," coldly declined to afford protec- tion to " those wretches" And then came the usual climax, unwillingly related by Mr. Margoliouth himself in 1850, "The mission, the chapel, and the schools were abandoned. "* Ten years later, an Anglican clergyman laments that the European Protestants in Algeria are more likely to lose their own shadowy religion, than to communicate it to others. Thus, at Medeah, where they are too few to possess an " Oratoire," he is led to make the following observation : "It is not to be marvelled at if the numerous scattered Protestants of Algeria present too often an indifferentism greater than that of their Koman Catholic neighbors, and if their children lose all pro- fession of any form of religion."f Yet we have seen examples of Chinese, Hindoos, and Cingalese, and shall find similar cases of Africans, and even of American Indians, who, though de- prived for half a century of their Catholic teachers, still clung to their religion with unshaken fidelity, while their children could repeat with accuracy the catechism, which their parents, still zealous and fervent, had taught them. One consolation, however, was reserved for this Protestant clergyman during his travels in North Africa. The Mahometans, he relates with satisfaction, displayed a marked preference for the Protestant over any other form of the Christian religion. They did not fully appreciate the British Constitution, but " about our religion they had clearer ideas. The Imaums had told them that we were nearer the Moslems than any other of the Western people.":): The Imaums were not mistaken, but this is more than we can venture to affirm of Mr. Tristram. "The popularity of the English with the Arab population of Algeria," says another British traveller, whose acuteness was less clouded by religious self-complacency, is entirely due to the pious expectation of the followers of the Prophet, " that the English may, some day or other, become good Mussulmen" u The English are righteous," said an Arab to Mr. Davis, " and the friends of Idam" And this opinion is founded, not only * A Pilgrimage to the Land of my Fathers, by the Rev. Moses Margoliouth. vol. i., pp. 281, 382. f Tristram, The Great Sahara, ch. iii., p. 42. $ Ch. x., p. 168. Ruined Cities, &c., ch. ix., p. 222. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 563 upon the rebuilding of Moslem mosques in India by the British authorities, but upon a popular tradition to this effect: "The envoys sent by the blessed Prophet to ask the Christian nations to become believers in the true faith, met with a downright refusal in every case save that of England, which returned for answer, ' We will consider about it.' "* The Moslems" are far more sanguine of the conversion of Mr. Tristram, with whom they were probably as much amused as the French officers to whom he explained the Thirty-nine Articles, than he can be of the sympathy of Arabs with the piebald religion of Hoad- ley, Simeon, and Pusey. EGYPT AND THE NILE. We have now reached Egypt, still, as of old, a land of bond- age and shame. "The Christians of Egypt," says one whose mission it is to unite them in one household, " may be compared to the children of Israel, living under the dominion of Pharaoh ; and this state of things will continue till European predomi- nance, either by counsel or by the sword, like Moses of old with his rod, succeed in freeing them from the servitude of ages."f Yet here also we may trace the eternal contrast between the Church and the Sects ; here, also, the first has produced mar- tyrs, the latter only merchants ; the first has drawn to herself the children of error, the last have been sucked, one after an- other, into the abyss of apostasy ; the first has struggled to gather all into one fold, the last to scatter even what was united ; the first has done the work of God, the last have been active only in the service of the Evil One. Here is the latest example of the manner in which the Sects do his bidding. The Christian Copts, now numbering only two hundred and fifty thousand, who have continually lapsed into Islamism,J among whom the rite of circumcision is commonly practised, whose priests, as M. de Chabrol remarks, " are generally as ignorant as the lowest of the people," and whom heresy has degraded almost below the .level of the Turk, disposed them- selves on a recent occasion to seek by a return to unity the gifts and blessings which they had forfeited. "Four years iiad elapsed since the death of their last patriarch," says the Fran- * Through Algeria, by M. S. Crawford, ch. xxi., p. 211 (1863). f The Bishop of Fez, and Apostolic Delegate in Egypt ; Annals, Feb., 18-56, vol. xvii., p. 251. { Histoire de VEgypte, par M. J. J. Marcel, de Flnstitut de PEgypte, ch. iv., p. 120. Essai sur les Hf&urs, &c., ap. Pancoucke, tome xviii., ch. i., p. 19 ; ch. ii, p. 61. 564 CHAPTER VII. eiscan Bishop Guasco, apostolic delegate in Egypt, writing from Cairo in the year 1856, " and the Copts had not yet agreed in the election of a successor. Finding it impossible to come to an agreement among themselves, the Coptic hishops and the leading men of their nation unanimously resolved to have re- course to me for the choice of their patriarch. Of course I could not accept any such mission, except with a view to rec- oncile Alexandria with Rome ; and there is every reason to believe that I should have succeeded, if the English Methodists had not interfered. These men, although they had nothing whatever to do with the matter, and no one asked their inter- ference, yet managed, by means of intrigues with their consul, to induce the Viceroy of Egypt, by religion a Turk, to elect a Christian patriarch, and to impose him upon the schismatical Copts as their administrator. The whole affair was contrived by the power and intrigues of the Protestants." And thus, by the intervention of English Protestants, a quarter of a million of sectaries, ignorant of the first elements of Christianity, were replunged into the miseries from which they seemed about to escape, in order that the Church might be hindered from per- forming her divine mission by imparting to them religion and civilization. But there is nothing in this fact to surprise us. It is the mission of Protestantism to scatter and destroy. In such triumphs its emissaries find their delight ; and we have seen, in various lands, that they openly avow their preference of Buddhism, Islamisrn, or any other form of evil, to the Catholic Church. Here are fresh examples of the same fact. A Prot- estant clergyman, of the High Church school, though he represents the schismatical Coptic patriarch as spending hia whole day in smoking and sleeping, and hopelessly sunk, like his flock, in ignorance and sloth, observes with gravity that " he occupies the see of St. Mark ;" but this writer does not so much as once allude to the Catholics of Egypt, whose prelates and congregations more candid Protestants will presently describe to us, lest he should be obliged to confess their superiority.* "Mahommedanism," says another Protestant minister, who bears the title of "Doctor of Divinity," and was not content with silent animosity, " was some improvement upon the system which it supplanted," that is, " Christianity in the fifth and sixth centuries !" And then this professor of theology says, " It is really a relief to pass from one of these idol-shrines into the stern simplicity of a Moslem mosque." He had just come out of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, * See Travels in the Holy Land, by the Rev. J. A. Spencer, M.A. (1850). MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 565 and this was the reflection which that place suggested to him.* The language of this gentleman deserves a moment's atten- tion, not perhaps for its own sake, but because it reveals a condition of mind almost peculiar to English Protestants. Ma- hometanism, he says, was an " improvement" upon the Chris- tianity of the fifth and sixth centuries. Now it was during this very period, that the world was illumined by the presence of such men as St. Chrysostom and St. Jerome, St. Augustine and St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Hilary and St Benedict, St. Simeon and St. Gregory of Tours; and by such women as St. Genevieve and St. Clotilde. It was during this period also, which he selects for unfavorable comparison with Islamism, that Chris- tianity encountered and overcame the greatest trial which any system or polity, human or divine, has ever survived. The Roman empire was then in the agonies of dissolution, and the wave of barbarism had inundated Europe from the Elbe to the Mediterranean. Before this storm every thing perished except the Church. " It was the Christian Church" says an eminent Protestant, " which saved Christianity, which vigorously re- sisted both the internal dissolution of the empire and barba- rism ; which conquered the barbarians, and became the bond, the medium, and the principle of civilization between the Roman and barbarian worlds Had the Christian Church not existed, the whole world must have been abandoned to purely material force. The Church alone exercised a moral power." And even this is not all. " From that epoch" says H. Guizot, " the Church powerfully assisted in forming th^ character and furthering the development of modern civiliza- tion.'^ And not only did she save at this crisis in the world's history both Christianity and civilization ; not only did she pre- serve the Holy Scriptures, and the apostolic traditions; but she rescued from 'destruction, in spite of the barbarians, jurispru- dence, letters, and philosophy. It was during this very con- vulsion, which upheaved and shattered the whole framework of society, that the monasteries became, as M. Guizot observes, " philosophical schools of Christianity it was there that intel- lectual men meditated, discussed, taught." And once more. Contrasting the intellectual life of the civil and ecclesiastical societies of this very epoch, the same distinguished person ob- * The Desert of Sinai, by H. Bonar, D.D., ch. iii., p. 63. Dr. Wolff ex- presses his astonishment " that, not only Unitarians, but also some orthodox Christians, should assert that Muhammedanism is free from idolatry," since its disciples " worship saints, the black stone at Mecca," &c. Travels and Ad- ventures, ch. xviii., p. 310. f History of Civilization in Europe, Lect. ii. 566 CHAPTER VII. serves, that the latter alone " were active and potent at once In the domain of intellect, and in that of reality ; their activity is rational, and their philosophy popular philosophy and religion were saved (by the Church of the fifth and sixth cen- turies) from the ruin which menaced them." So that M. Guizot does not hesitate to declare, in spite of prejudices as imperious and tyrannical as ever oppressed a noble and gener- ous heart, that " it may be said without exaggeration that the human mind, proscribed, beaten down by the storm, took refuge in the asylum of churches and monasteries."" 511 " The fifth and sixth centuries" says a learned Prussian writer, referring especially to the Armenians, the first people who, as an entire nation, embraced Christianity, and at that time so remarkable by the position which they occupied with relation to the rest of Christendom, "were the brightest period of the Armenian literature, during which a vigorous intellectual intercourse was carried on with the West : the classical works of Europe were translated, with a profound comprehension, instances of which I have before mentioned in the works of Plato and Aristotle ;" while that version of the Bible was then executed, "which, in the judgment of the Mechitarists, and of many scholars, is the finest of all translations of the Bible, and remains to the present day a model of the pure Armenian !anguage."f And it is of such an epoch as this, so fruitful in blessings to humanity, so inexpressibly glorious to the Church, that a British Protestant does not blush to say, that it was happily replaced by Islamism, the great destroyer both of religion and civilization ! Such is the dull imperturbable audacity, not of lofty and disciplined reason, jealously sifting its own conclu- sions, but of blind prejudice and contented ignorance. Let us briefly notice, before we resume our progress in Africa, the actual state of religion in Egypt. "Christianity has only remained among the mixt race of Copts," says a Protestant historian of Egypt.J The Catholics he does not even mention ; though another English writer observes, apparently with regret, the notorious fact, that " the Church of Rome has induced some to forsake the tenets of their ancestors" including the tenet of circumcision "and to join the community of Catholic Copts.'* She has induced so many to take that step, that a recent trav- eller in these lands tells us, that " of late years the number of Coptic Catholics has greatly multiplied, and it is now * History of Civilization in France, Lect. iv. f Von Haxthausen. ch. x., pp. 337, 339. | History of Egypt, by Samuel Sharpe, vol. ii., ch. xix., p. 345. Modern Egypt, by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, vol. i., p. 395. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 567 estimated at one-third of the whole Christian population of Egypt."* Dr. Durbin, an American Protestant, also confesses of the oriental Christians generally, "It is not to be denied that their intercourse witli the Roman Catholic Church tends to elevate them in the scale of civilization, as the priests sent to serve them, being generally educated men, diffuse European knowledge as well as manners among them."f Dr. Robinson, a well-known anti-Catholic writer, gives this description of a Catholic oriental prelate, who preached a sermon in Arabic, at Cairo, which Dr. Robinson and other Protestant ministers heard : " He was a man of noble mien ; his manner dignified, full of gesture, and impressive. His sermon, according to the judgment of my companions, was well-ordered, logical, full of good sense aud practical force.":): And the increasing power of the Church in these unhappy lands is freely admitted by all the better class of Protestant witnesses. Thus Mr. Jowett noticed, some years ago, the opinion expressed 'by Mr. Barker, at that time British consul at Aleppo : u All Syria and Egypt he considers as comparatively occupied by the Roman Catho- lics : even Aleppo, he says, is gradually drawing, and nearly drawn over to them." We shall see more ample illustrations of these facts in the next chapter. On the other hand, here are the accounts which Protestant writers give of the operations of their co-religionists, backed by the wealth of England and America, in the land of Egypt. A few examples will suffice. " I am sorry to tell you," is the report addressed from Cairo to the " Malta Protestant College" in 1851, "that very little Protestant progress has been made here, and that I find every thing poor and without life. But, on the contrary, wherever you turn your eyes you see Roman Catholic progress ; buildings everywhere, churches three or four, and schools three; missions in the villages," &c., &c.| And exactly the same report is given, by another Protestant witness, of Alexandria. " Whilst the Roman Catholics estab- lish schools, build convents and churches, and have a large number of their clergy here," says Mr. Ewald, the fugitive from Algiers and Tunis, " the- Protestants have withdrawn all their missionaries, and Mr. Winder is the only Protestant minister * Journal of a Tour in Egypt, &c., by J. Laird Patterson, M.A., app., p. 403 f Observations in the East, by John P. Durbin, D.D., Late President of Dick iuson College, vol. ii., ch. xxxiv., p. 287. \ Biblical Researches in Palestine, vol. ii., p. 458. Asiatic Journal, vol. vi., p. 503. J Fifth Annual Report of the Malta Protestant College, p. 19. 568 CHAPTER VII. of the Gospel at this important place."* Meanwhile, the prog- ress of the Catholic mission appears to have been so well sus- tained, that in 1860 the Lazarists had " an admirable school," attended by two hundred boys " of every nation and religion;" the Christian Brothers a second, which was equally successful ; and the Sisters of Charity a third, " frequented by a still larger number of girls."f At Cairo, by the same date, the school of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd counted about three hundred pupils ; while the operations of the Protestant agents are thus described. "They have been," says Dr. Durbin, in 1845, " about fifteen years engaged in the mission at Cairo, designed for the benefit of the Copts ; but such is the jealousy of these native Christians that missionaries can have but little access to them. I twice attended Divine service in the mission chapel, and found per- haps twenty persons present, and most of these Franks. I think there were not a half a dozen native Christians." Yet these missionaries had maintained schools, both male and fe- male, for many years, and at great cost ; but with the same results which have attended their educational efforts in every other land. " Most of them," Dr. Durbin confesses, " resume the same religious views and feelings which prevail among their people.";): They are perfectly willing, in spite of their "jealousy," to be taught and fed by Protestant missionaries, but they go elsewhere for their religion. And this fact became at length so apparent, even to those who were most reluctant to admit it, that an Anglican clergy- man informs us, only six years after Dr. Durbin's visit, that " Mr. Lieder's school, the Church Missionary Institute, has, alas, been relinquished, owing to the expense of such an estab- lishment, and the supposed inadequate appearance of fruit." Nor was the school the only instrument of conversion which sustained a check. Even the preaching appears to have lan- guished, and to have lost, what it probably once possessed, the merit of originality ; for a critical English traveller relates, a little later, that " Mr. Lieder gave us a good plain sermon, probably not his own composition, for I had heard it before. "| Ten years later, we hear once more of the Anglican mission at Cairo, and of Mr. Lieder, its pastor ; but no progress seems to have been made during that long interval. The Sunday congregation, * Journal, p. 264. f. Un Hiver en Egypte, par M. Eugene Poitou, ch. xvi., p. 448 (1860). 1 Vol. i., ch. vii., p. 67. The Land of the Morning, by H. B. Whitaker Churton, M.A., ch. i., p. 10 (1851). | Shadows of the East, by C. Tobin, p. 83 (1855). MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 569 we are told by Dr. Jobson, amounted to " about thirty persons, chiefly English."* Dr. Wilson had reported, indeed, and perhaps believed, that " a spirit of serious inquiry had begun to appear among a few of the Copts ;"f but the inquiry seems to have been barren of results. Even Dr. Bonar, who prefers a mosque to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, relates of the American missionaries at Cairo, that " the door," at which they have been knocking for so many years, " does not seem by any means an open one."J Dr. Yates also deplores that the Protestant agents have so com- pletely failed to persuade the natives to regard them as religious teachers, in any sense whatever, that " the less informed Ma- hommedan," as he resentfully styles him, " supposes that the people called Christians" he means Protestants "have no religion at all." Yet these gentlemen sometimes make an Egyptian convert, as we learn from the narrative of Mr. Petherick, British consul in the Soudan. His own interpreter at Cairo had married an English girl, and visited England. "Previous to his marriage he had adopted Christianity, and assured me that he attended scrupulously to his religious duties, and accompanied his wife every Sunday to the Protestant church. However, I may as well state that two years later, after the death of his English wife, he returned to his former faith, and married a couple of Mohammedan girls."|| The facts, then, which we have noticed in so many other regions of the earth, present themselves once more in Egypt. We need not multiply them. The characteristics of Catholic and Protestant missions are everywhere invariable. " In Lower Egypt alone," says the apostolic delegate whom we have already quoted, " seventeen martyrs are numbered as belonging to one order. Our religious, immovable at their posts, endured exile, imprisonment, every sort of trial and per- secution, and death itself. Nothing but a special Providence could assuredly have preserved their establishments from destruc- tion, menaced as they have been through ages of fanaticism ; but at length the day has arrived when Catholics are permitted publicly to open their churches, and to found schools and hos- pitals." And then he shows what has been done of lute under his own eyes. " During the sixteen years that I have been in the position of apostolic delegate, it has afforded me great satis- * Australia, with Notes by the Way, by F. J. Jobson, D.D., ch. ii., p. 34. f Lands of the Bible, by John Wilson, D.D., F.R.S., vol. ii., p. 528. j Ch. Hi., p. 36. Modern History of Egypt, by W. Holt Yates, M.D., vol. i., ch. Hi., p. 85. \ Egypt, the Soudan, &c., ch. i., p. 7. 570 CHAPTER VII. faction to see Catholic churches erected here for all the oriental rites. New religious bodies have also afforded us their zealous co-operation. Thus, in 1844, this vicariate welcomed priests of St. Vincent of Paul, and Sisters of Charity, both of whom are now in possession of very fine establishments at Alexandria. In 1846, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, from Angers, es- tablished themselves at Cairo, where they now have a nourish- ing seminary, a house of refuge, and an orphanage. These religious also conduct a day-school, which is well attended by poor Arabs. In 1854, there was founded in the same capital an exce^ent institution for the education of youth, confided to the care of the Christian Brothers. What can be the cause of so great a change ? Has not God, in His divine mercy, granted it as a recompense for the past, in consideration of the labors of the former missionaries, of their patience in bonds, and, above all, of the blood which they so generously shed for the faith?"* Whatever may be thought of this reflection of the apostolic delegate, it is at least certain, by Protestant testimony, that his own colleagues are not inferior in heroism and generosity to their martyred predecessors. " I allow," says Dr. Joseph Wolff, in explanation of his own residence at Cairo during the outbreak of cholera, " that the. example of the Pope's mission- aries at Cairo induced me more than any thing else to prosecute my journey ; for while during the plague in Egypt the Luther- an missionaries shut themselves ^lp, as I myself (I say it to my shame) did at Beyrouth, when there during the plague with my wife and child, the missionaries of the Propaganda of Rome visited those infected with that disease, so that six Roman mis- sionaries died out of seven ."f The Christian heroism which excited the admiration of Dr. Wolff w r as natural in men who were the heirs of Claude Sicard, the representative, as has been well said, " at once of the Church and of the Academy of Sciences" in Egypt ;:f who converted in one week the Greek solitaries of the Thebaid, and the next enriched Europe with those luminous essays on the monuments, the geography, or the chemical products of the land of the Nile, by which later researches have been aided ; and who died at last at Cairo, in 1726, a martyr of charity, ministering to the victims of the plague, and falling himself by the side of those whom he had no longer power to bless. Let us leave Cairo, embark on the Nile, and journeying towards its source we shall come to Khartoum. If we stay for a moment at this place, which brings us almost to the frontiers * Annals, ubi supra. \ Journal, p. 334. J Cretineau Joly, tome v., p. 17. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 571 of Abyssinia, it is only for the sake of noticing an account of the Mission of the White Nile, by one of those candid Protestants of whom we have encountered so many in these pages. This mission has lately been alluded to by a French traveller, who is nominally a Catholic, but who, like too many of his countrymen, eeems to think a reputation for wit the highest object of man's ambition, especially when it is some religious topic which inspires the sorry jest. M. Charles Didier is of opinion that all " pacific missions" are necessarily failures, and that the only apostles who can achieve success are those who travel, like Mahomet, sword in hand.* An English writer thus describes, almost at the same moment, the work in which the Frenchman only saw an opportunity for an indifferent joke. " One of the most interesting establishments in Soudan," says Mr. James Hamilton, in 1857, "is the mission for the conversion of the pagans of Central Africa, respectable both for its object and the character of the men who compose it." Mr. Hamilton then notices the untimely death of the well-known Padre Ryllo, from whose enlightened labors great results had been anticipated, and continues thus : " Should the mission be crowned with success, the spiritual conquest of the vast unknown regions of the centre will be amongst the most glorious triumphs of modern times. Artificers of various kinds, the pioneers of civilization and religion, are attached to the house, so that the pupils may learn and carry back to their countrymen many useful arts. The Superior takes yearly journeys of inspection up the White Nile, where three stations have been established ; and if, as I have every reason to believe, his patience and discretion equal his zeal and that of his fellow-laborers, they cannot fail in time to overcome the immense difficulties which surround their undertaking. Both among Turks and Arabs, Abuna Suliman, as Dr. Ignatius Knoblecher is called, enjoys the highest consideration ; far and near I heard him spoken of with respect, and even by the Copts, the least likely persons to appreciate his qualities. This is already a great success, alone worth the large sums which the mission has cost, for it is the breaking down of prejudices of color and religion, if not as old as nature, older than history or tradition." This intelligent and conscientious writer next proceeds to furnish details which appropriately illustrate the primary subject of these volumes: ' Many of the missionaries have already fallen victims to the climate, and perhaps also to the excessive austerity of their lives ; but in dying they have done good. Those who have been long enough in the country to be known have left a memory * Cinq writs lieues sur le Nil, par Charles Didier, ch. iii. 672 CHAPTER VII. venerated even by the pagans, and the funeral chant of one who died last year at his station up the river, Don Angelo Ninco, a gentleman of Verona, is still sung in their assemblies, as com- posed by the blacks themselves."* Have we not reason to say, that Catholic missionaries are everywhere and always the same? The honorable testimony of Mr. Hamilton is confirmed by an American Protestant traveller, who was a guest of the apostolic prefect, whose "thorough cultivation" and varied knowledge he warmly eulogizes, and who frankly reports " the success attending the efforts of the Catholic priests in Khartoum in educating children ;"f while Mr. Petherick adds, in 1861, that some of the Europeans, " and also Copts, who have families, have gladly availed themselves of this establishment for their education.";]: Mr. Hamilton notices with regret the impiety of European traders, whom the desire of gain has attracted to these regions. " Some of the anecdotes which I heard when at Khartoum of personal violence offered to the Vicar-general and his colleagues, and submitted to although they had ample means of successful resistance, raised my admiration of their exemplary patience." It is curious that even in these remote arid almost unvisited spots, Protestant writers are found to trace for us the contrast which we could hardly have proved without their assistance. " A certain German missionary," said an English writer, only a few months before Mr. Hamilton wrote the above account, "well known in this part of the world, exasperated by the seizure of a few dollars, advised the authorities of Aden to threaten the ' combustion' " of the place where he was mulcted. "A traveller," Mr. Burton calmly adds, "even a layman, is bound to put up with such trifles. " ABYSSINIA. And now let us pursue our journey, and enter Abyssinia. The history of missions in this kingdom has been written, with their usual decision of style, by certain Protestants, most of whom were never within a thousand miles of the place, or had any knowledge whatever of the events which they affect to describe but what they had borrowed from the reports of Catholic mis- sionaries. Our acquaintance with Abyssinia, Congo, and other interior regions of Africa, was derived exclusively, as even the English authors of the Universal History remark, "from the mis- * Sinai, tlie Hedjaz, and 8oudan,l>y James Hamilton, ch. xiv., p. 332 (1857). f Journey to Central Africa, by Bayard Taylor, ch. xxiii., p. 300. j Egypt, tlie Soudan, and Central Africa, by John Petherick, F.R.G.8., H. B. M. Consul for the Soudan, ch. vrii., p. 131. First Footsteps in East Africa, ch. i., p. 13 (1856). MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 573 sionaries who have penetrated into those torrid and unwholesome climes, and amongst the most barbarous nations, with the utmost of continual martyrdoms "made such dreadful havoc amongst them, that scarce one in ten outlived the first six months."* In spite of these notorious facts, some modern Protestant writers exulting in the certainty, as they deemed, that Catho- lics had been finally driven from Abyssinia, an anticipation which we shall see hereafter has been signally disappointed have published to the world their view of the circumstances which led to this result. One official writer, willing to borrow weapons in such a cause from any arsenal, is not ashamed to quote what he truly calls " Gibbon's melancholy picture of the wicked arts practised by the Jesuits, "f The Jesuits who went to Abyssinia, says the Rev. Professor Lee, in his preface to Dr. Gobat's Journal, were prodigies of infamy and cupidity, his actual words are somewhat coarser, and had no other motive but to pilfer the precious metals and other treasures with which this opulent country abounded. It would be quite as rational to say, that St. Paul went to Greece with the same design. Abyssinia, as M. Desvergers not long ago remarked, is a re- gion so utterly destitute of wealth, though fertile in agricultural resources, that "nothing but a purely religions motive'' could have induced the educated and well-born missionaries of France, Spain, and Portugal to enter it ;J and a modern missionary, Padre Montuosi, writing from Gondar in 1840, tells us that he found one of the kings of this country " clothed only with a pair of drawers, and having for his throne a miserable rag of cloth spread over a little straw." A recent English traveller records also his astonishment at finding " the capital of one of the most powerful kingdoms of Ethiopia nothing but a large strag- gling village of huts mostly thatched with straw."! Other writers will presently assist us still further in correcting the fables of Dr. Lee, in which a corrupt imagination has supplied all the facts, and a malice verging on frenzy has elaborated all the comments. Almost the only book 'on which he founds his calumnies, is Ludolf's pretended History of Ethiopia, of which an English .Protestant has lately said: " It is such an evident compilation of what ought to be the faith of the Abyssinian Church, rather * Universal History, vol. xi., p. 163. f Journal of a Deputation to the East, vol. ii., p. 849 (1854). \ Abysainie, par M. A. N. Desvergers, p. 10. 8 Annals, vol. ii., p. 348. Jl Parkyns, Life in Abyssinia, vol i. t cli. xiii., p. 161. 574: CHAPTER VII. than what it ever was, or is at the present day, that any account founded upon it would be one of the grossest impositions that could be palmed upon the reading public."* Perhaps Dr. Lee had partly derived his inspiration also from Bruce, who calls Father Pae'z an impostor, f and Father Lobo " the greatest liar amongst the Jesuits" such are the amenities of Protestant literature; although Dr. Beke, a learned and honest Protestant, who visited Abyssinia at a recent date, confesses that "Paciz discovered and described the source of the river Abai long before Bruce," and even hints that the latter probably " com- posed his own account from the description furnished by the very missionaries so much slandered and depreciated by him.";). But these are the w r eapons with which her enemies assault the Church, and Professor Lee is willing to reveal his own special qualifications as a Christian historian, by informing us, with respect to the heresies of Nestorius and Dioscorus, that " the disputes which have so long divided the Eastern Church amount to nothing more than a battle about words." And that we may still more clearly appreciate his zeal for the honor of God, he immediately adds, " Both Monophysites and Nes- torians hold the Divinity of our Lord ; their disputes respect only the mode of His incarnation !" Why should Dr. Lee show more respect for the virtues of Catholic missionaries, than he does for the Incarnation of our Redeemer?! Let us turn from this gentleman to graver writers, who possess a more accurate knowledge both of Christianity and of its history in Abyssinia. From them we learn that Frumentius, the disciple of St. Athanasius, was its first bishop ; and M. D'Abbadie reports that the Abyssinian Christians, fallen as they are, still celebrate a yearly festival in his honor. Ethiopia, subject from the first to the patriarchal see of Alexandria, embraced like it the heresy of Dioscorus, and from. that hour its long history of suffering began. The Empress Theodora, an eager partisan of the Eutychian errors, sent emissaries to propagate them in Ethiopia; and though it is now impossible to trace with minute accuracy the gradual progress of heresy in these regions, it seems probable that by the ninth century, at the * Johnston, Travels in Southern Abyssinia, vol. ii., ch. v., p. 80. f Travels, vol. iii., pp. 617, 623. % Memoir e Justificatif en rehabilitation des Peres Paez et Jerome Lobo, p. 69. Of. Hzstoire de ce qui s'est passe au royaume d'Ethiopie, p. 234 (Paris, 1629). History of the Church of Abyssinia, p. 5. I A Protestant bishop^ observes, " the pious Theodora had the satisfaction of establishing in Abyssinia the tenets and discipline of the Jacobites, a sect who held the doctrine of the one nature." He evidently thought it of little , importance whether they believed in one nature or in twenty. Nubia and Abyssinia, by the Right Rev. M. Russell, ch. v., p. 199. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 575 latest, the work of destruction was complete. It was not, how- ever, till the sixteenth that Abyssinia, still nominally Christian, was finally subjugated by the Mahometan forces which she had so obstinately resisted, and thus incurred the last and most grievous penalty which Divine justice has inflicted upon all the heretical churches of the East. They, as De Bonald said of the Greeks, have become, like the Jews, an accursed people, "The only Christian nation subject to masters who are not so."' And now the downfall of Abyssinia was accomplished. "Islamism," as M. D'Abbadie remarks, "at the present day: so much enfeebled in Europe, has revived in Africa." Al- . ready it has " perverted to its doctrines the savage or half- Christian tribes which surround Abyssinia, and having ex- cluded it from the rest of the Christian world, this fatal system keeps encroaching upon and gradually absorbing this ill-fated country." "The Turks and Arabs," says Werne, " are just as strenuous in their exertions to make proselytes as the expensive European missionaries ;"* and heresy is too weak to resist them. "It is said," observes Mr. Warburton, "that considerable num- bers annually become apostate to the Moslem creed, for the sake of marriage, or money, or both."f Such, in its outlines, is the history of the Church founded by Frumentius, and once guided by the counsels of St. Athana- sius ; and such the results of its separation from unity. And now let us see what Catholic charity has attempted towards the rebuilding of this ruined temple. In 1550, the Patriarch Nugnez, chosen by St. Ignatius for this perilous mission by the request of Julius III., sailed from Lisbon, together with the small body of Portuguese troops by whose heroic valor David, king of the Ethiopians, was assisted against the Mahometans. In his suite was Father Oviedo, by whom numerous converts were made, and who subsequently became patriarch in his turn ; but, after seeing many of his brethren martyred, was finally driven into exile by the arts of his implacable enemies, and exposed to perish by famine.^ Thus far partial success, constantly checked by greater reverses, had attended the Catholic missions. In 1589, as Gibbon scoffingly relates, " the patience and dexterity of forty years" seemed at length to have triumphed ; and Pae'z received the solemn abjuration of the king, who, as Mr. Murray observes, " not only professed himself a convert to the Romish faith, but made it the established religion of his dominions, which it con- * Expedition to discover tJie Sources of the White Nile,\ol. i., ch. ii., p. 89. f Crescent and Cross, vol. i., ch. xiv., p. 139. | Nouveaux Memoires du Levant, tome iv., pp. 277 et seq. Ch. xlvii. 576 CHAPTER VII. tinned to be for a long series of years."* On the llth of De- cember, 1624, the Abyssinian Church solemnly abjured the Alexandrian errors, and submitted to the Holy See. In consequence of these events, which appeared to establish religion on a solid basis, Mendez was sent as patriarch ; but once again the people, capricious and fickle as Greeks, revolted ; and at the death of Socinios, in 1632, his successor Facilidas, harassed by a civil war, once more ordered all Catholic mis- sionaries to quit the kingdom. From that hour it was only at the risk of death that they could force an entrance. Invariably massacred, either by the Mahometans, or by the still more ferocious Gallas tribes, they could henceforth be victims only, not apostles. In 1698, Louis XIY. sent the physician, Foncet, attended by Father Brevedent of the Society of Jesus. " I may truly say," was the report which Foncet gave of the latter, who died of dysentery after entering Ethiopia, " that I have never known a man more bold and intrepid in all dangers, more firm and ardent in defending the interests of religion, more modest and devout in his whole life and conversation.'^ Once more, in 1752, three Franciscan Fathers, fearlessly braving death, penetrated even to Gondar, in the time of Yasous II. , and " instructed many of the royal family in the Catholic faith ;"J but the king, in spite of his attachment to them, was ultimately forced, by the perpetual anarchy and disorder which reigned among his ignorant and heretical sub- jects, to dismiss them from the kingdom. And so this unequal contest continued ; for the Church, like her Divine Head, never abandons those whom she has resolved to save, and never calls in vain upon the servants whom she invites to such labors. She knows that the sure prospect of suffering and death will rather animate than discourage their zeal. Let us briefly state, in conclusion, what they have since done in Abys- sinia, and what they are doing at the present hour. In 1840, Father Montuosi wrote in these words from Gondar to his friend the Abbate Guarini, at Rome. u Towards the middle of September, 1839, we left Cosseir for Djeddah. We embarked on board an Arabian vessel, engaged in carrying corn for the governor of Egypt. The voyage was far from agreeable ; but why speak of privations and dangers? We accepted them as the welcome augury of the sacrifice which we were going to offer in the heart of Ethiopia. . . On the 1st of November we reached Aduah, the first important city of Abyssinia ; Father * Discoveries in Africa, vol. ii., ch. i., p. 36. | Lettres Edifiantes, tome iii., p. 299. i Salt's Travels in Abym?iia, app., p. 34. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 577 Sapito came to meet us. .... The Mahommedans have here more liberty than the Christians. Father de' Jacobis and I were obliged to recite the Office in a low voice, so as not to be overheard; we seldom celebrated Mass, and whenever we did, it was always in secret, a if in the catacombs." Finally, leav- ing Father Jacobis at Adnah, he at length reached Gondar, " the capital whence have issued at different epochs so many sanguinary edicts against the Catholic missionaries."* Let us leave him here for a moment, and return to his companion, whom he had left, as he says, u not without tears," at Aduah, like Daniel in the den of lions. On the 23d of April, 1842, Father Jacobis wrote as follows, from Massouah, to the Abbate Spaccapietra, at Naples. " On the 14th of February, the day on which we quitted Cairo to pursue our journey towards Abyssinia, we were witnesses of an edifying sight. In that city, in the convent of the Franciscans, were assembled bishops and missionary priests ; some of whom, recently arrived from India and Arabia, were proceeding to Rome to render an account to the common Father of the Faithful of their apostolic labors: while others were on their way to Ethiopia or China, to till the places which the martyrs had left vacant. Prostrated at the foot of the same altar, we renewed to our Lord the sacrifice of our lives, and, after bid- ding each other a fraternal and last farewell, we separated, ap- pointing to meet again in heaven.'' Their caravan was composed of ten missionaries, of whom six were destined for the interior provinces of China. In four days arid nights, travelling chiefly on foot, " because of the humble- ness of our means," they reached Suez. litre, a week later,. " the whole city, not excepting even the Mussulmans, rendered homage to the Catholic religion, by hailing with admiration the arrival of a humble colony of Nuns, six ladies belonging to the Society of Jesus arid Mary, who were on their way from Lyons, accompanied by the Abbe Caffarel, to found a school for girls at Agra, in the East Indies."f It is pleasant to know that the&e ladies accomplished their long pilgrimage in safety. Father Jacobis, to whom we will now return, was on this occasion on his second journey to Abyssinia, having conducted to Rome, in 1841, a body of Abyssinians whom he had induced to pay a visit to the Sovereign Pontiff. Two laymen, Captains Gaiinier and Ferret, officers of the staff, have recorded the re- sults of his journey. " The Abbe Jacobis reached Abyssinia," they say, " at a moment of universal anarchy, in consequence of. / * Annals, vol. ii., p. 347. f Vol. iv., p. 46. 38 578 CHAPTER VII. the defeat of Ubie, king of Tigre, at the battle of Devra-Tabor. The road which leads from Massouah to Aduah was full of the greatest perils, yet M. Jacobis did not fear to return to his post, and all the revolted chiefs whom he met on the way treated him with the greatest respect. A large number of the inhabitants of Aduah went out to meet him, and greeted him as a father whom they rejoiced to see again after so long an absence." And then these gentlemen continue their report as follows. " The journey of M. Jacobis to Rome has already produced its fruits. The Abyssinians who accompanied him are now Catholics from conviction, and fear not to avow it before their countrymen. They have the greatest veneration for the Holy Father The king, Ubie, has the highest esteem for M. Jacobis, and sent a messenger to him from the mountains of Semen, to congratulate him on his arrival, and to promise him that, if he should recover his kingdom, he would do his best to be of service to him. But although Ubie should not reascend his throne, M. Jacobis would not be without protection'. The most powerful chief of Tigre, who knew by reputation the ad- mirable missionary, has also sent to compliment him, and has offered him a place in his country, Yojjerat, with permission to build a church and to celebrate the rites of his religion. Thus, whichever prince may triumph in this* struggle, the Catholic mission will be established in Abyssinia. This happy result we owe to the edifying conduct of our missionaries, but above all to the inexhaustible goodness, the zeal and ability, of the Abbe Jacobis." Let us add, that when Dr. Beke visited Abyssinia a little later, he says, though a Protestant, " the Italian priests of the Roman Catholic mission, the Abbate de' Jacobis and his col- leagues, received me more like a brother than a stranger ;"* and Mr. Mansfield Parkyns relates, with the candor of a liberal and educated Englishman, that " it was well known that the esteem and influence which his truly Christian conduct and well-regulated charity had earned for him among the people were sore subjects of jealousy and causes of dislike in the hearts of the (Abyssinian) priests. "f And now let us leave Father Jacobis, in his turn, pass over an interval of eight years, and in 1850 we come to the recital of fresh events, communicated by Father Leon des Avranches in these terms. He writes from Massouah, on the Abyssinian coast, on the 12th of March in that year, after " three years of persecution." * Statement of Fatts relative to the British Mission to Shoa, p. 17 (1846). f Life in Abyssinia, vol. ii., ch. xxxi., p. 89. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 579 "The ancient Abyssinian empire, no longer in existence since the invasion of the Gallas, is at present divided into three kingdoms Tigre Amhara, where Ubie rules ; Shoa, mainly consisting of the Gallas tribes ; and the kingdom of Gojam. 1 ' It was to Shoa that the English government sent a mission a few years ago, the failure of which shall be noticed presently, while of its inhabitants Dr. Beke reports, in 184T, that they display " the lowest form in which the Christian religion proba- bly exists on the face of the globe."* Yet it is of such " Chris- tians" that Ludolf and other Protestant writers speak with sym- pathy and admiration, apparently for no other reason than that they reject the Catholic faith, and treat Catholic missionaries after the manner recited in the following narrative. " Bishop Massaia, the Vicar Apostolic of the Gallas nation," says Father Leon, " has just returned to this town, on the shores of the Red Sea. After spending ten months in visiting the various Christian tribes dispersed through the kingdoms of Shoa and Gojam, he found himself compelled to quit his mis- sion, on account of the persecution raised by the schismatical bishop of Abyssinia. Although the Christians of Abyssinia profess the error of Dioscorus, which was condemned in the Council of Chalcedon, a great number of them live in total ignorance of the matter, and suppose that their bishop, the Abouna sent to them by the schismatical patriarch of Cairo, is in communion with the Pope. According to the laws of the country, there can be only one bishop in Abyssinia ; the usurp- er of the title is subject to the penalty of death. This furnished the motive for the persecution raised against Bishop Massaia. The actual Abouna, before he became a bishop, was a poor youth, whose only property was an ass, which he let out to travellers. After studying two years at Cairo, he was deemed sufficiently instructed to perform episcopal functions ; he was ordained and dispatched to Abyssinia, together with some Anglican ministers, who were subsequently expelled by the people." By this singular prelate, Bishop Massaia was " excommuni- cated," and condemned to death ; " the sum of one hundred talaris being also promised to any one who would bring him the head of a Catholic missionary."f But the project was thwarted by the precautions of Father Jacobis, and " this outburst only served to extend the r knowledge of the Catholic creed. The name of the Eight Reverend Dr. Massaia was thenceforth on every tongue ; all parties spoke of the new Abouna sent by the * Christianity among the Gallas, by C. J. Beke, Ph.D. (1847.) | Annals, vol. xii., p. 830. 580 CHAPTER VII. Pontiff of Rome." Preserved by the chief of a Catholic tribe from assassination, the bishop finally escaped to Aden ; the Christians declaring that if he gave himself up to the Abouna, as he proposed to do, in order to save his flock from vexation, they would all die with him. During his temporary exile, a touching scene was enacted on the island of Dhalac, near Massouah, where he had found refuge, by the connivance of the Ottoman governor, together with Father Jacobis. For more than a year the latter had been in possession of bulls from the Sovereign Pontiff, appointing him to the dignity of the episcopate, which his humility had resolutely declined to accept. Even the remonstrances of Bishop Massaia were fruitless, till at length he was obliged to u command him, by virtue of the holy obedience which he owed to the Church, to receive the episcopal consecration," and the humble missionary became Bishop of Nilopolis and Vicar Apos- tolic of Abyssinia. Twenty-live native priests also received ordination from Dr. Massaia, and " after a fraternal embrace, the two outlawed bishops separated," the one seeking a refuge in the mountains of Altiena, the other remaining a few days to converse alone with God on the rock of Dhalac. And now a new incident revived the hopes of the suffering Catholics. Teclafa, an Abyssinian Abbot, the Superior of more than one thousand monks, appeared before Bishop Massaia, to make in his hands his abjuration of heresy. u After this astonishing profession of faith, he withdrew, and proceeded to proclaim at the court of the kings of Abyssinia, and in the very heat of persecution, that he had become a Catholic priest. Such a courageous declaration," adds Father Leon, " from the lips of a neophyte, made our enemies crest-fallen, and restored courage to our Christians. None ventured to lay a hand on Teclafa, from dread of a popular insurrection. On his return to his monastery, all his monks likewise declared themselves Catholics. But his zeal did not confine itself within these bounds. Like another St. Paul he now devoted himself to the conversion of his brethren, and already three Christian congregations have been associated by his exertions to the Church of Jesus Christ." The scattered missionaries had now all reached once more the frontiers of the Gallas tribes, and their bishop could not restrain the desire to be again in the midst of his brethren. Leaving Massouah in disguise, Dr. Massaia again entered Abys- sinia, where a price was set upon his head. Having shaved his long beard, and put on a Turkish dress, he joined a caravan proceeding to Gondar, in the character of a poor trader. In thirteen days he reached the camp of Ubie, who sent him on his way, "' accompanied by a soldier, with orders that the same MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 581 honors which were shown to the king should he paid to the bishop." He reached Gondar, but only to be once more ban- ished by the cruelties and exactions of his enemies ; then ascending the Blue Nile to its source, for nothing could daunt his courage nor exhaust his patience, he sought the presence of Has Ali, one of the most powerful of the Abyssinian princes, having at that time one hundred thousand men under arms. The Has was baptized, but in heart a Mussulman, and little ad- vantage resulted from his interview with one who resented in private the homage which he was forced to pay to Christianity before his followers. As he came out of the royal tent, he was accosted by Mr. Bell, an English traveller settled in Abyssinia, and a captain in the army of Ras. " He had a tent prepared for the bishop and his companions, and though he was a Prot- estant, always showed himself their friend and protector." It would, however, be an error to suppose that the obstacles to the conversion of this country proceed mainly from the Abyssinian heretics, or their miserable Abouna. " Islamism," says Dr. Massaia, "watches the whole coast of this vast conti- nent, and an immense belt of fanatical populations, constantly excited by emissaries from Mecca, obstruct all transit for Chris- tians towards the interior. Their means of action are unlimited, their proselytism ardent, their progress unfortunately rapid. Already two-thirds at least of the Gallas nation are Mussul- mans. In Christian Abyssinia they form a third of the popu- lation. In the capitals of Gondar, Tigre, and Shoa, they are in the ascendant, in consequence of their wealth and influence. .... The Christians, who are only heretics by birth, would willingly embrace our religion, if they were not oppressed by the Abouna and the Mussulmans." In spite of these formidable difficulties, and of the grave fact affirmed by Bishop Massaia, that u Mahometanism tends to supremacy within a short period," for none of the heretical communities of the East have lite enough to resist its progress the Catholic missionaries still pursue their arduous toils, always in peril, yet never dismayed, and leaving the result to Him whose servants they are. Already, six years ago, they had re- ceived the abjuration of more than ten thousand Abyssinians. including their most eminent ecclesiastics ; and within the last two years their influence has powerfully increased, even their most inveterate enemies being subdued by their unalterable patience and charity. In May, 1860, one of the most intelli- gent and influential of the Abyssinian princes "was restored to Catholic unity, together with all his people."* A little earlier, * Annals, No. 126, p. 125. 582 CHAPTER VII. Ne"gouci6, another of the native potentates, sent a solemn em- bassy to the Pope, announcing the free exercise of the Catholic religion throughout his dominions, and expressing his own de- sire to be received into the Church.* It is evident that but for the potent influence of Islamism, and its ceaseless intrigues, they would soon convert all Abys- sinia. The Abbot of Guendguendie, one of the most important personages in the country, lately exclaimed aloud in the pres- ence of Ubie, to some of the chief opponents of the missiona- ries : " If you would combat the Catholics with success, you must begin by leading as Christian lives as they do." Bishop Jacobis, who relates this anecdote, adds : "Thanks to our Divine Saviour, the exemplary conduct of the Abyssinian Catholics wonderfully justifies this reasoning. As for the Abbot, he does not confine himself to barren speeches ; impatient to confirm them by his actions, he solicits without intermission the favor of being admitted into the number of the faithful. We should already have yielded to the eagerness of his desires, if the con- version of a personage placed so high in general esteem on account of his perpetual fasting, did not require sundry pre- cautions, suggested by the interests of religion itself. This is, however, a sure conquest, although adjourned, aiid our tem- porizing only serves to mature it by fasting and prayer."f And now, since we have sufficiently manifested the character of Catholic influence in Abyssinia, and of the generous apostles by whose toil it is maintained, we may quit a subject which our limits do not permit us to exhaust. From Abyssinia, where the creed of St. Athanasius is evidently destined to triumph over the errors of Eutyches and Dioscorus, the faith is spreading even among the barbarous Gallas tribes. u I enjoy perfect liberty in the exercise of my ministry," says Bishop Massaia, now Vicar Apostolic of the Gallas, at the close of 1853. U A few years of patient perseverance will enable me, I feel con- vinced, to enter into communication with Sennaar." Seven years later, a Protestant missionary will tell us that the brave bishop had penetrated far beyond even that remote place. " I have with me here (Sandabo) two pupils, one an Abyssinian, the other a Galla ; the latter exceedingly fervent, and whom, in the course of another year, I shall be able to ordain priest. Nothing but death shall separate me from my neophytes; and if my corpse is not followed to the grave by a numerous proces- sion of Christians, the land at all events is here cheap enough to afford sepulture to my unworthy remains. Let me only * IS Abolition de VEsclavage, par Augustin Cochin, tome ii., p. 522. f Vol. x., p. 307. MISSIONS IN" AFRICA. 583 succeed, before that hour arrives, in planting the cross, and in kindling the evangelical fire which already begins to burn in the hearts of a few individuals, and the whole Gallas nation will be saved."* Six years later, the apostolic labors of this courageous prelate iiad already produced so much fruit in this savage soil which only zeal like his would have dared to cultivate, far from all human succor, and deprived of all human means, that he found it necessary to consecrate a coadjutor, and the native clergy consisted of five priests, a deacon, and seven religious. * It is of the labors of such a man as this, and of his venerable colleagues, who, as Mr. Hamilton observes with admiration, were not rarely " victims to the excessive austerity of their lives," and who won the reluctant veneration of the Moslem, the Nubian, and the Galla, that a Protestant minister, Dr. Wilson, could deliberately write as follows: "The apparent success of the agents of Rome at present in Abyssinia is to be attributed principally to bribery and corruption. Let them beware of all unrighteousness and hypocrisy, for the day of reckoning may come sooner than they expect."f lias Dr. Wilson forgotten that it will come for himself also ? Let us return for a moment from the country of the Gallas to Abyssinia, before we pass to other regions, in order to notice, according to our custom, the attempts of Protestant mission- aries in the latter kingdom. The Abyssinian Christians, fallen as they are, still profess a sincere belief in the Seven Sacraments ; and as M. Rochet d'Hericourt whose salutary influence with the king of Shoa Mr. Johnson describes and laments lately observed, display so much reverence for the Mother of God that they celebrate thirty-three annual festivals in her honor.:): Such devotions, always rewarded by her Divine Son, will no doubt hasten their reconciliation with the Church, in spite of the defects which accompany them. Meanwhile they have won for the Abyssin- ians the reproachful sympathy of Protestants, who reprove their agreement with Catholic doctrine as much as they laud their opposition to Catholic unity. In order to check the one and stimulate the other, Mr/Gobat, the gentleman who now repre- sents, without believing, the Anglican religion at Jerusalem, in spite of the ineffectual protests of men who are accustomed to " protest" without gaining, or expecting to gain, any thing by it paid a visit to Abyssinia. He had been preceded by * Vol. xv., p. 178. f Lands of the Bible, vol. ii., p. 593. J Second Voyage dam le Pays des Adds et le Eoyaume de Ckoa, p. 227. 584 CHAPTER VII. others, one of whom, apparently Mr. Isenberg, was happy enough, before he was expelled, to dissuade some of the natives from embracing Mahometanism. Let us hope that he may re- ceive an abundant reward for this good action. Mr. Gobat seems to have been less successful. His manner of life, he tells us, and especially his invincible repugnance to bodily mortifications in general, and to fasting in particular, did not attract the esteem of the Abyssinian Christians. " The greater part of the monks/' he complains, " have become my enemies, and call me ' Mussulman,' because I condemn the adoration of the Virgin Mary, and have no confidence in her intercession."* And so he found it expedient to depart, the people obstinately refusing to believe that a man could be any thing better than a Turk, who never fasted, had "no confi- dence 1 ' in the all-powerful Mother of Jesus, and publicly asserted that she " was a sinner." As such a statement may appear impossible, even in the mouth of one who seems to be, at the same moment, a German Lutheran, an agent of the Church Missionary Society, and an Anglican bishop, it may be well to add, that Mr. Gobat re- cords in his journal, for the advantage of English readers, the very arguments which he proposed without success to the Abyssinians. The Immaculate Virgin was evidently a sinner, he says, for two reasons ; first, because she called our Blessed Lord her Saviour ; and secondly, because she allowed Him to wander from her on the journey from Jerusalem ! A French writer observes that Mr. Gobat might have proved, by the same reasoning, that our Lord was also a sinner, because He submitted to be baptized, and because He voluntarily left the company of our Lady and St. Joseph.f But if the Abyssinians refused to believe that Mr. Gobat was a Christian, he was equally surprised that they could resist the attractions of his lenient religious code, and reject the cheerful form of Christianity which he offered them. " If the priests choose to marry," he remarks, severely reproving their indiffer- ence to that source of enjoyment, " they have nothing to fear, except a little contempt, together with the prohibition of their officiating as priests.";): To this hour, Mr. Gobat can neither understand why these Ethiopians took him for a Turk, nor why they rejected his cordial invitation to "defile themselves with women ;" because, as he observes, all they had to apprehend was " a little contempt," and degradation from the priesthood. * Journal of a Three Tears' Residence in Abyssinia, ch. iv., p. 323. f Les Lieux Saints, par Mgr. Mislin, tome iii., ch. xxviii. i Ch. v., p. 349. | Apoc. xiv. 4. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 585 By snch inadequate motives they were restrained from em- bracing the religion of Mr. Gobat. If Mr. Gobat had selected Kurdistan, instead of Abyssinia or Jerusalem, as the scene of his labors, there is reason to believe that in the former country he would have found the disciples whom he failed to attract by the rivers of Ethiopia or under the shadows of Mount Zion. That Kurdistan would have received him, if not with enthusiasm, at least with sympathy, we may infer from the remark of a. Kurd to an English traveller, to whom he confidentially observed, that the English and Kurdish religions were evidently identical, "for we eat hog's flesh, drink wine, keep no fasts, and say no prayers."* Mr. Gobat asserts, however, that he did make at least one convert in Abyssinia, and we are able to corroborate the state- ment by the testimony of a fellow-missionary. "Girgis, an Abyssinian," says Dr. Joseph Wolff, " was converted by Gobat." The fact, then, is authentic; but Dr. Wolff adds immediately, as if to check undue elation, that this solitary convert first sold two children into slavery who had been intrusted to his care, " and afterwards turned Muhammedan at Cairo."f It is characteristic of the levity which accepts and propagates such fictions, that in a biography of Mr. Gobat, published by what is called "the Evangelical Alliance," this very Girgis is presented to the admiration of English Protestants as "a noble Abyssinian," and a devout pupil of Kugler and Gobat, "whose instructions, combined with the diligent study of the sacred Scriptures, were blessed greatly to promote his advancement in Divine things !"J When Mr. Gobat retired from Abyssinia to continue else- where his unfinished career, he was succeeded by Dr. Lewis Krapf, who appears to have resembled the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, both in his views of Christianity and in the success with which he taught them. Mr. Gobat, indeed, was content to recommend matrimony to the Abyssinian clergy for its own sake; Dr. Krapf from higher motives. "My experiences convinced me," says the latter gentleman, "that an unmarried missionary could not eventually prosper." It might perhaps be suggested that this opinion betrays an imperfect acquaintance with the history of Christianity ; nor does Dr. Krapf s own career encourage the belief that marriage is an infallible guar- anty of missionary success. Everywhere he failed. "1 am specially grieved," he says, "by the indifference of the Wanika," * Nineveh and Persepolis, by W. S. Vaux, M.A., ch. ii., p. 23. f Wolff's Journal, p. 331. j Evangelical Christendom, vol. i., p. 77. 586 CHAPTER VII. who had largely shared in his thirty " chests full of Bibles/' " My dear fellow-laborer Rebmann had at one time collected a flock of children at Ennni, and begun to teach them ; but they soon dispersed." In the midst of these vexations, " it was very consolatory," he observes, " to remember the words, ' Fear not, Abram, I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.' ' The only reward, however, which he actually records is his appointment to a comfortable position in Germany, for which he abandoned the insensible Wanika. Rebmann himself, who also departed, reports in 1861, that "Macedonian voices called me back," and that unexpected successes constrained him " to raise an Ebenezer, both of the Providence and Grace of God." It appears that this means, in ordinary language, that he persuaded four savages to receive baptism, though he confesses that he had great difficulty in persuading himself to give it to them. " On the morning of their baptism I had still some struggle in my mind whether I should receive them as members of the Church of Christ, they appeared to me so weak and ignorant, so deficient in conviction of sin, and appreciation of Christ as their only Saviour." But the society at home wanted some new facts about East Africa, which had become an offence to their subscribers, and it was necessary to baptize somebody. A pretext was easily found. "I went out into the open air," continues Mr. Rebmann, "and looked up to Heaven ; a rain was just then preparing from the east to descend on the thirsty ground ; the freeness of the grace of God was brought forcibly to my mind." And so he baptized them all, and the Church Missionary Society exults in the fact.* Dr. Krapf s view of the efficacy of marriage in promoting mis- sionary work appears to have been modified by later observa- tion. "The wish to settle down as comfortably as possible," he remarks, " and to marry, entangles a missionary in many external engagements which may lead him away from his Master and his duty. This wish naturally prompts him to trouble himself about irrelevant and subordinate matters, such for instance as house-building, all sorts of colonizing schemes, &c., &c. 5 ' Dr. Krapf appears, therefore, to have been at least partially converted to St. Paul's doctrine on the same subject. Dr. Krapf records one convert, like Mr. Gobat ; but Dr. Krapf is an honest man, though an unsuccessful missionary, and tells us his real character. Wolda Gabriel, Dr. Krapf s hired ser- vant, was a native of Shoa, and having been sent to Jerusalem, " became acquainted with the Bible and the Protestant faith." * Report for 1862, p. 56. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 587 He could even, says his master, u defend pure Christianity against Mohammedans and bigoted Christians of the Greek, Romish, and Abyssinian churches." But this was the sum of his merits. He had reached that point beyond which no dis- ciple of Protestant missionaries ever advances, and " in spite of all his intellectual acquirements, his heart was still un- renewed and unregenerate." On the other hand, Dr. Krapf, like Dr. Smith in China, and Mr. Tomlin in India, was able to detect that the labors of Catholic missionaries, in spite of their being unmarried, were more fruitful than his own. We even learn something from him about Bishops Massaia and Jacobis, and the colleagues who shared their toils. "The Abuna said that the Gallas would not allow white people to visit Kaffa, especially if they were provided with lire-arms. In spite of this, some Romish missionaries seem to have succeeded in reaching Kaffa, where they are said to have been very well received by the king of the country." " Some time ago," he adds, " an Italian priest is said to have penetrated to Gezan, which is apparently twelve days south of Sennaar, and thence to have proceeded to Fadasi, the chief place of the tribe of Bene-Shongol. He seems to have purposed to reach Enarea and Kaffa, where are some Romish missionaries, who went to Kaffa from Abyssinia." The missionary executed his bold project, and at Fadasi, " gained the favor of the prince by curing his sick son." But Dr. Krapf has more to tell us. Unable, like his 'co- religionists in other lands, to relate any victories of his own, he is content to celebrate those of Catholics. " The Romanists made converts in Halai, Dixan, Kaich, Kur, and in other places, on the frontiers of Tigre, as many priests in the interior played into their hands." Towards himself, if we interpret his silence rightly, the same priests were less favorably dis- posed ; yet their Abuna was willing to give him free scope, and he relates, with great simplicity, how bluntly that intelli- gent functionary intimated his personal conviction that he had nothing whatever to fear from Protestant missionaries. " The Protestant missionaries," he told Dr. Krapf, who repeats the words without the slightest suspicion of their true meaning, "do not injure the Abyssinian Church, for they circulate the Bible, and that only ;" a practice which the Abuna had good reason to know would lead to very harmless results, " such as the wrapping up of snuff," as Mr. Parkyns has told us, " and such like undignified purposes." The " eight thousand Bibles" which Dr. Krapf himself distributed had made no other con- quest than the *' unrenewed and unregenerate" Wolda Gabriel. But *' the Romanists," the Abuna assured Dr. Krapf, wer 588 CHAPTER VII. insupportable, " and interfered with my government of the Church." Moreover, they were making converts in all direc- tions, especially among the higher ecclesiastics, and were in every way offensive. For this reason, when Kasai attacked Ubie in 1853, the A buna promised his co-operation, if the former would banish the Catholic missionaries from Gondar; which that prince did, to the great but premature exultation of Dr. Krapf. The Catholic religion is accustomed to outlive more formidable adversaries than Kasai, as Dr. Krapf quick- ly discovered. And so, he observes, "Ubie worked so stren- uously in the interest of Rome," having learned to venerate such representatives of the Holy See as Massaia and Jacobis, "that the Abuna could not prevail upon the prince even to cherish the Abyssinian Church to which he belonged. It was therefore evident that the Protestant mission must entirely abandon Abyssinia, and seek elsewhere for a sphere of labor; and such was the result." Whereupon, says Dr. Krapf, " I bid farewell to my household, after prayer and scriptural medi- tation."* And so ended the Protestant mission in Abyssinia. Mr. Gobat and Dr. Krapf, and their immediate associates, were not, however, the only emissaries of Protestantism who were ejected from Abyssinia. The Moravians also, we learn from Mr. Mansfield Parkyns, maintained a costly mission in that land, and this was the result of their operations. " Having expended a large sum in books and property distributed and lost, they left not one single convert, nor even one individual who would say more of them than that they were good-natured, open-handed people, but that it was a pity they were such des- perate heretics; even those whose gratitude for what they might nave gained in lucre induced them to pay the good brethren such negative compliments, were few indeed compared to those who openly spoke of them as infidels and worse than Turks." This verdict, however severe, was not altogether arbitrary and unprovoked. Not only did the Moravians resemble Mr. Gobat in their contempt for the saints, and dislike of bod i\y mortifica- tion, peculiarities which were far from recommending them to the sympathy of the Abyssinians ; they even adopted, as Mr. Parkyns relates, the decisive plan of " killing meat in the mis- sion-house during one of their most solemn fasts, to tempt the poor and hungry to sin against their own consciences" But the famished Abyssinian was only revolted by this characteristic proceeding, which excited such universal loathing and indigna- tion, that " the missionaries were declared to be no Christians," * Travels in Eastern Africa, ch. vii., p. 87 ; ch. viii., p. 110 ; ch. xi., pp. 185, 437, 465. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 589 and when they finally departed, " they left not a single friend behind."* Such, in a few words, has been the issue of all the Protestant missions in Abyssiriip. After years of idle boasts and baffled intrigue, during which Bibles were scattered in thousands, to be defiled as waste-paper or trodden under foot, and the worst maxims of an immoral creed were promulgated, but only to excite the disgust even of barbarians, "the East Africa mission is still represented by a solitary missionary, at a single station !"f One after another, the agents of the society which utters this lament have fled, or been ejected amid the scorn of the people. They have failed to gain a single disciple, and have been pur- sued to the shores which they were about to quit with a chorus of maledictions. Without, however, employing the vehement phraseology of the Christians of Shoa and Tigre, we may con- tent ourselves with observing, that if Protestant missionaries, of all sects and ranks, venture upon actions which shock the instincts, and provoke the disgust and astonishment, of the least spiritual races of the human family; if even the best of them lead everywhere, and with a kind of ostentation, a life which, however (decent and orderly, is as manifestly earthly and un- supernatural as that of their own domestics ; while their religion consists only in periodical fits of emotion, and in an incessant talk about mysteries which they never realize, and doctrines which they never interpret, and graces which they never display ; they have no reason to be surprised at the judgment which has long ago been passed upon them, with a terrible unanimity of aversion, by the whole heathen world. It was a rule of the great Apostle to be " all things to all men," and even to adapt his exposition of Divine truth, so far as the integrity of the faith permitted, to the ideas and perceptions of his hearers. He spoke even to the lascivious Greek and the effeminate Syrian of the vigil and the scourge ; but if he had preached in Hindostan or Abyssinia, he would willingly have fasted all the year round. Protestant missionaries disdain these apostolic arts. Fathers of families, and absorbed by secular cares, they hate fasting, silence, and every other mortification, and never' scruple to avow their antipathies, for which they have always a "scriptural" justification, to all who * Life in Abyssinia, vol. L, ch, xii., p. 148. It appears that some " Hano- verian missionaries" for in every Protestant land there are what a Protestant traveller calls " itinerant livelihood seekers," of all sects endeavored to enter East Africa, but were " prohibited from setting foot on the continent." They never advanced beyond the island of Zanzibar, where they are probably en- joying their salaries at this moment. \ Church Missionary Society's Report, 1862, p. 55. 690 CHAPTER VII. will listen to them. But in doing so, they effectually alienate not only Christians, but even pagans and Mussulmans. " The people bother my life out about fasting," says an English traveller in Africa. " Two young Touarick women came to me " 4 Thou Christian! dost thou fast?' (they having never seen a person before who did not fast). " 'No ; the Christians don't fast.' "The girls. < -Don't the Christians know God?'"* Major Cornwallis Harris, another English Protestant, was not less irritated by similar remarks on the part of Abyssinians, who used to ask one another, with respect to the members of the English mission whom that officer conducted to Shoa, " What can they be ? Are they Jews ? or Mahometans, or what ?" And when some charitably suggested that they might possibly be a kind of degenerate Christians, the bystanders would reply: "Christians! Impossible. They observe no fast."f Mr. Gobat, Mr. Richardson, and Major Harris might have told them, if so disposed, that Christians of the school of St. Paul do fast ; not like Mahometans, to avenge at night the mortification of the body by day ; nor, like heretics, as if fast- ing, without measure and without rule, were a substitute for more important virtues ; but with such a prudent and holy fast as St. Paul enjoined, " to bring the body into subjection," and chastise its disorderly appetites a fast expressive of hu- mility and contrition, inspired by charity, imposed by law, and consecrated by obedience. They might have told them, too, if they had remembered it, that the only two men who ever appeared in glory with the Redeemer of the world, were also the only two who ever received power to imitate His supernatural fast of forty days and nights. We have spoken of the English mission to Shoa. Mr. John- ston, alluding to its utter failure, says, "I know, from personal experience, that the merchant and the missionary must now seek other situations for carrying out their interesting arid philanthropic projects for the regeneration of Africa." The English mission, he seems to think, which w r as designed to counteract that of Catholic France, ruined those projects finally; and u the missionary," he adds, " now grieves for influence that is gone forever.";): The French mission, unlike the English, has been supremely successful in all its aims. Aided by the powerful influence oi the bishop and his apostolic companions, the dignity of whose * Richardson, Travels in the Great Desert of SaJiara, vol. i., ch. v., p. 149. The Highlands of Ethiopia, vol. ii., ch. xxii., p. 184. Vol. ii., ch. v., pp. 70 and 84. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 591 character has conciliated even their enemies, it has already importantly served the interests both of religion and of France. The delegate of the Holy See is at length enthroned in the cap- ital of Abyssinia, and fresh conquests reward his patient and enlightened zeal. Only the enemies of the Church, and of her work of regeneration, have reason to deplore this new triumph of faith and civilization ; but they do not conce.al their displeas- ure. A French Protestant lady, whose deplorable language makes one forget her sex, met in Mr. Lieder's unsuccessful school at Cairo an Abyssinian youth who seems to have made the usual progress towards utter infidelity under his English teachers, but who gave this candid account of his own native district. u There was an English missionary in my country, but they sent him avsay ; there is now an Italian missionary, who has built a chapel : they love the French religion better than the English."* And an emissary of a London society lamented a little later that the contest was over, and that " the endeavors of Protest- ants to send other agents into the country have hitherto been frustrated by the intrigues of the Jesuits."f The truth is, as we have seen by Protestant testimony, that they were driven away by the indignation of the people, who needed no stimulus from a few helpless foreigners to rid themselves of teachers whose worldly lives and unchristian doctrines led the Abyssin- ians, in spite of their own imperfections, to regard them " as infidels, and worse than Turks." WESTERN AFRICA. And now let us turn our faces westwards, traverse the vast regions which have already proved fatal to so many of the apostles of human science, Ledyard and Park, Burkhardt and Bowditch, Lang and Clapperton, and, in our own day, Barth and Warrington ;J and, without lingering in that great central waste into which the Catholic missionary alone can ever intro- duce religion and civilization, let us commence on the opposite coast of Africa the investigations which we have already at- tempted to pursue along its eastern frontier. The Pere Labat, in his account of Western Africa, endeavors to prove that the Normans visited that coast in the beginning of the fourteenth century. If it were so, they left no materials, and were not likely to leave any, for the history which we now * Journal d'un Voyage au Levant, tome ii., p. 446. f Journal of a Deputation to the East, vol. ii., p. 849. | Statement of the Society for exploring Central Africa, p. 7. flouvelle Relation de I'Afrique Occidentale, tome i., ch. ii. 592 CHAPTER VII. propose to trace. Four nations have, since that date, partly From religious and partly from commercial motives, made set- tlements on different points of the Atlantic coast. The Portu- guese, who led the way in the fifteenth century, now retain only in Lower Guinea, including the kingdoms of Congo, An- gola, and Benguela, the authority which they once "exerted through a wider range ; Senegambia, and the Mandingo race, acknowledge the influence of France ; the Cape Coast region forms part of the ample colonial conquests of Great Britain ; and America seeks, by her merchants and her missionaries, to dispute at Cape Pal mas and a few other points, by the ener- getic action of the Maryland Colonization Society, the religious and mercantile supremacy of Europe. Let us begin with Sierra Leone and the contiguous districts, which, for more than half a century, have been appropriated as their peculiar field by the agents of English commerce and religion. England has not usually been happy in the earlier represent- atives of her church and polity in foreign lands. It is true that the Anglican Church has, in every instance, employed members of other communities to convey her doctrines to the heathen ; because her own ministers, salaried officials of a civil corpora- tion, invariably refused the task. As in India and Ceylon, in Syria and the Levant, and in many other places, so in West Africa, she has been represented chiefly by Germans. Even the Americans, each of whose multitudinous sects has its own distinctive missionary organization, freely remark upon the reluctance of the Church of England clergy to act as mission- aries. "The Church Missionary Society," observes the Rev. Joseph Tracy, in a work on this subject, "sent out Germans; for, after several years of effort, no English missionary could be procured.' 7 * This statement may not be literally true; for the Rev. William Moister, an Afrfcan missionary, informs us that the " Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts" sent a clergyman to Cape Coast Castle as early as 1751. Possibly, however, this gentleman was also a German; but whatever his nation may have been, " very little impression," we are told, " seems to have been made upon the minds of the natives." And then Mr. Moister adds a very instructive anec- dote. The clergyman returned to England after four years' absence, bringing with nini three native boys for education. The fate of two of them is not recorded ; but the third, Quaque, received the highest privileges which England and her National Church could bestow upon him. He was sent to Oxford, * Colonization and Missions, by J. Tracy, Secretary of the Haas. Col. Socy. p. 30. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. " ordained," after completing his studies at that venerable university, and finally dispatched to his own country as the government chaplain. "This post," says Mr. Moister, "he continued to occupy for more than fifty years ; but it does not appear that he was, instrumental in turning any of his fel- low-countrymen to the faith of Christianity. Nor is this matter of surprise, when it is known that, on his death-bed, he had, at least, as much confidence in the influence of the fetish as in the power of Christianity."* Commencing our history with this characteristic example of the combined influence of England's principal Church and University, let us now examine the successive events which that history records. Not that Quaque was really the first rep- resentative of English Protestantism in Africa ; for as early as 1553, as Mr. Hugh Murray relates, Windham conducted an expedition to these shores whicli came to naught, " through the flagrant misconduct of those intrusted with it." The same fate attended a good many succeeding expeditions. When Gran ville Sharp, "the indefatigable benefactor of the Africans," at least in intention sent Dr. Smeathman in 1786 to found a settle- ment near Sierra Leone, "about sixty whites, but who were chiefly women of abandoned character, debilitated by disease, were embarked on board the transports furnished by govern- ment." Again, in 1792, when the island of Bulama was ceded to Great Britain, " the majority of those who went out with Mr. Dairy niple were persons of the most infamous characters arid vicious habits."f In 1795, two missionaries were sent, " but owing to indiscre- tion on the part of the one," and the illness of the other, " the mission was speedily abandoned."^ In 1796, the London, Scottish, and Glasgow missionary societies, afrer deliberating on past failures, resolved to make 4i a united attempt." But unity and Protestantism do not co- exist; so "this also," we are told, "owing to sickness and dissension, was attended with no better success. " In 1799, the African Association sent out Frederic Horneman. the son of a German clergyman. When he and his party reached Sciva'h, they were menaced with instant death as Chris- tians ; and then was enacted one of those curious scenes which are found only in Protestant annals, but which are perhaps less curious than the comments made upon them by Protestant * Memorials of Missionary Labor in W. Africa, cli. i., p. 41. Cf. Ashantee and the Gold Coast, by John Beecham, cli. x., p. 258. f Discoveries, &c., vol. ii., eh. iv., pp. 263, 281. i Western Africa, by J. D. East, ch. xi., p. 277. | Ibid. 39 594 CHAPTER VII. writers. " On this difficult occasion," says Murray, a vehe hement satirist of the Catholic religion, " Horneman acted his part with great courage." Perhaps you anticipate that lie gave his life for the faith ? But this was not Mr. Horneman's view of the value of life ; so " he drew out a copy of the Koran, and displayed his skill in reading and interpreting that sacred stan- dard of the Mussulman faith." Having produced "a deep impression," says the Protestant historian, by this unexpected action, "our traveller, who had thus established his reputation as an orthodox Mussulman, left with the caravan." Finally, in 1805, Sir William Young was informed by the British consul at Tripoli, that Horneman was living amongst the Mahometans, "highly respected as a Marabout or Mussulman saint." In that dignity he seems to have died about 1809.* In 1810, an Englishman, one Adams, was captured by Ma- hometans, and carried to Timbuctoo. There he appears to have solaced his retirement by certain irregularities, which might have been overlooked, says Murray, but that they were deemed u a truly unpardonable crime ' in a Christian who never prayed.' "f Thus far the history is uniform, and Africa had not yet in- curred any sensible obligations to England. And even a quar- ter of a century later, we still encounter the same phenomena, "which the annalist of Protestant missions, wherever their scene may be, strives in vain to avoid. " It has happened to myself," says one who represented the British government in these regions, in 1825, " to have seen one missionary lying drunk in the streets ; to have known a second living with a negress, one of his parishioners ; and a third tried for the murder of a little boy whom he had flogged to death." And then he adds, "That system does not work well, in which the removal of such individuals requires a representation from the governor of a colony to the secretary of a private society, who becomes the judge whether the governor's objection shall be acquiesced in or not."J * Murray, vol. ii., p. 445. f Ibid., p. 501. % Travels in Western Africa, by Major Alexander Gordon Laing, p. 393. When we consider what is, in every case, the ostensible profession of a mission- ary, and that he is voluntarily pledged, before men and angels, to exhibit in the sight of the heathen the loftiest type of Christian perfection, AVC may reasonably feel surprise at the apprehensions which the directors of Protestant Societies appear to entertain of the probable frailty of their agents. So diffident are they of the purity of their emissaries, and so imminent do they consider even such ca- lamities as Major Laing records, that some at least of their number have devised a special machinery to deal with these familiar cases. This singular fact is inci- dentally revealed by Dr. Morrison, of Canton, in forwarding to his society certain disclosures "of an unpleasant nature," relating to some of his younger col- leagues, which lie suggests, "should be considered in the secret department." MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 595 It is time to notice, without further delay, the final result of operations which commenced so inauspiciously. We may state it in a few sentences. We have seen that the first Protestant emissary reached Sierra Leone in 1751, the gentleman who afterwards conducted Quaque as an undergraduate to Oxford; more than a century has elapsed, therefore, since the inaugura- tion of missionary efforts in this colony. Afzelius, a Swedish botanist, relates that "un batiment rempli de missionaires methodistes," started from London in October, in 1797 ; and that a similar expedition the previous year had been completely unsuccessful.* What with "indiscretion" in some, and "dis- sension " in all, the earlier attempts were evidently a series of failures. At length the English government being solidly established throughout the colony, and the natives not only reconciled to their new masters, but full of admiration for the opulent missionaries who paid them with unexpected liberality for their presence at school and chapel, the constitution of the various missions was permanently organized, and Sierra Leone rejoiced in the possession of nineteen different forms of the Prot- estant religion. We cannot be expected to trace the history of them all, still less of those modifications of Christianity which the negroes have invented for themselves, and which, being administered by black preachers, such as "Domingo the Inde- pendent," and " Hector the Baptist," have attracted the special sympathies of enthusiastic congregations. Some of the sermons delivered in these chapels are not altogether such as a refined ear would hear with satisfaction, and the expositions of " the Bible " of which they are appropriate theatres would perhaps be more revolting to a Christian than any sounds which were ever uttered in these regions before Protestantism set its seal upon thein.f Let us confine ourselves, however, to the operations of the Anglican missions, of which a voluminous history has been compiled by the Eev. Samuel Walker, and which may be taken as a type of the rest. (Memoirs, ii., 34.) Dr. Campbell relates, that in the solemn exhortation to the missionaries who introduced Christianity to Polynesia "in her native purity," the prescient clergyman who occupied the pulpit gave this unusual but not su- perfluous warning : " Sons of men, beware of the daughters of women !" The Catholic Church, sure of the vocation of her apostles, is content to say to them, as St. Paul said to St. Timothy, "Neglect not the grace that is in thee." * Precis sur /Sierra Leona, par C. B. Wadstrom, p. 87. f The latest writer on Western Africa gives examples both of the kind of preaching adopted in these places, and of the results of negro education in Protestant schools, which make it doubtful whether negroes have not found in their nominal Christianity only a more irreparable calamity than that of which it is supposed to be the remedy. But it is impossible to quote language which is only a deplorable medley of blasphemy and nonsense. European Settlements on the West Coast of Africa, by Captain J. F. Napier Hewett, F.R.G.S., ch. vii., p. 103 ; ch. xvi., p. !49 (1862). 596 CHAPTER VII. There would be more profit in following Mr. Walker through the six hundred pages of his volume, if it were really a history of benefits conferred upon this unhappy population ; but as his work consists mainly, not to say exclusively, of panegyrics upon the extraordinary virtues of the missionaries and their wives, and incessant records of their marriages and of the for- tunes of their children, the natives themselves are only noticed parenthetically. Still we may glean something even from his somewhat monotonous biographies, though they resemble one another so exactly that a single individual might have been the hero of them all. In 1836, then, Mr. Walker relates that "the journals of the missionaries are this year abundantly supplied with proofs of the obstinate adherence of the natives, although professing Christianity" he means Protestantism "to the superstitious usages of their country." And then he notices, that some at least of these "obstinate" disciples were "communicants" of the Church of England !* Elsewhere Mr. Walker candidly intimates, that in spite of their wealth and their long occupation of the field, they can- not compete with their Mussulman rivals. "The spread of Mahommedanism at Charlotte this year was most distressing to the missionaries, who observe, in their report for the year, 'The emissaries of the false prophet have manifest advantages over the teachers of the Christian religion in this colony, the latter having so few natives to support them.' "f Yet through the whole period, in spite of such confessions and many more like them, in spite of the acknowledged paucity of their disciples, and the fact. that the best of them, the " communicants," obstinately adhered to pagan usages, reports were forwarded to England exactly such as the mis- sionaries used to transmit, with such courageous indifference to truth, probability, and common sense, from the islands of the Pacific. Thus one of the missionaries, the Kev. Mr. Johnson, who describes his congregation to his friends in England as " five hundred black faces prostrate at the throne of grace "- declares, in language which one is ashamed to repeat, that "all the people seem to be hungering after the righteousness of Jesus." And again, "It is really wonderful to see the dealings of the Lord with this people.":); * The Chwch of England Mission in Sierra Leone, p. 379. f P. 305. \ Africa's Mountain Valley, cli. vii., p. 117 (1856). It is probably consoling to the subscribers to be told by the Wesleyan Missionary Society, in 1862, that the devout negroes of Benguema <( are still holding fast that which they have, that no man take their crown !" Report, p. 94. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 597 Either this gentleman or a missionary of the same name addressed two letters from Sierra Leone to an Anglican minis- ter, which afford a lively picture of the class of agents employed by the Church Missionary Society to represent the Anglican establishment among the heathen. " When I was nineteen," is his account of himself, " I ran from my father's home, spent all I had, and parted with my last shirt." He next became a soldier, and creditably finished that part of his career by deserting. " How I came to be engaged in the Church Missionary Society," he says, " I cannot exactly explain now ;'' though the explanation seems particularly simple. He does, however, explain by what process, after being a vagabond and a deserter, he became " converted." This is a point on which gentlemen of this class are usually communicative. " A portion of Scripture," he relates, " darted into my mind, and instantly broke my stony heart, and I saw what a rebel I was." After this, his introduction to the Church Missionary Society was inevitable. He did not, however, join them till he had u fallen into the hands of Arminians, who brought me into deep mire," from which he was seasonably delivered " by the triune arid covenant Jehovah." Fortified with the sympathy, and the salary of the society, he now started for Sierra Le^one, which he "found stocked with Arminians," to whom, he says, he " preached a full Saviour." His doctrine, he adds, "was not relished" by his fellow-missionaries, wlio had each his own gospel, with which his was not in harmony. So they contrived to get him sent into the country, where, by his own account, he soon collected a large flock of negroes, who were entirely free from any Arminian taint. They were all, he reports, " under the Divine teaching," though he incautiously adds, a little later, " but I believe the real number of believers is still but small." All this he communicates freely to his Anglican friend, u being fully persuaded that you daily watch the sovereign acts of our covenant Jehovah." Whether he was only a successful comedian, or had finished his exemplary career by insanity, it would be difficult to decide ; but it is right to add that the biographer of Dr. Hawker considers that he was " more em- inently blessed of God" than any of his Anglican colleagues in Africa, and that his choice of Dr. H. as his correspondent was an additional proof of the universal reputation of the latter.* Mr. Venn also, the clerical secretary of the Church Missionary Society, assures the subscribers to that institution, who appear to require constant stimulants of this kind, that, compared with * Works of the Rev. Robert Hawker, D.D., Vicar of Charles, Plymouth ; Memoirs, vol. i., p. 73 (1831). 598 CHAPTER VII. the triumphs of Mr. Johnson, those of St. Francis Xavier " sink into insignificance."* We should probably err, however, in supposing the statements of these singular missionaries to be, in every case, deliberate untruths. Ihey admit of another explanation. Mere physical excitement, which such teachers often mistake for religious emotion, though it comes and goes like a summer cloud, will partly account for them. And moreover, to receive a Bible, to quote it as readily as a popular song, to come occasionally to chapel, and to assume the name of Christian these were the accepted tokens of " conversion ;" and all who could do thus much, no matter from what motive, were sincerely described as u hungering after righteousness." They satisfied the aspirations of their teachers by this remote imitation of Christianity, and the pastor and his flock were mutually content, f Another, and a conclusive proof of effectual conversion consisted in their i; observance of the Sabbath day." "The Africans," says a Protestant missionary, who was evidently quite sure of his audience, and knew what they could bear, "rose to the enjoyment of the Sabbath day.";]: To that enjoy- ment let us leave them, in the hope that they may one day aspire, not in vain, to a deeper and truer religion. Meanwhile, two facts represent the final results which we have no space to illustrate further. England has reason to be satisfied with her colony, because " the total gain to the industry and revenue of * The Missionary Life and Labors of Francis Xavier, &c., by Henry Venn, B.D., ch. viii., p. 261. f " If there be one thing more than another about the popular religion of the day, it is the cultivation of the religious feelings .... For this reason it is that we see around us so many strange develorments of a religion of mere feeling .... In vain does reason point out that they can tell us but little of the deep heart within. They are the mere phenomena of our own consciousness ; they are the mere lights and shadows which float over the surface of our being, and have but little to do with our real inward life. They come and go, and are de- pendent upon a thousand things, which are not our real selves .... We do not perceive that we are mistaking the lights that play upon the surface of our souls for its deepest depths ; so eager are we to hear news of God in our exile. We think that God is talking to us, when we are, in fact, only talking to ourselves. .... Each of the errors which we have noticed is a desperate spring at the substance of God across the wide gulf which yawns between fallen humanity and its Creator .... The con version of the Methodist is the fanatical eagerness of the soul to know the day and hour of its reconciliation to God. Even the sickly self-contemplation of the evangelical, arises from the same desire to feel the pres- ent God. All long for repose in God, and so far they are right. They err with a fatal error in taking the phenomena for the substance, but it is better to seek the reality than to give up all search for God and to acquiesce in the world. .... The fall was the universal shipwreck, and men" outside the Church " are tossing about the wild waves on a broken raft, driven to madness by their thirst for the living waters." F. Dalgairns, The Holy Communion, ch iii., pp. 69, 70. \ Africa's Mountain Valley, ch. x., p. 179. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 599 the mother country cannot be less than six hundred thousand pounds per annum ;" and England's religion is perhaps con- tent with the modest success revealed in the following figures, supplied by Mr. Walker, who admits, in 1847, that although there were five thousand three hundred and eleven children in the various schools of the colony, the whole number of " at- tendants on public worship," including those who did not even profess any definite religion, and the communicants who still adhered obstinately to their ancient superstitions, was only six thousand five hundred and seventy-six, after the labors of a' century.* That some good has been effected, at least by individuals, and especially in the diffusion of elementary education, we may easily believe, though we shall presently be warned by Protestant writers not to feel too confident even on this point ;f and that " the children turned out of missionary schools are vagabonds ;" but that any thing like primitive Christianity has been established amongst this people, or could be by such teachers, who, at the best, were only examples of -domestic propriety, we cannot venture to hope. Men whose chief em- ployment, as Mr. Walker shows, is " marrying and giving in marriage," may display many natural virtues, and even per- suade the heathen, in rare cases, to outward decency of life ; but to make them Christians indeed is a work which God has reserved for those who begin by offering to Him the sacrifice of their own lives, and who, like Massaia and Jacobis, have the vocation of apostles and the spirit of martyrs. Let us add, however, for it is pleasant to meet with even a solitary exception in the dreary history which we are tracing, that, of late years, some of the Protestant missionaries in this colony have shown higher qualities than are commonly displayed by their class ; and, though they have shared the in- coherent opinions of their colleagues, have manifested a certain zeal and benevolence which deserves the sympathy of Catholics, * Introd., p. 29, and p. 589. At a later date they claim, as might be expected, an increased number of " converts," while they admit the characteristic fact, that the disciples of the Methodists were to those of the Anglicans in the pro- portion of five to four. Captain Hewett observes also, in 1862. that " the church missionaries" only make them covetous and lazy, " their minds having been im- bued by their injudicious teachers with the notion of equality with the whites, and that the white man is made to minister to their wants." Ch. xvii., p. 817. f In 1863, the " principal of the Grammar School' at Sierra Leone, where the most propitious results might be looked for, makes the following singular re- port. " The moral tone of the school, which I greatly lamented in my last re- port, I am thankful to be able at this time to state has been much improved ; in fact, every thing seems to bid fair just now; but knowing too well the in- stability of the youthful character, I rejoice with fear and trembling." Re- port of Church Missionary Society, p. 28 (1862J. 600 CHAPTER VIT. and suggests the prayer which St. Augustine once offered for men of a similar character, that "God may teach them the truth which they think they know." Senhor Valdez, the latest writer on Western Africa, though professing to be a Catholic, appears to have spent most of his time with Protestant missionaries. They have " done all," he observes, " that human ingenuity could suggest for the amelio- ration of the temporal, and for the promotion of the spiritual condition of the liberated Africans." A little later, he is " as- tonished at their great knowledge of the Scriptures;'' and then he adds, like Mr. Cruickshank, Mr. Duncan, and other Prot- estant witnesses who shall be quoted, " I only wish their gen- eral conduct was more in unison with the Divine precepts ; for I was informed that some of them were very partial to their heathen customs, especially polygamy, and were in other respects immoral. Man may give instruction, but he cannot give grace."* It is pleasant, however, to be able to believe, from this gentleman's account, that some of the English mis- sionaries, apparently of more than one sect, have displayed of late both zeal and perseverance in their attempts to improve the lot of the African, and if they cannot make him a Chris- tian, have at least done all which they knew how to do with that object. If now we leave Sierra Leone, and travel southwards, we shall come to the Gold Coast, and to the kingdoms of Ashantee and Dahomey. Mr. Brodie Cruickshank, of Cape Coast Castle, a friend of the missionaries, and a member of the Legislative Council, will describe to us the operations on the Gold Coast. Alluding to all that was attempted previous to the suppression of the slave-trade, this gentleman says, "It was one long, dark career of unfeeling selfishness, without a single aspiration for the improvement of the natives. Our motives were perfectly understood by them, and placed us at once on an equality of footing with them." And then he enters into details about the missionaries. " The pay given by them," he says and they corresponded with him confidentially as one of their own school " to the young men whom they employed as teachers being fully equal to that given by the merchants, and a greater number of them being required for this service, the missionary employ- ment became an object of ambition with many, as much, we are assured, in many instances, for the sake of the loaves and fishes, as from a sincere and earnest desire to promote the cause of Christianity. This inducement drew a number of the best * Six Years in Western Africa, by Francisco Travassos Valdez, vol. i., ch vi., pp. 274, 287. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 601 educated natives within the pale of the society ;" while "masons, carpenters, laborers," and others employed by the missionaries in building, " in like manner swelled the ranks of the Christian community."* Thus far we have an authentic account of the mode in which their congregations were collected ; and Commander Foote, of the United States navy, judiciously observes, that the mission- aries have this additional advantage in their contest with the Mahometans, that the natives easily perceive that " Christian- ity now stands contrasted with Mohammedanism, as being the deliverer, while the latter is still the enslaver."f In spite of these inappreciable aids, Mr. Cruickshank gives precisely the same account of the Protestant converts which we have heard in so many other countries. Of their use of the Bible, he says, that " texts which seemed to bear some reference to the pe- culiar situation of individuals were wrested to suit their views, and to minister to their inclinations and wants." And then he goes on thus, though he was the associate of their teachers, and the earnest advocate of their efforts. " We are constrained to believe that many of the converts were either laboring under a hypocritical delusion, or that the frailty of human nature exhibited itself with a uniformity of weakness truly humiliating and deplorable." "There are only a very few exceptions," he adds presently, " to a general relapse into immorality, when motives of personal interest no longer bound them." And again, as if the picture were not sufficient- ly gloomy, " it is lamentable to have to state, that many of the best educated and most intelligent men, who, some years ago, were most distinguished for zeal for Christianity, and who occupied the first rank among the office-bearers of the society, are now living without its pale, while the offices are filled by an inferior class." He allows that some good is done by the numerous Protestant schools, which the natives attend solely to quality themselves for advancement, but " it is rare for a lad leaving the school to observe such a correct deportment as will admit him to the honor of membership." Finally, after a pain- ful description of the "gloomy and morose austerity which seems to pervade the ministrations of the missionaries," he concludes with these words : " It has often been a question, whether, with the pecuniary means placed at the disposal of the Gold Coast mission, greater results might not have been expected.";); * Eighteen Tears on the Gold Coast of Africa, vol. ii., ch. iv., p. G8. f Africa and the American Flag, ch. xxxiv., p. 388. i Pages 73, et seq. 602 CHAPTER VII. Throughout the whole region the same invariable facts recur. Of the Episcopalian missionaries at Cape Palmas, Mr. Tracy, a Protestant minister, reports that, as late as 184L', " the chiefs entered into a conspiracy to kill the missionaries and plunder their premises."* Mr. Kelly explains, in the same year, that " the disorder originated in this way. The Protestant ministers had forestalled almost all the trade of the coast, to the great injury of the American merchants. Deplorable consequences flowed from this rivalry. . . . The king and his subjects took up arms, and appeared resolved to set fire to the Protestant establishments." Meanwhile, we are told, the Catholic mis- sionaries " continued to visit the sick and to teach the catechism without meeting with the slightest insult;" for even the angry natives knew that they had no interest in the schemes of the rival traders.f Again : the American Board for Foreign Missions confess, with respect to the operations conducted in the same place under their special superintendence, that even "the colonists, as a body, regard the missionaries and their enterprise with ill will ;"J because they find them their most formidable rivals in all commercial speculations. Dr. Morrison tells also the usual tale of a certain "Mr. II.," a Protestant missionary, who "fell into a state of mournful backsliding, and greatly dishonored his sacred ealling." Yet it is to maintain such persons and their families in opulent idleness, that England and America consume annually nearly three millions sterling, with no result whatever but to make Christianity a proverb among the heathen ! Most of them, too, as we have seen in China and elsewhere, do not even take the trouble to learn the dialects of the people to whom they are supposed to preach. " I cannot but express my surprise," observes a Protestant minister, who was deputed to visit the West African missions directed by his own community, " that in eighteen year* no attempt has been made to acquire and speak the languages of the country."] Of Dahomey, Commander Forbes relates that " the Moham- medan religion, spreading over the vast continent of Africa, is gaining millions of converts ;"*[" while Mr. Duncan, another friend of the Protestant missionaries, gives this candid report ad to the working of 'their schools : "All that these young men * Historical Examination of the State of Society in W. Africa, p. 25. f Quoted in Annals, vol. iv., p. 246. \ East, p. 295. The Fathers of the London Missionary Society, app., p. 596. | Lift and Journals of the llev. D. West, cli. viii., p. 184. 1" Dahomey and the Dafioinaita, vol. i., p. 170 (1851). MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 603 aspire to, is to get something in the fashion of European clothing, and to seek employment as clerks." He deplores the " little benefit" of " a partial education by merely reading the Scriptures," and adds that, u in many instances this partial education is only the means of enabling them to become more perfect in villany"* Yet the missionaries, in order to swell their funds, could gravely describe these poor Africans as " prostrate before the throne of grace," and u hungering after righteousness." And now let us attempt a brief review of Catholic missions in West Africa. From Senegarnbia to Congo and the southern limits of Guinea, through nearly forty degrees of latitude, on both sides of the equator, and from, the Atlantic towards Soudan and for three hundred miles into the interior. the Catholic faith has been preached, with an efficacy, as Protest- ant writers will tell us, which sufficiently attests its Divine power. It was in the fifteenth century that apostolic mission- aries commenced their labors in the kingdoms of Congo, Loango, and the contiguous regions. To discover a new realm, and to dispatch to it without an hour's delay the messengers of peace, was the unfailing practice of Spain, Portugal, and France, animated by still more zeal for the salvation of souls than for conquest and renown. About the year 1485, as Merolla relates, three Dominican Fathers entered Congo : the first was martyred, and the other two died of the climate. f Their suc- cessors, as well as the sons of St. Francis, " penetrated deep into Congo," as Dr. Ley den remarks, u and even into the regions behind, explored by no other European.":): A little later, the Jesuits carried the Cross into the same country ; and that we may comprehend at once, by one prodigious fact, re- vealed to us by Protestant testimony, what was the nature of their work, let us hear an English witness, who writes from the Cape of Good Hope in the year 1859. At that recent date, the Protestant editor of an African journal declares, that " the Jesuits, before their expulsion, effected so much, that the natives in the large districts are still taught to read and write, the work of education being carried on by native teachers " This remarkable fact, characteristic of the strangely enduring influence of the Catholic apostolate, is more than confirmed by Dr. Livingstone, who tells us, with the frank honesty which distinguishes that manly writer, that ' the Jesuit teaching has * Travels in Western Africa, vol. i., ch. iii., p. 42 ; vol. ii., cli. xiii., p. 3C3. f Voyage, to Congo, Pinkerton, vol. xvi., p. 215. \ Discoveries and Travels in Africa, by J. Leyden, M.D., vol. i., cli. i., p. 77. Tlie Cape and Natal News, January #1, ISM, p. 80. 604 CHAPTER VII. been so permanent" in spite of a century of abandonment and calamity, that even at this day " the Prince of Congo is pro- fessedly a Christian, and that there are no fewer than twelve churches in that kingdom, the fruits of the mission established in former times at San Salvador, the capital ;"* and further, that the poor deserted natives, to whom Portugal, fallen from the glory of other days, has no longer Jesuits to send, still try, in spite of their ignorance, " to keep up the ceremonies of the Church !" Woe to the men who robbed Africa of her apostles, and restored to the Enemy so many victims who had been rescued from his dominion. There is no need to trace in all its details the history of the missions of which Dr. Livingstone and others have noticed the actual remains, and which declined because, in consequence of the constant mortality of the missionaries, the forcible suppres- sion at a later period of religious societies in various parts of Europe, and the total absence during a long course of years of apostolic teachers, there was no one left to maintain them. It was the special misfortune of Western. Africa to be connected with an empire already corrupted, faithless to Catholic tradi- tions, and rapidly hastening to ignominious decay, owing to the gradual extinction of all religious principle amongst its rulers; and Proyart was probably riot mistaken when he said that the immoralities of the Portuguese accelerated the ruin of their missions in Africa. In India, the influence of Portugal, once a chosen instrument in the designs of Providence, has for many years been unfavor- able to religion and morality. Since the hour when Pombal, too well imitated by his successors, cast away the traditions which had made her one of the noblest and mightiest of European nations, and adopted the political philosophy of Protestantism, which refuses to the Creator any share in the government of civil society, decay and ruin have marked the history of Portugal, till at length the " most faithful" kingdom has become contemptible in "the eyes of the world, and her colonies, with the exception of Brazil, are a proverb for the feebleness and disorder which Brazil only escaped by timely separation. " It is deplorable," says Senhor Yaldez, speaking of a colony of three thousand Catholic Africans, in the island of Anno Bom, "to see such destitution of religious services as exists among them."f And this is not a solitary case. But Portugal, which has lost all religious fervor at home, except in the hearts of the poor, is unworthy to be any longer a nursery of apostolic missionaries, and the cloud which broods over the * Missionary Travels in 8. Africa, ch. xxi., pp. 411, 426. f Vol. ii., ch. i., p. 63. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 605 land of De Britto and Laynez casts its shadow even upon the " streamless deserts" of Africa. From 1554 to 1626, eight bishops ruled in succession the Church in Congo ; but from 1648, " the kingdom remained without any clergy,"* and in 1814 the king vainly implored the Portuguese monarch to " send clergymen to Congo." Yet we learn from Proyart, that when some missionaries visited the interior towards the close of the eighteenth century, they found a province (Sogno) in which, afrer their long abandonment, u the people still continued Christians, and publicly professed the faith, and their horror of idolatry," and were accustomed to offer prayers to God to send them a missionary, f Such facts, proper to the history of Catholic missions, sufficiently indicate the influence once exerted in these countries by men, who, as Murray scornfully relates, " sometimes exercised an authority almost paramount to that of the sovereigns." The same unfriendly annalist repeatedly admits the courage and tirmness with which they "insisted upon a strict conformity to the Christian rule." Hoefer tells us of one of them who ' converted the king of Mahonga and all his family," and yet found leisure to publish a Grammar arid Dictionary of the Bonda language ;f and an infidel French writer confesses that " there is something marvellous" in the fact, that " a few igno- rant missionaries," as he absurdly styles such men as Colombia! and Cannecattim, " were able to snatch a whole people from their ancient customs and their gods." " It is astonishing," says a Protestant writer already quoted, " to find what a hold the Portuguese have got upon the tribes far into the interior, and it is impossible not to conclude that the enlightenment and happiness of Africa in future ages will depend very much upon them."|| May Portugal once more prove worthy of the sublime mission which Providence in- trusted to her in earlier days ! Already there are signs of her resurrection. It is Dr. Livingstone who tells us, that " the good influence of the Bishop of Angola, both in the city and the country, is universally acknowledged," and that he is es- pecially active in " promoting the establishment of schools." The same excellent writer reports of the abandoned district of Ainbaca, which he traversed, that " it is now quite astonishing * Valdez, vol. ii., ch. ii., p. 85. f Histoire de Loango, Kakongo, et autres Royaumes d'Afrique, par M. 1'AWW Proyart, ch. xvii., p. 317 (1770). \ Afrique Australe, par M. F. Hoefer, p. 471 (1848). Encyclopedic de Voyages, par J. Grasset de S. Sauveur ; Mosurs des Habi tans du Congo, p. 16. \ The Cape and Natal News. 606 CHAPTER VII. to observe the great numbers who can read and write in this district. This is the fruit of the labors of the Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries, for they taught the people of Ambaca ; and ever since the expulsion of the teachers by the Marquis of Pombal, the natives have continued to teach each other. These devoted men are still held in high estimation throughout the country to this day. All speak well of them os padres Jesuitas" And then Dr. Livingstone utters a regret, which we also may share, though not for precisely the same reasons, that the Jesuits did not 4 *~give the people the Bible, to be a light to their feet, when the good men themselves were gone."* Yet this distinguished traveller will confess, that to translate the sacred Scriptures into the African' dialects, a work in which Protestant missionaries, with all their leisure, have not hitherto been very successful, was hardly possible to men absorbed by the toils of their apostolic calling, and speedily worn out by exhaustion and the influence of such a climate. And we may add, without disrespect to this worthy man, that, from his own account, which we shall have the advantage of quoting present- ly, these very men effected so much more, without the aid of such translations, than his own colleagues have accomplished with them, that for upwards of a century their potent influence has survived them ; nor will he deny, with the facts of Prot- e"8tant missions before him. that while millions of Christians, during the early ages, attained to the closest union with God, though they never saw a Bible, thousands in our own day, who have almost learned it by heart, are still as far from any saving knowledge of Him as the pagans themselves. We have now only to state, in conclusion, what Catholic missionaries are doing in "West Africa at the present moment. Twenty years have not elapsed since Dr. Barren, formerly Vicar-general of Philadelphia, was appointed by the Holy See Bishop of Constantina and Vicar- Apostolic of Upper and Lower Guinea. Landing at Cape Pal mas during the rainy season, with a band of missionaries, who were immediately dispersed to various points along the coast, but who did not lind so much as a roof to shelter them, almost all were cut off by death in rapid succession. The Abbe de Regnier fell first. " Tell my family and friends," were his last words, " that I rejoice at hav- ing left all for our Divine Master." Father Bouchet was the next to sink, followed in a few weeks by Fathers Audebert, Laval, Roussel, and Maurice. Finally, of seven who had ar- rived in health and vigor, one only, the Abbe Bessieux, re- mained alive. * Ch. xix., p. 382. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 607 Six months after, in June, 1845, the solitary survivor wrote as follows from Gaboon : " I shall soon see zealous colleagues succeeding the friends whom I have lost, encouraging and sustaining my feeble steps. For, God forbid that you should forsake this poor Africa !" Already he had discerned that the tribes on the sea-coast had formed their estimate of Europeans from the miserable examples before their eyes, and had judged the spurious Christianity offered to them ; but, he added, there are tribes in the interior, " reared in privations, inured to toil, and famous for their courage. They know that there is nothing in common between the Catholic priests and the' foreign traders. To them we will go first ; this is a conquest which the ministers of error will not venture to dispute with us." Four months later, the same intrepid missionary had twelve native children residing under his charge, and could say : u I do not fear to assert, that there is at Gaboon a multitude of souls ready to receive the heavenly seed." But he was alone, and poor, without, as he observed, " the immense resources of the Protestant ministers."* Let us leave him fora moment, to follow the steps of others. In 184:7, his colleague, Father Briot de la Maillerie, wrote from Ndakar, a station on the Gaboon. Already they had established a training seminary, in which were " twelve native Levites, whose good conduct and docility have singularly edi- fied us," and who had learned to sing in the Wolof tongue " the praises of Jesus and Mary." In the same year these students were present at the ordination of the Abbe Gallais, and " their joy was at its height. They mutually excited each other to hasten the time for their ordination. Each fixed already the district which he would take. One would go to Cayot, another to Fouta . . and thus the whole apostolic vicariate was appro- priated!" "Be persuaded," said the Abbe Gallais, a little later, " that these negroes are not such as calumny has so often been pleased to depict them." They were now in the hands of apostles who could not only talk to them of a far-off Saviour, but guide them to His feet. In 1852, the Abbe .Durand sends these tidings from the mouth of the Gambia : " Praise be to God, in spite of numer- r ous obstacles, amongst which the snares of the Methodists are not the least, the Catholic religion has made rapid progress in this country. In the year that has just elapsed, we have had one hundred and thirty baptisms, and have admitted forty to * Annals, vol. viii., p. 76 608 CHAPTER VII. their first communion. The dispositions of our neophytes are excellent."* By the year 1854, out of a total of seventy-five missionaries sent to Western Africa, forty-two had already perished ; but there remained at that date two bishops, fifteen priests, eleven lay brothers, and nineteen sisters. " Our Christians," says the coadjutor Vicar- Apostolic in that year, u are generally faithful to their religious duties, especially in localities not frequented by Europeans. We have forty pupils in the central house ot studies at Ndakar," by the following year the number had increased to sixty; "henceforth many of the principal diffi- culties may be regarded as overcome ; traditions have been formed, an administrative organization has been established, and is beginning to work with regularity. "f But the bishop was destined to encounter a trial which even apostolic zeal could neither avert nor resist. Twice since the date of his letter every Catholic missionary, including all the bishops, has been swept away by pestilence. Warned by these repeated calamities, the ecclesiastical authorities appear to have adopted the conclusion that the evangelization of Western Africa must henceforth be mainly committed to a native clergy ; and to secure a staff of competent native missionaries is now the aim of the Holy See. But the dead have not labored in vain. At Goree, by the year 1845, there were already twelve hun- dred Catholics ; and a Protestant missionary reports, in 1850, " the people of Goree were all either Mahometans or Roman Catholics.";): The native king, a Mahometan, assured the Abbe de la Maillerie, that he had no objection to his commencing a school for his people, "since it was for a good object ;" and a little later Father Arragon could give this encouraging account : "At Goree, as in all Africa, the harvest to be gathered is immense The Marabouts are pleased to see us in this country ; they salute us when they meet us ; they are fond of saying that they esteem us, because we love the great God. Again, the people are warmly attached to us, and show themselves grateful for the smallest services. . . . With regard to the Mahometans * A Protestant missionary on the Gambia records the following triumphs in 1802 : " We have been enabled to go to the ' highways and hedges' to invite sinners to Christ, and, blessed be God, we have not returned without suc- cess. A Popo woman, who was an idolatress, has of late forsaken her idols, and is now bowing at the feet of Jesus. We are also glad to report that a Man- dingo woman has been admitted on trial." Wesleyan Mis. Soc. Report, p. 90. f Vol. xv., p. 380. On the Feast of the Epiphany, 1863, a native student from the Gambia recited a composition in his own language before the College of Propaganda. \ Moister, ch. ii., p. 70. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 609 also, we are not without grounds of hope .... The blindness of this people arises chiefly from their ignorance ; far from repulsing the truth, they in general wish for it ; and the prog- ress of the Gospel will be commensurate with the means of instruction." lie then relates this anecdote : " One evening two Marabouts came into our house while a little black was giving out prayers to the other children. This sight filled them with surprise. One of them observed to his companion, ' these people will be taking away the Koran from us.' Then address- ing himself to me, he said : ' If you only stay two years at Isdakar, there will be no more Mahomet nothing but the missionary.' May his prediction be accomplished, and God alone be adored, served, and loved by a people to whom He has been so long unknown !"* Let us add, in conclusion, a single example for there is no- need of many of the manner in which converts are made in this country, and in which they subsequently display the evidence of their reconciliation to God. One of the missionaries, . Father Poussot, had been attacked in the night by a fanatic,, and severely wounded. Shortly after, Vane, the chief of a> neighboring village, presented himself before his companion Father Bouchet, with these words: " Father, I have been long a Christian at heart, but I am determined to be one in deed.. Wash me with the water of prayer (baptism) .... You told me that your God loved mankind, and sent his Son on earth to save them ; that this Son died for them on a cross, and that instead of taking revenge upon His executioners, He pardoned them, and even prayed for them ; and you planted a cross in our village. I thought all this very fine, but still I was not in heart a Christian." Then raising his voice, and continuing with great animation, he said : " But do you remember our coming home together one day through the forest of Mpongues? You were told that the Father, your companion, had been wounded the previous night by a slave, and that his face was cut open. I was enraged at his cowardly and shameful act,, and if I had met the slave, I should have stabbed him. But you, Father, said nothing; you raised your eyes to heaven. I was watching what you would do. You pardoned the slave;, you begged that he might not be punished. The wounded Father also came some time after, not yet quite recovered. He was not angry. He spoke and prayed with us in his usual manner, and had a meeting with his intended murderer. Then I said to myself and others, 'This Father loves us; he doe what he says / he pardons his enemies. His word, therefore,. * Annals, vol. viii., p. 89. 40 610 CHAPTER VII. is true.' From that moment I was in heart a Christian, and I am now resolved to be so forever."* The chief was instructed and baptized. " The whole family," Father Bouchet adds, "have followed the example of their chief, and form at the present day a nucleus of fervent and courageous Christians, already tried by persecution, and, if called upon, prepared for martyrdom." The trial came destitution, cruelty, loss of friends and relatives, and menaces of a worse fate. All, even the children, endured it with unmoved fortitude. When the father was loaded with chains by the infidels, and they were about to carry him away, his second son exclaimed, " Take me instead of my father ; he is infirm, I shall be of more use to you." The offer was accepted, and the youth consigned to prison, with no other consolation than a crucifix, which one of his sisters conveyed to him. The pagans proposed to restore the old chief to his former position, if he would consent to apostatize. " I am a servant of the great God," he replied, "and must obey his orders rather than yield to your desires. I have said it, henceforth nothing shall persuade me to depart from the will of God." " Admirable and holy old man," exclaims Father Bouchet, the witness of these scenes ; " how often have I wept for joy over his conver- sion ! At Mass, in a special manner, his devotion is beyond all praise, when kneeling absorbed in meditation on the adorable mysteries. There it is that his faith is constantly revived, and from this source he derives courage to say with St. Paul : ' I can do all things in Him who fortifies me.' " It is impossible to read the history of Christian missions in this part of Africa, during the last twenty years, without admit- ting, that if the Catholics possessed even a small portion of the immense temporal resources which the two richest nations in the world continually place at the disposal of the Protestant emissaries, so as to enable them to found educational institutions, and to promote the other works of charity so urgently needed in this land of poverty, the conversion of the heathen would be immensely accelerated. But poverty is not the greatest obstacle to the success of the Catholic mission. There is a yet more formidable and fatal hindrance. When the heathen or the Mahometan has learned, in spite of ignorance and prejudice, to venerate teachers who lead an apostolic life, and who display even to his dull apprehension the marks of a supernatural calling; when the power of the demon is already shaken, and light begins to dawn upon the soul ; the half-awakened native is sure to be presently confounded and embarrassed by the * Vol. xvii., p. 216. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 611 apparition of others, also styling themselves ministers of the Christian religion, though attended by groups of females and children, surrounded by comfort and opulence, and leading before his eyes the common life of common men ; and when these teachers speak to him, in strange and unnatural accents, about a Book of which they comprehend nothing but the letter, and a Saviour of whom they know nothing but the Name ; the perplexed inquirer begins to suspect that, after all, Christianity is only a delusion, its advocates only impostors. The grave and devout pastors whom he had begun to love and admire, he is now told, are but the insidious professors of a wicked and false religion ; while the worldly and immortified men, who hasten to offer him their gold and their Bibles, are the only preachers of pure Christianity. What marvel if the angry heathen con- found the religion and its professors in a common sentiment of contempt and aversion ? or resolve, at the bidding of the baser instincts of his nature, to make the Christian religion a source of gain, and to sign a contract which leaves his conscience un- touched, while it redoubles his repugnance to teachers who are themselves the first victims of the hypocrisy which they create and recompense ? We have said, and it may be repeated with- out exaggeration, that Protestant missions are everywhere the worst and most fatal impediment to the conversion of the heathen ; because they add to the difficulties which beset him, in common with those which were surmounted by the primitive converts, a multitude of others, unknown to the pagans of earlier days, which had no existence till Protestantism arose, and with which even the Apostles themselves would perhaps have contended in vain. Protestantism let us once more de- clare it is the last scourge of heathenism. Before we approach the only region of Africa which now remains to be visited, it may be well to resume, in the words of a Protestant minister, formerly a missionary in these regions, the history which we have briefly traced. In 1856, nearly one hundred and sixty years after England had carried Protestant- ism to Western Africa, the character and results of missionary labor in these provinces were thus appreciated by Mr. Leighton Wilson. " The Church of Rome deserves great praise for the zeal she displayed in following up all the Portuguese and Spanish discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with efforts to extend the Christian faith. The Portuguese govern- ment itself, at the commencement of these enterprises, was in- fluenced as much by a desire to propagate the Catholic faith, as by any expectations of commercial gain. In the course of time, when unexpected sources of wealth were opened up by 612 CHAPTER VII. these discoveries, she lost sight, in a great measure, of the for- mer of these objects, and gave herself up wholly to an absorb- ing pursuit of the latter. The Church of Rome, however, was not diverted from her purpose by any such motives. She ad- dressed herself to the one great object of converting these newly discovered tribes to the Romish faith, and she pursued her calling with an energy, zeal, and perseverance worthy of a better cause." On the other hand, the emissaries of Protestantism, who have been described to us by their co-religionists as often pro- foundly immoral, and almost always engaged in the eager pur- suit of wealth, are thus noticed by the same writer. " Had Protestant nations and the Protestant Church pursued the same work with half the zeal and steadiness, the moral aspect of the world at the present time would have been very different from what it is." And then he gives this account of the actual fruits of their operations, backed by the support of England and America, and aided by immense resources, during a century and a half. "A.8 yet, the missionaries have done little more than possess themselves of the outposts ; but, in accomplishing even this much, they feel themselves greatly indebted to what has been done by the squadron"* Once more we have received the confessions, with which we are now familiar, and which we shall hear again in every land which we have still to visit. Once more we have been told by a Protestant missionary, who had himself abandoned the un- profitable work, the accustomed tale, which, in default of his testimony, we should have learned from others. There was as much prudence as candor in Mr. Wilson's tardy admissions. In 1842, the mission of Baraka, the principal station on the Gaboon river, was inaugurated by that gentleman. In 1861, after twenty years of costly effort, Mr. Paul du Chaillu, the intimate associate of the missionaries, records their own avowal, that they despair of acquiring any influence over the adult na- tives of 'Western Africa. They have some hope, he says, of the children in their schools, they have always hopes which are doomed never to be accomplished, and have already educated one generation in vain, but "it is only upon the children that the labors of the missionaries can have any important effects." They may well be "discouraged," he suggests, "at the slight result of their hard labor." " The positive success of the mis- sion," he reluctantly observes, " is not great ;" and we may accept his impartial estimate of it, when he relates that, after * Western Afi-ica, by J. Leighton Wilson, ch. iii., p. 446 ; ch. v., p. 481. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 613 the " inculcation of Bible precepts" during nearly a quarter of a century, " the older natives adhere to their vile superstitions, and are with difficulty influenced. If they come to church, it is too often out of curiosity, or to please the preacher, or from some fancied advantage to themselves."* In other words, a liuman religion is incapable, in Africa as in every other land, of effecting what only a Divine ministry can profitably attempt, or of imitating those triumphs of a holier faith which the agents of Protestantism are always occupied in recording, and always contrasting, in spite of themselves, witli their own blighted hopes and unfruitful toil. Mr. Leighton Wilson, whose candid testimony we have heard, was himself a Protestant missionary. Let us conclude our notice of Western Africa with the evidence of one of those lay writers whose verdict is, if possible, still more conclusive, be- cause announced after a still wider observation, and in spite of prepossessions not less incurable. We have said, and shall nave occasion to repeat the remark, that the latest report of Protestant missionary enterprise, in whatever region of the earth, is always the worst. A new example of this truth claims our attention. In 1862, Captain Napier Hewett, whose religious sympathies were wholly with the Protestant missionaries, and who warmly commends the zeal which distinguishes individuals among them from the mass of hirelings and adventurers, gives us the follow- ing information: "Though the country," he says, " exhibits a teeming fertility, unsurpassed by any thing on earth, the greater part lies uncultivated waste; . . . the lands once tilled sre abandoned, and the houses, except those inhabited ~by the mv- sionariesj desolate and decaying." "It seems," adds this impar- tial observer, " as though, like some of the West India islands, a blight had fallen on the place ;" and this calamity he at- tributes to "bad management, false philanthropy, and an insufficient schismatic priesthood." 181 Having given this account of the colony of Sierra Leone, Captain Hewett furnishes the following report of Bathurst : "The place of worship pertaining to the Established Church of England is a small building, whose neglected, unfinished in- terior, devoid of altar, plainly indicated the blighted state and stunted growth of that religion in the colony ; but the Catholic church is a large and commodious structure, as is likewise the Wesleyan chapel, which, unlike the place of worship of the Mother Church, possesses a large and extremely well-attended school." It was in schools of the latter class that he heard * Adventures in Equatorial Africa, ch. i., pp. 5, 6. 614: CHAPTER VII. the pupils "bellowing forth, in all the discordance of negro voice 'Oh let us be jyfool, jyfool, jyfool, jyfool,' " while from the chapel " came forth the favorite negro hymn 'Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Heigh ! for the land of Canaan ! Canaan is a pretty spot, I'm off to the land of Canaan,' " a melody in which Captain Hewett seems to think the truths of Christianity are somewhat imperfectly set forth. Of Bathurst, he adds, "There is also a convent of French Sisters of Mercy, who instruct children of their own persua- sion ; and these heroic ladies brave this dreadful climate, re- linquish joy, and forego every tie which makes life pleasant, solely to tend the sick and comfort the afflicted." 210 Sometimes he gives examples of individual converts, who have been, as he says, "lionized at Exeter Hall," and who seem to have been worthy of that distinction. Of one, who was "king of one of the Eboe tribes, and had amassed im- mense wealth by trading in the flesh and blood of his people," he relates, that "having been ostensibly converted to Chris- tianity, he had pretended to abandon that traffic, had become a promising protege of the missionaries, and had, in lieu of slave- dealing, taken to strong waters, and literally erected a rum cask as his throne." Being expelled by the people, who seem to have found that his profession of Christianity only made him a more intolerable ruffian, " the cause of this rum-drinking, but otherwise spiritually disposed potentate, was taken up by the missionaries, who, 'requested,' as Sir Charles Wood said in explanation to the House, ' the destruction of the town,' which was accordingly effected by the British squadron, though on what grounds this cruel act was undertaken Sir Charles Wood was unable to inform the House." 119 Captain Hewett observes a little later, that "too often the missionaries, these professed harbingers of Christianity and peace, are pestilent fomenters of strife between tribes, and have even encouraged the natives to resist the Queen's arms, as at Lagos, where the British force sustained a disastrous defeat. . . The missionaries are, in fact, the most warlike men on the coast." 315 Another of their most distinguished converts was the " heir apparent of the King of Barra," who was visited by Captain Hewett, and " who had been a boasted convert by the mis- MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 615 sionaries, but who, like most of the so-called converts^ had re- lapsed into barbarism," the habits of his court being such that the British officer was obliged to decline the hospitality of this singular disciple of Protestantism. Finally, Captain Hewett presents the following impressive summary of his observations in Western Africa. After reject- ing the proposal of " extended propagation of the Gospel by distribution of numerous missionaries throughout the continent," because " the competition between the Church and the rival sects of Dissenters must militate against the success of this plan, and emasculate the little good it possesses," he concludes with this grave statement : " Have missionary labors produced any beneficial effect in the colonies themselves? They have not. A former governor of Sierra Leone, when under examination before a committee of the House of Lords, some years since, being asked ' What was the state of the children turned out of the missionary schools?' replied, 'These children do not work; they are vagabonds ; and, without the immigration of liberated Africans, we could not get on at all.' " In 1852, Captain Hewett once more confirms the report of this official in these terms: "The missionary proteges invariably are found to be idle, lying, cunning, and utterly worthless ; and so thoroughly is this fact conceded, that no dwellers in the colonies wish to employ as servant a native educated in the missionary schools!" Such, by Protestant testimony, is the final result, in this case also, of human operations which force even so friendly a wit- ness to exclaim, " It does seem sinful to expend, when is re- membered the vast population in England which scarcely knows the rudiments of the Christian religion, in the vain endeavor to regenerate the black by means of missionaries, the immense revenues which are annually dissipated." " Little do the sub- scribers to foreign missions," he adds, " dream of the purposes to which their money is devoted ; little do they comprehend the character of the men to whom the distribution is intrusted, and in what manner the funds are lavished ; little do they know the small amount of good purchased by that expenditure ; and little do they conceive the false coloring bestowed upon the reports of missionary labors."* * European Settlements on the West Coast of Africa, ch. viii., p. 119 ; cli. xi., p. 181 ; ch. xiii., p. 210 ; cli. xvii., pp. 315-318. It would be unprofitable to multiply examples of the real character of the majority of Protestant mission- aries, but the terms i , which Captain Hewett records one of them, deserves notice. " The missionaries at Bathurst, feeling the want of creature comforts, and observing that the officers of the garrison, by the aid of their boat, man- aged to secure these carnal advantages," resolved to "participate in the lux- urv." " They might of course purchase a boat, but this did not suit them, and the question arose how to obtain one for nothing ? This would puzzle mos* 616 CHAPTER VII. SOUTH AFRICA. The southern portion of the vast continent of whose religious history we have now offered an imperfect sketch still remains to be noticed. We have spoken of the Moor and the Negro ; some account must be given in conclusion of the Kaffir and the Hottentot. In 1652, Van Riebeck inaugurated the Dutch reign in South Africa. Twenty-eight governors followed in succession, till in the year 1793 Holland forfeited her possessions to Great Britain. In 1795, General Craig, the first representative of English power, assumed the government of the Cape Colony. It is of the progress of religion among the heathen since the commence- ment of the latter epoch that we now propose to speak. The numerous writers on South Africa are in accord, as their own words will presently assure us, on one point only, that both the Hottentot and the Kaffir have degenerated morally during the period of English rule ; but an eager conflict has arisen amongst them as to the real cause of this deterioration. While the missionaries assert in self-defence, that it is the colonists who have ruined both Kaffir and Hottentot, the latter confidently retort, with wonderful unanimity, to whatever rank or class they belong, civil or military,- that it is mainly, and with rare exceptions, the teaching and influence of the missionary which have corrupted all the native tribes who have had the misfortune to come wthin the reach of either. When we have considered the evidence which they offer, we shall be able to judge, without much danger of error, on which side is truth. The first facts which claim our attention, and which consti- tute the distinctive features of Protestant missions in every land, are, enormous expenditure, and ceaseless multiplication of sects. Nearly twenty years ago, Dr. Grant remarked before people, but for missionaries, who are enabled always to draw on the inexhaust- ible exchequer of a too credulous public, the matter was easy. They accord- ingly compiled a flaming account of the extraordinary manner in which their efforts to propagate the Gospel in Bathurst had been crowned with success ; how many negroes had been received into the pale of the Church ! how edify- ing werextheir lives ; and that, in fact, the populace had become so virtuous, nothing further remained to them to effect in that quarter. But, alas ! the benighted ignorance and vice in which the tribes across the rimr were steeped. if they had only a boat, a multitude might be gathered into the fold. They could not purchase one themselves, because they had to deny themselves many luxuries, many comforts, nay even necessaries. Well, the next vessel brought out a boat, and that boat had been at Bathurst three years, and had never moved from the shore, except when the steamers arrived, and then on the same errand as the garrison boat !" Ch iv., p. 59. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 617 the University of Oxford, that already the following religious bodies had been transplanted to the Cape Colony : 1. Society for the Propagation of the Gospel ; 2. Scottish Missionary Society ; 3. United Brethren ; 4. French Protestant Society ; 5. German Missionary Society ; 6. London Missionary Society ; 7. Wesleyan Missionary Society ; 8. Baptist Missionary Society ; 9. American Board of Missions; 10. Rhenish Missionary Society ; 11 Paris Missionary Society.* We have seen in other lands the hopeless confusion and disorder, as well as the perplexity occasioned to the heathen, by such a colluvies of sects. In 1835, Mr. Moodie, a judicious and temperate writer, commented in the following words upon this disastrous but inevitable result : " Unfortunately each sect has some peculiar dogma, which they generally inculcate- to their followers, too often to the partial exclusion of more im- portant doctrines." And then he proceeds thus : " Each sect is ambitious of increasing the number of its followers ; a spirit of rivalry amongst them is the necessary consequence of this party zeal, which, joined to that external gloom and austerity which distinguishes them all, naturally creates a further distaste for their instructions."f And time, the sovereign remedy of so many human evils, only aggravates this. Thus, as late as 1855, the Rev. Mr. Holden tells us, even of the new province of Natal, that he found seven different religious denominations in one spot ; " enough, one would suppose, to meet the diversified creeds, tastes, and desires of the inhabitants !"J Two years later, we find Dr. Armstrong, a Protestant Bishop in South Africa, deploring in these words the same incurable dissensions : " I could not but be saddened by the thought of our religious divisions. No less than three places of worship were visible, as I approached the town, Cradock, besides the Church of England. This, in the midst of a population of some seven hundred people, was indeed a melancholy spectacle." This gentleman had also to lament, as we shall see when we come to examine his testimony, the implacable divisions within as well as outside his own sect, and his own incapacity to heal them. Such is the spectacle which, in Africa, as in every other land, Protestantism displays to the heathen, with no other effect than to warn them against adopting a religion of which these are the invariable fruits. * Bampton Lectures for 1843. f Ten Years in South Africa, vol. ii., ch. xiv., p. 280. History of the Colony of Natal, by the Rev. W. C. Holden, ch. ix., p. 246. Memoir of Bishop Armstrong, by the Rev. T. T. Carter, p. 347 (1857). 618 CHAPTER VII. Dr. Morrison relates of a number of missionaries sent out by the Scottish Missionary Society, that " they unhappily differed among themselves, upon some minor points of theology, and some of them failed to exhibit that spirit of charity and forbear- ance which ought to distinguish the missionary of the Cross."* Mr. Pringle also describes the voyage of some English Protest- ants, who were always engaged keenly in polemical discussions under the guidance of two preachers." They fought, he says, with so much bitterness, that they soon ceased to regard each other with sentiments of Christian forbearance."! Lastly, Dr. Livingstone tells us, in 1857, that "in South Africa such a variety of Christian sects have followed the footsteps of the London Missionary Society's successful career, that converts of one denomination, if left to their own resources," which ap- parently means, when they cease to be paid, " are eagerly adopt- ed by another and are thus more likely to become spoiled than trained to the manly Christian virtues.";): It would be superfluous to offer any illustrations of the other point, the enormous expenditure of these jealous and conflicting sects, each outbidding the other. Even the government adds its liberal contributions to those of the various missionary societies. Some years ago the education grant within the Cape colony already exceeded five thousand pounds per annum ; and we are told, in the Life of Dr. Armstrong, that Sir George Grey, the distinguished and justly popular governor, " proposes to spend no less a sum than thirty thousand pounds a-year on missions."! Dr. Armstrong asked, for his own share, four thousand pounds a-year. What the other sects spend, we may imagine, but need not stay to calculate. And now let us ap- proach, without further preface, the grave question of T-esulU, after more than half a century of uninterrupted effort. On this point there are, of course, two classes of witnesses ; the missionaries, who loudly assert, with the exception of truthful and respectable men, like Livingstone, Calderwood, Armstrong, arid a few others, that they have rivalled the first Apostles ; and the crowd of lay writers, who as vigorously proclaim, in spite of their sympathy with the missionary projects, that they have utterly failed, and even, as a rule, have proved most injurious to the character and welfare of the natives. We will hear both classes. The fortieth report of the Glasgow Missionary Society * Vol. ii., app., p. 593. f Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, ch. i., p. 7. Ch. vi., p. 115. Acts of the Government of the Cape of Good Hope, 1854-7. I P. 309. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 619 announces to the British public or at least to that portion of it who subscribe to such objects that " religion was striking its roots deeper and deeper in the native soil." Another re- port says : " Our missionaries are everywhere scattering the seeds of civilization, social order, and happiness."* It need hardly be said that the various societies emulate, and indeed often surpass, this style of narrative. Their agents also assist them with materials for such com- positions. The reports of Mr. Moffat who seems to have proposed to himself the journal of Mr. Morrison, of Canton, as his model are worthy of particular attention. Speaking of the weekly assemblies of his Hottentot dependents, he says : " A delightful unction of the Spirit was realized, especially in our Sabbath convocations."f If a poor savage, who had bor- rowed from civilization nothing but its vices, dies in the neigh- borhood of a " mission," u his disembodied spirit," we are told, " entered into the realms of eternal rest." The singular favors of what these gentlemen call, apparently for the sake of euphony, the u Triune Jehovah," are constantly showered upon the privileged Hottentots. Bloodthirsty savages, who after- wards became the bitterest enemies both of England and of her missionaries such asTzatzoe and Africaner, Pato and Macomo are described, at one time by the London Missionary Society, as zealous in "diffusing the name of Christ;" at another by Dr. Philip, as " elevated to a surprising height in the scale of improvement ;" or, by an American society, as remarkable for " an experimental acquaintance with the Bible !" And vast- sums were collected from w r omen and children, both in Eng- land and America, on the faith of these representations. But we shall perhaps obtain a clearer view both of the character of the missionaries and the results of their labors, if we introduce the witnesses in chronological order ; the unvarying uniformity of their testimony, during fifty successive years, will not escape the attention of the intelligent reader. The introduction of Protestant missions into this part of Africa appears to be due to Yan Der Kemp, whom Colonel Napier calls " the foundation stone of the South African mis- sions," and who has been celebrated with much applause in missionary reports. His history exactly resembles that of Bu- chanan, and other luminaries of the same order. He became a missionary, because every other profession was closed against him. He was originally, w*e are informed, a captain of dra- goons in the Dutch service, was dismissed from his regiment, and then became notorious as a professed atheist. Ultimately * Researches in South Africa, by the Rev. John Philp, D. D.; preface, p. 9. f Missionary Labors in Southern Africa, by Kobert Mofiat, ch. xi., p. 172. 620 CHAPTER VII. he found refuge in this remote dependency of Holland ; and Liechtenstein, one of his admirers, gave, in 1812, this account of his disciples : " They could sing and pray, and be heartily penitent for their sins, and talk of ' the Lamb of atonement ;' but none were really better for all this specious appearance." It was solely, he adds, the "convenient mode of getting them- selves fed," which u attracted many of the most worthless and idle among; the people, and all who applied were indis- criminately received into the establishment."* Van Der Kemp himself was accustomed to report of them officially as follows : " The zeal of our converted Hottentots is evidently an extraordinary gift of God's spirit." From Lichtenstein we also learn that both Yan Der Kemp, who now assumed the title of " doctor of divinity," and his English colleague, Mr. Read, whom a lively biographer calls " devoted heralds of mercy," married Hottentot girls ! while of another of their company, famous as a preacher, the same friendly witness relates, that u his influence over the minds of the female part of his flock was employed for the base purpose of seducing a young woman "f It would be necessary to apologize for introducing such details, if it were possible for the annalist of Protestant mis- sions to avoid topics which form so large a part of their history. Lichtenstein lived amongst these missionaries, and knew them intimately ; and though he makes an exception in favor of the Moravians, he declares that " the English and Dutch missionaries, with few exceptions, were idle vagabonds, or senseless fanatics." Indeed, the language of this traveller, who is the earliest in date of our witnesses, is sometimes still more energetic ; for he does not hesitate to call them " a swarm of idle missionaries, who find it more agreeable to be fed by the devout colonists, than to pursue the proper object for which they were sent out the endeavoring to instruct and civilize the neighboring savages." Of Kicherer, who long shared with Yan Der Kemp the homage of English Protestants, and of whose work " so much boasting has been made by himself and his friends in England," Lichtenstein says: "The Bosjemans, when they found there was nothing left to eat, hesitated not a moment to apostatize from Christianity."^: Such is the evi- dence of one who had watched the work, and was himself an ardent Protestant, and such the characteristic commencement of Protestant missions in South Africa. * Lichtenstein's Travels in Southern Africa, vol. i., ch. xvii., p. 236 (1812). f Ch. x., p. 144. J Vol. ii., ch. xli., p. 183. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 621 Dr. Sparrman, a learned Swedish Protestant, qualifies Liechtenstein's eulogy of the Moravians, by relating, that Smid, one of their number, " was banished out of the country of the Hottentots, for having illegally made himself a chief among the Hottentots, in order to enrich himself by their labor, and the presents they made him of cattle."* Many of the witnesses, however, seem disposed to contrast the Moravians with the other missionaries, apparently on account of the greater simplicity of their lives, and their habit of teaching mechanical trades. Yet most, or all of them probably, felt that they had gained promo- tion by settling in Africa; for, as Mr. Thompson remarks, nearly all of them had " originally been common mechanics, "f In 1822, Mr. Burchell, an unexceptionable witness, familiar by actual observation both with the missionaries and their work, writes as follows : " It is much to be lamented that the com- munity at home are misled by accounts catching at the most trifling occurrence for their support, and showing none but the most favorable circumstances, and even those unfairly exaggerated." The nominal converts, he reports, listen to the missionaries " as long as it suits their worldly convenience and advantages." The motives of the missionaries themselves Mr, Burchell seems to have easily penetrated. " Two of them in particular, as I was informed at Klaar water, had carried on the traffic in ivory with much success." Finally, as an example of what even the best of their converts were really worth, he notices " the three converted Hottentots" who were taken to England by Mr. Kicherer, "and exhibited as specimens of mis- sionary conversion,"^: and whose history deserves a moment's attention. Nothing could exceed the enthusiasm which they created among " the favorers of missionary labors." Even country subscribers were allowed an opportunity of seeing these selected specimens of African Protestantism, and of thus appreciating the excellent use to which their own contributions had been applied. At length they were withdrawn from the public gaze, after reciting, with surprising accuracy, innumerable texts of Scrip- ture, and otherwise manifesting to delighted audiences their intelligent zeal for the Protestant religion. The missionary, satisfied with such encouraging success, reconveyed his disciples to Africa, where he took them at first into his house as domestic * Voyage to the Gape of Good Hope, by Andrew Sparrman, M.D., ch. v., p. 213. f Travels in Southern Africa, by George Thompson, Esq., vol., ii. ch. viii., p. 91 ; 3d edition. % Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, by William J. Burchell, Esq., vol. ii., ch. v., p. 155. 622 CHAPTER VII. servants. But the drama was now played out, and the curtain dropped ; and Mr. Burchell informs us, that as they immediately resumed their real character, proved to be inveterate drunkards, "and in other respects immoral and undeserving, their protector found himself compelled to put them out of his house."* Unfortunately this climax became known in England ; and the missionary society, displaying a tardy repentance for the fraud which had been so beneficial to their funds, thought it expedient to affirm, for the instruction of their resentful sub- scribers, that " the Hottentots were not brought to England by the desire of the society, "f We need only add that Mr. Kicherer, whose indiscretion had been so profitable to " the Society," and probably to himself, ultimately abandoned mis- sionary work altogether. In 1828, we come to Dr. Philip, the most conspicuous amongst the whole body of missionaries, and a gentleman whose pro- ceedings, as recorded by himself or his contemporaries, excite in us to speak frankly such overpowering sentiments of repug- nance, that we must be careful to express them only in the words of others. Let us hear first his account of his converts. " John Tzatzoe," he tells us, " is of great use to Mr. Brownlee in his labors;" and then he shows that he was, in fact, an assistant missionary. Dr. Philip, mindful perhaps of Mr. Kicherer's example, determined to renew the experiment. Tzatzoe, in his turn, as Colonel Napier remarks, " was paraded at Exeter Hall." At the fifty-first general meeting of the London Missionary Society, long after he had returned to Africa, where the astute barbarian revealed him&elf in his true character, the following report was gravely communicated to an audience of whom the " directors" and their " secretary" probably felt quite sure. " John Tzatzoe and the other native assistant have made extensive journeys through the year,ybr the purpose of diffusing the name of Christ and the knowledge of His salvation." Nor was this all. A painting was executed, of which engraved copies were widely circulated, in which Dr. Philip appeared in the foreground in an impressive attitude, and the "native missionaries," with prayerful countenances, in the rear. The effect, as. is invariably the case with such performances, was triumphant. It is true that it did not last long, though prob- ably quite long enough to secure the objects aimed at. Tzatzoe, says Colonel Napier, " who excited such ill-directed sympathy in England, appeared foremost in arms against us during the * Trawls in the Interior of Southern Africa, by William J. Burchell, Esq., vol ii., ch. v., p. 155. f Missionary Transactions, vol. ii., introd., p. 5. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 623 late Kaffir war."* And Mrs. Ward adds, that when she saw the report of the missionary society above quoted, "My first impulse was to laugh, knowing that Tzatzoe, the propagator of Christianity in 1845, has been foremost in the mischief of 1846 ; but it is melancholy to think how we have been imposed upon" A little later this lady adds, " The British public was com- pletely imposed upon by this savage heathen, for such he is, was, and ever will be."f In the able reports of the London Mis- sionary Society he was wholly absorbed, as we have seen, in works of piety, and in "diffusing the knowledge of salvation." It is certainly worthy of observation, if we had leisure to dwell upon such details, that the arts practised by English missionary societies havebeen frankly compared, even by friend- ly voices, to the unhandsome " shifts" of traders and attorneys. Their operations, we are assured, exactly resemble, except in their ostensible object, those of commercial associations of the meaner class. " So mercantile houses," says a well-known Anglican clergyman, " take more pains to solicit orders than do the ' societies ;' " of which, he adds, " some are simply large trading firms, dealing with the money of others." Even their " balance-sheets," the same authority declares, being designed rather to hide than to reveal the real distribution of their revenues, are not only " very often intentionally delusive," but exhibited " in several the existence of a system of deliberate fraud"\ The facts already noticed, and which we will now resume, appear to indicate that the same spirit inspires all their operations, in England, in Africa, and every where, else. Another distinguished " convert," who was for some time a sure source of income to the societies, was Africaner, who, in the eloquent report of Dr. Philip, was "elevated to a surprising height in the scale of improvement." This account of him was forwarded even to America, where, however, it was deemed too tame to be safely submitted to audiences accustomed to the more violent forms of religious excitement. In the United States, therefore, Dr. Philip's eulogy of his pupil was published in the improved and expanded statement, that " he was of undissembled piety, and much experimental acquaintance with his Bible." The real history of Africaner is less attractive. He was 'originally one of the flock of a certain Mr. Ebner, who candidly * Excursions in Southern Africa, by Lieut.-col. E. Elers Napier, vol. ii., ch. xiv., p. 275. f Five Years in Kaffir Land, by Mrs. Harriet Ward, vol. ii., ch. iv., p. 116 ; ch. x., p. 277 (1848). \ S. G. O., The Times, January 17, 1860. | Life of Africaner, by the American Sunday-school Union, p. 23. 624: CHAPTER VII. described his own disciples to Mr. Moffat as " a wicked, sus- picious, and dangerous people, baptized as well as uribaptized."* And apparently Mr. Ebner was the only person not deluded by him, nor anxious to delude others. Africaner, who manifested such undissembled piety, became, like Tzatzoe, one of the most dangerous adversaries of the very missionaries whose schemes he had unconsciously served, and " a bitter opponent," as Mr. Francis Galton relates, of their work.f But if Dr. Philip habitually represented wicked and treach- erous savages, such as Tzatzoe and Africaner, as devout Chris- tians and valuable assistant missionaries, and his employers willingly profited by the fraud, there are not wanting grave and responsible witnesses to inform us they have already declared it before the British Parliament that it was he who stimulated them, for his own purposes, to the very excesses which cost so much blood and treasure, and which even a British army had some difficulty in chastising. It was his object to gain influence over them at the expense of the British government, and there- fore, says Colonel Wade, he " drove the Kaffirs to outrageous proceedings and depredations."^: Sir Benjamin d'Urban, also, though well affected to the missionaries, reported officially to Lord Glenelg, that " among the causes of the Kaffir invasion was the injudicious and most dangerous tampering with their discontents, practised (doubtless without intention of mischiev- ous consequences) by Dr. Philip, of the London mission, and his subordinate partisans." And then he distinctly charges this person that "he never apprized the governor" that the Kaffirs were about to " shed blood," though he was perfectly cognizant of their intention. But enough of such a " missionary" as this, who is obliged to confess that Lord Howden, another African official, reported " that the disinclination to increase or even maintain the mis- sionary institutions already established in the colony, is almost universal /" and that in reluctantly consenting to the continu- ance of the seditious "mission" at Klaarwater, he expressed the hope that it might become "something better than the refuge of many wicked and disorderly persons who are obliged to fly from justice." || it would occupy too much space to trace the gradual modi- fication in the tone of the home reports, in consequence of the unwelcome statements of officials and travellers, which * Moffat, ch. viii., p. 103. f Journal of Geographical Society, vol. xxii., p. 142. t Parliamentary Papers, July, 1835, vol. vii., p. 373. S lUd., 1837, vol. xliii., p. 380. jf Researches, &c., vol. i., ch. xviii., p. 370 ; and vol. ii., app., p. 382. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 625 began to reach England, and suggested to directors and secre- taries the necessity of caution. A single example will show into what language these unexpected revelations were cautious- ly translated, in order to produce the least possible shock upon their subscribers. Of one of the very worst cases, where the native disciples had become 1 notorious throughout the colony for idleness and profligacy, Dr. Smith observes : " The direct- ors" who could not afford to put out? too gloomy a view of the character of their pensioners "lament the prevalence of a Laodicean spirit among the greater part of them."* To have said that the so-called Christian natives were wallowing in vice under the very eye of the missionaries, might have compromised the annual revenue; so they were only affected by " a Laodicean spirit." In 1827, Mr. Thompson, a well-known African traveller, accidentally reveals, evidently from inadvertence, the prudent inaccuracy of his missionary friends, and exposes the real character of those well-known " reports," in which there was often nothing authentic but the date and the signature. None have surpassed, few have equalled, Mr. Moffat, of whose "Sabbath convocations" we have already heard. Mr. Thomp- son became the guest of this gentleman, and having ventured, with the blunt frankness of a traveller, to express his surprise at the scanty attendance of the natives in chapel, whom Mr. Moffat had described officially as attending in crowds, re- ceived this hasty and unguarded confession : '"At no time, the missionaries told me, has the attendance been considerable" Mr. Thompson adds, at a later date, after personal examina- tion, " Few or no converts have been made ! f In 1829, Mr. Oowper Rose our witnesses are all ardent Protestants contents himself with protesting against the popu- lar delusion, that u the missionary is a man who has taken up the cross, and renounced all that the worldly-minded seek." And then he notices their " convenient habitations," and their " wives and families," and the fact which continually met his observation, that they were "not deprived of social enjoy- ments.":): In 1835, we have the important evidence of Mr. Moodie, a particularly moderate and careful writer, who spent ten years in Africa, and visited the numerous missionary stations with warm interest and sympathy, which only painful experience was able to extinguish. * Hist&ry of the Missionary Societies, vol. ii., p. 182. f Travels, &c., vol. i., ch. ix., p. 193. i Four Tears in Southern Africa, Letter vi., p. 188. 40 CHAPTER VII. For more than thirty years the missionaries had now been at their work, without let or hindrance, and Mr. Moodie will assist us to appreciate accurately all that they had accomplished during that long period, in which one generation had already passed away. Of the Moravians, who are usually preferred by other writers, because they generally content themselves with following the trade or calling which they had pursued at home, he speaks thus : "I have, generally found the Hottentots who have come from the Moravian stations more improvident and lazy than those who come from other missionary institutions," which he attributes to their " obliging the Hottentots to de- posit all their earnings in their custody."* Sometimes he speaks of individual missionaries, and here is an example. Mr. S., missionary at Laure Brack, being in re- duced circumstances, " had taken up the trade of an instructor of the heathen." He first made the Hottentots build him a house, u for which they were not paid ;" then got them " to labor for months in leading out a spring of water from a ravine in the mountain, to irrigate a strip of rich land : this he kindly allowed them to clear from brushwood, and bring into cultiva- tion on their own account for a year or two ; and then, the moment the principal difficulties were overcome, he very coolly appropriated the ground to his own use, without giving them any remuneration for their labor." He adds, that "Mr. S. was allowed to remain for many years to tyrannize over this hapless people. Nothing could exceed the appearance of wretchedness in the institution." Finally, "his misdeeds, I am happy to say, have at last occasioned his expulsion. "f Again: "At all the missionary stations in Kaffreland,! could not help remarking the gloomy and desponding expression which pervaded the countenances of the people ; . . . . we cannot for a moment suppose that this could be the effect of true religion." And then he shows how the unnatural gloom of the whole system, and the ftmatical denunciation of the most " innocent amusements," which these teachers seem to regard as the essential tenet of Christianity, fully accounts for " the general disinclination of the Kaffres for the Christian religion." And finally he observes, that " as most of the mis- sionaries must be fully aware of the total inadequacy of the system hitherto pursued, they should confess the truth, instead of flattering the hopes of their employers by sanguine, if not exaggerated statements of their progress.":): * Ten Years in South Africa, by Lieut. J. D. W. Moodie, vol. i., ch. iv., p. 83. f Vol. i., ch. v., p. 94. J Vol. ii., ch. xiv., pp. 280-283. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 227 There is much more in Mr. Hoodie's sensible work which illustrates the real character of Protestant missions to the heathen, but we must hasten to hear others. "The improve- ment which has been effected," he says, in any measure, and in particular places, "the missionaries must well know is chiefly to be attributed to causes over which they have no con- trol." Again : " I have often been surprised to find that natives who bore the very worst character among the farmers, and had conducted themselves very badly in my own service, were considered quite ' saints' at the missionary stations, where they find it their interest to assume the greatest sanctity of demeanor." "I believe their system to be radically bad, and productive of the worst consequences as respects the interests and improvement of all classes of the community." And finally, he sums up in these grave words the results of missionary teaching : " It is notorious to all the colonists, that the Hottentots who have resided for any time at the missionary stations are generally the most idle and worthless of their nation"* In July of the same year, 1835, various witnesses were ex- amined before Parliamentary Committees on the results of Prot- estant missions in South Africa. " Do you think that the mis- sionaries have improved the character of the Kaffirs ?" was a question addressed to Captain Aitchison, who had lived long amongst them. "Not in the least" was his reply ; " with the exception of Kama, and one or two of his tribe, I have not seen the slightest improvement by the missionaries among them : in fact, in the neighborhood of Chumie, where the great mis- sionary station is, they are the worst behaved Kaffirs of the whole tribe."^ Major Dundas reported on the same occasion, "I believe they have hardly christianized a single individual ;":(; and we shall find this admitted to be true, even by missionaries, twenty years later. Sir Harry Smith, an ardent advocate of extreme Protestant opinions, observed, that " the house of the Eev. Mr. Brownlee," whom he calls " an exemplary man, who had resided years with these people," "'was burnt to the ground, and shortly after that of every other missionary, except the Chumie and Burn's Hill, which were ransacked." And the Rev. William Culmers, of Chumie, confessed that, after so many years, they had not acquired the slightest influence with the natives, when he said, "An angry look just now would be enough to send all * Vol. ii., p. 292. f Parliamentary Papers, July, 1835, vol. vii., p. 12. | Ibid., p. 142. 228 CHAPTER VII. the missionaries into eternity."* At Burn's Hill they were rescued by the military, at the earnest solicitation of the mis- sionaries themselves ; some of whom afterwards protested, when the danger was past, that they had never been in the least danger amongst their attached flocks If In one of the later Kaffir wars, that of 1850, a still more characteristic fact occurred, and one which shows, that as the Negro- Anglican " converts" at Sierra Leone were at the same time " communicants" and " obstinate" followers of native superstitions ; so in South Africa, the same class exhibit an equally remarkable duality of profession. At a place called the " Shilo Missionary Institution," " the church, or missionary chapel, was held most resolutely by the enemy, garrisone'd chiefly by those very Hottentots who, not a month previously, had received the Holy Sacrament within its walls.";}: In 1837, Sir James Alexander, though favorable to missionary schemes, says of the missionaries, " Little care is taken at home in the selection of the instruments ;" and of the missionary schools, " Schools of idleness they are, instead of schools of industry, as they ought to be," in which " the Hottentots were kept in a state of pupilage, immorality, and concubinage. r In 1839, Mr. Bannister, a member of the Aborigines Pro- tection Society, says : " Missionaries have for the most part proved themselves incapable of protecting the natives politi- cally, or of improving them so rapidly that they might become their own protectors. '| In 1842, we come to Mr. Moffat, and to his account of mis- sionary labors in South Africa. If this gentleman announces in animated phrase his own continual triumphs, he at least permits no such pretensions on the part of his colleagues and friends. Of Mr. Edmunds he tells us, that he abandoned the work owing to " an insurmountable aversion on his part to the people."Tf His companion, Mr. Ebner, as we have already heard, deplored the wickedness of his flock, " baptized as well as unbaptized." Of a tribe of Kamaquas, " which had long * Vol. xliii., pp. 359, 371. f The Mr. Brownlee mentioned above reports as follows, in 1862, to the London Missionary Society, of his own disciples. " We have some degree of confidence in viewing them as epistles known and read of all men. Some have departed, both from among the Hottentots and Kaffirs, giving Christian evi- dence of being prepared for glory, and longing to be with Christ. Report, p, 74. Such language defies comment. \ Narrative of the Kaffir War of 1850-1, by R. Godlonton, ch. xvii., p. 215. Voyage Among the Colonies of W. Africa, by Sir James E. Alexander, K.L.S., vol. i., ch. xvi., p. 402 ; vol. ii., ch. xx., p. 75. jj Memoir respecting the Colonization of Natal, by S. Bannister, Esq., Member of the Aborigines Protection Society ; preface, p. 10. * Missionary Labors, &c., ch. ii., p. 27. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 629 enjoyed the instructions of missionaries," he says, " They had not the least idea of a God or a future state. They were literal- ly like the beasts which perish."* Again, of Mr. Edwards and Mr. Cox, two Protestant missionaries, who " settled in the Bechuana country, for the ostensible purpose of preaching the Gospel to the natives," he gives this account : They took to farming and trading, and " on this rock these men appear to have struck, and both were wrecked." " Edwards," Mr. Moffat adds, " is now, or was some years since, a hoary-headed infidel."f His own interpreter, also, "brought home a con- cubine with him, and apostatizing, became an enemy to the mission." " Mr. Evans relinquished the mission altogether." Of the natives generally he confesses, that they were " sensible only of the temporal benefits enjoyed by those who have re- ceived the Gospel.":): It appears, therefore, that Mr. Moffat, though he does full justice to himself, is at least perfectly candid in his estimate of others. It is only necessary to add, that they, in their turn, speak with equal frankness of him. Thus, the feev. Dr. Brown, alluding to Moffat's florid narratives, says bluntly, " Of these awakenings, we confess, we entertain great doubts." And again : " Flourishing accounts were at different periods given of the progress of religion, but some of those accounts were probably much exaggerated, while others were founded on mis- taken judgments." Mr. Freeman also, a secretary of the Lon- don Missionary Society, confessed nine years later ^ after a visit to Kolobeng, which had so long enjoyed Mr. Moffat's presence, " The whole mission- work of the station is quite in an incipient state" And then, as he was not speaking of operations in which he had any personal share, he proposes this candid question : How far is a missionary justified " in remaining with a heathen people, when, though they are glad of his presence, from the shield it serves to throw around them in their civil and political condition, they not only do not embrace the Gospel which he preaches, out resist and oppose, and scarcely ever come to him ?"| Mr. Moffat should have remembered, when he wrote home about " the unction of the Spirit realized in our Sabbath convocations," that in these days people travel far and fast, and almost always publish an account of their travels when they are ended. * Ch. ix., p. 124. f Ch. xiv., pp. 215, 216. J Ch. xxxiii., p. 608. $ History of the Propagation of Christianity among the Heathen, vol. ii, p. 239, | Tour in S. Africa, by J. J. Freeman, ch. xii., p. 291. 630 CHAPTER VII. In 1844, Mr. Backhouse, who was apparently a preacher, and whose work is a painful specimen of complacent fanaticism, was obliged to admit, with respect to South Africa, " the little that has been effected, as well as the tardiness of its progress."* In 1848, for lapse of time brings no change, and after half a century of barren effort not the slightest sign of improvement is recorded, Mr. Bunbury, a scientific Protestant traveller, thus remarks on the pretended influence of the missionaries among the Kaffirs: "Yet it is certain, that in the present out- break the Kaffirs have shown themselves far more powerful and formidable, and at the same time have displayed a more sanguinary and merciless spirit, than at any former time. The task of reclaiming and civilizing these people is evidently not to be accomplished by missionaries alone."f In the following year, 1849, we have the testimony of Colonel Napier to the same facts which so many other equally capable and impartial witnesses have already attested. "Notwith- standing those flaming accounts which have been published to the contrary," this distinguished officer says, " it is notorious, it is a fact which cannot be contradicted, that all attempts to convert the Kaffir race have hitherto proved complete failures." It is just the history of China, India, Ceylon, and Australia over again. "Kaffirs, Koran rias, and Bushmen, spite of the falsely asserted success of missionary labor, are still in a state of most brutalized ignorance, as regards religion or worship of any description." Of the Hottentots, he says : " Their Christianity consists in that love of idleness, and a lazy, useless state of existence, which they so fully enjoy at those establishments formed by their #02'- disant spiritual instructors." Their natural vices, he affirms, u are shamefully countenanced and encouraged at most of the missionary establishments within the limits of the colony ;" which, he adds, u are hotbeds of laziness, and have moreover, in many cases, been converted into nurseries for harboring desert- ers and vagabonds of every description." It is here, Colonel Napier reports, as Sir B. D' Urban and others had already done, that " discontent and suspicion, and in some instances open rebellion," are fostered "by men professing to disseminate among the heathen the holy truths of the Gospel." And then he complains, with natural indignation, that " drunken ruffians," such as Macorno, Fato, and others, should be repre- * Visit to the Mauritius and 8. Africa, by James Backhouse, app., p. 51. f Journal of a Residence at the Cape of Good Hope, by Charles J. F. Bun- bury, F.L.S, ch. xi., p. 255. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 631 sen ted by the missionaries, with the most unworthy objects, " as converts to Christianity." Finally, after describing the mis- sionaries u as men sallying forth to convert the heathen with a Bible in one hand, and a Hottentot ' vrouw' in the other," he thus appreciates, in the same sentence, the teachers and their disciples : "The Hottentots are more drunken and dissolute than ever, and some reverend personages have not to their shame be it said set them the most rigorous examples of morality."* If we still multiply evidence which, during fifty years, we have found to be absolutely uniform, and which, proceeding exclusively from Protestants, effectively illustrates the real character of a religion of which these are the unvarying fruits in every land, it is only in order that its weight and volume may bear some proportion to the mass of prejudice and igno- rance which it may possibly assist to remove. For this reason, let us continue the chain of witnesses down to the present hour, and the next, in 1851, is the Rev. Gustavus Hines, who thus describes the influence of his brethren in South Africa. " Large numbers had professed to be converted, but very few had continued for any length of time to give evidence of a genuine change of heart. Indeed, it appears to be the case in Africa, as well as in other heathen countries, that it is much easier to get the people converted than it is to keep them so!"f And in the same year an English writer, not less favorably disposed than Mr. Hines towards the missionaries, makes the same revelations as all the other witnesses, both about them and their converts. Of the first he deplores that they should " put down every thing that is pleasant, connect the devil with the most innocent enjoyments, and make hymn-singing the only overt act of hilarity ;" while of the last he says, " Any thing more dreary and uncomfortable than a converted savage I have never seen in the form of humanity." And then he gives a specimen of one who had been taught to sing about " the sufferings of the Lamb," but who " attached no meaning to the words, and knew no more about the Lamb, or His suf- ferings, than one of the lower animals.":): In 1852, Mr. Cole, after five years of personal observation, thus confirms all his predecessors. " Out of every hundred Hottentot Christians (so called), I will venture to declare, that ninety-nine are utterly ignorant of any correct notion of a future state. I speak from experience. I have frequently * Excursions in Southern Africa, introd., p. 10 ; vol. i., ch. v., p. 58 ; ch. vii., p. Ill ; vol. ii., ch. xxii., p. 442. f Life, on the Plains of the Pacific, ch xv., p. 308. Cf. Sketches of the Caffrt Tribes, 1851. J To the Mauritius and back, ch. v., p. 197. 632 CHAPTER VII. been by the bedside of the sick and dying Hottentot, who has been a constant attendant at some missionary chapel, and I have asked him whether he had any fear of dying ? He has smiled, and said, "'None.' " I have asked him whether he expects to go to heaven ? and he has answered " < No.' " Where, then ? "< No where.' " This I have heard, over and over again, from the lips of some of the ' pet' Christians of missionaries." Is it possible to desire a more impressive demonstration of the incurable impotence of Protestantism ? Like all the other witnesses, Mr. Cole explains the fact that many Hottentots call themselves " Christians" by the " great pecuniary advantage" which they derive from the profession. He also, like Lichtenstein and Burehell, and Moodie and Napier, and the rest, declares that "it is notorious that the people living at the missionary stations are the idlest and most useless set of people in the colony ;" while at some of them, he adds, " promiscuous intercourse between the sexes was winked at, if not absolutely sanctioned."* In 1853, Mr. Galton explains, like Mr. Cole, the motive of the missionary in still continuing his unprofitable career. "The missionary is," he says, " to all intents and purposes, lord para- mount of the place."f And considering the purpose with which most of them undertake the work, and the principles upon which they conduct it, there is nothing in this to surprise iis. A well-known German traveller, who sailed with one ot' them to the Cape of Good Hope, exclaims, " What is to be expected from such a man ? He began the voyage with a falsehood. He had assured the committee he had no children, yet came on board with a child, and his wife was daily expecting anotlier."f In 1854:, we have the evidence of Archdeacon Merriman, whose frank and genial style can hardly fail to attract the sympathy of his readers, as his character seems to have won that of his friends. "The Keformed Church of England," this gentleman observes, judging it by its proceedings in Africa, k4 has yet to learn the elements of real systematic mission work." With equal candor, he rebukes " the exaggerated accounts of missionaries," of whom he does not appear to have formed a high estimate. Excepting certain " foreign" missionaries, he * The Gape and the Kafirs, &c , by Alfred W. Cole, ch. viii., p. 145. f Tropical South Africa, by Francis Galton, Esq., ch. ii., p. 29. | The Last Travels of Ida Pfeiffer, ch. v., p. 75 (1861). MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 633 says, " Not a few South African missionaries seem to quit the employment as soon as an opening occurs either to farm advantageously, or to enter the employ of the government. / meet with examples of this wherever I go" The true missionaries of the Cross, from the time of St. Paul to our own, have always died at their work, by martyrdom, by toil, by disease, or by old age. They do not " retire upon their property," like the Anglican missionaries in New Zealand ; nor upon a pension, like those in India ; they never " cease to call themselves missionaries," like Mr. Gutzlaff, Mr. Kicherer, and their fellows ; still less do they take to farming, banking, or other modes of augmenting their imperceptible resources. They give much to the world, but they borrow nothing from it, except the grave in which, after having confessed " a good con- fession before many witnesses,"* they lie down in peace, ex- pecting the day of account. Mr. Merriman seems to forget his own exception in favor of " foreign" emissaries, when he afterwards relates of the " French mission stations," that u the missionaries are extensively en- gaged in farming on their private account." Dr. Hawks does not increase our esteem for the same class when he notices the rumor, " that the Caffres have been instructed in the art of war by a French missionary settled among them, who passed his early life in the army."f Another singular fact which Mr. Merriman mentions, agrees with Mr. Godlonton's account of a parallel occurrence. Of certain rebels, who acted with great ferocity against the English, he says, "These men had all partaken of the Holy Communion together the Sunday previous !" Anglican communicants in the colonies do not seem to be of a high class. Lastly, Mr. Merriman, who seems to have been everywhere distressed and embarrassed by what he calls " our hateful religious disunion," relates how he tried to prevent its evil effects upon the heathen. He was, on a certain occasion, about to preach from a wagon, just as a Wesleyan missionary had taken up a rival position under a neighboring hedge. A prompt resolution saved appearances. The next moment the savages would have seen Protestantism under an unfavorable aspect, but a rapid colloquy was followed by a reluctant truce, and Mr. Merriman offered to read Anglican prayers while the other should give a Wesleyan sermon. The compromise was accepted, and for the first time a pagan audience was persuaded to believe in the unity of Protestantism. * Tim. vi. 12. f American Expedition under Commodore Perry, by Francis L. Hawks, D.D., ch. iii., p. 103. 634 CHAPTER VII. It is curious, however, that a little later we find this Anglican Archdeacon, who was far from being elated by so questionable a triumph, envying even the Dutch Calvinists in South Africa on this ground, that at least they all professed the same heresies. "Ten times the number of English," he observes, "could not do, in consequence of their religious divisions, what the Dutch so easily achieve."* In 1855, a more remarkable witness appears, and one who will assist us to comprehend not only the failure of Protestant- ism to impress itself on the heathen mind, but also its real in- fluence even upon some of the most respectable of its own pro- fessors. Dr. Colenso is, or was, an Anglican Bishop in Natal ; a man far beyond the reach of any imputation on the score of personal character, highly intelligent, full of honest zeal, and probably as superior to most of his companions in moral worth, as he certainly is in intellect and attainments. Towards this gentleman personally, it would be irrational to entertain any but kind and respectful feelings. Yet he is perhaps the most striking example in the whole history of Protestant missions, of the withering influence of a religion which could make such a man, full of ability and good intentions, avow opinions such as that which we are about to notice. Dr. Colenso, embarrassed by the obstinate adherence to polygamy which he observed among the Kaffirs, came to the resolution, after conference, it is said, with other Anglican authorities of the highest rank, to remove the difficulty by a process which, though adopted in a well-known case by Luther and Melancthon, had not previously received the official sanc- tion of Anglican bishops. As polygamy would not yield to Protestantism, Dr. Colenso agreed to consider polygamy a " scriptural" mode of existence. Here are his own words. " 1 must confess that I feel very strongly that the usual prac- tice of enforcing the separation of wives from their husbands, upon their conversion to Christianity, is quite unwarrantable, and opposed to the plain teaching of our Lord" And then he proves, of course from the Bible, that polygamy is not incon- sistent with the all-holy religion of the Gospel. Here is the proof. " What is the use," he asks, " of our reading to them (the heathen) the Bible stories of Abraham, Israel, and David, with their many wives?" One should have thought it easy enough to explain to them, as St. Paul did, that the New Law not only proposes a higher standard of holiness than the Old, because the incarnation of the Sou of God has completely changed man's relation to his * Journals of Archdeacon Merriman, pp. 37, 52, 116, 178, 185 MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 635 Creator, but gives power, through the Sacraments of the Precious Blood, to attain it; and that while the prophet of Israel permitted divorce to the Jews, "by reason of the hard- ness of their hearts," the Apostle of the Gentiles dissuaded Christians even from marriage. But the awful sanctity of the religion of Jesus is "foolishness" in the eyes of men who know it to be unattainable by themselves, and who do not blush to claim for the Christian a licence greater than that which was a reproach even to the Jew. St. Francis or St. Ignatius is a portent as hateful to the Protestant, as St. Paul was to the Greek. When our Lord said of the counsel of virginity. " All men take not this word, but they to whom it is given"* we know for whom he reserved, in all ages, the angelic gift. But Dr. Colenso was not without support in his view of polygamy. "The whole body of American missionaries in JBurrnah," he observes, " after some difference of opinion . . . came to the unanimous decision to admit in future polygamists of old standing to Communion, but not to offices ^in the Church :" as if the last were a greater privilege than the first ! " I must say this appears to me the only right and reasonable course."f Yet Mr. East assures us, and we hardly needed the assur- ance, that " intimately connected with polygamy, and in part at least resulting from it, is the degradation of woman in Africa.";): It is certainly a remarkable fact, that if any unusu- ally strange doctrine is announced among Protestant mission- aries, any new outrage upon the Incarnation, as when the Anglican bishops in India solicited an alliance with the Syrian Nestorians ; or upon the Blessed Eucharist ; or the Sacrament of Holy Baptism ; or the Creeds ; or the Mother of God ; or the Sacrament of Marriage ; it is sure to proceed, not from the unlettered Baptist or Wesleyan, but from some highly respect- able minister of the Anglican Church. Dr. Colenso speaks favorably of the Kaffir character, and of their "faithfulness and honesty," as Levaillant|| and other early writers on South Africa were accustomed to do. But it * S. Matt. xix. 11. f Ten Weeks in Natal, &c., by J. W. Colenso, D.D., Lord Bishop of the Diocese, pp. 140, 141. { Western Africa, p. 50. Of Dr. Colenso's later writings it need only be observed here, that it was in making the attempt, with unquestionable zeal and sincerity, to convert the heathen by the Bible, that this Anglican bishop was led to doubt its truth. It had been better for him not to put his hand to a work to which he was not called, nor to expose himself to the reproach, which applies to others also, "This man began to build, and was not able to finish." St. Luke, xiv. 30. \ Voyage dans I'Interieur de VAfrique, 1780-1785. 636 CHAPTER VII. seems to be the mission of Protestantism, by the testimony of its own agents, to rob the heathen even of his natural virtues. Dr. Colenso declares, and we may safely trust so intelligent a witness, that the Kaffirs display "traces of a religious knowledge, however originally derived, which their ancestors possessed long before the arrival of the missionaries." Yet Protestantism, with every human advantage on its side, could only succeed in exciting the antipathy of these vigorous bar- barians ; and Dr. Colenso himself mentions a chief, who, after listening with courteous patience to a sermon, inquired eagerly, the moment the preacher's voice ceased, " How do you make gunpowder?"* The only other statement which we need borrow from this writer, is an expression of opinion, founded no doubt upon personal observation, which is not likely to be acceptable to Protestant missionaries. " Wives often ruin a mission," he says, " by their tempers and animosities, breaking up the har- monious action of their husbands."f In 1856, that we may continue the chain of witnesses, Mr. Andersson, a friend and associate of the missionaries, gives such examples as the following of the complete nullity of their efforts. Of Schepmansdorf, in the country of the Narnaquas, he says : " Although Mr. Bam (the missionary) had used every effort to civilize and christianize his small community, all his endeavors had hitherto proved nearly abortive." Of the Da- maras, again, this is his account : " Mr. Halm, who is liked and respected by the natives, never succeeded, as he himself told me, in converting a single individual." Speaking of the nominal converts, under all classes of mis- sionaries, Mr. Andersson says, " So long as they are fed and clothed, they are willing enough to congregate round the missionary, and to listen to his exhortation. The moment, however, the food and clothing are discontinued, their feigned attachment to his person and to his doctrines is at an end, and they do not scruple to treat their benefactor with ingratitude, and to load him with abuse."J Such a history, uniform in every land, and for every race, sounds like an echo of the prophetic malediction : " You shall be as an oak with the leaves * P. 117. f P. 52. It is curious to see this confirmed, in 1862, by a female agent of th Church Missionary Society. " She who has not the inward adorning St. Peter Bpeaks of, proves rather a hindrance to her husband, especially when con- nected with mission work." Report, p. 29. The writer, whom no missionary had yet espoused, appears to intimate that she would prove any thing but a hindrance, since she could teach " fancy work and plain sewing, as well aa hymns and songs." J Lake Ngami, &c., by Charles John Andersson, ch. ii., p. 27 ; ch. ix., p. 103. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 637 falling off, and as a garden without water. And your strength shall be as the ashes of tow, and your work as a spark."* Five yqars later, to anticipate a case which exactly resem- bles that of the Nam aquas and Damaras, we are told that the Makololos, in spite of their profitable intercourse with Protest- ant missionaries, had just robbed a party of them of every thing which they possessed, and driven them out of the country. Mrs. Price, the wife of one of the ministers, " was buried under an isolated tree in the immense plain of the Mabobe;" and, " after the party left, the Makololos disinterred the body, and cut off a portion of the face to exhibit in their town."*)' Such was the progress which the missionaries had made, during the interval, in acquiring the reverence of their African disciples. In 1857, the Rev. Joseph Shooter had arrived at the con- clusion, suggested by the unvarying experience of half a century, that " we must not estimate the results of missionary labor merely by the number of converts." Yet any other estimate would apparently be still less acceptable, for he adds that long observation of their character only "tended to weaken his confidence in the religious professions t>f this people.":): In the same year, Dr. Armstrong, an Anglican bishop, confirms all the other witnesses, but with special reference to the misadventures of his own religious body. " If the Kaffirs," he says, " abound in the diocese of Grahamstown by thousands, the Church of England has yet done nothing for them." The representatives of that institution were fully occupied, it ap- pears, in dealing with the domestic phenomena which the Establishment is now exhibiting to the Kaffirs, after offering them to the contemplation of the heathen in every other land. " Port Elisabeth, where I first touch my diocese," observes Dr. Armstrong, "is full of Church troubles." He adds, indeed, as "might be expected, that "many bright features present themselves," and then reiterates the accustomed lament, " but there is something sad in beginning with internal strife." Dr. Armstrong found, like the rest of his brethren, that the end corresponded with beginning, and the " bright features" became clouded. A little later he had to deplore " the seces- sion" of part of his flock, who adopted this mode of protesting against a clergyman who preached in a surplice ; and the event was the more painful, because, as his biographer remarks, "he made many efforts to retain the dissidents, but in vain." At Uitenhage also, he found it expedient to suspend one of his clergy for a dispute about " the offertory." Such anecdotes, no Isaias i. 30, 81. The Times, May 2, 1861. The Kafirs of Natal and the Zulu Country, app., pp. 369, 371 638 CHAPTER VII. doubt, are trivial ; but in speaking of the Church of England as a missionary body, the most industrious historian searches in vain for graver materials. Dr. Armstrong's principal clergy, like Heber's, seem to have been German Lutherans, with an infusion of English Wesley ans, both classes accepting the " orders" which he was able to offer them. Yet he suffered much annoyance, we are told, from "the opposition of the Wesleyans," as Ileber and his suc- cessors did from the hostility of the Lutherans. And mean- while the heathen looked on, and formed their conception of the nature of Protestantism. "The reports," Dr. Armstrong says, meaning, probably, the private as distinguished from the official reports, " do not really speak of many converts. There are many listeners. A chapel will be full every Sunday, and yet but very few con- verted and baptized. As a fact there are very few Christian Kaffirs."* The Wesleyans were even more candid than Dr. Armstrong ; for Sir Benjamin D'Urban relates, that "they all acknowledged to him, that they could not flatter themselves they had ever made a lasting salutary impression upon one of the race of Kaffirs." In 1857, Dr. Livingstone published his interesting work on South Africa. From such a writer we expect the truth, and the expectation will not be disappointed. The first " element of weakness" which he noticed in his fellow-missionaries, was their determination not to venture beyond the tranquil borders " of the Cape colony itself." " When we hear," he remarks, " an agent of one sect urging his friends at home to aid him quickly to occupy some unimportant nook, because, if it is not speedily laid hold of, he will ' not have room for the sole of his foot,' one cannot help longing that both he and his friends would direct their noble aspirations to the millions of untaught heathen in the regions beyond, and no longer continue to con- vert the extremity of the continent into, as it were, a dam of benevolence." Dr. Livingstone, with the freedom from prejudice which is the privilege of manly natures, proposes this question to his readers: " Can our wise men tell us why the former mission stations (primitive monasteries) were self-supporting, rich, and flourish- ing, as pioneers of civilization and agriculture from which we even now reap benefits, and modern mission stations are mere * Memoir, by the Rev. J. J. Carter, pp. 264, 269, 281, 307, 347, 381. Cf, Travels in Eastern Africa, by Nathaniel Isaacs ; vol. ii., ch. xiv., p. 265. (2d edition). MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 639 pauper establishments, without that permanence or ability to be self-supporting which they possessed?" We may be allowed to regret that a writer of so much integrity and good sense did not attempt to answer his own question. Of the actual and final results of the labors of sixty years in South Africa, Dr. Livingstone gives this cautious but impressive estimate : " Protestant missionaries, of every denomination, all agree in one point, that no mere profession of Christianity is sufficient to entitle the converts to the Christian name."* It is impossible, in presence of such facts, to think without horror of the multitude of sacrilegious baptisms which, in Africa as elsewhere, appear to be the sole fruit of Protestant missions/)- To return to Dr. Livingstone. If any Protestant missionary might have hoped for success, we know not one of whom it might be predicated with greater confidence. Courageous, ex- perienced, and persevering remarkable among his colleagues for sincerity, moderation, and good sense this respected trav- eller has for some years applied his uncommon energy to one object. Yet we are assured by his own friends that he has utterly failed, and that it is time to confess the miscarriage of his hopeless enterprise. Mr. Andersson had already foreseen this result in 1860. Referring to new outrages by the Mako- lolo, whom he calls " that scourge of central South Africa," he added this comment: "This was the result of all Dr. Living- stone's earnest endeavors to dissuade these people from com- mitting depredations on their neighbors. All their fine prom- ises to that noble explorer, with their professions of peaceful dispositions, were, as we here see, mere delusions, to use the lightest word, on both sides. I very much fear that this tribe have two faces for Dr. Livingstone." Mr. Andersson admits that " he possesses very great influence over them," by the force of his character, and yet heads this very section of his book with the significant title, "Missionary Impotence "% Three years later, the whole truth is confessed in the Exam- iner, on the authority of " a letter of a melancholy character from Dr. Livingstone." That letter, we are told, " described the approaching fall, if there really ever was a rise, of the East African mission. . . . .'It amply verifies our anticipations. We * Missionary Travels, ch. vi., pp. 110, 117 ; ch. ix., p. 190. f In 1863, after constant and friendly intercourse with the missionaries dur- ing eight years, Mr. Baldwin reveals his opinion of the real character of their disciples, by recording that he unwittingly gave offence to one of their teachers, by refusing to " shake hands with a parcel of his baptized, singing Jieathens" African Hunting from Natal to the Zambesi, by W. C. Baldwin, Esq., F.R.G.S., ch. ix., p. 369. \. The Okavango River, by Charles John Andersson, ch. xviL, p. 194 (1861). 64:0 CHAPTER VII. were promised trade, and there is no trade, although we have a consul at five hundred pounds a year," who is also a mission- ary. " We were promised converts to the Gospel, and not one has been made In a word, the thousands subscribed by the universities, and the thousands contributed by the govern- ment, have been productive only of the most fatal results." What follows cannot be read without pain, since it reflects upon the upright and well-meaning man by whose advice these fruitless projects were undertaken. The natives on the banks of the Rosuma tired on his party, and Dr. Livingstone, who went among them as a preacher of the Christian religion, says, u In- stead of running away, we returned the fire." " Here, as he had done on the river Shire," continues the Examiner, u we find our missionary enacting the part of Mahomet, without his success." The whole scheme, it is added, " is not worth the mission or the consulship," and u we must come to the conclu- sion that the time has arrived when the hopeless enterprise ought to be relinquished."* Let us return to the south, and resume the chain of witnesses. In 1858, the Rev. W. Ellis, who could afford to be candid about South Africa, because it was not his own field of labor, though he describes each separate Hottentot station at which lie preached in language which would be absurd if applied to an average English parish, forgets at last to sustain his artificial song, and falls into ordinary prose. The "downward tendency" of the whole race, he admits, is too evident to be denied, in spite of the legion of missionaries who have dwelt among them. " Without a change, they must either become mere hewers of wood and drawers of water to others, or, as a race, gradually melt away."f Is it possible to admit more candidly that Prot- estantism can do nothing to avert their fate ? In the same year, the Rev. H. Calderwood gives this report of the Kaffirs: "If we view the Kaffirs as a nation, they may be said to have refused the Gospel. The Kaffirs, as a people, are just as uncivilized and degraded, their customs are as impure and cruel, and they are apparently as unmoved, as they were on the day when Yan der Kemp first stood on the banks of the Tyurne."J Nor does even this fatal testimony reveal the whole truth, since Captain Drayson, who constantly praises their ex- cellent natural qualities, " their honesty, truth, and disinterest- ed friendship," while he laments that they have now become * Quoted in the Times, January 20, 1863. f Three Visits to Madagascar, by the Rev. Win. Ellis,, ch. ix., p. 249 (1858). \ Caffres and Caffre Missions, ch. vii., p. 96. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. " confirmed rascals," adds, " but I doubt whether we have not made them so ourselves."* And so notorious is this dismal result of all the English mis- sions in South Africa, including the operations of nearly twenty different sects, that in 1850, President Pretorius, of the Trans- vaal Republic, could thus openly jest at them in a public speech : " It was his decided opinion, that the emissaries of the London Missionary Society have done, and continue to do, so much harm and so little good among the natives, that it has become absolutely necessary for the Raad to decide, whether ,or no their continued labors, and even their presence, to the north of Yaal river, shall be longer tolerated." It is true that the English writer who quotes this speech angrily retorts, that the Protestant Boers " are, as a class, far more dangerous to civiliza- tion than even the irreclaimable savages of Moffat and Co."f It would be idle to offer even a word of comment upon such a history, in which, though every sentence is penned by Prot- estant writers, we read only an unvarying record of covetous- ness, immorality, worldliness, confusion, and failure. St. Paul has written the same history, but in fewer words. When the Apostle enumerates " the works of the flesh," he seems to sum up, in one brief sentence, the principal incidents in all Protest- ant missions: " uncleanness, luxury, contentions, emulations, quarrels, dissensions, sects."| Such, as we have seen in every land, are their only fruits ; and it is to gather them once more in a new field, that vast sums of money, which might have al- leviated the lot of thousands of our heathen population at home, have here been expended, during three quarters of a century. Two races of pagan men have in this case been submitted, during three whole generations, to all the influences which Protestantism could exert upon them ; the one " have refused the Gospel," the other, wherever they have accepted the in- structions of a Protestant missionary, have only become " the most idle and the most worthless of their nation." If it were possible to admit that the agents in such a work are, as they assure their disciples, the interpreters of Divine truth, and of truth " reformed" by a kind of second revelation, the supposition would perhaps involve the most frightful satire upon the God of Christians which the subtlest impiety has ever conceived. It is time to quit a subject which is full only of regret and humiliation, arid to endeavor to seek more grateful scenes in * Sporting Scenes amongst the Kaffirs of 8. Africa, by Captain Alfred W. Drayson, R.A. ; ch. xiii., p. 235. f The Cape and Natal News, Jan. 31, 1859, p. 77. | Galat. v. 19. 41 64:2 CHAPTER VII. other lands. But first we may say a word in conclusion, npon Catholic missions in South Africa. A Protestant writer has observed, with allusion to the facts of which we have now completed the survey, that in South Africa " the Roman Catholic community, until these few last years, were a proscribed people. By an old law of India, Jesuits and Roman priests were to be forcibly apprehended, and im- mediately deported."* Bishop Devereux, Yicar Apostolic of Southeastern Africa, notices the same fact, in 1850, in ex- plaining the absence of Catholic missionaries from these regions during the Dutch and English occupation. " These provinces,' 5 he observes, " have been hitherto, so to speak, a sealed book for Europe. First, the Dutch East India Company forbade, throughout the whole colony, the exercise of our religion, en- forcing the interdict by severe penalties. The English domi- nation succeeded, which, after manifesting an almost equally intolerant spirit, concedes, even at the present day, only a reluctant consent to our miiristry."t It was not until 1838 that the existing mission, in spite of the frowns of hostile officials, was constituted by Bishop Griffith, the first Yicar Apostolic. For some years the insufficient number of the missionaries, and the necessity of attending to the wants of the Catholic popula- tion, forbade all attempts to organize systematic efforts for the conversion of the heathen. The " children of the household" had the first claim. In 1855, Dr. Colenso, who evidently does not share the vulgar prejudices of his order, and is too generous to employ their language, appears to have visited the Catholic bishop in Maritzburg, " a very gentlemanly Frenchman, with a benignant expression of countenance, and an appearance of sincerity and earnestness about him which I was rejoiced to witness. He told me that there were not yet any missionaries of his Church among the natives ; but he was about, without delay, to set some at work." In 1856 the project was executed, and the mission of St. Michael opened in Kaffraria. In ISa^, the Rev. H. Calderwood, writing from the same part of the country, says, "The Roman Catholics are on the increase. There are two bishops and a number of priests, who are able and energetic men. It is quite clear that Protestants are not U have it all their own way in South Africa."^: Lastly, Mr. Colt very candidly intimates what the final issue of the new Catholic mission is likely to be, when he says, "The Catholics arc steadily progressing in numbers, and make, I verily believe * The Cape of Good Hope, by John C. Chase, Esq., Secretary to the Societj for Exploring Central Africa, p. 138. f Annals, vol. xii., p. 12. i Gaffres and Caffre Missions, ch. 1., p. 12. MISSIONS IN AFRICA. 643 more genuine converts among the colored classes than any other sect."* We may now quit Africa, not without the consolatory belief that the work of true conversion has at length begun, and that a later annalist will record the same apostolic triumphs in this land which we have already traced in so many others, f Let the reader compare, for his own instruction, the historical facts which we have now imperfectly reviewed ; the warfare of the martyrs of North Africa, of Egypt, and Abyssinia, nev- er more truly apostles than when, like our Lord at Bethsaida or St. Paul at Antioch, they seemed for a season to preach in vain, and the later toils of the generous men who in our own day have succeeded both to their office and their gifts, with the narrative of turpitude and confusion which we have just closed ; and let him apply once again the Divine rule, By their fruits ye shall know them. And that he may comprehend the whole lesson which this history contains, let him note in this case also the accustomed fact, that the agents of the sects have not only failed, in Africa, as in India, Ceylon, and the Antipodes, but that they have failed, in spite of the advantage which in all these countries they enjoyed as the representatives of an irre- sistible power, and the dispensers of almost unlimited wealth. Silver and gold they had, but it could not purchase a single soul, for even the pagan mocked .the preachers who came to him with such gifts, when they saw that they could give him nothing better. The Catholic apostles, penetrated with other truths and holier maxims, gave the life which was all they could call their own, and gave it with more than royal munifi cence, content that a later generation should reap the fruits of a sacrifice of which they tasted only the gall and vinegar. And they did not offer it. in vain. Already from the north of Africa the Cross has begun to cast its healing shadow towards the mountains which bend down to receive it, and the deserts which * The Cape and the Kafirs, ch. ix., p. 155. f It is worthy of observation, and a striking example of the power which Catholic missionaries alone exert, that three of that very race, the Kaffirs, with whom Protestantism has proved so impotent, were converted on board the Austrian frigate Novara, and are now sailors on board the Emperor's yacht. Yet " they were prisoners sentenced for several years" by the English author- ities at the Cape. '* They of course understood, at their embarkation, only their own singular mother-tongue ; yet the chaplain of the expedition, the Rev. E. Marochini, after having made himself acquainted with their idiom, succeeded in instructing these black youths, by means of their own language, in the doc- trines of Christianity, and, by degrees, imparted some knowledge of the Italian and German languages ; and such progress did his three pupils make, that, on our return to Trieste, they were so far prepared as to be fit for recep- tion, by baptism, into the Christian community." Scherzer, Voyage of the Jfovara, vol. i., ch. vi., p. 211. 644 CHAPTER VII. smile at its approach ; and from the Kile to the Ocean, from Egypt to Morocco, the disciples of Islam are hiding tljeir faces before the mysterious Sign which tells them that their hour has come. From the East also a voice is heard which reaches even to the West, and is echoed from the mountains of Ethiopia and the cities of Abyssinia, across the burning plains of the Soudan, to the rivers of Senegambiaand the parched solitudes of Angola and Benguela ; and if in the South, long abandoned to unfruit- ful husbandmen, who sow but never reap, and whose labor is as unprofitable as their repose, the field seems to be preoccu- pied; yet here also the Church will accomplish the victory of which we have lately followed the "irresistible march in all the islands of the Pacific, and having silenced the discordant cries of struggling and conflicting sects, will at length intone the hymn which shall announce to heaven and earth that the curse is removed from Africa, and that the blood of her martyrs has not been shed in vain. END OF VOL. L $ <