S-.^S'il..*^^-' SS \yJ 3'^ 4' ■--> O wt '\ -o CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ARTHUR PROBSTHAIN Oriental Bookseller 41 Gt. Russell Street LONDON, W.C. I BV 3265'sT3";9"iT'^ '""''' ^°"iniii™'!li?,'f.,,!T;j?.&n,?,,.;?.ontaining gllmps 3 1924 022 905 966 ,»-,(!f?,.,%^ SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS ^f «l] Lu'J CKANiri' I'lLLARS IN THE SRIKANCIAM IIMFLE. The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022905966 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS CONTAINING GLIMPSES INTO THE LIVES AND CUSTOMS OF THE TAMIL PEOPLE J. A. SHARROCK, M.A. Siipeylntending missionary, &^ sometime Principal of the S.P.G. College, Trichiiiopoly - C ^:^-^' REVISED EDITION ILLUSTRATED ^orittg iot the propagation of the (Sff04)cl in Jforcign fiirte WESTMINSTER igio First Edilion Publiihed in January, igio Second Edition Published in May, igio ^■ /.■ /: CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. Preliminary remarl'att, who did much to resuscitate the Mission after it had fallen to a terribly low ebb. When Bishop Heber died, there HISTORICAL SKETCH 47 were only about 300 Christians in the whole of this vast, populous district. Trichinopoly with its two great temples — the Saivite one on the Rock, and the Vaish- navite one at Srirangam two miles off — has been for many ages, and probably will be for ages more, one of the strongest fortresses of Hinduism in India. Reference to the work done in these days will be found later on ; but the reader will understand that there are obvious reasons for not dwelling on the lives and work of the missionaries of recent times. TiNNEVELLY. Though Schwartz tells us of a native Christian read- ing the word of God to " the Romish and heathen " in Palamcotta in 1771, and as we saw, he himself visited the place, the first convert was a Brahman widow named Clorinda, who helped to erect the first church which Schwartz dedicated in 1785. There were at that time about forty baptised Christians ; there are now 31,000 in the S.P.G. and about 45,000 in the C.M.S. Missions. In 1 79 1 Jaenicke was sent to Palamcotta, and worked there till 1800. He helped to organise the Mission. But the name that stands out most prominently is that of the Rev. C. W. Gericke during whose brief stay a marvel- lous mass movement began. A Shanan called David had been made catechist, and under him began that great movement among the Shanars for which Tin- nevelly is so widely known.' Francis Xavier had ' The reader should note that Shanar is in Tamil the plural of ShanEln, though the English generally speak of Shanars, as they do of the Hebrew Cherubims. 48 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS baptised Christians wholesale at Tuticorin and other places on the coast, but Gericke and Sattianathan made perhaps more real converts — converts who could bear persecution without relapsing. In one short tour in 1803 Gericke baptised no less than 1,300 people and Sattianathan shortly afterwards baptised 2,700 more. When they visited a village they would find as many as 500 people waiting for baptism. The missionary would be engaged till near midnight in preaching to and baptising the catechumens — the physical labour of baptising being greater than can easily be imagined. But who can fathom the missionary's deep joy at thus g-atherinsj in the sheaves after wearisome labours, A missionary in Tinnevelly has often to travel over miles of teri, i.e. , sand blown in waves like the sea, and burnt hot and dry with the blaze, day by day and month by month, of a sun so fierce that even the thick sole of the native's foot is scorched by contact. Is it possible that a blade of grass or an ear of corn can sprout in such a soil ? So feels the sower in the Mission field as he deals with souls parched and withered by vice and superstition and with minds so ignorant and debased that it seems impossible to find an entrance for the simplest ideas. Then comes the monsoon with a flash and a roar from the black clouds ! when the gates of heaven are thrown open for the floods to rush down. The parched sand drinks in the fertilising stream as if its thirst could never be quenched ; and the sun draws up the vapour from the scented earth and with it almost as visibly the sprouting blades and verdant crops. One who has seen this magic performed will be able to sympathise with the HISTORICAL SKETCH 49 sensations of the missionary when he meets at village after village a crowd of earnest people begging for baptism. Many thousands were gathered in at this great harvest, and people ask, " Why is it not always so ? " "Why is it that this does not occur everywhere?" " Why cannot other missionaries be as earnest as this one and as successful too ? " " Why is the same method not applied in other places ? " " Why do not other people respond to the call in the same way ? " If the reader has patience to read on he will find answers to some of these questions below. This chapter deals with history. Suiifice it to say at present that " the wind bloweth where it listeth," and that India will be converted not individually, but by mass movements. The last census revealed a percentage of increase vary- ing from 336 to 2 in different districts. The next great accession was after the famine of 1877, when 30,000 to 40,000 were gathered in as cate- chumens by the S.P.G. and C.M.S. The present writer had just arrived, and at the first village he visited in a missionary capacity — though without ability to take any part himself — -he had the pleasure of seeing 200 people received in one night. Tinnevelly had at that time the benefit of Bishop Caldwell's strenuous labour, which lasted altogether for fifty-three years. The C.M.S. had benefited in a similar way from the services of the Rev. J. Thomas of Megnanapuram, and Bishop Sargent of Palamcotta — for there were giants in those days. All were splendid Tamil scholars, capable or- ganisers, and able leaders of men. The three great 4 so SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS missionaries of South India are Xavier, Schwartz and Caldwell. The Roman Catholic Xavier baptised his tens of thousands, but he had no settled abode and no permanent staff, and so no means of carrying on the vast work that he had begun. The Lutheran Schwartz, though the founder of our South Indian Missions, knew no method of consolidating or disciplining the Church which he had attracted to himself. But the Anglican Caldwell, though perhaps less of a genius than the other two, was a master of organisation, and skilled in the use of all the scientific machinery of modern Missions. He was in every sense of the word a Father in God to the growing Church. May the writer of these pages here add this tribute to him from whom he learned all that he knows of missionary methods and organisation ? Bishop Caldwell was not only a linguist and scholar of European fame, but he was a theologian of great dis- tinction, he was a bishop whose power of organisation surpassed that of any other Indian bishop, he was a missionary equally devoted to subtle Brahmans and ignorant rustics, he was a man gifted with charm in the highest degree, he was a Churchman, broad-minded and tolerant, and, above all, he was a saint who, in his own words, had put the Cross of Christ between himself and the world, and whose meat and drink — like that of his Great Master — was to do the will of the Father (p. 76). But, though Bishop Caldwell is acknowledged to be the greatest Indian missionary that the S.P.G. has known, he often regretted that he had permitted him- self to be consecrated bishop. He had no episcopal authority, for Bishop Gell thought that he had not a HISTORICAL SKETCH 51 legal right to delegate his own authority. The Com- mittee in Madras retained all the real power as managers of the Mission, some shrinking from an "evangelical," and others, sensitive of dignity, from a " curate " bishop. But the history of this trouble cannot be recorded here. Suffice it to say that after a protracted struggle and much unnecessary misery the bishop in Tinnevelly is now as free as any other bishop in Christendom. Bishop Caldwell did his best to or- ganise a system of Church Councils so as to foster the spirit of self-government. Another scheme that the bishop commenced was that of voluntary Evangelistic Associations. Every adult Christian, both male and female, was expected to make some effort once a week to reach some Hindu friend or relation. This not only led to many conversions but was of inestimable value in making Christians look to their own lives and set a good example before their Hindu neighbours. This organisation has now developed to something wider, as the people have begun to look beyond the boundaries of their own district. The Tinnevelly Mis- sionary As.sociation has sent workers to the Telugu country where a mass movement is now going on, and is reaping a rich harvest of souls in that field. The bishop lived for the greater portion of his life at Idaiyangudi (the shepherd's hamlet), which was de- scribed in 1853 as a " model Christian settlement" — the first of its kind where the mission bungalow was surrounded by church, parsonage, schools, dispensary, lace-room, etc. The roads were well laid out, and eood houses were built for the Christians who formed 52 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS almost the whole of the village. Such settlements are common now. This village cannot be mentioned without a reference to Mrs. Caldwell, who was by birth and training a model missionary's wife. She intro- duced lace-making from her home in Travancore, and scores of widows and poor women made their living by this industry. She also started boarding schools and " physicked " both the children and their parents until a regular dispensary was opened. To show how backward the people were in those days, she used to tell us of the amazement of the parents when girls were actually taught to read. " She will be teaching the cows next ! " they exclaimed. The Christians of Tinnevelly are taken very largely from the Shanars, a caste of palmyra-climbers. Bishop Caldwell, when starting his first boarding schools, wrote a pamphlet in which he described the Shanars as poor and as one of the castes low down among the Sudras. The courts have since established this view by deny- ing to Hindu Shanars the right of entering into the temples of the higher Sudras. Instead of the Christian " Shanars " being grateful to the bishop for raising them from a low Sudra caste to an honourable position among other Christians, they never forgave him, but clung with feverish anxiety to their supposed privileges as a caste and sadly embittered his declining years. The religion of Tinnevelly will be treated of in an- other chapter. Another famous missionary who was a little junior to the bishop was the great Tamil scholar, Dr. Pope. Three " seminaries " as they were called in those days, HISTORICAL SKETCH 53 one in Madras, a second at Vediarpuram (Bible- town) in Tanjore, and the tiiird in Sawyerpuram were founded by Dr. Pope in 1842. Dr. Pope was a born teaclier and a strict disciplinarian. His motto was " Nalla sappadu, nalla padippu, nalla adippu." The alliteration is lost in translation, but the general mean- ing is " Good food, good education, and good thrash- ing ".^ As an illustration of the third treatment as an aid to the second, the leading native clergyman of the district, the bishop's chaplain and a B.D. to boot, used to point to the upper rim of one ear from which a piece of cartilage was missing, having disappeared when Dr. Pope was literally driving the New Testa- ment in the original Greek into his luckless head ! The Seminary of Sawyerpuram developed into Cald- well College, Tuticorin, being transferred there by Bishop Caldwell, at Bishop Johnson's suggestion, when it was affiliated to the Madras University in 1 88 1. As my health had broken down and I had been invalided home, suffering from malarial fever after some very trying work as head of the Evangelistic Band, I was asked to become Principal of the college. It was intended to serve as an institution for the edu- cation of Christians, and not for the evangelisation of the Hindus; and I trust the reader will not think my object is self-praise when I record the Metropolitan's remark : " There is nothing like it in all India ". Fifty- two Christians graduated in Arts, and of these twenty- eight were subsequently ordained. Every Christian ' A Roman missionary used to decl.ire that what his congrejjation needed was boundless love, infinite patience, and a long bamboo I 54 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS S.P.G. headmaster, except one, in the whole diocese was trained in this college, and yet the college was closed, on the plea of the difficulty in securing for it sufficient financial aid. Every one now sincerely re- grets that the only really Christian college in India was closed and cannot now be reopened, unless some millionaire like Mr. Rockefeller, who is financing a college for the American Mission at Madura, comes to the rescue. The mistakes of Missions are quite as in- structive as the successes. The Rev. A. F. Caemmerer, who was at Nazareth, reported in 1844 that "nearly the whole of the Shanar population has embraced the Gospel ". If by this he meant the Shanars in that particular village we can readily believe it, as Nazareth was always a flourishing Mission. Dr. Strachan laboured for a time in this station, and was the founder of the medical part of the work. He afterwards became secretary of the Madras Committee and then Bishop of Rangoon. Under Canon Margoschis in recent years a model settlement like that at Idaiyangudi was established, and the schools greatly enlarged. Margoschis had a gift of organisation, but did his most useful work as a medical missionary. Nazareth is the headquarters of a large S.P.G. station, and with it are now associated the two other pastorates of Mudalur (" first village " of Christians) and Christian- agaram (Christiantown). Taking all three together there are ninety congregations, with 11,432 baptised Christians, and 4,372 communicants. There are also fifty schools containing 2,843 children. To minister i 'WSKBS^S )t^»mKf ' ,'3'*-^ HISTORICAL SKETCH 55 to these there are twelve Indian pastors and 120 lay agents. Like Idaiyangudi, Nazareth is a Christian village. A glance at the faces of the villagers is quite sufficient to show that one is surrounded by Christians. For the men look intelligent, happy, and fearless, the women are dressed neatly and cleanly, and the children are as merry as can be ; whereas heathen villagers, in spite of their gaily coloured clothes, often look untidy, depressed and unhappy. Even the houses show the difference. The orderliness and cleanness of the palm-thatched cottage of the Christian is a strong contrast to the uncomfortable, squalid abode of the non-Christian. The centre and inspiration of the whole of the various activities is the Church, which is dedicated to St. John the Evangelist. Here, morning and evening, a number of men, women, and children meet to worship. They sit or kneel reverently on the floor, and join heartily in the responses. Saints' days and festivals are well observed, and on such occasions a striking pro- cession is formed from the Mission compound to the Church. The following description by a visitor may be quoted : " In front moves the uplifted cross, gleam- ing brightly in the sun, then follows the choir chanting a Tamil hymn, and then the clergy, the one white face contrasting strangely with all the dark brown counte- nances around it. Finally, in order due, march the 500 children of the orphanage and schools, clad in their graceful, bright-hued garments, most of which were woven in the Industrial School." A great feature of this village is St. Luke's Hospital 56 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS and Dispensary, with an average yearly total of 15,000 patients of all castes and creeds. There they sit morn- ing by morning while the missionary and his assistants attend in turn to all who come from far and near. Here is a Brahman with his sacred thread ; here is one of another caste with a swollen leg, caused perhaps by the pressure of the silver anklet he is wearing; here is a mother with a tiny brown baby which has evidently something the matter with its ear. It frequently happens that a medical man has to sew up the lobe of a woman's ear, as one of the methods of adornment among girls and women in Tinnevelly is to drill a hole in the soft part of the ear, and then stretch it by in- serting leaden ear-rings till it can hold an enormous number of golden jewels. Sometimes the ornaments in the ears actually touch the shoulders, but at other times the lobe breaks, and then the doctor's aid has to be called in. (See p. 238.) Before Mrs. Caldwell opened the first girls' school in Tinnevelly, it was stated that not a single woman could read ; but great advances have been made since that time. Though only seven girls in a thousand even now can read and write, still in the matter of female educa- tion the Christians are easily first. A boarding school, started more than fift}' years ago in Nazareth and providing a sound "elementary" education, has been raised, so that its pupils now receive a good " middle class " education. Later a department had to be added to provide instruction for girls in preparation for the higher examination for women, and this is now raised to the standard of a high school. A few of such HISTORICAL SKETCH 57 girls, who have passed the matriculation examination are sent to the S.P.G. College at Trichinopoly, and, as will be seen below, two of them have taken the B.A. degree of the Madras University. The important part of their education is, of course, the religious teaching, and it is a great privilege to these Indian girls to have the opportunity of attending the daily services in Church, and of receiving regular instruction in the Christian faith. There are also orphanages for boys and girls, and no destitute orphan, Hindu or Christian, is refused admittance. (See p. 196.) In the Art and Industrial School, many different industries are taught, such as carpentry, tailoring, weav- ing, lace-making, drawing, Indian embroidery, black- smith's work, typewriting, and other industries. There are also silversmiths and basket-makers, under their native instructors. The workshops occupy three sides of a rectangle with a well and garden in the centre. Excellent work is turned out — the clothes worn by the children of the orphanages and boarding schools be- ing made by the weavers ; the surplices and cassocks of the Church choir by the tailors ; chairs, tables, cots, desks, benches by the carpenters ; and much that is made is also sold. The scholars who have finished their course find little trouble in getting work else- where in the Madras Presidency. Many of the older girls and women learn to make lace of English pattern, which is sold at a profit for the benefit of the Missions. A teacher of weaving in the industrial school and one of his students presented themselves a few years ago for baptism ; also the mother of the superintendent S8 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS of the industrial school thought about Christianity for two years while living with her Christian son, and then asked to be baptised. A devil-dancer aged sixty- five was also converted to Christianity with his family. Something must now be said of the MaduFa Mis- sion, which is associated with Tinnevelly. All the vowels in this name are short, but English people place the stress on the first syllable. Schreyvogel used to visit this and other places in the district from Trichin- opoly — it is 100 miles south of the latter — but it was never a strong station. In 1857 the Madras Com- mittee, acting under the advice of Bishop Dealtry, transferred all our Missions in this district, except Ramnad on the East, to the American Congregation- alists, who have organised a very flourishing Mission. We all owe gratitude to the Rev. Dr. Jones of this Mission for his book India's Problem, though we regret to have lost our own Mission. It may be remarked in passing that the Vellore branch of the Madras Mission was handed over to the American Dutch Church in 1855 ; but some of the native Christians objected, and much trouble has followed from this lamentable transfer. Let us then turn to what was left in the Madura District, Ramn&d. Ramnad was first visited by Schwartz in 1785, and the Mission was then founded. It was also visited by Gericke who dedicated a church there. A glance at the map will show Adam's Bridge, connecting by a series of small detached islands the mainland with Ceylon. This bridge will soon become a reality, and the two countries will be united by rail. Ramesvaram, which HISTORICAL SKETCH 59 juts out into the sea, is one of the " sacred " places of India. Holy water is carried all the way from the Ganges at Benares to the Saivite temple at Rames- varam, and the pilgrims then bathe in the sea.^ Like so many other scattered places, far removed from the solitary missionary's headquarters, this Mission had a hard struggle for life in its early da3/s. In 1873, however, the Rev. G. Billing was sent to Ramnad. The present writer can think of no other S.P.G. mis- sionary who approached more nearly to Bishop Caldwell as a sound organiser and hard, devoted worker than George Billing. He knew the people and the language well — many missionaries can scarcely struggle through a Tamil sermon — and would start off like an eager fisher at a moment's notice in the blazing sun in hope of catch- ing the soul of any likely man that he happened to hear of. He was the brother of Dr. Billing, Bishop of Bed- ford, and, like him, would have made an admirable bishop if he had had the opportunity. He was after- wards transferred to Madras as the secretary of the Madras Diocesan Committee. There, like the Rev. A. R. Symonds, he organised the work well, but he did not take kindly to being a secretary. Later on he was transferred to Calcutta, but there he was quite out of his element, and soon resigned the post and returned to his old love, Ramnad. He used to boast that sun and rain and travelling never troubled him ; but at 1 The writer has brought home some of the small brass pots used for this purpose and left at the temple. The reader should note that the short i in Siva, Vishnu, etc., changes in Sanskrit into the diphthong ai when the noun is turned into an adjective. (See p. 72.) 6o SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS length he collapsed quite suddenly, and though he re- covered sufficiently to take a parish in Kent, he never regained his former health, and died three years ago. The present missionary is the Rev. A. D. Limbrick. He and his wife have worked there for twenty years with unremitting zeal, and marked success. There are 3,563 baptised Christians, with 1,000 communicants. Mrs. Limbrick's lace is probably the finest and best in the country. The printing-press is also a most useful institution and pays its own way, as every industrial school should. Within the last two years the diocese of Tinnevelly and Madura has lost its two senior missionaries by death — the Revs. A. Margoschis and A. J. Godden. (See p. 162.) The latter, who succeeded me in 1893, devoted his life to Sawyerpuram. He used to regret that it wais not consecrated by the grave of any missionary. He has now conferred that honour upon it. Madra,s. Turning now to Madras, which as far as chronology is concerned should have been taken first, as it is our oldest Indian Mission, we note that the work com- menced in the same way as in Trichinopoly. As Schwartz migrated to the latter place from Tranquebar, so did the Lutheran Schultz to Madras in 172S. The Mission developed veryslowly, being constantly harassed by caste disputes as soon as it began to grow, since the converts taken from the Sildra castes declined to have any dealings with those from the out-castes. A separate^ HISTORICAL SKETCH 6i chapter will be devoted to the subject of caste, which has been the greatest difficulty with which the Missions in the South have had to contend. The early mission- aries devoted themselves largely to literary work, and the Tamil Church owes a debt of gratitude to Schultz and Fabricius for their revision of Ziegenbalg's transla- tion of the Bible ; to the latter for the devotional hymns that he translated into Tamil from the German ; and, lastly, to Dr. Rottler for the translation of the Prayer Book. Besides the difficulty alluded to there was much trouble on account of rash pecuniary investments, which so often ended disastrously. Things came to such a pass that Fabricius was put into the debtors' prison. It is a common remark that clergymen are bad business men ; but as far as the writer's experience goes the exact opposite is the case among modern missionaries. They ought not, however, to have the burden of finance thrown on them, but as there is no one else to bear that load they have to bend their shoulders to it. The collection, administration and audit of Mission funds ought to be conducted by Church Councils.^ A small Mission at Cuddalore, where the writer was once in charge for two years, was founded by the Rev. J. A. Sartorius in 1737 ; and another in Vellore in 1771, which, as we saw, was sold to the Americans. The first deacon to receive Lutheran Orders was a catechist named Aaron in 1733 ; the first to receive Anglican ' Efforts are constantly being made to develop Church Councils, but as they are allowed to hold so little authority they almost always collapse or become mere formal committees. There will never be self-support till more self-government is conceded. 62 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS Orders came nearly a century later. He was a Ceylon catechist, named Christian David, and was ordained by Bishop Heber of Calcutta in 1 824. " He was a ' caste ' man and proved himself a staunch champion of the caste party in the Vepery congregation, and, while in Madras, took a leading part in the controversies which raged at the time, and more particularly set himself in opposition to Haubroe".' It may be mentioned in passing that Haubroe was one of the few individuals who made it his chief work to fight against caste in the Church both in Madras and Tanjore. But he was not supported by the other missionaries and, of course, failed. The Rev. C. W. Gericke, who did excellent work in Negapatam, whose Mission he founded in 1782, and later in Tinnevelly, also laboured in Madras from 17S8 to 1803. Falcke was the first missionary in Anglican Orders to work in Madras (1S22), but died two years later of cholera. The Rev. J. Heavyside had the honour of being the first S.P.G. missionary employed in India (1829), and he also had to retire in two years owing to ill-health. It must not be thought, however, that, even in those bad days of no sanitation, etc., all mission- aries died young, for Dr. Rottler lived till his eighty- seventh year after labouring in India for sixty years (1836). Madras also had the honour of welcoming the first Anglican bishop who set foot on her shores in 1S16, when Bishop Middleton of Calcutta made his first visita- 'Oiir Oldest Jnilian Mission, p. 43, by the Rev. A. Westcott. Those who wish to know more of this Mission are referred to this book (S.P.C.K., Madras, 1897). HISTORICAL SKETCH 63 tion to this part of his colossal diocese — which then included all India and Australia — no small portion of the earth's surface ! The diocese of Madras itself was not erected till 1835, when Archdeacon Corrie was conse- crated (p. 276). The names of Dr. Bower and Dr.Kennet, two Eurasians who received the Lambeth degree, natur- ally occur to one's mind when writing of this Mission. The former worked as missionary both in Tinnevelly and Trichinopoly, but was most famous as chairman of the Tamil Bible Revision Committee. He was an excel- lent Tamil scholar. Dr. Kennet was a great theologian and did his best work as Principal of the S.P.G. Theo- logical College which was founded by the Rev. A. R. Symonds for the training of catechists with a view to their taking Holy Orders in 1848.^ Symonds, as Secretary of the Madras Diocesan Committee, stimu- lated fresh developments all over the diocese. Dr. Strachan and the Rev. G. Billing, most famous for their work in Nazareth and Ramnad, also occupied this posi- tion. The Theological College — though on "Western lines — has produced very good results. The Madras Mission has never flourished like those farther south, or as the Telugu Missions are now doing farther north. The Mission embraces many large towns in seven different Districts, and yet in all these can only claim less than 6,000 baptised Christians (see Appendix). In its origin it was much disturbed by the occupation of the French in 1746, and again harassed by their ravages in 1756. It was always troubled and weakened by caste wranglings ; and its missionaries, great as they I It had existed as a small seminary since 1830. 64 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS undoubtedly were, were raore famous for their literary work than their evangelistic zeal. But beyond all this) no town Missions from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin have ever flourished in the usual sense of the word. There is no comparison in difficulty between working in a town and in a village. In the latter the missionary is a great man, far above any country squire in influence. He is legal adviser, doctor, head-master, land-owner, builder, employer of labour, and spiritual guide all in one, and the simple people soon see the advantage of having him on their side and getting their children fed and educated in his boarding schools. But in a large town the missionary among the educated classes is either a nobody or a subverter of their faith to be ignored or thwarted. Most friends of Missions have heard of Nazareth in which Caemmerer, Strachan and Margoschis, built up so large a station ; but when Caemmerer was transferred to the town of Tanjore he declared that he was unable " to get a liearing by any chance in any quarter". Ought we to work in the towns where we fail, or in the villages where we succeed 'i Here is food for thought, and among those who are in earnest it will be found that " the appetite grows by what it feeds on ". THl-: S.P.r,. THKOLOGTCAL COLLKGH, MADRAS. KIN'S, fi. H. SMIIH AND S. V. AHKAHAM. sr-:i I r.i MKN'i- school for out-castes at I'ui.ai.i-k. i kichinoJ'olv. CHAPTER IV HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN Not for the gain of the gold; the getting, the hoarding, the having, But for the joy of the deed ; but for the duty to do. Go with the spiritual Hfe, the higher volition and action, With the great girdle of God, go and encompass the earth. Clough. There are so many books dealing with ancient Hin- duism that the reader will find it hard to make a selection. If I may offer a word of advice I would re- commend the reader to master thoroughly The Higher Hinduism in Relation to Christianity, by the Rev. T. C- Slater (Elliot Stock, 3s. 6d.) as the best of its kind. After that, if he wishes to dig deeper still, he may read Dilger's book on the same subject (Basel Mission, Mangalore). For a general view of the same he may turn to Hinduism and Christianity by J. Robson, or he may read Monier Williams' large book on Vedisni, Brdhinanisni and Hinduism. If he is not afraid of " problems," he will find much of an instructive character in India s Problem by the Rev. Dr. Jones (Revell), and The Empire of Christ, by the Rev. B. Lucas (Macmillan). The object of this chapter is to give a bird's-eye view of the whole question, and when this is taken in the details will easily follow. The reader must understand that the Aryans, who 65 5 66 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS entered India from the North-west several thousands of years ago, came from the same stock as ourselves. The modern Hindu thinks the Englishman a ndechcha, " unclean," and on a par with the pariah. Many a time have I seen a broad smile of incredulity pass over the faces of my hearers when I have boldly proclaimed, " I am as much a Brahman as any one in this audience ". But their faces change when I proceed from assertion to proof. The old Aryans can be shown to have spoken the same language and worshipped the same gods as the rest of the Indo-European family. In Sanskrit God is called Dyaus-pitri (sky-father) in Latin Ju-piter, and in Greek Zeus pater. Can any proof be simpler or stronger ? Words cannot lie. Then, too, trace such other words as father, mother, sister, brother, etc. Take the verb " to be " in these three old languages ; or take the verb " to know," with wit in English, video in Latin, oida in Greek and vidya in Sanskrit. When we begin to learn Tamil we are told that "iruthayam" means ' heart,' and at first we do not recognise an old friend — S. kiridyam, Gk. chardia^ L. cor, cordis, E. lieart, the cli the r and the / or i^are all there. Philologists used to say that Sanskrit was the father and Greek and Latin the two sons ; now it would rather be said that all three are sons of some common unknown father. When the Aryans settled on the banks of the Indus they worshipped the gods of Nature, Indra, Varuna, Agni, the rain, the heavens, the sun and so forth. There was no trace of caste, no objection to slaying animals or eating them as food, or doing a number of other things that we and our forefatliers have always done in com- HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN 67 mon. But they found themselves fair amongst a race of black and brown people, cleanly in habits among those who seldom bathed and did not shrink from eating car- rion ; and they also found themselves a small but in- tellectual race holding a comparatively pure religion in contact with a vast race of spirit-worshipping, devil-pro- pitiating, magic-fearing people of degraded habits and low morality. Nations are held in check either by the fear of the sword or the greater fear of priestcraft, until they are Christianised and " bound by golden chains about the feet of God ". The Aryans, like the Brahmans of to-day, were not a fighting race, and so they made their own rules to preserve their own supre- macy, as the embodiments of God on earth. They refused to drink from the same wells, to eat with them, or, above all, to intermarry with these unclean natives. We English generally make friends round the board, and intermarry too freely ; but never would they do so. Wars were, however, almost inevitable, and the Kshat- riyas must do the fighting ; and when the latter remon- strated, saying that the power was theirs, they were silenced by the dread of the higher power of God, whose representatives the Brahmans claimed to be. Still the Kshatriyas as soldiers must come next after them as priests. The merchants and traders brought wealth to the country and came third as Vaisyas ; while the agri- culturists, or Sfldras, took fourth place. All below this line were out-castes — Panchamas, or fifth class, as they are sometimes called, though in reality they are no " class " at all. These are the unclean carrion-eaters whose touch or even shadow causes defilement. 68 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS While the changes were going on, and the centuries rolling past, Vedism (1500-500 B.C.) — as the first period, when the four Vedas were composed, is called — changed into Brahmanism. The four Vedas were commented on and the ritual of the sacrifices was elaborated to the highest degree. During this Brahmana period (800- 500 B.C.) caste and the doctrine of transmigration began to take definite shape. Then it was discovered in the third period that not ritual but the heart is the chief consideration. The Upanishad [sitting down beside) period, when men spent day and night in meditation, produced out of the pantheistic doctrine the philosophic system of the Vedanta — the final end of the Veda. In the fourth period (500-200 B.C.) the wisdom of the ages is strung into a garland of pregnant aphorisms. Then sprang up the two great rival sects of Vishnu and Siva, and there began a vast development of the ascetic exer- cises now called yoga. During the fifth period the Epics were composed (200 B.C.-500 A.D.) — the metrical laws of Manu being written about 200 A.D. To this period also belongs the Bhagavad Gita, the Divine Song, incorporated into the Maliabhdrata, which is by far the most beautiful and popular poem in the whole literature of India. This song must be made a separate study by any one who wishes to know the inner mean- ing of Hinduism when it attained to its high-water mark. When we have mentioned that the eighteen Puranas, dealing with sectarian matters, follow, and that the two great poems of India are the jMaJiabJiarata just spoken of and the RainAyana, or story of Rama, we need say no more at present on tlie literature of the country. HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN 69 We must now look back and get a general impression of the Hindu philosophic system of religion. There are six great systems, all of which the reader will find explained in Monier Williams's books, the chief being the One-without-a-second theory as expounded by Sankaracharya (788-828), and the dualistic theory of Ramanuja who preached his doctrine in Trichinopoly in the eleventh century A.ri. The first is the most popular, namely that there exists nothing in the world except the neuter, unconscious, impersonal Essence called Brahma. The second teaches that there are two great factors in the world, God and man. Now, the Vedantic doctrine is that this neuter Brahma by a mysterious process, variously explained, evolved the masculine personal God Brahma, the earth, man and all creation ; but still we must never forget that there is only one reality in the world, Brahma, the Essence, and that all the rest is maya, illusion. Man may think that he has a personal existence and is different from a cow or a tree, but this is only due to his lack of know- ledge {a-vidya). That there can be anything else in the world apart from the Essence is in the Hindu's mind unthinkably derogatory to the conception of com- plete perfection in the Supreme. Man may easily be ignorant, but God cannot be limited and supplemented, and so, in His essential nature, He cannot be personal. The Hindu, the leading paper for Indians in Madras, commenced a leading article with the statement : " The Hindus have never sunk so low as to believe in a per- sonal God ". They postulate indeed the personal God Brahma, or Ishvara, Lord, but He too in the final con- 70 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS summation must once more be merged in the impersonal Essence Brahma. All deeds {karma) bind him down to earth, whether good or bad, and the chief aim of life is to get rid of every action and every thought so as to escape the curse of re-birth. By the severe exercise of yoga (holding the breath, etc.) and daily penance even thought may be suppressed and thus the supreme know- ledge {gnana) is obtained, namely, that there is nothing but Brahma. The " great sentence " of India is " Thou art That " — thou hast attained to the knowledge that thou thyself art the supreme Essence. The doctrine of transmigration, which may have been borrowed from Pythagoras is explained by pointing to the inequalities of life. " Rabbi, who did sin," asked the Jews in per- plexity, "this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind ? " There must, it is argued, have been some previous existence and some previous sin to account for it ; and so birth follows on birth, and life on life, in an ever-lengthening chain backwards. When we ask what the last link depends from, there is silence. If a man dare kick a Brahman he will be born a worm in a dunghill ; if he is bad tempered he will become a wolf ; and if he is cowardly and foolish he will be born a woman ! Thus the punishment fits the crime. When we say that it is a Christian dogma that " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap," and that coupled with this Christian doctrine oikanjia (action) there is also the greater doctrine that God can and does intervene between man's actions and the con- sequences naturally flowing therefrom ; that He sent His own Son to be a Saviour from kar)iia ; that that HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN 71 Saviour could walk on the sea and cause an ordinary man to do the same in supersession of the law of gravi- tation ; that sin and sickness and death are common to all, and not limited like blindness to a few, and that they will cease in the next world ; and, finally, that God is not a machine and we the playthings of fate — when we say this, our hearers only gaze at us in astonishment that we should hold such novel and complicated theories while their own are so simple and so obviously true. The Englishman, accustomed to consider religion and morals as bound together by irrefragable ties, cannot re- concile himself to the gross injustice, nay, blasphemy, of making God capable of punishing a man for some crime in a previous birth of which he is absolutely unconscious in this. But to the Hindu mind this presents no diffi- culty. It is not God but the " unseen power " which makes karma work itself out with mechanical precision. He has in self-defence been compelled to postulate such a mechanical power. Moreover, morality does not trouble him at all, for it is an entirely different thing from religion. One of the eighteen forms of charity is to give a holy man alms for the satisfaction of his own immoral desires. We have nothing to do with God's morals and God has nothing to do with ours. If the type of a certain letter in a type-writing machine be- comes damaged, the corresponding impression on the paper will be imperfect, but that does not prove that the person who keeps printing this imperfect letter is necessarily wicked ! As the student of Hinduism proceeds with his study of the standard books, he will have to lay hold on other 72 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS main principles as his guides in " a mighty maze yet not without a plan ". According to the philosophic system there can be no idea of personality, of love, of sin, or of future happiness. Now, God has implanted in every human heart an intense craving for personal love, for " the hope of glory " in some other life or at some future time, and has also given to us all, of all races and colours, the still small voice — the sound of gentle stillness — which we call conscience. There is no escaping from these things except by the brutal violence of wilful sin. Hence we find that though the Hindus have never sunk so low in their philosophy as to believe in a personal God, yet the favourite God all over India is Krishna, the personal avatar, or descent — or as we call it the Incarnation — of Vishnu. No matter that he was so thoroughly wicked ; he and the milk-maids are so intensely human. Then again what is the meaning of the 330,000,000 of gods and goddesses but that the human mind revolts from the barren idea of an impersonal Essence, and demands that it should have something to see — that it cannot be satisfied with the husks of pantheism but must feed itself fat on a boundless polytheism. Then again, as the student tries to find the inner meaning of the Bhagavad Gita, the " Divine Song," he will for the first time meet the new and glorious idea of bhakti. Bhakti connotes faith, love, piety and every- thing that is included in the Christian idea of devout- ness. This new idea was almost certainly imported from Christianity, but that is a question that cannot be discussed here. This idea has profoundly modified A CORRIDOR IN THIi TFMI'LE AT RAMI S\'ABAM. HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN 73 modern Hinduism, and provides a standing place for the Christian missionary. The conscience is being roused into acute activity more and more every day ; men are beginning to understand what sin really means ; they look with more and more gloom on the weary round of re-births ; they crave for personality and for love — not merely knowledge (gnana) ; and they see before their eyes the beautiful ideals of purity, justice and brotherliness. This is not the work of a day or a century. The Trichinopoly poet, T&yumanavar (he who is both father and mother, i.e., God), who lived a few centuries back, has some pathetic and despairing lines on the struggle which he had with himself to break away from the charms of his loves, as he groped about in the darkness for Parabaran, the Supreme, " if haply he might feel after Him and find Him ". As one reads such verses now one feels like a man in broad daylight watching another man with sightless eyes feeling his way over a rough and unknown road with the help of his stick. God leaves no race without some witness of Himself, and men like this poet had already received some dim light from the dawning sun of Christianity. Now the command has gone forth, " Arise, shine ; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee". India is awaking. Though her sons may shut the doors and windows of their hearts, the light pierces through the crannies and suffuses all things within with a subdued light. But even that alters everything. God cannot be immoral ; man must not be obscene ; truth must prevail ; justice cannot be sup- pressed ; men must be brothers ; women must be 74 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS elevated ; the out-castes must be emancipated ; educa- tion, freedom, progress must be fostered ; life cannot end in Nirvana, the loss of all personality, like a drop of rain falling into the ocean, or the flame of a candle blown out. Such thoughts as these are seething in the minds of orthodox Hindus as the result of the impact of Christianity upon ancient Hinduism. Modern Hinduism. What we have to deal with, however, is the Hinduism that we meet with in daily life, in the street, the field, the class-room, the shop, the hospital where we talk to the sick, and the village square where we preach in the open air. This is quite a different thing ; at bottom we have to deal with the religion or rather religions that existed for centuries before the Aryan invasion. Still we cannot understand the one without the other as they have acted and reacted so much on one another. We have seen that Vedism changed into Brahmanism, and have alluded to the great schism which sent the Saivites and Vaishnavites into hostile camps. Gautama, the Buddha, the Enlightened, tried to reform what we call Hinduism by abolishing caste and putting a stop to the sacrifice of animals in the fifth century B.C. We know that he completely failed as ever}- one has failed, the Christians included, and that his followers were persecuted and finally driven out of India. ^ The re- ' The Brahmans often boast that they have never persecuted people for their religion. Let any one look at the pictures painted on the walls of the temple at Madura. He will there see the Brahmans im- pahng their Buddhist antagonists, and torturing them in the most cruel and gruesome way, while dogs lick the blood of the dying men. HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN 75 ligion of the Brahmans, however, never recovered from the shock. The resultant of two forces is the diagonal of a parallelogram whose sides represent those two forces. Hinduism, as we now call the religion, moves in a differ- ent way from what it did in the Brahmana period, and still more different from what it did in the Vedic period. When the Aryans entered India some 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, they not only found the aborigines, " the black-skinned slaves," but also previous settlers, who, like themselves, had crossed the north-west frontiers or come from the east. The Dravidians had settled in the east and south as far as Cape Comorin. The Brahmans considered themselves infinitely superior to these "natives". They were essentially God, and as such could not sin. A Brahman lecturer in England recently declared that " men cannot commit a greater sin than to think that they are sinners ". This startling statement cuts the ground from under our feet. " Look at muddy water," he argues : " what has the mud to do with the water? Now it is ice, now steam, now the juice of the fruit you eat. Melt it, condense it, filter it, and you find the water as before. We may violate caste rules, but sin cannot touch us because we are the same as the Supreme Essence." This shows incident- ally how difficult it is for a missionary to implant in his hearers' minds any real idea of sin. A friend of mine was one day preparing a man for Holy Baptism and was going through the Ten Commandments. When he came to the seventh, "Is that sin?" exclaimed the catechumen in the utmost astonishment. It will take a century to teach the people of India the 76 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS full meaning of that one word Sin. As has been said above, religion and morality have been divorced. An ascetic will spend his days in fasting and austerities, and his nights in vigils, performing all the due cere- monies with the most scrupulous exactitude, but he will perjure himself in court to ruin his enemy, or even poison him by putting a pinch of arsenic into his rice, without the slightest compunction of conscience. Con- science ! he has none, for he has destroyed it. God gave him one as He did to all His creatures, but Hinduism has seared it as with a hot iron. If we are the play- things of fate, how can we be responsible for our actions ? Our re-births will go on and roll over us like the wheels of a Juggernaut car, and why should we try to stop them ? Moral responsibilities shrink into nothing in the face of the weary round of 8,400,000 births. Still we must always remember that many people are better than their religion. (See p. 252.) The old Dravidians were, speaking broadly, animists- Their whole life was, and still is after thousands of years, one long dread of what curses the spirits may bring upon them, their families, their cattle and their fields. God, as far as they can conceive of Him at all, is good, but He is far away, taking His ease in the luxuries of heaven. There are 330,000,000 of minor gods and god- desses and these must be propitiated with the sacrifice of animals. In Tinnevelly the spirits are devils who live in palmyra trees. The leaves of these particular trees are never cut off as is yearly done in the case of the other trees. Quite a host of devils may dwell in such trees, and these are constantly displaying them- PALMYRA I'RI'.I-: CL1M1-;EKS — SHANARS, TINNHX'FLLV DISTRICT. WHEN A 'IRHE IS RESERVED FOR DEVIES TO LIVE IN THE OLD LEAVES ARE LEFT HANGING FROM THE TOP TO THE GROUND. HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN 77 selves to the horror of the inhabitants, who flee to their houses in the wildest terror. I was one evening riding across the teri — a sea of sand with nothing growing on it except thousands of these palmyras — and I was quite alone, not a house or human being in sight. Suddenly I heard a most weird, wailing sound quite close. I looked up and thought I should see a late climber at work, but there was no one in sight in any of the trees. Again the sad, wailing moan was heard. Here, I thought, is a devil fit to drive a native frantic with dread, and so I was determined to get to the bottom of the matter. For some minutes there was a dead silence, then again the moaning, and at last I found that the cause of it was the simplest imaginable. The leaf- stalks of a palmyra are about six feet long and the edges are as hard and rough as a saw. Two of these leaves had got across one another, and whenever the breeze in the tree-tops was strong enough the sawing of one across the other produced this uncanny noise. That was the only devil. Every Friday night great fires are lit in the Tinnevelly teri at each village and a devil-dance takes place. The term " devil-worshippers " is generally applied to the people who take part in these rites, but " devil-pro- pitiators " would be a more appropriate word. Gon is good and will do no harm, hence He may be ignored ; the devils are bad and are constantly on the look-out to injure us and ours, so we ought to appease them. This seems to sum up their creed. They or their wives are constantly being possessed with devils, as they think, so they must pacify them with a sacrifice, and then get 78 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS the devil-dancer to interpret the devil's mind to them. No Englishman is allowed to watch a dance — the dance stops the moment he is seen in the distance — but there are stories of English youths, born in the country and so able to talk Tamil just like the natives, disguising themselves in order to see a dance. They would do so at great personal risk. Bishop Caldwell, who spent his long life among these people, gives such a graphic picture, probably supplied by his Shanar converts, that it will be well to quote his own words. "The Shanars are chiefly palmyra-tree cultivators and farmers. Belonging to the Tamil aboriginal race, they have retained their distinctive manners and cus- toms and their ancient religion of devil-propitiating. The majority of these devils are supposed to have been human beings — most of whom have met with violent or sudden deaths, or have been objects of dread in their lifetime. Devils may be male or female, of low or high caste, of Hindu or foreign lineage. The majority dwell in trees, but some wander to and fro or take up their abode in the temples erected to their honour, or in ordinary houses. Often, too, a person will become possessed by one. Every evil and misfortune is attri- buted to demons. Alwa}'s malignant, never merciful — inflicting evils, not conferring benefits, their wrath must be appeased, not their favour supplicated. A heap of earth adorned with whitewash and red ochre, near a large tree, constitutes in most cases both the temple and the demon's image, and a smaller heap in front of the temple forms the altar. The tree whose long dead leaves have never been cut is supposed to be HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN 79 the devil's ordinary dwelling-place, from which he sniffs up the odour of the sacrificial blood and descends un- seen to join in the feast. The worship requires no order of priests. Any one may be a devil-dancer, as the officiating priest is styled, and who for the occa- sion is dressed in the vestments of the devil to be worshipped, on which are hideous representations of demons. Thus decorated, amidst the blaze of torches and accompanied by frightful sounds, the devil-dancer begins his labours. The music is at first comparatively slow and the dancer seems impassive or sullen, but as it quickens and becomes louder his excitement rises. Sometimes, in order to work himself into a frenzy, he uses medicated draughts, lacerates and burns his flesh, drinks the blood flowing from his own wounds, or from the sacrifice, and then brandishing his staff of bells, dances with a quick and wild step. Suddenly the afflatus descends ; he snorts, stares, gyrates ; the demon has now taken bodily possession of him, and though he retains the power of utterance and motion, both are under the demon's control. The bystanders signalise the event by a long shout, and a peculiar vibratory noise, caused by the motion of the tongue and beating the mouth with the hand, and all hasten to consult him as a present deity. As he acts the part of a maniac, it is difficult to interpret his replies, but the wishes of the inquirers generally help them to the answers. The night is the time usually devoted to these orgies, and as the number of devils worshipped is in some districts equal to the number of worshippers, and every act is accompanied with the din of drums and the bray of 8o SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS horns, the stillness of the night is frequently broken by a dismal uproar." As we travel north from Tinnevelly, we find a mix- ture of animism, or spirit-worship, various aboriginal cults and orthodox Brahmanism. All the people, how- ever, call themselves Hindus and keep caste. Besides these there are various forms of magic, which are well described in Sir A. Lyall's Asiatic Studies. The English layman in India, or the cold-weather visitor, gazes at the huge, grotesque images of horses, elephants, and so forth ; photographs them, and sends them to his friends labelled " Hindu gods ". He does not know, as the missionary does, that the so-called " god " is a Dravidian " goddess," consisting of a rough unwrought stone not six inches above ground — probably it does not come in the photograph at all ; that the images are merely guardians of the goddess, who will send cholera or small-pox if she is enraged ; that the ceremonies per- formed are entirely different from those which take place in the Brahman temple, or that blood-sacrifices are offered which are intensely repugnant to the Bi'ahmans. - Nay, even tlm piljdri who performs the ceremonies and decapitates the goat, often imagines that he is an ortho- dox Hindu — for does he not keep caste with the ut- most rigour? — while all the time he is canying on a religion, and perpetuating ceremonies that his fore- fathers have handed down for a thousand generations from long before the Vedic period (1,500 B.C.). The Bishop of Madras, who has had exceptional advantages for collecting information from Government officials, and contrasting the ceremonies practised in various A DK.WIDIAN OODDK.SS W 11 H OLAKUIAN. I'HE dllDDlSS IS THh SMALL BLACK STONE IN FRONT. UNPAID BILLS AKK HUNG (IN THL TRKL. ANI> THE GODDESS INSISTS ON PA\"MENT IF REALL\' DIE. HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN 8i parts of his extensive diocese, has published an account of many of these strange prehistoric rites. A short description of one of them that the present writer has often witnessed will be given below. Let it be here emphasised that the "Hinduism" of the great mass of the Siidras as practised in everyday life is essen- tially different from the Hinduism proper as found in the standard books. When the Brahmans first set out to convert India they did not find, any more than we do, a land void of religion, but they discovered there a thousand non-Aryan or Dravidian religions and cults already in existence and firmly imbedded in their wor- shippers' hearts. The Brahman missionary of those far-off days did not trouble himself about the spiritual elevation of the people, but went away quite content if he had persuaded his hearers to adopt the caste system, by which he and his community were accepted as the visible embodiments of God, and to call his Dravidian gods by Brahmanic names. Hence India never has been, and of course now never can be, converted to the religion of the Brahmans, though all its people are called " Hindus," and all keep caste. It may be ad- mitted that all these various cults have incorporated something, some more, some less, from the conflicting and contradictory systems of Brahmanism proper ; they may be imbued with the idea of the immanence of the Divine ; they may delight to sing songs from the two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata ; their whole lives may be saddened by the fear of wearisome repetitions of births which the Brahmans have taught them to dread, but fundamentally and essentially their 6 82 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS religion is a different one. And as it is with one com- munity or caste so is it in an ever-varying degree with ten thousand other communities. What then is Hin- duism ? We may answer in the same breath, and with the same self-contradiction that the Hindu loves so much : " There is no such thing as Hinduism, and there are a thousand Hinduisms ". When, therefore, the youthful missionary, who has studied his books beforehand, lands on the shore of India, he finds as little of what he has learnt as he does of the " coral strand," of which he has sung all his life. They are both there, but he will not find them without much searching and discrimination. He is confronted with an amazing jumble of beliefs, so conflicting, so con- tradictory, and so inextricably interwoven that he is appalled at the prospect before him. Probably there is nothing in this world so elastic and rigid, so yield- ing and adamantine, so absorbent and so absorbable as Hinduism. And then the dread suspicion suggests itself to the mind, is our Christianity going to be an- other jumble of Christ and Krishna, the Gospel and caste, the Church and superstition ? Are we simply founding a Christian caste? Most missionaries have too much experience to be optimists, and too much faith to be pessimists. Let me now turn back and describe a Dravidian sacrifice. About a mile outside Trichinopoly there is a small river tumbling over a dam and down some rocks to the paddy (rice) fields below. On the bank is a small Dravidian temple dedicated to Kulumayi, the Lady of the Dam. There are many legends of the way in which HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN 83 the goddess was discovered and dug up in a field as the result of a dream ; but such legends form the stock-in- trade of all Indian wonder-workers, and need not de- tain us. On a certain night, usually about the begin- ning of February, the goddess^ — not the stone image itself, but a kind of pictorial representation of her cut out in palm-leaves — is carried in a gaily decorated car in procession to the town. The car is borne on men's shoulders by means of long, heavy poles, and is pre- ceded and followed by a large crowd with torches in their hands. The tom-tom beaters ^ and musicians walk in front, the latter braying out long dismal notes from brass horns eight feet in length, for it never seems to have occurred to the makers of these weird instruments that a brass tube can be curled round so as to take up less room. The crowd shout and laugh while the band plays and the torches flare, for there is generally more merriment than solemnity over these religious tanidshas, or festivals as we call them. The car is brought to a place within a stone's-throw of All Saints' Church, and the whole night is made hideous with the ceaseless beat- ing of tom-toms and the wailing blare of the horns. Mingled with these noises is the bleating of droves of black kids, fretting because they have been taken from their mothers, but unconscious of the worse fate that awaits them on the morrow. At sunrise thousands more crowd in from the neighbouring villages to take part in the festival. Then a fat, sensuous man with a 1 The tom-tom is a small drum beaten by the fingers. The word Paraiyan, generally spelled Pariah, means " drummer," as this is one of his duties. 84 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS fantastic turban of gold-tinsel, and with garlands of flowers round his neck, mounts on the shoulders of two strong men, sitting on the right shoulder of one and the left of the other. He is not the pnjdri of the temple, but has been appointed to make this annual sacrifice and is well paid for doing so. I am sorry that I can- not show the reader his photograph. He says that if any one takes him his eyes will drop out ! I have frequently run that risk, but he also runs as fast as his bearers can carry him at the sight of a camera. He sits aloft before the representation of the goddess, whose car is carried from place to place by a number of men, and then a devotee comes with a black kid — it must be quite black or it will not be accepted by the goddess — a swift stroke with a knife is made across its throat and it is handed up to the coarse, brutal-looking man, who thrusts his mouth into the gaping wound and pre- tends to drink its gore, while he gazes at the goddess on whose behalf he is sucking in the hot blood. An- other and another kid is brought and the ghastly orgy goes on all day in different streets. Garlands are also put on his neck from time to time, and he in turn takes them off and distributes the bunches of flowers to the women, who look on them as sacred. I have seen the man take a silver bowl holding quite a quart of steam- ing blood and drink it up as if with the greatest relish, but as he runs indoors occasionally one may easily imagine what is the disgusting end of the loathsome sight. It is estimated that as many as 2,000 black kids are sacri- ficed in this way, but it is obvious that while the offi- ciant is worrying at the throat of the victim, like a dog HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN 85 with a rat, he is not drinking the blood at all, though the devotees firmly believe that through him all this blood passes to the goddess who has to be appeased. Of course the whole idea of dispelling the wrath of a wicked god, in a wicked way, by a wicked man is mon- strous ; still the underlying idea of reconciling God and man, of making them "at one," through the spilling of blood on the ground, or allowing the smoke of the burnt- offering to ascend to heaven, accompanied by the com- munion of God and man in the subsequent feast, is not only common to all uncivilised races, but bears a re- semblance to our own most sacred rite.^ While the sacrifices are going on the crowd is amus- ing itself at the fair. Stalls and booths are erected everywhere ; coco-nuts, sugar-canes and sweets find a ready sale ; merry-go-rounds are thronged with happy children; side-shows are crowded with rustics; and vendors of books, bangles, toys and pictures of Krishna's " play," vie with one another to secure customers. Be- sides these all the blind, lame and halt sit on the sides of the roads, protrude their infirmities, and beg with persistent clamour; and, if the Collector does not keep a sharp look-out, boys will be seen with a needle thrust through both cheeks, girls will be buried in the ground up to their chins, and babies will lie in the blaze of the sun, apparently dying, while covered with gory, festering sores. I once took particular notice of a girl in this state, and found that her ghastly face and bleeding ulcers were all " faked," but a shower of " pies " (a pie = ' See Jevons's Introduction to the History of Religion. 86 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS one-twelfth of a penny) kept falling in her lap from the sympathetic crowd. In another part will be seen jugglers, fire-eaters, and performing women, all doing their best to wheedle coppers from the holiday-making crowd. We have two or more batches of clergymen and catechists working all day long wherever we can find quiet corners to preach to the people, and we distribute handbills which we have written for the occasion by the thousand. There is too much excitement for people to listen patiently, and sometimes there are violent out- bursts, but the handbills about the goddess may possibly be read at home after the frenzy of the sacrifice and the fair has subsided. It will not be necessary to tell of other Dravidian rites, the slaying of buffaloes, and even unclean pigs, in sacrifice, of the methods of expelling evil spirits from a village by throwing out baskets of rice steeped in blood, and so on ; but one thing must be mentioned to show how BrShmanism and Dravidianism have been blended. The blood sacrifices are most repulsive to Hinduism proper, but have been handed down from time immemorial. Hence many sacrifices take place on a stone slab or other kind of altar outside the temple while the door is locked, or the goddess is pre- vented from seeing the sacrifice by interposing a cur- tain. The goat is brought up and tested in the usual way for fitness, i.e., water is thrown over it, and if it shivers and shakes itself it is at once rejected as unac- ceptable to the goddess ; but if it stands the test its head must be struck off at one blow by the pAjdri. HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN 87 This is all Dravidianism pure and simple, and probably dates back for several thousands of years. But when we find the temple door closed, or the goddess screened lest she should be revolted by the disgusting sight of blood, although that blood is shed in her honour and to appease her wrath, then we have Brahmanism re- sorting to a compromise with Dravidianism, though the principles of the two religions are in flat contradic- tion to each other. It will, of course, be urged that Kali, the wife of Siva, is always represented as a cruel goddess revelling in human blood and the sacrifice of innocent babes, but one can never make any statement with regard to the complicated system called Hinduism without be- ing met with some sort of contradiction. To quote an illustration of this, the following incident fell under my notice when travelling in North India. I was shown a particularly repulsive female figure with the head all askew, and fresh blood on the slab at her feet, and was told that it was Kali. "Why has she got her head turned to one side?" I asked. " In the old days," re- plied my informant, "a human sacrifice used to be offered every day, but the people grew sulky, and the men used to hide themselves when it was their turn to be sacrificed. So the officiating priest asked the god- dess whether a bullock would not serve the purpose To this she gave a reluctant consent, and so for a long time a bullock was daily slain. Next, the people be- ing very poor, and being largely dependent on their cattle for their livelihood, began to grumble and said they could only offer goats. So the priest had to ask 88 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS the goddess for another concession, and she was so much disgusted that she turned her head aside and has kept it there ever since." Whether this turning of the head to one side so as not to see the goat when it was sacrificed arose from anger, or was in any way anal- ogous to the hanging of a veil before the goddess at the time of the decapitation of the goat, I cannot say. I give the story as it was told me without offering any opinion. Hindus have no ideas of worship, or church service, as we understand it ; nor is. an Englishman ever allowed to see what goes on in the inmost shrine. Every morning the god is wakened, bathed, anointed, decked out with flowers, and fed with milk and delicacies. People drink the water flowing from his bath, often foul and foetid with dead flowers, as the sweetest nectar. The temple musicians play, and religious rites go on nearly all day, except during the god's siesta, and similar ceremonies take place at night, when the god- dess is supposed to be conducted from her adjoining temple. At the minor shrines one may see a Brah- man " priest " offer flowers to the deity, while camphor blazes, and mantras (sacred verses) are muttered in Sanskrit. The persons in whose behalf the " service " is conducted, simply look on with folded hands put up to their foreheads, and pay the priest. All this, how- ever, pertains to the higher Hinduism. At the wayside shrines one sometimes witnesses ceremonies such as the following. There is a semi- circle of deities and grotesque guardians, etc. h piljdrt comes round with a pot of boiled rice, a coco-nut ladle HINDUISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN Sg and a few broad leaves. He deposits a pat of rice on a leaf before each deity and then tinkles a little bell to let them know that dinner is ready. After a minute or two he picks up all the pats and puts the rice back again into his chatti. "What are you going to do with that ?" " Take it home and eat it." " I thought the goddesses had eaten it?" "Oh, they have only taken the sAram (the virtue or essence) out of it." " Well, then, what is the good of your eating it ? " Silence and departure. Probably there was the thought, "What extraordinary people these English are with their questions and their logic, always want- ing to know the reason of everything ! " India is now awakening, and her unrest is not only political, but religious. The national spirit is daily growing, and who shall say what the end will be? She is in the throes of labour and needs more than ever our love and sympathy, and yet our very offers of help are resented as western and Christian interference. We can at least " watch and pray". This chapter does not profess to give more than the veriest sketch of an immense subject, on which num- bers of books have been written, but its object will have been attained if it has put the reader on the right lines and stimulated his appetite for more. The lack of interest in Missions among English people, which we deplore so much, does not arise from the inherent barrenness in the subject, or from the dulness of the missionaries who explain it, but — -if the reader will pardon two blunt words — from crass ignorance. CHAPTER V THE MISSION COMPOUND And we do not know when success is really near. When you seem at your worst perhaps you may hear the cry, " Well done, good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord". For He sees what you cannot see — like the commander-in-chief on the hill, who sees triumph when the common soldier can only discern ruin and despair. Triumph may be very close when you imagine defeat in- evitable ; — Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain ; The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain. If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars. It may be, in yon smoke concealed. Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field. For while the tired waves, vainly breaking. Seem here no painful inch to gain. Far off, thro' creeks and inlets making. Comes silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light. In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright. Clough. We will suppose that some visitors have come out to see the Mission and wish to be shown round, so as to 90 THE MISSION COMPOUND 91 sec the different kinds of machinery at work. We will take them round the town and district of Trichinopoly, and from one they will be able more or less to learn all. No description of this sort and no photographs can give the reader anything like as vivid a conception as an actual inspection in the flesh ; but at any rate the flesh will not be perspiring at every pore, and be longing for ice and punkahs, or tormented day and night by mosquitoes that so dearly love English visitors with their fresh ruddy complexions. The lady-mos- quito — will my feminine readers forgive me for men- tioning that it is only their sex (in mosquitoes of course) that sting? — experiences greater difficulty in digging down for red corpuscles in the tough tawny skin of the seasoned missionary than in theirs. First of all we arrive at the Mission house in its wilderness of a compound. It is a tumble-down, old house, but the rooms are spacious. Of course the doors and windows stand wide open, the verandahs are deep to keep out the glare, and the bedroom upstairs has ten doors but no windows. Here is the missionary's work-room, with his books and letters, his lantern and type-writer, his slides and photographic apparatus. He not only has to show pictures to the Hindus at evangel- istic meetings, and to Christians to explain the Bible and Church History as well as the sights and buildings in England ; but he must also take photographs of the school children for the friends in England who support them, since they naturally like to look at their proU'g-/es. In another part is " the office," where the clerks, or writers as we call them, are busy with the accounts and 92 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS are tapping out on their machine the replies to the day's letters. All the official correspondence with the Educational Department, the Bishop, the Society, the pastors — who send all their difficulties for solution to headquarters — and the people of the district come to the Superintending missionary. What is more trying is that thousands of rupees have to be received and paid out — mostly in small sums — every month, and all the accounts have to be audited. The missionary could not possibly get through the day's letters, fill in the official forms which have to be prepared for dozens of schools of which he is manager, and keep all the accounts, if he had not these native cler'KS to help him. They do their work admirably when they have once learned, but the missionary has to draft all the impor- tant letters. This office work that ties a missionary to his chair every day from eight to five when he is not " in camp," is rather trying and does not seem like missionary work, but some one has to do it. " Never do yourself what anybody else can do," is a good useful motto, but there is very much that the native pastors and the clerks cannot do, and so the missionary must do it. On his shoulders, too, rests all the administra- tion, and all the organising and initiating of new work ; he has what St. Paul calls " the care of all the churches " in an area larger than most English dioceses ; he is constantly preaching, speaking at meetings, writing papers, examining schools in Scripture knowledge, taking part in the open-air addresses to non-Christians, and so leads a very busy life. Now we will look into the girls' school. Here is THE MISSION COMPOUND 93 assembled a happy family of Christian girls in the Boarding School and of young women in the Training Institution, all under an English "lady superinten- dent ". The latter women, after gaining the Government certificates both in the theory and practice of teaching, are sent out as schoolmistresses to all parts of the Presidency. The visitors will be greeted on entering with " Salam, Ayya " (Peace, Sir), " Salam, Amma " (Peace, Lady), while the right hand is brought up straight to the forehead — not sideways as in a salute, and not with the left hand, as this would be an insult. Frequently, too, the visitors will have garlands of mari- golds or oleander blossoms put round their necks by girls whose faces are brighter than the flowers. (See p. 232.) The daily routine is as follows : Rise at five, when all sing and pray together. After bathing the small girls sweep up the rooms and compound, while the larger girls pound rice and help the cooks. All the flowers are in pots, and water has to be drawn for them and for other purposes. Most English people think that rice is white, but as a matter of fact it is encased in a hard brown husk, which has to be beaten off with heavy wooden pestles, shod with iron, in a stone or wooden mortar. This is capital exercise for young women (though it is not much liked) who have got beyond the age of romping and skipping about and who are tempted to become lazy in a temperature of 100 degrees in the shade. Two girls stand at each mortar, raising and dropping their pestles alternately, like two men beating hot iron on a blacksmith's anvil. The word rice is a shortened form of the Tamil word " arisi ". 94 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS Then after a light breakfast the boys and girls with their teachers march off to All Saints' Church close by, where matins is said. The psalms, canticles and a hymn are always sung to the accompaniment of the harmonium, for we are too poor to buy an organ as in England. Then back to school and lessons. Scripture first, till noon, when dinner is served. Most beautiful lace is made by some of these girls, and all are taught to sew. Let us look in and see what is done at dinner. All the girls sit down in rows in the verandah, each with a plate or dish, generally made of enamelled iron, though the very poor people use a broad plantain (banana) leat, and a metal tumbler full of water. After grace, all sit down cross-legged on the floor, and the cooks come in with huge pots full of boiled rice and lade it out with a big spoon made from half a coco-nut shell ; next the curry stuff made of vegetables is distributed — fish and mutton only being given once or twice a week, and on festival occasions. This food is taken up with the fingers, squeezed into a kind of ball and popped into the mouth. English people do not think that this custom looks nice and clean, but Indian people wonder why we are so nasty as to put a spoon or fork into our mouths when we know that other people put them into their mouths yesterday. Saliva is supposed to be a defiling thing, and a Brjihman would rather starve to death than eat food out of a vessel that some one else had used. He cannot even smoke a cheroot (cigar) because, having once touched it with his lips, he cannot put it back even into his own mouth because of the pollution of the saliva. After eating — never during CHRISTIAN BOARDERS IN THE ALL SAINTS SCHOOL, TRICHINOPOLY. BRAHMAN GIRLS IN THE ARIYALUR SCHOOL. NOTE THE JEWELS IN THE EARS AND NOSE, THE GOLD NECKLACES AND SILVER WAISTBANDS. THESE GIRLS ARE SHUT UP IN THE ZANANA. THE MISSION COMPOUND 95 eating — the water in the Httle brass tumbler is drunk ; and here, too, the tumbler must on no account touch the lips, but the water must be poured down the throat while the head is thrown back and the mouth opened rather wide. English folk sometimes try to achieve this feat, but the results are generally disastrous, and it is well not to stand in front of them while they are experimenting. After dinner and a short rest more lessons are learnt till four. Kindergarten, drill, other physical exercises and kiiimni are the order of the day in the afternoon, all the latter being, of course, carried on under the shade of the trees. Kununi is a dance that the girls are very fond of They stand in a circle, one begins to sing a line, and then all join in the chorus as they dance round, bowing towards the centre side- ways and clapping in time together with their hands. The Brahman girls in the picture do not belong to this school, but to one at a small town thirty miles away. The parents of these girls are rich, and so you may see what a quantity of gold jewels they wear — chains round their necks, ornamental plates of gold on their heads, rings in their ears and noses, bangles round their arms, all of solid gold and precious stones, while round their waists are either gold or silver belts, on their ankles silver bangles and on their toes silver rings. Silver only may be worn on the ankles except in the case of royalty. The jewel in the nose must be awkward at dinner or with a cold, still it is the fashion. The pictures will show how the girls dress. One blue, red or orange cloth is wrapped round and round the waist, and the gathered up folds hold it fast with the end tucked in 96 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS tight in its place. Round the shoulders is worn a short tight jacket of linen called a " rauki " (pronounced like rouky), and over the left shoulder is thrown another cloth bright and gorgeous in colour with a gold-lace band round the edge, if such fine clothes can be afforded. This is tucked in at the back of the waist and falls like an apron in front. When the girls go to church one end of this cloth is pulled over the head. Hats, stock- ings, shoes and the other mysteries of female attire are never dreamt of Jewellery is much beloved if it can be got, and a bride in all her jewels, her gold cloth, and garlands of flowers, is as proud of herself as any lady in a fashionable London church with her veil and orange blossoms (p. 232). The sleeping arrangements are as simple as the rest. Each girl has her own mat of plaited palm leaves, spreads it on the ground, with a cloth thrown over her body, and is soon fast asleep — and I fear it must be added, snoring. Any one who knows what it is to try to sleep in a tent on a sultry night when his boy, his chokra (really a " boy "), his cook and his groom are sleeping under the flaps of the same, knows to his cost how lustily natives can snore. A kitchen in India comes as a weird surprise to Eng- lish ladies. There is little but a raised platform of sun- dried bricks, about three feet high. There are holes in front in which the cook pokes sticks ; and on the top there are other circular holes in which large pots of metal or earthenware fit. There are no chimneys, and most of the smoke crawls lazily out through the spaces in the roof tiles, and the rest gets into the cook's eyes, but as the latter is as much reconciled to it as a Londoner THE MISSION COMPOUND 97 is to fog, he — generally he, not she — does not complain or think of adopting any remedy, any more than the average Cockney does. Such is their simple life, and such is the way that these " kings' daughters " are being educated, refined and raised in the world, but of course the religious part of the work is the most important. Our great object is to make them good, pure maidens, who will not tell lies, who will be modest in heart as well as in appearance — for they are all that — and really devout, and not merely nominal, Christians. I could tell you of girls hiding love letters under the mats in church ; of girls who would without flinching tell a hundred lies so as to escape the least pun- ishment ; of one quite little girl who drowned herself in the school well for no reason in the world that we or her parents could ever discover; of girls encouraging young fellows to come and meet them clandestinely, and of still worse things. But such things seldom happen, and such things happen all the world over as well as in India. As a rule they are as sweet and affec- tionate girls as one could wish for and very merry to play with. Later we shall talk about marriage cus- toms, but now we will go up a few steps and look at the church. There is nothing expensive, much less luxurious here, although this is like a cathedral to the rest of the dis- trict. There is no organ which must have more and more pipes added to it every few years, no paid choir, no stained glass, no chiselled stone-work, and no elaborately carved oak screens to cut the church into pieces. The only things that attract any attention are 7 98 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS the teak pulpit made in our own workshop and the brass lectern which was obtained from the S.P.G. Industrial School at Cawnpore. All the rest is simple and chaste and more likely to call forth devotion to God than de- mand admiration from man. We begin with a mud hovel and end with a really beautiful church. All the clergy meet here once a month, when we dis- cuss the whole affairs of the district. They and all the agents, male and female, come here also once a year for the Scripture examination of the agents and for the Missionary Conference, at which special sermons are preached and papers read — all in Tamil. As this church is dedicated to All Saints let us sup- pose it is the 1st of November. The day is a holiday and a feast day in every sense. At half-past seven, the church being gaily decorated with strings of flowers, crotons in pots, and plantains, etc., the choir in red cas- socks and surplices enter with the clergy singing a proces- sional hymn. The church is crowded with people and the singing is always congregational. The only defect is that it is too hearty, the choir is drowned and the nuances more or less spoiled. In England it is just the other way about, and the choir do as they please, while most of the congregation only listen as if at a concert. The Holy Communion i.s, of course, choral, and only the very little children go out in the middle of the service, but by " choral " nothing is meant in the way of an ela- borate "service". The music for the " Tersanctus," the " Agnus Dei " and the " Gloria in Excelsis " has all been written on purpose, and every man, woman and choir boy o « THE MISSION COMPOUND 99 knows it off by heart. One of the things that strikes hke a chill into the missionary's heart when he is in England is to see the choir go out, and almost all the congregation. He hears a few muttered words from a handful of people scattered about a large church, and is reminded more of a funeral than of the great service of Thanksgiving. How he longs to be back in India to hear what a congregational Eucharist can be ! Of course the singing is not good from the English standpoint ; but all natives can sing, and they all love to sing, though their voices lack roundness and sweet- ness. The sermon on All Saints' Day is generally preached by one of the best Tamil priests in the diocese. Their flow of words is wonderful if not rising to elo- quence, and their appeals to the emotions most im- passioned. After the day has been spent in feasting and games — the little ones delighted to have unlimited rides on the merry-go-round without parting with any small coppers — we have a joint evensong partly in English and partly in Tamil. The choir of the English church and those of the two Tamil churches sing the hymns in both languages together ; and as all the best hymns in Hymns Ancient and Alodern have been translated into Tamil and in the same metre, the effect is quite good. Thus while the English choir and congregation are singing, " The Church's one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord," the Indians are singing, "Sabaiyin astibaram lyesu Christuve". The sermon, which is generally preached by one of the Indian chaplains, is in English, and this is translated sentence by sentence, SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS TLhe Xorb Is mp SbepberC). Psalm xxiii. i, 2. e e »—' — £5 a «—- ' — © « — • -i- i I I I r I I I I I i I I I 1 I a^;rzp=pzz=?=±rf2zzz;p=z;e:i±r»i-j:p.--»z--i :EE: Fine. ±^^a=^ J I 1 I II iSi-Esiig}: z »_^ — »_ I I I i^l s^=f3; trrt" ^1 ^^^3^^:^ ^^^ ^_i_.„._^ _t_^ — ^„^. 1 1 1 ZJC. ' J 1 • • fl — H-i,3tZ. .,4 id 4 -i — T-* — I * — •- -a — w--- -»-- r- S — • - -^- -•— T- Z — • — S — '- T- '^ J- _; ttz Dfjva Pith^ endran meyppan alio ? Sirrumai talchi adaikilant', AvalatMy enai paimpun mi}I Avar mSy taniar nlr arulukindrar. — D^va, etc. THE MISSION COMPOUND loi without a moment's loss of a word, into Tamil. ^ And so a bright service, uniting the two races in a common act of worship, ends with " For all the Saints who from their labours rest," and carries our thoughts upwards and onwards to that great and glorious day when men of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation, ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thou- sands, shall with a great voice ascribe to Him that sitteth on the throne, and unto the Lamb the blessing, and the honour, and the glory, and the dominion for ever and ever. Amen. Before we leave this part of the town, Puttur, let us look back for a moment to the early days when Schwartz was trying to win converts in this suburb. We read in Pearson's Memoirs (vol. i., p. i6o) that the missionary sat by the roadside on a heap of earth and argued with a Pandaram, /.^w CAR FESTIVAL AT SRIRANGAM. VISHNU BEING DRAGGED ROUND THE STKEEl S. THE TEMPLES OF CHRIST 133 English maiden will blush to read of these things, we must not judge other people by our standard. Parents hand over a little girl to such a life of infamy with a semi-religious motive, and the girls who grow up to such a life do not resent it, or see any harm in it, but look upon the whole matter as one of the general cus- toms of their religion and country. We missionaries are always too ready, like bad chess-players, to look at the lives of others through our own eyes instead of from the others' point of view. Of course there can be no palliation for vice of this loathsome kind, but we must beware of hysterical sensationalism. Our work is not simply to try and save one soul here and there from perdition, joyful as such an experience is, but to raise the whole tone of the country and so to make such a state of affairs impossible. It is not we directly that have to sweep this Augean stable clean, but the Hindus themselves, when they see things as they are in the pure light of Christianity, and not through the murky, Stygian fumes of Hinduism. That such a con- science is being stimulated into active life is certain. Young Brahmans in our Mission Colleges nowadays boil over with virtuous indignation when we mention these matters. " Have you no fallen women in London and Paris ? " they ask. " Yes, unfortunately we have ; but when our bishops and clergymen on some great occasion enter in procession into St. Paul's Cathedral, they are not preceded by a number of immoral girls, dancing in honour of God. The difference is that Christianity condemns impurity, whereas Hinduism sanctions and embraces it. To call such women 134 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS ' servants of God ' is in itself blasphemy." Others allegorise the amours of Krishna, though allegories are foreign to India; but the fact that they do so, and do not acquiesce in such matters like their fathers, shows that a moral standard is gradually being called into ex- istence. Some of the leading men in the Presidency cities are forming societies for the protection of children, but so long as the " priests " who revel in sin foster the vice, the parents of the girls and the girls themselves acquiesce in it, and the people pay for it, their task is by no means an easy one. What India needs is the "abundant life" of Christianity, which the Holy Spirit imparts, to raise up an ethical standard and so to lead the Hindus themselves to abolish this vice. It is Ckfist's own vital force that is wanted, and we can all, each in our own way, add some of our spiritual strength to that force, and thus, as co-operators with God, do something to hasten the coming of His kingdom. Will my readers try to remember this, if they forget every other sentence that this book contains ? When they once realise this, they will all take their own part, if only by joining their " prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears " with those of the Saviour of the world, who is ceaselessly pleading the merits of the Cross for the overthrow of these great temples of wickedness. CHAPTER Vir OUT IN CAMP Put thou no value on the gift, Give freely that is thine ; Unto the Master leave the rest; Thine is but water at the best — God turns it into wine. E. Cooper Willis. What visions does the phrase "going out into camp" conjure up in the minds of old Anglo-Indians, especi- ally those who have been district officers! India is a vast continent of villages, teeming with life ; and these countless villages and hamlets have to be visited by- revenue officials, police superintendents, engineers, in- spectors of schools, doctors and so forth. Each of these, as well as the Superintending missionary, has to inspect his own branch of work over an area as large as an English county. They must all put up with a great deal of roughing it, travelling by bad roads or along country tracks under a blazing sun or through drenching rain, fording swollen rivers, and sometimes going without food for many hours. The missionary has a rougher time than the others. He is a poor man and does not receive a liberal travelling allowance like a Government official. He is not like a collector with 135 136 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS his motor-car, a double set of tents, a long string of luggage carts, a regiment of servants, and, above all, a number of obsequious officials waiting for him with supplies of food, and always ready to smooth away every difficulty from the great man's path. The mis- sionary does not complain ; he has counted the cost ; he takes his worries as part of the day's work ; and laughs over them with his friends when they are over. In some Missions the missionary goes out for evan- gelistic work with a band of catechists once a year ; but in every well-organised Mission in the South, there is an evangelistic staff, generally under a native priest, which is always at work, and travels thousands of miles preaching to tens of thousands of Hindus and Muslims, so as to familiarise them with the truths of the Gospel, and get them to see that it is their religion that is un- satisfactory, and not the Christian one, which at first seems unreasonable and unutterably alien to all their hereditary ideas. The English missionary has to take part in this work ; he has to inspect all the pastorates where the Christians live, to see that the work is not being shirked, and that the teachers are teaching reli- gion as well as arithmetic. He has also to train them in preaching — for each has charge of a village congre- gation under the native pastor ; and, worst of all, he has to go into the Mission accounts. He ought to be out in camp at least half of each month, except when the north-east monsoon makes travelling almost an impossibility. This work is necessarily very trying to body, mind and spirit, but, " Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel ". Moreover, the Superintending mission- OUT IN CAMP 137 ary must take the lead and set an example of self- denial to all the agents who are under him. He may have to move his quarters every day. At ten o'clock at night his servants must pack up all the furniture and household effects, and leave him with the barest necessities ; at 6 A.M. he has chota hasri (early break- fast), and mounts his horse or bicycle. On the way he catches up his evangelistic staff, who are preaching in a village, and stops to give an address himself; he then goes on to a Christian village where the congregation (if not in the fields) is waiting for matins and a ser- mon ; he examines the school children in their Scrip- ture subjects, and is then quite ready for a bath and late breakfast. After that he will have a consulta- tion with the pastor or other agents about their local affairs, answer his letters if they have reached him, and send instructions on the business and educational affairs of the whole district to his clerks at headquarters. Then after tea he will be out again at another evangel- istic preaching, followed by evensong with another sermon. As he falls asleep after dining, say, at 9.30 P.M., he hears the servants packing up again in prepar- ation for the next camp. As often as not, having only one tent to send on, he must sleep in a small and dirty schoolroom of sun-dried bricks and thatch; and when he is taking service in church he has a similar building with scarcely a patch of whitewash to make it look re- spectable. His "altar" is a small shaky table, and as he celebrates the Holy Communion his head is higher than the rough cross-tree that supports the thatched roof. While he is preaching, standing on the floor. 138 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS the naked children are crowded round his feet, and the clothes of both men and women, if they have been working in the oil-mills, throw off an odour that is almost overpowering in the stuffy little chapel, while the thermometer (if there were one) would record a tem- perature of 90° to 100°. But when the missionary looks into their simple faces, as they sit cross-legged and huddled together like sheep in a pen, his whole heart goes out to them while he tries to lead them up to a higher and more spiritual life. Both men and women nod their heads in emphatic assent, and answer at once when asked a question or for a text from the Bible, if they can remember it. The missionary becomes as wet as if he had been dipped into a pool, but he does not notice it, as his eyes too are wet while he pleads with these simple folk, pouring out his whole soul to them and " travailing in birth, till Christ be formed in them". As one leaves such a hovel, called a church out of courtesy, with scarcely a scrap of furniture in it besides an old table, a rough box for the dog-eared Bible and a few other books, and a small smoky lamp, one's mind flies back to the home-land, where thousands of pounds are yearly spent on making parish churches resemble cathedrals, and one wonders if a few shillings might not be spared, if only from altar flowers, to make these mud-chapels into something more like houses of God. On one occasion, just as we were leaving, a snake was seen wriggling its way into the loose stones that formed the foundation. A man promptly seized it by the tail, as it is not pleasant having snakes in church, but one OUT IN CAMP 139 of the peculiarities of these reptiles is that when they have got part of their bodies into a hole they will never leave go. You may pull them in two, but you cannot get them out. So we had to send for a crowbar and take down one side of the building before we could get rid of the unwelcome visitor. Some incidents of camp life may here be quoted. The first is taken from the report of the Rev. T. P. Adolphus. It must be explained that Tinnevelly is largely made up of tracts of dry sand in which palmyras flourish, and black mud in which cotton grows. Adol- phus writes : " When working in the Tinnevelly country for ten years, I spared not myself, but was assiduous in touring in the black cotton soil where in those days — -I speak of 1844 — a white face was something of a phenomenon. I had to put up in those days, i.e., forty years ago, in slushy cow-sheds, drink muddy water, live on coarse food and that at irregular intervals. There was much hard riding through rough cotton fields and corn fields, which laid the foundation of a complaint from which I have never been free all these years, but which will go with me to my grave, and which nearly carried me off some years ago." In my young days I went to visit Adolphus and found him almost blind. He was quite blind before he died, but preached with such vigour that the congregation did not realise that he was sightless. Speaking of black cotton soil, I was myself once caught and made a ludicrous sight before a wedding party. I had ridden ten miles to a village, but as I drew near I found the road was absolutely impassable 140 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS from the floods. So I turned my horse's head into a field to see if I could reach the place that way. But my horse after floundering for a while in the mud sunk down into it till no legs were visible at all. I then thought it was time to dismount, and the reader may imagine what I looked like after I had struggled through the mud. The bridal party had been waiting for me for some time, but had to wait considerably longer till I could get a bath and a change of clothes. Some illustrations of Adolphus's missionary methods will now be given. But first it must be explained that he was a most eccentric man and got into trouble with the bishop and Madras Committee, and was temporarily suspended, because he flatly refused to send in any reports and statistics of his Mission, or give any ac- count of money paid to him for the same." In the first matter many missionaries will sympathise with him, and, as regards the second, Adolphus was perfectly honest though he had a rooted objection to turning himself into a " business" man. As an illustration of his casual methods with regard to money matters it may be mentioned that after his death a number of uncashed cheques, representing his salary, were found in his Bible, as it does not seem to have occurred to him that it was necessary to endorse and cash them. The following remarks made by Lord Selborne in a speech at Oxford in 1905, after his visit as High Com- missioner to South Africa, bear upon this matter of re- ports : — " I desire to protest against the unholy thirst for OUT IN CAMP 141 statistics ; it is perfectly impossible to put into statistics the result of Mission work. I would go further and say it is absolutely bad for the missionary to have to try and write a report which will give a favourable impres- sion at home. What have you to do with statistics in such a matter as this ? The utmost a man can possibly do is to do his best, and the results really are not his business; they rest with a Higher Power." Although Adolphus did not trouble himself much about reports, or even bishops and committees, there is sufficient to show what kind of evangelistic work he did. There is, for instance, on record a letter undated (1878?), addressed to the Rev. J. M. Walker, an extract from which is well worth quoting, as it illustrates the kind of work a missionary has to do when on tour. This tour was evidently in what is known as the Coleroon Mis- sion, north of that river, and took place probably during one of KohlhofTs temporary absences. He writes : — " I got here safe last night, I am thankful to say, after a good week's peregrinations during which I have had services sometimes three times a day — a celebra- tion daily (at times even twice a day at two different villages) — travelling every day of these ten days from Saturday the 20th to yesterday, in the course of which I have covered over 100 miles and more, while the Communicants in only this Eastern division of the Dis- trict have been within two hundred. "After a full .week's continuous pastoral work during Easter week, I set apart one day (yesterday) to preach- ing to the heathen. At a village twelve miles off this I came in contact with an intelligent Brahman-priest of 142 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS a Siva temple, near the walls of which we entered into conversation. He said : ' I am tired of the distraction of Hinduism — there is Siva (his own deity) and Vishnu, and Brahma and Pilleiar and Mahariyayi, and Katteri and Pindari and what not ! And I am to worship and propitiate all these ! This is as far as I am personally concerned. Add to this, in matters where others are concerned ; being a priest, every clodhopper who has some object in view to gain, or whose wife is possessed with an evil spirit, comes to me with some camphor or a coconut, as offering to his idol, and I must gain the point for them. What do I know about driving out devils ! I don't see Christians suffering from posses- sions. Hinduism with all its Shastras is a pack of nonsense. I heartily wish all the Hindu books were burnt.' " I saw from his manner that the man was really in earnest, and what he further added goes to show his sincerity in this matter. He continued : — ■ "'You, sir, and all the padres have tried persuasion for a long time. I conceive the day for that sort of thing has passed away. You and the other padres should write to the Queen and obtain a takeed (a magis- trate's order) for the conversion of the whole country. And if this does not have due effect, why, order out the artillery at long ranges and pack off our temples and towers — the granite and timber will answer very well for building materials — and you will then see that the people will all have but one religion, which is very desirable, and why should not Christianity be that re- ligion ? ' OUT IN CAMP 143 " I said : ' No, no, my friend, you are getting on too fast — your plan would answer capitally for Muham- madanism, which was indeed established at the point of the sword, but the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. We must still only preach and do our duty and patiently bide our time. We have a fair con- viction, as the Hindus, who travelled for ages in lumber- ing carts, now betake themselves to the railway, and as they, who for ages resorted to quacks, now betake them- selves to the Dispensaries, though they have to travel twenty to thirty miles for it, so in course of time they will be led to see the better way and adopt it.' " ' Yes, sir,' rejoined he, ' I am convinced multifarious distracting Hinduism cannot but end, and that in time there will be one religion for all.' " He might have cited still more appositely the action of the Dutch in Ceylon who, it is said, drove the people to church at the point of the bayonet, but failed thereby to make Christians of them. The reader may, however, study -Sir A. Lyall's Asiatic Studies (vol. i. chap. viii.). When Aurangzib captured Benares, destroyed 1,500 Hindu temples and built his own mosque on the highest hill to dominate the whole city, he was playing the game according to the rules accepted by all Orientals ; and if we had, after the battle of Plassey, razed every temple and mosque to the ground, and built and en- dowed cathedrals and churches all over the land, the Hindus would have respected us more for our religious fervour than they do now with our constant ignoring of our own religion under the plea of religious neutrality. We need not trample on any man's conscience, but 144 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS neither need we hide the light of Christianity under a bushel, as the Indian Government does. Upon the ordinary pastoral work that Adolphus did both among the English and Indian Christians it is unnecessary to dilate, for it is only of the kind that every clergyman does as part of his daily routine. What is of greater interest is the evangelistic work to which Adolphus devoted much of his time and thought. The chief difficulty with a Hindu is that his sense of sin has been paralysed, and his conscience deadened, owing to the divorce between religion and morality. A Hindu may be, and in fact often is, most devout in \\vs, pAja^ and attentive to all the minutis of his religi- ous ceremonies, but he utterly fails to see the bearing of this on stealing, adultery and perjury. Hence the ten commandments form a very good basis for an in- troductory lecture or conversation. After Adolphus had quoted these commandments the man whom he was addressing was impelled to exclaim :— " ' Sir, the precepts of your religion are worth ten thousand pieces of gold. Our shastras are volumin- ous ; but these laws how concise and comprehensive ! Your religion, however, lacks one important thing to commend itself to us, and that is miracles. We want miracles.' ' Why,' observed I, ' our religion is founded on miracles, numerous, benevolent, and well authenti- cated by the blood of the testifiers.' ' Doubtless,' re- joined he, ' this is true, but it was in ages past ; we, however, have miracles in the present day at our prin- cipal places of pilgrimage, and at many of our sacred shrines more or less. For instance, within the precincts OUT IN CAMP 145 of this very temple is a jack-tree — you see the top of it over these high walls — the fruit of which when plucked at certain seasons drops blood, and if eaten is destructive to life.' ' You are only a pilgrim here,' said I, ' and have you witnessed the fact ? ' 'I have not,' replied he, ' but people say so, and they would not without good reason.' ' Oh, yes,' rejoined I, ' people say a good many things, and, particularly heathen priests, deeply inter- ested in maintaining the credit of their several temples, practise a great many pious frauds, and they are notori- ously capable of the act too. But to come to your sacred tree here ; does this happen to be the proper season for the fruit, and can I see a specimen ? ' 'It does not seem to be the season ; and hence no specimen is available, I should think.' 'Well,' replied I, 'no great matter. But even granting that this tree or its fruit exuded blood, possibly some reddish fluid, sap or gum, it may, on close rigid investigation, be fully accounted for by natural causes arising from a peculiar soil, secret inoculation (for we know Hindus are, many of them, adepts in certain arts) or the like. And why should this mere out-of-the-way matter be viewed in a religious light ? We have exceptional things in almost every department of nature, e.g., cattle with five legs ; hot boiling springs ; floating islands ; plants that thrive without being watered, but which perish by being watered ; and yet we do not consider them miraculous nor as confirmations of our religion.' " Here is another graphic account in the shape of a dialogue, which for a frank and calculated advocacy of evil it would be difficult to surpass : — 146 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS " I held another conversation with a Brahman priest. The people were bringing offerings, etc., to the priest, who was very earnest in receiving them. The priest gave in return a small quantity of sacred ashes and little pieces of coco-nut, etc., as consecrated things, and sent them away. Then my conversation with the priest went on in the following manner : — " ' How is it that you sent away your disciples with- out any exhortation ? ' " ' What do you mean, sir ? ' " ' Why did you not preach to your people, pointing out what they should do and what they should not ? ' " ' We take no trouble of that kind ; our business is simply to receive sacrifices and offerings from their hands, and to dismiss them with the dstrvdthani (bene- diction).' " ' That is not enough, you should admonish them not to commit sin.' " ' It is not our duty to admonish our people not to commit sin.' " ' Please let me know then, zvliose duty is it to preach to your people ? ' " ' It is the duty of Government to do so. They punish a man when he commits a crime, and that is quite warning enough to teach him not to repeat it again.' '" Sins are committed in thoughts and words as well as in deeds. All these sins that are committed by men arc not under the cognizance of Government. What have you to say to this ? ' " ' We cannot help that. Moreover, if we do undertake OUT IN CAMP 147 to do any such thing as you propose, it will be to our disadvantage.' " ' How is that ? ' " ' We have no salary or any other income. We live entirely upon the things that are brought by the people as sacrifices and offerings in expiation of the sins they committed. If they do not commit sins, they will not bring offerings and sacrifices. The more sins they commit, the more offerings we expect. If we tell the people not to commit sins, it will be just telling them in other words, Don't bring any more offerings to us. Then what shall we do for our support ? ' "The people, who stood by, laughed at their priest's reply." On another occasion an idol representing Sri Ran- ganathan, the god in the great Vaishnavite temple of Srirangam, was taken to a village called Siyapuram, and placed under a covering in a mandapam (porch of a temple). Adolphus seeing a musician there about II A.M., asked if he could see the idol. "Dear me, what a question to ask ! " exclaimed the man, "every- body knows the Swami (god) has made the journey all the way from Srirangam this intensely hot day, and being as tired as tired can be is taking his siesta ; and it will take the Swami from four to five hours yet to recover from his fatigue. By-and-by, however, in the cool of the evening, when he comes out in procession, you shall have a sight of him, all glittering with gems and gold." How like Baal in the days of Elijah, " He is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth " ! At the great EkSdasi festival at Srirangam Adol- 148 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS phus entered the thousand-pillared courtyard, and picking up a piece of white clay used in the temple- worship from one of the stalls, he wrote up on a wall a Sanskrit slogant (verse). The meaning of it is that if a pilgrim dies at Srirangam he will have no further body {i.e., no re-birth, but will attain Nirvina), or if he does, he will hold the disc in his hand ; in sleep will be protected by the serpent {dtliiseshd) ; will ride on an eagle ; and will have the Ganges at his feet {i.e., will be in all respects identical with Vishnu). At these festi- vals thousands used to die in the old days, when there was no sanitation, and cholera broke out, as it generally did, with deadly effect. Adolphus pointed out that this slogam was evidently invented by the Brahmans to prevent pilgrims from being disheartened at the ravages of disease, and then went on to remark how mean it was of the god to kill thousands of people who had come for the sole purpose of worshipping him. The bystanders merely replied : " It is our fate ; who can resist the fate inscribed on his skull ? " It should be explained that the disc, or chakram, is a kind of quoit that Vishnu carries to hurl at the heads of any enemies whom he wishes to slay. His vdhanam, or vehicle, on which he rides is the kite ; and Atliisesha, the king of the snakes, has the twofold duty of pro- tecting his god and supporting the world on his head. These extracts not only show the missionary's methods, but, what is more important, give us an in- sight into the thoughts of the people with whom he had to deal. It will be noted that the modes of thought of the Hindu and the Christian are often as wide apart Q Z Z H < OUT IN CAMP 149 as the poles, and so long as such vast gulfs remain unbridged, the conversion of orthodox Hindus must remain, humanly speaking, almost an impossibility. The following extracts are taken from the Rev. J. Sinnappan's report of evangelistic work in 1869, and give an idea of the kind of objections that our native pastors have so often to meet. " If our message should command consideration, and if our hearers are disposed to weigh the arguments ad- duced in favour of Christianity, we are met at the very outset by the objection that the statement that there is but one true God, who is the Saviour of all, is op- posed to the ideas which experience has impressed upon the mind. ' Surely there is a better chance of obtaining salvation if there are more gods than one, for if one could not help us, we could go to another to seek for aid.' ' If danger is likely to befal us in the way in which we are about to go, are we not glad to betake ourselves to another way to avoid it ? ' " And again, the pastor reports : — " When we go forth to speak to the people the words of salvation, and invite the heathen to come to Jesus the only Saviour, we are met at once with these ob- jections : ' What new thing is this which you bring to our ears? If this is the true way of salvation, how is it that it has not been revealed in the long course of the three j'/igas that have passed away? Is it possible that all our forefathers could have been under a delu- sion in respect to so important a matter as the salvation of the soul ? Are the four Vedas, the six Slidstras and the eighteen Purdnas, written by the holy Brahmans, ISO SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS all a lie ? And are they to be supplanted by a religion introduced by Europeans here a few years ago, which is embraced by only the vilest castes, and that merely that they may get a living by it ? You must be out of your senses if you suppose that we can give the least credence to such absurd assertions.' " To understand the force of this objection it must be explained that though the Vedic period goes back as far as 1,500 B.C., the Hindus as a rule think the Vedas much older, and as to the duration of yiigas they en- tirely surpass the limits of human thought. The Sanskrit ytiga is the Hebrew oUdi, Greek aloiv and Latin aevuni ; but the Indians have drawn drafts on time compared with which those of our own geo- logists pale into insignificance. The present isffl/Zj/z/^rt:, or iron age, has already lasted over 5,000 years, but still has 427,000 years to run before the golden age re- turns. The {owx yugas make a total of 4,320,000 years, and as soon as each of these epochs is over the same weary cycle begins again. This cycle of yugas has already revolved about 20,000,000 times, and will go on spinning 20,000,000 times more. It is not to be wondered at that the Indians have no histories, and none of the historic sense, and hence that they are so impervious to the historic methods of argument. Now let us go on with our tour and gain fresh ex- periences as we go. Camping out has many charms and provides many amusing incidents till one grows weary after years of it, especially when the buoyancy of youth and health, which enables one to cope with all manner of difficulties by the way and to laugh at mis- OUT IN CAMP 151 adventures, has departed. A few incidents of the road and illustrations of the work at the end of the journeys will now be detailed. One evening I arrived at a travellers' bungalow at 9 P.M., the road having turned itself into a ploughed field, and knew that my bandies could not come for hours. At the small bungalows, maintained by the Local Fund Boards, there will be a table, a few chairs and two cots with coarse mattresses stuffed with coco- nut fibre, but there is no servant except a caretaker. What were the chances of dinner ? They seemed slight. An Englishman turned loose in an Indian village, thirty miles from anywhere, realises what a helpless creature he is, and what a number of things are required to make up the veriest necessities of civilised life. The bare earth to lie on and a ball of cold rice tied up in a cloth as food, suffice for a native, but do not satisfy the average civilised man ; he wants a host more things, but he can get none of them. Fortunately on this oc- casion I found a native deputy collector at the bunga- low, and he hospitably offered me what he had, a few biscuits and a bottle of gingerade. Gingerade is not a liquor that I care for, but it was better than nothing, and a great deal better than dirty tank water. So I dined, threw myself on my mattress and went to sleep with the consciousness that my Friday's dinner, though scanty, was good enough. On another occasion, I found after riding twelve miles that the handyman had quietly left my schndn (luggage) on the roadside, as he declined to go any further owing to the bandy track being in such an awful 152 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS state. So I hunted up the village munsif (official in charge) and gave him no peace till he got me another bandy (cart), and then went gaily on. Presently I found the road was breached, but got across, being on horseback, without much trouble, went to church for evensong, and then waited for signs of my sdmdn ap- pearing. In the meantime more rain fell. When my patience had almost got to an end — and an Indian missionary must always keep a large stock of this on hand — a man came to say the bandy had stuck fast in the breach, and the driver had calmly unyoked his bul- locks and retired to the bosom of his family. The Hindus are a domestic people ! I thought longingly of dinner and bed. " Supplies short, prospects gloomy," as the season reports say in the papers. The pastor, however, came to my rescue, telling me that his wife could make a good curry, and that he had an iron bed- stead, left by a previous missionary. My hopes revived, and all my troubles seemed to be vanishing in a moment. This was late on Saturday night. An hour after, a capital curry appeared. It was fiery hot, so hot in fact that it seemed like eating fire ; it made me gasp for breath, and seemed to consist of nothing but chillies (red pepper), for this is what the natives love. Still I made quite a respectable dinner and was duly grateful to the clergyman's wife. This brought to my mind one of our late bishop's riddles. Perhaps the reader will be surprised to learn that such grave people as bishops can make riddles. Bishop Gell used to ask, " What reason have we for considering India a very cold country ? " and then, when you had given it up, would OUT IN CAMP 153 reply, " Because its hottest product is chilly " ! Then the iron cot was brought — oh, that iron — gridiron cot ! Of course there was no mattress, and my "evening dress " was with the bandy in the mud. I am not what is called a " stout person," in fact there is so much bone and tough parchment and so little of anything else, that mosquitoes as a rule — and I find that some human beings are just the same — like me so little that they leave me alone. But on that particular occasion the mosquitoes, who were perhaps as hungry as I had been, gave my bare limbs the warmest reception. Then every bone in my body seemed to find a corresponding bar in that gridiron of a bedstead. When one set of bones ached through and through, another set would have a turn till they too had had enough, and so on. I had a full day's work before me on Sunday, and I did not enjoy that night in the very least. Just before the dawn, however, my mattress was brought, and I slept for an hour in peace till my luggage cart with my dinner, etc., arrived at 6 o'clock in the morning. Now that we are at the headquarters of a pastorate we may as well have a look round. Perhaps there is a small bungalow for the missionary, or a room walled off from the schoolroom. The pastor has a parsonage built in native style and generally has quite a number of olive branches to provide for. Some of their wives assist in the Sunday School, in the Mothers' Union, and in the Voluntary Evangelistic Associations, where these branch societies have been formed. But we rarely find a clergyman's wife daily taking an active part in a pastorate in the way that a vicar's wife does 154 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS in an English parish. If there is a dispensary we shall see the patients coming morning and evening to be treated by the native medical man. This branch of work, however, with the education and the women's work, is referred to in another chapter. The chief build- ing at the headquarters of a pastorate is the church. This is situated as a rule in the chief village, and where the Christians are most numerous. It often takes ten to twenty years to complete such a church, if it is to be large enough to accommodate the congregations that come from all the neighbouring villages within a radius of four or five miles, for the Sunday service and Holy Communion. It is very difficult to build these central churches, because the mass of the Christians are so poor, and the S.P.G. cannot spare one penny for such buildings from its general funds. But the people save up money for years, and do a great deal of the rough work with their own hands, as they are always eager to have a pakka building — i.e., one of burnt brick or stone, in- stead of the sun-dried bricks and thatch of the small scattered villages. Six of these churches have been built or finished in the Trichinopoly District in the last dozen years. The missionary has to be the architect and master-builder ; he has to collect funds from friends, but can generally get a small grant of from ;£'20 to £'^0 from the S.P.C.K. The roof, with its expensive timbers wrought in the Industrial School, and tiles, is always the great difficulty. Then the requisite furniture, altar linen, lamps, etc., have to be provided; and finally, the church is dedicated by the bishop if on tour at the time. Occasionally a small harmonium is also furnished, but OUT IN CAMP 155 here there are two difficulties — to keep out the rats, and to get the services of a harmoniac, if the word may pass from lack of a better. In one church in Tinnevelly a girl was found who could play, and I was delighted to appoint her to the post. But on the second Sunday the harmonium was silent again. The elders of the congregation declared that it was not right for a woman to sit on a chair while they sat on the floor, and as the girl was only a musician and not a gymnast, that scheme fell through. The natives are all very fond of music, but my first experience at a village church in Tinne- velly was certainly trying. The missionary had intro- duced Anglican chants, and when one of the canticles was being sung the men on one side struck up one chant, while the women on the other side started another, and both parties sang steadily through without the least idea that there was anything wrong. Anglican chants have, however, been discarded for the Free Chant system. The Tamil Church Hymn Book has just been enlarged and revised as the result of fifteen years' work. Lyrics, or sacred songs, have also been written by Indian poets, and are sung to native melodies.^ I once sang a Tamil lyric in the Town Hall of one of our large cities at the bicentenary of the S.P.G., when about 2,000 children assembled from the whole town were present. But the Tamil words were too much for the children. They first tittered, then shook with suppressed merri- ment, then laughed right out, and finally roared with 'The Lyric Tune Book is published by the S.P.C.K., Madras, as also the Tamil Church Hymn Book ; the Free Chant Book is to be had from the S.P.C.K, Office, London, iS6 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS an applause that would have satisfied even a prima doftfia ; and the chairman when thanking me for my speech said, "We have enjoyed most that which we understood least ! " One of the chief difficulties of touring is the rain. This as a rule comes only at the time of the north-east monsoon, i.e., from October to Christmas, but when it does rain in India it rains as much in a day as it does in a month in England. The natives call the English kind of rain " drizzle," and will often, when asked, flatly deny that it has been raining, even when one points to the puddles on the road. One night a missionary friend came and asked me, Indian fashion, to put him up. I told him I had only a dressing-room with a bad roof unoccupied, if he cared for that, and of course he took it. He spent most of the time in pulling his bed about the room, for six inches of rain fell that night, trying in vain to find a place where the roof did not leak ; and next morning I discovered him with two pools of water in his bed ! He was none the worse and only laughed. I have found an umbrella tied to the bed-post useful, for one can generally sleep if the rain can be kept from pattering on one's face. At one village where I went on tour it invariably seemed to rain, and this from the native point of view is the best of good luck that any one can bring. " It always rains," said an old woman, wishing to pay me the highest compliment, " when the raja comes here." So, " king's weather" in India means soaking rain, for In- dians always think on opposite lines of thought from Englishmen. Once when Bishop Caldwell was out in OUT IN CAMP 157 camp, the Christians were delighted to have such a dis- tinguished personage in their midst, and at once asked him to pray for rain. He explained that God's will in such matters may not always accord with man's, but nevertheless complied with their wishes. Almost immediately the rain began to fall, and the people, be- ing most pleased that the bishop should have brought such a blessing and mark of Divine approval, at once began to 'dig trenches to keep the water from flooding the bishop's tent. But they were not half way through their task before the rain stopped as suddenly as it began, and the people were greatly puzzled because the miraculous fall was without any visible reason so suddenly interrupted. It may be remarked in passing that so far from miracles being an obstacle to an In- dian's faith, they are expected, and as Bishop Caldwell used to say, " If a native were told that on a certain night the moon fell out of its place, bumped against the earth, and then bounced back again, he would not have the least difficulty in believing such a miracle ". But to go back to rain and tents, the monsoon not only makes the roads impassable in parts for wheeled traffic, for the mud is a foot deep, but is far from pleas- ant while sleeping in tents at night. When the tent is pitched the ground may be almost as hard as stone, and the tent-pegs may refuse to be hammered in. The missionary is fagged with a long journey or a hard day's work in the muggy heat. Then suppose that, when he has dropped off to sleep, he is wakened, as I have been more than once, in the dead of night by a cold, slimy thing moving about over his face. A iS8 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS wet tent is giving him notice that it shortly proposes to fall down all of a heap, with him inside, if he is not sharp. When the tent is pitched the lascar is quite satisfied if he has driven the pegs only half-way down. Then at midnight the wind gets up and the rain comes down in a desperate hurry. Soon the pegs yield as if they were stuck in butter, and one side of the tent begins to sway and reel about as if it were not quite sober. It is then that he wakes up — or rather, that I did. The servants pulled, and hammered, and jabbered, and hammered again, and finally gave up in despair. Then they slipped off one after another to the village " to call ten men ". 1 knew what that meant It meant that they would not be back under half an hour at the least, and that if the tent had really made up its mind to collapse, it would not wait half an hour, or even five minutes, for ten men to come and prevent it. The time for action had arrived, and the chokra (small boy) who remained had to stand in the rain and hold a lantern, while the master, clad in the thinnest of night attire, promptly " went for " those pegs and slammed with all his might. Then as the wind tore along and the rain poured down in Niagara stj'le, the lantern must needs blow out, and leave us in Cimmerian darkness. After splashing and slipping in the slush ; groping about for matches in the wobbly, slimy tent ; coaxing a match to light, and again slamming with might and main, the pegs were driven up to their heads. All the large ropes were finally secured, and by the time sleep was beginning to creep back again, the storm had passed away, and the ten men (resolved OUT IN CAMP IS9 into one) with the servants came to saunter around, inspect the work, and tie up useless ropes. Cold shower-baths in the middle of the night, and such like adventures, are good enough to laugh at when they are over, but at the time when they occur they cannot be called pleasant. A word must be said here in praise of the servants. They are often careless and casual, and are always ready for pickings of all sorts. Moreover, a single man requires six or seven of them to attend to his small wants, but he only pays them on an average about three shillings a week each without board, though they get a trifle extra when in camp. Still, the things they have to put up with and the patient way in which they meet difficulties would astonish an English servant. If it does not rain, they will lie down on the ground and sleep anywhere ; but if it does, and there is no house handy, they will creep under the flaps of the tent and sleep as if they were turned to stone, except that, as has been mentioned elsewhere, they snore so loudly, and in so many discordant keys, that they make sleep almost an impossibility to the occupant inside. They will walk all night through with the luggage carts, and yet do their work next day without a murmur, lying down to sleep at any time, day or night, whenever they get an opportunity. If one is travelling with the carts and a meal is wanted, one has only to tell the cook. He puts three stones together on the roadside and collects a few twigs. After about half an hour he serves you on a box, if there is no camp-table handy, a dinner of soup, roast fowl, curry and rice, and a custard pudding. i6o SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS One wonders where it all comes from and how it is cooked, but there it is. Of course one soon gets tired of fowl for breakfast, fowl for tiffin (lunch) and fowl for dinner, and so on next day and the following day ; but there is often nothing else to be got except the scraggy niu7-ghi of the country. People interested in house- keeping may feel anxious when they learn that the price of chickens has risen from 4d. to 6d. each. Sometimes one can get a leg of mutton, and some- times the village dogs, which pay you a visit every night, discover the fact, and the cook has a sad story to relate in the morning. Very often the eggs may be smelled but not eaten. But the real danger is the milk and the water. An experienced camper generally takes soda-water with him, but he never drinks milk or water that has not been boiled, for there is death in it. The water must be filtered first to get rid of the organic matter and then boiled to kill the cholera germs — not the other way about, as the filter itself often becomes a germ culture and a cholera trap. We know nowadays something about " the pestilence that walketh in dark- ness, and the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday " ; we know that the dead rat has brought fleas that inocu- late us with the plague, and the mosquito (anopheles) that hums round us all night not only stings and burns us, but leaves behind the germs of malarial fever. If a cup of milk is left uncovered, a stray house-fly may dip its legs into it, and as it has been ascertained that a single fly can carry over six million germs in its concave feet, it will be readily granted that in a few hours that milk, acting as a culture, will contain countless hosts of the OUT IN CAMP i6i most deadly microbes. Still, in spite of all knowledge and all precautions, one could not live in the tropics if one did not become to a great extent "immune," as the doctors say, or acclimatised as ordinary mortals put it, to these deadly diseases by some unknown process of gradual inoculation. We travel about and see enough cases of typhoid, cholera, small-pox, etc., to frighten any European country into a panic. There are the horrible sights and smells of the sick-room, there are the corpses being buried by the roadside, and in some places the plague camps with their daily tale of deaths, but we go about our work as usual. A medical missionary told me that I had probably had cholera a hundred times, though only once have I been conscious of an attack. We lead an open-air life, take plenty of exercise, riding in camp, and tennis or golf when at headquarters, bathe regularly, take our meals as regularly as possible, and never go abroad without a medicine chest, and so are able to shake off disease, though we may wonder why at times we are feeling so terribly out of sorts. The friendly phagocytes in our blood are busily at work eating up the deadly bacteria, or smothering them with their own corpuscles, while we are arguing with a Brahman about the transmigration of the soul, or preaching to a crowd of half-clad rustics.^ No chapter on life in the district would be complete without a description of a santhippu, or, as we might call it, a reception. On any great occasion when a ' Worse than any cobra or plague germ is the critic, or false friend, who urges the missionary to think only of his work and leave his health to take care of itself. II i62 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS missionary visits some large Christian centre — especi- ally if the bishop has come to hold a confirmation or dedicate a new church — there must be a santhippii. Many of the people and children meet us a mile or two out with banners and songs. Then comes the " barbers' band," dressed in the quaintest attempts at an imitation of military uniform. The band walks backwards, like that of a Salvation Army, and consists of one or two clarionets, a clarionet kind of drone, two or three battered brass instruments, dreadfully out of tune, tom-toms, cymbals and a big drum. The music runs off from " We won't go home till morning" into an Indian mel- ody in a minor key, and then into a vague reminiscence of an English hymn-tune (this as a compliment to the bishop), which again gets lost as it merges into " A bicycle built for two ". Then, walking at a funeral pace to give the band a chance, we enter the village to find more flags and a large " Welcome " stretched across the road, till we arrive at the pandal, that is an extem- porised pavilion made of bamboo poles and coco-nut palm leaves, all decked out in the gayest way with flowers. The crowd becomes so dense that one can scarcely move or breathe, and a salute is fired from small upright funnels of iron, tightly embedded in a log of wood. If one is riding a skittish horse at the time, there is a good opportunity for several unrehearsed ef- fects, if not for a bad accident. If the bishop is present he, " receives the salute," i.e., he is covered with gar- lands of marigolds or oleanders, and sits in state while lyrics are sung. Hundreds of limes are presented, as each person must give one when he makes his or her OUT IN CAMP 163 saldin — and the tables are loaded with plantains, sugar, eggs and fruit. An address is then read by one of the leading members of the congregation. This ad- dress gives an account of the progress of the pastor- ate with its schools, etc., and generally runs off into a long list of requests to build a church, to grant free edu- cation for all the children in the boarding schools, or something else that is quite impossible. The bishop gives a diplomatic reply — is delighted to find things in so flourishing a state, and will give their requests his best consideration ; while the people are equally delighted because they have had a most enjoyable tamdsha. Even in quite small villages where the people are miserably poor, the congregation will bring the mis- sionary a bunch of plantains {i.e., bananas, sold at twelve a penny) and a few eggs, and the local " squire " will per- haps produce a fowl tied by the legs and protesting against the indignity with the most discordant squawks, or even a sheep brought into the village "church" with a garland round its neck, like a votive sacrifice. The missionary would give mortal offence if he did not re- ceive these small presents, though he knows that some sort of a quid pro quo will be expected of him in turn. Working in these villages calls forth the whole of one's sympathies. The people have to make such a fight to live at all, they are so ignorant of what is best for them either in this world or the next, so firmly wedded to all their old superstitions and caste customs, so incapable of seeing things from our point of view, and yet so patient in all their troubles and wants, so simple in their lives, 1 64 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS so gentle and so kind, that one's heart is naturally drawn out to them. Now we will go into a village of thieves, but we need not be alarmed, for the thief caste is one of the respect- able branches of the great Siidra community. They own land and live in good houses, and are most re- ligious folk to boot. Before going out to lift their neighbours' cattle, as said above, they are most careful to go to the shrine of their goddess and promise her a share of the booty if successful, and next morning they will pay their dues to thepiljdri with scrupulous honesty. If the highway is decided on they will divide themselves into small parties, and if a handyman is so indiscreet as to travel alone by night and not with a string of 50 or 100 other carts, a message will reach those in a dark corner of the road to that effect. As the bul- locks crawl along and the driver nods, half asleep, if not, as often happens, wholly so, he is rudely wakened with a crack on the head from a thick stick, and soon realises that it is better to run off and leave his master's cart than be beaten black and blue. The bullocks disappear and are sold at a cattle market fifty miles away, or the owner is told that if he pays so and so a certain sum — say, half the value — that person will be able to give him such private information as will lead to the discovery of the missing bullocks. Of course if he tells the police or wants to find out too much, the police will either have to be quieted in the usual way, or the complainant will have to be shown by a trumped- up counter-charge, and confronted with a crowd of " witnesses," or in some other equally disagreeable way, OUT IN CAMP 165 that he must play the game according to the accepted rules. He generally finds it best to lay the blame on his fate which is written on his skull. If a woman or a child's gold jewels are required, other methods have to be adopted. For an account of the conversion of a considerable number of the people in this village the reader must refer to the chapter on " Evangelistic Work". While we are in camp we must see what the pastor has to do. He has the charge of fifteen or twenty villages where there are Christians, and he may have to travel forty miles to get to his farthest out-station. He is supposed to visit each station at least once a month, which means that he is travelling for half the time. On Sundays he halts at the chief centres to administer the Holy Communion, but the small villages have to be content with a week-day celebration and a sermon at evensong. The agents in the different villages have to teach in the schools on week days and play the part of curates on Sundays, the administration of the Sacraments being reserved for the pastors. Funerals take place as a rule on the same day as the death, or on the following morning, and there is no time to send for the clergyman. One of the great defects of the Missions is that there is no institution for the training of our agents, and so it is often a case of the blind leading the blind. The clergy are trained in the Theological College in Madras, but these thousands of agents are not ' trained " at all, except in secular sub- jects. Each small village in England expects to have a vicar or at least a curate in priest's orders. What 1 66 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS would they say if they had a layman only able to read his Bible with difficulty ? The native pastors are, as a rule, either matriculates, first-in-arts, or graduates of the Madras University, and have also gone through a two or three years' theo- logical course in Madras, so that they are quite up to the work that is assigned to them. Many of them are admirable assistants, but in initiation and the power of organisation they are defective. They can keep work going that an Englishman has developed, but they cannot start such work themselves. Caste is not only a curse in itself but it has paralysed the Hindus for centuries and made them incapable of individual and independent action. But to show what splendid work these men can do in their own way some figures will be quoted. The clergyman referred to was not a highly educated man, but was so "full of old saws and ancient instances" and was accustomed to express him- self with the gravest face in such weird English, that he was known among the missionaries as " Socrates ". So- crates was not only a quiet unassuming man, but a man of real depth of piety and full of vital force. Here are the statistics of his pastorate while he was working with me for eight years : — The baptised Christians rose from 1,428 to 1,745, ^^ increase of 317. The communicants rose from 288 to 525, an increase of 237. The alms rose from 329 to 823 rupees, an increase of 494, that is more than double, and the pastor who did all this was passing rich on 40 rupees a month, t.e. £^2 a year. He was the best native worker that I have ever been associated with, OUT IN CAMP 167 but his work was, I believe, absolutely unknown to those outside his little circle, except to Bishop Caldwell, who both knew and expressed his high appreciation of it. As there was no kind of mass movement going on at the time (1882-90) the figures are all the more credit- able, and even those who do not care for statistics must admit that almost to double one's communicants in so short a period shows that there must have been a great revival of spiritual life. A volume of Tamil sermons that he published displayed that spiritual tone which was the secret of his success. If we could only get more Indian priests of this stamp we should hear less of caste, less of stagnation, and more of progress and of evangel- istic and missionary success. Here again we find an- other subject for our missionary intercessions. " More light," cried Goethe ; " more life," pray we. When travelling in the district we have not only bad roads to trouble us but rivers and streams to cross, and there are very few bridges, because a bridge over a river, like the Kaveri, must be half a mile long, and such bridges are expensive. Then too when the mon- soon has broken one never knows when the water will come rushing down. Once when I went for a short ri'de in the evening I crossed the dry bed of a stream — such small streams are called rivers in England — and soon after turned round to go home, and when I ar- rived at the stream I found the water up to my pony's girths. When people are walking across the dry beds of the real rivers, and their bullock bandies are plough- ing through the deep loose sand, they hear a roar, and there in the distance they may see the white line of i68 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS the rising surge drawn from bank to bank and tearing down upon them. Unless they hurry across at full speed they will be in danger of being swept down the river — people, carts, bullocks and all. The smaller streams {odai) fall almost as rapidly as they rise. I had one evening a journey of twenty miles to make and was hard at work till about four, when I was told that the water had come down the odai. I had no choice but to go that evening, and my intention was to cross the odai on my horse and then ride in on my bicycle. I started off accordingly and found two crowds waiting on the opposite banks, and I was told that I must wait too. I did so, but it is a novel idea for an Englishman to wait for a river fifty yards wide to flow by. The water was rushing along like a mill-race ; it seemed to grow no less, and I knew that it would be dark by half-past six. So I mounted my horse, think- ing that as he was a big beast — sixteen hands or more — I should be able to cross. The horse did not like the look of the rushing water which seemed to fly past us, but all went well till we got to the middle. Then he put his foot into a hole and over we both went, he on the top, with such a splash as I had never experienced before. I could not get my left foot out of the stirrup ; while the horse, terribly frightened, tried to struggle to his feet, dragging me with him ; but then the swirling water caught him broadside on, and down we went again with another tremendous splash. If it had not been for the water below every bone in my body would have been broken, but as it was I did not suffer in the least. Again he struggled desperately, and again we OUT IN CAMP 169 made another splash ; but then I managed to kick my foot out of the stirrup, and got round to his head and held him steady. By this time my horse-keeper (as we call grooms) managed to wade up to us and we floundered across, not only to my relief but to that of the crowd of people for whom we had been provid- ing all this involuntary entertainment. Next a coolie managed to get across with my bicycle on his head. The lamp had been taken off to prevent its being lost, and in the excitement of the moment I forgot to put it on. One does not stop on account of wet clothes in India, so off I started, and soon realised that I should have to ride in pitch darkness for the rest of the way, which was about eighteen miles. Trees overhung the road on both sides and native pedestrians wrapped in dark cloths kept popping up within a foot of my front wheel — a bell is not of much use, because village people do not understand what it means, and one is on the top of them before they find out — so that I was extremely thankful when I got to the end of that tour and found myself among lights and civilisation once more. But to go back to river incidents. I was once tak- ing the bishop round the district and we had to cross one of the big rivers. This is generally done in what is called a parisii, or coracle, made of split bamboos covered with hides, which is punted across by means of long bamboos. This is generally done with a thrust up- stream so as to counteract the downward force of the current and keep the coracle straight for the opposite thurrai, or landing port. On this occasion a chair had been put into the middle of the coracle, as it was I70 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS considered that it would never do for a bishop to sit on the edge like a missionary, much less to huddle at the bottom like a native. Moreover, a quantity of straw- had been put at the bottom to prevent the episcopal gaiters from getting wet. But all this was mistaken politeness. A great crowd of natives, Hindu and Chris- tian, Brahman officials — for a bishop in India is a Government official — and Mission agents, were on the bank to wish him bon voyage. The coracle was pushed off, the poles vigorously plied, the water swirled, and the coracle spun round like a teetotum. Then, without any respect of persons, it made a plunge, and the bishop perched upon his throne above the treacherous straw went head over heels with his feet in the air. No one laughed more heartily than he, as he picked himself up and sought another seat of less dignity but of more stable equilibrium. This river has to be crossed to get to the chief agri- cultural settlement for out-castes. It must be explained that the rich landowners employ thousands of these out-castes. They never touch a plough themselves or do even the least bit of manual work ; it would not only be derogatory to their dignity to do so, but clean contrary to all their caste customs. So they are en- tirely dependent on their pariah and out-caste slaves to do every particle of work that is done on their farms. Slaves you will say cannot exist under British Govern- ment, but let us see if the}' are any better. They are looked on — and, what is far more terrible, they have learnt to look upon themselves — as lower than the beasts of the field. A cow or a dog may walk down A SMALL CORACLL I'OK CROSSING K1\'HKS. HOLY TKINrrv CHURCH, SAWVERPUKAM, TLXNEVELLY, DEDICAThD I ITH NOV. 1887, BY BISHOP JOHNSON, METROPOLITAN OF INDIA. OUT IN CAMP 171 the Brahman agrahdrain, or street, but the pariah may not. If his shadow were to fall on a Brahman's food the latter would starve to death rather than touch it. In the native States such as Travancore, where the Brahmans reign supreme, the pariah must rush off the public road into the fields and shout so as to warn a coming Brahman lest there should be the least defile- ment by touch. And in the olden days the women were not allowed to wear any clothing above the waist, to mark their degradation, until our good Queen Victoria personally intervened, and reminded the Raja that she was a woman herself. But how can there be slaves in British India ? A pariah gets no wages from his landlord but only a portion of the grain at harvest, barely sufficient for his food, and if there is a famine he gets only the straw. When he wishes to marry, and every one marries in the East, he must borrow from his landlord some money for the wedding ex- penses. This money is readily lent ; a stamped docu- ment is drawn up, stating the amount of the loan and the rate of interest, 2 or 3 per cent, per mensem, of which the pariah does not understand one word ; this deed is signed by witnesses after the debtor has put his mark, and henceforth he and his bride and his un- born children are the landlord's slaves, and will be passed on like the cattle to the next owner whenever the farm is sold. The pariah with his relatives gets drunk at the wedding ; he can never repay one single farthing of the debt, as he never earns any wages ; the compound interest mounts up month by month and year by year ; he cannot leave his work with that debt 172 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS hung round his neck like a mill-stone ; and if he runs away he will only die of starvation. Yes, he is a British subject, and as we know, " Britons never, never, never shall be slaves ". But is he not a slave ? Then the Evangelistic Band comes round, and there is the sound of a violin and some singing. Here is a tanidsha in his own hamlet, and here is a white-faced Englishman who has deigned to come, though no Brah- man or self-respecting Hindu would put his foot into such a filthy and ceremonially defiling place. Then there are pictures. First, there is a wonderful display where reds and blues and greens whirl round one over the other and cross in and out, backwards and forwards. What does it all mean ? Creep a little nearer. Oh, these are Christians teaching their " way '' ! Even the women and the naked children come out of their hovels, and a happier look steals over their dull degraded faces, and sometimes even a laugh is heard. Then there is more singing. Oh, this is a grand taiiiasha ! — and then there is a picture of a man and a woman in a fruit garden, and the Christian catechist explains that the woman, whose name is Eval (Eve), had been taking some fruit, though she had been told not to do so. But then, of course, every woman would do that if she thought she would not be seen, or would not be beaten very severely for doing so ! More pictures, more singing, and more explanations of which the cleverest of them all can understand next to nothing. At any rate it has been a fine show, and to-morrow morning some of the men will have a quiet talk with the Christian teachers, and OUT IN CAMP 173 at least beg them to show their pictures again, and sing more songs about Jesus. After many visits and hours of patient explanations they begin to understand that even they are God's creatures like other men ; that they have a right to leave the little stone god in their village and worship the true God ; that even they have souls and are not worse than dogs, but may go to heaven and always be happy. These novel ideas spread rapidly, but then they are told they must not get drunk or commit adul- tery with other men's wives. Why not ? what harm is there in that, so long as you are not found out and the woman does not get thrashed or have her nose bitten off? It is all so new, so strange and so perplexing; still it is a good " way," and the missionary will build a school and teach the children for nothing, and when there are troubles he will help them. Yes, they will all join the " way " in a body. But the troubles come sooner than they expect. The landlords have heard of this interfering Englishman coming round. He will make a fuss about their methods of dealing with these people ; he will keep them from working on the farms, and so the crops will be lost ; he may even go to court about those stamped documents with their 36 per cent, compound interest ; there is no telling what this meddle- some foreigner with his new-fashioned religion will not do. So they discuss the matter in all its bearings ; and then they come to the conclusion that the best thing to do is to get a good strong stick and thrash the pariah serfs till the blood flows from their legs and 174 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS arms. Yes, that is the best remedy for the new-fangled fancies of diseased brains. When Moses and Aaron tried to help the down- trodden slaves of Egypt, the taskmasters beat the people, and so their leaders stopped them on the way out from Pharaoh saying, " The Lord look upon you and judge ; because ye have made our savour to be abhorred in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of his servants, to put a sword in their hands to slay us ". And so, in the same way, the poor pariahs come with tears in their eyes to show their bleeding arms and legs. It is hard work, and the missionary who is all alone with his prob- lems and burdens, must find some way of escape. Government can do, or at any rate does, very little for these millions of out-castes, perhaps because it is so much occupied in making political concessions to the Brah- man landowners; the courts can do little, for nearly all the magistrates are Brahmans ; but individual sympa- thisers are to be found. The collector, i.e., chief ad- ministrator of the district, recommended Government to give me a piece of forest-land which was no longer needed for growing timber. I had an interview with the Governor of Madras at the time — Lord Wenlock, whose brother now governs in his stead — and he very kindly got the official sanction for 300 acres of land to be transferred to me on certain conditions which I gladly accepted. I collected ;£'200 in England, being then at home on furlough, and started my little farm. Hundreds of coolies came and worked tempo- rarily in clearing the land, while the pastor and cate- chists got to know them well and selected such as had OUT IN CAMP 175 a real desire to become Christians. A school was built, huts provided for settlers, and five acres of land assigned to each family. One-third of the produce was to belong to the missionary as landlord to pay the Government rates, buy bullocks, seed, manure and so forth ; and each settler took his two-thirds part. Then they realised that they were free men for the first time in their lives, and that if they worked hard they would profit, but if they were lazy they would suffer. Also their children were clothed and sent to school, and all were regularly taught, as far as they could comprehend, the truths of Christianity. But what about the stamped documents ? I simply took the men who wished to come to me and left the landowners to prose- cute me in the law courts if they dared. As a matter of fact they did not dare to reveal their nefarious practices in the light of day. (See pp. 64 and 238.) But let it not be supposed that it was all plain-sailing after that. Satan does not loose his grip easily, and old bad habits do not die in a day. Sometimes too the rains failed and there was barely enough food for main- tenance, the settlers asked for loans without the least intention of ever repaying them, and demanded all sorts of impossible concessions. They are dreadfully lazy, being accustomed to work only under compulsion. Some threatened to go back to their old taskmasters, who made all sorts of promises to get them into their clutches once more. The rains held off and the crops were poor. Then it was the old story of murmuring. " Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness ? Wherefore 176 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS hast thou dealt thus with us, to bring us forth out of Egypt? Is not this the word that we spake unto thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians. For it were better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness." It is ever the custom of slaves to hug their fetters, and of all men to think lightly of the troubles of the past. Still the scheme progressed, the people were gradu- ally raised, and I was asked to baptise the first batch whom the pastor thought were sufficiently prepared for the Sacrament. When I arrived I baptised a few of the men, but their wives could not be found. After making inquiries I was told that they had hidden themselves because they thought that I should " prick their arms with a sharp instrument and rub in some poison " 1 Visions of the Government vaccinator were floating through their dull minds ; and so it was decided that several months' preparation was still needed. On a later occasion I baptised sixty-seven more of them, men, women and children, and a few were confirmed by the bishop at his visitation early in 1909. Their "Church of the Good Shepherd" was dedicated, and their village named PugalOr — village of refuge — near the ancient town of Jayankondacholapuram. Lest the reader should be alarmed at the length of this name it may be well to remind him of what was said in chap- ter i., namely that that name is really a sentence, and means "the town of the victorious (king) Chola". We have a school for the settlers' children, as it is most im- portant that we should elevate the rising generation : the children are bright enough, but irregular and lazy OUT IN CAMP 177 like their parents. It is difficult, too, to get a Christian teacher to live in an out-caste settlement. We have made it a rule that the banns of marriage shall not be called till the young couple can read and write. So, after the day's work is over, they do not spend their time walking about the lanes whispering sweet nothings to each other, but are hard at work in the night-school trying to learn how to read and write well enough to satisfy the catechist, or the pastor ! This settlement is sixty miles from Trichinopoly, but by crossing the river one can get to a railway station eighteen miles off. I once left about six in the morning, bicycled on a good road for ten miles, and then again for seven miles on a fair road, and just managed to catch the train as it was moving off the platform at noon, and of course had to go without breakfast ! If you ask what was the matter, the reply is the Coleroon River was in flood, and, like the Jordan, was " overflowing all his banks " i.e., the artificial and subsidiary " bands " that run parallel to the banks to prevent the river from flooding the country when it has overtopped its ordinary banks. We had first to float in the parisu through a jungle where the road had formerly been, then drag the coracle up the bank, past the trees and overhanging thorns and haul it over patches of dry land for a good mile. Then we all embarked, about thirty of us, and three men toiled at the bamboo poles, to get some lateral motion on as we shot like a dart down the river. It was a grand sight to see such a river in flood. A great forest tree came floating down the boiling stream with half its branches and half its tangled roots in the air. A 1)8 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS large snake that looked like a cobra, and which had probably been washed out of its hole by the flood, was fighting for dear life to wriggle its way to the edge, while all the time it was shooting down stream mile after mile in the rapid race. As for ourselves we must have gone down at least two miles before the men could jump out on the other side, and, getting ropes attached to the coracle, began to pull us upstream again till we could get out at the landing-place. The reader has now seen something of camp life without suffering its inconveniences. He has not had to go without food or a drop of water such as he dare drink from fear of cholera. He has not had to push a hope- lessly punctured bicycle for miles through a blazing sun till his tongue has literally cleaved to the roof of his mouth, and his thirst has become an absolute agony. He has not stuck in the bed of a swollen stream with a broken bullock-yoke, and had to wait in the rain till another could be procured from some far-off village. He has not had to lie for hours on the hard roadside, hungry and tired, because his luggage cart has broken down and no food was procurable. And, finally, he has not had to be jolted home in a cart for weary hours while dysentery, cholera or typhoid fever has got him in a deadly grip. He has not had to wrangle with an excited crowd about some difficult question of religion, or maintain his principles among his own Christian people who were angrily insisting on their "caste" rights. He has not felt the terrible loneliness, and the sickening heart-ache at failure, or the burden of respon- sibility where he has the care of all the churches in a OUT IN CAMP 179 district larger than an English diocese, and when he knows, like the captain of a ship, that if the ship is wrecked, he and he only, however faultless he may have been, will have all the blame laid on his shoulders. Yet if he has entered into the spirit of what has been suggested rather than described ; if his heart is in its right place ; if he realises that he is working for a Master who has gone through the stmggle Himself, and will never fail His weakest disciple, he will only be too proud to have the chance of hurling himself into the fray. Fancy a young clergyman, strong and vigorous, preferring a little country parish, such as we should leave to one of our youngest lay-agents, staying in England with such a life, such a campaign, such an immense scope for all his energies, physical, mental and spiritual, open to him ! Women cannot rough it like men ; but just think of the difference between the monotony of the English life with its dull routine of formal calls, its stiff garden parties, its shallow aims and insipid interests, and the life in the great wide world that is calling to them, and offering them something worth living for and a share in the great work of winning half the human race for Christ ! Of course there is and there must be sacrifice. But it is this longing for self- sacrifice which should be the strongest stimulus. " He, for thejoy that was set before Him, endured the Cross and despised the shame." And shall we be such poor, weak, pitiful, faithless Christians as to shrink from the same ? Shall we hanker after the fleshpots of Egypt, the snug vicarage with its pretty garden, its tiny little ivy-clad church and its peaceful, placid life of content- i8o SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS ment ? Why not leave these delightful little nests to the old men who have retired from the battle, too old and maimed for the active fight, and go out to conquer the world ? Can we not put the Cross of Christ be- tween us and the attractions of the world ? Can we not drink of the cup that He drank of? We can — we can as much as the "sons of thunder" did — if we have faith enough. When he who was "a blasphemer, a persecutor, and injurious " became " a faithful servant " and " a chosen vessel," he was "shewn how many things he must suffer " ; and we, too, are shown by this strange reward the great principle that in the spiritual world nothing is fruitful but what springs from suffering and self-denial. But how are we to know, men ask, whether we are truly called ? When the rugged old prophet, whose face was scarred with fasting and daily peril from an angry king, threw his shaggy mantle over the shoulders of the youthful heir to the rich estates in "the valley of the reapers' dance," he did not urge his suit, but said de- precatingly, " Go back again ; for what have I done unto thee ". And when a bishop of our own time, walking in the garden of one of the stately homes of Devonshire, saw a happy boy, home from Eton, playing among the flower-beds, he turned to his father and simply asked, " Will you give him to me ? " Elisha received the firstborn's portion of the spirit of his master, and Patteson won his martyr's crown in the far-off islands of the Pacific. In both cases the call was like " a sound of gentle stillness," but it was loud enough, and was obej^ed without a moment's hesitation. CHRISTIAN I'l-I'ILS IN THE ALL SAINTS SCHOOLS, 1 RICH INOPOLY THE TWO ELDER ARE BROTHER AND SISIER. THE BROTHER IS A CARPENTER, AND THE SISTER IS, A TRAINED TEACHER. CHAPTER VIII CASTE IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH Children we are all Of one Great Father, in whatever clime His providence has cast the seeds of lifr, All tongues, all colours. To write any kind of a book or even sermon on India without reference to caste would be like the play of Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark left out. Until we know what it is, we can never understand South Indian Missions. At the same time missionaries are divided on the subject ; they realise that they are made unpopular by it even if they touch it with one finger ; the Christians — and we will speak here only of caste among Christians — even if they condemn it theoretically, are aroused to anger b}' any allusion to it, and much more by any real action to get rid of it. Readers either fondly imagine that all Christians give up caste when they are baptised, or are weary of the subject. But as Bishop Sargent used to say, " Caste is Hinduism and Hinduism is caste". So a caste- keeping Christian is a semi-Hindu. The matter can only be sketched out briefly, as otherwise it would occupy the whole book ; but, first, let it be noted that caste is far stronger and far more i8i i82 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS hurtful in the South, where the converts are most numerous, than in the North of India. When the early missionaries arrived in India at the beginning of the eighteenth century, noblemen and landowners, both in Germany and England, were looked upon as being almost of different flesh and blood from the common herd. These missionaries found, as they thought, " the quality " on one side and the degraded masses on the other, and so easily fell into the trap — which fall the caste-loving natives were only too ready to facilitate — of thinking that caste in India corresponds with social rank in Europe. They did not realise that caste is a matter of birth and that a pariah can no more raise himself to the level of a Brahman than a sow can change herself into a cow. Though a pariah may become a devoted Christian, a graduate of the University and a refined gentleman, he is not con- sidered fit to give a cup of water into the hands of another "caste" Christian who can neither read nor write, and who leads the life of a beggar. Owing to such fundamental misconceptions the mis- sionaries adopted the plan of having separate celebrations of the Holy Communion for " caste " Christians and out- castes, though partaking of the Holy Communion does not break caste. They found also that the Roman Catholic missionaries openly sanctioned caste distinc- tions. To this day separate churches are built for the caste people and for out-castes ; and where that is not feasible a wall is built down the middle of the church to emphasise the separation. Once when I was look- ing at one of these Roman churches in company with CASTE IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 183 one of our best Indian clergymen in Tinnevelly, tlie at- tendant ordered my native friend to go to the otiier side of the wall, though there was no service taking place at the time. The Lutherans are almost as bad as the Romanists in this respect. Thus, when the S.P.G. began work in 1826, a century after the Lutherans, they found the evil recognised if not encouraged by the missionaries. Again and again have Christians from the different Sudra castes seceded from the Church rather than ad- mit any kind of equality with Christians from the out- castes in Madras, Tanjore, Trichinopoly and Tinnevelly ; and, similarly, Roman Catholics have come over to us because of caste disputes. Missionaries may thus see the work of a lifetime ruined, as it appears, in a moment ; hence many have been ready to catch at any kind of an excuse for caste — social rank, the parallel of slavery, the plea that the evil will die of its own accord, and so on, whilst some have gone further and have openly de- fended the custom on the plea of dirty habits among the pariahs, and justified their action by appealing to the Bible. Here is an extract from an open champion- ship of the caste system by a missionary : — •' " To desire a man to renounce his caste signifies to require (for example) a man of the high Saiva or Vellala (cultivator) caste, who is accustomed from his infancy to live only on vegetables, to eat meat, to enter into a close connection, or to level himself with the lower classes and intermarry with one another (e.g.) with the pariahs, a caste who, from time immemorial, have made them- 1 Quoted in Our Oldest Indian Mission, p. 28. i84 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS selves disgustful to all other classes of the natives by their inattention to, and disregard of cleanliness, and particularly by feeding upon carrion. And although our Protestant pariahs are not allowed to use such de- testable food ; yet as their heathen and Romanist rela- tions are not debarred the use of it in the like manner, the aversion of well-bred persons to enter into the closest connections with such a class of people (at least until every vestige of such filthy propensities shall have been effaced) is founded upon reason and decency ; and we do not feel ourselves warranted to require of the higher ranks such an unscriptural surrender of their birthright, to which no nobleman or gentleman in our own country would ever submit. " As we presume that the equity of such a demand cannot be proved by any precept in the sacred Oracles nor from the practice of the Apostles and primitive Christians, and as besides such a demand might be pro- ductive of fatal consequences, we have taken care to follow the same mode of acting as our predecessors have done." It may be observed in connection with this defence that no missionaries compel, or even ask, any Chris- tians "to eat meat" ; and to bring in the plea of eat- ing carrion is really to beg the question. Our Chris- tians neither in the past nor in the present have been "allowed to use such detestable food," but that is not the point. Supposing that a "pariah" Christian has been raised educationally, socially and in every sense to a higher position than a " caste " Christian (if the common but hateful terms may pass), would not the CASTE IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 185 latter stubbornly refuse to eat bread with, and die rather than give his daughter in marriage to, the former ? It is sometimes argued that so long as they will unite in receiving the Holy Communion together that is enough. But as Bishop Spencer once remarked in his visitation of 1845 : — ^ " It has been imagined by many, that the drinking out of the same cup at the Lord's table necessarily involves the absolute forfeiture of caste, on the part of the superior; but this is erroneous, although they would very gladly leave us in error on this point ". Even among the Hindus, taking part in a religious ceremony with others of a lower caste does not in any sense break caste. With regard to the renunciation of caste by the higher classes being " an unscriptural sur- render of their birthright," it may suffice to quote part of a resolution of the Madras Committee of the S.P.G. in response to a body of Sudras who subsequently seceded (1846) : — The Committee declared in 1845 that they never could be " parties to the degradation and insult which it (i.e. caste) imposes upon those who, if true Christians, are equally with themselves -inenibers of the mystical body of Christ, children of the living God, and inheri- tors of the kingdom of heaven". Then after recognis- ing the fact of differences in worldly station, education, etc., they declare that the refusal of the common offices of love " on the plea of caste {a distinction unknown in any other part of the world) appears to them utterly opposed to, and incompatible with, a profession of 1 See Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G. , p. 513. i86 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS Christianity".^ Two of these sentences have been italicised because they are very important. Nothing in the least corresponding with caste has ever been known in the world either when the Bible was being written or at any other time. Hence we can find no specific condemnation of caste " in the sacred Oracles," but as regards the general principles which govern our action in such matters, it would be a mere waste of time to quote innumerable passages from Holy Writ. In reply to the plea that caste in the Church will die down of its own accord like slavery, it will suffice, first, to say that caste is in no way parallel to slavery, being a birth distinction which drives its roots down to the very depths of pride in the human heart ; and, secondly, it does not die out, any more than weeds die out, which rather seed and increase in a neglected garden. So caste may be witnessed just as plainly now, though perhaps not so offensively, as in any previous period of the Mission's history. To establish this point we may compare the ex- perience of Bishop Wilson in 1833 with incidents taken from present life. He describes caste as " the nucleus of the whole system of idolatry" and as "eating, as doth a cancer, into the vitals of our infant Churches". He then gives the following summary : — " Heathen marks were retained on the countenance ; heathen processions and ceremonies were observed at marriages and funerals ; the degradation of the mass of the congregations was as debasing as before their Christian profession — exclusion from the same division ' Our Oldest Indian Misiion, p. 63. CASTE IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 187 of the church — approach to the table of the Lord in common — reception for rcHgious teaching into the houses of those of superior caste denied — the sponsors except of equal caste denied — separate spots and divisions in the burial ground imposed — in short, the impassable barrier of Brahminical caste erected again, which condemns the one class of mankind to perpetual debasement, and elevates the other to a disproportion- ate pride — and by which all the intercommunity of the body of Christ is violated and destroyed." Now let us compare this state of affairs with the following incidents which have fallen under the present writer's knowledge. Bishop Caldwell, who did more than any other man to elevate the Shanars, once wrote a pamphlet in which he stated that the Shanan caste is one of the lowest of the Sddra castes. Forty years later there was a great caste agitation among the Christians of Tinnevelly, and an old copy of this pamphlet was unearthed, and the fury of the people was so great that the police had to be called in to guard the house in which the bishop was living. Later on a cemetery for Christians was opened in Tinnevelly, and a disturbance was threatened if the graves were dug in order. The matter was referred to the then bishop, and he decided that the graves for the different castes should be dug in separate divisions of the burial-ground. A Shanan catechist was sent to do some business with a Vellala catechist in another village. The latter sent the Shanan to his cattle-shed to take his dinner. 1 88 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS Vellala and Shdnan clergymen were employed at large churches so as to marry and bury those of their own castes. There was a great disturbance in Tinne- velly because I declined to use the caste-titles after the names of those whose banns were called in church — " Pillai " shows that a man is of the Vellala caste, "Nid^n" of the Shanan caste and so on. The late Bishop of Madras decided against me, and I had no resource but to resign charge of my three pastorates. After two years' agitation this decision was reversed on appeal to the Metropolitan. On another occasion I baptised a pariah with his wife and children in the Trichinopoly District. While they were catechumens they sat apart in the transept. After baptism they were told to sit with the other Christians in the nave of the church. Whereupon there was brawling in church for half an hour, I was opposed by force, and the people locked the doors to keep out the out-castes. Then 200 people left the church in a body. I reported the ringleaders to the bishop for excommunication. He declined, however, to support me, and said it was well that these new Christians should sit apart in the transept and learn humility. On the same day a man was sent with a stick to thrash me, but, of course, I ignored him and his courage failed him. On this occasion I did not resign, but stood firm. Three months afterwards the seceders came to me and apologised, and were re-admitted. There had been many previous disturbances in this place, but the mis- sionaries had always yielded in the interests of peace ; but truth is greater than peace, and battles are not won CASTE IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 189 by running away, or sprinkling rose-water. If peace is always made the first consideration, truth has to take a secondary place. Two years ago a deacon was sent to one of the out- lying pastorates of the Trichinopoly District, but as he is of pariah extraction the Christians would not receive the sacred Cup at his hands, or attend church when he took the services. The present Bishop of Madras sup- ported me, and the whole congregation were excom- municated for more than a year, after which the bishop met them and they promised to submit. Two small incidents of a less painful kind may here be mentioned. The two pariahs mentioned above came in due course to be confirmed at another church. When the bishop had his robes on, a message was de- livered to him from the other adult candidates to the effect that these two Christians from the out-castes should be required to sit separately and be confirmed separately. The bishop's reply was : '' Tell them I am only going to confirm the two pariahs". On hearing this they relented. Caste prejudices can always be overcome by firmness, and always grow by concessions. There is nothing so fatal in India as weakness whether in the Church or the State. On another occasion I baptised two other pariah adults with their children at another village church. No one raised any difficulty ; but after the service the man told me how surprised and pleased he was that I had allowed him to be baptised inside the church where the other Christians were. When I asked for an ex- planation, he said that he quite thought that I should 190 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS have administered the baptism in the verandah with a temporary font. It is deeply pathetic to see how ac- customed these poor people are to submit to any kind of insult and degradation from those who are only a step or two higher than themselves in the caste scale. It is not the former, but the latter, who ought to be made " to sit apart in the transepts and learn humility ". Only one more incident will be quoted, but a few words must be said by way of introduction. It has been noted above in the historical portion that the first deacon ordained in Anglican orders was " a staunch champion of the caste party in the Vepery (Madras) congregation". Now, though no one is more ready than the present writer to acknowledge the admirable work of the majority of the native clergy, or more glad to number many of them among his sincere friends, yet this fatal mistake has always been made that caste has been no barrier to ordination. In spite of the never-ceasing curse that this evil has been to the Church, at Holy Baptism and Communion, at Confirmation, and at Ordination not a word is ever asked as to ^\■hether the candidate has renounced this central feature of Hinduism. The clergy from different castes do not intermarry any more than the laity, and so the evil cannot die out. To please the missionary they will take breakfast together, but when they are by them- selves and travelling about they do not think of seeking hospitality or a night's lodging from any but those of their own caste. " Do you belong to us ? " is the fii^st question asked in a strange place. Moreover they al- ways use titles denoting caste when speaking and writ- CASTE IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 191 ing to members of their congregations. " The people would cease to contribute to the Church funds if we do not" is their defence. The following incident is the most painful that has fallen under the writer's notice, and would not have been mentioned but for the assertion that caste is dying out of its own accord and will disappear altogether, if only the missionaries will leave it alone. A clergyman, X, of Vellala extraction was greatly esteemed for his great ability and many excellent qualities, and his name was frequently mentioned as a suitable person to be consecrated as an Indian bishop. His brother, Y, was sent as a pastor to work with me, but objected to live in the parsonage near the church amongst his congrega- tion, because they were "Shanan" Christians, and he insisted on living among the Vellalars, though Hindus. This caused some friction between him and myself, but I finally yielded, as it was a small matter. A few years afterwards the dispute referred to above arose about the use of caste-titles when publishing banns in church. A deputation was received in Madras by the late bishop, and at the inquiry I was present as defendant in the case, the charge being that I had forbidden Hindu titles in God's house, and X was appointed assessor to the bishop. Innumerable false statements were made, and the bishop, growing con- fused, asked X whether or no these titles are marks of Hinduism. He replied deliberately, " No". I was dumfounded, and made no further attempt at reply. The bishop then decided against me, allowed these caste-titles in church, and so I resigned. Some years 192 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS later X died, but before doing so confessed to a friend that he had told this deliberate falsehood because he was vexed with me for trying to make his brother Y live among Christians of a lower caste ! Thus, for this trivial reason on a matter which I had almost forgotten and on which I had yielded, he said what he knew to be untrue and caused a disturbance which lasted for two years, till the Metropolitan came on visitation. He confessed his fault, and may he find pardon "in that day". Enough has now been said both to show the extent of the evil, and the trouble caused by it, and also to prove that it is not dying out. But in the writer's opinion there is a still greater evil than what thus ap- pears on the surface. Christians are won in masses, and it is caste that pushes them over the borderland into the Church ; it is caste also that prevents them from rising above a fixed point. We can show suc- cesses in education, in self-support and self-government, also a certain amount of evangelistic zeal, but still the fact remains that these great mass movements are invari- ably followed by periods of deadly stagnation — there is always the same fatal cycle, first the conversion of a large body of some low caste or out-caste community, then a moment's zeal with general progress all round, and lastly a terrible state of lethargy. When men are baptised, idolatry must be given up, but caste, which is the greater and more insidious evil of the two, is re- tained ; hence there is no real life. As the Madras Committee said above, the low-caste Christians are, equally with the higher, " members of the mystical body CASTE IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 193 of Christ". Here is the secret. If we believe in the Incarnation, we must believe that the Church consists of all those who are incorporated into Christ and form His body. If a congregation is like the half-broken branch of a tree, how can we expect the divine sap to flow freely ; and if there is little or no sap how can there be good fruit ? It is life that is needed, abundant life, and without it there can be no real healthy de- velopment. Bishop Wilson compared caste to a cancer eating into the vitals of the Church. It is not a matter of an insufficient number of missionaries ; nor is it a matter of pastoral neglect. Caste is like the poison of a cobra which paralyses the action of the heart, induces coma, and, if not checked, produces death. I once asked one of our best native medical men — one from the out-castes — whether he thought that if St. Paul himself lived in his village of nominal Christians, and confined his whole missionary energies to that one village, he would be able to rouse the people out of their lethargy; and he replied, "I don't think so". Whenever there is a great festival — or rather a great tamdska, e.g., when the bishop comes to hold a confir- mation, the people flock in hundreds, read addresses and almost smother the bishop with garlands, but how different it all is when the tamdska is over ! Every- thing looks so prosperous externally, but hidden away there is the cancer eating into the vitals. The plea of " social rank " has been urged again and again, but as the Madras Committee rightly observed, caste is " a distinction unknown in any other part of the world ". This plea, also, which has been adopted by 13 194 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS too many missionaries, at the suggestion of their caste- loving people, was disposed of by the late Father Goreh in a very summary fashion. When the dispute about caste-titles in church was proceeding, one of the Tinne- velly missionaries wrote in toleration of caste to the Indian Clucrch Quarterly Review. Father Goreh took up the negative side very warmly, and said, " Christianity with caste would be no Christianity at all " } What then is to be done ? Individual bishops, like Bishop Wilson, have done their best and have utterly failed. Individual missionaries have fought single- handed like Haubroe in Madras and Tanjore, and have not only had their coats torn from their backs, but have received the cold shoulder from those above them as disturbers of the peace. Most missionaries leave caste severely alone and yield rather than fight. They urge that if they touch this thorny subject, they will become unpopular, and so lose their influence over their people. This, like the fear of losing funds, only shows that such a gigantic evil ought not to be left to individuals. Both missionaries and pastors need sup- port from without. It should be taken up by the Church as a whole, and as an organised body, which should determine once for all to combine and overthrow this citadel of Hinduism inside the Christian Church. In- dividuals can do no more than rouse public opinion. Sixteen years ago a Society for the Suppression of Caste was founded by a few zealous natives, but very few of the clergy, English or Indian, supported it, and all that it can do is to disseminate leaflets in order to ' Life of Father Goreh, p. 7, CASTE IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 195 keep the matter of reform well before the Church. Tea- parties among a number of Christians from different castes, when a few English biscuits are eaten, have been tried, but it is feared that such " teas " are more for English consumption than anything else. I have been present at such a tea-party, including Hindus as well as Christians. There has been a great flourish of trumpets and talk of brotherly love, but such parties mean no- thing and effect nothing. Another plea that has sometimes been urged is, that this is an evil which the natives themselves must over- come. This is only true in a secondary sense. Slaves cannot break the manacles which bind their own wrists, and drunkards, whose moral will has been weakened, cannot withstand the awful craving that overpowers them without outside assistance. Reform always first comes from without ; and when the will has been strengthened, the sufferer may gradually learn to help himself, and then in turn assist others. Those who are strong should give a hand to bear the burdens of their weaker brothers, and not stand aside saying, " Develop your own muscles, and then you will not need my help ". Still another reason has been assigned for treating caste in a tolerant spirit, that it may be like a golden bridge. It is suggested that if we are lenient the Brahmans will join us. This is the attitude of the Roman Catholics, and we may see the idea worked out in practice. Although caste is openly tolerated we do not find the Brahmans flocking to them. A mere hand- ful of them have been gained. They live in a colony apart with their wives and children, using their own 196 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS private wells ; they still wear the sacred thread, and still retain the sectarian marks of Hinduism, but Brah- manism as such has not been touched. They have been baptised, and so in the eyes of other Brihmans are pariahs. But this is not the elevation of Hinduism, but rather the degradation of Christianity. As to the duty of the Church we both can, and ought, to be particular at the baptism of adults, and still more so at confirmations; the use of caste-titles and the opening of caste-schools ought to be rigidly forbidden by the bishops ; and no one should be ordained who cannot in some way demonstrate that he has quite given up caste. The great difficulty lies, of course, in marriage. We cannot compel Christians to marry out- side their own particular caste, but till intermarriage of this kind comes, caste will still flourish in our midst. Caste is a much more serious matter in India than drunkenness is in England, and to combat it we need large and determined organisations like the Church of England Temperance Society. When Hindus embrace Islam they at once give up caste, are admitted as brothers, and, dropping their Hindu caste-titles, are called " Sahib ". Cannot the Church succeed as well as Islam ? It can, if it tries by corporate action. Yet the Episcopal Synod in Calcutta has never issued any pronouncement on this the greatest of all Indian diffi- culties. Bishop Wilson's dictum is still waiting to be carried out ; " The distinction of castes must be aban- doned decidedly, immediately, finally ". If the spiritual vitality were sufficiently raised the evil would die ; but we need corporate effort to raise it. If religion were CASTE IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 197 deep enough in England, drunkenness would also die, but so long as the man is besotted either with drink or with pride, it is useless to throw pearls to him. First, he must be brought into the reforming society, and then we shall have some chance of imparting deeper spiritual truths. And we need also our organisation for children. While at our boarding schools they all dine together, but when they leave they soon learn to shut the door in the face of an old schoolfellow who asks for a cup of water, and as to marrying one from another caste they never — or very rarely — think of such a thing ; and if the parents are approached they always excuse them- selves by laying the blame on the other parties. Here then is another subject for earnest prayer on the part of those thousands of devoted Christians who from one cause or another are unable to take an active part in the Mission field. It is by fasting and prayer that these devils are cast out. And if a lurid picture has been here painted, our prayers will on that account be made the more real from knowing the plain facts just as they are, and appreciating the terrible spell that Satan has thrown over so many hearts. It should be clearly understood that caste in its relation to Brahmans and other high-caste Hindus must not be confused with caste among Christians, with which alone this chapter deals. They constitute two very different problems. Much misapprehension exists in the minds of some people owing to this con- fusion. The question of caste among Brahmans, etc., is dealt with below in Chapter XII. CHAPTER IX EVANGELISTIC WORK Measure thy life by loss instead of gain, Not by the wine drunk, but by the wine poured forth ; For love's strength standetli in love's sacrifice, And whoso suffers most has most to give. The Disciples. Evangelistic work is generally looked upon as mis- sionary work />ar excellence. It is the work to which the young missionary specially looks forward, and what his sympathisers in England expect from him, though the reality is often different from the dream. He is eager to go to some neighbouring village and stammer out his message as soon as he can put a few words together and pronounce them well enough to be understood. Let us join the Evangelistic Staff, which every properly organised Mission has formed, and walk off to some village for a meeting. The cool evening breeze has sprung up and it is a relief to be able to get out of the stifling bungalow. Small boys or girls with only a dirty rag round the waist, but armed with a long stick, are driving great droves of cows and lumbering buffaloes home. Each cow as it arrives at its destination darts up the steps and through the open doorway of the house as one of the 198 EVANGELISTIC WORK 199 recognised inmates. Goats are standing on their hind legs, trying with insatiable appetite to nip off the last and topmost leaves from some straggling thorn-bush. Bandies, or carts, as we English call them, creak along the road on high wheels, each drawn by a pair of patient bullocks whose necks have grown hard with the heavy yoke. Men are busy winnowing corn by the roadside, throwing up the grain into the air with great shovels of canework, and letting the grain fall on the heap in the middle while the wind blows away the chaff. For " winnow corn while the wind blows " is as common a saying as our own proverb about making hay. Women with great bundles and pots on their heads are returning home from market to which they carried their garden produce when the sun rose, or are bringing from the fields and watercourses bundles of wet grass to eke out the miserable herbage that the cattle have been able to crop for themselves during the day. All are talking in a loud tone of voice, dis- cussing the next wedding or the latest birth, the price of rice, or the village gossip, which is to them twice as important, and needs ten times as much explanation, as are the world's telegrams to the Englishman with his daily paper. In the village a group of girls clad in all sorts of red, orange or vari-coloured cloths — one round the waist and the other thrown over the left shoulder with the ends tucked in at the back, are drawing water from the village well and chattering all the time louder than the monkeys in the neighbouring trees. One end of the cloth is rolled tight round and round and then placed on the top of the head, after 200 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS which a great brass pot brimming with water is perched up on top, while a second is hoisted on the hip, and off the girl starts for home where the evening meal must be prepared. Women with their babies straddling across their hips gossip at the doors of their neigh- bours, while countless children, boys and girls, big and little, dainty and dirty, ugly and beautiful, naked and clothed, play about in the dust of the village square, or quarrel and scold, with all the zest and ten times the noise of their white brothers and sisters on the sands of a sea-side resort. For the most part the little girls are, as an eloquent American missionary expressed it, "clothed in God's own sunshine," for though little silver bangles on wrists and ankles, strings of glass beads and other metallic ornaments are common enough, not a stitch of clothing is to be seen. The missionary is shocked at first, and still more so when he enters a village unexpectedly and finds all the women running off, like rabbits to their warren, to put on their shoulder cloths, which have been laid aside in the heat of their work like a labourer's coat in our cooler clime. He has to get used to these, besides other unaccustomed sights, as do the villagers them- selves ; also to the pariah dogs, ever barking and yap- ping, always starved and on the look-out for scraps of food or offal ; to the pigs, whose habits are viler still ; to the dungheaps that lie all about the lanes, and all the other disagreeables which need not, and in fact cannot, be mentioned. There may perhaps be no Christian church or school in the village, or within miles, but there are plenty of WOMEN CAKKYIN'G WATLH FROM THF. VILLAGE WELL. EVANGELISTIC WORK 201 little heathen shrines. There is the chief temple near the open square wherein the goddess who causes small- pox and cholera, when she is displeased, is situated. There are rough images, male and female, smeared black with oil and perhaps wearing a thin garland of white oleander blossoms, who may be themselves deities or may only be guardians of the presiding goddess. Under a tree is the god Ganesa, generally called Pil- laiyar, the "son" of Maha Deva, the great god Siva. He has the body and belly of an elephant, and is seated on his hind-quarters. His trunk is curved round so that the end rests in his left hand ; he wears as a head-dress a kind of mitre, and his large ears stand out at each side. Over the Pillaiyar's head are two sacred trees with trunks growing as if from one root. They have been married for this purpose and interweave their branches while the leaves rustle and sigh together in the breeze. The sun bends his head, as if even he were weary of blazing down all day with unveiled face out of a sky of deepest cerulean blue, while round his couch there float — no other word can express it — float in a sea of golden hazy light gauzy clouds touched with all manner of delicate blues, irid- escent yellows, rose tints and pale greens, the whole lit up with a translucent radiance such as no mother-of- pearl shell or opal can ever hope to rival. As the eye travels back from the glorious sight — the vision of the very gates of heaven itself — to the thatched huts, the half- clad, indifferent and ignorant villagers with their ugly gods and grovelling pigs, the verse springs to the lips : — 202 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS Though every prospect pleases And only man is vile. But it is man that is being sought for, man, however vile, with such infinite possiblities before him as the son of God, a state higher than that of the angels. He is degraded, ignorant, superstitious and immoral because he knows no better ; so as fellow-men we come to lift him out of the mire, to cast a beam of light on his darkened mind and debased soul, to break off the fetters of slavery and to plant his feet on the path that leads to the kingdom of Heaven. If Terence, who had no such glory of divine sonship before him, could say it, how much more may we : — Homo sum ; nihil humani a me alienum puto ? We will then commence our meeting. When the lantern is in use we can often collect a crowd of from one to two thousand men, women and children, who will sit rapt and patient till midnight while we explain the whole story of man's fall, redemption, judgment and salvation. But sometimes it is better, though not so popular, to give our addresses and discuss people's difficulties. The staff begin with the singing of a lyric or Christian song to the accompaniment of a violin and cymbals. This soon attracts a crowd, for the people are all fond of music — there are here far fewer non-musical people than in England. Then one of the catechists explains the Ten Commandments and shows how we transgress them by false weights and measures, false speaking, impurity and so forth — all illustrated from the people's own daily life. Then there is more singing and some one perhaps deals with the Fall. While he EVANGELISTIC WORK 203 is speaking one of the audience interrupts : " Why did God allow sin to enter into the world ? " Another asks : " Who made evil ? " Another : " We have never seen God ; how do we know there is one ? " We tell them that we cannot answer any questions till the addresses are over. This is a necessary rule, as otherwise our lectures would be so interrupted that we should be able to teach nothing. It frequently happens that this de- vice is adopted for the express purpose of stopping our meetings, and when at the end we ask for our critic's objection, we cannot find him. The birth and life of Christ and the means of salvation are explained by a third speaker. Again we are interrupted : " Who knows what will happen after death?" "What will you give us to become Christians ? " The village clown — and there seems to be one in every village — begins to cut capers and make coarse jokes. He does this, of course, to distract attention from us. Then another young man brings forward the latest attacks on Christianity, which he has learnt from the books of English sceptics. We now see that an organised attempt is being made to stop us from proceeding. From the village which is in the writer's mind some striking conversions had been made, which will be related later. The converts were from the " thief" caste, quite a respectable caste among the Sudras. We try to go on, and to drown the noise by more singing, and then' we urge all who will listen to abandon their idols, which cannot possibly help them, and to accept the " Way " of salvation. In vain : a dozen discordant voices are calling out in angry argu- ment, but it is useless to reason with people when they 204 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS have become so excited. The difficulty is to leave a furious crowd without loss of dignity or betraying the least trace of impatience. Balls of cow-dung and stones are freely thrown in the dark, and generally strike the wrong persons ; while the policeman, if present, puts his glass, like Nelson, to the blind eye. And now for the sequel. Since the number of Chris- tians has increased so rapidly in all South India, organ- ised efforts have been made by the Hindus to check the spread of Missions. They have learned, as Samson said, " to plough with our heifers ". They have their " Missions," their " Aryan Catechism," their " Tract Societies," their " Bhagavad Gita " classes, and their " Imitation of Sri (holy) Krishna, etc." We discovered that the young man who had interrupted us so much was one of their " agents ". We then understood that the whole opposition emanated from him to make it impossible for us to deliver our message. The youth had set up his friends to raise all their objections, and if possible make us quit the village. But we did not discontinue our work or lose heart. In time, the young man felt that he could not answer us. When he heard the sound of the violin and singing, and so knew that there was to be another meeting, he hid himself in his house. His conscience tortured him more and more and gave him no peace. At length he plucked up courage to come and tell us of the state of his mind. It was delightful news to us. We welcomed him, in- structed him and then finally baptised him. Veril)-, the power of the Holy Ghost is witnessed in such in- stances as these ! If we had been asked to select the EVANGELISTIC WORK 205 least likely person in that excited crowd to accept the Gospel, we should have pointed to this youth. But it is ever so in Mission work of all descriptions. We work and pray, but the answer to our prayers is gener- ally seen in the most unexpected ways. One of the lessons we have always to be learning is that it is not "our work " but God's. Having given one account of an open-air meeting as a sample of others, we may now quote illustrations of other conversions. The Evangelistic Band who are always travelling about among the Hindus and Muslims often hear remarks like the following : " We are only misled and corrupted by the Brahmans in the matter of religion". "It is nothing but foolishness this wor- shipping of idols." At one place after a lantern lecture they saw two boys throwing fallen fruit at the figure of Pillaiyar (Siva's son), while a man was heard abetting them and declaring that what the preachers had said was perfectly true. At another place during the night they overheard two men talking of their lecture and saying that Christianity is quite true, and then one of them remarked, " We ought to give up worshipping our stupid, ugly and unclean stones that cannot even wash and keep themselves clean". This is the state of mind that men get into before a mass movement. Caste pre- vents them from taking any individual action, but when a movement once begins from any cause it becomes easy for them to move in a body. We do our best to win individuals in spite of caste and all other obstacles, and sometimes we succeed. For this we are extremely 2o6 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS thankful, though we are fully aware that India will be converted by mass, and not individual, conversions. In the village that we are now visiting there lived a landowner of the thief caste. One of his boys was read- ing in a missionary High School, when one day he picked up a Christian handbill which another boy had thrown away. He was much impressed by it and began to give heed to Bible instruction, against which most Hindu students harden their hearts like Pharaoh of old. Then he commenced a great struggle with himself, for he well knew the danger and disgrace of becoming a Christian. All these months and years Jesus was knocking at the door of his heart, waiting, knocking and waiting again, till the boy had grown into a man, and finally decided to open the door. His father was then dead, but his uncles and brothers at once began to persecute him. They were horrified to find that their caste was about to be disgraced. To steal your neighbour's oxen or jewels is an honourable trade, sanctioned by all the laws of caste, but to be baptised is the deepest degradation that the mind of man can con- ceive. Sometimes they would plead and argue with him ; at other times they would lock him up without food or thrash him. Still he stood firm and was baptised by the name Sw^midasan (servant of God). Then his elder brother seeing this miracle of grace — for these are as real miracles as any recorded in the Bible — also determined to become a Christian. He in turn was persecuted ; then he was baptised by the name Gnanaprag^sam (spiritual brightness). Year by year others came, two or three at a time ; and now 2 J w W EVANGELISTIC WORK 207 half that thief village is Christian. Not only so, but these Christians are far the most zealous in the district. Why? Because they have gone through the fire of persecution. They do not need like us, whose religion is made so easy, any one to rouse their missionary zeal. All the men were married, but their wives, as usual, were the most bitter opponents, and threatened to drown themselves if the children were baptised. In course of time the eldest son of the first convert was baptised, but soon relapsed into a life of sin under pressure and temptation from his Hindu relations. A church was built with a school, and the five daughters of Swamidasan attended it. They were charming little girls and always made a point of going to see the missionary on his visits. When they grew up they were not allowed to leave the house much less attend church, but their father taught them patiently and prayerfully, till at last the mother yielded her con- sent. It was a happy day for the writer when these five girls were brought to be baptised, though the mother was looking on with sad eyes at the sacred rite. One day when I was on tour in this village, the pastor asked me to baptise one of these young men whom he had prepared. I had put on my surplice, when his widowed mother and sister came and threw themselves at my feet, sobbing, and implorfng me not to baptise the boy. " What have we done that you should bring such disgrace on the family ? " they cried. Then, pointing to her girl, the mother asked, "Who will marry my daughter when you have degraded us so ? " — and every girl nmst be married in India. I turned 2o8 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS to the young man and said, " It is for you to decide ". Would he choose Christ or his weeping, widowed mother? " If any man cometh unto Me, and hateth not his own father and mother . . . and sister, yea, and his own hfe also, he cannot be My disciple." The choice had to be made, and in either case what pain ! We English Christians do not realise how much Christianity means, because we are not brought face to face with these heart- rending decisions. We talk about self-sacrifice, and in- dulge in heroics when a young man or woman goes out to the Mission field ; but what do we know of sacrifice or persecution ? We should be in more deadly earnest if we had any experience of the realities of our religion. The young man looked at his mother and sister, and then made his choice. He said in a quiet but firm voice, " I must be baptised ". My duty was then clear. I tried to comfort the two women in their deep distress, and advised them to follow his example, but my words were only like a painful mockery, and I never saw them again. It would be a sad home, but there would be joy among the angels of heaven. Jesus had offered His love and had not been rejected. Hearts must often bleed and tears flow when a choice is made in this world of ours, but what must it be when the love of a soul is sought ? We know something of human love and mothers' tears in this sad world ; we know what heart- ache means and wounds that never will heal, when those whom we love a thousand times more than our own lives reject us, or are taken from us by the cruel grave, but we can only imagine in a vague and distant way what Jesus's heart, yearning and pulsating for the love of human souls, EVANGELISTIC WORK 209 feels in sorrow or in joy when His love is rejected or accepted. Our human love seems much, but what is the value of the soul ? This is how the poet Young describes it : — Knowest thou the importance of a soul immortal ? Behold the midnight glory ; worlds on worlds I Amazing pomp I Redouble this amaze; Ten thousand add ; and twice ten thousand more ; Then weigh the whole ; one soul outweighs them all ; And calls the astonishing magnificence Of unintelligent creation poor. But our thoughts run back from the " magnificence of unintelligent creation" to the poor widow and her daughter. Jesus must claim for Himself the love of souls in spite of all parental claims and widows' tears, for the value of a soul is beyond all human computation ; still we do Him a gross injustice if we do not think of His compassionate heart yearning over this widow as much as over that other widow of Nain, when He seized her son from the grasp of Death, as He did on this oc- casion from the hand of Satan, though in opposition to the mother's wishes. The veil is drawn and we do not know what the end will be on the Judgment Day, but " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ? " and will not Jesus put the tears of such poor widows in His bottle as He pleads in heaven the might of His Great Sacrifice ? There was another very pathetic case in this village. A woman just married was left alone with her Hindu relations while her husband went to the Straits Settle- ments to look for work on the plantations. He found 14 2 10 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS work and what was more found the way of salvation in Christianity while employed on the estate. He wrote regularly to his wife and told her that he wished her to become a Christian also. Generally the women are horrified at such an idea, but there had been so many striking conversions in the village that she was prob- ably prepared. Be that as it may, she began to read the Bible ; but she was in a difficulty, for her relations were most bigoted Hindus and would turn her out into the streets if she said a word about becoming a Christian. What was she to do ? Her husband wrote to say that she was to learn about Christianity from the other women in the village, but as secretly as pos- sible : as soon as he had saved up enough money he would return and take her to his home, where she could be openly baptised. She was delighted at the idea, and the pastor arranged for Christian women to instruct her. Suddenly a bolt fell from the blue; a letter came to say that her husband was dead ! How this story will end, or has ended, I cannot say, for the sad news came just before I left. The difficulty is that widows rarely re-marry. The pastor will no doubt do his best to find her a home among Christians and some means of earning her livelihood. Such cases as these demand our earnest intercessions, especially as the pressure of Hindu neighbours on one who is only a babe in the faith is almost intolerable. One or two other cases may be mentioned to show that the Church is a living, growing body, and that the Holy Ghost is still working miracles as great as any that are recorded in the pages of Holy Scripture. EVANGELISTIC WORK 211 One of the most astonishing statements made by Jesus Christ is this : " Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also, and greater works than these shall he do ; because I go unto the Father ". Through the mighty power of His prevailing intercessions at the right hand of the Father, we poor, weak, sinful mortals, if we have faith enough, are empowered to do "greater works" than healing the sick, opening the eyes of the blind, or even raising the dead. The lion shall eat straw like the ox : its whole nature then must be revolutionised. Can we tame the savage of the back-woods and make a lamb of him ? Can we draw the cannibal from his disgusting meal, the drunkard from his gin-palace, the fallen woman from her life of shame, the gambler from his fever for unholy gains ? Can the mother learn to realise that the anguish from the loss of her babe is the magnet that is drawing her from a world of pleasure to the realities of the other world ? Can the sick youth who in hourly pain feels his fresh young life ebb away from him by inches still trust God as his Father, knowing that as the body decays the soul grows daily stronger ? Nay, can any of us who kneel at the deathbed of one whom we love a hundred-fold more than ourselves still thank God because He has done what is best? We cmi drink these cups ; and we can do these greater works yet not we, but the grace of God which is with us. One of the things that seem so strange to us is the apparently trivial circumstances that lead to individual conversions. We organise our work, we procure the best machinery, we strain every nerve, we make great 2 12 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS combined efforts, we hold large meetings, we pour out our souls in earnest supplication, and yet in the end we seem to have effected nothing. Then we find that " the wind bloweth where it listeth," and " the weakness of God is stronger than men". It has already been shown how a great part of a "thief" village was brought to Christianity primarily through a handbill which one schoolboy picked up after it was thrown away by another. A goldsmith and a blacksmith had some business in another district worked by the Nonconform- ists, and spending the night with a mutual friend, noticed that family prayers were said before going to bed. I had the pleasure of baptising them both some months after. One was deserted by his wife, and had his children taken from him. The other was deprived of all his landed property by his brother. One of my catechists had spent five years — he was a Brahman from Poona — in studying medicine in England. On his sudden return, without a diploma, o«'ing to his father's death, he became a pretended Sannyasi (ascetic), and with about twenty followers made a large sum of money from credulous villagers. The tricks to which he re- sorted make up quite a strange tale, but cannot be in- serted here. He fell ill in Madras and thought that he was dying. Some Christian women nursed him, prayed with him and became the means of his conver- sion.^ Much has been written about the value of Mis- sion Colleges as evangelistic agencies. The College at Trichinopoly, of which I was Principal in 1907-8, has ' Mry. Penny interviewed him in my house before writing her novel, Tlie Sannydsi. EVANGELISTIC WORK 21 j never made a convert in spite of all our efforts, but in the purely Hindu College of the Raj^ of Pudukottai, thirty miles off, a youth was led to Christ from seem- ingly trivial causes in 1907. Like the young man mentioned above he had to struggle between the call of Jesus and the claims of his widowed mother. She alternately thrashed him with a broom-stick and pleaded with him in tears, locked him up and coaxed him, yet almost without any external assistance beyond a Bible, which he had to hide, he groped his way to the foot of the Cross and was finally admitted into the Christian fold. Another marvellous thing that we notice is the grace given to these babes in Christ by which, in the most patient way, they take up the Cross, and bear it without a murmur. One man in my district was deserted by his wife at baptism. He became at once dead to her. She has lived as a widow — the lot that every Hindu woman dreads so much — for the past twelve years. They often meet in the streets, but as the most perfect strangers. He could legally marry again, as almost every Hindu does at once on the death of his first wife, but I have always urged him to lead a celibate life. Those who know what happiness may be found in the married estate can appreciate the pain they both must feel. The iron must indeed enter into his soul when the wife of his bosom will no longer come into his house, speak a word of affection to him, or give him one wifely glance as they pass on the road. " I came not to send peace but a sword. For I came to set a man at variance " against his wife, as well as against his father and mother. 214 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS To such converts passages like this must come with a force that we English Christians can rarely appreciate. In another case a carter was out-casted. Five hundred of his fellow-caste men held a meeting formally to ex- pel him. After he was banned his former friends and relatives did their best to make his life a burden to him. They tried to set fire to his hut ; they stole his cattle ; they trumped up false charges against him and got him fined in court. They would not allow him to drink water from the village wells, and so he had to resort to wayside puddles. No dhoby would wash his clothes, and no barber would shave him — deprivations which may seem small to us, but which cause much annoyance in the East. No one, moreover, would dream of giving him his daughter in marriage. But as I have said else- where, a missionary is a matrimonial agent. A very old man with his daughter placed themselves under religious instruction and were baptised. Then I made a match! and I can assure my readers that I was as proud as a mother of many girls when I had brought the happy couple together, and am now as much pleased to see their little ones as if they were my own grandchildren. One more incident will suffice. The Brahmans are naturally the most difficult class that missionaries have to deal with, not only because they belong to the priestly caste and are the best educated community in the country, but because they are intellectually so subtle and morally so cunning. They are the gentlemen of India, refined in manner, courteous in bearing and plausible in argument to the last degree. The mission- ary receives them and treats them with courtesy equal EVANGELISTIC WORK 215 to their own, but cannot help wishing that their sin- cerity were as real as their poHteness. The number of converts from Brahmanism may be counted on one's fingers as far as the area contemplated in these pages is concerned. Many people, both missionaries and their friends, look to them to be the leaders in the van of India's conversion, and consider that the conversion of one Brahman is of as much value from that point of view as a mass movement which brings in ten thousand of the lower classes. But every missionary will treat with greater caution a Brahman inquirer than one from any other caste. Not only will numbers of students profess a liking for Christianity in our missionary colleges, if they see any chance of a reduction in their fees ; but some make a living by going to various Missions, trading on the hospitality of the missionary, getting baptised, and then going elsewhere, posing as inquirers and getting baptised again. Such impostors profess a great dread of persecution, but are known by their fellows, who so far from persecuting them join in the laugh against the gullible missionary. I will quote one illustration. When I was stationed at Cuddalore a young Brahman of about seventeen came to me with the usual protestations of sincerity and begged me to baptise him. I gave him hospitality, but told him I could do nothing till I had made full inquiries. He told me he came from Tinnevelly, but that he could not be baptised there because of the persecution that would ensue. He referred me to missionaries of the C.M.S. with whom I was acquainted, and to whom I wrote. They told me they knew nothing about him. 2i6 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS I continued, however, to make further inquiries, and at last discovered that he was an assistant teacher in a Hindu school, that he had been sent to the Govern- ment Treasury with the fees of the boys who were appearing for one of the departmental examinations, and had then decamped. He doubtless thought that he was safe 300 miles away, and probably had some vague idea that I should have been his " father and mother," as the phrase goes, if I had baptised him and taken him under my protection. When I went to tell him of my discovery, I found the bird had flown. Probably he had received a letter by the same post, or a telegram from an accomplice on the spot. A year or two afterwards I had two inquirers in Trichinopoly, and kept them on long probation while instructing them, and made all possible inquiries about them. According to one of my fixed rules I gave neither of them the least worldly assistance, directly or indi- rectly, and one of them eventually dropped off. I had the joy of baptising the other, one Easter Eve — the only Brahman that I have ever baptised — and gave him a post as an assistant teacher in one of the schools. His relations seem to have left him alone till they heard he was baptised, and then they came to compel him to go through the prayachittain ceremony — a purification in which a vile bolus of the five products of the cow has to be swallowed. They took him off by force to Madras, but when he got to Villupuram Junction he gave them the slip by night, and escaped to the French territory of Pondicherry. After a time he returned, and again his relations came to carry him off. He disappeared. EVANGELISTIC WORK 217 and I was told he had gone through the purification rite, and torn his Bible to shreds. I was deeply distressed, and feared that he had been drugged. He did not return again and did not write. After some weeks, however, I heard of him in Madras, wrote to him and, to my great relief, got a reply to say that he was still a Chris- tian, had got occupation on the railway, and was no longer troubled by his relatives. The question naturally arises, are we to look to Brah- man converts to be the apostles of India, or are we to look rather to the upheaval of the Sfldras and out-castes to act as the leaven in the parable in Christianising the country ? It is a question of very considerable practical importance. The late Father Goreh was a Brahman of the Brahmans and a most devoted Christian to boot. Are we ever likely to see a higher type of convert? And can we assert that this distinguished disciple be- came in any full sense an apostle of India ? Few would maintain so much. The fact is that when a Brahman is baptised, he becomes ipso facto an out-caste, and so loses all the prestige of his caste. The Brahmans, too, are numerically a small body, for they number less than 1 5,000,000, out of a total population of 207,000,000 Hindus. The future of India seems, both religiously and politically, to lie with the great mass of Sfldras. They have not wakened yet in either respect, but when they do awake — -and with the din from the clash of East and West in their ears, that wakening cannot be delayed much longer — there will be such a revolution in India as the world has seldom witnessed. Christians already number 3,000,000, and are mostly of the lower 2i8 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS classes. When Christianity has to any appreciable ex- tent leavened this nnass of Sudras, there will rise in India a new power that will sweep all before it, including the Brahmans, who now exercise enormous power through their priestcraft. Democracy and priestcraft cannot breathe and live in the same atmosphere, and with the fall of priestcraft will come the loss of the Brahman's power. A Brahman convert, however eminent, may be despised and ignored, but when a body of thousands of real, living Christians has been raised up ; when caste — the poison that has reduced so many of our Christians to a comatose state — has been purged from the native Church ; and lastly, when they have elevated themselves by an advanced education in the mental, social, and above all in the moral scale, there will then be a power in the land that no Brahman can sneer into insignificance or drag down into impotence. Different missionaries will give different answers to the question, " In which direction should our eyes be turned for the regenerators of India ? " But it is sufficient for the purpose of this chapter that the matter should be briefly stated and the question left unanswered. It is of the very essence of evangelisation that we should present Christianity in its purest form, and not stoop, as other religious bodies have done, to gain large and immediate results by lax methods. Both Buddhism and Islam have failed to storm the inner citadel of Hinduism, while Christianity, as represented by the Syrians and Romans, has yielded in principle so as to gain in numbers. We Anglicans are inferior to others in missionaries, adherents and resources, but we can at EVANGELISTIC WORK 219 least claim to have set a higher ideal and taught a purer doctrine. The Brahmans would admit Christ — as they have already admitted Buddha — into the Hindu pantheon as an incarnation of Vishnu, and would assign to the Christians a home in their caste system ; but these are just the things against which we have to set our faces like a flint. It is no amiable compromise which we have to patch up, but a war to the death which we have to wage. For this we need bold hearts and keen blades — " the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God". And that sword must not be rusted, or the bread of life tainted, by any of the corroding poisons of Hinduism. So much good work is done by humble, earnest, half-educated catechists, who tramp thousands of miles in sun and rain to raise their own brethren from the depths of heathenism, regardless of daily discomfort and weariness, of frequent disappointment and spiritual strain, forgetful of insults and petty persecution, and satisfied with a mere pittance of a pound a month, that I wish here not only to express my gratitude to those who have been my fellow-labourers in the Master's vineyard, but to apply to them the words of an emi- nent statesman and a whole-hearted supporter of Mis- sions, such as India so often produces. Sir William Mackworth Young, late Lieutenant-Governor of the Panjab : — ■ " I take off my hat to the humblest missionary that walks a bazaar in India, because he is leading a higher and grander life and doing a grander work than any other class of persons who are working in India", CHAPTER X EDUCATION Then to the rolling Heaven itself I cried, Asking, " What lamp had Destiny to guide Her little children stumbling in the dark ? " And — " A blind understanding I " Heaven replied. Rubdyat of Omar Khayydm. St. Paul prayed for his converts at Thessalonica, " May your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ ". The necessity of training the mind (or soul) and body as well as the spirit is recognised by all mis- sionaries, though one may lay more stress on evangel- isation and another on building up those who have already been admitted by baptism into the Church. The Indians can boast of an ancient civilisation, of great philosophic insight, and of marvellously subtle intellects ; yet what are they but '' little children stum- bling in the dark " ; and what have they to guide them but the " blind understanding " of those who by their own unaided wisdom are groping after God and hop- ing by their owtr religious merits to attain to the apprehension of, and final union with, God ? B)' illum- inating the mind we hope to remove ignorance and EDUCATION 22 1 prejudices and so be able the better to reach the higher faculties of the spirit. But we must never forget that education is like a dark lantern, and that by illuminat- ing the mind we do not necessarily remove darkness from the spirit. The heart and the mind resemble two separate rooms with different doors. In most Missions there is an immense amount of educational machinery at work. There are not only elementary schools in thousands of scattered villages associated with the boarding schools at the headquarters of the Mission, but in the large towns there are high schools to which elementary schools are affiliated, which are themselves attached to a college, and this latter in turn is affiliated to the university. Thus we begin at the bottom with the A B, and we finish at the top with the B.A. The elementary schools, like all the other branches, have a twofold purpose, first and chiefly to educate the children of our Christians, and, secondly, to serve as a means of reaching the non-Christian villagers. Whenever a village proposes to come over to Christian- ity en masse, the first request invariably is, " Open a school and send us a teacher ". The people all know the social advantage to be derived from the mastery of the three " R's," and, if they do not understand what we mean by the latter phrase they clearly understand that education stands for " Rs," i.e., rupees. Most of our lower schools have mixed classes for both boys and girls, but it is very difficult to get even Christian parents to send their girls to school, be- cause their function in life is to marry and look after the house, and not to earn money, unless it be by work in the 2 22 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS fields. We give every possible encouragement to Chris- tian children to attend the central boarding schools and thence to climb up to the very highest rungs in the educa- tional ladder. The result is that the Christians are, after the Brahmans, the most highly educated community in the country. Madras is often laughed at as " the be- nighted Presidency," but in the matter of education it is the most enlightened Presidency in India, and, of course, is far ahead of any other province in the number of its Christians. Female education is particularly backward, for only seven females out of every 1,000 know how to write their own names or read the easiest words in their own vernaculars. Here, too, the Christians are the most advanced of all. When Mrs. Caldwell first began with her girls' schools in Idaiyangudi, the people ex- claimed : " From the beginning of the world it had never been known that a woman could read ! " That was written sixty years ago, and now we have our lady graduates. Nothing more need be said of female edu- cation, training institutions and industrial schools, be- cause they have already been spoken of here and there in these pages. The great defect of our Missions, namely, the lack of proper training in theology for our agents, to whom the great bulk of our scattered Chris- tians are left for the greater part of their spiritual in- struction, has also been insisted on elsewhere. The present writer has been crying out for this reform for the past quarter of a century, and possibly the grant from the Pan-Anglican offering may supply this defect at last. The curriculum of our theological colleges for the clergy should also be made more oriental. EDUCATION 223 But we must pass on to what is known as higher, that is, collegiate education. We can only here briefly allude to the problems which are involved and the con- troversies which the whole question of the higher edu- cation of Hindus has raised. First, we must look at the history of Mission Colleges, always keeping before our minds their two aims, the direct one of giving our Christian youths, male and female, the highest possible education in both religious and secular subjects, and, secondly, the indirect one of giving instruction in Chris- tianity to non-Christians. In the early part of last century the Rev. A. R. Symonds, S.P.G. Secretary in Madras, and the Rev. Dr. Caldwell were appointed as a sort of commission to inquire into the question of higher education among Hindus. It was thought that if an advanced type of English education were given, all the follies and superstitions of Hinduism would vanish like shadows before the sun, and that if colleges were established and high-class lectures delivered the heathen would no longer in their blindness bow down to wood and stone. That hope, so natural and inspirit- ing, has not been realised — I do not mean absolutely but comparatively — for let me state once for all that I intend no statements of this kind to be absolute. I have listened to Mrs. Besant, the president of the Theo- sophical Society, addressing in English an audience of from 1,000 to 2,000 men, capable of appreciating every turn and nicety of her rhetorical flights, and yet heard these same educated men cheering to the echo every reference to the Rishis or their science, which can only be aptly described as science gone mad. Anyhow, in 2 24 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS response to this idea, Mission colleges for Hindus sprang up on all sides. The largest and best known of these is the " Christian College " in Madras, supported by the Scotch Presbyterians. In this college indirect influence is aimed at rather than direct conversion. This college was shaken to its foundations a few years ago when an over-zealous Scotch professor told his students that an idol was of no more avail than his boots. The principal Roman Catholic college is at Trichinopoly. The Bible is not taught at all, neither are religious lectures of any kind given. This is one of the peculiarities of the Roman Missions, another strange one being that they never do any open-air evangelistic work. They rely solely on personal interviews, especially on private discussions between their own converts and their non- Christian neighbours. St. Peter's College, Tanjore (in connection with the S.P.G.), to which the Rev. W. H. Blake has devoted almost the whole of his self-sacrific- ing life, has had to close its doors owing to the rigour of the University's demands. It never produced a convert. When I arrived in India in 1877, Bishop Caldwell put into my hands an important minute written by the Rev. Dr. Strachan, the Madras secretary. Its object was to foster and co-ordinate higher education among Christians. Much had been done for high-caste Hindus ; but so far very little had been attempted for Christians, and I need scarcely say that this scheme had the bishop's warm approval. All the Christian students were to be collected from the different S.P.G. colleges and high schools at one centre to receive a Christian education on the lines of the colleges at Ox- EDUCATION 225 ford and Cambridge. This idea finally took shape in the form of Caldwell College, Tuticorin. The extreme importance of the education of Christians had been pointed out by the late Fr. O'Neill, S.SJ.E., in his essay on Mission Schools in Christian Unity. Dr. Strachan's scheme, however, was only a partial success. The jealousy of some missionaries prevented them from sending their Christian students to the Christian centre ; the Madras Committee of that day were opposed to Bishop Caldwell and to Caldwell College, and cut down the annual grant from Rs. 8,ooo to 4,500, though the numbers had increased from 200 to 700; and one of the Tinnevelly missionaries also opposed the college. Bishop Caldwell was one of the most tolerant of men, but those were the days of bitter ritualistic strife. A college like this must necessarily be small and expensive, for 95 per cent, of the students in the college proper were Christians, and the fee income from Hindus was prac- tically nil. Such a college, too, is far more difficult to work than a large mixed one like that at Trichinopoly. The Christian students of the Caldwell College were maintained by the S.P.C.K., though the Home Com- mittee of the S.P.G. made one special grant to keep the college alive. Finally, this, the only Christian col- lege, was closed on the plea of want of funds, though Bishop Johnson, the Metropolitan, testified that " there is nothing like it in all India". When the college was lowered to a high school, the grant was again raised to Rs. 8,ooo ! I had fought for the college tooth and nail like a mother for her child, with but two re- sults. First, I got the name of a " fighting missionary " IS 226 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS — and that is the worst thing that any missionary can be called ! Secondly, I have now the gloomy satisfac- tion of saying, " I told you so ". For it is now, I think, generally admitted by all who have studied these mat- ters that the closing of such a Christian college was the greatest mistake the Madras Committee has made in the past half-century. It should be remarked here that the Christian scholars supported by the S.P.C.K. were transferred to the " Caldwell Hostel " attached to the college at Trichinopoly, so that the Christian side of the work was not altogether lost sight of (See p. 230.) To return, however, to the general question, the advo- cates of Mission colleges as evangelistic agencies plead that the only way that the missionary has of coming into contact with the educated classes, who are the leaders of thought, is through the instrumentality of colleges. They point to the marvellous awakening that has been going on in the country, especially during the last few years. They argue that if we can convert the Brahmans to Christianity we shall soon see all the rest of India following their natural leaders, just as when Constantine gave the lead to the Roman Empire. They also quote texts from the Bible in sup- port of their views as final. Those on the other side do not admit that the leaven- ing of India, which is undoubtedly going on, is due either entirely, or even to a large extent, to Mission colleges. They do not set store on isolated texts in the Bible — written by men who had no ideas at all about first grade colleges — but only on general prin- ciples. They do not admit that the majority of the EDUCATION 227 high-caste converts have exercised any extraordinary influence on their fellows, for they are at once treated as out-castes. They say that it is too often assumed that the present knowledge of, and influence exercised by, Christianity — a prayer at the 1907 National Con- gress is quoted as a specimen — is entirely due to the Mission colleges for Hindus. Is this assumption sound ? The best literature in the English language is put into every student's hands in every college whether Mission or Government, and that literature is permeated through and through with Christian ideals. Every lecturer, whether Hindu, Muslim or Christian, when teaching science and mathematics, is breaking to pieces with a rod of iron the earthenware vessels of Hinduism. Every Hindu magistrate that punishes a Brahman, or delivers any sound judgment, is not only stabbing at the heart of his own religion, but is preaching the morality of the Ten Command- ments and the Sermon on the Mount. Nay, every guard that hustles a heterogeneous crowd of all castes into a third-class carriage is cutting with a sharp axe at the tap-root of Hinduism. But, beyond all these things, there is the immense power of directly Christian literature, and Tlie Epiphany published by the Oxford Mission at Calcutta is widely read by the educated classes. There were not, they continue, any Mission colleges in the Roman Empire during the second century, yet public opinion was then powerfully in- fluenced, and the results were almost identical with the present state of affairs in India. As regards the Bible, we have no right to go be- 228 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS yond general principles. We may take the parable of the leaven. The best way to leaven the whole three measures of meal is to put the ferment where it has the best chance of working, and then to leave it alone and let it work in its own hidden way. On the other hand, we may take the parable of throwing pearls to swine. Why, we ask, should we spend our lives and money in training hundreds of Brahman graduates, for whom no work can be found, and who then turn round and rend the missionaries and the Christian Government, who by a mistaken kindness have made sedition pos- sible ? The Brahmans see that Christianity is striking at the roots of their religious pre-eminence in the land, and so naturally they are bitterly opposed to it. The "unrest" is purely due to Brahman agitation, and is based on the idea of their political pre-eminence.^ God's hour for them does not seem to have come. Would it not be more in accordance with His will and with the Church's past history to work upwards from the lower classes, where we succeed, than downwards from the upper classes where we fail? This line of ar- gument may also be thrown into parabolic form. A father and three sons, wandering in a jungle, wished to make a fire to cook their food. The father sent each son to go his own way and try his own method. After some time they came back, and the first said : " I found some splendid wood, but it was so green that I have used up all my matches in vainly trying to light it ". The second said : " I gathered some dead branches which burnt for a time but were not dry enough to ' See The Nineteenth Century and After for September, 1909. EDUCATION 229 make a proper fire". The third said: "I collected some straw and leaves and dry little twigs and soon I had a famous blaze, but they burnt themselves out in a minute or two". Then the father made the third son go and collect some more straw and twigs, the second bring some of his half-dried branches, and the first his green logs. Then the straw lighted the twigs, the twigs with a little patient fanning lighted the branches, and these together threw out so much warmth that the logs soon became dry enough to burn with a steady heat, and so the meal was cooked. There we have the Pariah, the Sfldra and the Brahman, or, in the terms of the first parable, the whole of the three measures of meal. If our Brahman students steel their hearts against our religious instruction, why should we spend Mission money in helping them to become graduates ? We are also fixed on the horns of a dilemma. If a college is made a battle-ground for real aggressive Christianity, can it succeed as a college? The numbers will fall off, the fee-income will be reduced, and the doors will have to be closed. If it is not, and if it rests content with what is called a " Christian atmosphere," is it worth maintain- ing ? If the Government, in view of the present anarchy, would close its own colleges or adequately support the Mission institutions, and so give religion a chance, the whole aspect of the case would be altered. But religious neutrality is at present a fetish. The following slight incident throws some light on the attitude of Brahman youths. An old student of the college at Trichinopoly came to see me in my private 230 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS room in the college. After a little pleasant talk he asked me if I would give him an English New Testa- ment, and so I gave him one. As he wished to read the Bible, I asked, " Are you at all favourably disposed towards Christianity ? " He drew himself up haughtily and replied : " Are you not taking an unfair advantage of me, when I am calling on you, to broach the subject of religion ? " He was interested in the Bible as we are in the Bhagavad Gita, but had no more idea of becom- ing a Christian than I of becoming a Vedantist ; yet I might have written an interesting paragraph for a mis- sionary magazine headed, " Old Boys Asking for the Bible ". It is so easy, but, oh ! so fatal, to read our own thoughts in our students' minds, unless, like my friend, they are frank enough to let the cat out of the bag. Enough has now been said to show the ordinary reader how the matter stands. It should not, however, be supposed that this is a new question. General Tremen- heere raised it more than thirty years ago.^ How are our men and means to be used to the best possible ad- vantage with the ultimate object of converting the whole of India? It is not so much a question of abandoning colleges for Hindus, much less of giving up all efforts to reach the higher castes, as it is a question of adapting ourselves to circumstances. This is not our campaign, but God's ; hence it is not for us to theorise but to follow His leading. If He says this door is open and that is locked at present, then it is our obvious duty to enter at the open door and wait for the unlocking of the ' T)ie System of Education m Government and Mission Schools Con- trasted, by Lt.-Gen. Tremenheere, C.B. (King & Co., 1876). EDUCATION 231 other. Our first duty is to kneel down and pray for guidance, and then just as the man at the wheel keeps his eye on the flickering compass, and the captain on the bridge watches with his glass for the signals from the admiral's flag-ship, so it is our duty simply to look with the eye of faith — God's signals are plain enough — and then simply obey. Some people advise us to redouble our efforts in the colleges because we have failed. Now, since our men and money cannot be increased to any appreciable e.xtent, common-sense — which is one of the gifts which "cometh down from the Father of lights" (St. James i. 17) — ought to warn us against this action. Since the force at our disposal is constant, it follows that if we double our efforts on the fruitless side we must reduce to the same extent our efforts on the fruit- ful one. In conclusion, it must not be imagined that those who advocate the closing of Mission colleges are adopt- ing a policy of despair. There is an alternative policy, and that is the establishment of hostels for Christians and Hindus, wherein both classes will be put under the best missionary influences, while the students attend a Government college which can spend thousands of pounds every year in providing the very best secular education available. Government lavish money on their own colleges, but will only give pittances to Mission colleges. Why should we not then follow the line of least resistance? The hostel system has de- veloped in a marvellous way during the past ten years, and it is probable that it will e.xtend still more rapidly in the future. CHAPTER XI WOMEN'S WORK Seize hold of God's hand and look full in the face of His creation and there is nothing He will not enable you to achieve. The Two Paths. The end of all right education for a woman is to make her love her home better than any other place. Pors Clavigera. A CHAPTER on women's work should be written by a woman and not by a mere man. But Ruskin wrote largely for and is read largely by women, and so, faute dc iiiieux, the present writer will do what he can to describe women's life and women's work in the Mission field as it appears to masculine eyes. Reference has already been made to girls' schools, but children will come in for further notice in this chapter. We talk of "girls," but except in our Christian boarding schools we see little of this class, for those that are children will be women with children of their own in a very short time. A Brahman child must be married before she is ten and after that she may be seen by the Bible-women, but the English missionary can see little or nothing of her. We have often to put pressure even on Christian parents to prevent them from marrying their daughters 232 WOMEN'S WORK 233 at thirteen. How often do we see haggard and wrinkled grandmothers of forty ! But to go bacl< to the children, we delight to see such bonny and happy little creatures with their coal- black eyes and hair, and teeth like pearls. We see babies of a few months old basking in the sun, with no other clothing but the sun, and no other cradle but mother earth. Here they sleep and kick and coo quite unconscious of the gorgeous cribs that white babies need. As they grow older they are decked in all sorts of jewels and rings, bangles and chains, beads and trinkets of every kind and value. A little later they arrive at the dignity of a small cloth or petticoat, their hair is plaited in a long tail, their eyelashes and eyelids blackened, their cheeks smeared with turmeric, and their fingers reddened with henna. But pretty children cannot be entirely spoiled any more than really pretty women in our own country by following the fashions, however hideous. The Brahman children are particu- larly fair, refined and dainty. Their eyes sparkle with delight at the mere joy of living, as they dance round and round, singing and clapping their hands while at their favourite kummi. But as they grow older the soft, fawn-like eyes often lose their tenderness, and all the intelligence seems to go out of their faces. Edu- cation, just when they are beginning to benefit by it, is cut short ; they live and move and talk among grown- up folk, and hear things, and soon learn to say things, that ought to be kept from a girl in her early maiden- hood. The bloom soon wears off by contact with the coarse world. But still the mothers of India are as a 234 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS rule a faithful, gentle and amiable class. They always have before them the character of Sita, the model of sweetness and chastity — " the miracle of noble woman- hood," as far as India has succeeded in evolving an ideal incarnation of all that is pure and good and gracious in God's last, best gift to man. A Hindu woman never leads a life of independence. She is under the control of her father, her husband or her sons, from the day of her birth to the day of her death, which, if she might have her own way would often be on the funeral pyre of her beloved husband, nay, her lord. She is devoted to her children, though her boys may soon learn to mock and insult her. Her married life is often far from happy, not because she has been denied any choice in the .selection of a husband, but be- cause she is generally put as a child-bride under a mother-in-law who is jealous and makes a drudge of her. Whatever goes wrong the bride is the cause. "If the mother-in-law," says the Tamil proverb, " breaks a vessel, it does not matter, it is only earthenware; but if the daughter does so, it is gold." If she is cruelly beaten, which is often the case, her boy-husband, whose mind is worried with conies and "graffs,'' cannot help her; and so these bright young girls frequently jump down the garden well as the only escape from the troubles they do not know how to bear. Her seclusion, though it is not so rigid in South as in North India, and her utter lack of independence, make it particularly difficult for the Bible-women to secure actual converts. How can a woman leave her home, unless she runs away to the Mission compound, or becomes a widow? WOMEN'S WORK 235 The baby- bride may find at her wedding that a school- boy struggling to pass some examination has been chosen for her, or he may be an old man seventy years of age, or more. In either case she may be left a child-widow before the actual and final wedding cere- mony takes place ; and once a widow always a widow. She is considered to have brought a curse on her hus- band and so have been the cause of his death. Hence her life is one round of drudgery, and too often also of open sin. All her jewels, that she delights in so much, are ruthlessly plucked from her, her head is shaved, she must wear a plain white cloth, and on eveiy eleventh day must fast from not only food but also from every drop of water through the long hot day, when the tiny hovel of a room assigned to her is like an oven. But we must bear in mind that the women are the first to resent any interference with their customs, however cruel. In England we have " old maids," and in India we have unmarried as well as married " widows ". But in India it is evident that all the laws were made by the men, whereas in Eng- land we have the principle laid down that " there can be no male and female ; for all are one in Christ Jesus ". A man may have in India as many wives as he likes, or can afford, but a wife, even though not really married, must always remain a " widow" after the death of a boy that she has barely seen, or of an old man tottering into his grave on his last wedding-day. All Hindu children wear as many gold and other jewels as the family can afford, and many a child toddling to school has been inveigled into a house or 236 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS garden and then brutally murdered for her jewels. In Tinnevelly the girls have the lobes of their ears cut, and as soon as the wound has healed, the holes are loaded with lead rings to drag them down. The belle of the village is the one whose ears are as long as possible, and almost hidden by knobs of gold in all sorts of fantastic shapes. When a Tinnevelly Christian wishes to enter the joys of matrimony, he does not waste his time " sighing like a furnace," much less in " writing odes to his mistress' eyebrow," but adopts the much simpler but more prosaic method of sending his grandmother to find him a wife. After inspecting all the eligible young ladies, the old dame comes back and reports that she has found one " with ears so long that they touch her shoulders ! " What more could any panting young swain desire? The banns are called and the wedding takes place with much eclat. The old granny knows well enough that ears full of jewels denote, if not wealth, at any rate comfortable circumstances. Of course it is becoming more and more difficult to get daughters well married, unless the dot is a large one. Each young man has his price, and the tariff generally depends on the educational qualifications. A matricu- late of the university can be secured say for Rs. 500 and a large quantity of jewels. One who has arrived at the intermediate stage will require Rs. 1,000, while a full-blown B.A. can dictate almost any terms. It was once proposed to send some students at a theological college to attend the classes at an arts college affiliated to the university. " What do you think of the plan ? " asked an Englishman, deep in solving Mission problems. WOMEN'S WORK 237 " How it will improve their matrimonial prospects 1 " exclaimed his Indian friend, knowing the country and having a mind that ran on practical politics. It is easy enough for us to smile a superior smile at the marriage customs of other countries, but do not our own young folk sometimes " goa wheer munny is " ? To mention one other incident that fell under my notice, I will give this illustration of how the Indian's way of looking at things is entirely different from our own. One of the leading Indian clergy had lost his wife and wished to marry again. It may be noted in passing that the subject for discussion, as the relatives return home from the funeral of a wife, is, " Who is the most suitable or likely person to take her place ? " This was an educated man, and he determined to choose for himself and not be tied by his relations to an ig- norant woman. So he proceeded to the house of one of his parishioners and called for the daughter. He then proceeded to put her through a regular examina- tion in the " three R's," etc., and not being satisfied with her attainments, promptly " ploughed " her ! However disappointed the young lady may have been at failing to secure the parson of the parish, she would not for a moment resent the method of procedure. Brahman and Muhammadan women are always shut up in the zandna (a Persian word, zmi woman, and ana room) and even well-to-do Christian women keep to their houses as much as possible, so as to conform to the rules of " society ". Our Bible-women have about forty houses each assigned to them. When invited to become teachers, the consent of the husband has to be 238 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS gained on one side, and the condition that the Bible shall be read, and not only lessons and sewing taught, is imposed on the other. There are girls of eleven or twelve and old grannies of seventy who either learn or hear. They are generally quite polite and willing to learn, and spreading a mat, ask the Bible-woman to sing. She sings one of the Indian lyrics : " Sweeter than honey is the name of Jesus," " Alas ! what a sinner am I," " There is no Saviour but Jesus," and so on, while the neighbours gather round her and listen with great pleasure. She then reads and explains a parable, and here the difficulty is to get the hearers to seize the right point and draw the right moral. There is a story well known all over India of a Brahman youth who had been instructed in the parable of the Prodigal Son : but, " the calf had to die'. " he exclaimed. The love of the father, the penitence of the son and the anger of the brother were as nothing compared with the enor- mity of " cow-killing ". All our teaching is so utterly strange that it takes infinite time and patience to instil right ideas. The mind is so pre-occupied with Hindu superstitions and ingrained customs that at first it seems like sowing seed in the salt sand of the seashore. When told of the miracles of Christ, they respond with the still more wonderful miracles of Krishna. On the wall is a picture of Krishna who is sitting aloft in a tree overhanging a stream. In his hands are the clothes of the milkmaids who are bathing and beseeching him with humble and reverent gestures to return their gar- ments. " Do you not think such a picture indecent?" asks the Bible-woman. "Oh, dear no; it is only the ^ 7. WOMEN'S WORK 239 god's ' play ' ; and besides the gods can, of course, do whatever they please. He is an incarnation like your Christ." It is hard to get them to understand that God must by His very nature be All-holy ; and that morality cannot be divorced from religion. The Bible- women themselves have often no clear idea of the differ- ence between the Christian dogma of the Incarnation, and the Hindu theory of an avatar, i.e., a temporary "descent" of a god on a man or animal, without any participation in the nature of either. The Hindu women hear from their husbands what is going on in the outer world and ask all sorts of strange questions in consequence. Mrs. Besant travels the length and breadth of India teaching Theosophy, and flattering the Hindus by telling them that all wisdom is found among them and that all modern scientific teaching has emanated from them. The vernacular papers tell of the wonderful conversions that have been made in London and New York. The fashionable ladies of our own West End, who dabble in such folly and think they have found some new excitement to ward off an hour's ennui, have no idea that their "conversions" are recorded in India. "Even Europeans embrace our religion," said one Hindu woman, " why do you ask us to leave it ? " On the other hand some remarks show a good feel- ing. One old grandmother said at the end of her Bible reading: " I have never despised Christianity". An- other remarked : " What you say is right. There is but one God for all ; and there is no use in caste distinctions. All these caste divisions were introduced so that some 240 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS might get the upper hand over others." Another asked in astonishment : " Why cannot your God keep you at home and feed you ? Instead of this you have to take the trouble of wandering about. You worship the true God, and yet you have to toil in this way." " Our Vedas," said one, " do not possess such authorita- tive and awe-inspiring words as yours ; they contain no rules of conduct. Your religion is good, and we ought to listen to what you say ; still, if we act according to your words our caste people and others will condemn us." One old Brahman woman, who has almost lost her sight, still remembers the Christian lessons she learnt as a child in the Mission school. Another old pupil says that in consequence of what she learnt, and of association with the Bible-women, she has ceased to take votive offerings to her temple and believes that Christianity is true. Can we doubt that the God of love will look with the eyes of compassion on these timid women who are feeling in this way after the truth ? Open conversions seem almost impossible, but the influence over husbands and children cannot fail to be good, apart from the elevation of the women them- selves. God will not let good work accomplished in faith fail of its object. The religion of these women is very largely cere- monial. Little burnt clay images of Ganesa (Pillaiyir) " the belly-god " are put up, and adoration is done to them. The talsi plant is sacred, and so women walk round it and say certain mantras. When kites fly past, or squirrels chirrup, the direction of the bird must be noted and the number of squeals emitted by the WOMEN'S WORK 241 small quadruped must be counted, for the happiness or misery of the house depends on the luck thus made known. They make wonderful and intricate patterns in white chalk in front of their doors, and fix the large orange-coloured blossoms of the water-melon in pats of dung to hold them mouth-upwards like a church bell thrown on its stay for ringing. English people imagine that this is with the object of beautifying the house, but it is for no such mundane purpose. It is to keep off the evil eye, like the pots covered with white spots in the fields, and the obscene figures on the temples and temple cars. Indians will do anything to catch the eye, and divert attention from the house, the field or the temple, and so prevent a curse from spoiling them. When there is an eclipse, the whole of the family must bathe either at home or outside, because the moon once told tales to the gods, and Rahu, the serpent, was so enraged that he periodically swallows her, and then the poison falls from his fangs. Woe betide the per- son on whom that poison falls ! The women bathe be- cause it would be madness to run any risks ; and the men say that they bathe to escape from having a bad time from their women-folk. Hence the great impor- tance of our influencing the women in favour of Chris- tianity. At present their influence is dead against us, and if we could turn it into our direction it would be an enormous gain. Many a mother has drowned her- self because her boy has been baptised. And though women in India are treated as of no importance whatever, yet their influence is immense, as it is with women all over the world. The present Bishop of 16 342 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS London remarked in one of his addresses that there is no power on earth equal to the influence that a woman possesses. It is fortunate that in England so many women take a deep interest in foreign Missions ; for how would the work go on without their efforts and their intercessions, especially in parishes where the clergy are not keen ? It is this enormous force that we want to be able to control in India. To do this we want more English women to help us. We do not want a dozen in one place to do the work we give to our Indian women ; but we do want at each large centre at least one good and capable woman to superintend the Bible-women, and another to superintend the girls' schools. Medical work is referred to elsewhere. The English woman must have a taste for languages, and must not be too old — thirty at the outside — (but I must skim lightly over the ice here) so as to be able to learn Tamil. The first question is. Are you musical? It may seem an inappropriate question, but it is not. A man may take a first-class at his universitj' and gain a fellowship, and yet be physically incapable of learning Tamil. One who has a delicate ear for the different shades of sound may pick up the pronunciation with six months' hard work, but one without that sensitive perception never will, if he tries till his hair is grey. As regards the superintendent of schools — and I wish to emphasize this word — we need a woman who holds some sort of diploma, and has had some experience of the way in which a first-class school is managed. Government insists — and rightly so — on some such qualifications. Its Inspectresses are generally sym- WOMEN'S WORK 243 pathetic, however exacting they may be in their de- mands. As one of them remarked to me, "The time for saying, ' Here is an indigent lady, and there is a Mission school ' has gone for ever." Let it be realised once for all that the work in India, teaching in a foreign language, etc., is far and away more difficult and more responsible for both men and women than work in England. This elementary fact is only now beginning to be realised. The first-class men and women are needed far more abroad, especially in India, than at home. I am not a first-class man myself, but when, thirty-two years ago, I told one of my friends at Cam- bridge who was, that I was going to India, he made only one remark, but that was a blunt one, "Sharrock, you're mad ! " As a matter of fact I have had ten times the opportunity in India of using such qualities as my Maker has endowed me with than I should ever have had in England. A lady superintendent must not expect the same moral tone in a Mission boarding school that she finds at home. As one of them remarked, " The lying, the prevarication, the cunning, the deceit, the treachery are appalling," and other superintendents would endorse these strong words. To live and breathe in such an atmosphere ; to be always groping about in underground tunnels, as one of the missionaries of the S.S.J.E. ex- pressed it, is a great strain on the spiritual faculties, and has to be experienced to be appreciated. Some of the educated Christian women, and the number is increasing every year, are models of all that such women should be, cultured, refined and devout. 244 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS To the educated Brahmans, who despise all Christians as pariahs, such women are a standing miracle of what Christianity can do. Till Christianity came to India, and such splendid women as Mrs. Caldwell began to open schools, the art of reading was confined to ddsis, dancing girls. If any one is sceptical about the power of Christianity, let him compare the state of a Christian country or a Christian community, such as we are now raising up in India, with the state of women among the Hindus and Muslims. A woman is locked up because it is almost inconceivable, or at any rate was so, that any woman would keep herself pure if she had the chance of going outside her house. If Christianity were banished from England, does any one imagine it would not soon become as bad as India was in the days when the Muhammadans first imposed the gosha system ? Two Christian girls attended the S.P.G. College dur- ing my principalship and both passed the B.A. exam- ination in the Mathematical Branch in 1907. They are, I believe, the two first Indian women who [have ever gained the degree in that difficult subject. Such educated women are extremely shy and reserved, so that no one need fear that, however much the educated men may cry out for manhood suffrage, these retiring women will chain themselves to pillars and shout, " Votes for women ! " When a girl is being married, she is often much too shy and retiring. It is only with the greatest difficulty that the priest can get the less educated ones to pro- nounce the man's name during the service, for to utter the name of one's husband is almost to insult him. He .^^^^^^ rft k f^Hff .>.i-;.-.^. • ,_* ■^i^-»-^^fc^ ■ '^^A r^ l^^pyp 1 '^m HhI 1 k^^ W/KM I^^^^^Bh^^^ 1 ^^ Ql 1 ibiSS ■ i ',T^^ JKS^^Kl/JI^!^ '^^I if' i^^^^H % < *?' ■;'■ ~P| l^^^^l^^'^^^ '\::' AN INDIAN CHRISTIAN GIRL WHO (SRADUATED IN M ATHH .M A'l ICS IN T H I-: M A Di'; A S V N 1 \' I'. K S I T \ . WOMEN'S WORK 245 may be referred to in some indirect way as " the B. A.," or " the schoolmaster," but his actual name must never be mentioned. All Indians are immensely fond of titles, honours, degrees, etc., so that though a man may have to speak of his friend a hundred times a day his degree must never be omitted. It is quite comical to hear a man, who is rushing frantically through the crowd at a station, shouting at the top of his voice to his friend, " Venkataramaiyar, B.A., B.L." — the aiyar being his caste -title as a Brahman, and the capital letters denoting his two degrees in arts and law. So in the same way one Christian woman of my acquaint- ance is always known by the name of "Mrs. M.A.," and no one considers it a nickname but an honorific, because her late husband had got that degree. At a marriage a ring is not put on the bride's finger, but a tali is tied by the bridegroom round her neck. Among poor people a saffron string with a small golden pendant hung on it, denoting the caste by its pattern, is used ; but people who are better off buy a golden chain with a spring clasp. The bridegroom is of course nervous and fumbles a great deal over this clasp, which, equally of course, will not close when it is wanted to ; while the bride, resplendent in a silk cloth of gorgeous hues, and laden with jewels and flowers, hangs her head down as if the rope were being adjusted round her neck on the gallows, instead of the tali being tied at the nuptial altar. When she leaves the church, and the tedious process of calling on all the friends and relations has to be gone through, she sits in a carriage, full to overflowing with other women and children, but 246 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS is recognised by the look of supreme misery on her face. She is not miserable, but as happy as she knows how to be, still the proprieties have to be observed, and this is one of them. Everybody must speak well of her modest behaviour, and hence the woe-begone look and hanging head. An English woman has two days on which she reigns as supreme queen, whatever may happen on every other day of her life — the day of her betrothal and the day of her wedding. But an Indian woman is not allowed the privilege of sealing for her- self a man's happiness or misery, and even on her wedding day she has to take second place. The bride- groom marches in front and leaves her to follow as she pleases. It has just been said that the happy pair have to visit their friends and receive small gifts of plantains, milk, sugar, etc., which bring luck like our rice and old shoes, and this terrible ordeal often lasts till midnight — in fact a fashionable wedding extends to three days. During these visits the band goes first and then fre- quently the bridegroom goes next, resplendent in a magenta or saffron satin coat with a gold band on his turban, and riding on one of the country ponies ; next after him in the carriage follows the bride and her at- tendant maids, but quite subordinate to the bridegroom, whose thoughts seem to be wholly occupied in main- taining a state of equilibrium on the pony, or worn-out hack, which is only too glad to walk at a pace that would do him credit at a funeral. Once when I had married a couple of working people, I wanted the bride to come and sign her name in the marriage register, but could not see her. Going into the church I dis- WOMEN'S WORK 247 covered a girl propping herself up, and half hiding against one of the pillars. This was the bride. She seemed quite unconnected with what was going on. It must not be thought, however — and it is fatally easy to convey wrong impressions quite unintentionally — that Indian men do not love their wives, or that they treat them unkindly. As a rule there is much affection on both sides, although the marriage has been arranged for them and they are quite strangers when they plight their troth and are made one for life. The happiness of their married life does not seem to depend on " falling in love ". There is a good deal of wife-beating among the lower orders, but it is not often of the brutal sort. A man comes home and finds that his child-wife has let his dinner spoil while gossiping with her neighbour, and so he gives her a smacking such as other naughty girls get to teach them to mend their ways ; but it is quite the proper thing to do, and so her amour propre does not suffer. There is no demonstration of affec- tion, but the affection is there all the same. Some of us do not like kissing at a station, and one never sees an Indian kiss his wife under any circumstances. If he has been away from home for a long time, he greets and is greeted by his neighbour most heartily ; he kisses his children, or smells their heads — a mode of endear- ment which we have not yet learned — -but he takes no more notice of his wife than he does of the man in the moon. " A stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy." The lot of a widow is a hard one all the world over ; but in India it is very rare for a widow to marry again. Great efforts have been made from time to time to get 248 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS young Christian widows re-married, but have always failed in the end. Often the widows are left utterly destitute, and go to work in the fields, or do worse. Even when they have enough to live on, all the sunshine is taken out of their lives, but so it is everywhere, and men suffer just as acutely as women do in this respect. A Bi'ahman widow has the additional pain of thinking that she brings a curse, or at least ill-luck, on all who are associated with her. An illustration will make this plain. Returning one morning to the schoolhouse in which I was putting up, I found a Brahman widow plucking flowers in the school-compound. Now I wanted a photograph of one badly, so I asked the old lady to let me take her photograph. " What ! catch my picture ? " as much as to say, " Are you mad ? don't you see I am a widow ? " but after some persuasion she reluctantly stood still among the flowers. So I went into the schoolroom to get out my " picture-catching- box," as they call a camera. The long legs of the tripod were sticking out, and in trying to get under the low roof of the verandah I knocked the focussing screen against a projecting beam and smashed the glass into atoms. The old woman fled with a look of amazement and horror on her face, and I have no doubt she was muttering to herself: " It's all your own fault ; you might have known that a widow would bring you bad luck. / didn't want to have my picture caught ; so don't scold me." Off she ran, and I could not help laughing, though I was vexed that I had not "caught" the poor old thing. Probably Indian women are no more curious than WOMEN'S WORK 249 any other daughters of Eve, but when an English woman goes into the district she will have in a very few minutes every woman, girl and baby in the whole place flocking to her, and if the white woman knows enough Tamil to ask about the name, age or teeth of the little naked creatures, their delight will know no bounds. " One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." A missionary's wife may often do more good in spanning the gulf between the two races in five minutes than her husband can accomplish in as many years — a plain fact that missionary critics when condemning matrimony often lose sight of The marriage of missionaries, how- ever, is a " problem," and, though referred to elsewhere, will not be stated at length in these pages. The follow- ing story, however, may be narrated. One of my pre- decessors was a young, clean-shaved married man, and took his bride out into the district with him. At a small town he and his wife attracted an immense crowd where the evangelistic staff was preaching. He was dressed in a white cassock and sola topi, and she was dressed in a white frock and sola topi, and the problem in that case was, " Which is the man and which is the woman ? " As in so many other missionary problems there was no solution, but the excitement over it was intense, and no heed was paid, I fear, to the preaching of the evangelistic band. I began this chapter with an apology for writing at all, and must end it with a reminiscence which is still painful to my mind about women's work. My very first missionary address, thirty years ago, was to a ladies' working party at Ealing. I had to stand in the 250 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS centre of a lawn while two or three dozen young ladies, sitting in a big circle, sewed. I had come home on sick-leave, after two years which I had spent mostly in struggling with the language and malarial microbes, and so knew nothing about Mission work. All eyes were steadily cast down on what, I believe, is techni- cally called "work," except for an occasional furtive glance from a pair of bright eyes ; and it was almost as difficult to speak to these silent workers as to the lay-figures in Mme. Tussaud's exhibition. I found also to my horror that this party was to go on for two hours, and the vicar basely deserted me after about five minutes. Think of my solitary misery, and the impossibility of breaking through that magic circle ! Think of having nothing to say, and two hours to say it in ! Before the end of that afternoon I was like a deflated bicycle tyre. Let me, therefore, ask the reader not to condemn " deputations " as dull and unin- teresting people before considering the circumstances. Even they may be found to deserve some of the milk of human kindness, and some spark of pity. Work amongst women and girls is carried out through the agency of a very important piece of the Society's machinery, namely, the Committee of Women's Work. All who are acquainted with Missions, whether at home or abroad, know how that work depends on the Com- mittee, and also how the Committee in turn can only carry on its labours through the sympathetic assistance of thousands of women in England who are eager to fulfil their own responsibilities, and take their own part in winning the Saviour's kingdom for Him. He WOMEN'S WORK 251 only knows how frequent and earnest are their inter- cessions, and He only sees the numberless acts of self- denial that are made on behalf of their sisters in heathen lands who are struggling towards the Light of the world. Even factory "hands," toiling all day in the mills, will rise at 5 A.M., so as to find time to do some piece of sewing for the Sale of Work, or to make some gar- ments for children at the other side of the earth. Girls and women, also, lying on sick beds, patiently work so as to help their heathen sisters to a knowledge of the Christian faith and the Saviour's love, and thus, while suffering themselves, to alleviate the sufferings of others. Boxes of clothing are regularly being forwarded to all parts of the world ; subscriptions are gathered from ladies and schools to support orphans and other poor children in " foreign parts " ; zandna workers and teachers are selected to superintend Bible-women and organise school-work ; and lastly, doctors and nurses are trained and sent out to Mission hospitals to bring relief to tens of thousands of sufferers therein, hidden away be- hind the purdahs of the zandnas, or lying in miserable hovels where they are left to the tender mercies of ig- norant mid wives, or dirty and superstitious attendants. All the organisation of this complicated machinery to reach half the people in the world with the consolations of religion, to teach the children, to elevate their mothers, and to bring the sympathy and tenderness of their sex to bear on those whose lives are withered and stunted, whose minds are shrouded in darkness, and whose bodies are racked with pain — all these things 2S2 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS devolve on the C.W.W. and on those who are not only their fellow-labourers but co-operators with God. The function of woman in life is to be " a ministering angel " ; a comfort to the hard workers, more than a worker herself; a ray of sunshine in a murky world ; an inspiring presence in the home, the school, the hospital, and the zandna ; and besides all these, always and everywhere, a pure, sweet, elevating influence. The good that is done by thousands of devout and humble women through such labour and such influence, both at home and abroad, is simply incalculable ; but, it must unfortunately be added, the mischief that is done by a few women who usurp the administrative functions of their husbands, and interfere in work beyond their own proper sphere is equally incalculable. .ANNVASI OR ASCETIC. I-EOPLK GAIN MhRIT BY GIVING HIM RICE. A "holy" man in INDIA IS OFTEN MOST IM.MORAL. CHAPTER XII THE FINGER OF GOD Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God. W. Carey. All England has been shocked at the political unrest in India, culminating in the brutal murders at the Im- perial Institute. How do we as a Church stand re- latively to this unrest ? However pained and puzzled we may be, there exists a silver lining to these murky clouds, and if we know where to look we may see something at least of the silver fringe. The revolution that is going on in that vast Empire is not only political but religious, educational, social and ethical ; and how- ever painful the birth-pangs may be, they are inevit- able. The East and the West have come into contact, and nothing can now stop or seriously hinder that con- tact, which in its broadest sense means a war a outrance between Christianity and all the other non-Christian re- ligions of that land. Not only so, but Christianity always brings in its train liberty in its best sense, education, material progress, moral growth, the equality of man with man, and woman with man, and so forth. The light has come, and even those who close the shutters cannot keep out all the light. What, then, has been the effect of Christianity in 253 254 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS India, and what future lies before it? The numerical increase of Christians during the past two or three de- cades has been starding, and the Christian leaven working beneath the flour has produced upheavals in unexpected ways, such as this agitation. But we must admit first, and with shame, that our own Church can only claim a miserable minority, for relatively to other Christian communities we care little as a Church about Mission work. Secondly, the question is not one of statistics at all, but of the vital force that Christianity as a whole is bringing to bear on India as a whole. To es- timate this we must close our missionary reports with their uninviting tables of figures, and listen to what the candid friend of Missions^ — not the shallow, hostile critic — has got to say. He will tell us that individual conversions have been but rarely and painfully won, in spite of all the sensational stories that we have read, and that these first-fruits give no promise of a full har- vest in the future. Converts such as the late Father Goreh have neither become the apostles of India nor have they succeeded in bringing the leaders of Hinduism one inch nearer to Christianity. It is evident from past history that if ever India is to be converted, it will be by mass movements, since individual independence is utterly foreign to the nature of the caste-ridden Hindus. The masses that have already been added to the Church have been taken from those who have had nothing to lose and everything to gain by embracing our religion. Caste has been no obstacle to them, but rather a force thrusting them upwards in the social scale. Not only so, but that same caste, not wholly THE FINGER OF GOD 255 abandoned at baptism, has led to a state of deadly stagnation, so soon as the first zeal has lost its warmth. Then our friend will go on to remind us — and we must patiently listen to everything he has got to say, how- ever unpleasant — that all Sfldras, above the caste line, can conceive of no shame or degradation equal to that involved in breaking caste as the consequence of bap- tism. As regards the Br^hmans and all other educated men, he will tell us that they have not only heard the Gospel and deliberately rejected it as inferior to their own philosophic system, but that they look upon the English missionary with even less favour than other foreign conquerors, because he has deliberately set him- self to undermine the foundations of Hinduism, on which their divine supremacy has for centuries been based. In their eyes, therefore — however strongly he may himself protest against it — he is the greatest op- ponent to their patriotic aspirations towards national independence. It cannot be denied that there is much truth and much force in this frank statement of the case. We cannot ignore it if we would. What answer can we make? We may reply that in the early history of Christianity a very similar state of affairs was witnessed in the Roman Empire, and yet the Church ultimately triumphed. The Christian converts in India may be persecuted and ill-treated for breaking caste, but at any rate they are not thrown to the lions or burnt as torches by a Nero. They may be reviled by a hostile Press, but are no worse off than the Christians against whom Celsus and Porphyry wrote. The Brahmans 2S6 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS with all their pride of birth and learning may laugh to scorn the possibility of a Christian India, but were not the Roman patricians and Greek philosophers equally arrogant and contemptuous? Though the out-castes of India form the bulk of her converts, is it not true that the slaves of Rome, sneered at as the dregs and offscouring of the nation, were the first in any numbers to embrace Christianity in the capital of the Empire? " Not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble were called " in those early days ; yet the Empire fell at the feet of Him who was as much despised and seem- ingly as powerless as any other crucified slave. History is a great comforter, and the resemblance is most striking and might easily be extended, but in one point the parallelism breaks down. In India we are always confronted with caste, and the history of the whole world can produce nothing in any way parallel to it. It is a system of such overwhelming power, both human and divine, that its breach, viewed from the re- ligious point of view, entails the plunging of the soul into the lowest depths under the curse of untold re- births, while, on the social side, it involves a stigma and a degradation worse than death. Not only is the converted son irretrievably lost, but the unconverted father also loses one on whom he depends for bliss in the next life. Not only is the Christian daughter cast forth like one polluted, or a corpse, by the mother who loved her as "the gem of her eye " (to use her own en- dearing term), but the mother herself can only hide her shame by plunging down the garden well. It is not the becoming a Christian, but the breaking of caste by THE FINGER OF GOD 257 the act of baptism, that causes the terrible disgrace. Then, too, the loss of one here and one there — a fall to the rest of the caste like that of Judas — though the gain and test of success to the evangelistic missionary who labours not so much to build up a kingdom as to detach isolated units, often increases the difficulty by causing those who have suffered the loss and shame to draw all the closer together, and to cling with a still more tena- cious grip to that which is to them immeasurably dearer than life. Thus the missionary finds a whole Hima- layan range thrown across his path. History gives no comfort here. What is to be done ? Rather, let us say what is not to be done. Above all things we are not to talk quite so much about " our work ". When the hills, the sea, and the army of Pharaoh hemmed in the Israelites on every side, then was the time for Moses to exclaim, " Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord ". Let us consider then what the finger of God has wrought in India. The change during the last century has been miraculous. The sages of ancient India lived on the mountain tops of religious thought far above this material world, and breathed an atmosphere too rare for ordinary lungs. In solitary meditation they strove to fathom the depths of human thought and so attain to the conception of the unconscious, impersonal Essence — " the One without a second". But the modern Hindu is plunged, not in thought, but in the maelstrom of political agitation and the scramble for the material possessions of this struggling world. The Hindu of old, weighed down by the travail of tens of thousands of 17 2s8 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS re-births and longing for an absolute cessation from the smallest action or even thought, cared no more for the fall and rise of empires than we care for the castles that children build on the sand, knowing that the next tide will sweep them away with a single rush. But the Hindu of to-day reads history, feels his pulse beat faster as he notes how the great Russian Empire fell like a Dagon at the feet of an Asiatic power, and insists in turn that he as a patriot must win back his country from the control of a foreign invader. The sage lived in a dream-world of phenomena, in which the marvel- lous, the mystic and the magic are the only realities, while the hard facts of earth are but illusions, the mirage of a childish imagination. But the Hindu graduate has been trained to see that science is based on facts, and that those facts are realities ; that history is a guide whose steps must be followed ; and that the critical faculties are not the sport of delusion to be avoided like the will- o'-the-wisp, but rather weapons that must be fashioned and sharpened for the battle of life. His forefathers were taught that their life was the pla)'thing of fate, and that obscenity was the plaything of the gods ; but he has been taught that there is such a thing as an ethical standard — that man is a responsible being who must not steal his neighbour's ox or his neighbour's wife, and that he must also postulate God as One all-holy. The chief aim of the ancient Rishi \\'as to look with- in and evolve a phenomenal world and a subtle philo- sophy from his own inner consciousness as a spider draws its thread from its own body ; or, to express it in another way, to shut up himself, his world, and even his THE FINGER OF GOD 259 God ill his own mental cell just as a silk-worm envelops itself in a chrysalis, never dreaming that there is a butterfly state of life beyond. It must not be assumed from what has been said above that the twentieth century Hindu knows that he is now a butterfly flutter- ing about among the flowers of a new and glorious world. Such figures must not be pressed. Though he is unconsciously struggling towards freedom, he does not know that he is emancipated from the old dead shell, and as a fact he is not. An assistant astronomer at the Madras Observatory wrote a pamphlet on the true cause of eclipses, which the Government gladly published and spread broadcast in all the vernaculars of South India ; but that did not prevent this same Brahman astronomer from going to bathe in the sea at the next eclipse, so as to wash off the poison that falls from the fangs of the snake that swallows the moon I The leaders of the present agitation are shrewd enough to see that if they are to succeed in their poli- tical aims, India cannot continue to be what its leaders have made it for the past 3,000 years. If India is to be ruled in any degree on European lines, and the franchise allowed, caste cannot remain as it is ; it can no longer be as it has been for all these centuries, the bulwark against every attack. They themselves must remove the obstacle. Cannot we see the hand of God in all this when the Hindus themselves (however unknowingly) are blowing the trumpets for the overthrow of the walls of their own Jericho ? Many of the Brahmans, conscious of the objection that India is unfit for self- 26o SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS government, are demanding the education and elevation of the Sudras and out-castes, oblivious or careless of the fact that the elevation of the majority must destroy the priestcraft of the minority. Caste and priestcraft, ser- vility and degradation, democracy and the franchise, education and progress, the elevation of women and out-castes — these things cannot by any possibility co- exist. How can we have "one man one vote" while the Brahman is the embodiment of God and the pariah lower than any dog in the street? And not only are the Brahmans thus throwing down their only bulwark, but the Indian Government, fettered by religious neutrality, can give only secular education in its own colleges. And when God is taken out of the life of any nation, sedition, anarchy and murder must inevitably follow. For East is East, and West is West, And never the twain shall meet, sings Kipling, but the whole trouble has risen from the fact that the East and the West have met. And there can be no going back now. Man may be born again, but he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb. Caste is the great obstacle. It is like the power that binds all the particles of a piece of granite together in an adamantine grip. We missionaries can only detach a few grains with the utmost difficulty ; and caste will never be destroyed, or India ever be converted, in that way. But there is another stone — " the Stone which the builders rejected," and, ''Every one that falleth on that Stone shall be broken to pieces ; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will scatter Itini as dust" . CHAPTER XIII MEDICAL MISSIONS Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again ? Only a medical missionary can write with authority or experience on this subject, and what is found in tliis short chapter must only be taken as the opinion of one who has looked at the matter from the outside. The importance of medical treatment as an auxiliary branch to the ordinary work, in breaking down prejudice, and in showing in a practical way, without the taint of bribery, the Gospel of love and sympathy in action, will probably be denied by no one. The S.P.G. is only now developing this method in a systematic manner, but there have been hospitals and doctors at work for many years. In the area under present notice it may be mentioned that Dr. Strachan did splendid work at Nazareth — since developed by Canon Margoschis — and at Madras. At Nazareth as many as 12,000 patients a year are treated. There have been also for years flourishing hospitals at Sawyerpuram and Irungalur, near Trichinopoly, the two latter under my own " man- agement," but worked by trained native medical men, nurses and midwives. All these Mission hospitals, like 261 262 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS the schools, are under Government supervision and re- ceive Government aid, while at the same time they are used for directly evangelistic purposes. Religious in- struction is given every morning and evening to the out-patients, and there are many opportunities for quiet talks with the in-patients. Besides these hospitals, much is done by attaching a medical catechist to the Evangel- istic Band. Such men, who arc competent to treat minor cases, take their surgical instruments and medicine-chests with them as they travel all the year round, into all manner of out-of-the-way places, where they are generally received with much suspicion at first, but much gratitude when they are better known. Direct conversions are seldom made in this way, though much good influence is indirectly exercised. It is very easy to make mistakes in organising Mis- sion hospitals. To send a qualified M.D. to a place where there is no regular hospital with its beds, appli- ances and store of medicine is simply a waste of money. To send a doctor to a town where there is already a large Government hospital implies either an immense expenditure of money, or a feeble and useless rivalry. To send an unqualified medical man or woman is also sheer folly. Perhaps I may quote m}' own case as an illustration of the latter. When I had taken m)- B.A. degree at Cambridge, I was told by my Society to learn as much of medicine as I could in the nine months before leaving for India. I put myself under proper guidance, attended a professor's lectures on paralysis a<^ita>/s, and iitidcr the surreon learnt the art of dissect- ing bullocks' eyes ! It is needless to say that what I MEDICAL MISSIONS 263 had acquired was'perfectly useless, but fortunately it did not take me long to forget what little I had learnt. At Madura the American missionaries have splen- did hospitals both for males and females, and compete successfully with the local Government Institution, be- cause they have first-class doctors and ample funds. But as a rule it is a waste of men, women and money to enter into such rivalry. A woman's hospital may often be worked by lady doctors with great success and untold advantage to the poor women who suffer terribly from dirty and incompetent midwives, and yet who shrink from the public hospital and treatment from a man. They are willing to die in unmitigated agony, but they will not submit to what they and their husbands think is far worse. There is great scope for women doctors anywhere, for men doctors away from the district head- quarters, and for medical practitioners of all sorts in the scattered villages. The latter need not be so highly trained as the others, but this class of medical agency needs much strengthening and developing. The S.P.C.K. gives a great deal of assistance in the way of medicine, etc., but more training for these agents, nurses and midwives is urgently required. The S.P.C.K. gave at one time scholarships to train young men, but the plan was quite a failure from the Mission point of view. There was no bond or agreement of any kind between the donors and the beneficiaries, and no pre- arranged salary ; so that when a man had taken his degree of L.M. & S. (Licentiate in Medicine and Sur- gery) he either demanded a salary that the Mission could not pay, or took up work under the Government. 264 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS This plan has failed from the want of a little common- sense, and no other has been substituted for it. The missionary has to " manage" everything, and this is the kind of failure that wears his heart out. As every one knows, India is constantly visited by terrible epidemics, plague, cholera and small-pox. In the old days villages were swept away wholesale ; and even now, when we know so much more of sanitation, something of the kind may still be seen. In my time, at a small hamlet near Sawyerpuram, consisting of fifteen heads of families, the medical man was not called in till fourteen persons had died ! The people will not be- lieve that there is death in the foul water that they drink, or take our advice when we urge them to boil it. It is the goddess Mariammai that sends cholera and small-pox, and the only way to stop the mischief is to cut a cock's head off at her shrine ! Who is to per- suade them that the water oozing from a dunghill and along the open sewers in the roads is full of deadly microbes? How are they to know that one rat will carry fleas impregnated with enough plague germs to kill half a village? How can they believe that one fly — and there seem to be myriads of them in ever}' dirty road — can carry over six million fatal bacteria in the hollow cups of its feet, deposit them in their milk, and so give them tj'phoid fever? Then, too, the mos- quito may be a perfect nuisance, as it buzzes around for half an hour before thrusting into one's skin the burning little lance in its proboscis ; but who ever dreamt of its being the source of malarial fever which causes more deaths tlian all the other diseases |)ut together? The MEDICAL MISSIONS 265 natives arc always greatly puzzled with us English people and think us more or less mad; but when we speak of these things they give us up at once as hope- lessly insane ! We suffer in India more than in England — though the disease is spreading in England — from bureaucratic officialdom. One of my hospitals was lately inspected by a Government official quite as innocent of medicine as myself — and I once did study paralysis agitans ! — who threatened to withdraw the Government grant because one of the instruments was marked with c|uite a harmless chemical stain. A few weeks afterwards I was preaching in an out-of-the-way village. The filth of the whole place was slowly draining into a horrible pond which was the people's water supply. " This is the way to cultivate cholera," I remarked to the clergy- man at the head of the Evangelistic Staff. On our return after the meeting, we heard a wailing. " Is some one dead ? " " Yes, a man has just died." " What was the cause ? " " Cholera." " Have there been any other fatal cases ? " " Yes, thirteen." We left our medical catechist behind, and I then reported the matter to the official referred to above, and got the usual reply, re- gretting that there was no medical practitioner to send and no sanitary official available to see about the water supply. A whole village might die of cholera, but if an instrument in a Mission hospital has got a chemical stain on it the hospital ought to be closed. Verily, gnats are still strained out of our water while camels are swallowed wholesale ! The villagers are very much troubled at one season j66 south INDIAN MISSIONS of the year with eye-flies. These pests are so tiny as to be almost invisible, but round each human head there will be a dozen always buzzing and ready to dart at the eyelids and fasten thereon. The rims of babies' eyes are often black with them ; and sometimes there will not be a single child or teacher in a school who can see properly from sore eyes. There is a great deal of blindness among the natives, and one cannot help thinking that this constant irritation must contribute to it. Zinc ointment, or a strong solution of nitrate of silver, seems to be the only remedy for this trouble- some complaint. All English hospitals get a bad name, because the quacks and barbers, who add the healing art to their tonsorial accomplishments, speak ill of them, and be- cause the villagers often take their relations to them as a last resource when all other methods have failed, and the patient has lapsed into a state of coma. When, for instance, a person has been bitten by a cobra, precious time is often lost in hunting up the village quack, whilst every minute permits more and more of the virus to circulate in the blood and so paralyse the action of the heart. When he arrives he rubs the wound with his snake-stone, a piece of hard black pebble that looks .something like sealing wax, or he cuts away the skin from the top of a cock's head and applies the bleed- ing part to the two deadly punctures. Of course the patient goes rapidly worse, is put into a cart and taken to the hospital, which may be ten or twenty miles off, and dies almost immediately. Then the hospital gets the blame for the person's death. But if the snake-stone AN INDIAN SNAKK-CHAKMIiK, WITH C( I'.KA IN A BASKET. OBSERVE THE "SPECTACLES". THE TWO UPPER POISON BANGS ARE DRAWN EVKR-l' EORTNIGHT. MEDICAL MISSIONS 267 cannot cure, why is it trusted ? Because of the magical ways in which it is thought to cure. Natives are apt to call every snake a cobra. The snake vanishes as soon as it has made its bite, and the person bitten is too much flurried — even if, as usual, it is not dark — to look and see if the "spectacles," always found on the hood of a cobra, are there or not. The vaittyan, or village doctor, assures them that it is the bite of a cobra, and then proceeds to cure them ! Similarly, if a man meets with an accident, the bone-setter tells him that his leg or arm is broken, that if he goes to the hospital he will not be out under six weeks, while he will cure him in as many days, which he does for the simple reason that there is no fracture at all. A cobra always darts like lightning at the place where it is hurt, and so an Englishman who treads on a .snake generally escapes, because the latter strikes at his shoe. A score of snake stories could be told, but there is only room for one illustration to show how credulous and unobservant natives are. They believe that a cobra can charm a bird out of a tree and make it fall into its mouth ; and they will tell you they have seen it witli their own eyes. What really happens is this : a spar- row is busy looking for insects on the ground and does not know that a snake is lying hidden in the grass. The cobra strikes like a flash, but cannot hold the fluttering bird, which flies into a tree. The cobra, however, waits there till the poi-son has had its effect, and then seizes the bird, which falls almost into its mouth. Another thing that ruins the reputation of a hospital 268 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS is that the relatives so often insist on taking a patient home to die, putting the body on the ground and de- stroying what chance there might have been of recovery at a very critical time. These poor people are veritable children, and ready to trust any quack or persistent old granny, while they are so suspicious of English methods that much patience is required in dealing with them. The saddest thing is when the doctor is called, and he knows that some oper- ation would be successful, but is allowed to do absolutely nothing. No wonder he returns home sick at heart. In the old days missionaries and their wives treated all sorts of simple cases. Many ladies, like Mrs. Caldwell, have had their crowd of patients every day ; but the ignorance of the people always stood in their way. A bread poultice is often a simple and useful applicati(jn, but if the poor hungry patient takes the poultice off and eats it, it may serve a useful purpose, but not the one for which it was intended. Here is another story. An old woman came with a relaxed throat to Mrs. Cald- well, who gave her a gargle in a bottle and told her to go home, throw her head well back, put it in her mouth and keep it there as long as possible. After a day or two she returned, complaining that she was no better, and that her neck ached terribly. When asked if she had strictly carried out the instructions, she said : " Yes, I threw my head well back, and put the bottle into my mouth, and held it there till m)' neck was almost ready to break ". She had never dreamt of taking the cork out and pouring the medicine into her mouth ! It is often said that education and medicine are the MEDICAL MISSIONS 269 two best indirect means of assisting missionary effort. They certainly need to go hand in hand. When people think that a spell written on a piece of paper, and then rolled up and swallowed like a pill, will cure sickness, education has come into play, but the knowledge is so very little as to be dangerous. Also, when women suffer from hysteria and are declared to be possessed with a devil, the thrashing that the poor woman gets to drive the devil out may be said to be worse than the disease. One often hears of cases of demoniacal posses- sion in India — ^though I have never seen one, or even heard of an authentic case — but it may be imagined that the demons themselves would resent this drastic method of expelling them. Sham ascetics have various methods of transferring demons to pots of water and sheets of paper, when it is easy work to decapitate them, or nail them to trees, while the chemicals with which they are depicted gradually fade away in the fierce hot light of the sun, after which the patient and relatives go home perfectly satisfied that the demon is dead. But such things as these make up another story. CHAPTER XIV CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Measure not the work Until the day's out and the labour done. Browning. This chapter consists of odds and ends. There has been some repetition where the different lines of thought have crossed at the junctions and then have gone off again in different directions. In spite of this, there are quite a number of questions that readers will wish to ask, that do not fall naturally under the general head- ings. An attempt is here made to answer a few of them by anticipation. The heat and snakes of India. People often say when asked to go out to work in the tropics : " I could not stand the excessive heat, though I don't mind cold ; and then, too, snakes are such horrible things, and there is so much fever". It must be admitted that if we take the j'ear all round the heat of Trichinopoly is about the greatest in the world, also that the compounds abound with snakes, and that there have been several cases of t}-phoid fever in my own bungalow. Now let us look at the other side. 270 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 271 Heat. This is very much a matter of clothes, houses and usage. People argue about it from their experi- ence in England. Here we wear heavy clothes, and our houses are built to keep out cold ; whereas in India our clothes only weigh a few pounds and our houses are built with large rooms open all round to let in every breath that blows, and with deep verandahs to give shade. In England the thermometer will jump up fifteen degrees from one day to another, people rush about between ten and four, wear straw hats, which are a much worse protection from the actinic rays than the ordinary felt, and then write to the papers about "the heat-wave". Of course old Indians feel the sudden change, and Bishop Caldwell told me that the only approach that he ever got to a sun-stroke was when riding on the top of a London 'bus in the silk hat of civilisation. In the tropics we keep indoors, or go out in a covered carriage, and when walking wear a sola topi made of pith an inch thick. The cli- mate of England is so horrible that, personally, I crave for the sun, and consider 80 degrees in the shade as the perfection of climate ; 100 degrees or more is dis- tinctly disagreeable, but this only lasts for two or three months, and is not so bad as the cold and wet which last for nine months in England. Snakes. Though I have seen scores of snakes and killed dozens, I have only once been in real danger. After dinner I generally sit out in the garden for an hour's quiet reading before going to bed. My long chair has a cushion for the head. Once, as I was going to throw myself back in it, my " Boy " (servant) shouted 272 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS panibii (snake), and then I saw a cobra coiled round the cushion and fast asleep. If I had sat down, it would probably have bitten me about the head or neck, and as one obviously cannot tie a ligature round one's neck to stop the circulation of the blood, I might have died. As it was, like the "cur of low degree" in the poem, " the snake it was that died ". Health. Everybody in India runs risks, but these risks do not keep civilians, officers and merchants at home ; why, then, should they keep missionaries ? Many missionaries have worked in India for fifty years, but young men and women often take credit to them- selves for being regardless of their health, forgetting that God gave them their lives to use and not to throw away. At first, too, they are not immune to disease as they often become later on by a process of gradual in- oculation. Will the reader pardon me for saying so much about myself? I do it to give a living interest based on personal experience. When I went to India in 1877, Bishop Caldwell remarked — not to me, of course, — that I looked more like a man going home on sick-leave than one just out ; and he prophesied that I should be back in England in a couple of years. He was right, too. While I sta3'ed in Madras for a few weeks, I was stung all over with mosquitoes. Mj- host, though a doctor, had provided neither mosquito nets nor a punkah, and my hands and feet were a sight to see. The doctor only laughed at me, for the deadly nature of the anopJicles was then unknown. I was soon saturated through and through with malarial fever, was quite hors de combat for six months, and was finally in- CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 273 valided home at the end of my second year. I was not allowed to return till I had been passed by the Society's physician, and I had to wait six months to see him, as he was abroad. When I presented myself he tapped me all over in the usual way, and then a.sked me to my great astonishment, "Are you fit to return to India?" " I have been waiting six months to ask you that ques- tion," I replied. " Oh, it is for you to say,'' he answered. So off I went, and except for occasional touches of fever, and none for the last twenty years, I have been quite free from the old attacks. As a matter of fact, it is not always the strong that live longest in the tropics. The weaker take more care of their health, as they know that they can do no work while they are ill. The others talk of " plain living and high thinking," and, putting work first and health second, die the earliest and do the least work. Of course no one, young or old, cautious or careless, missionary or layman, can always be safe from " the pestilence that walketh in darkness ". It should be added that the hill stations are now easily accessible, and those who fall ill can at once get into the finest climate in the world. Kodaikanal is our health resort. During the hottest months, April and May, about 200 missionaries, mostly Nonconformists and Roman Catholics, will be found here on holiday, though busy with much correspondence, and with large and important Missionary Conferences. While on this subject of health in relation to a mis- sionary's work, I will give another story which will probably elucidate the matter better than half a dozen 18 274 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS pages of argument. At one of the conferences of bishops, one who had just come out, and was full of reforming zeal, spoke strongly of the necessity of self- sacrifice among missionaries, and complained that they always seemed to be considering their health, and com- forts, and houses and food, instead of forgetting all these things and thinking only of their work. By his side was an aged bishop and an M.D. to boot, who had grown deaf with long service in the country. He had only caught a few words about missionaries and their health and comfort, but he was keenly interested, and at once got up to state that he cordially agreed with what his Right Reverend brother had just said, " When a young missionary comes out to my diocese," he con- tinued, " I always say to him, ' Now, my young friend, the first thing you have to consider is your health ; unless you take great care of your health you can- not possibly do your work'." He had got no further when he was interrupted by a peal of laughter from the others, in which, it is only fair to say, the young bishop heartily joined. IVIay Horace's prediction always come true — Solventur tabulce risu. It must not be concluded from this that missionaries lead an easy, comfortable life, or that they have no troubles. In reply to objectors of this class— bishops included — we may ask : " Why are you not a mis- sionary ? " There is endless scope for self-denial, and there is an endless succession of troubles. But the point to emphasise is that they do not lie in this direc- tion. Missionaries laugh at what are considered their troubles. Their real troubles have not been mentioned CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 275 in these pages. If they were, a second volume would be required. Missionaries are ready to try every method, without any thought of self, from that of Beschi, riding like a king on an elephant to impress the people, to that of Father O'Neill and Friar Stokes, living the life of the poorest natives. They are willing to sacrifice both health and life to serve their Master, but it is both foolish and wrong to throw away their lives, when God shows them that it is by their lives and not their deaths that they may serve Him best. Poverty and self-support. People in England scarcely realise how poor the na- tives are, and how difficult it is for them to maintain their own Church. Fancy a man working hard all day to earn 4d., and a schoolmaster being paid 3s. a week ! The " gorgeous East " is miserably poor. Then, too, the people cannot trust one another owing to caste, and so will not invest their money, but hoard it up, when they get a little. I once asked in college for the meaning of " A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush ". A young Muhammadan, after some thought, replied : " A bird in the hand is the money that you have got with you, and two in the bush means money put in the bank ! " It is estimated that ;£'300,ooo,ooo sterling are hoarded in India, and ;^i 1,000,000 are added to it every year. Almost as fast as gold sove- reigns are imported they are turned into jewels for women and children. The out-castes invariably drink — not so much that they get drunk, but if a man spends id. or 2d. a day in 276 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS todd)' (fermented juice of the palmyra) he has not much left for food out of 4d. Then, too, they squander money and get dreadfully into debt when there is a wedding. Interest also varies from 12 to 36 per cent, per annum. Socialists talk about the poverty of English working-men, but they do not know what poverty means. England spends more through her Poor Law every year than India spends on one of her great famines, and India has no Poor Law. Yet the Christians give very liberally to their Church. It is said by the bishop that each man, woman and child gives 2s. a year in the diocese of Madras. Canon Body's parish at Kirkby Misperton used to give £iyi, a year to the S.P.G., a truly large amount for a parish of 900 people. This works out to nearly 4s. a head, but then English work-people earn more than 4d. a day. How many parishes give even 2s. per head ? Syvipathy and gentleness. When the Prince of Wales returned from India he declared in his speech at the Guildhall that " sympathy is the supreme duty ". Quite true, but not the whole truth. Sir Andrew Eraser, formerly Lieutenant-Gover- nor of Bengal, erred, if at all, on the side of leniency, patience and gentleness. The Hindus ought to have loved him above all Englishmen, but what do we find ? His life was attempted no less than four times ! English missionaries arc always being told that if they were as patient and gentle as the Hindus the)' would soon con- vert them. This is their obvious duty, as it is that of the most ordinar}' Christians ; but why do the native ", < ai CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 277 pastors, who are also mild Hindus, fail to convert them ? The Englishman, also, has to impart his own qualities of justice and straightforwardness, or he will only be what a pastor is. A missionary, e.g:, has to be always auditing accounts, if he does not wish to see Mission money lost wholesale. A friend of mine was reported to his bishop, who was the incarnation of gentleness, for thrashing one of his catechists with his stick. What a picture for a missionaiy magazine ! The bishop was very indignant. On inquiry it was found that the missionary had given his catechist some famine relief money, sent to him from England, for his starving Christians. On his next tour he learnt that the poor people had not received one penny, but that the catechist had spent it all on himself. So my friend rose in his wrath and made the punishment fit the crime. I for one, having read of a whip being used in a temple, say " Wei! done ". It is hard to teach natives that they must be moral. 1 What is the good of talking about love to your neighbour if you steal your neighbour's ox, if you covet his wife, or refuse to pay him your debts ? Yet sometimes a native will rob his Mission and then ask you to display Christ-like forgiveness. Another story. Once when I was in Belgium on furlough I got a telegram from a native Christian whom I knew, to say that he was in London and penniless. I knew the family well ; and also that they were very well off indeed. He had been bitten by a mad dog in Burma and sent to Paris to be treated by Pasteur. He asked me for ^^30 to pay his 1 See Some Elements of Religion, by Canon Liddon, p. 12, 2 78 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS passage back, which at the time was extremely incon- venient to me to provide, but I lent it to him on condition that he paid me back as soon as I landed in Tuticorin a few months later. When I returned he declined to pay me one penny, and talked to me of the love that missionaries should display. I had to put him in court ; and he had to pay all the expenses as well as the debt. This incident is not cited to give a bad impression of native Christians. They are only babes in Christ, and missionaries make allowances accordingly. Many of them are exemplary Christians and I am proud to own them as my friends. But that is not my point. Do not blame missionaries because they are often com- pelled to be severe and stern, if they are ever to teach the natives at all, and make them learn to be moral. Fes tin a Icnte. " Hasten slowly" is a golden rule in India. Above all things the Indian admires patience and above all things he hates to be hurried and bustled out of the ordinary routine of daily life. An energetic missionary anxious to get people out of the rut, and eager to adopt all sorts of improvements, will meet with a great deal of resist- ance. 'Tis bad for the Christian's peace of mind To hustle the Aryan brown. Much of the unrest in India is due to the fact that the Government have changed the "changeless East" at such a rate as to leave it gasping for breath. Institu- tions like the Church need time to grow, and cannot be run like machines at so many hundred revolutions to CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 279 the minute. Driving one day several years ago with a friend to a small station to catch the only train for the day, we overtook a bullock-cart crawling at a snail's pace. " Hurry up, or you will miss the train," cried my friend. " Oh, it does not matter, we can go to-mor- row," was the reply. It was no hardship to them to sit and sleep on the stone platform for twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes, but hurried they would not be ! Indian bishops. " When are you going to have Indian bishops ? " we are sometimes asked, and the answer is: "As soon as ever India is ready for them". This is an ideal at which we should aim, for the Indian Church ought to be both self-supporting and self-governing. But neither is as yet in sight. The bulk of the people, too, are for the present opposed to it, laity as well as clergy, Indians no less than English. They know that the Church is not yet sufficiently advanced, and that a suitable body of men does not yet exist. Why choose the least suitable, in mind and soul, simply because of their coloured skins, or in response to mere sentiment ? The problem of episcopal oversight is difficult enough as it is without introducing this new and most serious difficulty. In India we have practically no bishops and no deacons. We have quasi-archbishops over provinces as large as the United Kingdom. Then we have super- intending missionaries over districts larger than English dioceses. They are practically bishops, as they have to do all the administrative and organising work, and 28o SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS in the early days of the Church would have been con- secrated as " chorepiscopoi " as a matter of course. But nowadays we expect a bishop to be a great man in the social scale with plenty of money. The Roman Catholics keep much closer to the apostolic model. The missionaries elect one of their own number, and expect him to be a spiritual father, but remain as poor as themselves. So long as there are urgent appeals for Oxford and Cambridge men to do all the real work, which the Indian clergy at present cannot do; and so long as the Indian Church can neither support itself nor govern itself, the consecration of Indian bishops would only throw the Church back, as the Indians themselves well know. While English missionaries are a necessity, Indian bishops are an impossibility. About eight years ago the Bishop of Madras, when in Tinnevelly, declared publicly that the supervision of native pastors by Englishmen was a necessity. What has occurred since then to reverse their positions ? Father Goreh was a brilliant exception, but his work was that of a controversial evangelist. He would have been spoiled and useless as a bishop. Many Indian priests, like my good friend " Socrates " mentioned above, do admirable work in their own way, but even his accounts had to be overhauled every quarter. He was much too " pious " a man (to use his own word) to be dishonest, but unless the Mission money had been counted on the table it would soon have been in the money-lender's hands at 36 per cent, interest. Others are clever enough in business matters, but far from being " pious ". CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 281 Then again there is the caste matter. A priest will declare that he has given up caste, but is not his wife taken from the same caste ? Does he not lodge with his own caste when from home ? Are not all his children married in the same caste? And ought not a bishop first of all to be able to rule his own house aright ? Fancy the dignity of a bishop going about to beg young men of his own caste to come and marry his daughters ! And think of him ignored by all but his own caste! Everything is already being done — and rightly so — to give the Indians free play to develop their own powers. Give the Church in India time to grow, and the fruit will ripen in due course; but if like the child in the story, we " help God to blossom the flower" with our fingers, we shall only see the fruit spoiled.^ The mind of a convert. A good chess-player is always trying to find out what his opponent is aiming at, and a good missionary is always trying to look at Indian things through Indian eyes, and to do the one is as difficult as to do the other. The Indian is very secretive and always anxious to "pump" the Englishman, but he is as ex- pert as any young lady in turning the conversation when on dangerous ground. An inquirer will talk by the hour on religion, but it is almost impossible to find out what is in his secret heart. To begin with, " There is a great gulf fixed," as Bishop Caldwell was fond of saying, " between his assent and his conviction, and a still greater gulf between his conviction and his action ". ' Co-operation wit't God, by the Rev, A. W. Robinson, D.D., p. 104. 282 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS A convert will brood for months and years, and wrestle with his own heart before taking the decisive plunge. There is first the negation of all his ingrained ideas and prejudices, and when Hinduism lies in ruins, he has still to begin his constructive work. We generally find, after his baptism, that there has been an intense crav- ing for personality — the neutral, impersonal Essence is too vague ; he longs for a consciousness of forgive- ness ; he yearns for rest from endless re-births — in a word for a personal Saviour. At first his mind is all in confusion ; then it becomes like some intricate pas- sage in music, where one jarring and involved discord runs on into another and yet another, till at last the straining sevenths and ninths slip down a semitone, and the other notes leap back to the tonic chord, and rest is found in the full harmony. As St. Augustine says, " Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it repose in Thee ". He is ready then to bear all persecution in return for that blissful peace of mind. But we missionaries make a great mistake if we allow him " to consider baptism to be the final goal," after which he " may settle down into an assured spirit- ual content".^ Baptism is our birth, and the infant life has to be nourished and protected from endless danger. Old prejudices die hard, and though Satan departs for a time he soon returns. The neglect of this elementary truth has led to much spiritual atrophy and much death. Tlte zveakncss arising froDi division. From the top of one house in Madras can be seen nine Christian churches belonging to different de- ' See The Empire of Christ, by Luca^, p. 113. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 2S3 nominations. And in many a small village Lutherans, Romans and Anglicans may be found. What a lesson to the fourth party, the Hindus ! In Trichinopoly the old Lutheran missionaries under the S.P.C.K. handed over the Mission to the S.P.'G. in 1826. But by 1850 another body of Lutherans were back again. Some of the Christians reported to the Leipzig Lutheran missionaries that they "disliked the legal spirit of the Anglican Church and the frequent dissensions about caste ; they objected to the bald, reformed mode of celebrating the Holy Communion, without previous confession ; and they wished to return to their mother Church".' This took the Lutherans in completely, as they did not know that it was the petitioners who had made all the dissensions about caste, or that the latter were aware that the Lutherans are laxer on this point than the Anglicans. And so the schism spread all over the Trichinopoly and Tanjore Districts. Many of those who left us had been previously Roman Catholics, and the way in which these had been received forms a story which is instructive in more ways than one. It happened in the year 1828 that a serious dispute took place among the Roman Catholic Christians on the northern bank of the Coleroon which led to the establishment of what was once called " the Coleroon Mission ". This was formed into a separate Mission in 1843, by the Rev. C. S. Kohlhoff, the third of that illustrious name who laboured there with unremitting zeal and kindness for thirty-eight years. He was known ^ Die EvaugtHscJi-Lutherische Taniulen lilhsion, by R. Handmann, Leipzig. 2,34 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS as " the smiling missionary," and used to go among his people with his pocket full of small coins, an un- pleasant precedent, as I found when his heritage fell to my charge, as the quid pro quo method of founding a Mission is losing favour even amongst the Romanists, who formerly swept in crowds by its means. But to return to our story. All natives love a ta?ndsha, and the most loved form of a tatnAslia is a nadagain, or musical drama. The Roman Catholics there are of two main castes Vellalars (farmers) and Servaikarars (servants). These two classes of farmers and servants were always at loggerheads, and the chief bone of con- tention was the question as to who were to take the lead- ing roles in the dramas. The Vellalars, being the higher caste, demanded the right to play all such parts as king, or prime minister ; while the Servaikarars, who were the better actors and singers — and singing forms an important feature in these plays — generally man- aged to assume to themselves the chief roles. Thus the vast crowd of onlookers — in the open air, of course — witnessed the degrading sight of Vellalars taking the minor parts and doing obeisance with clasped hands and bowed heads to their caste inferiors when decked out with gorgeous robes and tinsel crowns. Things arrived at such a pass from the disputes which constantly arose, that an appeal was made to the French mis- sionary, and he, following the usual course of Roman procedure, decided that a Vellalan must always play the part of king. The Servaikarars were much exas- perated at thi.s decision. One dark night the mission- ary's house was broken into by three or four men with CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 285 the object of doing him serious personal violence. The missionary, however, being a muscular Christian, suc- ceeded in putting his unknown assailants to flight. During the scrimmage one of the latter dropped a cudgel and lost it as he fled. Next morning this staff was found, with the owner's name branded on it — Thambasvami Servai ! The secret was then out, for Thambasvami was the leader of the aggrieved Servai- karar players. It is said that legal proceedings fol- lowed. Be that as it may, the head men from all the surrounding villages presented themselves to the Rev. J. C. Kohlhofif, who was stationed at Tanjore on the southern side of the river, requesting him to receive them into his Mission. He did his utmost to reconcile the contending parties, and at once set out to visit the French missionary with a view to making peace between him and his enraged flock. The haughty Roman, how- ever, refused to admit a heretic, as he called him, into his house. Mr. Kohlhoff then invited the missionary to visit him in his own house, but only met with another rude rebuff. Naturally he was offended at such treat- ment and made no further attempt at reconciliation. As the angry Servaikarars refused to return to their church, the result was that all the Roman Catholic Christians (754 in number) of sixteen villages joined the S.P.G., and the " Coleroon Mission," under C. S. Kohl- hoff, in the Trichinopoly District, then took its rise. The descendants of these Christians — though as usual many went back, and others, as we have just seen, joined the Lutherans from Leipzig — form at the present day the great bulk of our existing congregations in the 286 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS pastorates north of the river. Probably J. C. Kohlhoff did the best that he could under the circumstances, but we cannot fail to be struck with the frank recognition of caste ; the passion which it engenders ; the strength of its bands ; the unworthy and utterly childish motives which impelled the discontented ones to secede ; the traditional hauteur of the Roman Church in its deal- ings with " heretics " in spite of all consequences ; and, lastly, the unsatisfactory quality of the materials with which all subsequent missionaries have had to deal, owing to the lax Roman system of making the gates of heaven so wide. A temple in making. People who think that Hinduism means the philo- sophic system of the Vedanta should watch a temple grow. My attention was once drawn to some stones on a hillside with a crowbar stuck in the ground. Two Ottars (stone-hewers) had been at work when one of them suddenly died of cholera. His mate buried him there on the spot and stuck his crowbar into the ground to mark the place. People passing by saw the crow- bar and put stones round it till quite a small wall was built. Later on another crowbar appeared, the wall grew higher, and the place began to look like a village shrine. In time the shrine itself will doubtless be built, offerings made, and a pujari appointed. All village deities have weapons such as tridents for the guardians to use when evil spirits approach or small-pox threatens. No doubt a crowbar will do as well as a trident ; a stone goddess will take up her permanent abode, and, A STONECUTTER S CART DRAWN BY BUFFALOES. THE DECORATED ROOF OF A SHRINE IN A SOUTH INDIAN TEMPLE. THE CHIEF ODD OR GODDESS OF THE TEMPLE RESTS UNDER THIS DOME. THE DOME IS EITHER GILT OR PAINTED IN BRIGHT COLOURS. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 287 finally, a legend will be invented by the ////^r/ to edify the people who bring him offerings. Married missionaries. Brotherhoods are rather in favour just now, and have their advantages, but missionaries' wives have their use too. " But look at the expense ! " friends exclaim. " Look at the economy of having two workers for one salary," I retort. Bishop Sargent used to say that his wife was " as good as six curates " ; and I am quite sure that six curates could not have done the work and exercised the influence that Mrs. Caldwell did. An American visitor had once been shown every detail in the machinery of a Mission, and had asked innumer- able questions of the workers that he met. After thus leading the strenuous life all day, he was taken by the missionary into his house and introduced to his wife. At once he pounced down upon her and asked, " What (].o you do?" "I take care of the missionary," was the sensible but unexpected reply. Many a life would be saved, and many breakdowns to health and work would be averted, if missionaries only had some one to take care of them. The majority of missionaries have to lead a solitary life, and this is the worst method of all. The Indian and the Englishman. It is sad but quite true that there is a wide gulf be- tween the two races. God has put them together for the good of both. There is not only the language gulf, but the oiificial one of head and subordinate, and the 288 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS national one of foreign invader and subject ; while all the time, owing to the religious gulf, the inferior despises his superior as an unclean pariah. Then, too, the best of the English hate the lying and the unreliability that confront them everywhere ; while the best of the Indians resent what seem to them the bluntness and arrogance of the Englishman, even when he means nothing of the kind, or is full of righteous indignation. The Indian is very patient and gentle, but also very sensitive and I^roud. One day he will pluck out his eyes for you, the next he is ready to pluck out yours. Lord Curzon once made a speech condemning falsehood and the Indian love of exaggeration ; and the Indians never forgave him, but ever after treated him as an enemy, because he had told them the truth. The higher Hinduism has overwhelmed man's moral sense by the very vast- ness of its retribution of millions of re-births ; and caste prevents all idea of being " members one of another " ; also, the lower classes have been treated by the Brah- mans as slaves, and lying is always the refuge of a coward or a slave. Still the moral sense is rising. If an English missionary wishes to be popular, his course is simple enough : Treat caste as " social rank," never get angry at lying and trickery, and be free with MLssion and private money. But how can he do any of these three honestly ? Yet, if he is unpopular with his people, how is he to influence them? There is the difficulty. Nothing .seems to puzzle an average Hindu so much as the plain truth. Travelling by train at night I often tic my handkerchief over my eyes, as they are very .sensitive to light. Once in the middle of the night, I CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 289 woke and pushed up my handkerchief, as a native got into my carriage. "Are you ill?" he asked. "No." "Are you sure you are not ill?" "Yes, quite sure." He hesitated, but put in his dozen packages ; and I pushed my handkerchief down, as I wished to go to sleep again. There was a good deal of plague about, and my strange tricks once more alarmed the native. "Are you quite certain that you are well?" "Yes, I assure you that I am perfectly well." This emphatic assertion was too much for him. I must be ill as I was so positive that I was not ; so he fled, while the porter bundled out all his boxes as fast as he could. If I had tried to explain to him that the light of the carriage kept me awake unless I bandaged my eyes, he would either have concluded that I was deliberately trying to throw dust into his eyes, or else that I was mad as well as plague-stricken. Even the Prince ot Wales acknowledged that " in India sympathy has to meet with supreme difficulties". A missionary was once building a church, and borrowed an elephant from the Raja, who only stipu- lated that some one should be responsible for the proper feeding of the animal. This duty was assigned to the missionary's daughter, who soon began to sus- pect that the elephant-keeper (a Hindu) was pilfering from the daily allowance of rice. When charged with doing so, he exclaimed, " I love the elephant as if it were my child. Should I be likely to steal my child's food?" To emphasize the truth of his protest, he threw himself on his knees and stretched out his hands above his head. Thereupon the elephant, which was 19 2 go SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS standing by, plucked the end of his waist-cloth with its trunk, and out fell the stolen rice on the floor! Suardj. There is a great demand all over India now for self- government, and within certain limits that demand is both legitimate and laudable. The same applies to the Church. As soon as Bishop Caldwell was consecrated, he did his best to foster the Church Council system in Tinnevelly ; but we have made little or no advance since then. The people in England will not sufficiently trust " the man on the spot " ; committees are unwilling to concede any real authority, and without power such Church Councils speedily collapse; and, lastly, mission- aries are not allowed to have seats on their Diocesan Committees. With the denial of self-government comes necessarily a partial refusal of self-support from those who constitute, as the leading laity, the members of our councils. We missionaries maj' claim, without boasting, to be experts, and we know what is wanted far better than any outside committee. Our laity too have local knowledge which is simpl)' invaluable ; still neither they nor we have an}- real power to administer our own affairs. We are always told that the com- mittees are responsible to the subscribers in England, and so must retain all power in their own hands. That is quite true to a certain extent and is always allowed for; but what about the money subscribed locally — often a considerable share ; does not this con- stitute a certain claim to suardj? And how are we missionaries to preach self-support to our people, when CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 291 we have to tell them that self-government is denied ? Is the problem too difficult for solution? Hints have been given above as to the mistakes made by the Madras Diocesan Committee, acting with- out Church Councils, or over-riding their decisions. When a wrong policy is adopted, there is not only a great loss of money and energy, but the whole Mission is thrown back indefinitely. Hoiv Christianity may be perverted. At the village of I there is a Hindu goddess called Karumbayi, who is believed to protect the vil- lage from cholera. A few years ago some Roman Cath- olics migrated from I to A , a village thirty miles off. These Christians engaged a Hindu piljdri to transfer Karumbayi from I to A — . They prepared a rough stone, washed it, anointed it with oil and then requested the //J/'^rz' to transfer by his cere- monies the goddess, so that they might never suffer from cholera. They built a rough temple over it, and paid all expenses from their Mission funds. But they were not content with this. Near Negapa- tam the Roman Catholics have a famous image called the Potter's Virgin, who is specially noted for her miraculous powers and is visited by thousands of pil- grims, Hindu and Muslim as well as Christian. The Roman congregation at A determined to get the Virgin also to their village, and so erected a wooden cross to which she was supposed to be transferred, and this was put next to Karumbayi's stone and surrounded by a number of minor deities. Karumbayi, however, 292 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS signified her disapproval of the symbol of a cross in her neighbourhood, and so the latter had to be placed elsewhere. They say that the two goddesses are sisters and St. Thomas and St. Anthony are brothers, while prayers arc offered to all four indifferently. But what has all this got to do with us ? First, we are constantly being told that if we adopted the lenient methods of the Roman Catholics we should be as suc- cessful as they. Secondly, such winking at superstition, though it seems to make the way easier at first, kills all real progress in the future. When I asked the pastor of A what progress he was making, he replied, " We make none, and can make none, till the Hindus respect us. They club all Christians together, and despise us because we condemn idolatry by our words, but practise it just like themselves by our actions." An American Nonconformist, whom I know, once found that one of his villages had joined the Romanists bodily. His catechist said they had been bribed. One day he met the priest and hotly charged him with the offence. The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders and smiled — " You give them leetle more ; they all come back." TJie Engl is J I in India. English people often speak ill of native Christians. Yet what do they know of them ? They may live twenty years in South India, not know si.x words of Tamil, or c\'er see a Mission station, }'et they pose as impartial witnesses ! They talk in English to their Roman Catholic servants, and then if one were to CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 293 judge from the rubbish that one hears on the deck of an Indian steamer, there is not a single real Christian in the whole country. The speaker has lived there and therefore he, or she, knows ! These Roman Catholic servants are taken from the very lowest class of pariahs. What right have we to expect a high standard from such as these ? And what sort of an example do these harsh English critics set ? Is it fair — nay, is it not grossly unfair — to judge our village Christians by the standard of these town rascals ? Indian Christians are far more regular communicants than English Christians. We often have in India 300 at one Celebration, and there are as many men as women, which is seldom the case here in England.^ Moreover, as regards giving for religious purposes the Indians are, in proportion to their means, far more liberal than the English." India's greatest statesmen and soldiers — those who really hiow India — are the warmest advocates of Missions and speak of them in the highest terms of praise. Sometimes the opposite charge is made, namely, that Missions are ruined by the immorality of the English. The garrison towns certainly have a bad name, because so few of the soldiers are allowed to marry on the plea of expense. This is not only bad morality but bad policy, for it leads to great loss of efficiency and hence great ivaste of public inotiey. Still, here too, we must not exaggerate. Our own bad Christians do far more harm in their villages than the soldiers do in the garrison towns, because in a village every one knows 1 When the Sawyerpuram Church was dedicated tiiere were 753 communicants. (See p. 170.) '■' See p. 276. 294 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS what his neighbour does. I was once explaining to some Hindus the Ten Commandments, and at the close a man asked : " Why do the Christians at K. (where I was camping) steal our sheep?" I found on inquiry that the charge was true. These Christians were Roman Catholics ; still my mouth was closed. A few of the English residents are rude and over- bearing to the natives, which is very much to be re- gretted, as it is only by the sympathy and brotherly kindness of true Christianity that we can span the gulf between the two races ; but to say that English gentle- men are worse in India than they are in England, and the rest of the world, is a libel. I have always found the English as a whole most willing to help forward our work by their contributions, and to assist in other ways to the best of their abilities. One reads such scathing condemnation of them at times that I wish to state my experience. One of my friends and his wife used to send me cheques every month, entirel}' unsoli- cited ; and one year these amounted to Rs. 2000 (^^133). Of course the officials are tied down b}' religious neutrality, and this has become almost a fetish. The natives think the English have no religion at all, an im- pression which has brought us into contempt with some of the people who wish to drive us out of the country. P)Ut this is too big a subject to enter on here.' A /I liistorical parallel. Since the Aryans, some thousands of years ago, de- veloped their wonderfully subtle philosophic s)-stem, and ' Those who wish to read more of it will find it discussed in The NinetecHlh Century and After (September, 1909). CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 295 bound all India in the adamantine fetters of caste, they have resisted the onslaught of all external religions and all internal attempts at reform/ Gautama, the Buddha, attacked caste in the fifth century B.C., but signally failed. His followers were persecuted and for the most part were expelled from the country. The Muham- madans entered in the sixth century A.D., with the Quran in one hand and the sword in the other. As rulers they made many converts, but were held at arm's length by the naked power of Brahman priestcraft working through caste. Now, what has Christianity done? The Syrian Christians have been in India since the third century at least, but they made two fatal mis- takes : they tolerated caste and made no attempt to evangelise the country. Now, every church that has not the missionary spirit must become stagnant if not dead, for the church exists to evangelise the world. The Roman Catholics came in the sixteenth century, and they also found caste too strong for them and made terms with it. Buddhism and Islam have failed, and Christianity so far has scarcely fared better. The bul- wark of Brahmanism has ever been caste, and the modern Brahman scouts with scorn the possibility of India ever becoming a Christian country. " We always have won, and we always shall win," they declare. What answer can we make ? It has already been shown in previous chapters that the "awakening" now going on, with its demand for political freedom, must inevitably overthrow this great 1 1 am indebted for most of these thoughts to The Future of Christ- ianity in India, by Mr. Farquhar, Secretary of the Y.M.C.A,, Calcutta. 296 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS fortress of caste, and then the Brahmans will have to meet the Christians in the open field. Let us see how the war went in the second century of the Roman Em- pire, and compare the circumstances of those days with what we now see in India. The parallelism will be found to be truly marvellous. I. (a) On the Roman side was the enormous power of law and civil administration, coupled with the subtle philosophies of the Greeks, and supported by intense pride of race. {d) The Brahmans have been the hereditary rulers of India for centuries by sheer weight of intellect, and by their philosophic systems. They have displayed an arrogance of priestly power, as the living embodiments of God, such as no Pope of Rome has ever dreamed of. II. (a) Religion was with the Romans largely a matter of citizenship. Cicero openly laughed at the Roman gods, but prided himself on his rank. And we know how St. Paul claimed the privileges of his citi- zenship. (b) The Hindus do not object to a neglect of idola- try, a change in belief, or even to baptism, except on the ground that this sacrament " ruins their caste ". By its means they consider that a man is degraded, losing all his privileges and becoming like a pariah. III. {a) Nero, and other Roman Emperors, cruelly [jersccuted the early Christians ; while Lucius, Celsus and Porphyry wrote books sneering at Christianity. (Ji) The Hindus are not allowed to put Christians to death, but they invariably persecute, as far as they can, all high-caste converts. And from the native Press a CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 297 constant stream of abuse is poured forth on Christians and their religion. IV. (a) We know that not many of the rulers or wise were converted at first. The majority of the con- verts were slaves. (d) The Brihmans often sneer at all Christians as pariahs and slaves. When confronted with statistics of the increase of Christians, they say we are welcome to such dregs of society. V. (a) The French sceptic Renan testified to the wide diffusion of Christian ideas among the heathen in the second century. (/') Hindu writings abound with quotations from, or references to, the New Testament. The sanuyes are, of course, largely built up of Christian teaching. VI. (a) Porphyry praised Christ, but rejected Chris- tianity. (Jf) A Hindu magazine called the Hindustan Re- vieiv writes : " The Indians have been gainers, not losers, by rejecting Christianity for the sake of Christ ". VII. (a) In the second century there was a re-organ- isation of the old philosophic faitli called neo-Platonism, as a reaction against Christianity. (b) In India Mrs. Besant is teaching Theosophy in the same way, and the Hindustan Reviezv declares that, " A revival of Hinduism has taken place ". And what was the result in the past ? The proud and powerful Empire of Rome was soon laid at the foot of the Cross. And will not the Empire of India be laid there too? Christ won then in spite of all the forces 298 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS of the civilised world in array against Him. Shall He not win now ? " Truth is great and will prevail." A few fis:ures. The reader of this book will not complain that he has been troubled with too many statistics, so the following figures, which will give food for thought, may be allowed to appear. If the figures are not in all cases precise, they are near enough for the purpose. In the British Isles there are 25,000 clergymen for 42,000,000 people, or one clergyman for 1,680 people. In India there is only one missionary (not R.C.) for 100,000 people. The Church gives ;^7,094,44g for its own work in England, and only ^^882, 297 for the work of all the rest of the world, that is 2s. 6d. in the pound. There are in India and Burma 294,000,000 people ; and of these there are 2,900,000 Christians, made up of 1,772,000 Romans and Syrians, 658,000 Noncon- formists and only 470,000 Anglicans. Thus the Roman Catholics have 60 per cent., the Nonconformists 24, while we of the great and rich Church of England can only claim 16 per cent, of the Christian population. Yet God has entrusted India not to France or America but to England. Can we retain our Empire if we neglect our duty ? The Census for all India shows that the Christians increased during 1871-81 by 22 per cent., during 1881- 91 by 33-9 per cent., and during 1891-1901 by 30^8 per CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 299 cent. The increase during tlie thirty years 1871-1901 was 1 138 per cent. In Trichinopoly there are 76,000 Roman to 2,500 Anglican Christians. In other words there are 94 per cent. Roman to 3-5 percent. Anghcan and2'5 percent. Nonconformist. The United Kingdom gains ;£'8 50,000,000 a year in rents and interest, and gives .2^882,297 to Church of England Missions, that would be a trifle over £1 in £1,000 if only the rich and well-to-do contributed. The Church spends more than this on the fabric and furniture alone of its church buildings — ;£■!, 191,095. There is plenty of money, and it is only a question of how we ought to apportion our expenditure, even when we leave all idea of self-sacriiice out of account. Though people cannot give, in spite of all our efforts, ;£'i, 000,000 for the conversion of the whole world, they can spend i^ 1,000,000 on Christmas cards. The rich pay ;£'i, 500,000 for cigars, and the poor from .!{^5, 000,000 to i^iO,000,ooo for tobacco. Our drink bill is ;!f 161,000,000, t.e., about £iS a family, each year. Thus for every ^i we spend on drink, we give only i^d. for the evangelisa- tion of the world. Would it not be better both for us and for them if we reversed these figures? With ^161,000,000 we might do something. What can we do with less than ;£"i,ooo,ooo ? It cost us ;f 300,000,000 to win a small piece of South Africa for King and country, how much will it cost to win the world for the King of kings ? And there are plenty of men too, as well as money — soldiers of the Cross ; but oh, koiu little faith I 300 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS Here is a note from the Indian Census of 190 1, refer- ring to Madras : — The Christians have increased to a remarkable extent, being 1,038,854 strong against 879,437 in 1891, that is, they number 159,417, or iB'i per cent, more than they did ten years ago. Taken by themselves, and exclud- ing Europeans and Eurasians, native Christians have advanced by 19 per cent. In the decade between 1881 and 1 89 1 the increase among them was even more striking, being 48'8 per cent., and during the last thirty years it amounts to 99 per cent, against an increase in the population as a whole of 22'i per cent. In other words, native Christians have multiplied between four and five times as fast as the population generally. In the Madras Presidency there are 1,038,854 Christians. Of these 139,897 belong to the Church of England, or I3'3 per cent.; 248,709 belong to the Nonconformists, or 24 per cent. ; 642,863 belong to the Roman Catholics, or 62 per cent. ; 7,385 are classified as " others," or 7 per cent. The Church of England is far stronger in the Madras Presidency than in any other part of India, j'et, even here, it is woefully behind. The increase of Christians in the Godavery District was 336 percent, and in Tanjore 2 percent. — a striking illustration of the effects of mass movements and caste. During the last decade (1891-1901) the Roman and Syrian Christians increased by I7'2 per cent., while the non-Romans increased by 63'8 i)er cent. Taking the CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 301 last fifty years the increases are Iir5 per cent, and 857'2 per cent, respectively. It looks as if India will become a Nonconformist country unless the Anglican Church wakes up soon. The great majority of the Church of England Chris- tians, even of those connected with S.P.G. Missions, know little about distinctive Church doctrine and set no value on episcopacy. If left to themselves they would probably found a National Church on a Pres- byterian basis. I'Vk}' do we take no interest in Missions ? There is no use in disguising the fact that we of the Church of England as a body, and excluding many keen supporters of the C.M.S., and a few of the S.P.G., take no real interest in Missions. Archbishop Temple said : " It is strange that though the Church was cre- ated expressly for the purpose of evangelising man- kind, and though this is the main purpose for which it now exists, yet this fact has not received the fulness of consideration that should correspond to the Lord's command ". And again : " He who cares not for it (the Mission of the Gospel) is but half a Christian after all ". The present Archbishops of Canterbury and York lately issued a joint letter on the subject. The Pan-Anglican Congress has stirred up a little transient interest ; but as a Church we are hopelessly behind the Roman Catholics and Nonconformists. Here in England we reign su- preme, but outside our tiny little parishes, and our tiny little island, we are nowhere. Will nothing provoke the Church to jealousy ? 302 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS "Missions are a failure!" "My cousin in India says the native Christians are the worst of all." " Lord So-and-so, who was out after tigers and big game, says he never saw a single Christian!" Oh, what pitiful excuses ! If Missions are a failure why not go and put them right? If the missionaries lead idle and com- fortable lives, why not go and take their places ? If the natives are so bad, then why not do more, and give more, and pray more to make them better? Has England, which was once heathen, been ruined by Christianity ? I have lived in India for over thirty years and have never seen a tiger or a wild elephant except in a menagerie, for the simple reason that I have never been to the jungle to look for one, just as Lord So-and- so never looked for a Christian. Then we are told how dull and uninteresting depu- tations are. I dare say we are ; but sometimes we feel inclined to hit back. Is it quite fair on a missionary who has been trying to keep three and sometimes four men's work going in the tropics, and who on his return home, thoroughly fagged out and longing to be refreshed in body, mind and spirit by sympathetic Christians in England, has instead to be hustled about from parish to parish to flog up an interest in Missions in other men's churches ? I am only repeating what the Archbishop of York has said. The Sunday before "S.P.G. Sunday" the curate reads out a string of notices including " Collec- tions for the S.P.G. " ; and after the sermon or the meet- ing, and a miserable collection, no more notice is taken of the matter, and attention flies back to the Sale of Work for the new organ, the new screen or the addition of CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 303 more stained glass. Would not Amos, if alive, say, " I hate, I despise your organs and your windows " ? When the subject is mooted the clergy blame the indifference of the laity, and the laity in turn say their clergyman is absorbed in his parish-work. Yet other communities are daily occupying our vacant places in the wide earth. How do they keep up the interest? Then again, we hear that the clergy will not attend the J. CM. A. meetings. "No one will read a paper or make a speech." " What is there to talk about, and where can we get information ? " Are there not books by the score full of matters of absorbing interest? Is there not The East and the West — one of the best maga- zines printed ? There is now going on in India one of the greatest miracles that the world has ever seen. Islam in Turkey has just entered upon an entirely new phase which may revolutionise the world. Persia is in a transition stage and presents all sorts of strange pos- sibilities. China is awakening: 400,000,000 people, no small part of the world's population, are on the brink of momentous changes. Yet there is no material for a paper at a J. CM. A. meeting; there is no sub- ject for the Sunday sermon ; there is nothing for the curate to tell his C.E.M.S. meeting or Lads' Brigade; and nothing for the vicar's wife to talk about at the Mothers' Union, or his daughter at the Sunday School ; nothing for the Communicants' Guild or Prayer Meet- in^ ! Do let us get rid of these excuses. It is the want of study that is the fault. Suppose, when the Boer war was on, the editor of a daily paper had said that he could not write leading articles every day based on the 304 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS meagre telegrams at his disposal. He would very soon have found his paper cut out by a rival journalist, w^ould he not ? The Church will never rise to its responsibilities till we make Missions a part of her daily life and daily prayer ; until we realise what is meant by the simple words, " Thy kingdom come" — ^not our little parish but the world-kingdom — and that Jesus Christ is longing to see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied ; till we reflect that on the Judgment Day He will recognise no narrower sphere of service than a campaign to win the whole world; till all Church work is associated with the idea that the parish is a small bit of the king- dom, and must work only as a branch or auxiliary of the whole. All luxuries both in the Church and the home should be suppressed with a firm hand. We have no right to speak of doing things " to the glory of God," when in reality we are only contributing to our own selfish glory. If people could only be brought to realise the facts, there would be no necessity to say a word more. Work, prayer, and gifts would flow in. It is not want of heart but want of knowledge. Why then not have more Study-Circles ? Publishers will not look at our books on Mission problems, because, they say, " Men will not buy them ; it is only ladies who read and they want popular stories and plenty of pictures". Why should not men read — clergy and laymen ? The more they know of the Church abroad, the better will they do their work at home. They are devoted to — nay, slaves to — their parishes ; let them extend their interests and take a wider view. Every- CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 305 body knows the old initials, "S.P.G.". Let us give them another interpretation, Study — Pray — Give ! Giving is the easiest part of all. We cannot all go out and fight, but we can in common honesty maintain our soldiers at the front. Giving may become a pleasure as well as a duty. " Oh, but we need money for our own churches," say the church-wardens. Yes, but in the spiritual world everything goes by contraries ; no- thing is fruitful but sacrifice ; the more we send abroad the more we have at home. It is the Church abroad that keeps the Church at home alive, for the gifts come back in blessings to repay us a hundred-fold. In God's market the imports are not of less value than the exports ; without them trade would be ruined, i.e., the Catholic Church would degenerate into an insular sect. When I went to India, an old missionary took me into his church to pray, and then said : " Never let a day pass without praying for Missions ". May I conclude this book by asking the reader to do the same ? Would that some such prayer were used every day in every church in the land ! I never take a celebration myself without using it. O God, who hast made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth, and didst send Thy Blessed Son to preach peace to them that are afar off and to them that are nigh ; grant that all the people of India (or, all who know Thee not) may feel after Thee and find Thee, and hasten, O Heavenly Father, the fulfilment of Thy promise to pour out Thy Spirit upon all flesh, for the sake of Jesus Christ, our Saviour. Amen. 20 3o6 SOUTH INDIAN MISSIONS The Religions of India. (Census of igoi.) Many of those marked Hindus — probably the majority — are really animists, but they keep caste, possess a veneer of Hinduism, and so describe themselves as " Hindus ". Of the total Hindus 7'2 per cent, are Brahmans, 25'6 per cent, are out-castes, and 67-2 per cent, are Sudras and other non-Aryan castes. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 307 THE NUMBER OF BAPTISED CHRISTIANS SINCE 1826, WHEN THE S.P.G. TOOK OVER THE MISSIONS. 1826. 1836. 1846. 1856. 1866. 4,464 2,539 11,633 1876. 1886. 1896. 1906. First Division Second Division Tinnevelly Diocese . 3,802 389 4,161 5.371 2,020 4,352 6,296 3,797 6,524 4,436 1,574 9,824 5,646 3,046 16,977 5,367 3,772 30,656 5,874 4,678 30,687 5,640 5,616 30,943 Total 8,352 11,743 16,617 15,834 18,636 25,669 39,795 41,239 42,199 The First Division includes all the Missions in the two districts of Trichinopoly and Tanjore. The Second Division includes all the scattered Mis- sions in seven districts connected with Madras. The Tinnevelly Diocese includes all the Missions in the two districts of Tinnevelly and Madura (Ramnad). The somewhat violent fluctuations are due to mass movements when there is an increase {e.o-, in Tinnevelly after the famine of 1877), and to caste disputes, epi- demics, etc., when there is a decrease. There is a constant leakage, especially in the First Division and in Tinnevelly, owing to the emigration of poor Christians to Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, South Africa and even the Paciiic Islands, where good wages are to be earned on tea and rubber estates, etc. Our loss is their gain. INDEX Aaron (Catechist), 6i. Abbe Dubois, 29. Adolphus, Rev. T. P., 125, 139-48. Advocacy of evil, 145-47. Animists, 76, 80, 306. Aryans, 66-67. Asiatic Studies, So, 122, 143. Avatar v. Incarnation, 72, 239. Awakening of India, 257-60. Banns of marriage, 177. Baptism and vaccination, 176. Besant, Mrs., 223, 239, 297. Beschi, 29. Bhagavad Gita, 68, 72, 230. Bhakti, 72. Bible-women, 232,234, 237-38, 240. — translation, 61. Billing, Rev. G., 58, 63. Bishops, Indian, 191, 279-81. Bishop upset, a, i6g. Blake, Rev. W. H., 46, 224. Boarding schools, 52, 93, 232,243. Body, Canon, on almsgiving, 276. Books on Missions, 62, 65, 80, 132, 194 K, 225, 295 n. Bower, Rev. Dr., 63. Brahmans as apostles, 217-18, 226, 254. — and caste, 67, 295. — and conversion, 2r4-i7. — girls, 12, 232-33. — as students, 229. — widows, 234-35, 248. Bribery, 284, 292. Buchanan, Rev. Dr., 45. Buddha, 74, 119, 219, 295, 306. Caummerer, Rev. A. F., 54, 64. 308 Caldwell, Bp., 31, 40-52, 78, 157, 187, 223-25, 271-72, 281, 290. — on caste, 187. — college, 53, 225. — hostel, 120-21, 226, 231. — Mrs., 52, 56, 222, 244, 268,287. Calling and patience, 15. Call, missionary's, 180, Canterbury, Archbp. of, 30, 301. Carey, Rev. W., 5, 253. Carnatic, Nawab of, 34, 39, 122. Caste V. Christianity, 46, 62, i8r, 194, — — education, 116. Holy Communion, 182, 1S5, iSg-go. — — industr}', 104. mass movements, 24, 254. social rank, 10, 24,182,288. stagnation, 192-93, 2S6. — defended, 1S3, 1S7-88, 190-94. — its origin, 67. — Suppression Societv, 194. C.E.M.S., 303. Census results, 298-300. Chanda Sahib, 33. Cholera, 17, 19, So, l6r, 178, 264-65. Christian literature, 227. Christianity- perverted, 291. Christ or wife and mother ? 207-20S, 213-14. Church building, 154. — councils, 51, 290-91. — music, 99-101, 154-56. — service, 97-98. Climate, 11, 123, 271. Clive, Lord, 32-33, 38-39. INDEX 3°9 Clorinda, 47. C.M.S., 49, 301. Coleroon Mission, 45, 141, 283-85. Collector, the, 22, 174. Colleges, Christian, 223-31. Committee of Women's Work, 250-52. Compliments, 12. Conversion, compulsory, 142-43. — of a thief, 206. — of English ladies, 239. — trivial means of, 206, 211-13. — pathetic, 207, 209. — of a persecutor, 204. Convert's mind, 281-82. Corrie, Bp., 63. Cow killing, 238. Criticism, candid, 254. Cuddalore, 3r, 40, 61, 215. Cultivation, 8. Curzon, Lord, 122, 288. Customs, Indian, g, 94. Cycles of time, 150. Dalton, Capt., 32-33, 36. Dancing girls, 117, 132-33. Danish Mission, 29, 37, 121. David, C, and caste, 62, 190. Dealtry, Bp., 58. Debt, 19, 171, 276. Demoniacal possession, 77-78, 142, 269. Denmark, King of, 29-30. Deputations, 4, 249, 302. Devils, 76-78. — dancing, 77-78. Dining, 94, 151-52. Divisions, our unhappy, 282-S6. Doctor's decision, 273. — qualified, 262. Dramas, musical, 284. Dravidian cults, 17, 80-87. Drunkenness, 196-97, 275-76, 299. Dupleix, 35. East and West, meeting of, 217, 260. East and the West, The, 303. East India Co., 30, 38. Eclipses, 241, 259. Education, elementary, 56, 113-14, 221. — female, 93-96, 115-16. Elephant story, 289. English in India, 23, 292. Evangelistic Associations, 51, 153. — band, 172, 198, 202-205. — work, 139-48. Evil eye, 241. Explosions, 42, Eye files, 266. Fabricius, Rev. J. P., 61. Falcke, Rev., 62. False speaking, 25, 243, 288-89. Famine, 44, 106, 17s. Festivals and fairs, 85, 113. Figures, instructive, 298-300. Food in camp, 159-60. Francke, Prof., 29. Eraser, Sir A., 276. Gate of heaven, 131. Gargle, a, 268. Gell, Bp., 50, 126. George I., 30. Gericke, Rev. C. W., 45-48,58, 62. Girls' boarding schools, 52, 93, 97. — dancing, 95. — graduate, 57, 244. — • of India, 232-34. — reading, 52, 56, 222, 244. Godden, Rev. A. J., 60. Goddesses, 17, 80-S5, 201. God being fed, 89. — personal, 69, 72. God's siesta, 147. Goreh, Fr. Rev., 24, 194, 217, 254. Gosha women, 237, 250-51. Government inspectors, 105, 242. Greater works, 211. Groping to the Cross, 213. Harmonium playing, 155. Haste, unwise, 278, 281. Haubroe, Rev. L. P., 46, 62, 194. Health, 161, 272-75. — bishop on, 274. — resort, 273. 3IO INDEX Heat, 123, 270-71. Heavyside, Rev. J., 62. Heber, Bp., 31-32, 46, 62, 125. Hickey, Rev. W., 124. Hindu sacred books, 68. Hinduism, what is it ? 82, 286. Hoarding, 275. Hospitals, 55, 261-68. Husband dead to his wife, 213. Idaiyangudi, 51. Idolatry, 192, 205. Incarnation and caste, 193. India's need, 134. India and Englishmen, 287. Industrial schools, 57, 98, 102-106. Inquisitiveness, 15. Irungalur, 45, 261. Jaenicke, 47. J.C.M.A., 303. Jewels, 95, 235. Johnson, Bp., 53, 225. Kali, 87. Karma (works), 70-71. Karnul, Nawab of, 124. Kennet, Rev. Dr., 63, 305. King's weather, 156. Kitchen, Indian, 96. Kohlhoff, Rev. J. B., 37, 41, 45. J. C, 45, 285-86. C. S., 45-46, 124, 283-85. Krishna, 72, 82, 85, 132, 134, 238. Kulumayi, goddess, 82. Lace-making, 52, 60. Lady superintendent, 93, 242-43. Ladies' working party, 249-50. Lantern lectures, 24, 172, 202. Lawrence, Major, 32, 35, 38. Leaven, 218, 228-29, 254. Life worth living, a, 179-80. Limbrick, Rev. A. D., 60. Litigation, 20-22. London, Bishop of, 30, 242. Lover of souls, 208-209. Lutherans, 29,41, 61, 121, 183, 283, Luxuries, Church, 97, 138, 302. Madras, 60-64, 299-300. — Bishop of, 80, 276, 280. — " Christian College," 224. — Diocesan Committee, 185. 192-93, 290-91. — Theological College, 63, 122. Madura, 41-42, 54, 58, 263. — hospitals, 263. Man or woman ? 249. Margoschis, Canon, 54, 60, 64, 261. Marriage customs, rog, 171, 232, 236-37, 244-45- Married missionaries, 249, 287. Mass movements, 5, 24, 49, 205. Matrimonial agents, 109, 214. Medical evangelist, 262. — Missions, 56, 261. Microbes, 160-61, 264. Middleton, Bp., 62. Miracles, 144-45, 157. Mishaps by road, 139, 151-53. Mission records, 123. Missionary, Superintending, 91-92, 136-38, 279. Monsoons, 48, 156, 167. Mosquitoes, 153, 264, 272. Mothers' Union, 153, 303. Muhammadans, 196, 21S, 295, 303, 306. Music, 83, 98-100, 154-55, 162. Mysore, Diwan of, 34-35. Native endurance, 107-10S. — servants, loS, 159, 292-93. Nazareth, 54-57, 261. Negapatam, 45, 62, 291. Nonconformists, 58, 121, 29S, 301. Objections to Christianity, 149-50, 203-204. Missions, 292-93, 301-302, 305- Offerings, 120,276,293,298-99,305. Office work, 92. O'Neill, Rev. Fr., 225, 275. One without a second, 69, 257, 2S1. Orphans, 106-12. — stories, 107, iii. Out-castes, 25, 170-77. — and baptism, 176. INDEX 311 Out-castes and caste, 67. debts, 19, 171, 276. — settlements, 170-77. Pantheism, 69. Pastors, 153, 165-66. — success, 166. Pastorate headquarters, 153-54. Pathetic conversion, 209-10. Persecution, 206-07, 214, 216, 296. Ploughing a bride, 237. — with our heifers, 204. Plutschau, 29. Pohle, Rev. C, 39, 43, 46, 125. Polytheism, 76. Pope, Rev. Dr., 46, 53. Popularity, r94, 288. Prayer, Bp. Cotton's, 305. — subjects for, 8g, 134, 167, 197, 2ro. Prince of Wales, 276, 289. Pudukottai, Raja of, 35, 213. Quacks, 266-67. Races of India, 6-7. Ramanuja, 69, 131. Ramesvaram, 58. Ramnad, 42, 45, 58-59. Ranganathan, 126-30, 147. Receptions, i6r. Religion v. morality, 71-76, 133-34, 144. 173. 239. 258, 277. Religious neutrality, 31, 143, 229, 260, 294. River in flood, 167-70. Robert de Nobili, 29. Rock of Trichinopoly,32-35, 38,117. Roman and Indian Empires, 227, 255, 296-97. Roman Catholics, 29, 39, 121, 218, 224, 283, 291-95, 298-300. and caste, 182-83, 195. bishops, 280. Rottler, Rev. Dr., 61-62. Sacrifices, 80, 82-89, ii9' Sannyasi (ascetic), 212, 269, Sankaracharya, 6g, 131. Sargent, Bp., 49, 287. — on caste, 181. Sartorius, Rev. J. A., 61. Sattianathan, Rev., 45, 48. Sawyerpuram, 21, 53, 261, 264, 293. Schreyvogel, Rev. D., 46, 58, 124. Schultz, 60-61. Schwartz, 31, 38, 58, loi, 122-25. — at Tanjore, 40-47. Selborne, Lord, r40. Self-government, 51, 290. — V. priestcraft, 257-60. Self-support, 275-76. Servants, Indian, 108, 159, 292-3. Settlers, out-caste, 170-77. Shanars, g, 44, 47, 52. Sinnappan, Rev. A., 149. Sin, what it is, 75-76. Sita, 127, 234. Slaves, 170-72, r76, 256, 297. Snake stories, 138, 178, 266-67, 271-72. " Socrates," 166, 280. Soldiers and climate, 123. — in India, 293. S.P.C.K., 27, 29-31, 121, 126, 154, 225-26, 263, 283. Spencer, Bp. on caste, 185. Splash, a big, 168. Srirangam, 33, 37, 119, 126-32, 148. Statistics, 140, 166-67, 254, 298-300, 306-307. Stokes, Friar, 275. Strachan, Bp., 54, 63, 106, 224-25, 261. Study circles, 304. Success, what is ? 5. Sudras, 7, 81, 164, 185, 187, 217-18. Superintending missionary, 91-92, 136-38, 279. Symonds, Rev. A. R., 59, 63, 223. Sympathy, 276-78, 289. Syrian Christians, 21S, 295, 298. Swallowing camels, 265. Tamashas, 83, 107, 163, 172, 193. Tamil language, 12-14, 26, 242. — lyrics and hymns, gg-ioo, 155. — translation, 61, 63. 312 INDEX Tanjore, 39, 42-46,64, 119,283-85.': — College, 46, 224. — Raja of, 29, 43. Telugu Missions, 51. Temple in making, 286. Tent life, 157-58. Thaumaturgy, 122. Thiet caste, 164, 206. Thomas, Rev. A. H., 125 n. — Rev. J., 49. Three Rs, 221, 237. Tinnevelly, 42, 44-45, 47-58. — Missionary Association, 51. Titles, caste, 188, 190-gi, 245. Training Institutions, 93, 122. Tranquebar, 29, 41, 60. Transmigration, 70-71, 76. Trichinopoly, 31-40, 91, 113. — churches, 32, 42, 122, 126. — college, 42, 57, 116, 119, 212, 244. — rock, 32, 35-38, 117-19. — siege, 33-37. Unrest in India, 106, 228, 278. Value of a bridegroom, 236. VedatUa, 68. Vedas, 68-69, 15O1 240. Vediarpuram, 46, 52. Vellore, 58, 61. Village deities, 17. Village life, 16-17. — work, 8-g. Villagers' attitude, 162-63. 23, 137-38, Wages, 9. Wedding, an Indian, 245-46. Wenlock, Lord, 17.1. Westcott, Rev. A., 62 n. Westminster Abbey, 38. Widows, Brahman, 234-35, 24 — photograph, 248. Wife beating, 247. — choice of, 236. Wilson, Bp., on caste, i85, 94. Women of India, 234, 241. — doctors, 263. — dress, 95-96, 171, 199-200, — influence, 242, 252. — • and Queen Victoria, 171. Wyatt, Rev. J. L., 46. Yoga, 68. York, Archbp. of, 301-302, Young, Sir W. M., 219. Xavier, 29, 47, 50. Zanana, 237, 251-52. Ziegenbalg, 29-30, 61. 193- ADliRDEHN \ THE UNIVERSITY PRESS