blessedly converted, and idolatry has been completely eradicated. In
other cases where mass movements have taken place, certain
missionaries have found it physically impossible to sift out each
doubtful individual, and for safety have demanded that the whole
family or clan or village shall give up idolatry before any single
individual convert has been received for church-membership. To combine
strict faith and practice, according to the New Testament standard,
with a proper respect for local customs and traditions, demands great
wisdom in our missionaries, and makes their conferences very practical
and very necessary. Certain it is that in our Baptist missions abroad
greater care is exercised in receiving members than that to which we
are accustomed in the homeland. The missionary cannot afford to have
false disciples in the flock, if he knows it, for "one sinner
destroyeth much good."
New Year's Day at Madras was full of interest. Lady Pentland, wife of
the governor of the Madras Presidency, invited us to a New Year's
garden-party. An open-air gathering of any sort on the first day of
January would have been a novelty to us, but this one found the
atmosphere so balmy and the vegetation so green, that such a party was
a positive delight. The avenues of approach to the governor's residence
were lined with the body-guard of his excellency, stationed in twos
along the way, and clad in scarlet The reception took place under a
wide-spreading tree, on a spacious lawn. There were as many as a
thousand guests. It was a gay and beautiful scene. Hindu and Moslem,
Parsee and Christian, all met together. It was an exhibition of loyalty
to the British Crown, as well as a proof that just government may yet
weld all India's classes and castes together. Lord Pentland spoke to us
most pleasantly of certain members of his family whom we had met in
America, and Lady Pentland showed herself to be a charming hostess.
But a reception still more charming to us was the reception which the
Rochester men gave us that same New Year's night, at the bungalow of
Doctor Ferguson, close to the Day Memorial Chapel, where the sessions of
the conference were held. At least ten of our graduates sat down to
supper, together with their wives. Subsequently, from adjoining rooms,
other members of the conference came in to the New Year's reception,
which is an annual affair. The United States consul dropped in, with a
few other guests, until the total number could not have been far from
eighty. It was like a family gathering. When I remembered that the
Telugu Mission was once called "The Lone-Star Mission," and was in
danger of being given up, and when I noted that it now numbers one
hundred and sixty-eight churches and a church-membership of more than
seventy thousand, I could but say, "What hath God wrought!"
X
THE TELUGU MISSION
Madras is the greatest city of South India, and ranks next to Calcutta
and Bombay in thrift and importance. Tamil and Telugu are the two
languages of the extensive Madras Presidency, the former prevailing most
to the south, the latter to the north. They are cognate tongues, and
both are derived from the Sanskrit. Our American Congregationalists have
done most for the Tamils; we Baptists have done most for the Telugus.
The Telugus number twenty-six millions. Though Madras is near their
southern border, it is the best starting-point for our description.
Next to our mission in Burma, the Telugu mission has been most blessed
by God. The famine of 1876 was followed by a wonderful revival, in
which a nation seemed to be born in a day. The people accepted Christ
by the thousands, and twenty-two hundred were at one time baptized.
Evangelization has been followed by education. While our organized
Telugu churches number 168, and our church-members 70,000, we have 819
schools of all grades, and 28,781 pupils under instruction. The needs
of the body have been cared for, as well as the needs of the soul, for
there are fourteen hospitals and dispensaries, ministering to 8,067
patients.
In such a mass movement as that among the Telugus, it was inevitable
that the organization of the converts into distinct, self-governing,
self-supporting, and self-propagating churches should be a gradual
process and should require time. The poverty of the people was an
obstacle to self-support. But Christian teaching has made them models of
liberality, and it was touching to see the church-members come forward
at the close of the Sunday morning service with their thank-offerings.
In fact, these Telugu churches, in the support of their native ministry,
are in large measure independent of foreign financial aid. It is certain
that, so long as religion is an exotic, its existence will be
precarious. The plant in the pot needs, for permanence, to become a tree
rooted in the soil. Self-government is as necessary as self-support, and
self-propagation is equally important, if the Christianity of the native
is ever to become indigenous. These aims have been dominant in recent
years, and we have been permitted to witness scenes which demonstrate
the power of God to make multitudes of people, of the lowest class,
intelligent, liberal, and aggressive Christians.
I must take four separate stations as illustrations of my thesis.
Fortunately, all of these stations are now under the administration of
Rochester men, whom I am proud to recognize as my former pupils. But
before I proceed to describe our experiences with them, I must to some
extent repeat what I have said in my last letter about Madras and the
conference there at the house of Doctor Ferguson. Because Madras is the
greatest city of South India, it is the natural source of supplies and
the easiest place of gathering for our Telugu missionaries, even though
most of them live and work much farther to the north. The principle of
home rule requires such gathering, and the missionary at Madras, without
seeking it, naturally becomes a sort of secretary and treasurer and
entertainer of the whole body of Telugu workers. No one could be
better adapted to this position of responsibility than is Doctor
Ferguson. His abounding hospitality and his command of the whole
situation make him sought as a counselor and as a leader. As the older
men, like Clough and Downie, pass away, Doctor Ferguson, by common
consent, forges to the front. The present prosperity and harmony of
the Telugu mission are largely due to his unassuming and welcome
influence. He too is a man whose scholarship and character reflect
honor upon the Rochester Theological Seminary, where he sat under my
instruction twenty-two years ago.
Coming now to our stations north of Madras, I begin with the Theological
Seminary at Ramapatnam, in charge of the Rev. Dr. Jacob Heinrichs. Its
students met us at the entrance of the mission compound, and we passed
under an arch over which were inscribed the words, "Welcome to Dr. and
Mrs. Strong." We had garlands of flowers thrown about our necks, and we
were sprinkled with eau de Cologne. In the large assembly-room of the
seminary, we listened to addresses in excellent English from pupils of
the higher grades, and we made responses in the same language, which
were interpreted to the scholars of the lower classes by the pastor of
the village church. A beautiful casket of carved ivory and pearl was
presented to us, containing engrossed copies of the addresses delivered
by the students. There was singing of hymns, both in English and in
Telugu, by choir and congregation. The beauty of it all was its
spontaneity and naturalness, for the pupils themselves had planned and
executed the whole program.
Instruction in this seminary is largely biblical. Preachers are prepared
for their work by being grounded in the life of Christ and the life of
Paul. The text-books have been written by Doctor Heinrichs himself, and
they are so well adapted to their purpose that they have been
extensively used by seminaries of other denominations than the Baptist.
A native Christian literature has been created for the Telugus,
beginning with the Bible, but now embracing church history, theology,
ethics, and something of modern science. It must not be thought that
the teaching is exclusively religious. Our seminary, and all our
schools of lower grade, are affiliated with the government system of
education, and in all their lower grades are subject to government
inspection. So far as they conform to government standards of
thoroughness, they receive government grants of financial aid. British
India is impartial--aid is also given to Hindu and to Mohammedan
schools. But Christian schools can well stand competition with these
other systems, for the methods of our Christian schools are more
modern and more rational. We left Ramapatnam, convinced that India is
receiving from the work of Doctor Heinrichs an inestimable blessing.
Through a long series of years he has been training preachers and
teachers for this whole Telugu land, and much fruit is appearing in a
new type of New Testament pastors and evangelists.
Ongole, one hundred and eighty-one miles north of Madras, was the scene
of the great revival. Here too we were received most royally. A crowd of
church-members waited for us at the railway station and flocked round
our carriage as we passed to the mission compound. On the way, a company
of Telugu athletes entertained us at intervals by their feats of ground
and lofty tumbling. It was their native way of welcoming distinguished
guests. Dr. James M. Baker has ably succeeded Dr. J. E. Clough in the
work of administering and organizing this important field. The Ongole
church of twelve thousand members, with its connected schools, is enough
to tax the resources of the ablest man. The new Clough Memorial Hospital
had its beginning while we were in Ongole, in the laying of the
corner-stone of a gateway in honor of Dr. S. F. Smith, who wrote, "Shine
on, Lone Star," as well as "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." Mrs. Strong, with
a silver trowel, made its foundation sure, while the English deputy
collector for the district represented the government, and I had the
privilege of making an address to a great mixed audience of Hindus and
Mohammedans as well as Christians.
Our most thrilling experience in connection with Ongole I am yet to
relate. We wished to see the heart of India, as we had seen the heart of
China and the heart of Burma. We could do this only by taking part in
one of Doctor Baker's country tours. Every year he takes advantage of
the favorable weather centering about mid-winter, to spend two solid
months in visiting the villages which throng these fertile plains. With
tent and equipment for cooking, he penetrates these swarming heathen
communities and carries to them the gospel of Christ. It was over some
fearful roads that our two-pony, two-seated buggy enabled us to
accompany him. Government roads are one thing; native roads are quite
another. Sudden descents to fordable streams and sudden ascents to the
opposite banks are succeeded by long stretches of passage through
cultivated fields, where there appears no sign of road at all. At last
we reached the village of Naletur. Under the shadow of a great tree we
found at least a thousand people assembled, sitting on the ground
bordered by a broad fringe of men and women standing on the outside, and
supplemented by a score of half-naked Zaccheus-like hearers perched in
the branches of the trees. Mrs. Baker, awaiting the coming of her
husband and his guests, had been holding this motley audience for two
hours with selections from the gramophone, with illustrated Scripture
lessons and pictures from the Life of Christ, and by calling on her
"band" for "music" with a big drum, castanets, cymbals, and various
other instruments of Indian manipulation. Salvation Army methods have
great influence over a childlike people, and Mrs. Baker would make, in
case of necessity, a first-class Salvation Army lassie. In fact, no act
of missionary humility has struck our eyes as more pathetic and true,
than that of Mrs. Baker, beating a big drum to the time of native music,
in order to hold an audience for the hearing of the gospel. The
amphitheater of dusky faces, massed together and intently listening,
with Christians on one side and heathen on the other, seemed like a
reproduction of the days "when Jesus was here among men," and a
prophecy of the great final Day when our Lord, the Judge, will separate
the sheep from the goats.
That evening we left the grove and entered the village with fife and
drum, attracting auditors, and held a torchlight meeting in the
market-place. There was preaching, and the chanting, in rhythm but not
rhyme, of a versified story of the life of Christ. The missionaries
make much of this sort of Telugu singing. There was the same crowd of
auditors that had met us in the afternoon, but now the intermittent
light of the torches made the scene seem to be flashing rays of
conviction into many a troubled breast, and I wished that some great
painter could immortalize the picture upon canvas, for no one can
understand missions to the heathen without picturing to himself such
preaching.
The next morning, on our way back to Ongole, we visited the famous spot
on the river bank at Vellumpilly where, in 1878, 2,222 believers were
baptized. On Sunday we attended a service of the mission church, where a
native pastor officiated and at least fifteen hundred persons in
addition to the missionaries were present, though several hundreds of
scholars were absent on account of the holiday vacation. And finally, at
the sunset hour on that memorable Sabbath Day, we ascended
Prayer-meeting Hill, where Doctor Jewett, Mrs. Jewett, and two others
met on New Year's Day fifty years ago, looked out over the great
surrounding plain, and prayed the Lord to give them the Telugus, as John
Knox of old prayed, "Give me Scotland, or I die!" In both cases prayer
was answered, and we hope the more recent prayers offered on that
historic spot in January, 1917, will also be answered. The Telugus are
gradually being won, and we ourselves were witnesses to that fact when,
at the village of Naletur, we beheld the baptism of eleven new converts,
nine stalwart young men and two married women.
Kavali is next to be mentioned. Here is a work for the gradual
reformation of criminals and the industrial regeneration of India. In
this land of poverty and famine, our converts, when turned out of house
and home, need new means of earning a livelihood. There is in India a
hereditary criminal class which, like the thugs of a former generation,
make it a sort of religion to prey upon their fellow countrymen. The
British Government has been almost powerless either to subdue or to
reform such offenders. Something more than mere justice is required in
their treatment. The Government is recognizing the value of Christian
education and supervision, and has recently put large tracts of
territory into the hands of the Salvation Army, the Methodists, and the
Baptists, with a view to combining compulsory work and paternal
influence in the reform of the criminal classes. The Rev. Samuel D.
Bawden, at Kavali, has charge of over eight hundred such people, and is
teaching them agriculture and all manner of trades. Mr. Bawden is one of
the graduates of our theological seminary. He was for several years
chaplain of our House of Refuge at Rochester. Physically and mentally he
is a remarkable man, an athlete and almost a giant, a man of science and
a man of faith. It needs all these gifts to dominate and lead toward
Christ eight hundred born thieves. I know of no more self-sacrificing
and Christlike work than that which brother Bawden is doing.
The success of it proves its value. There are no prison walls, though
leaving the community is followed by pursuit and recommittal. There are
no punishments except deprivation of food-wages. Each member of the
community is paid in food, and in proportion to the extent of his labor.
If he will not work, neither can he eat. Opportunities for education are
given to all. There is even a church, made up of converted convicts. The
faithful among these Erukalas, as they are called, are made monitors and
helpers to their weaker fellows. Squads are sent out from five to twenty
miles, to build and repair the roads, with only an unarmed comrade for
overseer. Nothing is given but education and Christian influence.
Everything for the physical man is earned. In this way hundreds of
reformed criminals learn to gain their own living and to lead an honest
life. It was pathetic to receive the welcome of these humble men, and to
see their reverence and affection for their "big father," Mr. Bawden. We
heard them greet him as "our savior." To show their respect for Mr.
Bawden's former theological instructor, these poor men subscribed of
their scanty means and hired a large gasoline street lamp to illuminate
the evening service.
I have reserved to the last my account of our visit to Nellore. Nellore
is last, but not least, for this was our first permanent mission station
in South India. Work was indeed begun at Vizagapatam in 1836, but in
1837 it was moved to Madras, and in 1840 to Nellore, Madras being
reopened in 1878. Nellore is one hundred and seven miles north of
Madras, on the main line of railway, and sixteen miles from the
seacoast. In the Nellore field we have six churches, and a total of
nine hundred and twenty-six members. It is our Baptist schools that
most attract our attention. The Coles-Ackerman High School, in charge
of the Rev. L. C. Smith, has more than eight hundred pupils, and is a
great credit to our denomination. Bible classes and special preaching
services for students are conducted with enthusiasm by our young
missionaries, Smith and Manley, and they bring good results. There are
also in Nellore a high school for girls, a hospital for women, and a
nurses' training-school, all under the direction of our Woman's
Society. In these schools, Miss Tencate and Miss Carman are
representatives of Rochester.
The general work of the mission is presided over by the Rev. Charles
Rutherford, one of my former pupils and graduates. Mr. Rutherford is the
young and able successor of Dr. David Downie, a much older Rochester
man, and one of the pioneers and leaders of the Telugu Mission. He
graduated from Rochester in 1872, the year in which I began my work as
president of the seminary. I cannot easily express my gratification at
finding him in South India to welcome me, and to accompany me during a
large part of my stay on this field. Few men have so noble a record.
Though he retired from active service ten years ago, and is now devoting
himself to writing the history of the mission, he is still vigorous in
mind and heart, and to meet him is to come in contact with "an
incarnation"--an incarnation of the missionary spirit. He has seen "the
little one" become not only "a thousand," but well nigh a hundred
thousand. His faith is great, that this whole Telugu Land will bow to
Christ's scepter. Long may he live, to bless India and the world!
XI
THE DRAVIDIAN TEMPLES
The Dravidians are supposed by most ethnologists to have been the
aborigines of India. When they were subdued by the Aryans from the
north, they were crowded southward and were compelled to serve their
conquerors. This subjugation was the origin of caste; the weaker became
hewers of wood and drawers of water for the stronger. The Brahman would
have no social intercourse with the Sudra, and thought even his touch a
profanation. For the Brahman represented Brahma, was in fact Brahma
incarnate, while the Sudra was a manifestation of deity in inferior
clay. Yet the Brahman needed the Sudra, and had to propitiate him in
order to use him. So the Aryan absorbed into his own system some of the
Dravidian gods, and usually did so by marrying to Dravidian female
divinities male deities of his own. Siva, the Aryan god, for example,
took for his wife the Dravidian goddess Kali. In many ways like this,
the Aryan and the Dravidian united to form the Hindu. The Hindu religion
is a composite--a corruption of the nature-worship of the earlier Vedas
by its union with the more cruel and debasing features of the Dravidian
idolatry. The renowned temples of Southern India best represent this
mongrel form of Hinduism, and show Hinduism in its most corrupt
development under Dravidian influences.
The massiveness and vastness of these temples demonstrate the power of
the religious instinct in man, even when that instinct is most
perverted. With all their grossness and crudity, these shrines reveal a
wealth of imagination and an artistic inventiveness, which furnish
object-lessons to the most cultivated Occidental mind. We wonder what
the East could really have accomplished, if its native gifts had been
under the control of Christian truth. Unfortunately, those gifts were
commonly under the control of the baser instincts. Paul's philosophy of
heathenism is far more correct than that of many a modern writer on
comparative religion. Only an ancestral sin can explain man's universal
ignorance and depravity. Because he would not retain God in his
knowledge, he was given up to the dominion of vile affections, to show
him his need of a divine redemption.
Tanjore and Madura are the seats of the Dravidian temples which we
visited. Tanjore is two hundred miles south of Madras, and fifty miles
from the Bay of Bengal. It is in the Presidency of Madras, but European
influences have not greatly changed its prevailingly native aspect. The
half-naked coolies, and the children clothed only in sunshine, show how
inveterate are custom and poverty. The great Tanjore temple is the
center of worship for a hundred miles round. It is built on a stupendous
scale. It consists of a series of courts, in the midst of which are two
tremendous towers or gopuras, as the technical term should be. Its
principal tower, is pyramidal in form, is two hundred feet in height, is
covered with row after row of colossal carvings of gods and goddesses,
and is surmounted by an immense dome-shaped and gilded top of solid
stone, said to have been brought to its place upon an inclined plane
from the quarry four miles away. The gateway leading to the temple is
itself an enormous structure. It opens upon a court eight hundred feet
long by four hundred feet wide, the walls of which enclose an endless
succession of little chapels, each one of which has at its back a rude
picture of some incarnation of Vishnu or Krishna, and in front of each
picture there stands erect an image in stone of the lingam or phallus.
A great platform, in the center of the court, houses, beneath a gorgeous
canopy, an immense black granite image of a bull, the favorite animal of
Siva, carved out of a single block sixteen feet long and twelve feet
high, and kept perpetually shining by anointings of holy oil. The
imagination of the worshiper is thus excited by successive statues and
pictures, until at last he reaches the tremendous pyramidal tower, or
gopura, which portrays and symbolizes the power of the heathen god to
destroy and to recreate. That massive tower, superimposed above the idol
and forming its magnificent abiding-place, has no superior in all India
for grandeur. Mr. Fergusson, the distinguished writer on architecture,
calls it the most beautiful and effective of all the towers found in
Dravidian temples. The sculptures in the long and dimly lighted
corridors at the base of the temple, and in the first tiers of the
tower, are wonderfully realistic representations of a sensual and
ferocious deity. But, as you stand in the court, and look up the sides
of the tower to the gilded pinnacle on its dome, you discover that all
the upper rows of gods and demons are of stucco. Money evidently gave
out, as the structure rose, and plaster took the place of stone.
The appurtenances of the temple are tawdry and childish. Huge cars, in
which images of the gods are carried about at times of festival, stand
in the courtyard. Each car has its bejeweled beast for the god or
goddess to ride--a wooden elephant, a wooden bull, a wooden rat--each
with trappings of many-colored glass, to imitate rubies and diamonds,
and each with its escort of dusky priests, not forgetting to follow the
foreign visitor and hold out their hands for alms. Yet in these
corridors there were prostrated many absorbed and eager worshipers,
seeking protection or aid from a deity more demonlike than divine. One's
heart grew sick as he realized that, still in these latter days,
The heathen in his blindness
Bows down to wood and stone,
and worships in a temple which exhibits in its halls a hundred immense
images of the male organ of generation.