THE FRIAR AND THE LUTHERAN.
It was Marco Polo, after his travels in the East at the end of the
thirteenth century, who first awoke the Church in Europe to take some
interest in the Christian community far away in India. He told the tale
of what he had seen on his visit to Malabar, how that the shrine of St.
Thomas attracted many pilgrims and that cures were wrought by a handful
of sacred dust from his grave. Also that the church which contained
the body of the martyr was supported by the produce of the groves of
coco-nut palm trees, and that in the vicinity were many Jews. Here then
was the ancient Syrian Church preserving the flickering flame of truth
amid the darkness of heathenism.
Meanwhile the two great Orders of the Middle Ages, the Franciscans
and the Dominicans, were, at the bidding of the Popes, carrying far
and wide the missions by which the all-embracing power and authority
of Rome would assert itself, not only in making converts, but in
bringing the political power of courts into its grasp and subjection.
In the year 1319 a group of friars sailed for the Far East and found
themselves on the shores of India (near the modern Bombay), and the
leader of them, Jordan or Jordanus, during a stay of two years, visited
the Nestorian churches and travelled amid many perils, for the leaders
of Islam were oppressing the Christians. The true mission of Jordan
was doubtless to bring the Nestorians to acknowledge the supremacy of
the Pope, for up to this time they accepted only the rule of their
own Archbishop at Bandas (Baghdad). He bitterly complains in his
letters to the Pope of the disorder in doctrine which prevails. Not
even the rite of baptism is administered and many are so ignorant that
they believe Saint Thomas the Great to be the Christ. This friar had,
however, the saving quality of optimism, especially in the work of his
own Order, for he says, “Of the conversion of those nations of India I
say this, that if there were two or three hundred good friars who would
faithfully and fervently preach the Catholic faith, there is not a year
that would not see more than ten thousand persons converted to the
Christian faith.”
With the dawn of the sixteenth century we meet the awakening of that
spirit of discovery which was to affect so deeply the missionary
enterprise of the world. Vasco da Gama had already visited India in
May, 1498, and henceforward from Portugal, the faithful son of the
Romish Church, sailed ships of exploration and adventure to establish
trading colonies, upon the decks of which were hundreds of friars.
Churches, monasteries, and colleges sprang up wherever they landed,
and Goa, raised to the dignity of a bishopric, became the flourishing
centre of Church and Empire. One of the most significant events of this
age, however, was the meeting together on the Feast of the Assumption,
in the year 1534, of Ignatius Loyola and six friends to establish the
Society of Jesus. One of them was a young man who had been reared amid
Protestant influences and was related on his mother’s side to the Kings
of Navarre. This was Francis Xavier, whose name and character is a
glowing point in the history of that time. Shorn of the legends which
his Church has woven about his career, the great missionary cannot fail
to command the attention and admiration of the historian, and, as his
first sphere was India, he deserves a special reference in the early
history of Christian missions there. At first his royal patron, John
III of Portugal, hesitated whether he should not keep Xavier at home,
but eventually he was sent with the new Viceroy and a suite of notables
in a well-equipped fleet of seven vessels to Goa on the 7th April,
1541. The young monk, burning with missionary zeal, looked across the
waters with a beating heart. He did not lack authority, temporal and
spiritual, for he went out as Papal Nuncio to the new world, with
full powers to propagate the faith of the Church of Rome in all the
East, was recommended to the care of David, King of Ethiopia, and all
the princes and governors were urged to pay him respect and service.
But his heart’s desire was not dependent upon these. He came as one
ready to suffer and bear trials, and to the end of his life these were
bravely borne. The inner spirit and purpose of the man is best revealed
in his letters, and when he arrived at Goa, and saw what awaited him,
he wrote thus home to his friends:
“I am persuaded that those who truly love the Cross of Christ esteem
a life thus passed in affliction to be a happy one and regard an
avoidance of the cross or an exemption from it as a kind of death.
For what death is more bitter than to live without Christ when once
we have tasted His preciousness; or to desert Him, that we may follow
our own desires? Believe me, no cross is to be compared with this
cross. On the other hand, how happy it is to live in dying daily and
in mortifying our own will and in seeking not our own but the things
that are Jesus Christ’s! I trust that through the merits and prayers
of our holy mother the Church, in which is my chief confidence, and
through the prayers of its living members, to which you belong, our
Lord Jesus Christ will sow the Gospel seed in this heathen land by my
instrumentality, though a worthless servant. Especially if He shall be
pleased to use such a poor creature as I am for so great a work it may
shame the men who are born for great achievements, and it may stir up
the courage of the timid, when forsooth they see me, who am but dust
and ashes and the most abject of men, a visible witness of the great
want of labourers.”[3]
With a spirit so brave and aims so high and self-renouncing, one cannot
help wondering what he might not have done had he preached a purer
creed and been less fettered and influenced by political association.
His landing at Goa, with the whole heathen and Mohammedan millions
to win for Christ, was rather a bad beginning, since being under the
orders of the Viceroy he had to limit himself to the pearl fishers at
Tuticorin. Here he had to make Christians in order to bring a valuable
industry to Portuguese advantage, an arrangement having already been
made whereby the fishermen were willing to change their religion if
they might be protected against the Mohammedans.
Xavier knew nothing of the language and did not seem to think it
necessary at any time to learn. He went from village to village with
a hand bell, getting the crowd of boys to repeat after him words of
the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and Ave Maria, and then as opportunity
offered baptising old and young wholesale. He admits his difficulties
when he writes: “Conceive therefore what kind of life I live in this
place, what kind of sermons I am able to address to the assemblies when
they who should repeat my address to their people do not understand me
or I them. I ought to be an adept in dumb show. Yet I am not without
work, for I want no interpreter to baptise infants just born or those
which their parents bring, nor to relieve the famished and the naked
who come in my way. So I devote myself to these two kinds of good works
and do not regard my time as lost.”[4] So little did his catechumens
understand what they were doing that he admits to his companion
Mansilla that he found they were stumbling over the very first sentence
of the creed and saying “I will” (_volo_) instead of “I believe”
(_credo_) in their baptismal services.
Leaving the pearl fishers after a year’s work the great Jesuit turned
his attention to the conversion of princes and kings. He gained great
influence over the King of Travancore, using it for the protection
of Christians, for many of the members of the old Syrian Church were
living on the western coast of his dominions and suffered much from
the oppression of tax gatherers. The truth of his labours is sadly
exaggerated and overladen with the legends of his Jesuit biographers,
who relate miracles performed by him even so improbable as the raising
of the dead. Twenty years after his death, when he was canonized by
Gregory XV as a Saint, these miracles were set forth to his honour,
among them being a gift of tongues by which without any learning he
could fluently speak any language, a statement which his own letters
prove to be a fiction.
It is not within the scope of the present work to deal with anything
beyond his three years’ work in India, which leaves the greater portion
of his deeply interesting career unrecorded. This first attempt to
evangelize the world certainly gave him no content or satisfaction.
He writes on 14th January, 1549, on the eve of his leaving for Japan,
these words of keen disappointment, speaking of India:--“The natives,
on account of the enormity of their wickedness, are as little as
possible fitted to embrace the Christian religion. They so abhor it
that they have no patience to listen to us if we introduce the subject.
To ask them to become Christians is like asking them to submit to
death.”[5]
On his return he spent some months in arranging the work of the
crowd of Jesuits who had followed him, but it cannot be said that he
renewed his original plan of preaching _Christianity_ in a simple
and elementary manner to the nations of India. But with all his
limitations he stands on the horizon of history as one of the greatest
missionaries his Church ever knew. He had the courage of a hero and the
piety of a martyr, and his end, as he died of fever in a dirty hut on
the Island of Sancian, amid unsympathetic strangers, without the rites
of his Church, with his glowing eyes wistfully looking towards the
China he hoped to win, forms a sad but not inappropriate close to his
life.
His less distinguished successors are deserving of only a brief
mention. Their methods were open to grave objection, and, indeed, were
condemned by Pope Clement XI. The Jesuit influence declined with the
decay of Portuguese power and the advance of that of the Dutch. The
newcomers were not disposed to favour Roman Catholic missionaries; it
could hardly be expected that the nation which withstood the arrogance
of Philip of Spain could tolerate with equanimity the Jesuits in
their Eastern possessions. On the other hand, the missionaries of the
Reformed Protestant faith were naturally encouraged to go forward, and
in Ceylon the Dutch missionaries won great though ephemeral successes.
We must now look at the part played by Denmark in the evangelization of
India. This was largely due in the first instance to that enlightened
Christian King Frederick IV, who having concluded a long and disastrous
war with Charles XII of Sweden was able to turn his attention to the
work of evangelizing the East. In this he was prompted by Dr. Lütkens,
his chaplain, who was also interested in the development of a strip of
territory purchased from the Rajah of Tanjore. Here then was the moment
of providential opportunity and soon the man appeared who was ready and
willing to embrace it.
[Illustration:
Bartholomæus Ziegenbalg,
Misnensis Saxo, Ecclesiæ ex Indis
collectæ Præpositus.
]
In the little town of Pulsnitz in Lusatia was a youth named Bartholomew
Ziegenbalg, who was born on 24th June, 1683. The fatherless boy, who
had lost his mother a few years before, recalled her words about
gathered treasure: “Seek it in your Bible, my dear children, you
will find it there, for I have watered every leaf with my prayers.” His
studies were in the direction of a ministerial career, which he felt
God had placed before him, but his weak health and lack of means were
hindrances to this. Through the kindness of friends, however, he was
able to study at Halle under the direction of Professor A. H. Francke,
and eventually he was discovered by Dr. Lütkens and, with his friend
Henry Plütschau, was appointed to go to India. He set sail on the 29th
November, 1705. He left behind many friends who wished him God-speed,
but not a few, of little faith and equal grace of soul, sneered at his
zeal and predicted nothing but failure and shame.
Through a long and stormy passage he worked hard to acquire a knowledge
of Portuguese, and at last, reaching his destination, stepped ashore
without a friend to meet or welcome him and his companion to this
strange land. They were evidently not wanted in India. On every hand
they looked round only to find a fresh trial of their faith.
The natives were bigoted Hindus and Mohammedans, whose tongue had to
be mastered; added to this the Europeans, with the flimsiest semblance
of a Christian profession, were living dissolute and mercenary lives
which brooked no interference. It is the old story, many times repeated
since then. The name of Christ was profaned by the white people who
were supposed to represent and honour it. Said a native to a chaplain:
“Christian religion! Devil religion! Christian much drunk, much do
wrong, much beat, much abuse others!” But Ziegenbalg and his comrade
had come to warn their unruly brethren and to vindicate the power and
grace of Christ to the heathen. They taught the children in schools,
they learned Tamil in order to preach, and toiled with an unremitting
zeal which soon broke down the health of poor Ziegenbalg.
It is marvellous to see what the faith and persistency of these brave
men could accomplish. This is what Ziegenbalg writes about the building
of their little church:
“We began, in great poverty but in firm trust and confidence in God,
to build in a great heathen street in the city, and though we did not
know how we should bring the work to a conclusion, God so strengthened
our faith amidst obstacles, that we spent upon it all we could save
from our salaries and whatever we had laid up before. Many mocked us
but some were moved to pity and to help us. Thus this house of assembly
was carried on with all speed, thirty persons, who were all heathens,
working on it daily. On the 4th of August, 1707 (exactly two months
after laying the first stone), it was consecrated in both languages, in
the presence of a great number of Christians, Mohammedans and heathen,
and the church received the name of New Jerusalem.”
Wherever he went he entered into conversation with the people on
the subject of religion and was bold in declaring that their idols
were naught. It was also his custom to gather at Negatapatam the
learned Brahmins for a discussion sometimes lasting for five hours,
and on one occasion one of these declared that the Supreme Being had
revealed Himself to Europeans in one way and to Hindus in another;
they might believe in Jesus Christ, but the Hindus were equally right
in worshipping idols; a virtuous life was the one thing needful. “My
friend,” said Ziegenbalg, “no man can lead such a life but by the help
of Christ, but it is not in my power to make you perceive this; go home
and bow down humbly before the supreme Lord of All and ask Him to show
you how it is necessary to believe in Jesus Christ and own Him for your
Redeemer.”
His greatest difficulty seems to have been with the civil authorities,
and Hassius, the governor of Tranquebar, an ill-conditioned
Jack-in-office, actually struck the missionary on the breast during an
outburst of passion and had him arrested on some frivolous pretext
and conducted from his study just as he was, in dressing gown and
slippers, through the streets under an armed escort. For four months he
was immured in a dark cell, deprived of pen and paper and books, the
governor thereby hoping to break his spirit so that his prisoner might
beg for release and return to Europe. But he had mistaken the mettle
of his man. The answer of Ziegenbalg to this insolent suggestion was:
“I bear you no ill will, but you may see that I do not fear you in the
least.” Meanwhile, crowds outside clamoured for his release, even the
natives who did not accept his religion holding him in deep respect and
honour. When he eventually returned to his work he found the Christians
all scattered by persecution, his schools closed, and, to add to his
troubles, the ship which was bringing him money and supplies had
foundered at sea. Soon afterwards, however, a letter came to him from
the King of Denmark, and three brethren, Gründler, Bövingh and Jordan,
arrived to strengthen his hands.
Ten years before this, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
had been established and these English friends were destined to become
the faithful and effectual supporters of Ziegenbalg and the Danish
Mission in India. Through their agency the work was made widely known
to England and Europe, and help was sent out for the translation of
the Holy Scriptures and the opening of schools. The chaplains of the
English forts at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay were entreated to show
the missionary and his flock every favour. Ziegenbalg’s companion,
Plütschau, had to return to Europe on account of failing health, but
the work grew and extended in different directions. One of the notable
converts at this time was a Tamil poet, Kanabadi by name, who was
asked by Ziegenbalg to translate some portions of the Bible into that
language and by doing so was led into the light. Afterwards he rendered
the life of Christ into verse and used to sing it with the children
on the housetops in the cool of the evening. Whatever great things
our nation has done for India since then--and the Church has poured
forth without stint her best treasure and noble witnesses for the
salvation of its people--the palm of credit must be given to Denmark
and Germany for the pioneer missionary efforts. The great missionaries
of England were yet unborn, but the hearts of many godly people were
deeply stirred by the tidings of what was being dared and done by the
Lutheran brethren who had gone forth with their Bibles in their hands.
Their letters home had been translated into English by the Rev. A. W.
Boehme, the German chaplain of Prince George of Denmark (the uncle of
King Frederick), and these were sent to the Society for the Propagation
of the Gospel, asking their sympathy and help. The latter, however, it
was not in their power, under their original charter, to give, as they
were limited to the “English Plantations and Colonies,” so the appeal
came to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, which was not
so bound in its action. Thus it came to pass in the order of Divine
Providence that this Society should have the privilege of expressing
the pious liberality and equally precious direction which the Christian
love and faith in England placed at the service of the needs of India.
Its practical sympathy was shown at once by sending many copies of the
New Testament in Portuguese to Tranquebar and a printing press with a
fount of Roman type, together also with one Jonas Fincke, a printer by
trade. These, however, were perilous days for ships, and the French
captured the ship off Brazil, which seems a little out of her course,
and took Fincke as a prisoner of war. In the end he was set free but
died at the Cape of Good Hope of fever and the belated press arrived in
India the following year. Fortunately, one of the soldiers of the East
India Company was found who could work a press, and thus catechisms,
hymn books and tracts began for the first time to be printed for the
mission.
In 1714 Ziegenbalg returned to his native land for a little rest,
freely forgiving his old foe the Governor, who trembled for the
consequences if the King heard of his shameful conduct. Bövingh, full
of fault-finding, was already on his way back to Germany, scarcely on
friendly terms with his old leader and comrade. Ziegenbalg reached
the camp when the King was engaged in the siege of Stralsund and his
reception was a remarkable tribute to his character.
“One evening there was evidently a profound movement among the Danish
troops. A stranger of note had had an audience with the King, who had
shown him singular favour, and for hours, it was said, they had been
closeted together. The soldiers who had gathered round may have been
disappointed when they saw he was only a clergyman, a man indeed of
commanding presence, of a wonderful dignity and fire, resolute and
calm, with a keen eye, a bronzed and almost swarthy face seamed with
deep lines of care, and a winning courtesy and lovableness of manner.
But when he opened his lips and preached to them and they heard it
was Ziegenbalg, the missionary from Tranquebar, there were some at
least who ceased to wonder at his welcome from the King. To the camp
Ziegenbalg had hurried with all speed. Letters had given no warning
of his journey and he seemed to have dropped out of the clouds. He
was accustomed to rapid movements, and he had no time to spare, but
he got his story told to the King and was content. Some days were
snatched from war for this work of peace, changes and arrangements were
proposed in the management of the mission, Ziegenbalg was informed that
his patent of superintendent had already been sent out to India, and
for details he was referred to Copenhagen. Thither he journeyed with
restless speed, and then into Germany to Francke at Halle, halting
little at any place and preaching to vast crowds who filled the
churches and swayed out into the street, ‘very weak,’ we are told,
‘yet kindling by his presence the zeal of all the mission friends and
moving his audience as he would by his glowing appeals.’”[6]
His visit to England was specially gratifying to Ziegenbalg. He was
personally for the first time to meet all those good friends of the
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge who had so liberally supplied
him with money, books and letters full of encouragement. At a meeting
of the Society he was welcomed with an eloquent Latin address, to
which he replied in Tamil. Before his return the aged missionary was
presented to King George I, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London and other eminent
persons, and afterwards in 1717 the King wrote him a letter in Latin
in which he said: “We pray you may be endued with health and strength
of body, that you may long continue to fulfil your ministry with good
success, of which we shall be rejoiced to hear, so you will always find
us ready to succour you in whatever may tend to promote your work and
to excite your zeal.”
Two years afterwards when Archbishop Wake was acting as President of
the Society he sent to Ziegenbalg and his colleague Gründler a Latin
letter full of good wishes. The following extract will show the spirit
of this Apostolic epistle:--
“Your praise it will be (a praise of endless duration on earth and
followed by a just recompense in Heaven) to have laboured in the
vineyard which yourselves have planted, to have declared the Name
of Christ where it was not known before and through much peril and
difficulty to have converted to the faith those among whom you
afterwards fulfilled your ministry. Your province therefore, brethren,
your office, I place before all dignities in the Church. Let others be
pontiffs, patriarchs, or popes, let them glitter in purple, in scarlet
or in gold, let them seek the admiration of the wondering multitude and
receive obeisance on the bended knee. You have acquired a better name
than they and a more sacred fame. Admitted into the glorious society of
the prophets, evangelists and apostles, ye with them shall shine like
the sun among his lesser stars in the Kingdom of your Father, for ever.”
The subsequent years spent at Tranquebar were a mingled experience
of blessing, progress and difficulties, and disappointment at the
loss of some very promising converts. And the time for the departure
of Ziegenbalg drew near. It is painful to hear that the sorrow which
hastened his end was not the opposition of unbelievers but the
persecution of a man who for a time was the presiding power on the
Missionary Board at Copenhagen. With a narrow and uncharitable spirit
he assailed Ziegenbalg and his co-workers, trying to force upon the
already wearied workers theories and orders as foolish as unkind.
Ziegenbalg answered this mandate with a dying hand, but the mischief
was already wrought. He was not the first brave witness of Christ who
has laid down his life in a storm. On Christmas Day, 1719, he preached
to his flock for the last time, and after much patient suffering,
interspersed with tender counsel, meditation and prayer, he asked
to be seated in his armchair and that they would sing his favourite
hymn--written by Louisa Henrietta, Electress of Brandenburg.
“Jesus Meine Zuversicht.”
Jesus my Redeemer lives,
Christ my trust is dead no more,
In the strength this knowledge gives,
Shall not all my fears be o’er,
Though the night of death be fraught
Still with many an anxious thought.
As the voices filled the chamber he caught the sound of other music
beyond the river and passed heavenward. Old before his time, for he was
scarcely thirty-six, Ziegenbalg had put into those years a consecrated
labour which was evidenced by the four hundred converts and catechumens
who followed their stricken shepherd to his rest. He was buried in
the Jerusalem Church he had built, and the remains of his colleague,
Gründler, are also within those walls. On the other side of the way is
the old Danish Government Church of Zion, built in the early days of
the mission. In the vestry is suspended a curious representation of the
Last Supper carved in high relief and painted, the Latin inscription
underneath being:--
“Tu vis esse meus per coenam, Christe, sacratam:
Fac, Amor, aeternum sim maneamque tuus.”
It may be said with truth of Ziegenbalg that he was a born pioneer,
undaunted in courage, fertile in resource, patient and yet full of
inspiration, with a remarkable gift of organization. Plütschau, his
comrade, on the other hand, was differently made, a timid, faithful,
earnest and pensive man.
[Illustration: NEW JERUSALEM CHURCH, TRANQUEBAR
THE MISSION CHURCH BUILT BY ZIEGENBALG, 1717]
After the loss of its leader the mission soon suffered again. Gründler,
a faithful and able man, ordained by the Bishop of Zealand in 1708,
under the same provocation from Copenhagen which killed his chief, died
of a broken heart the year following, and the three young missionaries
who came to pick up the thread were good but scarcely sufficient for
the task. Benjamin Schultze was an intellectual and talented man, with
linguistic gifts, which he used in translating the Bible, in this
respect completing the work which Ziegenbalg had left unfinished. When
he felt called to leave Tranquebar and make Madras his sphere of work
Schultze showed his capacity for work and great ability. The school he
started in Black Town was very successful; so many men came to visit
him, asking for Christian teaching, that he was compelled to fix an
hour every day to preach to them. While diligent with his pen it was
his stated opinion that “_viva voce_ preaching, the testimony of a
living man, had a great advantage over the private reading of books.”
But Schultze did both. He mastered the difficult Telegu; worked hard
at Hindustani in order that, as this was the language used by the
Mohammedans, he might translate the New Testament and part of the
Old, and also write a refutation of the Koran. But he ruled badly,
being restless and lacking in dignity. He could not get on with his
colleagues, Sartorius and Geister, most excellent brethren, who were
the first two missionaries sent out by the S.P.C.K. The committee had
hoped that, by persuading Schultze to open a new mission at Cuddalore
and leaving these colleagues at Madras, peace might be maintained.
Certainly the epistle they sent to him is a model of considerate
insistency.
“You have, good sir, we believe, as few failings as any missionary in
India, and as warm a zeal to promote the Glory of God. Do what you can
to sacrifice your chiefest failing to this Zeal, and to mortify the
least degree of pride that can tempt you to assume a Superiority or
Rule over your fellow labourers, altho’ your merit may make you worthy
of it and would probably command it of them, if you did not assume it.”
Schultze, however, declined to move, and as a consequence Sartorius and
Geister began the work at Cudalore (as then spelt), where the former
died in 1738 and was buried in the English burial ground with every
mark of respect.
Schultze finally returned to Germany in broken health, after
twenty-four years of work in India. For years after, he served the
cause of missions at Halle, and to him the honour was given of
numbering amongst his students the distinguished and noble man who is
the subject of the present biography.
Another, Keistenmacher by name, died after a few weeks of his
arrival. The question of caste in the Church had become an “apple of
dissension,” and two new missionaries, Walther and Pressier, reversing
the practice of Schultze, maintained the toleration of caste as a
matter of principle so that the Sudras were now kept a yard apart
from the Pariahs, and their children in the schools separated. One
important development marked this period of the mission: Aaron, a
native catechist who had been baptised by Ziegenbalg, was ordained a
minister according to the rights of the Lutheran Church, and sent to
Tanjore. Other missionaries came out from Europe. One only perhaps
needs specific mention here, Philipp Fabricius, who arrived at Madras
in 1742 and for fifty years laboured with much wisdom and patience. He
made a close study of Tamil literature and is always to be remembered
as the hymn writer of the Tamil Christians. He was pre-eminently a
scholar; indeed so slow and reverent was he in his translation work
that when he was making his Tamil version of the Holy Scripture it is
said that “he crept through the original Bible text on his knees as if
he was himself a poor sinner or mendicant, carefully weighing every
word to see how it might best be rendered.” It is a sorrowful fact to
record that through financial speculations in which he was deceived by
a dishonest catechist, poor Fabricius ended under a cloud of debt which
brought scandal on the mission work, and old and quite weary of life,
on the 23rd January, 1791, he passed to his rest.
As Tanjore will have considerable attention in the subsequent story of
the spread of Christianity in this part of India, it is only fair to
make some reference here to the earnest native who started the work
in these earlier days. He was an outcast Pariah, by name Rajanaiken,
a Roman Catholic, whose mind was awakened by reading Ziegenbalg’s
translation of the New Testament, and forthwith, with great courage and
devotion, he threw in his lot with the Protestant missionaries. He gave
up his position as an officer in the service of the King of Tanjore,
became a catechist, and, though persecuted with vindictive cruelty by
the Jesuit Beschi, he stood faithful. His father was killed and his two
brothers were wounded at his side by the emissaries of this man, but he
was himself spared to do a good and permanent work among both heathens
and Christians, and died in 1771 at the age of seventy-one.
Thus the work of the Danish Mission, for the first forty years of the
eighteenth century so zealously pursued and in its later years so
generously supported by the S.P.C.K., had spread from Tranquebar to
Cuddalore and Madras and to Tanjore in the interior. In many instances
the missionaries rendered great services to the English garrisons,
especially to the foreign levies, for in 1749 an enlistment of Swiss
soldiers made the ministrations of these Danish and German clergymen
very acceptable. These missionaries, it must be remembered, used the
English Prayer Book or translations of it, taught the Church catechism
in their schools, and in their adult work observed the ordinance of
baptism according to the English rite. In one of the ancient minutes of
the S.P.C.K., dated 4th December, 1744, are the words, “Recommended to
ye Missionaries to continue ye use of ye ch. of Eng. Catechism and to
baptise in ye form of Com. Prayer.”
We have now arrived at a point in the history of these early missions
of Christianity in India at which in the Providence of God one of the
greatest, if not the most distinguished, of the missionaries of his
time appears upon the scene.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Venn, _Life of Xavier_, p. 28.
[4] _Ibid._, p. 37.
[5] Venn, _Life of Xavier_, p. 156.
[6] W. Fleming Stevenson in _Good Words_, Dec., 1872.