ANGLICAN AND PROTESTANT MISSIONS
Protestant missions were the offshoots of reformation. The Reformation evoked Protestantism and evangelicalism. In other words, reformation, Protestantism, evangelicalism and missionary activities were different stages of a continuous process. The political invasion of Europe made colonies and gave birth to colonialism. The religious invasion of Europe, by one hand, took away and destroyed the indigenous cultural plurality of the societies across the world; by other hand it strengthened, purified and modernized the popular cultures by adding western ideas, liberal education, social justice and; recognizing and strengthening the ‘vernacular’ languages. Diffusion of western culture into the eastern through was something like the standardization of language. On one side, the standardization of language fortifies the language by defining the spelling and meaning of words. On other hand, it allows the colloquial words to be raised into the status of high language by repeatedly using and familiarsing it. It had some perils as well as some boons; there were some thorns here and there around the roses.
4.01 THE REFORMATION:
4.02 PROTESTANTISM: Protestantism was the product of reformation begun and led by Martin Luther. Dr.K.M.George writes about the origin of Protestantism as follows: “For centuries the Rome Centered church was the only spiritual society in Western Europe. It had the unique position of being considered the sole guardian of true Christian teaching from the time of the apostles. The church reached its zenith in the 13th century.
Although that Rome-centered church had developed a highly centralized administrative system with a monolithic pattern, it was radically challenged under the leadership of Marti Luther (1483-1546), an Augustinian monk. He questioned the centralized hierarchical structures especially the role of the papacy. Luther’s main problems with the Rome-centered church were threefold: first, the sale of indulgences as a way of increasing the revenue of the church which enabled the church to become very wealthy through moral blackmail; second, the belief of the Rome-centered church that during Mass (Eucharist or Communion), the wine and bread literally turn into the blood and flesh of Jesus; and third, the concept of purgatory the limbo state between death and heaven where some people can get stuck forever. He was greatly disturbed by the question of indulgence, which enabled the parishioners to claim not only remission of the temporal penalties of sins repented, confessed and absolved, but complete remission of all sins. Moreover, certificates were issued releasing the late parents of those who purchased indulgences from purgatory as well. He wrote his famous 95 theses (statements) and fastened them on the church door in Wittenburg on 31st October 1517, and challenged Johan Tetzel (1465-1519) , a Dominican friar who was the Pope’s chief agent n Germany, to a public debate. This and other similar debates resulted in the formation of a Reformation movement in Western Europe. This religious movement established Protestantism as a major division of Christianity. The reformation spread to most of Europe. As the Pope-led church was the official religion in the West at that time, the reformers assumed a politico-religious character, which divided Europe into Protestant and Roman Catholic camps leading to political and religious polarization. Local, regional and national problems led to further divisions. Various protestant churches, namely, the Church of England, Lutherans, Reformed churches (Congregational churches and Presbyterian churches), Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, The Salvation army, Seventh Day Adventists, Quakers, Pentecostals, The Brethren, etc. After the reformation, English Protestants were divided into three main groups: Anglicans (who were satisfied with the Church of England), Puritans (who wanted to ‘purify’ it) and Separatists (who wanted to withdraw and adopt the congregational form of church government). (Dr.K.M.George, Christianity in India through the Centuries)
4.03 ANGLICANISM: [This is an extract from Development of Christianity through the Centuries by Dr. K.M. George] “Anglicanism is a term to denote the religious beliefs and positions of members of the established Church of England, and of the communicating churches in the United States and elsewhere. To some extent, they acknowledge the leadership and allegiance to the See of Canterbury. It includes those who have accepted the work of the English Reformation as embodied in the Church of England or in the offshoot churches, which in other countries have adhered, at least substantially, to its doctrines, organization and liturgy. The Church of England, of all the churches in the Anglican Communion, is the only church established by the state. The Church of Ireland, the Episcopal Church of Scotland and the Church of Wales are the other Anglican churches in the British Isles. There is also the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA, the churches in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, The West Isles, West Africa and Central Africa, the Holy Catholic Church of Japan, Anglican Church of South Asia outside the British Isles, the Church of the Province of East Africa, Uganda, Rwanda and Bermuda, the Church of the Province of South East Asia and a number of overseas dioceses acknowledging the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
4.03.01 THE ORIGIN OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND: The origin of the Church of England goes back to 1559 when the English parliament gave powers to the English crown to retain control and discipline of the church. The first parliament of Queen Elizabeth I promulgated an Act concerning religion; by the Act of supremacy the queen was declared to be ‘the only governor of this realm… as well as in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or cause, as temporal’ and the authority of the Pope was repudiated. Henry VIII, the father of Elizabeth, had begun the anti-Roman movement in England and it had been continued during the reign of his successor Edward VI. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, produced the first edition of the Book of Common Prayer in 1549. After the death of Edward VI in 1553, his sister Queen Mary restored Catholicism, but when she died, Elizabeth (her sister) became queen and ensured that the English would once again repudiate allegiance to Rome. The original formation of Anglican principles is to be sought in the reign of Elizabeth rather than Henry VIII or Edward VI, for it was by her efforts that a via media between the opposing factions of Rome and Geneva became a political necessity and Anglicanism as a doctrinal system came into existence.
A series of ‘Thirty Nine Articles’ of religion was promulgated in 1563; these articles remained authoritative to such an extent that all ordinands were henceforth required to subscribe to them. They contained many fundamental Christian teachings, and the statements that the general council of the church was not necessarily infallible, a recognition of only two sacraments-baptism and the Lord’s supper-and a declaration that what the Roman Catholics believed about the Mass was ‘a blasphemous fable and dangerous deceit’ resulting in an irreconcilable state of affairs between the Roman Catholics and the Church of England.
4.03.02 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT: The Hampton Conference set up by King James I in 1604 emphasised the irreconcilability of Anglicanism and Puritanism. Puritanism is an attitude towards religion that arose in opposition to the alleged unscriptural, catholic forms embodied in the Acts of Uniformity in 1559 and the Thirty Nine Articles in 1563. The Puritans generally sought to purify these forms of the Church of England, substituting Calvinistic models of ecclesiastical polity and liturgy. The seventeenth century was the golden age of Anglicanism when the Church confirmed her rejection of the claim of Rome and refused to adopt the theological system of the Continental reformers. The historic episcopate was preserved, even though many especially Hooker, the grayest of Elizabethans, did not regard it as a divine institution.
The spiritual life of Anglicanism was heightened by the rise of Evangelicalism in the 18th century that stressed the importance of personal religion and paid very little importance to ritualism and church organization. Two of the great exponents of the Evangelicalism were John Wesley and George Whitefield. Evangelicalism played a vital influence on social reform, including the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. One of the groups of the Evangelicals, however, left the Church of England and formed Methodism, which became a prominent religious and social force in the industrial areas of the nineteenth century England.
John Keble, John Henry Newman and Edward Pusey of the Tractarian Movement in the mid 19th century took a keen interest in the Roman Catholic view of Anglicanism; they stressed the Anglican links with the medieval Church in belief, ritual and organization. They published a number of tracts, which created mounting opposition from the Anglican Church leaders. This led many tractarians like John Henry Newman to enter the Roman Catholic Church. The increasing campaign led the Parliament to pass the Public Worship Regulation Act in 1874 whereby those Anglican clergy men who in their service diverged too far from the prescriptions of the Book of Common Prayer could be more easily punished in ecclesiastical courts. However, the High Church clergy, as they were called, gradually increased their strength.
4.03.03 ANGLICAN DOCTRINE: This is found primarily in the Book of Common Prayer, containing the ancient creeds of individual Christendom and in The Thirty Nine Articles which are interpreted I accordance with the Prayer Book…The Church England differs from the Roman Catholic Church chiefly in denying the claims of the papacy, both to jurisdiction over the church and to infallibility as promulgator of Christian doctrinal and moral truth and in rejecting the distinctly Roman doctrine of discipline. It differs from the Eastern Orthodox Churches to a lesser degree. However, the Anglican Church and its sister churches in Anglican Communion differ from most Protestant Churches in requiring Episcopal ordination in the apostolic succession for all their clergy; in structure and tone of the liturgical services which are translated and revised versions of the pre-Reformation services of the church; and in spiritual orientation in which a catholic sacramental heritage is contained with the biblical and evangelical emphasis that came through the Reformation.
The Protestant Episcopal Church in Chicago, in 1886, adopted at their general convention four propositions which were promulgated as a statement of basic Anglican belief at the Lambeth Conference in 1888. These were subsequently known as the Lambeth Quadrilaterals, as the official declaration of the fundamental Anglicanism. First, the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments contain all things necessary to salvation and are the rule and the ultimate standard of faith; second, the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed are a sufficient statement of the Christian faith; third, the two Sacraments ordained by Christ himself, namely Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, ministered with unfailing use of Christ’s words of institution and of the elements ordained by Him are a necessary part of the Christian life; and fourth, the historic episcopacy, locally adopted n the method of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the Unity of the Church, is also a necessary part of Christian life.
4.03.04 LAMBETH CONFERENCE: The Lambeth Conference is the decennial meeting of the Bishops of the Anglican communion under the chairmanship of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Though the decisions of the Lambeth Conference have no legal binding on the churches, they are widely accepted as the opinion of the Anglican Communion.
4.04 EVANGELICALISM: The term ‘Evangelicalism’ is, strictly speaking, applied to a Protestant theological movement. It is based on the Reformation doctrine of salvation solely by faith in Jesus Christ. It implies acceptance of the literal truth of the Gospel and a personal experience of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. It derives from the New Testament Greek word, euangelion, ‘good news’, and meaning ‘pertaining to the Gospel’. Evangelicals are Christians who consider themselves to be upholding the Christian gospel by emphasizing, firstly, the uniqueness of Jesus Christ-his life, teaching, atoning death, resurrection and second coming; and secondly, the supreme authority of the Bible (being more important than the authority of the church or human reason). George M. Marsden mentions that essential evangelical beliefs includes the reformation doctrine of the final authority of the Bible, the historical basis of God’s saving work as recorded in scripture, salvation to eternal life based on the redemptive work of Christ, the importance of evangelism and missions and the importance of a spiritually transformed life.
Evangelicalism differs from the traditional Catholic teaching on salvation that placed considerable importance of the role of the church and the clergy in the ministration of the sacraments. It applies to the early leaders of the reformation who emphasis the biblical message and rejected the official interpretation of dogmas by the Roman Catholic church. In continental Europe, “evangelical’ means ‘protestant’ and it is attached to the name of the reformation churches.
In the English-speaking countries, evangelicalism placed greater emphasis on religious experience. Puritanism which w as fashioned in the context of reformed (Calvinistic) Christianity emphasized the need for an inner experience of God’s regenerating grace as a mark of election. For puritans, conversion, which culminates in the personal covenant with God, validates the external covenant made in baptism.
The early forerunners of Evangelicals include the fourteenth century English theologian John Wycliffe and John Huss, leader of the fourteenth century Hussites of Bohemia. The sixteenth century Reformers, the seventeenth century English and American Puritans, and the early Baptists and other non-conformists were the more immediate forerunners of evangelicalism. Some of the important landmarks in evangelicalism include the arrival of Philip Jakol Spenser at a parish in Frankfurt in 1666, where he became the leader of Pietism in German Lutheranism and the conversion experience of John Wesley, the leader of Methodism within the Church of England. Both Pietism and Methodism taught the necessity of personal saving faith rather than routine membership of a national church.
English evangelicalism reached a high point with Wesley. William Wilberforce (a lay member of in parliament) and his associates contributed to the education of the poor, founded the Church Missionary Society (1797) and the British and French Bible Society (1803) and brought about the abolition of slavery (1833) in British territories. Others like Charles G. Finney (1792-1875), Dwight Moody contributed a good deal in this field.” (Dr. K.M.George, Development of Christianity through the Centuries)
4.05 MISSIONARY FEELING AND PROTESTANT MISSIONS - ORIGIN OF CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY (CMS): How did and when did the missionary feeling develop in England; and how did the protestant missionary societies originate? M.E.Gibbs in an article, ‘Anglican and Protestant Missions 1706-1857’ writes: “Missionary feeling developed in England towards the end of the seventeenth century; and when the Company’s charter was renewed in 1698, a clause was added requiring the chaplains to learn Portuguese and the local languages so as to enable them to instruct the local inhabitants in the Protestant religion. In this year the oldest Anglican missionary society was founded, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.). Three years later, in 1701, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.) was founded and incorporated by Royal Charter but for the first century of its existence its work lay exclusively in the English colonies in America.
4.05.01 EARLY ANGLICANS AND FIRST BAPTISM IN INDIA: The first Anglican clergy came to India as chaplains on the East India Company’s ships. They were usually engaged for the round voyage which lasted about three years and spent some time ashore at the English factories Surat and Bantam. One of these chaplains, Patrick Copeland, seems to have been responsible for the conversion of the first Indian Anglican on record. He was a young man ‘from the bay of Bengala’ who had been taught by Copeland and who was baptized in London at the church of St. Denis Backchurch in Eenchurch street on December 22, 1616, King James I, who took a great interest in the affair, suggesting his baptismal name of Peter. He returned with Copeland to the Indies with the idea that he should evangelize his fellow-countrymen, but no more is heard of him.
In 1640 the English acquired the settlement of Fort St. George, Madras and the era of more permanently settled chaplains began. One of their preoccupation was education of the children of unions between English soldiers and women of the country, mostly, ‘Portuguese’ or ‘mestios’ and therefore Roman Catholics, in their father’s rather than their mother’s faith, a matter which led to constant disputes with the Roman Catholic priests who were also permitted to live in Fort St. George to minister to the Portuguese soldiers employed by the company. The chaplains were encouraged in this matter by Streynsham Masters who became Governor of Madras in 1677. He had previously served in the west of India, where the company had moved its headquarters from Surat to Bombay, ceded to Charles II of England in 1661. Here the Governor, Sir Gerald Aungier, in 1671 busied himself with the building of a church “inviting the natives and strangers to a reverence and embracing of our wholly (? holy) reformed religion”. The church was planned to hold a thousand people, an amazing undertaking considering that there could have been no more than three hundred Anglicans in Bombay at the time; but missionary purpose failed with the death of Augier in 1677 and Streynsham Masters’ removal to Madras. There he was responsible for building the Church of St. Mary on a much smaller scale, as space within the Fort was extremely limited. The care for the education of the children of soldiers and others of mixed blood developed in Madras into a notable system of charity schools and orphanages for both boys and girls; and a similar development took place in Calcutta, founded in 1699. Bombay lagged behind; and the projected great church also remained an unfinished shell till an energetic chaplain, Richard Cobbe, secured its completion in 1718. So large is St. Thomas church that, with the addition of a Victorian chancel, it serves today as a very adequate cathedral for the diocese of Bombay.
4.05.02 LUTHERANS AT TRANQUEBAR AND TAMILNADU: The first impulse to Protestant missions in India came from Denmark. King Frederick IV founded a mission in the Danish settlement of Tranquebar in the extreme south and a mission college in Copenhagen to direct the work. He found his missionaries in the University of Halle in the dominions of the Elector of Brandenburg, which had been founded under the influence of pietism. Official Lutheranism had rather quickly degenerated into a tepid formalism, and pietism had arisen to make good its deficiencies. It was extremely individualistic, stressing above all the personal experience of the believer. Under the influence of the pietist leaders, the two Francks, father and son, Halle became a centre of missionary endeavour. The two first missionaries of the Royal Danish Mission, Ziegebalg and Plutschau, both Germans, came from Halle and arrived in Tranquebar in 1706. Plutschau returned to Europe in 1711.Ziegenbalg also returned in 1714, but was back in India in 1718 and died there on February 22, 1719 at the age of thirty six. He was the real founder of the Danish Lutheran Mission. He had to face considerable difficulties, including, in spite of the king’s protection, the opposition of the Danish authorities in Tranquebar and converts were very difficult to make. Still by 1719 he had built the large and beautiful Jerusalem church in Tranquebar and had translated the New Testament into Tamil. His colleague Grundler died a year after he died and the work was then carried on for sometime mainly by Benjamin Schultze. In 1733 a prominent convert of the Sudra caste, later known as Aaron the priest, received Lutheran ordination. Another capable catechist was Rajanaiken, a Pariah by birth, a sub-officer in the army of Tanjore and a very nominal Roman Catholic.
From the first the group of Anglican churchmen who were responsible for the foundation of S.P.C.K. and S.P.G. had taken a great interest in the Danish Royal Mission. The chief point of contact was M. Boehm, the Lutheran chaplain of Prince George of Denmark, husband of Queen Anne and uncle of Frederick IV; who was on very friendly terms with them; and information about the mission was published from time to time in England. When Schultze at Tranquebar was reinforced by new missionaries with whom he did not get on very well, he moved, in 1728, to Madras and started a new mission there. British power and influence were increasing and Madras seemed a better centre for a mission than Tranquebar. But Danish support was not available for missionaries working outside the Danish settlement and so S.P.C.K. undertook responsibility for the new mission. So began the ‘English Mission’, a remarkable example of international and interdenominational co-operation. The missionaries were all Lutherans, mostly Germans, with very few Scandinavians. They were trained at Halle and recommended by Francke and his son and successor; but they crossed to England to take their passage to India and were received by the Committee of S.P.C.K. with an exchange of speeches in Latin. S.P.C.K. required reports of their work and accounts of their expenses and were consulted on important points like locations and ordinations; but distances were so great and communications so slow that in practice the missionaries did pretty much as they liked. With Lutheran missionaries and no Anglican bishop in India, the form of the church was bound to be Lutheran, though S.P.C.K. tried to give it as Anglican a look as possible, having the Book of Common Prayer translated and trying to insist on its use.
Schultze returned to Germany in 1743 and was succeeded in charge of the mission at Madras by Fabricius who died there in extreme old age in 1791. Fabricius’ name is chiefly associated with the translation of the whole Bible into Tamil, the first to be made in any Indian language, a work which attained something of the esteem among Tamil-speaking Christians as the English Authorized Version. It seems probable that the version which finally came to bear the name of Fabricius was the end product of the versions by more than one missionary of Ziegenbalg’s pioneer work. Rhenius of the C.M.S. (in India 1823-1838) was dissatisfied with Fabricius’s version and devoted himself to making a new one, but this didn’t win much favour. When, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, a committee of the Bible society undertook the revision of the Fabricius version, they were astonished at its scholarly excellence.
The earliest S.P.C.K. in Madras had their headquarters in Black Town, now George Town; but when Madras fell to the French in 1746, Fabricius and his colleagues retired to Pulicat and their buildings were demolished. On their return in 1748, they received, in l\place of their old property, a chapel and land at Verapoly, a village a little outside the town. This had been founded by Coja Petrus Uscan, an Armenian merchant who had become a Roman Catholic and had become a mission station for French Capuchins during the French occupation. Vepery, now well inside the modern city, is still an important Christian centre.
The most famous of the S.P.C.K. missionaries was Christian Frederick Schwartz. He was born in Brandenburg in 1726 and his thoughts were turned to missionary work at Halle by a meeting with Schultz and the finding there of a Tamil Bible Abstract. He arrived at Tranquebar on July 30th, 1751 and died at Tanjore on February 19th, 1798. He worked at first with the Danish Royal Mission at Tranquebar, but from 1762 he began visiting Tirucherapalli and in 1767 was transferred to S.P.C.K. as there missionary there. About the same time he began to pay visits to Tanjore. In 1773 Tanjore was captured by the Nawab of the Carnatic and when Raja Tulyaji was restored in 1776 it was with a British Resident at court and a British garrison in the Fort. In 1777 Schwartz came to live permanently at Tanjore where he acted as chaplain to the British garrison and built two churches, one in the Fort for the garrison and other about a mile away for the Indian congregation. Schwartz was drawn into the political affairs of the day, protecting Serfoji or Saraboji, the adopted son and destined successor of Raja Tulyaji against an usurper and helping to carry out the plan of reform imposed on Tanjore by the Madras Government. In 1779 he also went as an envoy of the British Government to Haider Ali of Mysore. Some people criticized Schwartz as more involved in politics than became a missionary; but these political employments were forced on him because of the respect inspired by his Christian character and he never seems to have let them deflect him from his missionary duties.
Schwartz was a great ascetic and he was almost alone among the Lutheran missionaries of his day in thinking that, for him at least, a missionary life must involve celibacy. But in 1768 he was joined by a boy of sixteen, John Caspar Kohlhoff, the eldest son of John Baltazar Kohlhoff, one of the senior Tranquebar missionaries whom he came to look upon almost as a son. John Caspar Kohlhoff received Lutheran orders in 1787 when he preached a sermon in Tamil “with a graceful ease” which was not surprising, for he had known Tamil all his life. He became Schwartz’s successor at Tanjore and died in 1844 at the age of nearly eighty two, the last of the S.P.C.K. missionaries. He had the faults and merits of a man of the second generation. He was sincere, devoted and kind-hearted to a fault and thoroughly acquainted with the people of Tamilnad which he never left in his whole life; but his experience was limited, he was a poor judge of character and had no head for accounts and these defects were responsible for some of the short-comings of the Tanjore mission in years to come.
Distance and difficulty of communication made the finances of the S.P.C.K. missions very different from later practice. In theory yhe missionaries were paid very modest salaries. For buying such articles as printing press and books, the remittances from England arrived very irregularly so that the missionaries sometimes found themselves embarrassingly short of money. At times they were supplied with equally embarrassingly large sums too. These they lent to the Government on interest, or, if the Government had no need of a loan, to private borrowers. This was sometimes very profitable but could be disastrous, as when Fabricius in old age, apparently misled by an untrustworthy catechist, was cast into prison for debt at Madras. A similar catastrophe befell Kiernander in Calcutta. Schwartz was more fortunate, as was Gericke, who succeeded Fabricius at Vepery in 1788 and died in 1803. Both Schwartz and Gericke had lucrative appointments as chaplains and both used their money for the work of their missions and left considerable funds as endowments after their deaths. But this wealth was by no means spiritually healthy for the churches of Tanjore and Vepery. The Christians tended to think that they had a right to be supported by the mission and quarrels, which were sometimes scandalous, broke out about property.
Another weakness of the South Indian missions was their attitude to the caste. Although, as Christians, the missionaries disapproved of caste, they found it necessary to make very considerable concessions in practice, which they justified to themselves by the hope that the leaven of Christianity would gradually loosen it; but even at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was no sign that this was happening. Sudra and Pariah Christians occupied different sides of the church separated by some feet of space and seated on different mats. At a communion service all Sudras, men and women, communicated before the Pariahs. At one time in Tranquebar there were two chalices in use, one for Sudras, the other for Pariahs, but Dr. John, the Royal Danish missionary, had them melted down into one. Though there were a few Pariah catechists, only Sudras were ordained, the missionaries rejecting a suggestion from Europe that the Pariah Rajanaikan should be ordained by saying that to be required to receive the sacrament at the hands of a Pariah might lessen the people’s reverence for it. These Sudra “country priest” as they were rather oddly called often refused to enter the house of their Pariah parishioners or to allow Pariah Christians to enter their houses. There were separate burial grounds for the two classes.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century and especially after the death of Schwartz Gericke, the Lutheran missions in South India began to decline. The younger Francke was dead and Halle had become a centre of enlightenment rather than of pietism and was then engulfed with the rest of Europe in the Napoleonic wars. Arrivals of missionaries became rare and those who came were not of the same quality as their predecessors. Holzberg at Cuddalore was a notorious drunkard and was dismissed by S.P.C.K. in 1813, but as they had no means of enforcing his dismissal and no one to send in his place, he continued till his death in 1824. Paezold, at Vepery, was quarrelsome and doubtfully honest and there was scandalous litigation between him and his congregation. When in 1825 S.P.C.K. decided to hand over its South Indian missions to S.P.G. there were only five missionaries, including the veterans Rottler at Vepery and Kohlhoff at Tanjore. By this time there was an Anglican Bishop in India and S.P.G. had a strict rule that they would employ no one who had not received episcopal ordination. The old missionaries in Lutheran orders however continued in the pay of S.P.C.K. for the remainder of their service, though in fact they served S.P.G. Diocesan Committees of S.P.C.K. and later of S.P.G. were formed and the missionaries thankfully handed over their mission funds to be administered by them. At Tranquebar, the last Royal Danish missionary Augustus Frederick Caemmerer died in 1837. The sons of Kohlhoff and Caemmerer were educated at Bishop’s College in Calcutta and they took Anglican orders and had long and useful careers as S.P.G. missionaries. The Anglican Church had absorbed the old Lutheran missions and when the Leipzig society began to work as a Lutheran mission in this part f India in 1842, it really represented a new beginning.
4.05.03 ENGLISH SOCIETIES AND MISSIONS: S.P.C.K. had early extended its works to Cuddalore, but when the French took Fort St. David in 1758, the missionary there, Kiernander, a Swede. Took refuge in Calcutta, probably at the invitation of Clive who had won the battle of Plassey the year before. He soon collected a congregation of about two hundred, though only a few of these were adult converts from Hinduism or Islam, the rest being Anglo-Indians or Portuguese converted from Roman Catholicism and their families. At one time Kiernander was helped by no fewer than four former Roman Catholic priests most of them being ex-Augustinian friars. For the ‘Portuguese’ here and in Madras, the Bible and Book of Common Prayer were translated into that language and services held in it until, early in the nineteenth century, it was found that they were unnecessary, since English was now better understood than Portuguese. Presently Kiernander as his second wife a wealthy widow and though his fortune was probably exaggerated by rumour, it was sufficient for him to build at his own expense the church later known as the Old Church or the Old Mission Church, which still stands, though very much altered from its original appearance. But in 1787 Kiernander was declared bankrupt and retired to Chinsurah, whilst the old church legally his private property, was put up for sale. It was rescued by three friends, the civilian Charles Grant, his brother-in –law, William Chambers and the chaplain David Brown. These three became trustees for the church and David became responsible for it until S.P.C.K. could send out another missionary. Abraham Thomas Clarke, a Cambridge graduate; arrived in 1790, the first English man in Anglican orders to come to India in Anglican orders to come to India as a missionary; but within a year of his arrival he had accepted a chaplaincy and left the mission church. In his place S.P.C.K. sent a German Lutheran, William Toby Ringeltaube in 1797, but he felt himself unsuited to work and did not stay long. Instead he offered his services to the newly formed London Missionary Society and was sent to open their work in the extreme south of India. After a few years of devoted service under the most austere conditions among Tamil speakers near Nagercoil, he left in 1816 for a voyage to the East Indies and was never heard of again. David Brown continued to minister to the congregation of the Old Church.
The eighteenth century saw the most remarkable movement of religious revival in England, whose best known leaders were John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield. They were Anglicans but, like the German priests with whom they had some contact, they, stressed strongly personal religious experience and they expected every Christian to undergo what they called conversion which, rather than the baptism which he had received in infancy, was thought of as the real beginning of a Christian life John Wesley’s religious societies were intended by their founder to remain within the Anglican church, but his own action in authorizing some of his lay preachers to administer Holy Communion made separation inevitable and after his death at the end of the century the Methodist Church became a non-conformist denomination in England. Methodism had its greatest success among a rather lower social class than the three old dissenting denominations-Presbyterians, Congregationalists or Independents and Baptists who were strongest in the urban middle class; and it had also great success in the United states of America. Parallel with Methodism was the Evangelical Movement within the Church of England, many of whose supporters, like William Wilberforce, an influential Member of Parliament and friend of the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, were prominent and wealthy men.
The influence of the new movement made itself felt in Calcutta, especially on Sir John Shore, afterwards Governor General and later Lord Teignmouth and on Charles Grant. Grant had been greatly encouraged by the arrival fom England of the young chaplain David Brown, the disciple at Cambridge of Charles Simeon, who, as fellow of King’s College, had a long life of influence on undergraduates there. David Brown was a very young man-too young to have received more than deacon’s orders-who came out originally to take charge of a new military orphanage in Calcutta, a charge he had to give up when he insisted in carrying on his ministrations at the Old Church, though his appointment as chaplain made the financial sacrifice bearable.
1787, at Brown’s suggestion, Grant, Brown and Chambers addressed letters to religious leaders in England, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Wilberforce and Simeon, suggesting a Government sponsored mission to Bengal with Missionary clergy, catechists and school masters in important centers, though there would be no compulsion on anyone to adopt Christianity. Few of those addressed responded, but Simeon’s interest in India was aroused and from that time onward he exerted himself to encourage suitable young clergyman of Evangelical view to apply for chaplaincies under the East India Company. Grant returned to England in 1790 and soon acquired a predominant influence in the court of Directors which was responsible for these appointments, so that Simeon’s nominees were generally accepted. He also became a close friend of Wilberforce and a member of the so-called Clapham sect of Evangelicals. When in 1793 the charter of the East India Company came before Parliamentfor renewal, Wilberforce secured the passage of resolutions embodying a plan for the employment of missionary educators very similar to that which Grant, Brown and Chambers had suggeste; but as no clauses activating the scheme were included in the Act, nothing was done in the matter. In fact by this time strong opposition to Christian missions had developed among Englishman concerned with East India Company and the Government of India. The S.P.C.K. missions had received patronage and help from the company; but in those days it was still mainly a commercial concern. Now that the British had acquired large territories in India and were well on the way to ruling the whole country, a fear developed that any active support of Christian missions, even, sometimes any open profession of Christianity might so alarm Hindus and Moslems as to endanger British rule. The East India Company claimed the right to exclude from there territory any European of whom they disapproved; and they used it to exclude anyone who came with an openly missionary purpose.
They could not, however, exclude the Evangelical chaplains recommended by Simeon. The first of these was Claudius Buchanan who arrived in Calcutta in 1797. He found favour with the Governor General, Lord Wellesley, who appointed him, with David Brown to superintendence of his ambitious Fort William College, intended principally for the education of the young civilians, but which Wellesley hoped to make also a centre for the translation of the Bible and other sacred books. The directors, however, disapproved of the project and it was reduced to an establishment for giving a one year course in languages and other Indian subjects to the young civilians of Bengal; and when Wellesley left in 1805 Buchanan fell into deep disfavour with the Government for his defense of the Baptist missionaries of Serampore; but before any action could be taken, he had left India for reason of health. Buchanan produced a somewhat grandiose plan for the establishment of an Anglican episcopate in India; and with Kerr from Madras, he was one of the first Anglican priests to visit Travancore to get in touch with the Jacobite Syrians there and to give an account of them to the English-speaking world.
Just about the time that Buchanan was leaving India, Henry Martyn arrived. One of the most brilliant Cambridge scholars of his day, he had been the first Englishman to offer himself to the newly formed Church Missionary Society, but he later had to withdraw the offer for family reasons. Simeon then suggested that he should apply for an Indian chaplaincy instead. His career in India was very short, from 1807 to 1811, spent partly at Dinapur and partly at Kanpur; but during this time he translated the New Testament into Urdu and at Kanpur was the means of the conversion of a Moslem of good family, Sheikh Salah, who heard Martyn preaching on Sundays to a crowd of beggars gathered before his bungalow and afterwards took employment as a copyist under him. This gave him the opportunity to study the New Testament and when Martyn’s health- he was in an advanced stages of tuberculosis-forced him to leave Kanpur; he came forward and asked for baptism. This was not at once granted, but he accompanied Martyn to Calcutta where, after further instruction, he was baptized by David Brown in the Old Church on Whitsunday, May 19th, 1811, taking the Christian name of Abdul Masih. Martyn, meanwhile had left India to travel home overland by Persia, where he hoped to be able to perfect his Persian translation of the New Testament. He spent a year at Shiraz in this work and in debates with Moslem scholars and then set out for home, but died of exhaustion at Tokhat in Armenia and was buried by Armenian monks, through whom the news of his death and his papers eventually reached England. Short as Martyn’s Indian career was, he left an unforgettable memory.
Martyn had the company during his last days at Kanpur of his friend and fellow chaplain, Daniel Corrie, who was destined to a much longer Indian career. Ill-health forced Corrie too to return to Calcutta shortly after this; but in 1812, just after David Brown’s death, he left for Agra accompanied by Abdul Masih, who was going as a CMS catechist under his supervision. Abdul Masih’s work opened in the centre of the city, at a place now known as Abdul Masih Ka Kattra, which is still a Christian quarter and where, forty years later, the large church of St. John was built.
Meanwhile in 1808 Thomas Thomason at last arrived to relieve David Brown of the charge of the Old Church. Bishop Heber later described him as “a very good and a very learned man-a child in guilelessness and facility of disposition-the most unsuspicious being in the world- inclined to think well of everybody-and an excellent preacher.” He had been in charge of a church near Cambridge and in his family Simeon, who had renounced marriage for himself because it was incompatible with his position at King’s College, had been able to enjoy a taste of family life. Thomason spent the rest of his active life in India, dying in 1829.
Besides the five famous Evangelical chaplains of Bengal-Brown, Buchanan, Martyn, Corrie and Thomason-there were Evangelical chaplains at Madras-Richard Hall Kerr, Charles Church, Marmaduke Thomason and James Hough, the latter of whom played an important part in the history of the Church in Tirunelvelli.
4.05.04 WILLIAM CAREY AND THE SERAMPORE BAPTISTS: William Carey was born on August 17th, 1761 at Paulers Pury in Northamptonshire in the very centre of England, where his father and grandfather had been parish clerks and village schoolmasters. Carey, however, joined the particular Baptists in 1779 and became a shoe-maker and Baptist preacher. He had a remarkable talent for languages and taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and Dutch. In 1792 Carey preached a sermon to a gathering of Baptist ministers at Nottingham, proving that it was the duty of Christians to fulfill the Lord’s command to preach the gospel to every creature. It seems strange that any one could have doubted this, but the Particular Baptists were strict Calvinists and it had been customary to argue that God himself would provide for the Gospel to reach all who were predestined to salvation. The result of Carey’s sermon was the formation of the Baptist Missionary Society with a subscription of 13.2.6. Pounds and Carey’s departure to Bengal as their first missionary on June 13th 1793. Carey and his party had undertaken to provide for themselves by their own earnings in Bengal, and this, and the sustained disapproval of the Government involved them in great hardships in their earlier years. Finally on January 10th, 1800 the Baptist Missionaries settled at Serampore, then still a Danish possession. Carey had been joined in 1799 by John Marshman, a school master and William Ward, a printer. These three-Carey, Marshman and Ward-were the great Serampore trio who worked together for many years. (Carey died June 9th, 1834, Ward of cholera in 1823 and Marshman in 1837.) Marshman and his wife Hannah opened profitable boarding schools for boys and girls and in 1801 Carey was appointed professor of Bengali in Wellesley’s Fort William College at a handsome salary and he later became professor of Sanskrit also. Carey held these appointments for many years. In this way the financial difficulties of Serampore were greatly relieved. About the time of the settlement in Serampore the first noteworthy converts began to be made. The Serampore missionaries also took in hand an ambitious programme of Bible translation as a preparation for missions to the whole of Asia-they included not only Indian Languages but even Chinese. These versions were pioneer work which has long since been superseded by more accurate translations. The Serampore missionaries were also pioneers in the printing of Indian scripts and in the production of newspapers in Bengali. In 1818 they produced the monthly Bengali magazine Dig Darshan and at the same time a weekly newspaper Samachar Darpan. These were among the very first of their kind ever published. In English journalism Serampore founded The Friend of India, which continues in the modern “Statesman”.
In 1818 Serampore College was founded and in 1820 it was opened to non-Christians as well as Christian pupils. In 1827 a Danish charter was obtained which enabled Serampore College to give divinity degrees. It is still the only institution in India empowered to do so.
Baptist missionaries sent out from Serampore were established in various parts of India such as Monghyr, Benares, Agra and Delhi, though many of these were at first very weak and did not always have a continuous existence. The greatest strength of the Baptist mission continued to be in Bengal.
The Baptist missionaries in Bengal never returned home and one consequence this was that they gradually lost touch with the committee which supported them there. So when in 1818 new missionaries arrived who wee very critical of the Serampore trio, their complaints were believed and serious trouble followed. Instead of supporting the Lall Badar congregation in Calcutta, the new arrivals founded a new Baptist church at Entally and established their own Calcutta Missionary Society. Reconciliation with the schematics took place in 1820, but it was not till 1830 that the trouble with the home society was settled by the transfer of Serampore to eleven home trustees with right of occupation to the existing missionaries for the rest of their lives.
Carey and his colleagues belonged to the Particular or Calvinistic Baptists who were predestinarians; but in 1829 there arrived missionaries from the General or Freewill Baptists, a more numerous denomination. Carey directed them to Orissa, where they have worked ever since.
4.05.05 NEW BRITISH MISSIONARY SOCIETIES: In 1813 Parliament was due to renew the East India Company’s Charter and Wilberforce and Grant, now also a member of Parliament, prepared a campaign for the insertion of religious clauses in the new Act. A diocese of Calcutta was to be founded with three archdeaconries, for the presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. This was comparatively easy, as it could be represented as a necessary completion of the chaplaincy establishment for the benefit of the Company’s European servants. It was more difficult to obtain clauses in the Bill which would open India to the work of missionaries. The position had changed since 1793through the foundation of some important missionary societies which made the plan proposed in 1793 obsolete. Of the B.M.S., we have already seen something. In 1795 an interdenominational society called at first simply the Missionary Society was founded. Later, to distinguish it from other societies it became known as the London Missionary Society (L.M.S.). It has never in theory lost its interdenominational character, but, as the other denominations founded their own societies, it came to be in practice almost entirely a Congregational society. In 1799 a group of Evangelical clergy and laity in the Anglican Church founded the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East (C.M.S.) which was to become the largest and most influential of all British Missionary Societies. It differed from S.P.G., now almost a hundred years old, in two important respects. It was a private venture with a large lay element, which included Wilberforce and Grant, whilst none of the clergy concerned held high preferment and most were unbeneficed in 1799. It was not till 1841 that the English Archbishops and bishops all became officially associated with the society. Secondly, whilst S.P.G. did not represent any party in the church, the principles of C.M.S. were definitely Evangelical; and indeed it became much the greatest achievement of Evangelicalism in the Church of England. The result was that, as almost all Evangelical support for missions was channeled through C.M.S., S.P.G. came to be thought of as the High Church society. S.P.C.K. which concerned itself mainly with Christian literature and education remained unpartisan. In 1805 the British and Foreign Bible Society was formed. It was interdenominational and its object was to provide copies of the Christian scriptures in all languages at a low price. In order to avoid disputes about interpretation it was early decided that the Society’s scriptures should be “without note or comment”.