CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA.

CHAPTER I.

The Ante-Protestant Era-Legend of St. Thomas-Pantænus-Frumentius -The Syrian Churches-Francis Xavier-Inroads of the PapacyMenezes-The Jesuit Missions.

Ir is my design that this volume shall contain a popular sketch of the progress of Christianity in India; more especially as it has been affected by the efforts of the Protestant Church and the measures of the British Government. Glancing at the legendary history of the earliest Christian ministrations in the East, I shall touch upon the establishment of the Syrian Churches, upon the first efforts of the Papacy, and upon those great and important facts the Jesuits' missions in the East; until, arriving at the period of British connection with India, I come to speak of the doings of our own countrymen at home and abroad, aided by the efforts of their Danish and American fellow-labourers in the same vineyard. I shall dwell upon the progress of the Anglican Church in India; upon the advancement of practical Chris

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tianity as exhibited in the lives of our Anglo-Indian brethren; and upon what is called the "traditionary policy" of the British Government in the East. I shall endeavour to show in what manner Christianity and Heathenism have severally received support or discouragement from that Government; and shall conclude the sketch with some observations on the manner in which the great question has been affected by the calamities which have recently filled so many hearts with fear and so many homes with mourning.

At the outset of his journey the historical inquirer finds himself groping in the dim regions which lie between fact and fable. He cannot clearly discover who were the first apostles who carried to the shores of the Indian ocean the truth of the new religion which Christ had bequeathed to the world. He knows that from the very commencement of the Christian æra there was constant interchange of worldly goods between the shores of the Red Sea and the southern and western coasts of the great Peninsula of India. It was by the enterprise and the ambition of the Macedonian Alexander that a knowledge of the countries of the East had first been opened out to the empires of the West, that the gates of commerce had been unlocked, and the people of India and the colonists of Egypt brought into frequent intercourse with each other. The great city which he founded became in time the mart of the commerce of the East and the stronghold of the new religion of the West. But the glory of the Greek empire had

passed away.

THE LEGEND OF ST. THOMAS.

3

The advent of the Redeemer found the Romans masters of the world; and Alexandria a

Roman city.

In

With the increased demand for foreign luxuries, there grew new incentives to commercial enterprise. Every year, at the time of the summer solstice, a fleet of more than a hundred merchant ships sailed, under the Roman flag, out of the port of Myos Hormus on the Red Sea, and steered for the rich pearl-fisheries of Ceylon and the spicy coasts of Malabar. exchange for the rich silks, the costly jewels, and the aromatic treasures of India and Arabia, the Romans gave their precious metals and something more precious still. They carried out tidings of the birth and sufferings of the Redeemer, and of the new faith that he had bequeathed to the world.

Of the first Indian missionaries we have no account. There is a legend which attributes to the apostle Thomas the establishment of the Christian Church in India. Slowly does reason reject a tradition which imagination is so eager to embrace. It would be pleasant to accord the fullest faith to the legend of the apostolic origin of Christianity in India; but there is really no authority in its favour to divest it of all the attributes of fable. A very exciting account of the life and death of the apostle in India is to be found in the pages of a Portuguese historian. With apparent good faith Maffeus relates the miracles that Thomas wrought in India; how he converted certain Magi; how he built a temple at Meliapore; how he brought the dead to life; how

he delivered himself of certain wonderful prophecies: and, finally, how he became a martyr for the faith.* The Portuguese, at all events, believed these traditions, and invoked the miraculous aid of the saint when they went into battle. Marco Polo, who visited India before the time of the Portuguese, relates that St. Thomas was accidentally killed when at prayer in a wood, by a low-caste man, who was shooting at peacocks; and that, as a consequence of this mischance, none of the poor man's tribe could ever enter the place where the saint lay buried-" Nor," adds the Venetian, "could twenty men force them in, nor ten hold them there, on account of the virtue of that sacred body."† Every one who has visited Madras, knows "St. Thomas's Mount." It has for centuries been held, both by the Syrian and the Romish churches, to be the burial place of the apostle; but the more the legend is investigated, the more fabulous it appears. I do not know a modern writer of any note who has the least faith in the story.

That the gospel was ever preached in India during the first century, there is no credible evidence to show; but this much history may assert, that towards the close of the second century, when the Emperor Commodus, one of the worst and weakest of the many tyrants and idiots who hastened the downfall

Gibbon says that "Marco Polo was told on the spot that he (St. Thomas) suffered martyrdom in the city of Meliapore." This, however, is clearly an erroneous statement.

Dr. Fryer, who visited India about 1680, says that "about this mount live a cast of people, one of

whose legs are as big as an elephant's, which gives occasion for the divulging it to be a judgment on them, as the generation of the assassins and murtherers of the blessed apostle St. Thomas, one of whom I saw at Fort St. George." Such the miraculous origin of Elephantiasis !

of the Roman empire, exercised bloody dominion in the eternal city and throughout its marvellous dependencies in three quarters of the globe, the glad tidings of the Gospel had reached the ears of the dwellers on the Southern Indian coast. From whosesoever lips the great message fell, it had not fallen on ungrateful soil. Among the pearl-fishers of Ceylon and the rude cultivators on the coasts of Malabar and Coromandel were men who sighed after better teaching and a purer faith than those of the priests of their idol temples.

From those distant Indian shores the Egyptian mariners brought back intelligence which spread joyfully among the Christians of Alexandria. Demetrius held the episcopate of the Alexandrian see. Pantænus presided over the celebrated school which was among the glories of that famous city. He had forsaken the philosophy of the Portico to embrace the faith as it is in Jesus; and now the intelligence brought home by the Egyptian mariners stirred his heart among his pupils and his books. The longings of the heathen were after Gospel teaching. Their prayers for the help of instructed Christian guides did not find utterance in vain. Pondering, perhaps praying over, these strange tidings, the philosopher formed a great resolution, and girded himself up for a great enterprise. He determined to leave his disciples-to abandon the honours and rewards of the academy-and to go forth to preach the Gospel to the heathen upon heathen ground. What he did, and what he taught, it is hard to say.

Doubts of the