INDIA AND CEYLON.

1792-1892.

A

FORMER chapter tells the story of the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society, and of the departure of Carey and Thomas to preach the Gospel in India. That time is memorable as a great era in the Kingdom of Christ and in the kingdoms of men. Great Britain was growing fast into Greater Britain; the first settlements were being made in Australasia; France was restless at home and abroad, and made all Europe restless; and the youngest of the nations was making a large home for the Old World in the West. A great revival of faith and love had lately spread over England and other lands. Carey and Thomas were now chosen to extend that work, for they themselves had been called by our Lord to share His sorrow and pity for the wide world then lying in the shadow of death; but their missionary zeal seemed to many an impertinence, for the Church generally was still apathetic and the Government hostile to Foreign Missions.

The East India Company had lately "declared that they had hoped the age was become too enlightened for attempts to make proselytes; that the conversion of fifty or a hundred thousand natives of any degree of character would be the most serious disaster that could happen, and they thanked God that it was impracticable." But when all hope of Government sanction for missions was at an end, William Carey and the Baptist Missionary Society ventured to obey the command of Jesus Christ, without waiting for the permission of any earthly power. Their conduct drew down upon them hatred, ridicule, blame, and-eternal praise.

But the protection which they had dared to do without was freely promised them by the Danish captain, if on their landing the stringent laws against English residents in India without the

Company's permission should menace them. Denmark has the honour of having established the first Protestant Mission in India at Tranquebar in 1705, and of having sheltered the first English missionaries in Serampore.

The departure of these brethren for India marks the dawning of a new day and the gradual passing away for ever from the British churches of indifference to the claims of the heathen and the commands of Christ. The lands beyond were henceforth to lie for ever upon the heart of the Church at home. In the land they were leaving John Wesley's spirit was alive, though he had died two years before; and the churches quickened for work at home were about to receive a baptism of the Spirit for work abroad. The New Reformation in the British Islands and the United States was to spread through the world. These men were but as the first swallows flying over seas to tell of spring; heralds of the Sun of Righteousness soon to rise over India with healing in His wings.

I. INDIA A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

There was much need of healing both in India and nearer home. For as our missionaries sailed past France, a Revolution was progressing, in strange contrast to that which Wesley, Whitefield, and others had led in Great Britain and America. Louis XVI. had already gone to the guillotine; the queen followed him; and the Reign of Terror began, while Carey and his companions were carried to and fro for almost a month by contrary currents in the Bay of Bengal. Their ship while in the bay might have spoken with that which was carrying home Lord Cornwallis, who had surrendered a British army to General Washington at Yorktown twelve years before; for at the time when England, somewhat ashamed of herself, as she might well be, was losing colonies in the West, she was gaining in the East such a prize, with such an opportunity for usefulness, as God never gave to any nation before. The memorable work of Lord Cornwallis in India was now done; for though he returned twelve years later, it was but to die. He had already won his fame; Carey, who was never to leave India, had all his work to do and all his fame to win. The lowly-minded scholar and the noble governor, who passed each other unawares, were sent like all their successors, though in different ways, to prepare the way of the Lord in that troubled and dark land. The Prince of the kings of the earth was now

sending to India by Englishmen law and gospel-the ordered earthly rule, and the good news from heaven.

THE LAND.

Let us now look out on the shores, that our missionaries after five months weary voyaging at length reached. What does the name India include? Certainly it includes a greater variety of physical aspects, climates, tribes, races, languages, religions and social conditions than any similar area of the earth can show. Well would it be for India and Great Britain if our countrymen knew more of this their matchless prize and opportunity. As Carey and Thomas passed along the low Bengal coast and slowly moved up the River Hugli to Calcutta, all the land they saw around them was literally the creation of the rivers and the sea. For the rivers in their long journeyings, like weary giants, bring down day and night through the ages great loads of silt, the Himalayan boulders ground to dust, to throw them into the sea; and in opposition to the rivers each incoming tide brings the sand of the sea against the silt of the rivers, and in the strife the burdens fall, and these deposits slowly rise as solid land. They have been traced to the depth of 480 feet, and they cover an area nearly as large as England. This delta of the Ganges, rising but a little above the level of the sea, with myriads of channels for the slow moving waters, is subject to periodical overflowings, when the fields disappear, and the country looks like a vast lake studded with houses upon island mounds, where evergreen bamboos and plantations of mangoes, with "cocoa nuts, date trees, areca and other coronetted palm trees" grow, and where all communication is, at these seasons, by boat. The Bengal plains, like Norfolk with its Broads that artists know so well, have a peculiar beauty all their own. Two of these sluggish rivers, if the Gogra be the true source of the Ganges, rise at a height higher than Mont Blanc, or nearly 16,000 feet above the sea. And these lofty sources lie 13,000 feet below the crowning peak of the Himalayas and of the earth, Mount Everest. This great Himalayan mountain wall, in parts five hundred miles thick, and altogether nearly two thousand miles long, separates India from th rest of Asia, and secures it against invasion from the north. A trough lies between the mountains to the north and the mountains to the south, and here the Indus and the Brahmaputra rise near together, but flow in opposite directions, north-west and south-east, and, when

fifteen hundred miles apart, make their way through the southern half of the great mountain wall; the first leads the five rivers to the Arabian Sea; the second joins the Ganges near Dacca. Between the Indus in the far west and the Brahmaputra in the extreme east, the whole of the vast sub-Himalayan plain is drained and fertilised by the Ganges and its affluents. The waters that supply these rivers are brought up in clouds from the sea by the south-west monsoons, and poured out as rain upon the hills, and shaken out as snow upon the loftier heights, to feed the streams that fret away the mountains and gather themselves into mighty rivers, which provide and then transmit food along all their way for a hundred and fifty millions of our race, who worship them as sacred benefactors. The clouds from the sea, that as rain and as sacred rivers fertilise the plains, carry the mountains slowly back to the ocean and "sow the dust of continents to be." The valleys are being exalted and the mountains and the hills are made low; a picture of the slow, sure, silent changes that these men were to attempt for God in spiritual things. They could see in plains and rivers and mountains an image of the gigantic scale of their Indian tasks. Thomas in later days, from Moypaldiggy, could see the magnificent peak of Kunchinjinga, 28,000 feet above the sea, "speaking ever to the missionary of the people dwelling in ignorance in the valleys at its feet."

South of the great Gangetic plain lie the range of the Vindhya Mountains and the Nerbudda River, with hills and forests and broken lands farther south that have served as a barrier to lessen, if not to stay, the storms of invasion that have rolled in through the passes of Afghanistan, and swept like desolating floods over the rich plains and cities and kingdoms of the North. The South has had its invasions and confusions, but there the ancient Indian life has suffered less than in the north from those changes that come in with successive conquests. The hills called the Eastern and Western Ghats fringe either coast, and run southward to the apex of the triangle of Southern India, which has no navigable river worthy of the name, and derives its chief rainfall, not from the south-west monsoon that waters Northern India from June to September, but from the north-eastern from October to December.

Ceylon, to the south-east of Southern India, has nearly one-sixtieth of the area and one-hundredth of the population of the Indian continent.

NO UNITY.

Over this vast Indian area of a million and a half of square miles there never existed any true unity. The area that includes Sind, where rain is as rare as in Egypt; and Bengal, where the greatest rainfall in the world is found, has within it many languages, as well as climates, and a great variety of tribes and races that were never one nation, or united in one empire. The so-called aboriginal hill men are found everywhere, stranded upon the hills by the invading races that rolled in as floods and settled upon the richer lands, Aryans in the north, and Dravidians in the south. The Mughal Empire, founded by Muhammedan invaders, the "longest and strongest empire that India ever had, gave an imposing promise of real unity; but the south was no sooner subdued than the strength of the Empire was seen to be spent, at the death of Aurungzeb, and disintegration and chaos returned, and continued till long after our missionaries began their work.

CHAOS.

Britons would not shake their heads so sadly at our acquisition of India if they knew of the lawlessness, the slavery, the chaos that prevailed there, and of the desolating wars that preceded our advent to power. For fifty years before the date of Carey's landing, the miseries of vast tracts of India are indescribable. In 1739, Nadir Shah, the Persian, the last great conqueror of the East, sacked Delhi for fifty-eight days, and took back thirty-two millions sterling in plunder Six times under one leader the Afghans swept through their passes, plundering and slaying; sacking cities, defiling temples, and making fertile and populous districts waste solitudes.

The Mahrattas, who were Hindus, whose first home was the Western Ghats and their first leaders soldiers of fortune and freebooters who paid their troops in plunder, seemed to be the heirs of the dead Muhammedan Empire, and under their later leaders expeditions were made on a vast scale, and robbery was systematised over large portions of the Continent.

Carey and Thomas often saw the ditch that had been drawn around a part of Calcutta as a defence against their raids; for one division of them plundered Bengal, another spoiled the Punjab, Sindia and Holkar looked after the Rajput, Jat, and Rohilla provinces, and the fifth leader of these Mahrattas, years after the beginning of Carey's