“Beyond question this work at Purulia is one of the most successful concrete results of Christian missions that the world can show.”
|A Costly Sacrifice.| The founder, Missionary Uffman, paid a costly sacrifice of devotion to the cause which he loved in the death of his oldest daughter from leprosy. Among the workers for the lepers was the Rev. F. P. Hahn, who gave forty-two years of labor in the mission, dying in 1910. He had been awarded, as have been other Lutheran missionaries, the Kaiser-i-Hind golden medal, which the British government bestows only upon those who have rendered distinguished service in humanitarian causes.
The reports of the Gossner Society for 1913 recorded fifty German missionaries and seventy-one thousand Christians. The Gossner mission is the largest of the Lutheran enterprises in India.
|The Command of God Unheeded.| The Danish-Halle mission among the Tamils in Tranquebar had been founded by Ziegenbalg and Plütschau as we have seen. Then during a period of unbelief at home, this noble mission declined. It was no wonder that the command of God was forgotten when a writer upon ecclesiastical affairs could express himself thus: “The Church of Christ is not suited to such nations as the East Indians, the Greenlanders, the Laplanders, and the Esquimaux. These people belong to the race of apes and it is useless to preach the Gospel to them until they become men.”
|A Decline.| At the time of the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the mission, Madras, Cuddalore, Tanjore and Trichinopoli had been allowed to pass into the hands of English missionaries, smaller stations had ceased to be occupied at all, and the Danish-Halle Society was limited to work at Tranquebar and Poriear. In 1825 a royal command put an end officially to the mission.
In 1837 there died the last Danish-Halle missionary, Kemerer by name, who bewailed upon his death-bed the sad condition which he left. But the church which he loved was not to remain without witnesses. The Leipsic Society, whose origin we have described above, sent to Tranquebar in 1840 John Henry Charles Cordes, who was a son-in-law of Kemerer.
|A Single Witness.| Alone, Cordes set to work. Feeling the need of native helpers he began once more a training school for them at Poriear. When in 1845 England bought Tranquebar he saved the mission to the Lutheran Church. At first the circumstances under which Cordes labored were disheartening in the extreme. Then two missionaries, Ochs and Schwartz arrived. A third station at Majaweram, begun and given up by the English, was incorporated.
|A Delicate Question.| In 1846 several hundred Tamils from Madras turned from the mission of the Church of England into the mission of the Leipsic Society on account of caste difficulties. One of the most delicate questions which must be met by missionary policy in India is that of caste. It has been the policy of most churches to decline to recognize that which is so contrary to the spirit of the Christian religion. The policy of the Leipsic missionaries has been to ignore the question, trusting to the purifying and uplifting effect of the Gospel eventually to solve the problem.
|Old Citadels Retaken.| Gradually under Missionary Cordes and his successors some of the old work of the Danish-Halle Mission was resumed and new stations were established. Work was begun once more in Madras, where Schultze had labored. Cumbaconam, where Christian Frederick Schwartz had preached, where ten thousand heathen priests were supported by the populace, where heathen temple touched heathen temple, heard again the Gospel, preached now by another Schwartz. In Sidabarum where the natives declared: “Christians may not live here; the God Siva will not endure it,” the Leipsic missionaries won seven hundred converts.
For more than thirty years Cordes worked in India and until his death in 1892, fifty years after he had been ordained as a missionary, he busied himself with missionary affairs.