In North India—where the casteless races of the hills, corresponding to the Shanars around Cape Comorin, were not discovered till far on in the present century—almost everything was different. By the time that the Evangelical Church directed its attention to Calcutta, the East India Company had become a political, and consequently an intolerant, power. It feared Christian proselytism, and it encouraged Hindu and Mohammedan beliefs and institutions. Whereas, in Madras, it gladly used Schwartz, subsidised the mission with 500 pagodas or 225l. a year, and had always conveyed the missionaries’ freight in its ships free of charge, in Bengal it kept out missionaries, or so treated them with all the rigour of the law against ‘interlopers,’ that William Carey had to begin his career as an indigo planter, and seek protection in Danish Serampore, where he became openly and only a preacher and teacher of Christ. North India, too, with Calcutta and Benares as its two Hindu centres, and Lucknow and Delhi as its two Mohammedan centres, Shiah and Soonni, was, and is, the very citadel of all the non-Christian world. The same Gospel which had proved the power of God to the simple demonolators of the Dravidian south, must be shown to be the wisdom of God to the Koolin of Bengal, the Brahman of Kasi, the fanatical Muslim from Dacca, and ultimately to Peshawur and Cabul, Persia and Arabia. The Himalayan and Gangetic land—from which Buddhism overran Eastern and Southern Asia—must again send forth a missionary message to call Cathay to Christ.
The Christianising of North India began in 1758, the year after the battle of Plassey, when, as Governor, the conqueror, Clive, welcomed his old acquaintance, of the Cuddalore Mission, the Swede Kiernander, to Calcutta, and gave him a rent-free house for eight years. Even Burke was friendly with Clive, writing of him: ‘Lord Clive once thought himself obliged to me for having done what I thought an act of justice towards him;’[20] and it is pleasant thus to be able in any way to link that name with the purely spiritual force which used the Plassey and the Mutiny wars, as it will direct all events, for making India Christ’s. The first church, built in 1715 by the merchants and captains, had been destroyed by a hurricane; the second had been demolished by Suraj-ood-Dowlah, in the siege of Calcutta, two years before, and one of the two chaplains had perished in the Black Hole, while the other was driven away. For the next thirty years the few who went to the chaplains’ church worshipped in a small bungalow in the old fort, where Kiernander opened his first school. By 1771-4 he had formed such a congregation of poor Christians—Portuguese, Roman Catholics, and Bengali converts—that he built and extended the famous Mission Church and School-house, at a cost of 12,000l., received from both his marriages. When, by becoming surety for another, the old man lost his all, and blindness added to his sorrows, he left an English congregation of 147 members, and a Native congregation of 119, half Portuguese or Eurasians, and half Bengali.
Kiernander’s Mission Church was the centre of the religious life of Calcutta and Bengal. Six years after its foundation there came to Calcutta, from Madras, Mr. William Chambers—who had been converted by Schwartz—and John Christian Obeck, who had been one of the catechists of the Apostle of South India. Chambers had not been a year in the capital when he found out Charles Grant, at that time overwhelmed by a domestic sorrow, and brought him to Christ. Grant soon after went to Maldah as Commercial Resident, where he had as his subordinates, George Udny, Ellerton, W. Brown, W. Grant, J. Henry, and Creighton. These men, with their families, Sir Robert Chambers, of the Supreme Court, Mrs. Anne Chambers who was with her sons, Mrs. Chapman, and others less known, formed the nucleus of a Christian community which first supported Thomas as a medical missionary, then welcomed Carey, and, with the assistance of two Governor-Generals, Sir John Shore and Lord Wellesley, changed the tone of Anglo-Indian society. Sir William Jones, too, in his brief career of six years, set an example of all the virtues. Henry Martyn had two predecessors as Evangelical chaplains and missionary philanthropists, the Yorkshire David Brown, and the Scottish Claudius Buchanan.
David Brown, an early friend of Simeon and Fellow of Magdalen College, was recovering from a long illness in 1785, when a letter reached him from London, proposing that he should seek ordination, and in ten days he accompanied Captain Kirkpatrick to Calcutta to superintend the Military Orphan School. The officers of the Bengal Army had unanimously resolved to tax themselves for the removal and prevention of the scandal caused by the number of boys and girls left destitute—no fewer than 500 at that time. This noble school, the blessings of which were soon extended to the white and coloured offspring of non-commissioned officers and soldiers also, was organised at Howrah by Brown, who then was made chaplain to a brigade, and afterwards one of the Fort William or Presidency chaplains. He found the Mission practically non-existent, owing to Kiernander’s losses and old age. To save the buildings from sale by the sheriff, Charles Grant bought them for 10,000 rupees and vested them in himself, Mr. A. Chambers, and Mr. Brown, by a deed providing that they remain appropriated to the sole purposes of religion. Until the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge could send out a minister, David Brown greatly extended the work of Kiernander. At one time it was likely that Henry Martyn would be sent out by Mr. Grant. Under the Church Missionary Society the Mission Church of Calcutta has ever since been identified with all that is best in pure religion and missionary enterprise in the city of Calcutta.
When sending out the Rev. A.T. Clarke, B.A. of Trinity College, Cambridge, who soon after became a chaplain, the Christian Knowledge Society, referring to Schwartz and Germany, fertile in missionaries, declared, ‘It has been the surprise of many, and the lamentation of more, that fortitude thus exemplified should not have inspired some of our own clergy with an emulation to follow and to imitate these champions of the Cross, thus seeking and thus contending to save them who are lost.’ That was in 1789, when the Society and Dr. Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, along with Simeon, Wilberforce, and the other Clapham men, had before it, officially, the request of Charles Grant, Chambers and Brown to send out eight English missionaries on 350l. a year each, to study at Benares and attack Hinduism in its very centre. Not till 1817 was the first Church of England missionary, as such, the Rev. William Greenwood, to settle in Ceylon and then in Bengal. Even he became rather an additional chaplain to the invalid soldiers at Chunar.
After a career not unlike that of John Newton, who first directed his attention to India, Claudius Buchanan, whom his father had intended to educate for the ministry of the Church of Scotland, wandered to London, was sent to Queen’s College, Cambridge, by Mr. Thornton of Clapham; there came under Simeon’s influence, and was appointed to Bengal as a chaplain by Mr. Grant. That was in 1796. For the next ten years in Barrackpore and Calcutta as the trusted chaplain of Lord Wellesley, by his researches in South India, by his promotion of Bible translation, and by the interest in the Christianising of India which his generous prizes excited in the Universities and Churches of England and Scotland, Dr. Claudius Buchanan was the foremost ecclesiastic in the East. He at once gave an impulse to the silent revolution which David Brown began and the Serampore missionaries carried on. His Christian statesmanship commended him to all the authorities, and soon the new Cathedral of St. John, which Warren Hastings had erected to supersede the old Bungalow Church, became filled with an attentive and devout congregation, as well as the mission church. These two men and William Carey formed the pillars of the College of Fort William, by which Lord Wellesley not only educated the young civilians and military officers in the Oriental languages, and in their duties to the natives, but developed a high ideal of public life and personal morality. Such was the growth of Christian feeling alike in the army and the civil service, and such the sense of duty to the rapidly increasing Eurasian community, as well as to the natives, that by 1803 Claudius Buchanan submitted to the Governor-General, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Bishop Porteus, his Thoughts on the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India. It took ten years, covering the whole period of Henry Martyn’s activities and life, from this time for the proposal to be legislatively carried out in the East India Company’s Charter of 1813.
Practically—except in Maldah residency during the influence of Grant, Udny, and Carey at the end of last century—the reformation was confined to Calcutta, as we shall see. It was a young lieutenant of the Company’s army who was the first to draw the attention of the Governor-General, Sir John Shore, in 1794, to the total neglect of religion in Bengal. Lieutenant White wrote that he had been eleven years in the country without having had it in his power to hear the public prayers of the Church above five times. He urged the regular worship of God, the public performance of Divine service, and preaching at all the stations. He proposed ‘additional chaplains to the Company’s complement for considerable places which now have none to officiate. Unless places were erected at the different stations for assembling to Divine service, it must be impossible for chaplains even to be able to do their duty, and to assemble the people together.’ The letter delighted the Governor-General, who said of it to David Brown, ‘I shall certainly recommend places to be made at the stations, and shall desire the General who is going up the country to take this matter in charge, and to fix on spots where chapels shall be erected.’ Nothing was done in consequence of this, however. It was left to Martyn, and the other chaplains who were in earnest, to find or create covered places for worship at the great military stations. Claudius Buchanan himself could not hold regular services at Barrackpore, close to Calcutta, for want of a church, and that was supplied long after by adapting and consecrating the station theatre!
The figures in Buchanan’s published Memoir on the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment, enable us to estimate exactly the spiritual destitution of the Protestant subjects of the British Government in Asia. Twelve years after Lieutenant White, Sir John Shore, David Brown, and Claudius Buchanan first raised the question, and when Henry Martyn began his ministrations to all classes, there were 676,557 Protestant subjects in India, Ceylon, Java, Sumatra, and Canton, Roman Catholics and Syrian Christians not included. In the three Presidencies of India alone there were 156,057, of whom 7,257 were civil and military officers and inhabitants, 6,000 were the Company’s European troops, 19,800 were the King’s troops, 110,000 were Eurasians, and 13,000 were ‘native Protestant Christians at Tanjore.’ In Bengal alone—that is, North India—there were fifty stations, thirty-one civil and nineteen military, many of which had been ‘without the offices of religion for twenty years past, though at each there reside generally a judge, a collector, a commercial resident, with families, together with their assistants and families, and a surgeon;’ also indigo planters, tradesmen, and other European inhabitants and the alarmingly large number of Eurasians. In Bengal alone there were 13,299 European Protestants, of whom 2,467 were civil servants and military officers; of the whole 13,299, ‘a tenth part do not return to England,’ and desire Christian education and confirmation for their children. Yet ‘at present there are but three churches in India, the chief of which was aided in construction by Hindu contribution.’ The India Journals and Letters of Martyn must be read in the light of all this.
It was thus that the successive generations of soldiers and civilians who won for Christian England its Indian Empire in the century from Clive to Wellesley, Hastings, and Dalhousie, were de-Christianised. Not till the close of the Mutiny war in 1858 did John Lawrence, first as Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab and then as Viceroy, and Sir Robert Montgomery as Lieutenant-Governor, lead the Queen’s Government to do its duty, by erecting, or helping Christians to erect, a chapel in every station up to Peshawur and Burma—that, to use Buchanan’s language in 1806, ‘the English soldiers and our countrymen of all descriptions, after long absence from a Christian country, may recognise a church.’ Including Ceylon, Buchanan’s scheme proposed an annual expenditure of 144,000l. for four dioceses, with 50 English chaplains and 100 native curates, 200 schoolmasters and 4 colleges to train both Europeans and natives for the ministry; of this, Parliament to give 100,000l. The ecclesiastical establishment of India—without Ceylon, but including Church of Scotland chaplains, and grants to Wesleyans and Roman Catholics—now costs India itself 160,000l. a year, while the annual value of the lands devoted to the non-Christian cults is many millions sterling. With all this, and the aid of the Additional Clergy and Anglo-Indian Evangelisation Societies, and of the missionaries to the natives, Great Britain does not meet the spiritual wants of the now enormous number and scattered communities of Christian soldiers and residents in its Indian Empire.
Henry Martyn went out to India at a time when the government of India had been temporarily entrusted to one of the only three or four incompetent and unworthy men who have held the high office of Governor-General. Sir George Barlow was a Bengal civilian of the old type, whom Lord Wellesley had found so zealous and useful in matters of routine that he had recommended him as provisional Governor-General. But the moment that that proconsul had seated the East India Company on the throne of the Great Mogul, as has been said, and Lord Cornwallis, who had been hurried out a second time to undo his magnificent and just policy, had died at Ghazipore, Sir George Barlow showed the most disastrous zeal in opposition to all his former convictions. By withholding from Sindia the lamentable despatch of September 19, 1805, which Lord Cornwallis had signed when the unconsciousness of death had already weakened his efficiency, Lord Lake gave the civil authorities a final opportunity to consider their ways. But Barlow’s stupidity—now clothed with the almost dictator’s power of the highest office under the British Crown, as it was in those days—deliberately declared it to be his desire, not only to fix the limit of our empire at the Jumna, a river fordable by an enemy at all times, but to promote general anarchy beyond that frontier as the best security for British peace within it. The peace of Southern Asia and the good of its peoples were postponed for years, till, with difficulty, the Marquis of Hastings restored the empire to the position in which Lord Wellesley had left it. Sir George Barlow is responsible for the twelve years’ anarchy of British India, from 1805 to 1817. His administration, which became such a failure that he was removed to Madras, and was from even that province recalled, must rank as a blot on the otherwise unbroken splendour and benevolence to the subject races of the government of South Asia in the century and a half from Clive to Lord Lansdowne.