"Hear Ye the Rod, and Who Hath Appointed It" / A Sermon for the Fast Day, October 7, 1857

by James Galloway Cowan

And cannot any reflecting mind, informed of our manner of rule in India, discern the nature and point to the instances of our provoking sin? A wonderful Providence has made us, on most easy terms, possessors of a territory abounding in all kinds of riches: we have brought home thence great stores of treasure: we have found there lucrative and desirable employment for our children, who in their turn have been enabled to make ample provision for their families, and we have reaped there many other advantages. With the soil, we have acquired dominion over some two hundred millions of human beings, possessed like ourselves of immortal souls, and destined to inherit an eternal state of bliss or woe, according as they shall have pleased or displeased God in the flesh. We found these natives sunk in various forms of the most degrading superstition, gratifying (as they thought religiously) the most grovelling lusts, and practising the most inhuman rites. At the time when our chartered merchants took possession of the ground they had purchased for warehouse room, the full glare of the Gospel-light shone upon us. The semi-darkness of Popery had been dispelled. It was the triumph-day of the Reformation.

Now, it is a first principle of the Gospel (which we had then no excuse for not understanding), that none of us lives for himself; that a candle is not lighted to be hid under a bushel; that what we have received, Christian love and Christian duty require us to impart. Yet we traded with these benighted people, and lived among them, without allowing them to see the faintest glimmer of the true light. By and by, we became their masters, or rather stewards over them for God. We knew the religious responsibilities which rest upon the rulers of a household, we could not plead ignorance of the duties of stewards; still, not only did we refrain from discharging these duties by instructing and regulating those of whom we had the charge, but we actually ignored in their sight our own recognition of God, and our own personal responsibility to a Divine Master. So that they not unnaturally judged that we were infidels, acknowledging no religious faith at all. It was a common remark made on all sides, “When an Englishman goes to India, he leaves his religion at the Cape”—because no sign of its having accompanied him was ever witnessed.

And this, be it observed, was not because the servants wantonly disregarded their employers’ injunctions. It is recorded in history against the East India Company (and I need not tell you that the responsibility does not rest wholly on them), that they never sought to make converts to Christianity, but only to get money in India. Nor, my brethren, is this a crime, a dereliction of most solemn duty chargeable on past ages only. To this day and hour, no effort has been made by authority to persuade the natives to become Christians. Nay, worse; no clear exhibition of Christianity has been made to them. There are, it is true, three bishoprics in the country, erected (and supported) by voluntary societies, when the tardy permission was given. There are also Company’s chaplains at the various military stations, and there are some few missionaries. But the whole number at the beginning of the present outbreak was only in the proportion of one clergyman to some eight or nine hundred thousand natives. I know that some persons would object, that even this little show of Christianity has been injurious to our tenure of the country; that it has roused the suspicions of the jealous infidels, lest they should be coerced into an acceptance of our religion—that, in fact, it has caused the present outbreak. My brethren, this statement is scarcely worthy of a refutation. If it were, I could furnish it in the larger attendance of native children at the Missionary schools where the Bible is read, than at the Government schools from which it is excluded; and in the candid testimony of unconverted Hindoos, that their greatest suspicions of compulsory conversion was founded on the timid, half-concealed profession of Christianity by the English. But, my brethren, suppose it even so: suppose that an attempt to proclaim Christianity did meet with opposition, did provoke mutiny, is not this what it has ever had to contend against? Should you and I be Christians this day, if the brave missionaries who first came to our island had desisted at the earliest menace or murmur of the Ancient Britons or Anglo-Saxons? O let no such vain and impious excuse be made! We are bound as a Christian nation to exhibit Christianity to all our subjects; or, at any rate, to encourage the efforts of societies and individuals to do it. We must do it discreetly, but it must be done. How else shall we give account of our stewardship—that stewardship entrusted to us for the good of our subjects? But, my brethren, we have not even brought moral influences to bear upon this people. In our country every one is bound at least to obey the common law, and so is he (as far as I know), in all our dependencies, save in India. But there (some restraints have of late years been laid on them) infanticide, widow-burning, wholesale polygamy, and many other equally flagrant crimes have been tolerated, nay, deliberately sanctioned, because, forsooth, they are part of the Mohammedan or Hindoo religion.

Do we not deserve a judgment for this? And have we not got it, alas! in kind? We have left the Mohammedan to believe that it is heavenly to gratify lust, that it is meritorious to kill the disbeliever in his prophet. We have left the Hindoo (till lately) to destroy the widow, to murder the infant. And has not this had its influence in the treatment of our outraged and murdered ones—the men of peace, as well as the warriors, the women and the helpless babes?

This is not the place, nor am I the person to discuss at length the causes and cure of the Indian mutiny. My aim has only been to give you some glimpses of it in its religious light; and so to help you to see God’s hand in it, that you may seek relief from Him; and, according to your several opportunities, take counsel and use efforts to avert this judgment, and others, of which, if neglected, this will be the sure forerunner. “Hear ye the rod, and Who hath appointed it.”

With such sense of our neglect of God’s work, and our fearful responsibility to Him, let us draw near to the Throne of Mercy on this Solemn Fast Day. Let us humble ourselves as a people for the aggregate of this sin, and as individuals, for the shares in it, which by our deeds, our influence, our voice, our silence, we have respectively had. Let us consider, too, that as this wound in a “member,” affects the whole “body,” so may it have been inflicted for the sins of the whole body. The moral corruption, the tolerated, the sanctioned, the justified sins of this land, the general disregard of God as the administrator of temporal affairs, the unwilling acknowledgment, often withheld, of responsibility to Him; the sins like in kind to those which now excite our horror and indignation, the deceit and fraud, the atrocious murders, the daring deeds of uncleanness, the reckless meddling with the sacred law of marriage here at home—who shall say that this unhealthy state of the “body” has not helped to cause the sore in the “member”? And who shall not acknowledge that it is of Divine Mercy that that sore has not broken out in a more vital part? O then, as we “hear the rod, and Who hath appointed it,” let us not only submissively receive the chastisement, but also humbly and thankfully adore the clemency, which has made it so much lighter than we deserved.

But this is a day of requests as well as acknowledgments. We have to make our humble petitions to Almighty God; and to be acceptable petitioners, we must offer righteous prayers—righteous, not simply in the feeling that we merit punishment, that we do not merit mercy; but in the resolution to provoke punishment no longer; to deserve, by appreciating and turning to godly advantage, the supplicated mercy. “We have done wrong, we repent, we pledge ourselves to amend:” in this tone do we pray for peace and the restoration of our dominion; at least if we do not, the intelligent Christian must devoutly hope that our prayers may not be answered. Better, far better would it be, much as the worldly-wise will deride the folly of the assertion, that we should lose India altogether, than that it should be given back to us in anger; than that it should be again a wide field, on which to display our contempt of Christianity’s strongest obligations: we the holders of a gift, which not to hand on is to lose, seeming not to know that we have that gift: we the soldiers of the Cross to connive at, to sanction, and so to adopt and establish the dominion of Satan! O, as you pray for the success of our soldiers’ arms, asking that they may prevail and execute justice (not revenge) and restore peace, let it be with the resolution that so soon as the fitting time arrives, your voice, and influence, and means shall do their utmost to send out a spiritual army, to obtain a better conquest, to set up a more glorious dominion, to secure a more lasting and effectual peace wherein righteousness shall reign!

Meantime, let us not forget—oh, their case will bear no delay!—the immediate sufferers under the Divine displeasure. Too many, alas! have already drunk the bitterest dregs of our cup of visitation. Brutally treated, savagely murdered, it is too late to do anything for them. But there are many whom danger as yet but threatens; whom fiendish lust and cruelty are seeking to grasp and victimise; whom the sword may smite or the pestilence lay low, or the famine starve. What can we do for them? I am not asking what the Government is to do for them: they know their work, and seem fully bent on doing it: but what can we, as individual Christians, here at home do? What, my brethren, but pray for them? Besiege the throne of God daily: intreat Him, if it is needful to smite us yet longer with His rod, at least to bear less heavily on the innocent and helpless, to prepare those whom He wills to take, for death and the judgment that comes after death; to sanctify their sufferings; to comfort those who mourn for them.

And something else remains for us to do. There are sufferers in this sad mutiny who have escaped with life, but nothing else. We read of crowds of them, helpless babes without nurse or mother; gentle, delicate women, accustomed to all the comforts of life, huddled together in one room—their hearts torn with the loss of those they loved—their minds distracted with the remembrance of the atrocities they have witnessed—perhaps experienced—their bodies enfeebled, if not diseased, through their unspeakable hardships—without a comfort of any kind, or the means of procuring it! You know what to do for them. You know the value and power of sympathy timely shown in relieving pain, in binding up the wounds of the heart. In the name of the Great Sympathiser be not slow to manifest that sympathy in all possible ways; and as a substantial proof that you have it, lose no time in sending your contributions to the Fund which is to relieve their most pressing wants.

I will not do you wrong by supposing that you need words of mine to urge you to this duty. If the knowledge of the facts which you possess did not move you, it were vain to expect that any reasoning, any expostulation, any entreaty would avail. Whoso hath this world’s goods, and seeth his brother in such need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God—or anything else excellent or human—in him?