India's Problem, Krishna or Christ

by John P. Jones

But it was only from the arrival of Vasco da Gama and the Portuguese conquest four centuries ago, that the influence of that Church began to be seriously felt and its triumphs recorded.

By the sword and cruel Inquisition not only were Syrian Christians compelled to transfer their allegiance to the Pope; non-Christians also were, for perhaps the second time in the long history of the land, subjected to the bitter restraints and inhuman inflictions of religious persecution. It is a curious fact that the hideous and bloody monster of religious intolerance was hardly known in India until, first, the followers of Mohammed and, secondly, the disciples of the meek and lowly Jesus began to invade the land.

Then follow the devoted and heroic labours of the saintly Xavier. He was a man of princely extraction, of royal bearing, of Christian devotion and self-denial. He wrought, according to his light, with supreme loyalty to his Lord and with a divine passion for souls in South India. Many thousands of the poor fishermen on the coast was he permitted to baptize into the Christian faith. It is much to be regretted that, like nearly all subsequent Romish missionaries, he gave himself, all but exclusively, to the ceremonial salvation, rather than to the ethical transformation and the spiritual regeneration, of the people. It has always been a much easier thing, in [pg 167] India, to gather the people for the reception of the mystical ordinances of our faith than it has been to prepare them, by patient teaching and guidance, to exemplify its precepts by their lives.

After Xavier came the accomplished and wily Jesuit, Robert de Nobilibus—the nephew of Cardinal Bellarmine. A believer in the Jesuitical principle that the end justifies the means, and ardently desiring to bring the Brahmans over to his faith he proclaimed himself, and in every way assumed the rôle of, “the Western Brahman.” He lived scrupulously as a member of that haughty caste and, until recalled by the Pope on account of his deception, wielded much influence over the Brahmanical hierarchy in Madura.

Men of great power and supreme devotion to their faith followed as representatives of that great Church in India. Such names as de Britto, Beschi, the Abbe du Bois are a crown of honour to that community. Many like them spent lives of great self-denial for the cause of Christ and faithfully wrought for the redemption of the people; so that at present the power of the Romish Church and the devoted energy of its leaders are known in every section of the Peninsula. After nearly six centuries of effort its community in India has reached the total of 1,524,000 souls. For a long time, it has not enjoyed much increase in its membership. In many places it finds numerous accessions; but not a few of its people backslide and return to their ancestral faith. The marked defects of Romanism in that land have been its concessions to, and compromise with, the religion of the land both on the side of idolatrous worship and of caste observance. I have discussed the subject [pg 168] with Indian Roman Catholics in the villages and find that to them the worship of saints, through their many obtrusive images, is practically the same as the idolatry of the Hindus—the only marked difference being in the greater size of the Romish images! In like manner the Jesuit has adopted and incorporated into his religion, for the people of that land, the Hindu caste system with all its hideous unchristian divisions. All this makes the bridge which separates Hinduism from Roman Catholic Christianity a very narrow one; and it reduces to a minimum the process of “conversion” from the former faith to the latter. But an easy path from Hinduism to Christianity means an equally facile way of return to the ancestral faith. If the Hindu has little to surrender in becoming a Christian, neither has such a Christian any serious obstacle to prevent his return to Hindu gods and ceremonies when it suits his convenience to do so. Hence it is that the new accessions to Romanism hardly exceed the number of those who leave it in order to resume their allegiance to the faith of their fathers.

3. Protestant missionary effort began late. In India it was introduced with the Dutch conquest in the early part of the seventeenth century. But the proselytizing methods of the Dutch in those days savoured too much of the Romish inquisition under the Portuguese. When the pressure of religious compulsion by the civil government was removed, consequent upon the English conquest in Ceylon and India, the people apostatized in a body.

(a) It was not until the truly Christian King, Frederick IV. of Denmark, took, himself, a religious [pg 169] interest in that land at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and sent, at his own expense, the first two Protestant missionaries to Tranquebar on the east coast, that really consistent Protestant effort for the redemption of India began.

Zeigenbalg and Plutschau, the two pioneers who were sent to Tranquebar, arrived in 1706. They inaugurated the great work of Protestant Christianity for the spiritual regeneration of India, and will always find an honoured place among the heroes of the cross.

Zeigenbalg was a man of great piety and of intellectual resources. He died in 1719 after a most successful service of unremitting toil. He gathered hundreds of converts into the Christian fold, established schools and erected a beautiful church edifice which stands today as the oldest Protestant Mission Church in the East. Above all, he felt that an open Bible in the vernacular was essential to the conversion of India; and he therefore gave himself to the translation of God's Word. He was not able to complete this work; it did not issue from the press until 1725. This Tamil version of the Bible was the first translation of God's Word in India and in all the East; and it stands today as a monument to his intelligent labours and to those of his worthy successor, Schultze. It also represents the beginning of a new era of missionary effort in the country. The Roman Catholics, during all their stay in that land have done nothing towards giving to the people the Bible in their native tongue. It was not until the year 1857 that, stirred by Protestant example, they published their first and only translation of any portion of God's Word in any [pg 170] of the South India vernaculars—that of the Tamil Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.

Schultze spent fifteen years in Madras and left a congregation of 700 persons there. From Tranquebar, as a centre, missionary effort spread extensively throughout the Madras Presidency. This was done through German missionaries supported mainly by English funds furnished by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge.