"Not much remains to be done in Spain. However, Toledo has established a scholasticate in Murcia, and Aragon is planning one for Tarragona. France is dispersed, but it has furnished excellent professors for the Biblical Institute and the Gregorian University. In the mission of Calcutta, 130,000 pagans have been brought to the Faith and in one Chinese mission, 12,000. The numbers could be doubled if there were more workers." This was in 1910, and within a week of this pronouncement, the expulsion in Portugal took place; in 1914 the war broke out which shattered Belgium and made France more wretched than ever. What the future will be no one knows.
[CHAPTER XXVI]
MODERN MISSIONS
During the Suppression — Roothaan's appeal — South America — The Philippines — United States Indians — De Smet — Canadian Reservations — Alaska — British Honduras — China — India — Syria — Algeria — Guinea — Egypt — Madagascar — Mashonaland — Congo — Missions depleted by World War — Actual number of missionaries.
Besides its educational work, the Society of Jesus has always been eager for desperate and daring work among savages. At the time of the Suppression, namely in 1773 three thousand of its members were so employed; and the ruthless and cruel separation from those abandoned human beings was one of the darkest and gloomiest features of the tragedy. To all human appearances millions of heathens were thus hopelessly lost. Happily the disaster was not as great as was anticipated. In his "Christian Missions" Marshall says: — It would almost seem as if God had resolved to justify his servants by a special and marvellous Providence before the face of the whole world, and had left their work to what seemed inevitable ruin and decay only to show that neither the world nor the devil, neither persecution, nor fraud nor neglect could extinguish the life that was in it. And so when they came to look upon it, after sixty years of silence and desolation they found a living multitude where they expected to count only the corpses of the dead. Some indeed had failed, and paganism or heresy had sung its song of triumph over the victims; others had retained only the great truths of the Trinity and the Incarnation while ignorance and its twin sister, superstition, had spread a veil over their eyes, but still the prodigious fact was revealed that in India alone that there were more than one million natives who, after half a century of abandonment, still clung with constancy to the faith which had been preached to their fathers, and still bowed the head with loving awe when the names of their departed apostles were uttered amongst them. Such is the astonishing conclusion of a trial without parallel in the history of Christianity, and which if it had befallen the Christians of other lands, boasting their science and civilization, might perhaps have produced other results than among the despised Asiatics. The natural inference would be that besides this special Providence in their regard these neophytes had been well trained by their old masters (I, 246).
For a time, of course, there were some Jesuits who lingered on the missions in spite of the government's orders to the contrary. Thus we find a very distinguished man, a Tyrolese from Bolzano, who died at Lucknow on July 5, 1785. His name was Joseph Tiffenthaller and he had lived forty years in Hindostan. His tombstone, we are told, may be still seen in the cemetery of Agra where they laid his precious remains. He was a man of unusual ability and besides speaking his native tongue was familiar with Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hindustanee, Arabic, Persian and Sanscrit. He was the first European who wrote a description of Hindostan. It is a detailed account of the twenty-two Provinces of India, with their cities, towns, fortresses, whose geographical situations were all calculated by means of a simple quadrant. The work contains a large number of maps, plans and sketches drawn by himself and the list of places fills twenty-one quarto pages. He also made a large atlas of the basin of the Ganges, and is the author of a treatise on the regions in which the rivers of India rise; a map of the Gagra which Bernoulli calls "a work of enormous labor" is another part of Tiffenthaller's relics.
In the field of religion he wrote books on "Brahmanism," "Indian Idolatry," "Indian Asceticism," "The religion of the Parsees and Mohammedanism with their relations to each other." He also published his astronomical observations on the sun-spots, on the zodiacal light, besides discussions on the astrology and cosmology of the Hindus, with descriptions of the flora and the fauna of the country. He was besides all that an historian, and has left us an account in Latin of the origin and religion of the Hindus, another in German of the expedition of Nadir Shah to India; a third in Persian about the deeds of the Great Mogul, Alam, and a fourth in French which tells of the incursions of the Afghans and the capture of Delhi, together with a contemporary history of India for the years 1757-64. In linguistics, he wrote a Parsee-Sanscrit lexicon and treatises in Latin on the Parsee language, the pronunciation of Latin, etc., He was held in the highest esteem by the scientific societies of Europe with which he was in communication. During the greater part of his life in India, the struggle was going on between the French and English for the possession of the Peninsula.
Of course he was not alone in India, at that time, for Bertrand tells us in his "Notions sur l' Inde et les missions" (p. 30) that "the Jesuits had a residence at Delhi as late as 1790", but, unfortunately, he could say nothing more about them. It is very likely, however, that when Pombal's agents attempted to crowd the 127 Jesuits who were at work in the various districts of Hindostan into a ship which had accommodations — and such accommodations — for only forty or fifty, many of them had perforce to be left behind, or perhaps failed to report at the place of embarcation. By keeping out of Goa, they could easily elude the pursuivants. The jungle, for instance, was a convenient hiding place. However, as they received no recruits the work went to pieces when the old heroes died, so that there were, most likely, no Jesuits there at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was just at this time, that England took possession of the greater part of Hindostan and, as a consequence, the country was soon swarming with Protestant parsons of every sect, eager to fill their depleted ranks with new converts from the East.
Marshall had been employed to report on their success, but as every one knows, the investigation brought him to the Church. His researches furnish very reliable and interesting information about the conditions prevailing in those parts among the old proselytes of the Jesuits. Quoting from the "Madras Directory" of 1857, he shows that in the Missions of Madura, founded by de Nobili, there were still 150,000 Catholics, and in Verapoli as many as 300,000, with an accession of 1000 converts from Mohammedanism every year. Nor were these Hindus merely nominal Christians. Bertrand who knew India thoroughly, writing in 1838, says of the Sanars: "One might almost say that they have not eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil with Adam, and that they were created in the days of original innocence. Among these Hindus there are numbers who when asked whether they commit this or that sin, answer: 'Formerly I did, but that is many years ago. I told it to the Father, and he forbade me to do it. Since then I have not committed it.' We reckon more than 7000 Christians of this caste." Father Garnier, S. J. wrote in the same year as follows: "The Christians of this country are, in general, well disposed and strongly attached to the Faith. The usages introduced among them by the Jesuits still subsist; morning prayer in common, an hour before sunrise; evening prayer with spiritual reading; catechism for the children every day given by a catechist; Mass on Sunday in the chapel. But in spite of these excellent practices there still remains much ignorance and superstition, and we shall have a good deal to do to form them into a people of true Christians before we turn our attention to the pagans. We shall do that when we are more numerous."