stantial nature of their security by the cruelties of Surajah Dowlah, in 1755. The horrors of the Black Hole reduced the English population from one hundred and forty-six to two or three and twenty; and no great efforts of missionary enterprise could be expected from those terrified and heartbroken survivors, even after the genius of Clive had placed them in greater security than before. Kiernander, however, replaced the church which Surajah Dowlah had destroyed in the year 1770, defraying all expenses out of his own resources, and henceforth the gospel was preached in sincerity and truth, whatever might be the atmosphere of vice and selfindulgence in which the chief officers of the now ambitious Company lived. That vice and self-indulgence were the rule rather than the exception, in high places, is not to be denied, and the more credit is to be given to the few-faithful found, though fewwho resisted the contamination of such examples as were set them by Hastings and Francis, and the other leaders of the politics and fashions of Bengal. "Verily," says Mr Kaye at this portion of his narrative, "it was of little use to think of Christianising the people until the English in India had begun in some measure to Christianise themselves."

With the year 1786, and the governor-generalship of Lord Cornwallis, the curtain draws up on a more hopeful scene. There are good men and true in offices of dignity and influence, such as Mr Charles Grant, and Mr William Chambers; and when the highest officials in India were seen to be as strict in marking the iniquities of private life as the neglect of public duties, the society of Calcutta underwent a sudden and extraordinary change. Gambling, duelling, and the other vices of high life, went out of fashion; and no longer restrained by the unanswerable taunt of the Hindoos, derived from the acts of some of its professors, "Christian religion, devil religion," the war was carried into the enemy's country with a strong garrison, as it were, left in the rear. This aggressive movement was made, however, without the concurrence of Lord Cornwallis; not that his lord

ship undervalued the religious and political effects of Christianity, but simply from the contempt and dis. like he entertained of the natives, whom he considered "not a convertible people." But this question was now about to be practically tried by other and humbler hands than those of a Governor-General. David Brown, a favourite disciple of Charles Simeon of Cambridge, and afterwards a most active propagator of the faith, had landed at Calcutta in the same year with Lord Cornwallis, as chaplain of the Military Orphan Asylum, then recently established. In the first glow of the evangelical zeal into which his humanity had burst forth while he was an undergraduate, the new chaplain saw much to mourn over in all that met his eyes. Yet he was not the man to draw back from the plough on which he had once set his hand. Negotiations were entered into with Wilberforce and Simeon for the establishment of Church of England missionaries, their salaries to be paid by subscription; and though these propositions for a while were fruitless, they led eventually to the formation of the Church Missionary Society from which the greatest benefits were expected to flow. David Brown, however, derived greater aid from the change of the chief governors than from the establishment of any society. Sir John Shore succeeded. Lord Cornwallis in 1793, and held the viceregal throne for four years. For that period all that the personal zeal of the Governor-General could do was done in aid of the missionary cause. He made open profession of his individual faith. "I have no hesitation," he wrote to Wilberforce, "on any occasion, and on some find it a duty, to declare myself a disciple of Christ, in whose gospel and in the Bible I look for my religion." With so congenial a spirit in the chief, the working officers were certain to proceed with additional vigour, and Sir John, after he had returned home with the title of Lord Teignmouth, as if conscious of the danger which might arise from an official encouragement of their labours, was careful in laying down the limits within which he believed their efforts ought to be restrained.

out fear the footsteps of the roving Tartar, and insinuated themselves into the camps of the valleys of Imaus, and the banks of the Selinga." When India was thus penetrated and surrounded by Christian missions so early as the fifth and sixth centuries, we are prepared for the marvels related of Thomas Cana, an Armenian merchant, who devoted himself to the evangelisation of the Hindoos in the eighth. This admirable personage was naturally enough, in the lapse of time, confounded with the real disciple who bore the same name, but whose connection with the East is not so well established. Whether, however, this Thomas was mistaken for the primitive apostle or not, the circumstance that our great King Alfred sent an embassy under Bishop Sighelow of Sherborne to do honour to the tomb of a Holy Thomas at Madras, admits of no doubt. A pilgrimage to the Coromandel coast in the year 883 for such a purpose, shows a wider diffusion of the Christian faith, and greater toleration and teachableness in the natives, than the ancient prejudices of Hindooism, and the recent introduction of Mohammedanism might lead us to expect; and even if the carping suspicion of Gibbon be well founded, that the envoys got no farther than Alexandria, and in that great centre point of the East and West collected their cargo and their legend, the belief in a Christian shrine in the town of Madras remains uncontroverted. Mussulman fanaticism was limited to the destruction of hostile religions, or the subjection of hostile nations. It tried in vain to erect a barrier against the cupidity of the West, which it could neither convert nor conquer, and the truths of Christianity were conveyed from the capital of the Grecian Empire through Arabia, and across the Indian seas, by the merchants of Genoa and Venice. When Constantinople fell, commerce found out the passage round the Cape, and Christianity accompanied it--but Christianity in its mere earthly form, girding itself with the sword of Peter, and fighting for the dignity of the Pope rather than labouring

for the propagation of faith and the saving of souls. The contest for papal supremacy at once began. The churches already founded by the efforts of the Syrian patriarch resisted the Latin yoke, and the native converts had the shame of seeing the first application of persecution commanded by the Christian pontiff against a Christian congregation. The Franciscan friars, who accompanied the expedition of Vasco di Gama in 1502, considered that they were advancing the interests of the faith by showing, or rather by hiding, the virtues of Christianity in their monastic cells. They built monasteries and churches, but withdrew from the active duties of life, leaving the benefits of the faith as it is in Jesus to be judged of by the lives of the Portuguese traders and adventurers, who, from the "Admiral of the Eastern Seas" to the lowest follower of the camp, were the most abandoned reprobates who ever disgraced the name of true believer. "The first Christian settlers in India," says Mr Kaye, "were the most unchristian of men, and it has taken more than three centuries to wipe away the stain cast upon Christianity by the lives of its European professors." This sentence, though applied to the Portuguese of the sixteenth century, we quote as the key-note of a great portion of Mr Kaye's volume. What indeed is the use of preaching and catechising, if the conduct of the great majority of the Christian inhabitants is in direct antagonism to the lessons of the teachers? The converse, at all events, of Pope's unorthodox line, "He can't be wrong whose life is in the right," is worthy of all acceptance"He can't be right whose life is in the wrong;" and as all was naught in those early days of Christian propagandism, Mr Kaye rejoices at the rise of one true man who does the work appointed him in a high and self-denying spirit, and rises into one of the most eloquent passages of his book when he describes the career of the sainted Francis Xavier of the Society of Jesus:

"It was in the spring of the year 1541 that the first missionary of the New So

6

ciety of Jesus turned his clear blue eyes, for the last time, upon the orange-groves of Spain, and set his face towards the shining Orient. A Portuguese vessel, destined to carry out to Goa a new Indian viceroy and a reinforcement of a thousand men, suffered the great-hearted enthusiast to slink silently on board, and to mingle with the noisy crowd of soldiers and mariners on her deck. No pleasant well-fitted cabin was there for him-no well-supplied cuddy-table'no outfit that he did not carry on his back. He pillowed his head upon a coil of ropes, and ate what the sailors discarded. But there was not a seaman in that labouring vessel, there was not a soldier in that crowded troop-ship, who did not inwardly recognise the great soul that glowed beneath those squalid garments. No outward humiliation could conceal that knightly spirit; no sickness and suffering could quench the fire of that ardent genius. The highest and the lowest held converse with him; and, abject, prostrate as he was, he towered above them all, alike as a gentleman and a scholar. And when, thirteen months after the vessel sailed out of the port of Lisbon, its rent sails were furled, and its strained cables coiled before the seaport of Goa, there was not one of the many enthusiasts who now, as they dropped down her weather-stained and shattered side, shaped for themselves in imagination so brilliant a career in the great Indies, or heaped up such piles of visionary wealth, as stirred the heart of Francis Xavier. But his career was only that of the Christian missionary, and the riches he was to gain were countless thousands of human souls.

"It was Xavier's will to suffer. The King of Portugal had ordered, that on his passage to India a cabin should be placed at his disposal, and furnished with everything that could render tolerable the discomforts of a sea life. But he had rejected these kingly offers, and contented himself with the bare deck as his home; a single cloak to shelter him in the foul weather, and a few books to solace him in the fair. And now that he had reached the point at which were to commence his apostolic ministrations, the same spirit of self-denial and selfdependence animated him in all that he did. He had prayed before his departure for more stripes; he had asked the Divine goodness to grant him in India the pains that had been faintly foreshadowed in his Italian career. He had carried out all sorts of briefs and credentials from regal and pontifical hands; and the bishop now eagerly tendered

him assistance, and pressed upon him pecuniary support. But he refused all these episcopal offers, and sought no aid but that of God. The more dangers seemed to thicken-the more appalling the difficulties that beset his path-the more agonising the trials he enduredthe louder, the more earnest was his cry, 'Yet more O my God!-yet more !'

"Protestant zeal is only contemptible when it denies that Francis Xavier was a great man. Delusions he may have had, strong as ever yet wrought upon the human soul; but the true nobility of his nature is not to be gainsaid. He faced the most tremendous trials with a courage and a constancy of the highest order, and prosecuted the most arduous and astounding labours with an energy and a perseverance scarcely exampled in the history of mankind. He found himself suddenly thrown into the midst of a mingled community of natives and Europeans, of which it was hard to say whether the one or the other were sunk in the deeper and more debasing idolatry. It was a privilege to him to endure hardship and to be beset with difficulty in the prosecution of his great work. His courage rose as the objects in his path loomed larger and larger, and he waded through the sea of pollution that lay before him as one who never feared to sink. He began his course by endeavouring to entice his countrymen at Goa into a purer way of life; and as none since the days of the apostle Paul have known better how to abound and how to be abased, he became as weak unto the weak, all things to all men, that by all means he might save some. The knightly spirit was never extinct within him; with the chivalry and the courtesy of the old noble, he united the fulness and readiness of the scholar; and whether among the gay and gallant officers who surrounded the Viceroy of Portugal, or among the degraded fishermen on the coast of Malabar, the gentle blood which flowed in his veins imparted dignity to his presence, softness to his speech, and the most winning generosity to his actions. Whether, placing himself at the head of a band of oppressed Christians, he charged down, crucifix in hand, upon a marauding enemy, or whether he braved death in fever hospitals and lazar-houses, performing readily the most sickening offices for their tainted inmates, the same noble courage and self-devotion shone out in everything that he did.

"That the doctrines he taught may not have been the soundest-that his means of teaching were insufficient-that he knew little of the native languages

that he made converts who were in reality no converts that he had an overweening faith, not peculiar to the sixteenth century, in the efficacy of infant baptism, are facts which all history records, but no true history in a grudging spirit. The more insufficient his means, the greater the faith that sustained him. When Francis Xavier went about the streets of Goa, or traversed the villages on the western coast, bell in hand, its clear sounds inviting all who heard to gather round him and accept from his lips the first rudiments of Christian truth; and when, with inalienable European accent, he enunciated a rude translation of the Apostles' Creed, and then of the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments, he did not believe that he, BO unworthy an agent, so weak a vessel, could convert thousands of wondering heathens to the faith as it is in Christ; but he believed that even a weaker vessel, even a more unworthy agent, might, in God's hands, become a human medium for the conversion of tens of thousands, and he did his best, knowing how little it was in itself, but how great it might become, if the Holy Ghost descended upon him as a dove, and birdlike accompanied him in his wanderings. How far the Diving Spirit may have worked in him, and for him, it is not for us in these days to determine. It was said that a miraculous gift of tongues was vouchsafed to him, that he raised the dead, and performed other prodigies; but he was too truthful, too real a man, to favour the growth of errors which the whole Cathohe world was only too willing to accept; and it would be the vilest injustice to fix upon the first Jesuit missionary the charge of dishonesty and insincerity, because among his followers have been liars and hypocrites of the worst class.

"The proselytes of Francis Xavier are numbered by his followers, not by tens, but by hundreds of thousands. He is said to have converted seven hundred thousand unbelievers to the Christian faith. His converts were drawn from all classes, from princes to pariahs. That the dishonesty or credulity of his biographers has greatly magnified his successes is not to be denied; but, making large deductions on this score, there still remains a formidable balance of nominal Christianity to be carried to the account of the apostle. His superhuman energies seem to have been attended with al

most miraculous results. Idols fell at

his approach; churches rose at his bidding; and the sign of the cross became the recognised symbol of fellowship among the inmates of entire villages.

From Goa he travelled southward to the pearl-fisheries of Cape Comorin, and after succouring the poor people who had been driven thence to the shores of the Straits of Manaar, returned to the western coast, and commenced his lsbours with extraordinary energy and success in Travancore. According to

his own account he baptised ten thousand heathens in a single month; carrying on the holy work till he could no longer articulate the words of the formula, or raise his hand to perform the office. Then he took ship for the Eastern isles, visited Malacca, Amboyna. Ternate. Java; and, after a while, returned to visit his churches in Southern India, and to prepare himself for a great crusade against the Bonzes of Japan. More than two years were spent in this holy war; many strange adventures he encountered, many converts he made, and many churches he established; but his career was now drawing to a close. He returned to Goa, and there in council with one Iago Pereira, captain of the vessel which had carried the apostle on his strange and perilous voyage from Japan, formed the magnificent design of converting the Chinese empire. But be never reached the flowery land. Difficulties beset the enterprise. The apostle of the Jesuits was landed at the island of Sancian; and there, as he was about to join, full of heart and hope, a Siamese embassy of which he had gained tidings, and thus aided to penetrate into the interior of the celestial empire, the hand of God was put forth to stay his triumphant career; the Divine mandate, 'thus far shalt thou go, and no further," was issued to that lowly, well-prepared servant of God: he met the summons with rapture, and on the bare beach, or beneath a miserable shed, which sheltered him neither from the heat by day nor from the cold by night, he closed a life of agony and bliss, of humiliation and of triumph, with scarcely a parallel in the history of the world."

After this glowing tribute to the apostle of the Indies, we are not surprised that Mr Kaye comes to the conclusion that, in the history of the Jesuit missions to Hindostan, Francis Xavier stands out in solitary grandeur as the one apostolic man. Beside him all his successors were but mountebanks and impostors. Strengthened by many nominal adhesions to the Romish form, the papal priesthood became insufferably arrogant and presumptuous. Don Al

exis de Menezes, the Archbishop of Goa, blew the trumpet in the good old knightly style, and rode at the head of his retainers to exterminate the schismatics of the south, terrifying their archdeacon into apparent compliance, and marshalling all his forces: the missionary archbishop cursed his foes, and struck them with excommunication-pronounced the head of their church, the Patriarch of Babylon, a heretic and impostor, and by dint of amazing perseverance, by bribery and bullying skilfully applied, by claiming the assisttance of the native princes, and undermining the confidence of all the churches, he finally attained his object, and the Syrian congregations professed themselves the liegemen of the Pope.

It was a matter, however, with which real Christianity had very little to do. The conversions were in few cases sincere, and the doctrines of the church were limited to its ceremonies and discipline. As if to prove the unsubstantial nature of Hindoo conformity under the teachings of Rome, there came a fresh band of Jesuit missionaries at the beginning of the seventeenth century. These men despised the example of Francis Xavier, who kept up the distinctive forms of his church, and preached openly the peculiarities of his faith; they pursued an opposite course. "They turned aside from the practice of no deceit, from the exercise of no hypocrisy. They lied in word, and they lied in action. They called themselves Western Brahmans, and in the disguise of Brahmans they mixed themselves with the people; talking their language, following their customs, and countenancing their superstitions." The success of these missionaries was proved by the number of converts they persuaded to go through the ceremony of baptism; but in all other respects the convert continued as deeply heathen as before. Jesuits, missionaries, catechists, and converts, all vied with each other in the ostentatious idolatry of their religious services. The processions which had taken place in honour of Vishnu, were now marshalled in worship of the Virgin. There was the same

noise of trumpets and kettle-drums; there were the same dancers, with the same marks of vermilion and sandal-wood on their naked bodies. To break down the barriers of caste would have been a great achievement, but the Jesuits did not attempt it. They went among the people with great parade of caste, and declared that they were sprung from the head of Brahma himself. As falsehood and imposture are sure, sooner or later, to meet their just reward, it will not surprise us to be told that the new Brahmans were detected, and driven forth with ignominy and contempt. It certainly is with no feeling of regret or commiseration that we read, that the dawn of the eighteenth century found the authority of the Church of Rome reduced to the narrowest limits, and the Jesuits nowhere visible on the Indian coast.

The first establishment of an English East India Company dates from 1599. The objects of the Company were simply commercial; and yet it was no long time before the religious element began to be introduced. Chaplains were appointed to all the ships, and each voyage was inaugurated with solemn prayer and supplication in presence of the Governor and his colleagues. The lives of the private adventurers were not very striking models of Christian conduct, and for the first century of the Company's existence the original institution only was kept in view, and in its official capacity the Company was not a proselytising body. We cannot help thinking that a great deal too much is made of the supposed immorality of the English people, and the lukewarmness on religious matters displayed by the Corporation of Merchants trading to the East. Mr Kaye extends his indictment against our predecessors from the beginning of the seventeenth century to very recent times. He dwells upon the dissolution of manners attendant on the Restoration, but he forgets the strong under-current of Puritanic asceticism that flowed beneath the glittering surface on which floated the revellers of Whitehall. There were men also, all through the reigns of Charles and James, who had