Pioneers and Founders

This journey extended to the Himalayas, where the Bishop had four months’ repose at Simlah, then in its infancy as a resort for wearied East Indians; and on his descent from thence, his first halting-place was Kurnaul, where he found the church in a state of efficiency, owing, in great part, to an officer whose conversion to a religious life had been very remarkable.  Once, when in a large party, where gambling was going on to a reckless extent, he saw one of the players take out a hideous little black figure, supposed to represent the devil, to which he addressed himself with a mixture of entreaties and threats, involving such blasphemy that this officer, utterly horrified, withdrew from the company, spent the night in tears and prayers, and from that time became a religious man.  There was also an active chaplain, a large church, and a bungalow, built by the soldiers of an English regiment, the centre part arranged for service, and the surrounding verandah partitioned into little cells, where the soldiers could retire for private prayer or reading.  It was called St. John’s Chapel, and was in the hands of the chaplain.  Here the Bishop remained for two Sundays, and ordained Anund Musseeh, who had been fifteen years a Christian, and had been known to Bishop Heber.  The difficulty in his case was the rule not to ordain a person who had a heathen family, since he had not been able to convert his wife.  His excellence outweighed the objection, and he was the first Brahmin who received holy orders from an English bishop; but in after-times the heathen influence at home told upon him; and this failure perhaps rendered Bishop Daniel Wilson somewhat over-cautious and backward in ordaining a native ministry.

The next stage was Delhi, where a very interesting interview awaited him.  An officer of Anglo-Indian birth, James Skinner by name, who had raised and commanded a capital body of light horse, had twenty years before entered Delhi with a conquering army, and, gazing on the countless domes and minarets, vowed that if ever he should be able, he would build an English church to raise its cross among them.  He had persevered, though the cost far exceeded the estimate, and though the failure of houses of business had greatly lessened his means; and now he came, a tall, stout, dark man of fifty-six, in a uniform of blue, silver, and steel, a helmet on his head and a red ribbon on his breast, to beg for consecration for his church.  His sons were Christians, but his wife was a Mahometan, though, he said with tears, that “for thirty years a better wife no man ever had.”

The church was of Greek architecture, shaped as a Greek cross, with porticoes with flights of steps at each extremity except the east, which formed the chancel, and at the intersection was a dome and cupola.  It was paved with marble, and the whole effect was beautiful.  After the consecration a confirmation followed, and the first to receive the apostolic rite were the noble old Colonel himself and his three sons.  Twenty years later this fine building was filled with dying men, and shared in the horrors of the siege of Delhi; but it has now returned to its rightful use, and as a church of martyrs.

Indeed, all the places that the Bishop visited in this excursion have since been associated with the Mutiny.  Cawnpore was not much more satisfactory than when Heber had visited it; an irreligious commandant and a dissipated regiment had done much harm; and an imprudent letter of one of the chaplains had led to a quarrel, in which the clergyman unfortunately put himself in the wrong.  Happily, a new commanding officer and better conducted regiment had replaced the first, and the ill-feeling was so entirely removed that the Bishop wrote, “Never did I enter a station with such despondency, nor leave one with so much joy.”  And thus he prepared Cawnpore for that which was in store for it!

His visit to Allahabad was chiefly memorable for his horror at the large resort of pilgrims to bathe in the Ganges, and at the tax by which a Christian government profited by their pagan superstition, with all its grossness and cruelty.  He brought home a little ticket, with the number 76902 stamped on it, such as was issued to the pilgrims, and made a strong appeal to the Governor-General, as well as to persons in England.  The next year both this tax and that on the pilgrims to Jaghernauth were suppressed.  Here he heard of the death of Bishop Corrie, after having held the see of Madras only a year and a quarter, but having spent many years in India, and worked there for a whole lifetime, in which he had seen the very dawn of missionary efforts, and had watched the English Church spread from a few scattered chaplains to three bishoprics.

Lord Auckland and his sisters were more sincere friends of Christian efforts than any Governor-General had yet been, but these were trying times.  Mr. Bateman, his daughter’s husband, fell ill, and his wife was obliged to return to England with him; the Bishop’s other chaplain died, and also some of his best friends.  On going, a few years later, to consecrate a church at Singapore, he visited Moulmein, and was introduced to Dr. Judson, with whom he was very much struck.

The great work connected with Daniel Wilson’s name, as that of Bishop’s College is with Middleton’s, is the building of the Cathedral of Calcutta.  “What do you say, my four children,” he writes, “to your father’s attempting to build a cathedral to the name of the Lord his God in this heathen land?”  It had been the desire of Bishop Middleton, but there had been too much to do during his nine years, and it was only now that at last the times were ripe.  Subscriptions were opened, and the Bishop devoted a large amount of his income to the fund; plans were drawn up, land granted freely, and on the 9th of October, 1839, the first stone of St. Paul’s Cathedral was laid by the Bishop.

Just at this time there was a most remarkable move made towards Christianity.  Krishnaghur, 130 miles from Calcutta, was the great centre of the worship of Krishna, one of the manifestations of Vishnu.  Here two missionaries of the Church Missionary Society had been at work; and when the Bishop was there in 1837, he described them as having made “a little beginning,” by keeping schools and holding conferences with the people, but they had then no adult convert.  A year after a message was brought by a native, entreating for further help.  There were 1,200 seriously inquiring into the doctrine, with many candidates for baptism, and at many places around it was the same.  In the year 1840, the Bishop set forth to visit the spot and the adjacent districts, where almost all the villages seemed to be actuated by the same impulse.  The missionaries did their utmost to distinguish between mere fashion and hope of gain and a true faith; but after all their siftings, large numbers were ready for baptism, and the hope was so great that the Bishop was full of thankful ecstasy, and could hardly sleep from agitation, joy, and anxiety.  One hundred and fifty converts were baptized at once, at a place called Anunda Bass.  The examination was thus, the Bishop standing in the midst:—

“Are you sinners?”

“Yes, we are.”

“How do you hope to obtain forgiveness?”

“By the sacrifice of Christ.”

“What was that sacrifice?”

“We were sinners, and Christ died in our stead.”

“How is your heart to be changed?”

“By the Holy Ghost.”

“Will you renounce all idolatry, feasts, poojahs, and caste?”

“Yes, we renounce them all.”

“Will you renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil?”

“Yes.”

“Will you suffer for Christ’s sake?”

“Yes.”

“Will you forgive injuries?”

“Yes.”

These converts had been under preparation for more than a year, and seemed thoroughly convinced and fairly instructed.  Therefore the baptismal service was read by Mr. Deerr; and when the vows were reached, the Bishop turned to the Christians around and asked if they would be witnesses and godparents to these candidates; and, with one voice, they shouted that they would.  Each candidate was singly baptized, and then came up to the Bishop, by whom the words receiving him into the Ark of Christ’s Church were spoken.  At Ranobunda there was another baptism of 250, and, in the whole district, full a thousand were admitted.  It was not in over-confident joy.  “Time will show,” said the Bishop, “who are wheat and who are tares.”  It was impossible among so many that all should be perfect Christians, but it was a real foundation; the flame then lighted burns on steadily, and the Christian faith has a firm and strong hold in the district of Krishnaghur.

Anxieties of course crossed his work.  The Church Missionary Society, after being used to control its clergy, was not properly ready to allow their canonical obedience to a Bishop; and the troubles that thus arose made him once speak of Heber as happy in being shielded by his early death from the class of vexations connected with societies.  To his great grief, too, a lady who had worked for years at the education of girls and orphans at Calcutta seceded to the Plymouth Brethren, and was necessarily obliged to give up the charge.  It was to him “as if a standard-bearer fainteth.”  The Oxford controversy also vexed him a good deal.  The school of Newton and Cecil, in which he had been brought up, was at the most distant point that the Church permitted from the doctrines of the Tracts for the Times; and few men are able or willing candidly to judge or appreciate opinions that have grown up since their own budget was completed, especially after they have been for some time in the exercise of authority.  Thus he set his mind very strongly against all the clergy holding those views who came to work in the diocese; and thereby impeded a good deal that might have worked heartily with him if he had only been able to believe it, and to understand that the maintenance of the voice of the Church is truly the maintenance of the voice of Christ.

In November 1844, when on a visitation at Umballah, he had his first serious illness, a fever, he being then in his sixty-sixth year and in the thirteenth of his residence in India.  For about a week he was in great danger, but rallied, and was able to be removed by slow stages, though not without an attack of inflammation on the lungs before reaching Calcutta; and his constitution was altogether so much shaken that he was ordered home, without loss of time, to recruit his health.

He returned to England by the Overland route, and after a short respite recovered much of his strength, so as to be able to preach in many churches and appear at numerous meetings; and in a year’s time the vigorous old man was on his way back to his diocese, where he arrived in time to keep the Christmas of 1846, just two years after he had been stricken down by fever.  In the October of the next year he consecrated his cathedral, towards which 20,000l. had been his own donation, half towards the building, half towards the endowment.  His strength was not quite what it had been before, but he still had abundant energy, and new branches of the Church were springing up around him; not only the three dioceses that had branched from his own in India, but Ceylon had a Bishop of its own, Australia had five, and the Cape and New Zealand and the Isle of Hong Kong had each received a Bishop.  The principle had come to be recognized that to send out isolated workers without a head to organize was a plan that could hardly be reasonably expected to succeed; and in the long run prosperity has certainly attended the contrary arrangement.  Not to speak of the Divine authority, the action of a body under a recognized head and superior on the spot must be far readier of adaptation to circumstances than that of a number of equals, accountable only to some necessarily half-informed Society at home.

In his 73rd year, just after a visitation tour, it somewhat dismayed Bishop Wilson to find a letter from the Bishop of London sending him to consecrate the new church erected by Sir James Brooke, at Sarawak.  Few careers have been more remarkable than that of the truly great man who subdued Malay piracy, and gained the confidence of the natives of Borneo; and when the effort of the fourteen weeks’ voyage had been made, the Bishop returned full of joy and hope, and not long after, together with the Bishops of Madras and Victoria, joined in consecrating the missionary Bishop of Labuan to the new field of work there opening.  On the last journey of his life he also visited Rangoon, and there consecrated the church, finding the clergy hard at work and numerous converts.

During the year 1856 he had many attacks of illness, more or less severe; and in December, in going across the room in haste, he struck himself against a wooden screen, and was thrown down.  His thigh was broken, and his age was such that great fears for his life were entertained, but he recovered, and was able to pray with, cheer, and comfort the many anxious hearts at Calcutta during the dreadful days of the Indian mutiny of 1857, when the churches he had consecrated were stained with the blood of the worshippers.

But there was no cause for despondency in the attitude of the converts.  The districts where Christianity had been so widely diffused remained tranquil, and the Christians in the cities where the mutineers were raging did not apostatize; but, unless they could conceal themselves, suffered with the whites.  There was a great day of fasting and humiliation appointed by him for the 24th of July, 1857.

That day Bishop Wilson preached his last sermon.  The text was from Habakkuk i. 12.  “Art Thou not from everlasting, O Lord my God, mine Holy One? we shall not die.  O Lord, Thou hast ordained them for judgment; and, O mighty God, Thou hast established them for correction.”  Calcutta was then trembling under the tidings of the horrors of Cawnpore, the death of Sir Henry Lawrence, and the siege of Lucknow; and no one knew what peril might be the next.  Slaughter seemed at the very gates, when the old man stood forth to console and encourage, but yet to give warning strong and clear that these frightful catastrophes were in great measure the effect of our sins, our fostering of heathenism, our recognition of caste, and were especially a judgment on the viciousness and irreligion that had been the curse of English life in India.  It was in open Christianity alone that he beheld hope.

The day was observed by all the clergy, but the Governor-General for some reason declined to make it official, and, only when the worst of the danger was over, appointed the 4th of October as a fast-day.  The Bishop arranged the services, but was too unwell to attend them.  This was the beginning of his last illness; and though he held an ordination some weeks later, these latter weeks were all sinking, and increasing feebleness.  A sea-voyage was twice attempted, but without success; and on the 1st of January, 1858, his trembling hand wrote, “All going on well, but I am dead almost.—D. C.  Firm in hope.”

Daniel Calcutta, whom these initials indicated, wrote these words at half-past seven at night.  By the same hour in the morning he had peacefully passed to his rest.

One more Bishop of Calcutta we have since mourned; though the shortness of his career was owing to accident, not disease or climate.  But with Daniel Wilson the see of Calcutta became established as a metropolitan bishopric, and ceased to possess that character of gradual extension which rendered its first holders necessarily missionaries.  True, it needs many subdivisions.  Four Bishops are a scanty allowance for our vast Indian Empire, and the see of Calcutta has a boundary scarce limited to the north; but these are better days than when it included the Cape, Australia, and New Zealand.  The Bishop has now more to do with the development of old missions than with the working of new ones; and there can be no doubt that though there has been much of disappointment, and the progress is very slow, yet progress there is.  The older converts form more and more of a nucleus, and although there is a large class who hang about missions from interested motives, there are also multitudes of quiet and contented villagers whose simplicity and remoteness shield them from the notice of the travellers who sneer at Christianity and call mission reports couleur de rose, because they have been taken in by some cunning scamp against whom any missionary would have warned them.

The towns and the neighbourhood of troops are not favourable places for observing the effects of Christianity.  The work of the schools in the great cities tells but very slowly.  At present, out of a hundred boys who go thither and receive the facts of Christianity intellectually, only the minority are practically affected by it; and of these, some lose all faith in their own system, but retain it outwardly in deference to their families, while others try to take Christian morality without Christian doctrine; and only one or two perhaps may be sincere and open believers.  But even if only one is gained, is not that an exceeding gain?  It took three hundred years of apostolic teaching to make the Roman Empire Christian.  Why should we “faint, and say ’tis vain,” after one hundred in India?

CHAPTER VIII.  SAMUEL MARSDEN, THE AUSTRALIAN CHAPLAIN AND FRIEND OF THE MAORI

It has been mentioned that the island of Australia was considered as an archdeaconry of the see of Calcutta.  This enormous island, first discovered in 1607 by Luis de Torres, and inhabited only by the very lowest race of savages, appeared to the Government of George III. a convenient spot for forming a penal settlement; and in 1787 the first convict ships carried out an instalment from the English jails to New South Wales, where the city of Sydney was founded by Governor Phillip.

As usual in those days, the provision made for the moral or religious training of this felon population was lamentably and even absurdly deficient; for it seemed to be considered, that so long as the criminals were safe out of England, it did not greatly matter to her what became of them.  But the power of grace is sure to work sooner or later wherever the Christian name has been carried, and a holy man rose up, not only to fight hard with the mass of corruption in Australia, but to carry on the light to the more distant shores of the Southern Ocean.

This good man, Samuel Marsden, was the son of a small farmer at Farsley, near Calverley, in Yorkshire, and was educated at the free Grammar School at Hull by Dr. Joseph Milner, whose Church History used to be a standard book in the early part of this century.  He began his career as a tradesman at Leeds, but his school influences had given him higher aspirations; and a body termed the Elland Society, whose object was to educate young men of small means and suitable character for the ministry, and whose chief supporters were Wilberforce, Simeon, and Thornton, selected him as one of their scholars, and placed him at St. John’s College, Cambridge.  He had not even taken his degree when, to his surprise, he was offered a chaplaincy in New South Wales!  The post was no doubt a difficult one to fill,—for who would willingly undertake to be one of two clergymen sent to labour among an untamed multitude of criminals?—and Mr. Wilberforce was, no doubt, glad to suggest a young man so blameless and full of zeal, and of whom, from personal observation at Cambridge, Mr. Simeon had so high an opinion.

Samuel Marsden wished to decline it at first; but finding that no one else would come forward to undertake the charge, he accepted it; and in the spring of 1793 he was ordained, and married, being then nearly twenty-nine years of age.  His wife, Elizabeth Tristan, was thoroughly worthy of him, and ruled his house admirably, never calling him back from any duty, but so managing that his open-handed charity never brought him into difficulties.  They were obliged to take their passage in a convict ship, which was to sail from Hull.  Marsden was engaged to preach in a church near the harbour, and was just about to enter the pulpit when the signal-gun was fired to summon the passengers on board.  He took off his gown, gave his arm to his bride at her pew door, and walked to the beach, the whole congregation streaming out after them down to the boat, where the young clergyman stood for a few moments ere pushing off, to give his parting benedictions.

The ship went round to Portsmouth to receive her load of convicts; and while she was lying there, Marsden visited the Isle of Wight, and one Sunday preached in Brading Church.  The effect of his sermon in touching the heart of one young woman was long remembered, in consequence of a memoir of her, entitled “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” which was drawn up after her death by the clergyman of her parish, the Rev. Legh Richmond.

It was as trying a voyage as Henry Martyn’s, except that even less was to be expected from his shipmates.  The captain was unwilling to allow prayers to be read even on Sunday, saying he had never known a religious sailor; and though, after a time, Mr. Marsden prevailed, he never felt himself making much impression for good.  One of his books on the voyage was the Life of David Brainerd, that torch of missionaries, and who proved the example which served to stir Mr. Marsden to look beyond his own immediate field of labour, severe though that was, and unflinching as was his toil.

His arrival at Paramatta, his new home, was in the March of 1794, when the convict system had prevailed about seven years, and had been sufficient to form a population disgraceful to human nature.  None of those endeavours to reclaim the prisoner which now prevail had then been attempted, and jails were schools and hotbeds of crime, whence the transported were sent forth to corrupt each other more and more on board ship; and then, though employed on Government works or assigned to free settlers as servants, so soon as they had worked out their time of servitude they were let loose to live after their own will.

Such as had any capacity for steady industry soon made their fortunes on the parcels of land allotted to them by Government, to which they added by purchase; and these persons, by the influence of wealth and property, rose into colonial rank and authority, though without any such real training in the sense of uprightness or morality as could fit them for the posts they occupied.  The least tainted by crime were the Irish, who had been deported by wholesale after the rebellion, some without even a form of trial, but these were idle and prone to violence; while of the regular convicts there was a large proportion addicted to every brutality that vice could conceive, and their numbers were continually being recruited by fresh shiploads after the assizes at home.  The only attempt at securing order and tolerable safety was by visiting every offence, even the slightest, of which a convict was accused in a court of justice, with the most unrelenting severity; and this, of course, had the effect of further brutalizing these felon people, making them reckless of the deeds they committed, and often driving them to become bush-rangers—outlawed wild men of the woods—a terror to the colony.  A powerful military force was kept up to repress these wretched beings by physical force, but of moral training there was only what was afforded by the openings for industry in a new country, and religious teaching was represented by—two chaplains, for convicts, soldiers, settlers, and all!  No wonder that the senior soon broke down under the hopeless toil of such a position, and left the junior to struggle with it alone.  And nobly he did struggle!  Wilberforce had made a wise choice of a man in the prime of youth, whose bullet-headed portrait speaks of the most dogged determination, with nerves, health, and weight enough to contend for a whole lifetime with the horrible depravity around him—the only clergyman, and with three settlements far apart dependent on his ministry.  And in the outset he was severely tried by domestic sorrows; for his eldest son, at two years old, was thrown out of his mother’s arms by a jolt to the carriage over the rough road, and killed on the spot; and a younger child, who was shortly after left at home from dread of a similar accident, was allowed by its attendant to stray into the kitchen, where it fell backwards into a pan of boiling water and was fatally scalded.

The father bore these calamities as one who had steadfast faith and resignation—“one who felt much and said little.”  The demands on his time, indeed, left him no leisure for giving way to grief.  Spiritual matters were not all that came upon him.  In the utter lack of conscientious men to perform the functions of the magistracy, he was at once appointed to the bench; nor, indeed, was there the same feeling in England then as now against the combination of the clergyman and justice of the peace.  The most exemplary parish priests viewed it as a duty to administer justice in their villages; and the first, and till quite recently the sole manual of prayers to be used with prisoners, was the production of one of these clerical magistrates.  A Yorkshire farmer’s son could not be expected to know much about law, but good sense, uprightness, perception of justice, and intense determination, he had, as well as Christian humanity; and in these he was superior to any of his colleagues on the Paramatta bench, whom he was continually striving to raise to some comprehension of the commonest rules of justice, mercy, and decency; and in this, after a long course of years, he in some measure succeeded; but not till after his strong hand, impartial justice, and hatred of vice, had made him enemies among all parties; and it is only too probable that his secular authority, though always nobly wielded, impeded rather than otherwise his pastoral influence.