Отрывок из книги
Robert Caldwell
Published by Good Press, 2020
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On the western side of the Ghauts, the great mountain-range of Southern India, Christianity is also making progress. The Missionaries of the Basle Missionary Society have been labouring for the last twenty years in the provinces of Malabar and Canara, on the Malabar coast, and when I last heard of their progress, their converts from heathenism amounted to 2,000. Further south, on the same coast, there are the interesting Missions of the Church Missionary Society in the native states of Travancore and Cochin. I have not been long enough in India to remember the commencement of those Missions, but I have twice visited their principal stations, and on the occasion of my second visit, after an interval of nine years, I found both the number of Missionaries and the number of the native Christians under their care nearly doubled. It was particularly gratifying to find that the new converts who had been gathered in were not like the first converts, proselytes from the Syrian Church an old and interesting, though corrupted, Christian communion, but were direct acces sions from heathenism, especially from classes of heathens that had never before been reached. Amongst those newly-reached classes are the "Hill-kings," a race of rude, aboriginal moun taineers, living mostly in trees, and rarely before seen by any European eye. The Church Missionary Society's Missions in those districts comprise nearly 6,000 converts, who have to con tend with greater difficulties than any other native Christians in southern India, in consequence of the heathenism of the Malayala people being the most intense and fanatical with which I am acquainted, and the government of the country being heathen.
Further south still, in the Tamil portion of the Travancore country, are the Missions of the London Missionary Society, the most important and successful Missions of that Society in India, and which in the list of Indian rural Missions rank next to those of the Church of England in Tinnevelly. In connexion with those Missions there are upwards of 18.000 converts to Christianity, nearly all of whom speak the same language as our own converts in Tinnevelly, belong to the same castes and classes, and may be regarded as the same people ; and though in point of numbers they are considerably behind our Tinnevelly Christians, yet in education, public spirit, missionary zeal, and liberality in contributions to charitable objects, they have made, in proportion to their numbers, at least equal progress.
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