CHAPTER VII

INDIA AND THE VOYAGE IN 1823

IN the flower of his life and the fulness of his powers, at the age of forty, Reginald Heber went out to India. The time was propitious; the men who guided the policy and administration of the East were the ablest and most upright who have ever adorned the service of the East India Company. There was one exception. A new GovernorGeneral had been appointed about the same time, and had sailed for Calcutta only three months before Heber. By a series of unfortunate accidents, the selection had fallen on Lord Amherst. The fact that he had borne with patience the indignities which the Peking Mandarins had cast on the British Ambassador, was considered a better title to the office of Governor-General than the Madras services of Lord William Bentinck, who had to wait for some years longer. More unfortunate still was the political event which, at the last moment, prevented George Canning from taking up the appointment on the resignation of the Marquess of Hastings. On his way down to Liverpool to bid his constituents farewell before embarking-and to be the guest, as usual, at Seaforth House, of the father of Mr. W. E. Gladstone, then eighteen years of age and his devoted admirer-the Governor-General designate was informed of the suicide of Lord Castlereagh, then Marquis of Londonderry. Lord Liverpool refused to carry on the Government without the help of Canning as Foreign Secretary, and that brilliant statesman never saw India, which his son was to govern as the Queen's first Viceroy after the Mutiny.

The genius and the detailed experience of George Canning, gained as President of the Board of Control, would have worthily crowned the administration of Lord Hastings. For the ten years after the new and more liberal charter of 1813 had been conceded that Governor-General had ruled the East in the imperial spirit of Warren Hastings and the Marquess Wellesley. After victories of peace no less than of war, of public works and education as well as over Goorkhas, Marathas, and Pindarees, Lord Hastings consolidated the Empire of India proper, and left ten millions sterling in the treasury, with an annual surplus revenue of two millions. In the same period Bishop Middleton had been laboriously organising the new diocese. Had George Canning entered on the one high office at the same time as Reginald Heber was consecrated to the other, the history of India must have been differently guided. What a group of wise and cautious, as well as brilliant and successful administrators and soldiers India had! Mountstuart Elphinstone was governing Bombay; Sir Thomas Munro was revolutionising the land system of Madras; Metcalfe and Malcolm were in the vigour of their powers; and Heber's connection, Lord Combermere, was soon to be Commander-in-Chief. Yet, because at the head of them all there was Lord Amherst, a very ordinary English gentleman, without experience or will, the war in Burma was so conducted as to empty the treasury, add to the debt, and arrest all that progress for which Lord Hastings had made the time ripe. Even if Lord William Bentinck had relieved Lord Hastings when the latter vacated Government House, Calcutta, on the first day of the year 1823, the war with Burma must have been brought to a rapid conclusion, and have paid its way by the inclusion of fertile Pegu, instead of or along with Tenasserim, in the British Empire, as Munro desired; and Hindoo widows would not have continued to be sacrificed on the funeral pile as they were for seven years

more.

The East India Company's Charter of 1813, by which Parliament had forced on the Directors the bare toleration of Christianity and the supply of Anglican and Presbyterian services for its own servants, began to bear missionary fruit for the highest good of the natives in the year 1816. Then Corrie settled Mr. Bowley in Chunar, committing to him the

revision of Henry Martyn's Hindostani version of the New Testament. Then the first two clergymen of the Church of England who had gone forth as missionaries landed in India, Rev. William Greenwood at the Kidderpore suburb of Calcutta, which he soon left for the European military invalids at Chunar, and Mr. Norton at Travankor. Then Lieutenant Stewart founded the Burdwan Mission of the Church Missionary Society, and then the Basel Missionary Seminary was established, afterwards supplying that Society with at least eighty Lutheran agents. This the Berlin Seminary had previously done. Two years before, the able German Rhenius had been sent to Madras, and in 1820 he began the fruitful Tinnevelli Mission, and the Bombay Mission was begun, following that of Benares in 1817 and Ceylon in 1818. In 1822 Miss Cooke, who became the wife of Mr. Wilson of the Church Missionary Society, opened the first school for native girls in Calcutta. It was in 1821 that the older Society for the Propagation of the Gospel saw its first English missionaries to India land. there for Bishop's College-the two Cambridge men, W. H. Mill of Trinity and J. H. Alt of Pembroke Hall. But up to 1823 no ordained missionary of the Church of England was at work teaching or preaching to its peoples in their own tongue, and no native convert had been Episcopally ordained.

Unsupported by missionary brethren, for whom they called to England in vain, the five evangelical chaplains alone had cared for the spiritual good of the Hindoos and Musalmans. David Brown, Claudius Buchanan, and Henry Martyn, above all, had been true to their Master's call, and had passed away. Corrie and Thomason were still about the Father's business, wearing the mantle of the young prophet who, after flashing through North India, Arabia, and Persia, had disappeared at Tokat. Corrie indeed had been the only practical bishop worthy of the name in all India till Heber delivered his charge. Thomas Thomason, while influencing Lord Hastings, who commissioned him to draw up a system of public instruction for the natives, which it fell to Lord William Bentinck, Macaulay, and Duff to inaugurate on broader lines after the next charter of 1833, gave himself to the organisation of the Church 1 Sir Richard Temple's James Thomason, the Chaplain's son, p. 29 (Oxford 1893).

Missionary Society, of which he became the local Secretary in 1817. He wrote: "We have begun our missionary operations in print; for the first time two of our highest civilians show their faces to the Indian public in connection with a professedly missionary institution. We have established a monthly missionary prayer meeting at my church. Missionary communications are read, and prayer is offered up for missionary prosperity. Ten years ago such an event would have thrown the settlement into an uproar." "Send us labourers, faithful and laborious labourers," he cried, as Charles Grant and George Udny had done a generation before.

1

In and around Calcutta itself there were only six native converts 1 belonging to the Church of England in 1823, when Rev. J. Wilson was joined by Rev. M. Wilkinson, whose Sketches of Christianity in North India is an almost contemporary authority of great value, for it was revised by Bishop Corrie.2

"I am ashamed of both our Universities," Wilkinson wrote. 'They have given us bishops, but not one missionary.3 What is wanting is men-that precious commodity-who shall be wholly devoted to the work. Meanwhile, our Dissenting brethren are accumulating around us. At this time we had ten Dissenting ministers of different kinds constantly labouring in Calcutta ; their presses are at work, their legs, their lungs, all are engaged in the great and good cause." Since 1813 Calcutta had been as openly a centre of William Carey's work as Danish Serampore itself. The Serampore Brotherhood alone had at this time ten stations manned by twenty-five

1 See p. 233 of Wilkinson's Sketches.

2 See also Long's Hand-Book of Bengal Missions in connection with the Church of England (1848).

3 In his interesting sketches of the early history of the Church Missionary Society in its Intelligencer, May 1895, the Rev. Charles Hole, B.A., quotes the famous sermon, in 1813, of the Rev. William Dealtry, F. R. S., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who was the friend of Charles Grant, and tutor of his sons. Although the bishops still held aloof, and the first dignitary of the Church to join the Society was Dean Ryder of Wells in that year, and although missionaries had to be fetched from the Seminary of Berlin," Dealtry prophesied that which the deaths of Martyn and Heber brought about -"A new race of missionaries shall enter into the labours of those who have been called to their eternal reward, and, whilst they reflect honour on our own Church, will confer benefit upon the universal Church of God."

European and Asiatic missionaries.1 The Baptist Society of London had five stations with twelve such agents. The London Missionary Society was represented at Chinsurah by Mr. May, whose primary schools had formed a model for Thomason and Stewart. How generously the new Bishop bore himself to such predecessors in the greatest of all conflicts, as Henry Martyn had done, we shall see.

Such was the relation of the Church of Christ in England to the non-Christian peoples of India and the East, of Africa and Australasia also, when Reginald Heber, after an almost secret consecration service in Lambeth Chapel, went forth as their "chief missionary." Under a salute, however, the second Bishop of Calcutta joined the Thomas Granville, East Indiaman, Captain Manning, on the 16th day of June 1823, at the mouth of the Thames. At this point that Indian Journal begins which his widow dedicated in 1827 to the Right Hon. C. Watkin Williams Wynn, M.P., President of the Board of Control, and Mr. Murray published under this title, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, from Calcutta to Bombay, 1824-1825 (with Notes upon Ceylon); an Account of a Journey to Madras and the Southern Provinces, 1826; and Letters Written in India. The work has ever since kept its place in English literature as the most popular 2 book on India in the first half of the Nineteenth Century. It is at once a picture of the peninsula and an autobiography of the writer, written for his wife during their long enforced separation, but lacking the personal selfrevealing which gives autobiography its charm and value. To some extent we are enabled to supply that from his letters to Charlotte Dod:

"AT SEA, Lat. 14.1 North, Long 27.40 West, 12th July 1823. "MY DEAR CHARLOTTE-I sent you a short and hurried letter by an English vessel which passed us off Cape Finisterre, which will, I trust, have long since informed you of our prosperous

1 The Life of William Carey, D.D. (2nd. ed., 1887, John Murray), p. 345.

2 Mr. John Murray has published a in his "Colonial and Home Library." 1873.

cheap edition at 3s. 6d. in 2 vols. The last of many editions is dated