the first East Indiaman that arrived, the chaplains were so few that even Calcutta was without a Protestant minister of any kind till Clive invited the missionary Kiernander to come from his Cuddalor mission. There is no evidence that any one chaplain besides Lord, of Surat and Bombay, ever learned an Oriental vernacular or sought to influence the natives for their highest good. Not one schoolmaster seems to have been sent out. The largest number of chaplains at one time in the Company's service in Bengal, Madras, Bombay, Prince of Wales's Island, St. Helena, and the factory in China, was nineteen. As the East India Company became transformed from a purely commercial into a political organisation, its directors and servants learned to dread missionary Christianity as dangerous to their revenues. Even to their own factors and troops the "decent and convenient place for divine service" ordered by King William III. was not supplied outside of the three Presidency cities. Eight years before that charter was signed, Calcutta had been founded by Job Charnock, whose tomb is still the most prominent monument in the churchyard of the old cathedral, and the oldest bit of English masonry in India. Heber passed it daily. Behind it, in Hastings Street, is the house of Warren Hastings. The first church of St. John erected in Calcutta, beside the west end of Writers' Buildings, had been used for forty years, when it was destroyed in the Mohammedan sack of the city the year before the battle of Plassey. The cathedral church of Heber was founded in 1784 by Warren Hastings, and opened three years after by Lord Cornwallis, having been dedicated to St. John by a special act of consecration sent out by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Messrs. W. Johnson and T. Blanshard were the chaplains. Lieutenant Agg of the Engineers designed and constructed the building; Lord Cornwallis afterwards founded the north gallery, and Lord Minto, in 1811, enlarged and improved the south gallery. Sir John Zoffany, the German favourite of the Georges II. and III., to whose fourteen years' residence in Calcutta we owe portraits 1 The Bengal Obituary, being a compilation of tablets and monumental inscriptions from various parts of the Bengal and Agra Presidencies, Calcutta 1848. |