was the ruling influence of his conduct. . . . How many he had drawn over to support the missionary cause !" " 1 When Reginald Heber gave his last breath to the Tamil Church of South India, and was laid down so suddenly in the heart of it, there were not more than forty thousand Christians of the Reformed Church in that region. They were not then a self-propagating church, because of the temporising policy of their Lutheran teachers as to caste and anti-Christian social customs such as had ruined the Jesuit missions. We have seen how firmly, yet judiciously for an inquirer new to the facts, Heber grasped the question and ordered investigation with a view to a decision. A fortnight after that he was no more. The results of the Committee of Inquiry fell to be dealt with by Bishop Wilson ten years subsequently. Had Heber lived, we cannot doubt that his opposition to caste customs in the Christian church and family would have been as thorough-going as his sharper successor's, while it would. have been expressed in a manner more favourable to the national, or racial, or historical spirit of the converts from Hindooism. 2 Unhappily, the Lutheran policy has not changed; but we date the revival of the Church of South India and its marvellous growth from 23rd March 1826, when Heber instituted the inquiry which Daniel Wilson dealt with so conclusively in his primary visitation, and in 1894 the venerable Bishop Gell completed on the side of Tamil marriage customs. In January 1835 Daniel Wilson visited Trichinopoly, and made this comment: "I have preached in the pulpit, I have stood at the self-same altar, I have placed my foot on the very spot which contains the remains of the holy and beloved Heber. On 2nd April 1826 he preached there; the next morning he was a corpse, in the prime of life and dawn of usefulness. Such are the mysteries of the kingdom of God." Soon after the philosophic missionary, George Berkeley, had been made Bishop of Cloyne, that even greater thinker, Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham, preached before the Society for 1 Memoirs of the Right Rev. Daniel Corrie, LL. D., first Bishop of Madras (1847), p. 389. 2 See letter dated Palace of Calcutta, 5th July 1833, p. 437, vol. i., of Bateman's Life of Right Rev. Daniel Wilson, D.D. (John Murray), 1860. the Propagation of the Gospel, in the Church of St. Mary le Bow, a sermon which links on the missionary policy of the Irish prelate on the West with the ceaseless action of the English Metropolitan of India. Bishop Butler said in 1738: "No one has a right to be called a Christian who doth not do somewhat in his station towards the discharge of this trust [the stewardship of the Faith in behalf of others]; who doth not, for instance, assist in keeping up the profession of Christianity where he lives. And it is an obligation but little more remote to assist in doing it in our Factories abroad and in the Colonies, to which we are related by their being peopled from our own Mother Country, and subjects—indeed very necessary ones to the same Government with ourselves; and heavier yet is the obligation upon such persons in particular as have the intercourse of an advantageous commerce with them."1 The East India Company's Factories of his day have expanded into the dominion of the Queen-Empress, open under the new principle of toleration and education to the true Light. Since, as the chief missionary of his brief episcopate, Heber reorganised Anglican missions in India and Ceylon, in Madras province alone the 40,000 passive Christians of 1826 have increased, according to the vital law of the spiritual kingdom, under suffragan successors so greatly after his own heart and life as Caldwell and Sargent, to 600,000, with 800 of their own race ordained pastors, and nearly 4000 lay preachers. These are superintended by some 270 foreign ordained missionaries of all the Reformed churches and societies. "Can we refrain," exclaimed Heber to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge when, in 1823, the Bishop of Bristol delivered to him their valedictory address, "from indulging the hope that, one century more, and the thousands of converts which our missionaries already number may be extended into a mighty multitude?" Two-thirds of the century only have passed since these words were spoken, and even now the number approaches a million of the natives of India professing the pure faith of the Gospel. 1 One of the greatest successors of Bishop Butler, the Right Rev. B. F. Westcott, D.D., quoted this passage in his noble sermon of 1895 before the Church Missionary Society in St. Bride's Church, specially applying the words to Great Britain's duty to the peoples of India. When Robert Southey wrote his defence of William Carey and the Serampore Brotherhood in the first number of the Quarterly Review, the article was intended to be part of a work on all Protestant Missions, proving his "firm belief that there are but two methods of extending civilisation-conquest and conversion--the latter the only certain one," and connecting the whole subject of the reception of Christianity with that of civilisation. No writer, even up to the present time, could have done such a work better, and it is still a desideratum, as every year adds to the rich materials. In default of that, we may let Southey's verse-rarely equal to his prose-"On the portrait of Reginald Heber" complete this biography, as Ruskin's began the volume : "Large, England, is the debt To India most of all, where Providence, All seas have seen thy red-cross flag Yea, at this hour the cry of blood "The debt shall be discharged; the crying sin For ever done away. That England, from her guilty torpor roused, Thither, devoted to the work, he went, There left his holy dust. "How beautiful are the feet of him That bringeth good tidings of good, The Malabar, the Moor, the Singhalese, Yet not the less admired The European soldier, there so long Felt, at his presence, the neglected seed Refreshed, as with a quickening dew from Heaven. Be cognisant of aught that passeth here, To look from Paradise that hour "Yes, to the Christian, to the heathen world, Heber, thou art not dead, . . . thou canst not die! Nor can I think of thee as lost. A little portion of this little isle At first divided us; then half the globe; The rending of a veil ! Oh when that leaf shall fall, That shell be burst, . . . that veil be rent, My spirit be with thine!" may then CHAPTER XIV BIBLIOGRAPHY 1801-1886 1801. Carmen Sæculare: The University Latin Prize Poem on the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century. Recited at Oxford. 1805. A Sense of Honour: The University Bachelor's Prize Essay. Recited in the Theatre, Oxford, 26th June 1805. 1806. History of the Cossaks to the year 1535. This unfinished work was published in the Memoir by his widow (vol. i.), where it covers 122 quarto pages, with a map of the Crimea in 1788, reduced from Dezauche's. 8vo. 1807. Palestine, a Prize Poem, in Oxford Prize Poems. 1809. Palestine, to which is added The Passage of the Red Sea : a Fragment. 4to. London. 1812. Palestine: an Oratorio. The words selected from a Prize Poem by Reginald Heber. Sacred Harmonic Society. 4to. The music composed in the year 1811 by William Crotch, Mus. Doc., Prof. of Music in the University of Oxford. music. Crotch selected the passages, and set them to Finished on 5th November 1811, and first performed on 21st April 1812 at the Hanover Square Concert Room. Mr. François Cramer led the band. This was the first new Oratorio by an English composer for forty years. It was favourably received, and repeated there and at Drury Lane Theatre in the series of Lenten Oratorios in 1823. mingham Musical Festival of Worcester Festival of 1848. in 1775, died at Taunton reputation by this Oratorio. First part given at Bir1843, and a selection at Crotch (born at Norwich in 1847) gained great |