The Press. — London, England, 1857-11-28 00:00:00

1154 The Bishop of LONDON drew a vivid picture of the refined heathen and the refined Christian, as illus trated by the conduct of each in India, and expressed his conviction that God intended by this revolt and its great chastisement to teach us rightly to value our Christianity, and to rouse " the slumbering energies" of our young men to go forth and advance their Master's cause in that distant country. Mr. PULLER, M.P., said he did not seek to inter pret the purpose of God in bringing about the dis astrous events in India, but, inasmuch as for the last hundred years we had neglected the duty which as Christians we owed to our fellow-subjects in that great empire, we might justly conclude that the present calamity, which might be intended for a thousand other wise purposes, might also have for its object to draw our attention to the grievous omission of which we had been guilty : The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had not at the present moment more than fourteen clergymen em ployed as missionaries in the whole of Bengal. No duty was more incumbent upon it than that of extending its operations in that presidency, and one cf its first efforts ought to be the revival of the mission at Delhi. What was asked was not that revenge which was suggested in the newspapers—the utter destruction of Delhi, so that not one stone should rest upon another—but the more Chris tian revenge, which heaped coals of fire upon the heads of the enemy. Was it too much to ask that the number of the society's missions in India should be doubled ; that this country, out of its overflowing mass of wealth, should contribute another 30,0001. a year to extend that which every one admitted to be the greatest of all blessings? And if the pecuniary means were found—if every Christian man, sincerely anxious for the spread of the Gospel, gave in proportion to hie substance—he had little doubt that men would be forthcoming in the Church to offer them selves as volunteers in the great and noble work of the evangelisation of India. The Bishop of OXFORD, in proposing the second resolution, viz.— That the proposal of the society to establish missions in the presidential and other cities, with a view to bring the truths of Christianity before the minds of the upper as well as the lower classes of India, is deserving of the most cordial approbation and encouragement; and that it is desirable to promote by every available means the edu cation, training, and ordination of the more advanced native candidates for the work of the ministry among their own countrymen— said he subscribed with an aching heart to the charge brought by Mr. Puller against us as a na tion I subscribe for myself to the charge brought against us. I have no doubt that we did not intend to encourage heathenism. God forbid that such an accursed thought should be in the breast of any man, but I believe that we were afraid and ashamed of the God of our Christianity ; that we upheld our administration in India upon the tolerance of heathendom rather than on the belief that as God's Providence had given it to us, so God's Providence would keep it for no. I think it is of the greatest moment that we should understand what this really means. Was not the greatest crime which this earth has ever a( a I committed upon its face justified and brought about by that same reasoning which has been used to justify our policy with regard to Christianity in India? What was the argument of those who betrayed the Lord of Life ? " If we let him alone the Romans will come and take away both our place and nation." The trust of God's ancient people rested rather upon the sufferance of the heathen than upon the might of God's everlasting power ; and has not this been our reasoning with respect to the spread of Christianity in the East:—" If we do this the Brahmins and the Musul mano will come and take away both our place an I nation." Is not this contrary to the writing written in the Book of Truth which we can hardly at this moment read without trembling?—" Whoever, therefore, shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of Mon be ashamed when He eometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels." If we are ashamed of this faith, and I will not weary you with details of proof that we have been ashamed of it, is not what we have seen the very aspect of the judgment which Christians must have looked for? Is it not one of those things by which God forces a Christian people to contemplate the position which it has almost unawares assumed. Sir W. P. Woon, who seconded the motion, be lieved with the Bishop of Oxford that Christianity had been keep in abeyance in India from a cowardly fear of losing the commercial advantages which we enjoyed in that country. He believed, also, that that very suppression of Christian truth had brought upon us the fearful calainity of the present mutinies : Without exercising the smallest compulsion, the Christians in India might, by the examples of their lives and professions, have great effect in the evangelisation of India, for none knew better than the Indian " By their fruits ye shall know them." Much might be done, too, by bringing the English and native minds as much as possible in contact. This was comparatively easy, for the Govern ment might require that no native should take an office unless he could speak the English tongue, and that no Englishman in turn should be placed in a position of authority unless he were well acquainted with the native languages. Great good must undoubtedly arise from such a regulation. He agreed with the member for Hertford that we must not be discouraged by the magnitude of the task. Thirty or forty missionaries might be a small num ber to send among so large a population as that of India, but it was the duty of Christian men to do what they THE PRESS, NOVEMBER 28, 1857. could, even though that might be littl., and to trust in God's Providence that two, three, or fou r missionaries would be sufficient to leaven the mighty mass of heathen. dom. Other formal resolutions were then proposed, and the proceedings shortly terminated. upon Him, they leant upon Egypt for support, it should be as when a man leaneth upon a staff and it runneth into his hand and pierceth him ! How has God, through this Brahminical superstition, allowed these people to rise against us in their heathen fury and darkness, and ferocity and bloodshed—those whom we thought to make through that heathen superstition the instruments of our getting their brethren in subjugation ! Now, then, I say, if this is so, and really I believe it—for we might carry it out further by a multitude of details—what is plainer than that the Christian mind of England ought to rise under these disasters, put the true interpretation upon them, and say this is the cause of England's disasters, that England has been false to England's faith and timid of avowing England's God ? His lordship concluded by an earnest appeal to his aueience on behalf of the society, and resumed his seat amid reiterated plaudits. THE BISHOP OF OXFORD ON CHURCH MISSIONS. Tint Bishop of Oxford delivered a very eloquent lecture on Church Missions and our Indian Empire, at Reading, on Tuesday. After showing that the Church of Christ must of necessity spread and multiply, Dr. Wilberforce traced the history of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Christian Knowledge Society, and the Church Missionary Society, all of which had sprung from the same parent stem. Their various labours were glanced at, and the history of the Church of England missions was brought down to the present century. His lordship said he did not propose to deal with any other societies than those he had mentioned: the field of the Church was occupied by them ; they had a distinct vocation for their ministry, and could work at home with perfect unity. He intimated that he did not approve any other missionary societies con nected with the Church, because he believed those in question were sufficient for the work ; they had their machinery in full operation, whereas, in the establishment of other societies there was only a waste of that money in paying secretaries and agents, rent of house, stationery, printing and advertisements, and deputations, which ought to go towards the great object of spreading truth abroad. His lordship then proceeded to say : And now let us turn to that part of the world which fills so many hearts at the present time—the great peninsula of India. Men used to talk of it as possessing a population of 150,000,000, but the recent attempts of our Government to estimate the population have shown that we cannot estimate it at less than 140,000,000, and it is very probable to all thoughtful minds that there are 203,000,000 in that great peninsula, Hindostan. I ask you, is not that a field large enough for us? Why, we raise in the Church of England for these two great societies something like 200,00 W. a year. Two hundred thousand a year, and 200.000,000 of people to whom to preach the gospel. And remember, if the gospel is to be preached, men must be sent, and they must be supported, and there must be books and means of transit. Therefore you see our endeavours are, as it were, but a drop in the ocean of our wants, if you take but that one country into account. But you may add to that the whole of Asia, Africa, and New Zealand, and the labours that are requisite among The few remaining North American Indians, and many other places. We have these colonies and dependencies, from which as centres of light, from which as garrisons of faith, they ought to go forth on behalf of England and on behalf of England's Church a message of salvation, and the ministry of the Word converting the heathen to the faith of Christ. Well, then, my friends, here is the great call to support this society, and here is the great field for it to labour in. Its instruments are those of the Church of England, and nothing else. It belongs to no peculiar colour or view in it. It takes the greatest care that its agents shall be the colour of the Church of England. Instead of leaving to any committee, who may represent this or that colour, power of choosing missionaries, it leaves to the two Arch bishops of Canterbury and York and the Bishop of Lond)n to name from year to year clergymen of the Church of England to be its missionaries, in order that there may be no possibility of its giving a sectional or party tone, but , that it may represent the Church of England as it is—be it in its strength or in its weakness, be it as it was of old in its languor, or be it as it is now, thank God, in its awakening strength. It seems to me that it is scarcely necessary to add a word to show you that it belongs to every Christian member of the Church of England to to something to help us in t►.e Church. And surely if ever there was a time when God himself took up this text and preached to man on it, it was at this moment—it was with regard to our colonial empire ; because you cannot have read those judgments that have come upon us in any other light than this. My friends, if you come to con sider that now for one hundred years we have possessed that empire, and we have as yet done very very little for our God—nay, tnat we have used it as a means of politi cal advancement, that we have used it as a means of gaining wealth fur our own land at home, of providing for our own children, of making ourselves great among the people of the earth ; and if we were swept off that mighty peninsula to-morrow we should scarcely leave behind us, in any part of it, a mark or tract of our having been a Christian people, that one thing alone condemns us. And if you go into the detail of the history, the con demnation only becomes more signal and black. The one ruling feature of our whole administration in this respect, as to doing anything to encourage the faith of Christ or to spread his truth, has been a most un-English timidity. Mere un-English, because whereas in all other respects now we speak our minds, we say, " Let what will come of it, we will speak our minds." But we have not spoken our minds about that: we have held our tongues about our being believers in Christ. Nay, lam afraid we have done more. We have been building our might to a great degree upon the basis of heathenism. We built on caste distinc tion the foundation of our Indian power. The Bengal army was ordered to recruit only from the Brahmin race, in order, as we thought, that it might be a more trustful body. That was the idea. But how has God fulfilled the old tradition of Idie people, that when, instead of leaning LORD SHAFTESBURY ON INDIA. LORD SHAFTESBURY delivered another of his eloquent and piquant public appeals in support of the ex tension of Christianity in India, on Thursday evening, at Crosby-hall. The noble earl, premising that such an opportunity as the present, if properly managed, with respect to the extension of our faith in India, was pregnant with future events of the highest order, proceeded to illustrate the evils of the Hindoo religion by pointing out to his hearers, with a minuteness of detail only surpassed by the extent of his information, the nature of the atrocities that religion tended to develop when oppor tunities occurred. The noble earl was so explicit as to declare he had no wish to rouse the vengeance of his hearers : It is only this very day that I have seen a copy of a letter written and sent to England by an officer of rank who was one of the first that entered Cawnpore a few hours, or, perhaps, only one hour, after the perpetration of the frightful massacre which was enacted there; and think of the description he gives, and what was seen by the whole soldiery, and you will not wonder at the esaspe• ration that was felt by every man among them who bore the European name. On arriving at Cawnpore he states— and he can scarcely permit himself to write the sad story —that, to his unutterable horror and dismay, he saw a number of European women stripped stark naked, lying on their backs, fastened by the arms and legs, and there many of them had been lying four and five days exposed to a burning sun ; others had been more recently laid down ; others again had been actually hacked to pieces, and so recently, that the blood which streamed from their mangled bodies was still warm. He found children of ten, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen years of age treated in the same horrible manner at the corners of the streets and in all parts of the town, attended by every circum stance of insult, the most awful and the most degrading, the most horrible and frightful to the conception, and the most ►evolting to the dignity and feelings of civilised men. Cawnpore was only a sample of what was perpetrated in various parts of that vast region, and that with a refine ment of cruelty never before heard of. Women and children have been massacred before, but I don't believe there is any instance on record where children have been reserved in cold blood to be most cruelly and anatomically tortured in the presence of their horrified parents before being finally put to death. (Sensation). Can you wonder, where such a religion prevails that the people ahould prove worthy of their tuition when the opportunity occurs of developing its fruits ? MR. MILLER AT COLCHESTER. MR. MELLEN M.P. for this borough, was entertained at a public dinner last week at Colchester by his Conservative supporters. The dinner was given at Messrs. Osborne's brewery, and between 500 and 600 gentlemen sat down. The reception given to Mr. Miller on his entry was most enthusiastic. After the usual loyal toasts had been received, the chair man, Mr. Wolton, the late mayor, proposed the health of Mr. Miller amidst loud and continued cheers. _ _ Mr. Piffn.LEn in an able speech reviewed the pro ceedings of the past session, and alluded to the subjects which will probably engage the atter tion of the House very shortly. With respect to the Bank Charter Act, Mr. Miller said : Should the Government, as they must, bring in a bill on the subject during the next session, I shall feel it my duty to maintain the principle embodied in the Act of 1844, because that principle embraces within it perfect security for every issue which the Bank of England may make. Whether, in carrying out this principle, some alterations of detail may not be made, is a question which will depend upon the course taken by a committee which sat during the last session, and which has collected, as J am informed, important evidence not yet laid upon the table of the house. I will, however, say that at the present moment the Bank of England, by its charter, is stemming a torrent brought upon us by the recklessness of the joint-stock banks; and Heaven forbid that I should see the Bank of England ever sunk into the depths of indignity and distress to which these joint-stock banks are come, and into which they have drawn the whole of the community. The distress which at present exists prevails to a greater extent amongst the poor labourers than amongst the rich ; and the distress which has been brought upon them has in my humble judgment been occasioned by the recklessness of the joint• stock bank system. When those joint-stock banks are most prosperous—when they are paying the largest din- t