A Tour of the Missions Part 4

Everything for the physical man is earned. In this way hundreds of reformed criminals learn to gain their own living and to lead an honest life. It was pathetic to receive the welcome of these humble men, and to see their reverence and affection for their "big father," Mr. Bawden. We heard them greet him as "our savior." To show their respect for Mr.

Bawden's former theological instructor, these poor men subscribed of their scanty means and hired a large gasoline street lamp to illuminate the evening service.

I have reserved to the last my account of our visit to Nellore. Nellore is last, but not least, for this was our first permanent mission station in South India. Work was indeed begun at Vizagapatam in 1836, but in 1837 it was moved to Madras, and in 1840 to Nellore, Madras being reopened in 1878. Nellore is one hundred and seven miles north of Madras, on the main line of railway, and sixteen miles from the seacoast. In the Nellore field we have six churches, and a total of nine hundred and twenty-six members. It is our Baptist schools that most attract our attention. The Coles-Ackerman High School, in charge of the Rev. L. C. Smith, has more than eight hundred pupils, and is a great credit to our denomination. Bible cla.s.ses and special preaching services for students are conducted with enthusiasm by our young missionaries, Smith and Manley, and they bring good results. There are also in Nellore a high school for girls, a hospital for women, and a nurses' training-school, all under the direction of our Woman's Society. In these schools, Miss Tencate and Miss Carman are representatives of Rochester.

The general work of the mission is presided over by the Rev. Charles Rutherford, one of my former pupils and graduates. Mr. Rutherford is the young and able successor of Dr. David Downie, a much older Rochester man, and one of the pioneers and leaders of the Telugu Mission. He graduated from Rochester in 1872, the year in which I began my work as president of the seminary. I cannot easily express my gratification at finding him in South India to welcome me, and to accompany me during a large part of my stay on this field. Few men have so n.o.ble a record.

Though he retired from active service ten years ago, and is now devoting himself to writing the history of the mission, he is still vigorous in mind and heart, and to meet him is to come in contact with "an incarnation"--an incarnation of the missionary spirit. He has seen "the little one" become not only "a thousand," but well nigh a hundred thousand. His faith is great, that this whole Telugu Land will bow to Christ's scepter. Long may he live, to bless India and the world!

XI

THE DRAVIDIAN TEMPLES

The Dravidians are supposed by most ethnologists to have been the aborigines of India. When they were subdued by the Aryans from the north, they were crowded southward and were compelled to serve their conquerors. This subjugation was the origin of caste; the weaker became hewers of wood and drawers of water for the stronger. The Brahman would have no social intercourse with the Sudra, and thought even his touch a profanation. For the Brahman represented Brahma, was in fact Brahma incarnate, while the Sudra was a manifestation of deity in inferior clay. Yet the Brahman needed the Sudra, and had to propitiate him in order to use him. So the Aryan absorbed into his own system some of the Dravidian G.o.ds, and usually did so by marrying to Dravidian female divinities male deities of his own. Siva, the Aryan G.o.d, for example, took for his wife the Dravidian G.o.ddess Kali. In many ways like this, the Aryan and the Dravidian united to form the Hindu. The Hindu religion is a composite--a corruption of the nature-worship of the earlier Vedas by its union with the more cruel and debasing features of the Dravidian idolatry. The renowned temples of Southern India best represent this mongrel form of Hinduism, and show Hinduism in its most corrupt development under Dravidian influences.

The ma.s.siveness and vastness of these temples demonstrate the power of the religious instinct in man, even when that instinct is most perverted. With all their grossness and crudity, these shrines reveal a wealth of imagination and an artistic inventiveness, which furnish object-lessons to the most cultivated Occidental mind. We wonder what the East could really have accomplished, if its native gifts had been under the control of Christian truth. Unfortunately, those gifts were commonly under the control of the baser instincts. Paul's philosophy of heathenism is far more correct than that of many a modern writer on comparative religion. Only an ancestral sin can explain man's universal ignorance and depravity. Because he would not retain G.o.d in his knowledge, he was given up to the dominion of vile affections, to show him his need of a divine redemption.

Tanjore and Madura are the seats of the Dravidian temples which we visited. Tanjore is two hundred miles south of Madras, and fifty miles from the Bay of Bengal. It is in the Presidency of Madras, but European influences have not greatly changed its prevailingly native aspect. The half-naked coolies, and the children clothed only in sunshine, show how inveterate are custom and poverty. The great Tanjore temple is the center of worship for a hundred miles round. It is built on a stupendous scale. It consists of a series of courts, in the midst of which are two tremendous towers or gopuras, as the technical term should be. Its princ.i.p.al tower, is pyramidal in form, is two hundred feet in height, is covered with row after row of colossal carvings of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, and is surmounted by an immense dome-shaped and gilded top of solid stone, said to have been brought to its place upon an inclined plane from the quarry four miles away. The gateway leading to the temple is itself an enormous structure. It opens upon a court eight hundred feet long by four hundred feet wide, the walls of which enclose an endless succession of little chapels, each one of which has at its back a rude picture of some incarnation of Vishnu or Krishna, and in front of each picture there stands erect an image in stone of the lingam or phallus.

A great platform, in the center of the court, houses, beneath a gorgeous canopy, an immense black granite image of a bull, the favorite animal of Siva, carved out of a single block sixteen feet long and twelve feet high, and kept perpetually shining by anointings of holy oil. The imagination of the worshiper is thus excited by successive statues and pictures, until at last he reaches the tremendous pyramidal tower, or gopura, which portrays and symbolizes the power of the heathen G.o.d to destroy and to recreate. That ma.s.sive tower, superimposed above the idol and forming its magnificent abiding-place, has no superior in all India for grandeur. Mr. Fergusson, the distinguished writer on architecture, calls it the most beautiful and effective of all the towers found in Dravidian temples. The sculptures in the long and dimly lighted corridors at the base of the temple, and in the first tiers of the tower, are wonderfully realistic representations of a sensual and ferocious deity. But, as you stand in the court, and look up the sides of the tower to the gilded pinnacle on its dome, you discover that all the upper rows of G.o.ds and demons are of stucco. Money evidently gave out, as the structure rose, and plaster took the place of stone.

The appurtenances of the temple are tawdry and childish. Huge cars, in which images of the G.o.ds are carried about at times of festival, stand in the courtyard. Each car has its bejeweled beast for the G.o.d or G.o.ddess to ride--a wooden elephant, a wooden bull, a wooden rat--each with trappings of many-colored gla.s.s, to imitate rubies and diamonds, and each with its escort of dusky priests, not forgetting to follow the foreign visitor and hold out their hands for alms. Yet in these corridors there were prostrated many absorbed and eager worshipers, seeking protection or aid from a deity more demonlike than divine. One's heart grew sick as he realized that, still in these latter days,

The heathen in his blindness Bows down to wood and stone,

and worships in a temple which exhibits in its halls a hundred immense images of the male organ of generation.

It was a relief to be conducted by a clergyman of the Anglican faith to the church where lie buried the remains of Schwartz, the first English missionary to India. It must have required great gifts of mind and heart and will to brave Hindu opposition, to win the affection and support of a raja, and to lay the foundations of a Christian community in this heathen land. Schwartz was a Prussian by birth, though he went out as a missionary of a Danish society. He gave his life and his fortune to the cause of missions, and the English work in Tanjore is even now largely supported by the endowments which he left behind him when he died. Our good friend Doctor Blake, the English clergyman, took us to the palace of the princess of Tanjore, also to the raja's library of Oriental ma.n.u.scripts within the palace--a priceless collection of eighteen thousand Sanskrit ma.n.u.scripts, of which eight thousand are written on palm-leaves. This library is unique in all India; and it shows that a raja in Tanjore, in his love for literature, could equal the raja of Jaipur, in his love for astronomy. The desire for learning was a pa.s.sion that survived the fall, an evidence of the presence in humanity of the preincarnate Christ, "the Light that lighteth every man."

Madura is a hundred miles farther south than Tanjore. It is really the center of Dravidian worship. While some features of the Tanjore temple are more beautiful, the temple at Madura is more vast. Five great pyramidal towers, four of them on the points of the compa.s.s, meet the eye as one looks upon the temple from a distance. The temple is built about two great shrines or cells, one for the G.o.d Siva and the other for his G.o.ddess wife Minakshi, each cell surmounted by a n.o.ble dome of plated gold. On the four sides of the temple are stone porches, arcades, and pillared halls of great variety, filled with elaborate and grotesque carvings and sculptures. The extent of the structure may be judged from the simple statement that the outer walls, twenty-five feet high, surround a s.p.a.ce eight hundred and thirty by seven hundred and thirty feet, and are surmounted by four lofty gate-pyramids, each of them ten stories in height. The portico roof of Minakshi's Hall is supported upon six rows of carved pillars, each made from a single stone. There is an extensive "Golden Lily Tank," bordered by a granite corridor hung with cages of parrots, and the putrid waters of the tank furnish purification preparatory to worship at Minakshi's shrine. The very porch or entrance pavilion of this shrine is called "The Hall of a Thousand Pillars,"

though the actual number is nine hundred and eighty-five. Here and there among the pillars are seated learned men or pundits, who place offerings of flowers and perfumed water before their sacred books and chant the meaning of Sanskrit scriptures to groups of devout listeners.

The great temple, with its dimly lighted corridors, is open to the public day and night, and there is special illumination by hundreds of little lamps in an arch at the entrance when night comes on. Long avenues are filled with buyers and sellers of wares, and the rent of their stalls furnishes a large revenue for the support of the many priests. A big elephant and a baby elephant, each with the mark of the G.o.d upon its forehead, are paraded up and down, and are taught to pick up with their trunks the coins thrown down by visitors. Innumerable dark alcoves invite the crowd to rest, and many a sleeping form is seen at the foot of the altars. Imagine a festival night with these dimly lighted courts crowded with worshipers, the fierce and l.u.s.tful images, the glorification of the lingam, the secret places of a.s.signation! And this is the acme of Hindu religion!

There are better things than this to be seen in Madura. The palace of Tirumala, a raja of the seventh century, is a magnificent specimen of Moorish architecture with unexpected Gothic tendencies. Its entrance hall, one hundred and thirty-five feet long, half as wide, and seventy feet high, has a lofty roof supported by heavy stone pillars with pointed arches of Saracenic type. It shows that the Moslem, in the long ago, had at least a temporary hold upon South India. This palace, which has the structural character of a Gothic building, has now been partially restored and taken for the law-courts of the British Government.

The same Tirumala who built the palace, built the Teppa Kulam, an artificial reservoir outside the town, about one thousand feet on a side, very symmetrical and the largest of its kind in South India. The whole "tank" is surrounded with granite walls and parapets, and next the water there is a granite walk five feet wide running round the whole structure. Flights of steps lead down to the water, at intervals. In the center of this small lake is an island, also walled around with granite slabs, and on it there are five towers, a large one in the center and one at each of the four corners. The whole effect is very graceful and it makes a sight long to be remembered, when the "feast of lights" takes place and the island and the parapets and the granite curbings are illuminated with hundreds of little oil-lamps. Not far away from the "tank" is a famous banyan-tree which covers with its shade an area sixty yards in diameter, has a main stem seventy feet in circ.u.mference, and has besides two hundred branches that have struck root.

But the n.o.blest sight of Madura is its American Congregational Mission.

Beginning in 1836, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions planned and founded their most wise and successful foreign missions. They have aimed to do one thing well: to make the Madura station not only complete but well supported, to embrace in it all stages of education and all sorts of evangelization; and to reduce the whole work to a unified system. And the result has been the raising up of a large native ministry, churches with twenty-two thousand members, schools of every grade from the kindergarten to the college and the theological seminary. We were most hospitably entertained by the princ.i.p.al of the college, Dr. J. X. Miller, and the other missionaries; and we met and addressed both the native church at their Sunday service, the faculty and students of the seminary, and the annual conference of Congregational missionaries. The Madura Mission is a light shining in a dark place, the darkest place indeed in India. But it is a light that cannot be hid. Like our missions to the Burmans and the Telugus, it is showing the power of the gospel to "cast down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of G.o.d," and to make a spiritual desert "bud and blossom as the rose."

XII

TWO WEEKS IN CEYLON

Ceylon is not a part of India. It is a Crown Colony of Great Britain, and is administered directly from London, while India has more of independence and self-government. The relation of Ceylon to Britain is somewhat like that of the Philippine Islands to the United States, while the relation of Britain to India resembles that of the United States Government to our several territories. Ceylon, however, is very productive and prosperous. Surrounded by the sea, it is free from Indian droughts and famines. Its people are stalwart and loyal. The English language is fast becoming the easiest method of communication between Cingalese and Tamils, Hindus and Malays. Colombo is really a European city, as large as Rochester, with n.o.ble public buildings and lovely parks. Our Galle Face Hotel, on the very edge of the sea, with a great stretch of green lawn in front of it, is one of the finest hotels in the East, and our week of rest here was delightful.

Buddhism has been one of the great missionary religions of the world. It was a reform of Hinduism. But the Hindus, with their caste system, would have none of it and drove it out. The Buddhist triumphs were in Burma, Tibet, China, j.a.pan, at the north; in Ceylon and Java, at the south.

Here in Ceylon is preserved a sacred tooth of Buddha; and one of his bones, recently discovered in northern India, is to be brought next week with great pomp and ceremony to the temple in Kandy, which already ranks in sacredness next to the great Shwe Dagon paG.o.da in Rangoon. A temple in Java is founded upon a single hair of Buddha's head. All this superst.i.tion and imposture dates back to a couple of centuries before Christ, and there is great reason to believe that the Roman Catholic worship of relics is only an appropriation of this form of heathenism.

Christian schools and churches are doing much to undermine Buddhism in Ceylon. Colombo is especially fortunate in possessing a n.o.ble college of the Wesleyan Methodists and a strong inst.i.tution of all grades with eight hundred students. The English Baptists also have a very creditable mission work under the charge of Messrs. Ewing and Charter; while Mr.

Woods is the able pastor of an English-speaking Baptist church. The students of these various schools usually adopt the English dress. The barefooted pupils first put on shoes, then the coat, finally the trousers. In the end you can hardly distinguish them from Europeans.

These changes are more rapid in Colombo than in Madras. Indeed, British rule is fast transforming what was first a Portuguese, and then a Dutch, settlement into a city where English is universally known and spoken.

It was gratifying to find that the Government College, where the English language alone is used, is opened every day with the reading of Scripture and with prayer. But it was unpleasing to learn that, side by side with these Christian influences, the Ananda College, a theosophical inst.i.tution, allied to Mrs. Besant of Madras, was exerting an influence unfavorable to Christianity, not only by setting Buddha side by side with Christ, but by urging the claim of Buddha to be the supreme ethical teacher of the world.

Before I tell you of our visit to Buddhist temples, I must speak of the refuge from them which we found at Nurwara Eliya, sixty-two hundred feet above the sea. Colombo is only six degrees north of the equator. Here in January the sun casts hardly any shadow at noon, and the middle of the day is hot. Later in the year the heat is intense, day and night. So British officials combine with the rich of every tongue, and even with the missionaries, to make their summer quarters high up among the hills.

We were transported thither on a narrow-gage railway, cut into the sides of precipices, running through tunnels, and so tortuous as to form a hundred horseshoe loops. The road seemed almost a miracle of engineering. But the views were beautiful beyond description. It was Switzerland without its ruggedness. It was Italy on the southern side of the Alps, as "Philip van Artevelde" best describes it:

Sublime, but neither bleak nor bare Nor misty, are the mountains there; Softly sublime, profusely fair; Up to their summits clothed in green, And fruitful as the vales between, They lightly rise And scale the skies, And groves and gardens still abound, For where no shoot Can else take root, The peaks are shelved and terraced round.

I am inclined to think that, of all the beautiful railway rides I have ever taken, this was the finest. From the rice-fields of the plains we pa.s.sed upward through endless tea-plantations, where every inch of soil was preserved and utilized by the construction of artificial terraces.

In the midst of these plantations, rubber trees were set at intervals.

There were many instances when we looked down from our airy perch, on the edge of a precipice, at least a thousand feet, and saw ourselves on the side of a veritable amphitheater of mountains towering a thousand feet above us and covered with rows of tea-plants from the bottom to the top. This amphitheater was often two miles across, every foot of the ground minutely cultivated and a perfect sea of verdure.

But, as we went up, the palm gave place to the pine; cold succeeded to heat; and to be at all comfortable at our hotel we were obliged to order fire in our rooms.

Beautiful for situation as was Nurwara Eliya, we were glad, on account of the January cold, to leave it. And we went to Kandy. I wonder whether our word "candy" is derived from that sweet place. I agree with some celebrated author, whose name I forget, in saying that "Kandy is the loveliest city in the loveliest island in the world." Of late years Kandy has become the resort of tourists, though the present war has greatly diminished their number. A hotel that was accustomed to entertain fifty guests now has only half a dozen. But the beauty of the place abides. An artificial lake, with an island of green in its center and winding among a forest of stately palms, is surrounded by a circlet of hills. On the summit of one of these hills is the Missionary Rest-house, founded and endowed by a wealthy Christian woman for the relief of pilgrims, as was the House Beautiful of Bunyan's story. There we were invited to afternoon-tea, and as I looked upon the fairylike landscape I almost thought the Garden of Eden had come again.

But I could not long be deceived, for at the very foot of this hill was the most famous Buddhist temple of Ceylon. If this is Paradise, it is Paradise Lost. Here Buddha's tooth is worshiped, and here a newly discovered bone of his body is to add sanct.i.ty to the temple. We attended the evening worship, which consisted of a torchlight procession of priests, with beating of tom-toms and frenzied dancing of musicians, which would have done credit to the savagery of the Fiji Islands. The temple here has no lofty paG.o.da. It shows what the original paG.o.da really was, for this temple has a number of bell-shaped structures resting on the ground. Next, historically, came the elevation of the bell upon a stone platform; and, finally, the lifting of it into the air, resplendent with gilding. Kandy ill.u.s.trates the humble beginnings of Buddhistic worship, but with later accessories begotten by irrational devotion.

I should mention, however, the only sign of intelligence which I found in this Buddhist temple. It was the library of Pali ma.n.u.scripts containing the sacred books and stories of Buddha's life and doctrine.

Many of these ma.n.u.scripts were written on palm-leaves and were wrapped in silken coverings. Some had been presented by Siamese and by Burmese kings. Some were ancient. I saw no priest who could read them, and I fancy that the sacred books are really studied only by pundits, whose vocation is that of teaching, and whose personal beliefs may be very different from those of orthodox Buddhism. It was pleasant to find, not far from the Temple of the Tooth, a little church of the English Baptists, which sends out light into all the surrounding darkness. Its pastor is a native Christian, who preaches every Sunday morning in Cingalese and every Sunday evening in English, while his week-days are devoted to the work of conducting an English boys' school.

Kandy is celebrated also for its botanical gardens. Only those of Java compare with them in completeness. The long avenues of palms of different varieties--palmyra, talipot, sago, royal, sealing-wax--and the specimens of bamboo, India rubber, and rain-tree, are unique and wonderful. The rain-tree is so called because the vast spread of its branches and the density of its foliage collect the dew to such an extent as actually to water the ground upon which it drops. Think of viewing in one morning of two hours' length, a score of trees we had hitherto known only in the tales of the tropics: the traveler's tree with its fernlike leaves, the cannon-ball tree, the deadly upas, the nourishing breadfruit, the clove, the cinnamon, the mace or nutmeg, the vanilla, the guava, the cork, the almond, the mulberry, the mango, the sandalwood! There were great screw-pines, lignum-vitae, mahogany, mimosa, magnolia trees; and the tree-fern, the giant creeper, the panama-hat plant, the Peruvian cactus, the papyrus, the pineapple, and a great collection of orchids. Only the sunshine and the moisture of Ceylon could produce such a result. A tree cared for from its first sprouting, and favored by the elements, becomes a wonder of the world.

It shows what man may become under the tutelage of G.o.d.

Anurajahpura was our last place to visit. Far to the north of Colombo, it is the most important extant specimen of the ruined cities of Ceylon.

Before the time of Christ it was the seat of a kingdom that embraced the whole island. Buddhism, after a life-and-death struggle, captured it and erected in it structures for worship, which for grandeur and beauty rivaled those of Burma. Two paG.o.das, or dagobas, of solid brick, each of them more than two hundred feet high, tower up before one as he enters the town. These structures are covered with verdure, for gra.s.ses and shrubs have eaten their way into the mortar on the sides, until the dagobas resemble conical natural hills. It is said that the brick of a single one would suffice to build a wall eight feet high and a foot thick from Edinburgh to London. One of them is being restored, and fifty men are at work upon it, tearing away the vegetation and building anew the outside covering of brick. The dagoba itself is not a temple, for it is solid and has no chamber within; but at its base is a structure, infinitesimal in size as compared with the one that towers above it, and in this structure there is a reclining statue of Buddha seventy feet long. Buddha must have been a giant, for his footprints are four feet long, and his tooth is as large as the tooth of an alligator, and surprisingly like one.

The grounds in the neighborhood of these towering dagobas are strewn with ruins. Sixteen hundred pillars of stone, seven feet high, remain to show the vast foundations of an ancient Buddhist monastery. There is also a temple excavated in the solid rock of the hillside, and adorned with curious carvings of elephants. We made the acquaintance of its high priest under very peculiar circ.u.mstances. We met him at a funeral. It was the cremation of one of his priests. On the outskirts of the village a great crowd surrounded a burning pyre. Two or three cords of rough wood had been piled up, with the body of the priest in its center and the bier on which the body had been brought laid upon its top. The fire was blazing upward, and a deafening beating of tom-toms gave sacredness to the obsequies. The awe-stricken followers of Buddha stood at a little distance around, while the flames grew fierce, and the sickening odor of burning flesh entered their nostrils. It was no wonder that they were willing to follow the high priest, when he came to salute me as a minister of religion from the other side of the world. He was eighty-eight years of age. Clothed in his saffron robe and holding with trembling hands his rod of office, he seemed the decaying specimen of a moribund religion. He presented me with an umbrella of yellow silk. It had an ivory handle with the carving of a lotus bud on its end. I could not let him make such a present without some reward, and he seemed grateful for the few rupees which my interpreter wrapped up in his handkerchief. He lifted up his fan and fanned me, as we parted, while he uttered some words of blessing. I could hardly doubt his good will, or fail to hope that some gleams of heavenly light had come to him from Christ, the Light of the world. But Anurajahpura was, like Pagan in Burma, the type of a vanishing religion, and its high priest was, like the Jewish high priest of old, the type of a priesthood sure to pa.s.s away, since Christ, the true High Priest, has come.

XIII

JAVA AND BUDDHISM

We have crossed the equator, and the Southern Cross, invisible to northern eyes, seems still to beckon us onward. But we have reached the most distant point of our journey, and henceforth we shall be homeward bound, taking China and j.a.pan as we go. Java is not so hot as we expected. An island like Cuba, six hundred miles long and only two hundred broad, has sea-breezes enough to keep it tolerably cool. Rain falls almost every day, with an average of twelve feet in a year. As the moisture is excessive, all sorts of vegetation are luxuriant. Java is a gem of the ocean, and an emerald gem at that. Life here is as easy as anywhere on earth, and there is a swarming population. While Ceylon, similar in area, has only five millions of inhabitants, Java has thirty-five millions.

Java is the jewel of the Dutch Crown, one of the most fertile and productive islands of the world. Coffee and tea, rice and sugar, salt and spice, tobacco and corn, coal and oil, coconut and rubber, are exported in an aggregate of two hundred millions of our dollars every year, while the aggregate of imports is little more than a hundred and twenty millions. The Dutch have taken a colony whose deficits once frightened the English into abandoning it, and by the famous "culture system" of letting out the land upon wise conditions as to the kind and quant.i.ty of production, have turned the whole island into a veritable garden, and a princ.i.p.al source of revenue for Holland. The Dutch indeed have drawn from Java much more than they have given. The Roman Empire should have taught them that incorporation of a colony, and privilege granted to it, were the only security for permanent possession. Until ten years ago, however, the Dutch policy was one of repression rather than one of development. While Britain has tried by her schools and hospitals to Anglicize India, Holland, for many years, tried to keep the Javanese apart and in subjection, discouraging their study of the Dutch language and giving them also no share in the government. This policy has at last been seen to be suicidal; Chinese immigration has added an element of vigor, industry, and discontent; the modern movement in India and in j.a.pan has provoked new aspirations here; even the Malay has become aware that he has rights. Dutch schools have at last begun to educate the people; the more progressive among the students are also learning English; and Java now bids fair to press forward to occupy a position in the van of national and democratic progress.