Chapter 8

Instruction in this seminary is largely biblical. Preachers are prepared for their work by being grounded in the life of Christ and the life of Paul. The text-books have been written by Doctor Heinrichs himself, and they are so well adapted to their purpose that they have been extensively used by seminaries of other denominations than the Baptist. A native Christian literature has been created for the Telugus, beginning with the Bible, but now embracing church history, theology, ethics, and something of modern science. It must not be thought that the teaching is exclusively religious. Our seminary, and all our schools of lower grade, are affiliated with the government system of education, and in all their lower grades are subject to government inspection. So far as they conform to government standards of thoroughness, they receive government grants of financial aid. British India is impartial--aid is also given to Hindu and to Mohammedan schools. But Christian schools can well stand competition with these other systems, for the methods of our Christian schools are more modern and more rational. We left Ramapatnam, convinced that India is receiving from the work of Doctor Heinrichs an inestimable blessing. Through a long series of years he has been training preachers and teachers for this whole Telugu land, and much fruit is appearing in a new type of New Testament pastors and evangelists.

Ongole, one hundred and eighty-one miles north of Madras, was the scene of the great revival. Here too we were received most royally. A crowd of church-members waited for us at the railway station and flocked round our carriage as we passed to the mission compound. On the way, a company of Telugu athletes entertained us at intervals by their feats of ground and lofty tumbling. It was their native way of welcoming distinguished guests. Dr. James M. Baker has ably succeeded Dr. J. E. Clough in the work of administering and organizing this important field. The Ongole church of twelve thousand members, with its connected schools, is enough to tax the resources of the ablest man. The new Clough Memorial Hospital had its beginning while we were in Ongole, in the laying of the corner-stone of a gateway in honor of Dr. S. F. Smith, who wrote, "Shine on, Lone Star," as well as "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." Mrs. Strong, with a silver trowel, made its foundation sure, while the English deputy collector for the district represented the government, and I had the privilege of making an address to a great mixed audience of Hindus and Mohammedans as well as Christians.

Our most thrilling experience in connection with Ongole I am yet to relate. We wished to see the heart of India, as we had seen the heart of China and the heart of Burma. We could do this only by taking part in one of Doctor Baker's country tours. Every year he takes advantage of the favorable weather centering about mid-winter, to spend two solid months in visiting the villages which throng these fertile plains. With tent and equipment for cooking, he penetrates these swarming heathen communities and carries to them the gospel of Christ. It was over some fearful roads that our two-pony, two-seated buggy enabled us to accompany him. Government roads are one thing; native roads are quite another. Sudden descents to fordable streams and sudden ascents to the opposite banks are succeeded by long stretches of passage through cultivated fields, where there appears no sign of road at all. At last we reached the village of Naletur. Under the shadow of a great tree we found at least a thousand people assembled, sitting on the ground bordered by a broad fringe of men and women standing on the outside, and supplemented by a score of half-naked Zaccheus-like hearers perched in the branches of the trees. Mrs. Baker, awaiting the coming of her husband and his guests, had been holding this motley audience for two hours with selections from the gramophone, with illustrated Scripture lessons and pictures from the Life of Christ, and by calling on her "band" for "music" with a big drum, castanets, cymbals, and various other instruments of Indian manipulation. Salvation Army methods have great influence over a childlike people, and Mrs. Baker would make, in case of necessity, a first-class Salvation Army lassie. In fact, no act of missionary humility has struck our eyes as more pathetic and true, than that of Mrs. Baker, beating a big drum to the time of native music, in order to hold an audience for the hearing of the gospel. The amphitheater of dusky faces, massed together and intently listening, with Christians on one side and heathen on the other, seemed like a reproduction of the days "when Jesus was here among men," and a prophecy of the great final Day when our Lord, the Judge, will separate the sheep from the goats.

That evening we left the grove and entered the village with fife and drum, attracting auditors, and held a torchlight meeting in the market-place. There was preaching, and the chanting, in rhythm but not rhyme, of a versified story of the life of Christ. The missionaries make much of this sort of Telugu singing. There was the same crowd of auditors that had met us in the afternoon, but now the intermittent light of the torches made the scene seem to be flashing rays of conviction into many a troubled breast, and I wished that some great painter could immortalize the picture upon canvas, for no one can understand missions to the heathen without picturing to himself such preaching.

The next morning, on our way back to Ongole, we visited the famous spot on the river bank at Vellumpilly where, in 1878, 2,222 believers were baptized. On Sunday we attended a service of the mission church, where a native pastor officiated and at least fifteen hundred persons in addition to the missionaries were present, though several hundreds of scholars were absent on account of the holiday vacation. And finally, at the sunset hour on that memorable Sabbath Day, we ascended Prayer-meeting Hill, where Doctor Jewett, Mrs. Jewett, and two others met on New Year's Day fifty years ago, looked out over the great surrounding plain, and prayed the Lord to give them the Telugus, as John Knox of old prayed, "Give me Scotland, or I die!" In both cases prayer was answered, and we hope the more recent prayers offered on that historic spot in January, 1917, will also be answered. The Telugus are gradually being won, and we ourselves were witnesses to that fact when, at the village of Naletur, we beheld the baptism of eleven new converts, nine stalwart young men and two married women.

Kavali is next to be mentioned. Here is a work for the gradual reformation of criminals and the industrial regeneration of India. In this land of poverty and famine, our converts, when turned out of house and home, need new means of earning a livelihood. There is in India a hereditary criminal class which, like the thugs of a former generation, make it a sort of religion to prey upon their fellow countrymen. The British Government has been almost powerless either to subdue or to reform such offenders. Something more than mere justice is required in their treatment. The Government is recognizing the value of Christian education and supervision, and has recently put large tracts of territory into the hands of the Salvation Army, the Methodists, and the Baptists, with a view to combining compulsory work and paternal influence in the reform of the criminal classes. The Rev. Samuel D. Bawden, at Kavali, has charge of over eight hundred such people, and is teaching them agriculture and all manner of trades. Mr. Bawden is one of the graduates of our theological seminary. He was for several years chaplain of our House of Refuge at Rochester. Physically and mentally he is a remarkable man, an athlete and almost a giant, a man of science and a man of faith. It needs all these gifts to dominate and lead toward Christ eight hundred born thieves. I know of no more self-sacrificing and Christlike work than that which brother Bawden is doing.

The success of it proves its value. There are no prison walls, though leaving the community is followed by pursuit and recommittal. There are no punishments except deprivation of food-wages. Each member of the community is paid in food, and in proportion to the extent of his labor. If he will not work, neither can he eat. Opportunities for education are given to all. There is even a church, made up of converted convicts. The faithful among these Erukalas, as they are called, are made monitors and helpers to their weaker fellows. Squads are sent out from five to twenty miles, to build and repair the roads, with only an unarmed comrade for overseer. Nothing is given but education and Christian influence. 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 classes 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 noble 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 gods, and usually did so by marrying to Dravidian female divinities male deities of his own. Siva, the Aryan god, for example, took for his wife the Dravidian goddess 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 massiveness 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 God 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 principal tower, is pyramidal in form, is two hundred feet in height, is covered with row after row of colossal carvings of gods and goddesses, 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 god to destroy and to recreate. That massive 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 gods 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 gods are carried about at times of festival, stand in the courtyard. Each car has its bejeweled beast for the god or goddess to ride--a wooden elephant, a wooden bull, a wooden rat--each with trappings of many-colored glass, 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 manuscripts within the palace--a priceless collection of eighteen thousand Sanskrit manuscripts, 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 passion 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 compass, 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 god Siva and the other for his goddess wife Minakshi, each cell surmounted by a noble 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 space 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 god 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 lustful images, the glorification of the lingam, the secret places of assignation! 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 circumference, and has besides two hundred branches that have struck root.

But the noblest 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 principal 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 God," and to make a spiritual desert "bud and blossom as the rose."

XII

TWO WEEKS IN CEYLON