What Mr Caine, M.P., Saw at Singapore.

Evening Star, Issue 7484, 31 March 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

What Mr Caine, M.P., Saw at Singapore.

Mr W. S. Caine, M.P., who has been staying some time at Singapore, on his journey round the world, has written a severe criticism of the work done by the Christian missions in that part of the globe, lie says:—" The heathen of the Straits Settlements are not much troubled by missionary zeal. How is it, I wonder, that we so persistently neglect the conversion of the heathen at our own doors in our various Crown colonies ? Can it be that the specimens of Christianity which form our governing and merchant classes are of such a quality that missionaries find it impossible to get the heathen to believe in the religion whose products they are ? The existence of 7,000 Eurasians in the Straits colonies, the illegitimate offspring of ' Christian' fathers, combined with the "fact that a ' Christian' Government draws the bulk of its revenue from the encouraged vices and degradation of the population, may go far to account for the obstinate preference of a Mahomedan Native for a religion which enjoins tot.d abstinence, and forbids the social habits which produce Euiasians. The merchants say the missionaries are idle and worthless; the missionaries retort in kind; and, for myself, I fear that in Singapore at any rate there is truth on both sides. There is a magnificent cathedral at Singapore, with a right rev. bishop, a venerable archdeacon, and an assistant colonial chaplain. There is a surpliced choir to boot. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel has also a missionary, who gets L3OO or L4OO a year. The only Natives visible at the cathedral services are the fifteen or twenty Malays who, standing outside the building, pull the punkah strings to cool the fashionable worshippers inside. The only attempt to reach the heathen by the Church of England is a small school chapel, at which there is an attendance of fifty or sixty at most. The Presbyterians have a fine handsome chapel for themselves. I surveyed it from the outside, and it had a fashionable congregation of 150 or 200, .fifty or sixty handsome carriages waiting outside, with as many native servants as there were good Presbyterians inside. The minister gets LSOO a year and a free house. The English Presbyterian mission have one clerical and one lay missionary. Thpso two energetic brethren have [four small rooms in Singapore in which they hold services, and in none of which do they muster a congregation of fifty souls. I do not venture to judge these gentlemen. I am quite sure, from all I heard, that they arc excellent and pious men, but the results of their labors arc miserable and unsatisfactory; and I cannot but think their methods and plans of working must be wrong, I think it would be well if the secretaries of our missionary societies spent twelve months in the East trying to find out how it is that Jesuits succeed so well, when they fail so completdy. What I want explaining is the comparat ve zeal and success of the Roman Catholic, and the comparative failure of Protestantism, in the conversion of the heathen to the Christian faith. The fact is there, and is stubborn. I draw the figures from returns furnished to the Government of Singapore by the various denominations themselves, and published in the Blue-book for 1886."