LORD CURZON ON MISSIONARIES.

Waiapu Church Times, Volume I, Issue 2, 1 August 1907, Page 12

LORD CURZON ON MISSIONARIES.

It was m 1807 that the C.M.S. made its first grant for Christian work m India. The amount was £200, and it was made to a Corresponding Committee comprising David Brown, Claudius Buchanan, Henry Martyn, and George Udny. The grant, was to promote the translation of the Scriptures; a further grant ior the employment of Indian Christians as .' readers ' was adversely commented upon by a hostile member of Parliament m the House of Commons. It was also m 1807 that two Baptist missionaries who arrived m India were ordered home, and one of them proceeded to Burma instead and started a Mission there. It is interesting to

compare with this attitude of public men at Home and m India a hundred years ago what took place before the 'Indian Section of the Societv of Arts on February 14 last. The late Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, was m the chair, and Sir Frederic' S. P. Lely, K,C.1.E., C.S.VL, read a strikingly interesting and most useful paper on • ' The Practical Side of Famine m India,' m the course of which he paid this tribute to the work of women missionaries :— A frequent annexe to the poorhouse and often to the relief work was the orphanage. I am free to confess that Government never succeeded m this branch of relief and never will succeed. Given a stout and sturdy child- who can eat his daily ration, and the official agent will keep him going, m a way ; but given a wasted famine ■- starveling, and nothing will save him but such care as cannot be bought. The devoted Christian wom^n missionaries who sought out wretched little ones and mothered them back to life, deserved, as they" gained, the gratitude of the people. And again at the end of the paper he mentioned among ' the many faithful men who spent themselves without stint ' five m particular who, 'it is safe to say, were the first m the history of the province (of Gujerat) to give their lives to save the outcasts — the outcasts, and aborigines who still to Brahmanical feeling are something less than dogs.' And three of these five were missionaries. Sir Frederic said of them : — There was Mulligan, Presbyterian missionary, who when the {head of the district was m sore need of strong men volunteered to. help and was put m charge of a thousand persons on a relief work, on whom cholera had already taken hold. There was Mawhinney, also Presbyterian missionary, who undertook a similar trust m the adjoining. Native State of Sunth. Each of them took up his abode among the people im a hut like their own ; he restored order - and cleanliness ; he instilled some of his own courage:; and then each within a month of the other was stricken with the disease from which he had saved others, and died the death of a Christian. .• There was Thompson of the Church Missionary Society, who had sole charge of a large district of .Bhils m the Native States of Northern Gujerat. - He was worn out with his heavy burden, and he was seized with cholera when thirtyfive miles away from the nearest European, surrounded only by his faithful Bhils. They trjed to carry him into headquarters, but on the way he told them to stop -under a tree and there he died. As a comrade wrote afterwards, 'he loved

his Bhils. and they loved him ; he has been true to them m his death and they to him.' . I make no ajpology for mentioning these names, for the blood of such men is the seed— and the sap — of Empire. •_. And Lord Curzon from the chair made it clear that he associated himself with these remarks : — ' If administration m high places brought one, as he thought it sometimes did, m contact with the seamy side of human nature, a great ordeal like an Indian f amine also showed one the reverse side of. the picture. It showed one the nobility of which human nature was capable ; its capacity for self-sacri-fice, and its sense and power of duty. As he looked back on the experience of that time, he did not know whether more to admire the patient and uncomplaining resignation of the native peoples, the sufferers themselves ; or the heroism of the officers, both English and native, civil and military, to whom the charge of all those suffer-' ing thousands was committed > or the devotion of the missionaries, English, American, Canadian, European, "of every nationality/women as well as men. - They literally stood for months between the living and the dead,- and they set a noble example of the creed of their Master. Many of those persons rested m forgotten graves, but he hoped it was not presumptuous to cherish the belief that their names were, written m the Book of Life. '