THE

COLONIAL CHURCH CHRONICLE

AND

Missionary Journal.

JULY, 1854.

THE CHRISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS.

"LET us also go, that we may die with Him," said Thomas to his fellow-disciples. And he did go and die with Him. The same warmth of affection which spoke out then, encouraging his fellow-disciples to be faithful even unto death, carried Thomas to the ends of the earth, for twenty years and more preaching Christ's Gospel throughout the East, through Parthia, Persia, and Arabia, to Hindostan and the confines at least of China, until at last, the Master he had loved so warmly and served so well, heard that early aspiration for a martyr's crown, "Let us also go, that we may die with Him." The local tradition' bears that he preached the Gospel first on the Malabar coast, where a very ancient colony of Jews, settled there from before the Christian era, would naturally invite the preaching of the Apostles; that he passed to the opposite coast of Coromandel, crossed next to China, then returning to India, preached the Gospel of God with great success, baptized the king Salivahan and many of his nobles; until a crowd of Brahmins rushed upon him with stones, and one at last thrust him through with a lance, on the 21st of December, A.D. 68, at the city of Meliapore, eight miles from Madras, at a spot still venerated as St. Thomas's Mount. "That it is really the place," writes Bishop Heber, "I see no good reason for doubting; there is as fair historical evidence as the case requires, that St. Thomas preached the Gospel in India, and was martyred at a place called Meliapore.'

1 Etheridge's Syrian Churches, p. 150.

2 Heber's Journal, vol. ii. p. 177. And compare Correspondence about and with Mar Athanasius, at the end of the same volume.

For it is not a mere isolated or local tradition.1 The ancient Hindoo Churches, which surprised the Portuguese on the coast of Malabar, and which continue to exist there, claim to be the seal of the Apostle's labours. In their Office books they celebrate him as the "Apostle of the Hindoos and Chinese, by whose instrumentality the errors of the Hindoo idolatry were dispelled." But besides this, there is independent and unequivocal evidence of the presence of Christianity in India, from the time at least immediately subsequent to the Apostolic age. In A.D. 190, a Missionary, who travelled from Syria to Hindostan, is reported to have found there the Gospel of St. Matthew in Hebrew, which he conjectured to have been left there by St. Thomas or St. Bartholomew. In A.D. 325, at the great Council of Nicæa, John, Bishop of India, was present, and his name stands among the subscriptions to its canons. Our own King Alfred (at the end of the ninth century) is recorded to have sent ambassadors on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas in India. And the early existence of Christianity in these remote regions is thus shown to have been then familiar to the Churches of the West. A monk of Alexandria, Cosmas Indicopleustes, A.D. 547, had published an account of his travels among the Indian Churches, and reported himself to have found Christians in Ceylon and Malabar, under bishops who received their ordination from Persia.

This last particular points us to the link which so long bound these distant and isolated Churches to the great body of Christendom. Their foundation may be owing to the preaching of St. Thomas, but their enlargement and preservation is due to the missionary zeal of the Nestorian Churches of the East, of which the Patriarch of Babylon was the head. The labours of these Churches in preaching the Gospel to the Heathen beyond them, is one of the most interesting but least known pages in the history of Christianity. Before the Western Church had half evangelized Europe, the Babylonian Churches had penetrated to the extreme bound of Asia. They had preached Christ among the Tartars of the North, and reckoned innumerable converts there. They entered China from the confines of Tartary, on the north, and also by the port of Canton in the south. A Chronicle of their Chinese Mission is extant, from A.D. 636 to A. D. 719, marking the steps of their progress and the persecutions they endured, with a list of the clergy,-bishops, priests, monks, archdeacons, who had laboured in the work. And it was not

1 Yeates' Church History, p. 76, &c.

2 Pantænus, ap. Euseb. Eccl. Hist.

5

3 See this point examined in Sharon Turner's Anglo-Saxons, vol. ii. p. 351, seqq. See the Summary in Gibbon, vol. viii. p. 73.

5 Yeates' Church History, p. 86, &c.

till some centuries afterwards that Chinese cruelty finally succeeded in exterminating their faith. With India the Nestorians maintained a larger and more constant communication,' and their affiliated Church on the coast of Malabar was so completely naturalized in the country as to be able to maintain itself in that isolated position against Hindoo and Mahometan, and for 1,500 years was the sole representative of the Christian name in the peninsula of Hindostan.

There these Churches were found existing by the Portuguese discoverers of India in A.D. 1505. Their settlements extended below Goa, 120 Indian miles along the south-western coast, and inland below the Ghauts as far as Cape Comorin, the southernmost extremity of Hindostan; while another body was settled at St. Thomas's Mount near Madras, on the opposite coast. Malabar they numbered 200,000 souls and 127 churches, under the Bishop of Angamalee, their Metropolitan. But the Christianity of India the Portuguese discovered was not altogether coincident with their own. The Archbishop of Goa complained, among other things, that they held the errors of Nestorius on the Person of our Lord, and, by consequence, denied to the Blessed Virgin the title of the Mother of God. They received no images, and when an image of the Virgin was displayed in church, cried out tumultuously, "Take it away, we are Christians, not idolaters." They venerated the sign of the cross, and displayed it everywhere in their churches, but the crucifix they did not use. They had no knowledge of extreme unction; auricular confession they abhorred; and instead of confessing before receiving the Eucharist, observed no other preparation, than that they went to the Sacrament fasting. They looked upon the Sacrament as a holy oblation and sacrifice, and solemnly offered up the elements upon the altar; but they said no masses for souls in purgatory,-they did not believe there was a purgatory; they held that the souls of the just rested in Hades till the day of judgment. Their priests married without hindrance even a second and third time; and their wives even had a precedence given them, and were distinguished by a cross, which they hung from their necks. They counted the Patriarch of Babylon their spiritual head, and refused to pray for the Pope in their Liturgy. Their Canon of Scripture also varied a little; their MSS. not containing the Apocalypse, the Epistle of St. Jude, the Second of St. Peter, the Second and Third of St. John,-thus establishing the very early date when

1 Etheridge details Missions from the Parent Church, A.D. 822, 1499, and 1503. 2 Cf. Geddes' History of the Synod of Diamper, and the Summary in Appleyard's Eastern Churches, p. 20.

3 La Croze, Christianisme des Indes, p. 146.

these Churches were founded, at a time, namely, when the Canon of Scripture had not yet been universally settled.'

All these matters, with lesser irregularities, the Portuguese prelate set himself to rectify. A struggle ensued. Their bishop was sent prisoner to Rome. A synod was held at Udiampoor, A.D. 1596; the Syriac Office books were called in and reformed after the usages of the Western Church, and the clergy sworn to the obedience of the See of Rome. This enforced subjection continued for sixty years, till the fall of the Portuguese before the arms of the Dutch' gave a signal to the native Church to reassert her independence of the Papal See. An Indian archdeacon headed the movement; bishops were sent for from Babylon, and about one half of the Christians of St. Thomas were eventually withdrawn from the Roman obedience and reconstituted their ancient church. They do not, however, seem to have ever recovered that simpler creed in which the Portuguese describe them. Syrian bishops from Antioch divided them against Nestorian bishops from Babylon; their numbers gradually diminished, their existence was almost forgotten again in Europe, till, in the year 1816, Dr. Buchanan,3 a chaplain of the East India Company, penetrated to that remote quarter of Hindostan, and succeeded in awakening among English Churchmen that natural interest which we must always feel in a Church whose history presents so many features of resemblance to our

own.

He was received with friendliness by the people, discoursed with their bishop and clergy, and was present at their services. He conciliated their good-will by producing a printed Syriac Testament, which they passed one from another and read with eagerness, and sat down to verify its correctness by comparison with their own MSS. copies. This opened a discussion, whether the New Testament was not originally written in Syriac rather than Greek; and Buchanan had to concede that Syriac was, indeed, the native language of our Lord and His Apostles. "How do you know that?" they said. "By the preservation of phrases used by them; as Talitha Cumi; Ephphatha; Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani, which were Syriac words." "The Syrians

1 Their MSS. also wanted the doxology, Matt. vi. 13; the text, 1 John v. 7; and the passage, John viii. ad init. See Geddes, p. 134.

2 A.D. 1653. See Dublin Review, vol. xxvi. p. 181, Art. "The Portuguese Schism in India." In 1663 all Portuguese clerics were expelled; but in 1698 a Portuguese prelate was sent out by permission of the Dutch. In 1709, the Independent Syrians sent to Antioch for a Bishop, vid Amsterdam. Schaaf read their letter; and in 1737 an impression of Syriac Testaments was sent them from Amsterdam. 3 The following particulars are taken from Pearson's Life of Buchanan, and 'Buchanan's Christian Researches. The former contains three curious woodcuts of their churches.