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1836-1842
DEVELOPMENT OF THE MISSION.
Civilians and Officers raise a special Fund for the College—First and
Sixth Public Examination of the College — Domestic Slavery in India —
Negro Boys captured from the East African Slavers—An Abyssinian General
and his Sons—Joseph Wollf again—Dr. Wilson on the Government College—
Two Princes from Joanna—What Converts should be supported by the
Mission—First Proposal of a Scottish Mission at Madras—Projected
Missions to Kunjeet Singh and Independent Sikhs—To Kathiawar by Irish
Presbyterian Church—Sir Robert Grant’s Death—Dr. Wilson’s Report on his
Educational System for Lord Elphinstone when Governor of Madras, and for
Ceylon—Proposal to send Missionary to the Jews of Arabia and India—First
Meeting with Mr. David Sassoon—Female Education and the Misses
Bayne—Major Jameson establishes the Ladies’ Association in Edinburgh—The
Afghan Policy of the Government of India—Intercourse with the
Heir-Apparent of Dost Muhammad Khan — Dr. Murray Mitchell arrives—Dr.
Duffs Visit—Encouraging Pastoral from the General Assembly —Dr. Wilson’s
Work as a Translator—Dr. Pfander.
In Bombay, as in
Calcutta, the Parsee conversions had established the value of an English
college as an agency for evangelising the educated native youth no less
than as a means of disintegrating the old faiths of Persia and India.
The English laymen, chiefly officials, who had helped to set up the
English school in the Fort in 1832 under Dr. Wilson’s superintendence,
and who gladly formed the corresponding committee of the General
Assembly’s Mission in 1835, did not fail to urge the importance of
English as the medium of teaching and preaching to this special class.
At the end of 1833 eighteen of the best men and highest officials in
Bombay combined to raise a fund for the support of another missionary
who should devote his whole attention to this work; and they instructed
Mr. Webb and Captain Candy, who had gone to England, to select a
missionary of learning and zeal. Civilians like
Messrs. Farish, Townsend, and Campbell; scholars like Captains
Molesworth, Shortrede, and Jacob; and physicians like Drs. Smyttan and
Campbell, with not a few purely military ^officers who were an honour to
the Bombay army, used these words : “ In gratifying this desire of the
natives to learn our language, we would most solicitously provide
against the horrors of irreligion by communicating and recommending the
religion of God. We need, for this object, a man qualified for the
instruction of the natives in the English language, and for the teaching
and preaching, through this medium, the Gospel of Christ. We need a man
qualified to assist the mind now emerging; to draw it forth and lead and
direct it; to mould and form and abidingly fix it. We need a man devoted
to the Lord ; a man of talent, and intelligence, and general information
; of a vigorous and energetic yet patient mind ; of a sober and sound
judgment, of steady and strong selfdenial; of a prayerful and hopeful
spirit, and of great and catholic love—we want a missionary. Oh! how
should we rejoice to behold such a man ; how glowingly should we welcome
him! ” The transfer of the Scottish Mission to the Church of Scotland
had rendered the need less urgent; and Dr. Wilson, while fortunately
continuing to hold unshaken his view of the importance of using the
classical and vernacular languages, threw the whole weight of his
culture and energy for a time into the new Institution. Mr. Nesbit’s
absence at the Cape and Ceylon, from ill-health, made the help of a
colleague more than ever necessary, and for this the special fund was
ready. He studied carefully the experiment of the Baptist missionaries
at Serampore, which was of the same Oriental type as his own, and he was
in close correspondence with the Scottish missionaries at Calcutta.
The first examination of Dr. Wilson’s college has a curious interest, as
described in the public journals of 1836. All the dignitaries of the
island were present, even the leading priests of the Parsee, Hindoo, and
Muhammadan communities, for the conversion case had not yet occurred on
its public side. Dr. Wilson alluded to the difficulties he had only
partially overcome in securing qualified teachers and monitors, and a
sufficient supply of unobjectionable text-books and scientific
apparatus. He anticipated the time as not far distant when the knowledge
thus communicated would bring many natives with their children “ within
the pale of the Church.” By the hope of this he defended his connection
with the Institution as a missionary, and his determination “ to devote
to it a large share of my attention without neglecting other important
duties which harmonise with its objects.” From the reading of the Gospel
of Mark in their native tongue by ten Marathee boys selected from the
primary schools to be educated as teachers, to a theological examination
in the English Shastres, and on natural history and mineralogy by the
highest class, the work of the college was passed under review. The same
Goojaratee papers, which a few months later denounced the college at the
bidding of the sanhedrim because of its necessary and publicly avowed
results in the baptism of its students, were unqualified in their
eulogies. The Chabak or Whip declared that “ all were fully satisfied
that no such progress as that made by the boys of this school within the
eleven months of its existence has ever been exhibited in any
institution in this place.” A knowledge of the Christian Shastres was
liberally put side by side with that of arithmetic, “ man, and other
objects of natural history.” In reporting the examination to Dr. Brunton,
Dr. Wilson wrote:—
“10th November 1836.— .... You will observe that we secure the religious
instruction of all the pupils, even of the boys who have not made so
much progress in English as to use it freely as the medium of
communication. It is my intention not to overlook the cultivation of the
native languages, which have hitherto, to the great prejudice of English
seminaries in India, and to the prevention of their pupils from
benefiting their countrymen by translations, been much neglected. The
Brahmans here have the greatest contempt for some tolerably good English
scholars, because they speak their vernacular tongues like the lowest of
the low, and are unable to compare together the native and European
science and literature. This, I trust, will not be their feeling in
reference to our pupils, if you entertain the view which I have
expressed. The natives have already much confidence in our operations.
As all their own learning flows through the priesthood, many of them
have the idea that all European learning must flow through it also. One
of the most influential of their number, and of the class represented by
party men as hostile to missions, lately oflered me a large sum of money
if I would give himself exclusive attention during a part of every day,
which I of conrse declined to do, as it would place me in a wrong
position with regard to the natives in general.”
With this may be contrasted the facts revealed at the sixth annual
examination in March 1842, when 1446 youths were under instruction. Of
these 568 were in the girls’ vernacular schools, and 723 in the boys’
schools. There were 155 in the college, of whom 78 were Hindoos, 38
Jews, 6 Mussulmans, and 33 Christians of the Eomanist, Armenian, and
Abyssinian, as well as Eeformed Churches. The subjects and text-books
were those of the Scottish Universities, not excluding Greek and Hebrew.
Prize essays were read by natives on domestic reform and the practice of
idolatry. Geology was the science studied that session. Dr. Wilson
lectured on the evidences of Christianity, Biblical Criticism, and
Systematic Divinity.
So early as 1833 Dr. Wilson directed his attention to the slave trade
from East Africa, and to the character of domestic slavery among both
Hindoos and Muhammadans in India. In reply to an appeal from T. H.
Baber, the Bombay Union of Missionaries invited the Moravians or United
Brethren to utilise their experience gained in the West Indies and South
Africa, and their knowledge of industrial occupations, in the formation
of a colony in the Upper Wynaad district of South India, “ to reclaim
the slaves from their present state of ignorance and barbarism.” The
Basel and English missionaries have since done much in mitigating the
oppression of the casteless races of South India by the native
Governments and Brahminical communities, and that with the aid of the
British Government, while Christianity has won her greatest numerical
triumphs among the simple peoples from the Dekhan to Cape Comorin. But,
till so late a time as 1859, it was the custom of the civil courts in
India, more or less ignorantly, to register and treat as legal documents
contracts for the service and sale of slaves, which have been prohibited
ever since. Whatever serfdom or domestic slavery exists in India is
beyond the law, and has ever since been discouraged by the law, as well
as by the special efforts of the police directed to the extirpation of
kidnapping, eunuch-making, and other nameless horrors of the kind. After
the interference of Parliament for the suppression of the African
slave-trade the Indian Navy played its part with a vigour and a humanity
worthy of its reputation, which, till its premature extinction followed
by the revival of a Marine Department, had always been great in
scientific work as well as in maritime warfare.
What was to be done with
the captured slaves who were restored to freedom in Bombay, the
head-quarters of the Navy 2 The Government at once made over those of
school going age to Dr. Wilson, to the number of eight boys and five
girls at Bombay, and five boys at Poona, to begin with, in 1836. The
problem is not yet solved; it has assumed proportions since the Zanzibar
treaty, secured by Dr. Kirk following Sir Bartle Frere, which must issue
in Eastern and Central if not also Western Africa, following the course
of the empire created by the East India Company. But the germ of the
enterprise, which blossomed out into the expeditions of Dr. Livingstone
attended by some of those very slave boys, is to be found in the
eighteen youths of whom Dr. Wilson wrote home at the end of 1836: “There
is reason to hope that they may ultimately prove a blessing to the
Mission, while their capture will teach the native slavers a salutary
lesson.”
In April 1837 we find, similarly, the germ of Lord Kapier’s success in
the Abyssinian Expedition. In the course of those almost chronic
revolutions from which Abyssinia has been rarely free, Michael Warka,
military commander of three towns in Habesh, as it is called, found
himself compelled to take refuge with the British Consul at Massowah,
along with his two sons Gabru and Maricha. When in power Michael Warka
had always shown himself friendly to Mr. Isenberg, Joseph Wolff, and the
Church Missionary Society’s station at Adowah. The father and sons went
on to Bombay, where they became, of course, Dr. Wilson’s guests. The
boys, then seventeen and twelve years of age, read Amharic and its Tigre
dialect with great fluency. Dr. Wilson’s polyglott accomplishments had
not up to this time extended to the tongue of Ethiopia, but Joseph Wolff
accompanied the Abys-sinians, and left with him an Amharic and English
vocabulary, through which they and their teacher at first learned from
each other. “ I trust they are not the only Christians connected with
the Eastern Churches exterior to India who will be placed under our
care,” Dr. Wilson wrote. Wolff disappeared more suo for America, in
order to enter Africa by Liberia, leaving behind him this characteristic
letter :—
“Bombay, 10th April 1836.—My dear Wilson—Knowing that you are a dear
brother of mine, I take the liberty of making the following request to
you. I don’t like to trouble dear Mr. Farish with it, for he does a
great deal for me whilst I am with him in his house. My sickness and
journey, and the circumstance of having been robbed on my return for
Sanaa, obliged me to draw more on Sir Thomas Baring than I think it to
be just to. draw now. With regard to my dear wife, I gave my word to her
worldly brother never to carry on my mission at her expense. I also
don’t know whether all the money for my book has been sent in. If you,
therefore, could procure for my future journey to the Cape some
assistance from Christian friends I should be most obliged to you and to
the friends. I also wish to consult with the brethren here about my
future movements, whether I should pursue my journey to Africa via the
Cape, or go at once to Kokan and Yarkand via Kutch, Kurachee, and
Candahar ? I think if I could obtain 1200 rupees for either journies it
would be abundantly sufficient.—Yours affectionately,
“Joseph Wolff.”
In Dr. Wilson’s correspondence we find these traces of his own college
work, and that of the state institution, the Elphinstone College:—
“30th November 1837.—The Elphinstone College, which is in the immediate
neighbourhood of our school, and which has most^splendid accommodations
and large endowment and Government grants, has only at present eight
pupils. In order to get the number increased its managers have resolved
to found sixteen large scholarships, and to commence an elementary
school. Did it not by its constitution and practice exclude Christianity
I should "wish it success. But while it interdicts the teaching of the
words of salvation I must invite the youth of India to repair to those
seminaries of learning of which the motto is, ‘ The fear of the Lord is
the beginning of knowledge,’ and use all lawful means to induce them to
place themselves under their influence. Of the most important of these
means, in connection with ourselves, is the procuring of suitable
buildings for our Institution.
“28th February 1838.—I am happy to state that the Abyssinians have
conducted themselves in the most becoming manner, and that the progress
which they have made in their studies is most gratifying. Gabru, the
elder boy, you would observe particularly noticed in the account of the
examination of the seminary. He acquitted himself on that occasion
remarkably well, considering the short time that he had been studying
English; and his subsequent advancement has been such as to sustain the
hopes which his appearance led us to cherish. He has superior talents
and a most commendable thirst after knowledge. His brother, though
inferior to him, is also getting on well. I am quite hopeful that good,
which may yet prove to be saving, impressions have been made on both
their minds. Their father returned to his native country on a visit a
few days ago. Had he not been satisfied with the treatment which they
are receiving in Bombay he would not have left them even for a season.
When I expressed to him the hope that his sons might yet be teachers of
primitive Christianity on the mountains of Habesh he seemed much
delighted.
“Of the Zanzibarian children rescued from the Arab slavers, there are
now with me six boys and six girls. Three boys, and these not the least
promising, have been removed by death. Those who remain are learning
English. The most advanced of them is a very promising boy. They all
wish to be considered Christians, though when they came to me they were
Mussulmans. The five boys who are with Mr. Mitchell at Poona are
advancing in every respect. For each of the Zanzibarians we receive
three rupees monthly from the Government, but about double that sum is
needed. The day may be speedily approaching when the interesting objects
of our care and solicitude may prove not only the monuments of the
divine mercy but the instruments of the divine praise in their native
land, or among their benighted countrymen who visit the shores of India.
“Two young princes, aged nineteen and twenty years, nephews of the king
of Hinzuan or Joanna, the African island of which an interesting
description is given by Sir William Jones, came in their own dhow on a
visit to the Government in the month of October. They were first placed
with the Kazee of Bombay ; but in their own broken English they said,
Tat won’t do at all. We come from Hinzuan to see white man, and governor
send us to stay with black man and leaving the Muhammadan judge to his
own meditations they betook themselves to their own vessel in the
harbour. I was then asked to take charge of them, and they became
inmates in my house, in which they continued to stay during the three
months of their visit. We felt a great interest in satisfying their
curiosity connected with the numerous subjects of their inquiry, and
particularly the principles of Christianity ; but though they became
acquainted with the truth to a considerable extent, and seemed sometimes
to feel the force of the arguments against the Koran, they appeared to
the last to cling to their errors. 'What the future effects of our
intercourse may be no one can tell. They carried to their homes the word
of God in Arabic, which they understand. Their knowledge of English,
picked up principally from shipwrecked seamen and occasional visitors,
is considerable; and even their servants had some acquaintance with it.
From what they stated it would appear that it could be propagated
throughout their island without much difficulty. The language most
prevalent with them is the Sowaheli, which is spoken at Zanzibar and
through large districts on the coasts of Madima or Africa. Muhammadanism
they represented as making great progress in those quarters, but
principally through the violence of the Arab colonists, and the agents
of the Imam of Muskat. Their own hatred of idolatry, though they had not
a few superstitions, they made apparent on many occasions. One evening,
after they had accompanied me to some of the Hindoo temples, they had a
curious discussion with a Hindoo gentleman whom they found in the
mission-house on their return: ‘We take walk,’ they said, ‘with Dr.
Wilson, but have got great pain in our stomachs (hearts) because all
Hindoo men are mad, and make salaam to stone god. What for got Governor
? Why not he put you all in prison ? You come to Joanna, then we flog
you.’ The Hindoo, in self-defence, declared that he did not worship
idols. *Then,’ pointing to his sectarial mark, said his princely
instructors, ‘ you double-bad ; you come into Englishman’s house and
say, I wise man, I not worship images ; then you go to your own house
and put on Hindoo god’s mark just ’bove your eyes there. You two-faced
man! ’ With these interesting youths I expect to keep up a
correspondence.”
The growth of the mission raised such questions as that of “alimenting”
or providing for the temporary support of young converts excluded from
their Hindoo and Parsee homes, and fit to be trained in the college for
missionary or educational work. From the first Dr. Wilson drew a clear
and wise distinction between “ promising and select Christian youths
while they study English with a view to our subsequent employment of
them as agents,” and “ native Christians who have nearly reached the
meridian of life.” Practically, he settled the difficulty in the case of
the former by taking them to his own house and table, even up to the end
of his life, judging carefully in every case, but with a kindliness that
left him sorely out of pocket. The village and barrack systems for the
occupation and training of converts, must be judged of according to the
class to be trained and the state of native society from which they have
come. In every case the very appearance of seeming to hold out a bribe
to converts has been carefully eschewed by the Scottish Missions.
In 1832 Dr. Wilson had urged the establishment of a Scottish Mission at
Madras; offering, on behalf of M. R. Cathcart of the Civil Service
there, £150 a year for a time. Not till 1836 was the General Assembly,
moved by Dr. Duff’s return, able to appoint Mr. Anderson there, soon to
be followed by Mr. Johnston and Mr. Braidwood, the last specially sent
out by the Edinburgh Students’ Missionary Association which Dr. Wilson
had established.
The Church of Scotland, influenced by the alliance with Runjeet Singh,
which preceded Lord Auckland’s unfortunate Cabul expedition, projected a
mission to the then independent Sikhs, but Dr. Wilson counselled a first
attempt among those of the protected states of our own territory, such
as the Church Missionary Society and the American Presbyterians
afterwards undertook. He declared his willingness to make a missionary
survey of the Punjab up to the Indus and its tributary streams,
preaching in Hindee and Oordoo or Hindostanee on the way. “ I could
perhaps induce some influential natives to betake themselves to Bombay
or Calcutta for their education. I could furnish you with such a full
report, diversified by notices of the country, people, and prevalent
religious systems, as you could lay before the public for their general
information, and to invite approval and co-operation.” Such a survey,
and the consequent action at that time, would have anticipated by twenty
years the Christianising of the land from the deserts of Rajpootana and
Sindh, at which Dr. Wilson’s influence ceased, to the Sutlej
immediately, and ultimately to Central Asia.
What it was not expedient or possible for his own church to attempt, in
the regions beyond the three settled presidencies, as they then were,
Dr. Wilson induced other churches to undertake. The missionary survey
which he made of Kathiawar co-operated, with the eloquence of Dr. Duff
in Ireland, to lead the three hundred Presbyterian congregations of the
Synod of Ulster, as the Irish Presbyterian Church was called in 1839, to
establish a mission in India. The Rev. George Beilis, the secretary,
asked Dr. Wilson’s counsel in time to report to the Synod of 1840. He
submitted, in reply, an exhaustive report—an apostolic epistle—on the
needs and the advantages of Kathiawar, which thus begins and closes :—
“Bombay, 27th November 1839.—About three years ago I had determined to
memorialise the Synod of Ulster about the propriety of its engaging in
foreign missionary operations in its corporate capacity, and with
special reference to the great and inviting and promising field to which
I am about to direct your attention, and I was led to delay
communicating my views to you only by observing from one of your
missionary reports that you yourselves had been led to determine to send
forth some of your ministers to preach the glad tidings of salvation to
the heathen world, and to make some inquiries—the result of which I
thought it proper to await—at Dr. Philip and some other individuals,
about the particular scene of your operations. When, in April last, I
learned that you had turned your attention to India, I proceeded to
collect some more particular information than I possessed respecting the
district the claims of which I had resolved to plead before the bar of
your Christian compassion and enlightened benevolence. The arduous
duties which I have been called to discharge, and the great trials in
which our mission has been involved since that time, have hitherto
prevented me from accomplishing my purpose. My procrastination you will
easily understand. Cum ad Maleam deflexeris, obliviscere quce sunt domi.
“ .... I say nothing about plans of labour, as your dear brethren and
agents ought personally to inspect the field before particular measures
are resolved upon. It will afford me, and the other members of our
mission, unspeakable pleasure to receive them in Bombay, and to
introduce them to the friends of the Redeemer’s cause particularly
connected with the scene of their labours. We most cordially invite them
to join our ranks, and with us to fight the battles of the Lord in these
high places of the field. Let them come to us ‘ full of faith and the
Holy Ghost, ’ and be prepared both to labour and suffer agreeably to the
Divine will, and the work of the Lord will assuredly prosper in their
own souls, and those of multitudes of their fellow-men. We cannot say to
them, ‘ The fields are already white unto the harvest,’ where the soil
is not even broken ; but we can tell them that the field is both large
and unoccupied, and that when the seed is sown it will prove
incorruptible.”
In 1838 Dr. Wilson lost a personal friend in the death of Sir Robert
Grant, the Governor, of whom one of the native newspapers remarked that
his last act had been to subscribe to the General Assembly’s
Institution—“ the last expression of his regard to the hallowed cause of
education, which ever lay near his heart, which on various occasions he
advocated with surpassing eloquence, and which many of his public
measures were calculated to advance.” In a letter to Miss Bayne the
widowed. Lady Grant wrote—“I have much valued the letter which Dr.
Wilson had the kindness to send to me, and it has interested me often
when nothing else could. May
I be enabled to profit by the lessons given in it.” Under the new
Charter Act Mr. Farish became Acting-Governor, as senior member of
Council. Soon after Dr. Wilson was pleasantly associated for the first
time with a Governor to whose administration he was destined to render
signal services. The young Lord Elphinstone, nephew of the Hon.
Mountstuart Elphinstone, had been appointed Governor of Madras. One of
his earliest acts was to invite a statement of the experience of the
principal educational institutions in India before introducing reforms
into his own Province.
Nor was it only the Madras Government that consulted Dr. Wilson as to an
educational policy. We find in his papers this extract of a letter which
he wrote to the Governor of Ceylon, the Eight Honourable »T. A. Stuart
Mackenzie, dated 28th April 1811.
“It will afford me very great pleasure to write a short epistle to Mr.
Anstruther on the subject of vernacular education, if you will kindly
apologise to him for my intrusion. None of the arrangements connected
with the Indian Governments on the subject of public instruction have
given me a tithe of the gratification which yours in Ceylon have
afforded. Our ‘ boards of education ’ are by far too exclusive, and they
admit no members of practical experience. They despise and disparage
religion, the only available engine of moral reform; and were their
endeavours not in some degree supplemented by our Christian missions, I
should be disposed to question their ultimate safety. With you all seems
right, proper, and judicious ; and it reflects great honour on Lord John
Bussell that he has approved of your scheme. There are many eyes in
India placed on Ceylon as a model Government. In saying this, I do not
mean to make any insinuation against the civil officers of the Company,
who as a body are a most honourable, enlightened, and faithful set of
public servants. It is the simple fact of the intervention of a Company,
which sometimes appears to me to interpose between this great country
and our happy native land a barrier to the full tide of free and
generous British feeling. Direct responsibility to a chartered
corporation—most necessary when infantile adventure required every
guarantee against destructive loss—is a very different thing from direct
responsibility to the Sovereign, nobles, and popular representatives of
our own realm. I express this opinion merely as glancing at the general
interests of philanthropy.”
Nearly twenty years were to pass before, under tlie catholic University
and grant-in-aid systems, the Government of India assumed its proper
relation to all educational enterprise, independent as well as under its
own departments. But Dr. Wilson did not confine his energies to India
and Ceylon. His sympathies had been also all along with the Gaelic
School Society, to which he and other Scotsmen were in the habit of
sending remittances. And, in return, he sought to induce other
committees of his Church than that specially charged with the care of
the India Mission, to evangelise the Jews.
“16)th July 1841.—To Robert Wodrow, Esq., Glasgow.—It is a joint Mission
to the Jews of Arabia and India, having Bombay as its centre, which I
think in present circxi instances most feasible and promising. I will
thank you to direct the particular attention of the General Assembly’s
Committee to the view which I take of the subject, and also of the
friend who has so generously promised to support a missionary at Aden. I
am certain that his views would be forwarded, and not retarded, by the
plan which I venture to suggest. I think that my friend Dr. Smyttan
could easily show the advantages of the scheme which I propose. A
missionary for Bombay would require to direct his particular attention
to the Arabic as well as the Marathee language. I called a meeting of
the principal Arabian Jews, which was held at the house of David
Sassoon, the most opulent merchant of their body. R. T. Webb, Esq.,
Major Jervis, Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Glasgow, and Mr. Kerr were present with
me during the greater part of the time that we were together. We were
very politely received, and obtained much of the information which we
asked, as well as the promise of every assistance being granted to a Jew
whom I have employed to commit to writing whatever he can learn of the
circumstances of his brethren in Yemen, Bussora, Bombay, and other
places. Towards the close of our interview we entered on the infinitely
important question of the Messiahship of Christ, and had an opportunity
of stating the usual arguments for its establishment. They ordered all
their children to leave the room when we first mentioned the name of the
Saviour; and we could not help observing how much more reserved they
appeared in this matter than the Beni-Israel. They otherwise evinced,
however, no improper feeling ; and they freely discussed with us the
different points to which we adverted. I told them of the deputation to
Palestine, the objects of the General Assembly’s Committee, and its
readiness to aid in the instruction of their countrymen ; and they
seemed pleased with the interest which our Church takes in their
welfare. More noble-looking men than they are not to be seen on the
streets of Bombay, where so many tribes of the world have their
representatives.”
Such was the first love of the Church of Scotland in the infancy of its
missions abroad and its evangelical revival at home, that it planned
enterprises in Arabia, in Persia, and on the upper Indus,1 while it
stimulated other churches to take up provinces which its agents had, as
pioneers, surveyed. But in Bombay itself the death of Mrs. Margaret
Wilson had left the many female schools without a head,, although a lady
teacher had been speedily sent out to conduct them; and the development
of the College made it imperative that the long-sought-for colleague,
whom the Christian officials desired to help Dr. Wilson, should be at
once found, the more that Mr. Nesbit had been absent from India for a
time seeking health. Accordingly, Dr. Wilson, early in 1836, had
summoned to his side the Misses Anna and Hay Bayne, on whom he pressed
the claims of their sister’s work as an inheritance of which they were
bound to take possession. These ladies were to be his own guests,
brought out at his own cost, while retaining their independence in all
things. Towards the end of 1837 the sisters arrived in Bombay, and at
their own charges. Very tender and beautiful was the family life in the
Ambrolie mission home, and occasionally in the country house on Malabar
Hill and in that at Mahableshwar, as revealed by the now faded
correspondence, till Hay was married to Mr. Nesbit only to carry on her
missionary work till her premature death in 1848, and Anna was laid
beside her sister Margaret in the Scottish cemetery, her works following
her. Once more did the fast-increasing class of educated Natives of all
sects in Bombay, as well as the native Christian community, see the
purity, the grace, and the intellectual attraction which cultured women
lent to the missionary’s home, making it every year more and more the
centre, and largely the source, of all that was elevating in Bombay
society.
Impressed by the importance of the work, a retired Bombay officer who
had taken part in it, Major St. Clair Jameson, brother of Sheriff
Jameson, had in 1837 issued an appeal to the ladies of Scotland, which
resulted in the formation of the Ladies’ Society for Female Education in
India. That Association, united in 1865 with a similar agency for
Africa, has ever since worked side by side with the Foreign Mission
Committee of the Free Church, and with remarkable success. At Poona, as
well as Bombay, this indispensable side of a vigorous mission was
extended. In a letter to the Rev. G. White, chaplain. of distant
Cawnpore, who was successfully conducting a Female Orphan Asylum there,
Dr. Wilson wrote in 1835, “I am more and more convinced that, in seeking
for the moral renovation of India, we must make greater efforts than we
have yet done to operate upon the female mind. In Christian countries it
is, generally speaking, more on the side of religion than the male mind.
In India it is the stronghold of superstition. Its enlightenment ought
to be an object of first concern with us. You will be happy to hear that
the prejudices against its instruction in Bombay are fast diminishing
among the natives.” In a letter to his Edinburgh agent Dr. Wilson gives
us a contemporary view of the then gathering Afghan expedition. He shows
himself wise, as always, in political questions, while, writing to a
confidential agent, he expresses his opinion with a frankness rare in
his more public communications. For while he was the citizen and the
statesman, the scholar and the philanthropist, he was above all things
the Christian missionary:—
“I am not by any means satisfied of the justice of onr invasion of
Afghanistan. Shah Shnjah (that old cruel monster) has got from our army
6000 volunteers, officered by the Company, to endeavour to reseat him on
the throne of Cabul. Our main army, 13,000 strong, is now assembling on
the banks of the Sutlej, and it is to move to the northward under the
command of Sir Henry Fane. It is entirely composed of Bengal troops. Our
army of reserve, 5000 strong, composed of Bombay troops, is now
mustering in Kutch. Four of the Bombay stations, Sholapore, Kaludgee,
Belgaum, and Dharwar, are in a few days to be occupied by Madras troops.
The large station of Mhow is to have Bombay instead of Bengal troops.
That we should send an army to watch the movements of Russia, Persia,
etc., I fully admit. That we should dethrone Dost Muhammad Khan I
stoutly deny, on the ground of my present information.”
When, three years later, the Afghan iniquity was becoming a tragedy of a
very doleful kind to our arms, our honour, and our prestige in Asia, and
when Dost Muhammad was a state prisoner on parole in Calcutta, where he
might be observed at his devotions on the Course as the gay world rolled
past, his heir-apparent, Haider Khan, was a frequent visitor at Ambrolie.
On the 1st March 1841 Dr. Wilson thus gossips in a letter to Dr. Smyttan
:—
“We have lately had presented to us a hydro-oxygenic microscope, which
cost Ks. GOO. It has been several times exhibited at my house, and has
made a great impression on the natives. Prince Haider Khan, the son of
Dost Muhammad, is coming to see it in a day or two. He and I are great
friends. Should his family ever again be restored to sovereign power, it
will, I think, be favourable to missionary operations. He sat two hours
with Anna and me the other day. He talks nothing but Persian and Pushtoo.
I get on pretty well with him; and the Moonshee Abdool Eahman Khan, whom
you will perhaps remember as a companion of Dadoba Pandurang, makes all
clear when I break down. This young man, by the bye, comes to us every
morning to read the Scriptures. He will, we hope, declare for Christ.
What an accession he would he to our strength!” So grateful was Dost
Muhammad to Dr. Wilson for his kindness to his son when in captivity,
that he declared he would keep the passes open for a visit from the
Padre Saheb, however disturbed the frontier might be. But Haider Khan
never became more than a sensual Afghan, as described in Colonel
Lumsden’s confidential report on the “Mission to Kandahar” in 1856,
although he was always well inclined to the British Government because
of “the manner in which he was treated while a prisoner in Hindostan.”
When in Bombay he had an opportunity of visiting England, of which he
afterwards regretted that he did not avail himself. The late Ameer, Sher
Ali, was his full brother.
The Mr. Mitchell for whom Dr. Wilson wearied, was the Rev. J. Murray
Mitchell, of the University of Aberdeen, which now followed in the wake
of the Universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews, and, besides him, gave
to India from the same year’s classes the Bev. John Hay, still the able
Telugoo scholar of the London Missionary Society at Yizagapatam, and the
Rev. Dr. Ogilvie, the first missionary of the Established Church of
Scotland at Calcutta. Dr. Murray Mitchell, as in due time he became,
took with him the Classical and Hebrew scholarship with which Aberdeen
and Melvin were associated, while his wife subsequently became a
missionary to the women of Bombay and Calcutta, worthy of her cousins
the Baynes. The arrival of his new colleague towards the end of 1838
gave Dr. Wilson another proof of the confidence and affection of the
Christian officials, who had raised a special fund of £1800 for this
extension of the college operations.
Having roused the whole of Scotland, the north of Ireland, and many
parts of England by his fiery zeal, Dr. Duff returned to Calcutta early
in the year 1840, by wa)r of Bombay. It was necessary for the good of
the Mission in all three cities and for the success of the projected
Irish Mission, that the two distinguished men, still young, should
consult together—Dr. Wilson, now almost worn out by eleven years of
incessant and varied work for his Master; Dr. Duff fresh from home, but
also from labours no less abundant. If, in the course of the many
splendid orations which Dr. Duff had spoken and published in the
previous five years, he had been led by his Calcutta experience
occasionally to seem to Dr. Wilson to underestimate the need for female
education and instruction in the vernacular languages which Western
India at least had demanded, all was forgotten or discussed after a most
brotherly fashion when the two held long converse at Ambrolie.
The General Assembly of the subsequent May addressed an encouraging
pastoral letter to its missionaries, ministers, and elders in India,
signed by the moderator, Dr. Makellar, and the learned Principal Lee,
the clerk. Their generous acknowledgments of the arduous labours of the
missionaries, and co-operation of the chaplains and elders, and the wise
counsels of the document, had so good an effect that a similar
communication might be more frequently sent with the best results both
at home and abroad. After the last Assembly before the Disruption of
1843, Dr. Welsh, second only to Dr. Chalmers in the Church of Scotland
at that time, addressed Dr. Wilson, at the request of the Colonial
Committee, on the subject of the scattered settlers in India, for whom
no spiritual provision was made till the establishment of the
Anglo-Indian Union in 1864.
It is difficult to see how, in the midst of all his other engagements,
Dr. Wilson found time for that translation and publication of books,
which formed in his eyes as important a department as the schools and
even the preaching, because the press fed both.1 So early as 1833 he had
thus justified his expenditure to the directors of the Scottish
Missionary Society, when they were insisting on restricting operations
in Bombay, where the press cost £128 a year; the Goojaratee pundit £20;
the Hindostanee, £36; and the Sanscrit and Marathee, £36 :—
“The Pundits whom I have retained for some time have been required by me
not so much for the purpose of aiding me in my studies—though they are
of course highly xiseful in this respect—but of aiding me in fulfilling
my engagements with the press. During the past year I have composed and
principally written out with my own hand, in the first instance, upwards
of 2000 8vo pages in different languages; and it will be perceived, when
the general inefficiency of native assistants is considered, that the
help which I have enjoyed has been reqtiired for almost merely
mechanical purposes. At present the editing, and in a great degree the
translating, of the Marathee Scriptures, and the editing of the tracts
of the Bombay Tract and Book Society, and the preparation of some
pamphlets, have devolved on me. I have all along paid a considerable
part of my Pundit’s wages independently of the Society.”
Nor was it in Bombay alone or in its languages that Dr. Wilson was
active. Dr. Pfander, the Arabic scholar and controversialist, had
arrived in Calcutta in 1838, and sought his aid in printing the three
Persian treatises before referred to. In the work of translating the
Scriptures into the various vernaculars all the competent Protestant
missionaries in the Province, and scholars like Captains Molesworth and
Candy, gladly gave help. Until there are native scholars, masters of
Greek and Hebrew as well as of their own classical and vernacular
languages, to become to the races of India what Luther was to Germany,
the translations of the Scriptures by foreigners, however learned and
experienced, will require revision every generation. This has been the
case in the century since Dr. Carey began his attempts in northern, and
the Lutherans in southern India. The difficulties caused by such
revisions, required even in the English Bible, are inevitable, until the
Church of India develops its own organisation and life. |
