Æt. 29. BEGINNING OF THE RENAISSANCE COMPLETED. 231

Lord Metcalfe, when acting as Governor-General, deliberately risked the permanent appointment, by the Act XI. of 1835, which Macaulay wrote, repealing all restrictions on the press throughout India, and leaving it, like all other institutions and persons, to the ordinary law of sedition and libel. Vernacular as well as English literature in India took a new start, hardly checked by the bureaucratic timidity of Lord Canning's advisers in 1857, and certain to be again freed from the less excusable action of Lord Lytton's councillors in 1877. Thus the birth of the Renaissance was completed. Thus the name of Metcalfe is linked with those of Macaulay, Trevelyan, Bentinck and Alexander Duff.

No one who knows history and is accustomed to weigh in its balances, sacred and secular, the causes and the tendencies of human progress, will be surprised that we have thus broadly applied the term Renaissance to the intellectual and spiritual movement started by Great Britain in Southern Asia in 1813, vitalised by Duff in 1830-35, and still in its vigorous infancy. That this movement is not a birth only, but a re-birth, those will most readily confess who know far better than the Brahmanizing orientalists of the East India Company the real splendour of the early Aryan civilization; the comparatively pure traditions which were the salt of Vedic nature-worship; the wealth of the Aryan languages which Hellas itself never matched, while it borrowed from them; and the influence of all three, through Greek, Latin and Arabic, on Europe in the dark ages. That the waking up of the Hindoo mind is certain to prove a Renaissance not only in the Italian sense, but in the English—a reformation in the spiritual region, and a silent constitutional revolution. in the political condition, is due to Alexander Duff. We have seen it in the Christian college which is the

nursery and in the first converts who proved the seed of the Church. We have seen it in the English language, in Western science, in the liberty of printing, in the education of the people in their mother tongue, in the growth of a pure vernacular literature. We have yet to watch the development in church and university, in literature and science, in social freedom and even in the political elevation that springs from the concession, without a struggle, of all the constitutional liberties which it took the ruling power centuries to consolidate for itself. But above and under all we shall continue to find this, as Europe and Scotland before all countries found, that the motive power and the principle of growth consist in the putting every Asiatic spiritually in that relation to God which the Divine Christ has alone revealed and guarantees. The missionary is thus before all others. Savonarola has survived the Medici, and Luther lives.

CHAPTER IX.

1832-1835.

WORK FOR EUROPEANS, EURASIANS AND

NATIVE CHRISTIANS.

St. Andrew's Kirk.—Anglican and Presbyterian Sectarianism.—The Steeple Controversy.-The Battle of the Gilded Cock.-Fight for a Second Sunday Service.-A Boileau Wanted.-Sunday Observance in India.-A Boston Socinian and the Lord's Supper.Duff longs for Friendly Sympathy.-The Senior Chaplain of Madras.--Daniel Wilson and Lord William Bentinck.-Rise of the Eurasian Community.-First Charity Schools.-Origin of the Doveton Colleges.-The Civil and Religious Rights of Converts from Hindooism and Muhammadanism. The first Writ of Habeas Corpus in India.-Dr. H. H. Wilson Apologises to the Missionaries.-Case of Brijonath Ghose.-Duff does the Bishop of Calcutta's work.-Castigates Mr. Longueville Clark.-His Power of Moral Suasion.-Bengal Asiatic and Agricultural Societies. Mr. and Mrs. Duff decline to attend the Governor-General's Ball.-Lord William Bentinck's Public Eulogy of Duff.-The School becomes an Arts and Divinity College.-Reminiscences of Duff in 1834 by a Bengalee Schoolboy.-The Bible and Tract Societies.-The Great Cyclone of May, 1833.-The panic-stricken Tiger.-Fever after Flood.-Duff's First Attack.—Visit of A. N. Groves from Baghdad.-A Day in the College.-Duff again stricken down by Dysentery. Carried on board the John M'Lellan bound for Greenock.-The Precious Seed Germinating. So early as the beginning of the year 1832, while Mr. Duff was steering his apparently frail boat in the very trough of the sea of Hindoo society, with no assistance and little sympathy from his own countrymen, he was called to minister in St. Andrew's kirk to the Scottish residents, and to help the Eurasians and the native Christians in their earnest struggles after toleration for themselves in the eye of the law and a good education for their children. Thus early he began the afterwards lifelong labours which ended in the estab

lishment of the Anglo-Indian Christian Union, and in the creation of the Doveton Colleges of Calcutta and Madras.

St. Andrew's kirk-in 1813 the fruit, like its fellows in Bombay and Madras, of much talking in obscure Scottish presbyteries, and much petitioning of Parliament by synods and general assemblies since 1793had never justified its existence. How Dr. Bryce, its first chaplain, went out to Calcutta in the same ship with Bishop Middleton we have told. A bishop must have his cathedral; so St. John's church, consecrated by the ministrations of Claudius Buchanan and Henry Martyn, to which Warren Hastings, his council and all the "factors" in the settlement used to walk to morning service, was enlarged and dubbed by the necessary name, until Bishop Wilson built St. Paul's Cathedral. It was still more requisite that the Scottish chaplain should have a church, and the Government selected as its site the spot on which Lord Clive's old court-house had stood, whence the name still given to the finest street in all the East. The Presbyterian had won the first move in the evil game of sectarianism which he and the Anglican bishop introduced into India. But, viewing the national Church of Scotland as a dissenting body, the bishop would not allow Government to give it a church with a steeple. The Scottish blood of more than half Calcutta was roused at this, for as to origin the Scotsmen were in the majority. They had the secret sympathy of the evaugelical missionaries of the Church Missionary Society, whom Dr. Middleton liked no more than the episcopal and youthful representative of the same views in the see of Colombo now does. Long and loud raged the battle of the steeple. It occupied secretaries and honourable members of Council and the GovernorGeneral week after week, till the literature of the

Æt. 26. ANGLICAN AND PRESBYTERIAN SECTARIANISM.

235

subject plunged the predecessors of future Dalhousies, Cannings and Lawrences in despair. The men who were equal to successful expeditions to Java, Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope; who had conducted to a happy issue Burman and Goorkha wars, Maratha and Pindaree campaigns, confessed themselves beaten by the steeple controversy. Lord Hastings, himself a Scotsman, directed all the papers to be hurled at the heads. of the directors who had sent out the ecclesiastical combatants. Equally baffled, the directors appealed to the Crown and its law officers, not sorry that the authority which had forced the Church establishment upon them should have a little more trouble. The decision was that, as equal in their own sphere to the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians should have their steeple, although the Government were paying a thousand pounds as ground rent for the site. Years had passed in the fight, but the national zeal had not waxed cold. There are steeples and steeples. Of what height was St. Andrew's to be? The kirk itself was a noble structure, and the steeple must correspond with it architecturally. To close the matter, the Scottish residents, in public meeting assembled, subscribed eighty thousand rupees (£8,000) to add to the spire allowed by Government, so as to raise it to a point twenty feet higher than that of the cathedral, and they surmounted the whole by a cock to symbolise their crowing over the bishop. Against this Dr.

Middleton renewed the fight, and the cock, like the steeple, occupied the discussions of the GovernorGeneral in Council and then of the Court of Directors. The decision was worthy of the most subtle of the ecclesiastical schoolmen, and of the satire of Boileau's "Lutrin." It must have been meant, by the James Mills, Charles Lambs or Thomas Love Peacocks who in those days draughted the despatches, as fine irony.