William Butler

“ From these mangoes, as they fall, flows a mighty river of perfumed juice, so communicative of its sweetness that those who partake of it exhale the odor from their persons all around to the distance of many leagues. There also grow rose-apple trees, whose fruit is ‘large as elephants,’ and whose juice is so plentiful as to form another mighty river, that converts the earth over which it passes into purest gold!”—Duff's India and India Missions, p. ”

“ You have often told me you would be a Christian, and you now repeat it again; if you will become a Christian I will take the responsibility of remaining, to help the rest of your people into a better life; or, if you will even give me a pledge of your sincere purpose to become a Christian in the future, I will see to it that some one comes to you without delay. ”

“ There is a pressing demand for trained men in a rapidly expanding work. Now is the time for a shoulder to the wheel. The great deep in India is breaking up. The Church should move with wisdom and power at this supreme moment. Anti-Christianity is trying to preempt the field. It is a burning shame that infidels and scoffers from Europe and America are found here doing the work of their father, the devil, villifying Christianity and withstanding the missionaries. These are scattering infidel literature and trying to organize the natives against us. A native ministry under God must save India. ”

“ Are we simply to do what is right, or what seems expedient? If the former, we may confidently ask the Divine blessing on our efforts for the moral and material welfare of the people of India, and we may strive, by a steady course of kind and righteous dealing, to win their alienated affections for ourselves as individuals, and their respect and interest for the religion which inculcates justice, mercy, and humility as equally indispensable to national as to individual Christianity. ”

“ The great epics of India are the Ramayana and the Mahabarata. These stand peerless in their voluminous literature, and have held control of the minds of the people since long before the Incarnation.
The Ramayana is probably the most ancient and connected epic poem in the Sanscrit, and exceeded only by the Vedas in antiquity. It contains the mythical history of Rama, one of the incarnations of the god Vishnu, and was written by the great poet Valmiki. For a very brief epitome of this wonderful and venerable development of Hindoo literature we are indebted to Speir's “Ancient India.” ”

“ A similar spirit manifests itself in England and America, but when once domiciled in a vast empire like India, with unlimited numbers presenting themselves in every direction, it would be little short of folly to expect men full of holy, aggressive zeal for God and souls to live for years and generations upon one bank of a great river, and refuse to carry the message which God has given them for all mankind to dwellers on the opposite bank. ”

“ Our missionaries and other workers are preaching in sixteen different languages. A meeting of this body is somewhat like a gathering of delegates from all the nations of Europe, with a few added from Egypt and the upper Nile. It is evident that as time goes on the gathering of delegates from such widely scattered communities will constantly grow in interest, while the feeling will become more and more deeply rooted among all our people that they are truly engaged in building up a mighty Christian empire which is to affect for good the whole of Southern Asia. ”

“ During the long period from the time of William the Conqueror till Clive fought the battle of Plassey in 1756, the Hindoos and Mohammedans maintained their diversity, and were as far from any unity or amalgamation when England entered the country, as they were when Mahmoud of Ghizni conquered Delhi. While the nations of Europe tended to unity, and fused their tribes and clans into homogeneous people, who gloried in a common faith and fatherland, these millions of hostile men have retained the sharp outlines of race, religion, language, and nationality as distinctly as ever. ”

“ If a similar attempt were to be made at the present time, if a body of twenty men, inspired with an enthusiastic confidence in the success of their work, moved by an ardent zeal for God and for the salvation of souls, and profoundly believing that the testimony with which they were intrusted was to be carried to the uttermost parts of the earth—if these men were to be put down on another continent, and told to confine their efforts within an area half as large as an average American State, the attempted restriction placed upon them would prove utterly futile. ”

“ EVEN among educated men there is a very inadequate idea of what India really is. It is spoken of as though it were one country, with one language and one race of men, just as persons would speak of England or France; whereas India ought to be regarded as a number of nations, speaking twenty-three different languages, and devoted to various faiths and forms of civilization. ”

“ In their hearts is the full and patient persuasion that truly converted men, thoroughly trained, with the Bible in their hands and the unction of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, can cope with any resistance, and that such an agency is yet to lay low in the dust the proud and hostile heathenism of India. ”

“ Landed property in England has been largely enhanced in value by the investments of fortunes, the fruit of civil, military, and commercial success in Hindustan. A nation controlling the resources of such a dependency, with such a noble field in which to elicit and educate the genius of its youth and display the ability of its commanders, with the profitable employment of its mercantile shipping in the boundless imports and exports of such a country as India, could not lightly resign, or throw it away without a mighty struggle for its retention. ”

“ One would be the secular reason of men who valued India for what she was to England in the way of profit and power. Millions of British money were invested in the funds and reproductive works of India; then, there was the vast, increasing, and lucrative market for English goods, one item alone of which will express its importance. The clothing of the Hindoo is not very voluminous, yet, what a business was it for Lancashire to have the right to supply cotton cloth for one sixth of the human family! ”

“ All the virtues and the vices of man, all the allotments of life—beauty, jollity, and sport, the hopes and fears of youth, the felicities and infelicities of manhood, the joys and sorrows of old age—all, all are placed under the presiding influence of superior powers.”—Duff's India. ”

“ Meanwhile the wicked inhabitants of all worlds utterly perish. At length the long night ends, Brahma awakes, the darkness is instantly dispelled, and the universe returns to its pristine order and beauty.”
This amazing chronology further states, that when these 36,000 “days” and “nights” (each of them 4,320,000 solar years in duration) have run their course, Brahma himself shall then expire, amid the utter annihilation of the universe, or its absorption into the essence of Brahm. ”

“ For some years it did not seem very clear what value would be permanently attached to our English work in India. Many of our friends in America looked upon it with great misgiving, fearing that it would divert the attention of our missionaries from the greater work of giving the Gospel to the Hindoos and Mohammedans. Others thought that among so sparse a population no important churches could be built up, and no material help received from the prosecution of the general work. ”

“ The divinities worshiped are not unknown to later systems, but they there perform very subordinate parts, while those deities who are the great gods—the Dii Majores—of the subsequent and present period, are either wholly unnamed in the Veda, or are noticed in an inferior and different capacity. The names of Shiva, of Mahadeva, of Durga, of Kali, of Rama, of Krishna, never occur, and there is not the slightest allusion to the form in which, for the last ten centuries at least, Shiva seems to have been almost exclusively worshiped in India, that of the Linga or Phallus ”

“ I. The Theological Seminary, Bareilly.—While using every instrumentality available to spread the Gospel among the people no matter how humble their ability, our brethren in India are at the same time wide awake to the value and importance of the highest possible culture to meet the keen and violent heathenism that confronts their precious work. They cannot be intimidated by any show, or pretence, or bitterness exhibited by the enemies of the Lord Jesus and his cause. ”

“ But, the man who would present no further reasons than these for British resolution to keep India in its control, would do injustice to the better section of English society, and to many of her noble representatives in the East. There is another and a better reason than what was measured by the pounds, shillings, and pence of mere worldly men, underlying the determination of England in this matter. The Christians of Britain hold firmly that, the Ruler of heaven and earth, in so wonderfully subjecting that great people to their rule, has done so for a higher than secular purpose ”

“ God's chosen instruments have evidently been “building better than they knew,” for even here, before the first generation has passed away, we are allowed to behold, with adoring amazement, the divine growth of the precious seed, which they sowed with tears amid the dark and trying scenes of thirty years ago. ”

“ Coming out again from the gloomy scenes of these “works of darkness” into the light and purity of our blessed Bible, with all its “fruits of the Spirit,” never before were we so thankful for our holy religion, nor have we ever felt as deep a compassion for the millions so shamefully and so long deluded by the false and hollow pretensions of the Vedic teaching. ”

“ He lives to see his younger brethren coursing up and down as messengers of life and peace in a vast region which contains two and a half times as large a population as was comprised in the whole Roman Empire in the days of Barnabas and Paul. His sole assistant, Joel T. Janvier, still survives, but he is now a patriarch in the midst of a great host of men and women whom God has raised up to bear a noble part in the work. Instead of timid, doubting men, who at first came at long intervals to inquire concerning the way of life, the inquirers of the present day are numbered by the thousand. ”

“ The worlds above this earth are peopled with gods and goddesses, demi-gods and genii—the sons and grandsons, daughters and granddaughters, of Brahma and other superior deities. All the superior gods have separate heavens for themselves. The inferior deities dwell chiefly in the heaven of Indra, the god of the firmament. There they congregate to the number of three hundred and thirty millions. The gods are divided and subdivided into classes or hierarchies, which vary through every conceivable gradation of rank and power. ”

“ No idea of sacredness was connected with the cow; and it is quite clear, however abhorrent and revolting the truth may appear to their descendants, that in the golden age of their ancestors the Hindoos were a cowkilling and beef-eating people, and that cattle are declared in the Vedas to be the very best of food! Yet modern Hindooism holds it to be a deadly sin to kill a cow, or eat beef, or to use intoxicating drink, and they dare to assert that this was always their creed. ”