Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/540

Rh 518 M I S M I S tionally rapid. In Cuddapah, e.g., in the Telugu territory, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the London Mission ary Society laboured side by side for upwards of thirty years without winning over more than 200 converts. Then on a sudden there sprang up a revival among the non-caste population, and the 200 became nearly 11,000. Among the Kols, after five years waiting, the Gossner missionaries baptized their first converts in 1850; now in the German and English stations together these amount to about 40,000. Since the famine, however, in 1878-79, the increase of new converts has been still more rapid, and the practical experience of the superiority of Christian pity to heathen selfishness and of the helplessness of their heathen deities, united with the effect produced by persistent missionary labour in past years, brought thousands into the fold of the church. Thus in the Tinnevelly district, where the Church Missionary Society carries on its operations, upwards of 11,000 heathens applied in 1878 to Bishop Sargent and his native clergy for instruction preparatory to baptism. 1 In the same district, in connexion with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, between July 1877 and the end of June 1878 upwards of 23,564 persons betook themselves to Bishop Caldwell and his fellow- labourers for Christian teaching. Thus the English Church mis sions in Tinnevelly and Ramnad received in little more than a year and a half an increase of 35,000 souls, 2 and the Propagation Society is now proclaiming the gospel in nearly six hundred and fifty villages in the Tinnevelly district, amongst not merely food-seeking &quot; rice Christians &quot; but those who have had the courage to face severe persecution for joining the Christian church. Encouraging progress has also been made among the Santals and the Karens in Burmah and Pegu. Speaking generally, it may be said that the largest proportion of native converts is in the south, in the presidency of Madras; next to southern India the most fruitful field is Burmah, where the American Baptist missions are carrying on a successful work among the Karens, while the Propagation Society has founded many schools on the Irawadi, and penetrated up to Rangoon, and beyond British territory to Mandalay; next in point of numbers stand Bengal and the North- West Provinces. Here the largest contingent is supplied by the missions in Chutia Nagprir, among the aboriginal tribes of the Kols, while the Santal mission also presents many promising features. For the Punjab district and that of Sind, the Church Missionary Society has planted in Lahore a flourishing theological seminary for Christian Hindus, Sikhs, and Mohammed ans, and Christianity has advanced thence by way of Peshawar into Afghanistan and Kashmir. It thus appears that by far the greatest measure of success has been obtained amongst the aboriginal races and those who are either of low caste or of no caste at all, while the real strongholds of the Hindu religion and civilization still stand out like strong fortresses and defy the attempts of the besiegers. Still the disintegrating agency of contact with Christi anity is working out its slow but sure results. &quot; Statistical facts,&quot; writes Sir Bartle Frere, &quot; can in no way convey any adequate idea of the work done in any part of India. The effect is often enormous where there has not been a single avowed conversion. The teaching of Christianity amongst 160 millions of civilized industrious Hindus and Mohammedans in India is effecting changes, moral, social, and political, which for extent and rapidity in effect are far more extra ordinary than any that have been witnessed in modern Europe.&quot; &quot;The number of actual converts to Christianity in India,&quot; says Lord Lawrence, &quot;does not by any means give an adeqiiate result of missionary labours. There are thousands of persons scattered over India who from the knowledge they have acquired either directly or indirectly through dissemination of Christian truth and Christian principles have lost all belief in Hinduism and Mohammedanism, and are in their conduct influenced by higher motives, who yet fear to make an open profession of the change in them lest they should be looked upon as outcasts and lepers by their own people.&quot; To some such a negative result may at first sight appear discouraging; but, read by the light of history, it marks a natural, almost a necessary, stage of transition from an ancient historical religion to Christianity. The Brahma Somaj is not the first instance where a system too vague and shadowy and too deficient in the elements of a permanent religion has filled the interval between the abandonment of the old and the acceptance of a new faith. The cultured classes amongst the Greeks and Romans experienced in their day, after the popular mythology had ceased to satisfy, a period of semi-scepticism before Christianity had secured its hold. Meantime in India the indirect agencies which are at work the results of war and conquest, of European science and European literature, of the telegraph and the railway, the book and the newspaper, the college and the school, the change of laws hallowed by immemorial usage, the disregard of time-honoured prejudices, the very presence of Europeans in all parts of the country all these various influences are gradually bringing about results analogous to that to which Sir James Mack intosh referred in a conversation with Henry Martyn, when the 1 Abstract of Church Missionary Society s Report for 1879, p. 13. 2 Rtport of the Propagation Society for 1879, p. 31 sq. Oriental world was made Greek by the successors of Alexander in order to make way for the religion of Christ. But when to these indirect influences we add the effects of direct missionary instruc tion, of training schools like those of the Free Church of Scotland in Madras, of Bishop Sargent in Tinnevelly, of Bishop Cotton in the North- West Provinces, of Zenana missions now carried on on an extensive scale amongst the female population, of the numerous missionary presses at work circulating thousands of copies of the Holy Scriptures and of Christian books, it is obvious that, small and insignificant as these agencies may seem compared with the magnitude of the work required to be done, there has been a great advance made during recent years. The present century of missions may favourably compare with the primitive and mediaeval ages of the church, and the continuity of the missionary spirit operating, as we have seen, after long periods of stagnation and depression is the best guarantee of its ultimate and more com plete success at the close of the present epoch, during which, to use Karl Ritter s expression, &quot;almost all the rivers of the earth have begun to run in double currents, and nearly all the seas and rivers have become the seas and rivers of civilization.&quot; (G. F. M.) MISSISSIPPI. The territory drained by the Missis sippi river and its tributaries includes the greater part of the United States of America lying between the Alle- ghany Mountains on the east and the Rocky Mountains on the west, and has an area (1,244,000 square miles) con siderably larger than all central Europe. The central artery through Avhich the drainage of this region passes is called the Mississippi river for about 1 300 miles above its mouth. The name is then usurped by a tributary, while the main The Mississippi and its Tributaries. stream becomes known as the Missouri. From its remote sources in the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico the total length of the river is about 4200 miles. The other principal tributaries are the Ohio, the Arkansas, and the Red River, but the Yazoo and the St Francis often make dangerous contributions in seasons of flood. The tables given below exhibit the hydraulic features of the Mississippi and its principal tributaries. Below the influx of the Ohio the Mississippi traverses alluvial bottom lands liable to overflow in flood seasons. The soil is of inexhaustible fertility, producing large crops of corn in the northern portion, cotton in the middle dis trict, and sugar, rice, and orange groves near the mouth. These bottom lands, averaging about 40 miles in width, extend from north to south for a distance of 500 miles, having a general southern slope of 8 inches to the mile. The river winds through them in a devious course for 1100 miles, occasionally on the east side washing bluffs from 100 to 300 feet in height, but usually confined by banks of its own creation, which, as with all sediment-bearing rivers of like character, are highest near the stream itself. The general lateral slope towards the foot hills is about 6 inches