Page:Lesser Eastern Churches.djvu/389

Rh preach in a native Church, after his sermon, with his own hands tore down a picture of St. George and "committed an act of violence to an individual there" in so doing; they taught their pupils out of a Presbyterian catechism. So there came a formal breach. The Metropolitan excommunicated those who follow the Anglican missionaries; they have set up rival, frankly Protestant, conventicles, with a service of their own. Meanwhile, about the year 1825, there was another schism among the natives themselves. Of late years, High Church clergymen have travelled in Malabar and have shown these people that there are different kinds of Anglicanism.

4. The Land and People

We come to the present state of the schismatical Church. The situation is different from that of all the other Churches described in this volume, for in this case the schismatics are a minority, and are clearly a later breach away from the old body. From what has been said in the last paragraph it is clear that, as a matter of historic continuity, the Uniates are the original Church which accepted union with Rome at the synod of Diamper. The Uniate Vicars Apostolic ritus syro-malabarici now represent the old line of Metropolitans of India. The Jacobite Metropolitan rules a new schism, tracing his line only to Thomas Palakomatta, ordained in 1665; and the breach of continuity with the past is the more manifest in that they then joined another religious body — the Jacobites. If the Jacobite bishops in India wish to trace their line to the Apostles, they must go back to 1665, then leave India, join on to the Jacobite Church of Syria, and go back to James Baradai, Severus of Antioch, and so, in a way, to the old Patriarchate of Antioch.

Along the south-western coast of India, between latitudes 9 and 13, lies an undulating country between the sea and the high Anamullay mountains. It stretches for about two hundred miles from Mangalore on the north to Cape Comorin, and is from