To understand the present extremely complicated state of non-Uniate Christianity along this coast we must go back to the Anglican missions.
In 1816, missionaries of the Church Missionary Society began operations among the Malabar Jacobites. We have noted that they were exceedingly Low Church.[1] As usual among Protestant missionaries, they began with the idea, not of converting natives away from their Church, but of reforming and purifying it by spreading the pure gospel. They seem to have cared very little about Monophysism, if indeed they even knew enough to understand what it is.[2] But they were strong against what they thought Popish abuses, such as images, praying to saints or for the dead, the liturgy as a sacrifice, and so on. They did not know that both Nestorians and Jacobites inherit these things from the early Church just as much as Rome does. The panacea for all these abuses was, of course, to be vernacular (Malayalam) versions of the Bible. They preached the pure gospel with such effect that, out of the one Jacobite body, there are now seven quarrelling sects.
At first the Malabar Jacobites believed the assurances of their Anglican guests that they did not mean to proselytize, nor to disturb a venerable sister Church. To the C.M.S. clergymen, Monophysites were a branch of the Church, just as much as the Orthodox, Lutherans and Moravians. Only (like most branches out of England) they wanted a little reforming. But the reforming efforts were not very successful. Dr. Richards tells us: "Apparently the only effort that was quite successful was that for the reintroduction of marriage among the clergy,
- ↑ They are so still. Dr. W. J. Richards, for thirty-five years C.M.S. missionary at Malabar, author of a little book: The Indian Christians of St. Thomas (London: G. Allen, 1908), talks about a deacon being ordained "full priest" (p. 37). He also thinks that the Council of Nicæa made five patriarchates, Constantinople being the second (p. 13). He thinks Menezes of Goa, who held the synod of Diamper, was a Jesuit (p. 14); he seems to think all Romish priests to be more or less Jesuits. He constantly talks about a Jacobite "Patriarch of Jerusalem" (pp. 17, 18, etc.). He thinks that "Catholicos" means Patriarch (p. 10), and he does not understand what Nestorianism means (p. 13). From his book I gather that the zeal of the C.M.S. missionaries exceeds their theological equipment.
- ↑ See the instructions of the C.M.S. quoted in Richards: op. cit. 21, 22.
