and this was brought about by the offer on the part of the British Resident of special dowries to the first women who would accept priests as husbands."[1] This is interesting. One does not often find so unblushing a confession of bribery. So with their married native clergy and their Protestant ideas the Anglicans formed a Reforming party within the Jacobite Church. It soon became a sect. In 1835 the Jacobite Metran[2] held a synod at a town Mavelikara. He was now quite disillusioned about the C.M.S., and made all his clergy take an oath to have nothing to do with them. The Reformers then became a new body, and began a long process of lawsuits with the Jacobites about the property.
A Malpān (teacher) in the Kottayam College, Abraham, who was a priest (Katanar),[3] took up the Protestant ideas warmly. Dr. Richards says of him with just pride that he was "the Wyclif of the Syrian Church in Malabar."[4] The Kottayam College, in the hands of the C.M.S., became a centre in which boys were trained in these ideas. "Colporteurs and catechists spread the printed Word all over the country."[5] Malpān Abraham had a nephew, Matthew, and a pupil, George Matthan. Both were excommunicated by the Jacobite Metran. George became an Anglican, and died in 1870. Matthew used cribs at Madras, and was expelled from the college there.[6] Then he went to Syria and got ordained bishop by the Jacobite Patriarch (who must, I think, have been misinformed as to his intentions). In 1843 he came back, calling himself Metran of the Reformed Church. Naturally, he was again excommunicated by the Jacobite Metran. Then he embarked on the favourite Malabar practice of going to law with the Jacobites over the property, and turned out so full of what Dr. Richards calls "ungodliness,"[7] that his uncle Abraham refused to receive Communion from him when dying. He now called himself Mâr Athanasius Matthew, got recognized by the Government in 1857, was apparently converted to a more moral life by the Anglican bishop Dr. Milman in 1870 (though he was still "too astute"),[8] and died in 1877.
