plication than at
present. It included several countries in Southwestern Asia, and even a
portion of Africa. While St. Thomas may therefore have laboured and died
in "India," it does not at all follow that his field of labour was within
the limits of the peninsula now called by that name. Indeed, many
historical incidents and facts agree in disproving Apostolic connection
with the rise of Christianity in India.

Pantaenus, the saintly and learned Presbyter and Christian philosopher of
Alexandria and the renowned teacher of the illustrious church fathers,
Clement and Origen, is the first honoured name which finds historic
sanction in the grand roll of Christian missionaries to India. He visited
Malabar, South India, during the last decade of the second century. He was
a man wonderfully equipped by deep spiritual insight and piety and also by
philosophic training and metaphysical acumen to become the messenger of
Christian truth and life to the Buddhists and Brahmans who lived side by
side in South India in those days.

We know little of his work in that land. He found in Malabar a colony of
Jewish Christians who possessed a copy of the Gospel of Matthew in the
Hebrew tongue, said to have been given to them by the Apostle Bartholomew.
It is not known, however, whether this last named apostle laboured among
these Christians in that region.

Probably a century later that Christian community formed connection with
Antioch, Syria, which was the first of all Christian missionary centres;
but which, through its Nestorian faith, soon lost its missionary ardour.

1. And thus emerges out of the darkness into its long and unique history
the Syrian Church of Malabar.

It has passed through many vicissitudes and has lost much, if not all, of
its positive Christian influence and missionary character. During a recent
visit to that region I was saddened by the sight of this Christian
community which had lived all these centuries in the centre of a heathen
district with apparently no concern for the religious condition of the
surrounding, non-Christian, masses--content to be as a separate caste
without religious influence upon, or ambition to bring Christ into the
life of, its benighted neighbours.

This church has survived its own apathy, on the one side, and Roman
Catholic inquisition on the other, and appears before the world as what it
really is--the only indigenous Christian Church in the peninsula of India.
It enjoys the uniq