were not only without a church but also without a pastor; for the
Company did not think it necessary to go to the expense of providing a
chaplain for so small a community. But it was an age in which
religious services on Sunday were seldom neglected; and it may be
conceived that, in default of a chaplain at Fort St. George, the
Governor himself or his delegate read the Church Service on Sunday
morning and evening, in the hearing of the assembled employees of the
Company, and perhaps also some selections from the published sermons
of distinguished Elizabethan divines.

In the Portuguese settlement of San Thome there were numerous Roman
Catholic priests, and some of them ministered to the numerous
Portuguese and other Roman Catholic residents of White Town around
Fort St. George, as also of Black Town close by. So numerous indeed
were the Roman Catholic residents of White Town within three years of
the foundation of the Fort that the Governor permitted a French priest
to build a chapel in the Town. It was thus not a little anomalous that
in a British settlement, founded under the auspices of such a
redoubted antipapist as Queen Elizabeth, there was a Roman Catholic
church with a priest in charge, yet neither a church nor a pastor of
the established religion.

In 1645, however, the Company's Agent at Fort St. George forwarded to
higher authority "a petition from the souldiers for the desireing of a
minister to be here with them for the maintainance of their soules
health;" and in the following year a chaplain was sent out. There was
still no Protestant church, but the celebration of religious services
was held in careful regard; for the chaplain read morning and evening
prayers every day of the year in a room in the Fort appointed for the
purpose, and it was compulsory upon all the youthful employees of the
Company to attend regularly, under the penalty of a fine.

Chaplains came and chaplains went, and for some sixteen years they
continued their ministrations in the room in the Fort. A small church
was then built; but, with the Company's developing trade, the
population of White Town increased so rapidly that before long the
little church was too small for the number of the worshippers. When
Mr. Streynsham Master, after a long term of years in the Company's
service, was appointed Governor of Madras, one of his first acts was
the circulation of a voluntary subscription paper for the building of
a church that should be