relations now begin to throw in the soil; and
after a short space, two of them descend into the grave, and tread the
earth firmly round the body of the widow. She sits a calm and
unremonstrating spectator of the horrid process. She sees the earth
rising higher and higher around her, without upbraiding her murderers,
or making the least effort to arise and make her escape. At length the
earth reaches her lips--covers her head. The rest of the earth is then
hastily thrown in, and these children and relations mount the grave,
and tread down the earth upon the head of the suffocating widow--the
mother!"

Before Carey, what had been done to turn the millions of North India
from such darkness as that? Nothing, beyond the brief and impulsive
efforts of Thomas. There does not seem to have been there one genuine
convert from any of the Asiatic faiths; there had never been even the
nucleus of a native church.

In South India, for the greater part of the century, the Coast Mission,
as it was called, had been carried on from Tranquebar as a centre by
the Lutherans whom, from Ziegenbalg to Schwartz, Francke had trained at
Halle and Friedrich IV. of Denmark had sent forth to its East India
Company's settlement. From the baptism of the first convert in 1707
and translation of the New Testament into Tamil, to the death in 1798
of Schwartz, with whom Carey sought to begin a correspondence then
taken up by Guericke, the foundations were laid around Madras, in
Tanjore, and in Tinnevelli of a native church which now includes nearly
a million. But, when Carey landed, rationalism in Germany and Denmark,
and the Carnatic wars between the English and French, had reduced the
Coast Mission to a state of inanition. Nor was Southern India the true
or ultimate battlefield against Brahmanism; the triumphs of
Christianity there were rather among the demon-worshipping tribes of
Dravidian origin than among the Aryan races till Dr. W. Miller
developed the Christian College. But the way for the harvest now being
reaped by the Evangelicals and Anglicans of the Church of England, by
the Independents of the London Missionary Society, the Wesleyans, and
the Presbyterians of Scotland and America, was prepared by the German
Ziegenbalg and Schwartz under Danish protection. The English
Propagation and Christian Knowledge Societies sent them occasional aid,
the first two Georges under the influence of their German chaplains
wrote to them encouraging le