txbxavy of €he theological gtminary PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY PURCHASED BY THE MRS. ROBERT LENOX KENNEDY CHURCH HISTORY FUND BX 5640.4 .A4~C35T898 19?6COtt/ Alfred' 185° The Church in the West Indies lmd*irWMb*tS*efbrii vmiMif Mam fcwrfifru (Colonial ffifjuvd) SHstortcs Of PBM/? / THE CHURCHUJUN 29 1967 ^ IN THE WEST INDIES A. CALDECOTT, B.D. tofessor of logic and philosophy in king's college, london \ rector of lopham, norfolk ; late fellow and dean of st. john's college, Cambridge ; sometime principal of codrington college, barbados. Gltitlt JHap. PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE TRACT COMMITTER. LONDON : SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C. ; 43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C. BRIGHTON : 129, North Street. New York : E. & J. B. YOUNG & CO. 1898. Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London & Bungay. PREFACE The fact that the British West Indies include eight groups of Colonies, which are politically quite separate, and have come into the empire at different times and in various ways, made it worth considering whether the plan of this book should not be to give a separate account of each Colony or group. But behind their differences there are certain common features which give them a partial unity, and after deliberation it seemed better to make this a history of the Church in the islands as a whole, with glimpses from time to time at the individual Colonies. The primacy of Jamaica has necessarily given to that Colony the most frequent mention, but it is as typical to some extent of them all that it has been taken. I have endeavoured to show the connection of the stream of Church history here with the general history of the Church of England on the one hand, and with the social life of the Colonies on the other. Of materials for history there was abundance : able men have written histories of many of these Colonies ; and for recent years journals and reports of Synods and other Church literature have been available. My thanks are due to the secretaries of many Societies, both Church and Nonconformist ; and the libraries of the Church House and the Royal Colonial Institute have been invaluable. February, 1898. CONTENTS CHAPTER I THE BRITISH WEST INDIES— INDUSTRIAL CONDITION- SLAVERY, A.D. 1605— 1800 Our territory in W. Indies — Interest not to be measured by area or population — Changes in their relative importance in Empire — Not a Unity — Government and Law — Industrial System : Sugar-planting — The Slave Trade : Chiefly retained by Home Influence — Slavery — Considerations affecting W. Indian mind — Alleged Cruelties considered ... .../>. 9 CHAPTER II SOCIAL LIFE IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD Five Classes of Society: Ruling Whites, Subordinate Whites, White Bondservants, Coloured People and Free Blacks, Slaves — Family Life — Higher Life — Dependence ... /. 26 CHAPTER III THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD The Church Established from outset — Toleration allowed — Pro- vision for the Clergy and Churches — Irreligious character of many of original settlers — Government of the Church — The Bishop of London's Jurisdiction — The Governor as Ordinary — No corporate body of Clergy — Refusal to appoint Bishops considered — Character of the Clergy — Education — The Church and the Slaves — Alleged incongruity between Slavery and Baptism — West Indian arguments for refusing Baptism — Nonconformist Missions : Moravian, Methodist, Baptist /• 43 vi CONTENTS CHAPTER IV EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW— REVIVAL OF THE CHURCH, A.D. 1800— 1833 Political change in Britain — Increase of Evangelical influence — Resistance in W. Indies — Annals of Progress, 1797 — 1833 ; Mitigation of Hardships of Slavery — Discipline and En- couragement of Clergy — Legal protection of Nonconformist Missionaries — Registration of Slaves — Amelioration policy of Canning — Two Bishoprics formed, supported by Imperial Grants — Arrival of Bishops Coleridge and Lipscombe — Cod- rington College re-constituted — Riots in Jamaica — Deputation to England — Emancipation — Religious character of reception by the slaves — Note on some recent additions to our territory, Trinidad, Guiana, etc. ... ... ... ... ... /. 77 CHAPTER V THE PERIOD IMMEDIATELY SUCCEEDING EMANCIPA- TION, A.D. 1833 — 1870 Imperial assistance to Religion and Education — Liberality of Local Legislatures — S. P. G. Negro Education Fund — C. M. S., Nonconformist Societies — Increase of Clergy — Catechists and Schoolmasters — Increased resort to Offices of the Church — Lay Help — Education — Benevolent Institutions — Encourage- ment of Industrious Habits — Missionary Enterprise engaged in — The Church in Colonies acquired since 1763 : Relation to Church of Rome in some of these — Endowment question — Education — Denominational system secured — Compromise as to Establishment in Guiana — The Bahamas — British Honduras — Statistics of religious bodies in 1870 ... 100 CHAPTER VI DISESTABLISHMENT AND DISENDOWMENT The movement in general — Application to W. Indies — Ordered from Great Britain — Cessation of Imperial support of Bishop- rics— Disestablishment Act in Jamaica, 1870 — In other Islands — Concurrent Endowment in Trinidad and Guiana — Re-establishment in Barbados — Effects of Disestablishment — Of Disendowment ... ... ... ... ... p. 134 CONTENTS vn CHAPTER VII REORGANIZATION AND PROGRESS, A.D. 1870 — 1 897 Conditions favouring reorganization — Diocesan Constitutions, their leading features — Example, the Constitution of the Church in Jamaica — The Synod of the Province — Increase of Bishops, Clergy, and other Workers — Catechists and Lay Readers — Deaconesses — Education of the Clergy — Educa- tion : University, High Schools, Elementary, Sunday Schools — Training of Teachers — Social and Moral Life : Relation of the Races, Marriage, Illegitimate Births, Sobriety, Veracity, Steadiness, Industry, Thrift, Honesty, Crimes, Personal Qualities — Practical Character of Religious Work p. 148 CHAPTER VIII SPECIAL TOPICS: THE COOLIES— THE ABORIGINAL IN- HABITANTS— WORK ON NON-BRITISH ISLANDS, AND ON THE ADJACENT CONTINENT— FOREIGN MISSION- ARY WORK— THE PONGAS MISSION— CODRINGTON COLLEGE, BARBADOS — THE CONNECTION WITH ENG- LISH SOCIETIES The Coolie System — Responsibility of the Church — Efforts made — The Aboriginal inhabitants : In the Islands, in Guiana — Brett's Missionary Labours — Recent work — Work in Non-British Islands — Foreign Missionary Work : The Pongas Mission in W. Africa — Codiington College : Its Foundation and Early History ; Re-constitution by Bishop Coleridge ; Principal Rawle ; Recent Flistory — The Con- nection of W. Indian Church with English Church Societies : S.P.G., S.P.C.K., C.M.S., and Colonial and Continental— The New England Company — The Christian Faith Society, its origin and history — The Ladies' Negro Education Society /. 204 CHAPTER IX SOME SPECIAL POINTS AND FINAL OBSERVATIONS Antigua — Windward Islands — Trinidad and Tobago— Guiana — Nassau — British Honduras — Other Christian Bodies and their present position : Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Moravians, Salvation Army — Statistics vm CONTENTS — Misrepresentations : Froude, Mr. Salmon — Final Reflec- tions : The Industrial Depression ; Grounds for Encourage- ment of W. Indian Churchmen — The time not yet come for entire self-maintenance ... ... ... ... /. 241 ArPENDix I. The West Indian Episcopate ... /. 262 II. Statistical Table ,, 263 III. Climate and length of service ... 264 IV. Landmarks for West Indian Church History ... ... ... ... 265 V. List of Authorities quoted ... ... 267 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES CHAPTER I THE BRITISH WEST INDIES — INDUSTRIAL CONDITION — SLAVERY, A.D. 1605 — 1800 Our territory in W. Indies — Interest not to be measured by area or population — Changes in their relative importance in Empire — Not a Unity — Government and Law — Industrial System : Sugar-planting — The Slave Trade : Chiefly retained by Home Influence — Slavery — Considerations affecting W. Indian mind — Alleged Cruelties considered. In the shaping of the destiny of the beautiful is- lands of the Caribbean Sea, Britain cannot claim the first place, either in order of time or in extent of influence. Her territories there have been less ex- tensive than those of either Spain or France. The Spaniards secured the magnificent island of Cuba, itself containing more acres than the whole of the rest of the Archipelago ; a share of the second island, His- paniola (San Domingo), the whole of the third, Porto Rico, and the fifth, Trinidad. The French had the remainder of Hispaniola (Hayti), and several of the choicest of the smaller ones, Martinique, Guadeloupe, IO THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia. The share of Britain was at first only some smaller islands, occupied in the Stuart period, after more or less conflict with the Spanish or French in all except Barbados. The others were Antigua, St. Kitts (partly), and Nevis. The aggregate area of our territory at the time of the death of Charles I. was about the same as that of the single French island Martinique. Still these gave us our foothold in the region, and from them we con- stantly increased our holding during the great wars of the 17th and 18th centuries. The redistributions followed the course of our prosperity in naval and military war, and therefore showed almost continuously to our advantage. The decay of Spain was our first opportunity, and Spain's great enemy, Cromwell, the man to seize it. At that time the term a America" covered both the islands and the mainland across the Atlantic ; and Cromwell was aiming a blow at Spanish power in America when he sent his expedition against Hispaniola. It failed there, but the leaders made a ■ compensatory stroke by securing the fourth island in size, Jamaica ; this acquisition at once increased our territory tenfold, and for a century it remained at that extent. In the 1 8th-century wars our antagonism was with France, and thus we never pressed farther upon the great Spanish islands than acquiring Trinidad. But in the great French wars the Caribbean Sea was always one of the centres of conflict, and islands kept changing hands continually, being restored or retained when Treaties were made as the necessities of nego- tiation required. The close of the century saw our territory augmented by the islands of Trinidad (from Spain), Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and Dominica (from France). In addition to these gains we had secured by settlement a position in the Bahamas, and another on the Central American Coast at Belize (British Honduras), and we also took over from the THE BRITISH WEST INDIES 1 I Dutch the western portion of their territory on the South American Continent, viz., the basins of the rivers Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice. These latter, grouped later under the name British Guiana, as well as the Colony of Honduras, are usually included under the general term " West Indies/' and the term is so employed in this history. There has been no further change of territory affect- ing Britain : France has lost Hayti as a Colony, and Spain St. Domingo ; both of these have become Re- publics, connected with their mother countries by ties of tradition and social habit. Those of our Colonies which we acquired by conquest are even now not British in the full sense of the term ; in language, religion, and social affinities they retain many ele- ments of their Spanish, French, or Dutch periods, and they have not so much local government as our purely British Colonies. St. Vincent and Grenada were ac- quired somewhat earlier than the others, and are more Anglicized ; but in Trinidad, Dominica and St. Lucia French and Spanish patois prevail, and the Roman Church predominates. In the first period covered by the present history we are to deal, therefore, with only a portion of our present territories ; with the thoroughly British Colonies of Jamaica, Barbados, the Leeward Islands, Antigua, St. Kitts and Nevis. In our second period, i.e. after 1800, the area includes also Trinidad, Dominica, St. Vincent, Grenada, St. Lucia, with the Bahamas and British Guiana. Small as is the total area of the British West Indies there are grounds for an interest to the English mind which is not to be measured by the numbers of their square miles, or even of their inhabitants. These islands saw the first attempts of British people to Europeanize tropical lands ; to apply British char- acter to the shaping of industrial and social system in I 2 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES circumstances which necessitated the employment of tropical races, of other colour than our own, and of lower range of mental capacity. They show us the Planta- tion type of life. For this purpose they may be studied along with the Colonies of Virginia and Carolina, but in the islands the system is more isolated and in clearer light. There were no such neighbours as those of New England and Pennsylvania to modify the system; and their tropical climate — they all lie within 200 of the Equator — rendered them more dependent upon the black races for physical labour than even South Carolina and Georgia. And again, small as they were, they were exuberantly fertile ; thus they were able to place Great Britain in a position to supply herself from within her own territory with a staple article which she would otherwise have had to seek from France or Spain ; possibly had she not possessed these sugar-plantations of her own we might earlier have reached the era of Treaties of Commerce, but this is hardly so likely as the other possibility, that we should have gone on to acquire one or more of the greater islands. And therefore it came about that the cultivation of these little islands was so fostered by British capital that their total produce was out of all proportion to their acreage when compared with Cuba and Brazil. A considerable enhancement of their importance in British eyes followed upon the loss of our North American Colonies. Our remaining possessions on the St. Lawrence were too far north and were but of little consideration at that time. So for at least two generations the West India islands represented practically our share in the great discovery of Colum- bus The Governorship of Jamaica was considered next in importance to the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland and the Governor-Generalship of our dominion in India. Among the Governors have been an Earl THE BRITISH WEST INDIES 13 of Carlisle, a Duke of Albemarle, a Duke of Rutland, a Duke of Manchester, Sir Eyre Coote, a Marquis of SHgo, and Earls of Mulgrave and Elgin. It was hardly as a merely complimentary expression that the great Admiral Rodney, in thanking the Jamaican House of Assembly for their vote of a statue in commemoration of his splendid victory (1783) over the French Fleet that had been threatening our islands, said : " The preservation of Jamaica was always at my heart, as I ever did, and ever shall, look upon it as the brightest jewel in the British diadem." But with the advance of the 19th century the rank of these islands in the British imperial system has constantly declined, even though they have been extended as described above. Other Colonies have grown up in Canada, Australasia, South Africa; our Indian Empire has been extended and consolidated ; and our adoption of a Free Trade policy did away with much of the special commercial interest in our own territories. French sugar became as welcome as British. And a burning grievance arose in West Indian minds that even the countries which refused to abolish slavery suffered nothing at our hands on that account, but that we found the slave-grown sugar of Cuba and Brazil as sweet as the produce of the eman- cipated negroes of our own dominions. And so our Sugar Colonies in the Caribbean Sea sank in the scale of relative importance as members of the Imperial system. In thinking of these islands it is to be borne in mind that they are far from being a unity. The term " British West Indies " is a real case of geographical expression ; it is in no sense a political term. They never had a common Government, but each hung on to Great Britain by its own thread, except that there was some grouping in the case of some of the small ones. Jamaica is 1000 miles from Barbados, and no 14 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES exports or imports passed between them ; each traded direct with Europe or America. Even now there are many West Indians who have never been on any island than their own, except for a few hours' landing while in harbour, although they have often visited " home." They always had common cause, naturally, by reason of their industrial affinities : but it was in London that co-operation for any purpose was devised, as a rule. One of the few cases of inter-communion is the highly creditable action after the tremendous hurricane of 1831, when Barbados, St. Vincent, and St. Lucia, which lay in the pathway of its ravages, were assisted by a large subscription from the islands unaffected, as an addition to the House of Commons vote of ^100,000. And it is pleasant to note that in this subscription French Martinique and Danish St. Thomas and Santa Cruz came forward to help. The Government of the older Colonies was in the main a reproduction of the English Constitution. A Governor from "home" represented the Crown, and some chief offices were Crown appointments; there was a Governor's Council of residents, selected by the Crown ; and an elected Assembly. Antigua, St. Kitts, and Nevis had a Governor in common (" Leeward Islands "), but they had each a local legislature. In Foreign affairs and in commercial policy the Colonies were of course without independent rights, and the same may be said of the relations of Church and State. The laws of the Colonies were — (1) The Common Law of England, (2) such Statute laws of England as were in force at the time of the settlement of the Colony: both of these "so far as applicable"; and (3) local enactments. For example, it was declared by English judges that British Acts of Parliament since 1655 did not run in Jamaica unless it was specially THE BRITISH WEST INDIES T5 provided in them; to have force, adoption by the Jamaica Legislature was indispensable. The enact- ments of the Colonial legislatures, on the other hand, required ratification by the Crown in order to become permanent. All money votes, however, were in their own hands, except that in Barbados and Antigua there was for many years a 4J per cent, customs duty, which, as may be supposed, gave rise to constant friction, especially as it was usually scandalously misapplied at home. The Industrial System was determined by Nature, in the prolific return which these islands gave to the cultivation of the Sugar-cane, just as European taste for this commodity was growing. In the earliest days of settlement there was no foresight of this. If any single plant was prominently in mind then, it was tobacco ; but the early settlers were occupied also in growing cocoa, coffee, spices, indigo, and fruits, and in exporting the valuable timbers. The Portuguese brought the Sugar-cane to Brazil from the East ; some Dutch settlers in Brazil were ejected and took refuge in Barbados; thence Governor Modyford took it to Jamaica, and Colonel Codrington to Antigua. So that by the intervention of man an Eastern plant was conveyed across oceans to become the main source of prosperity in regions on another side of the world; in the distribution of plant-life for man's benefit nature was brought into subservience by art. The success of Sugar was prodigious : in Barbados the best of the island was speedily planted over, and 50,000 settlers were soon at work in a space no larger than the Isle of Wight. This led to two important results of a social character. It settled that large-scale production should be the method of industry ; the Plantation system, not small holdings : and it com- pelled resort to an external source for labourers. The original inhabitants, the Caribs, had either l6 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES disappeared or were intractable. None were found in Jamaica or Barbados ; in some other islands there were some left of the more savage type, and in no sense a source of labour-supply. Following up the plan already initiated by the Portuguese and Spaniards for their territories, the Atlantic was crossed, and the Continent of Africa was resorted to for this purpose. The West Coast of that unfortunate Continent from the river Senegal to Angola was 11 cupped," as M. de Vogue says, for regulir supplies of labour to the American Plantations from Virginia to Brazil. It was not the good missionary Las Casas who first invented the plan ; he found it already in operation ; but he certainly knew that his dear Indians in Mexico and the islands could not toil as labourers — -they perished like flies if compelled — and he saw that the Negroes could. So he joined in commendation of the Negro system, hoping, of course, all the while that they would be settled in the Plantations on a Christian basis of life. This is not the place for an exhaustive handling of the subject of Negro Slavery. But the condition of the masses is of primary importance in every true review of a period of Church history, and a history of the Church in the West Indies would wholly miss its point which did not give careful attention to the social system in vogue for so long a period of that history. I. THE SLAVE TRADE. Something of approval may be oaid of this traffic in the abstract. It was a method of deportation of labour from a place of abundant supply to a place of profitable demand. It was a method of greatly augmenting the productivity of the earth, and the supply of the legitimate wants of mankind. But it THE BRITISH WEST INDIES 17 offended absolutely against deeper principles. It was based upon injustice and tyranny, and was carried on with disgraceful neglect of the fundamental duties of the strong to the weak. The mercenary shippers whose visits kept West Africa in constant internecine warfare, and whose arrangements for the Atlantic voyage are for ever execrable in human memory under the name of " the Middle Passage," are matched only by the merchants and planters who on arrival ruthlessly disregarded any relics of family ties ; and the two together must bear the irrevocable judgment which history has recorded against the "Traffic" as it was conducted. In that reference in a certain con- tract to 10,000 tofis of negroes to be delivered, the callousness of civilized man reached a degree which must remain in permanence as a proof of the possi- bilities of evil of which human nature is capable. But we are bound to notice that there is evidence that the weight of blame should fall not upon the Colonists, but upon the merchants of Britain. The Slave Colonies in America were all ready to let the Trade cease; and the Assembly of Jamaica was at one time similarly disposed. In 1774 this body passed two Bills limiting the importation ; these Bills were disallowed at home. Two historians of Jamaica do, indeed, refrain from considering that these Bills were really aimed at limitation for its own sake ; the tax proposed to be imposed on imported slaves was, they think, only for revenue. And indeed it is some- what difficult to see how men could really desire limitation so long as they acquiesced in the method of working the Negroes to rapid exhaustion, as was frequently the openly approved plan. And farther, in 1797 the Jamaica planters certainly receded from any such position, and claimed the continuance of the Trade as their right. But whatever is to be said about the Colonists, the conduct of the supporters of B 1 8 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES the Trade at home was explicit ; the merchants^ of Bristol and Liverpool petitioned against the Bills of 1774, and the Secretary of State accepted their con- tention to the full when he said — it is degrading to write the words as coming from a British statesman — "We cannot allow the Colonies to check, or dis- courage in any degree, a traffic so beneficial to the nation." It stands out fairly clear that whilst the planters depended on this traffic, and neglected to adopt methods of employment and life which would allow the Negro to increase naturally, the Trade, as a trade, was not a colonial enterprise at all. It was worked from Liverpool to the extent of one-half, London one quarter, and Bristol the remainder. And to those mercantile centres went all the direct profits. At one time the City of London was on the point of agreeing to its abolition, and even voted a petition in that sense ; but Liverpool was indefatigable and drew them back again. And it is farther to be remembered that we made this Trade a leading object of public policy. At the Peace of Utrecht, 17 13, we insisted on reserving it for ourselves, not only for our own Colonies, but also for those of Spain. II. SLAVERY ITSELF. (i.) The opinions of enlightened and thoughtful people were at variance. Even Christianity — as interpreted at that time, at least — offered no decisive criterion as to its Tightness or its iniquity. We find among rulers Charles V. (and his Confessor) ; Car- dinal Ximenes ; Pope Leo X. ; and perhaps Queen Elizabeth (although she knighted Hawkins with his shockingly infamous crest, "a Negro, manacled ") pro- testing against it. But on the other hand Cromwell THE BRITISH WEST INDIES renewed a Charter to engage in the Slave Trade ; the unquestionably philanthropic Moravian Brethren them- selves held slaves so late as 1844; the Baptists, not usually given to any mincing of matters when they have a clear light, in their instructions to their early Missionaries deprecated opposition to it in slave- holding countries ; and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, as trustees for two estates in Barbados, were unable to see their way to anticipate the general emancipation of 1834. (ii.) We shall never arrive at a just judgment as to the character of the Planters of Virginia and Caro- lina or the West Indies if we persist in assuming that the Slave system was invented by them, and that they thereby forfeit something of their claim to be thought true Englishmen, devoted to constitutional liberties, but should rather be associated with the despotic political systems of Portugal, Spain and France. The point of their contention was that they did as a matter of fact proceed on old English con- stitutional lines. There never was a time when all Englishmen had political liberties, and the time was but very short in which full civil liberty had been possessed by the masses of the people. The Planters acknowledged that it was going back, but they con- sidered that it was only for a century or two : resuming a semi-feudal position in relaiion to the tillers of the soil. It must be remembered that there had been such a thing as '* Villenage," or serfdom, in England ; and that the labouring class had passed out of it so gradually that no man could say when it ceased. So late as Edward VI. 's reign, in a law for branding runaways the word u slave " occurs 38 times ; slaves were manumitted so late as the reign of Elizabeth ; the status of both "serf" and "slave" were recognized by English law in 1570, says a great contemporary jurist, Sir Thomas Smith. Macaulay says that traces 20 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES were to be seen even in the Stuart period ; while in Scotland there are records of certain rights over serfs so late as 1750. So that it is plain that we may go so far as to say that English " villenage " and the American Slave system actually overlapped. Nor was it simply that milder form of villenage which meant permanent attachment to an estate, not to the owner, that persisted so long. The most recent investigator, Vingradoff ( Villainage in England, pub- lished 1892), leaves no room for doubt here. "The majority of the peasants were villains, and the legal conception of villainage has its roots not in the con- nection of the villain with the soil, but in his personal dependence on his lord." Again: "As to the general aspect of villainage in the legal theory of English feudalism there can be no doubt : the lords are owners not only of the chattels but of the bodies of their ascripticii, they may transfer them wherever they please, and sell or otherwise alienate them, if they like " (p. 44). This writer further shows that the " villain " had no rights against his lord, except that the Courts intervened in his protection against " loss of life or injury to his body." If the status of villenage proved efficacious in guiding the social advancement of England in mediae- val times, is it surprising that the Planters of America insensibly revived it in their treatment of the uncivil- ized beings who were introduced year by year as workers on their estates? These new-comers from Africa were hardly fitted for civil liberty. (Political liberty the natives do not even now possess, either in the West Indies, in Cape Colony, or even in India of course.) They came from different tribes, and spoke different languages ; three-fourths of them had been "slaves" in their own country; they had in common only their physical endowments, a low degree of in- telligence, an indisposition for toil, a very slight range THE BRITISH WEST INDIES 2 I of self-control, and abundance of superstitions. Are we, even at this day, to say that to fall back upon the policy which had prevailed in England for centuries was in itself a proceeding prima facie either senseless or iniquitous? And in the later part of our period the Planters' friends in educated society in England were not backward in directing attention to the fact that the abolition of serfdom in England did not mean universal abolition, but that it still prevailed in several continental nations. This line of defence led Lord Brougham to think of going to Germany, Russia, Hungary, and especially Poland, to inquire into the actual conditions, in order to reply to the Planters' friends — a thing he would have found very difficult to do. / III. THE CRUELTIES OF WEST INDIAN SLAVERY. A system may have palliations when viewed in the light of the slow progress of humanity. But in the manner of its working there may be qualities for which no palliation can be found. It is impossible not to acknowledge that in the manner of working Slavery there were defects amounting to culpable and lamentable outrages upon humanity. Cruelties of an odious character occurred too often ; and even the ordinary discipline of a large household, but especially of an estate, involved proceedings which can only be designated as abominable. Here and there favoured estates may have been carried on in an atmosphere of simplicity and bonhomie ; very often this may have been the desire, if not the actual achievement, of planters of the type cleverly sketched for us by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Mr. Selby and Mr. St. Clair. But masters were not all in easy 22 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES circumstances, and "driving" was often imperative, or seemed to be so ; and they were not ubiquitous, while their overseers were of too low a morale to be much influenced by any considerations of humanity when once seasoned to their "duties." And so, beyond question, the cry of the African went up to Heaven. Still, as recorders of the affairs of men and not of angels, we are bound to ask how the ruling class in the Plantation Colonies stand amongst their fellows. In so comparing them we must remember — (a) The greatest severities took place in the treat- ment of the Negroes who had newly arrived. Fresh from the wild life of Guinea, many of these were rest- less in the extreme; and when amongst them were found some warriors, victims of misfortune in tribal wars, and sold at high prices for their superior physical endowments, it is plain that to control them on a remote valley-estate was no matter for easy treatment. The Coromantins especially were an untamable tribe, and very forcibly impressed the Jamaican mind with the need of vigilance and severity. The French and Spanish colonists were wiser than ours, and would not knowingly admit slaves of this tribe at all. But as Jamaica was very freely supplied from it, we are not surprised to learn that it was there that insurrections broke out with the greatest frequency.1 And, on the 1 But in connection with this tribe, that better things might have been done is opened out in a passage in a letter of Christo- pher Codrington (Dec. 30, 1701). Writing of the murder of a Major Master (in Antigua) by his slaves, he says : "I am afraid he was guilty of some unusual Act of Severity, or rather some indignity towards the Coromantes, for they are not only the best and most faithfull of all our slaves, but are really all born Heroes : there is a difference between them and all other Negroes beyond what it is possible for your lordship to conceive. There was never a Rascall or a Coward of that Nation. Intrepid to the last degree. Not a man of them but will stand to be cut to pieces without a Sigh or a Groan : grateful and obedient to a Kind Master, but implacably revengeful when ill-treated. This THE BRITISH WEST INDIES 23 other hand, the heart-burning and heart-hardening thereby caused affected most injuriously the Jamaican temper. We can but regret that a wiser policy was not adopted when we know that in Virginia it was only after lapse of a considerable time that the legislature shows any perceptible sign of dreading insubordination or insurrection at all. (b) It is true that after some of the insurrections the Planters acted in a frenzy born of panic. After a rising in Antigua, in 1736, five Negroes were broken on the wheel, six hung alive in chains (one of these was eight days and nine nights in dying), fifty-eight burnt at the stake. But we must take cognizance of contemporary methods of dealing with insubordina- tion and crime. We might read Macaulay's account of the English treatment of the misguided supporters of Monmouth's rebellion, a much less formidable affair than a Negro insurrection on islands where the whites were in a small minority ; or, much later, Sir Charles Napier on the severe floggings in the army, or John Howard's accounts of the treatment of the wretched inhabitants of our gaols, or Sir Samuel Romilly on the atrocities of our criminal code. It is along with these contemporary actions, not with our subsequently reformed criminal procedure, that even the cruelties of West Indian slavery must be judged. (c) There were considerable differences between the several Colonies in this respect. The palm for mildness goes to the Leeward Islands, especially Antigua, and the burden of greatest reproach falls upon Jamaica. But here again let us observe some operative causes : the folly of the Jamaicans in accept- ing the Coromantins ; the presence in her wilder was the opinion, too, of my Father, who had studied the genius and temper of all kinds of Negroes for forty-five years." Let us be glad that some of this fine strain of blood is even yet coursing in the veins of our West Indian fellow-subjects. 24 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES recesses of Maroons or escaped Negroes, living out> side the pale of government, and a constant incentive to the more turbulent among the slaves to make a stroke for liberty like theirs ; and a greater prevalence of absenteeism than elsewhere. Of these causes two were faults, certainly j but they were not exactly cruelty or barbarity, and so our judgment to some extent may be mitigated. {d) The West Indian writers insist on our com- paring the Negroes in slavery in the Colonies with Negroes in their native tribes in Africa. The sources from which they issued were captives in war, criminals, wives or children sold, and domestic slaves. Long, the historian of Jamaica, persuaded himself that ninety-nine out of a hundred belonged to the first two of these classes, and therefore were already doomed to slavery or under sentence of death. Accordingly he selects lugubrious pictures from travel- lers in Africa of the lives of such people there. Bridges is somewhat double-faced ; he condemns the traffic and applauds Wilberforce, but yet when op- posing Great Britain in her treatment of Jamaica, he considers himself free to make full use of the above argument of Long. Every one can see that there is a great deal of force in it, but the palliative force claimed for it is not so powerful as these advocates represent. (e) There was disadvantage in the great amount of "Home Rule" which prevailed in the British Colonies in comparison with those of France and Spain. Long acknowledges this with reluctance, and he quotes Montesquieu as showing that a Monarchy was better suited than a Free State to the direction of a slave system. In the Spanish and French Colonies the status of the slave was regulated by Imperial authority. The "Codes," or systems of laws and regulations, were formed at home, and there- THE BRITISH WEST INDIES, 25 fore were conceived in a less one-sided spirit than was likely to be the case with local legislatures com- posed of Planters and their dependents. Both the French Code Noir and the Spanish Code contained provisions which we could much wish had been in force in our islands, and removed from being tampered with by the employers. But the actual records show, it must be allowed on our behalf, that we may easily over-estimate what might have been done from home. Allusion has been made to the sinister influences at home which operated upon the Trade itself. In another very important matter, the attachment of each slave to the estate on which he was born, and his consequent possession of a rudimentary M home," it was the Planters who passed a law that slaves should not be seized and carried away by a Planter's creditors, it was the home authorities who disallowed this humane provision. In practice, however, it is certain that it was very unusual for the West Indian Planters to break up families. And on another point, the efforts of the Colonial Governments to check absenteeism, by placing the permanently absent at a disadvantage in comparison with those who made their homes where their fortunes were accumulated, were relentlessly crushed by the home authorities. We may therefore accept the claim of an able living West Indian, Mr. C. S. Salmon, that after all the Planters were Englishmen, placed in a false position. And we may go further and say, that the blame, which is their due by reason of their reverting to a social system out of which the British Isles had emerged, must be fully shared by the nation at large, for it was to Great Britain that the lion's share of the profits of the retro- grade system fell, and not to the colonial communities themselves. CHAPTER II SOCIAL LIFE EN THE SLAVERY PERIOD Five Classes of Society: Ruling Whites, Subordinate Whites, White Bondservants, Coloured People and Free Blacks, Slaves — Family Life — Higher Life — Dependence. "The two great forming agencies of the world's history have been the religious and the economic," says Professor Marshall in the opening sentences of his Principles of Economics. In the West Indies we have a society formed exclusively by the latter agency ; the whole social and moral order was determined by industrial considerations; the Plantation system settled the whole fabric of society. Society in the West Indies was divided into five classes, as sharp-cut in many features as Hindu castes. I. THE RULING WHITES. The Planter in his industrial capacity was a complex personality : at once a landlord, a farmer, and a manufacturer. He owned the land, he grew the canes, he manufactured the sugar, molasses, and rum. An "Estate" meant not only cane-fields and food-grounds, but also a sugar factory. The complexity made a large capital necess.iry ; small properties proved unable to compete, and certain ten- acre holdings that were started in some islands were speedily absorbed. A Plantation of 500 acres would 36 SOCIAL LIFE IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 27 have 150 picked acres in Cane, the remainder in provision and pasture ground for estate consumption. Some 200 Negroes would be employed : the capital required would be about ^80 an acre, ^"40,000. At the time of high prosperity in Jamaica there were some 700 such estates. The Planter himself in "the Great House" over- looking the buildings and yard, lived much as a com- bined English squire and large farmer might do in England ; the estate supplied his household with a large portion of its provisions, and from twenty to forty slaves were set apart for domestic services. This was, however, the condition of earlier times rather than of later ; as fortunes were made planters resorted to Great Britain and left their estates in the hands of agents. Their representative was entrusted with a power of attorney, and so came to be styled an Attorney, the designation still in vogue for Agent or Factor. A competent man would have several estates entrusted to him; as many as ten or fifteen. On one of these he resided, or perhaps on his own ; the others he visited at intervals and received regular visits and reports from his overseers. In 1796, out of 769 Jamaican proprietors 606 were absentees. This was a calamity. And the residents were alive to it even in its earlier stages, but, as already mentioned, their endeavours to arrest the evil were blocked at home. An old English precedent of Richard II. 's time in England, itself restricting non-residence of land- owners, was pleaded in vain ; the Jamaican Act was disallowed, and later Governors went out with stand- ing instructions always to veto at the outset any special taxation on absentees. Similarly when the Assembly proposed to require a greater contribution of " defici- ency whites," — i. e. support of a certain number of white people required to make up a fixed proportion to the coloured, — from absentee owners, their measures 28 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES were annulled by absentee influences brought to bear at Westminster. As time went on the Planters almost ceased to be men of independent capital : mortgages, jointures, annuities to younger brothers and sisters, and other charges necessitated heavy borrowing ; the margin left to the nominal owner was small, and the estates were worked at high pressure in order to secure imme- diate profits ; and they often changed hands. The Merchants. — Their business was to buy the produce from the estates, and to export it; and to import foreign provisions, tools, clothes, hardware, and articles of luxury. Firms in Great Britain had agencies in the islands, and a system of consignment set in, by which a Planter received supplies as he required them, and was bound to hand over his whole produce as it was realized. This relation of the producers to the merchants sapped the proper inde- pendence of the former class, and, indirectly, of the Colonies themselves. For example, on the failure of the Higgensons of Liverpool it was found that one- third of the whole produce of Barbados was in their hands. Such merchants as resided and their principal agents were of the same social standing as the Planters and Attorneys. The Professors comprised the higher Government officials, lawyers, doctors, and clergy. The Governor and some high officials came out from home. Unlike the American Colonies the West Indies never attained to election of their own Gover- nors. Several of the offices were of great value by reason of the fees attached to their functions : in Jamaica the Colonial Secretary, the Provost-Marshal, and the Prothonotary drew from ^6000 to ^9000 a year apiece. But a sinister influence soon prevailed here also; by a discreditable and unjust abuse these offices were conferred upon Court favourites or Party SOCIAL LIFE IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 29 supporters, who never went out at all, or even thought of doing so. The " Patentees" were allowed to appoint permanent deputies, and to lease out the revenues of the offices. For example, an office of .£1050 was let for ^840 a year, leaving .£210 for the lessee, who did the whole of the work. Two notable men of fashion, whose contributions to literature cause us to wish that they had derived income from more wholesome sources than these abuses, were Horace Walpole and George Greville of the Journals. " Horatio Walpole Esquire " was Surveyor and Auditor-General for America, and Greville, who was. Clerk to the Privy Council at home, was also Colonial Secretary of Jamaica; it is probable that neither of these ever saw the scene of his sup- posed duties. In vain did the Colonial Legislatures protest: in 1699, 17 11, 171 5, local Acts were passed against these abuses, but they were disallowed. Of course the holders of the leases squeezed out fees to the utmost ; and it was said that the fees on shipping paid to the " Controller of Customs " at Kingston were five times higher than those charged at American ports. In 1782, Lord Lansdowne, the Secretary of State, interposed, and forbad the issue of patents apart from residence ; but two generations passed before the reform was really made effective. In 18 14 there were still ninety-four patents in the Colonies held by fifty-five absentees (including all the Colonial Secretaryships), of which ninety had been issued since 1782. But in 1834 the number had been reduced to six.1 The Lawyers. — -For barristers it was necessary to have been called to the English Bar, although some- 1 A similar state of things had been allowed in the other Colonies. In 18 14 six Canadian offices were in this position. But no Colony ever quite saw the gross abuse which inflicted on Virginia a non-resident Governor (Earl of Orkney) for forty years. 30 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES times the Governor would issue a licence to practise. Solicitors could either qualify in England or serve articles in the Colony. In Jamaica there were some eighty or ninety solicitors, and the Bar usually included some men of ability. The Doctors. — A similar condition was supposed to be in force; but as matter of fact the very low qualifi- cation represented by a certificate of the Society of Apothecaries sufficed, and indeed in some Colonies there has been no Medical Register at all up to the present day. A year or two with an apothecary, or a voyage or two in a merchant ship as " ship's surgeon " sufficed. Long is very severe on the profession, and introduces a highly-coloured sketch of the murder- ous career of a typical adventurer. As each estate had regular medical attendance there was certainty of considerable employment, although of a humble kind. Taken as a whole it was only the few doctors with proper qualifications who ranked as professional men; the others associated naturally with inferior grades. But this was not an uncommon occurrence elsewhere in times when a ship's surgeon was engaged to shave the officers as well as to doctor the crew. By the Planters, the Merchants, and the Lawyers the administration of public affairs was carried on. The franchise was very high, and was hedged about in various ways, so that both the Assembly and the local Vestries were wholly in their hands. They were also the Magistrates and the Grand Jury, and they officered the local Militia. II. THE SUBORDINATE FREE WHITES. On the Estates there were managers called Over- seers, in receipt of salaries from ^,100 to p£.20o, of whom the best might aspire to become Attorneys. Under these were u Book-keepers," so called, who SOCIAL LIFE IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 3] personally directed the operations in the field and in the boiling-house, with some £$o to £80 a year, and on their way to becoming Overseers. The ranks of this class were constantly replenished from Great Britain; many of them fell speedy victims to disease or vicious living. The young men (and there were very few old ones among them) lived together in a kind of barrack with the Overseer; none of them were permitted to marry. A melancholy picture of frustrated hopes of friends at home, and of characters fatally deteriorated or ruined is drawn by an observer in Jamaica (Stewart) so late as 1823. Only a minority of these men lived to middle life. There were a few white men who were master- mechanics ; some employed on the estates, others working independently, perhaps with ten or a dozen slaves of their own. Then there were the clerks in the offices and the retail stores; in Jamaica the store- keepers were mostly Jews. As there grew up a "coloured" population, by mixture of Whites and Negroes, the mechanical trades and clerks' work and the smaller stores gradually fell into their hands, for the most part. III. THE WHITE BONDSERVANTS. Soon after the occupation of these islands, free use of them, along with Virginia, was made for the trans- portation of British prisoners and criminals, and espe- cially of political prisoners. These were delivered, like cargoes, by bills of lading, and sold, on arrival, to different Estates for varying terms, sometimes for life, and were known as " indented servants." The remnant which survived Cromwell's sack of Drogheda, seven or eight thousand prisoners taken after the battle of Dunbar, a large number captured in the battle of Worcester, and after the insurrection at 32 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES Salisbury; the deluded participators in Monmouth's rebellion; conspirators in the Rye House Plot; and rebels of 1716 were deported in this way. And besides these, there were the clearings of the ordinary gaols; notably rogues and vagabonds from Scotland shortly before the Act of Union opened a new chapter in her history. These deportations provided material for many a novel and melodrama, especially when associated as it was with "kidnapping," i.e. the forcible abduction of men and women for sale, under the guise of being convicts and deserters, or by fraudulent methods of other kinds. It is a grim episode in the history of the movement of Labour. Probably only a fourth of the transported ever found their way back across the Atlantic; the fate of the others was more pitiable than that of the majority of the African slaves themselves, and moved the warm compassion of contemporary writers like Ligon and Esquimelling.1 It is a relief to learn that the system had been stopped before the time of Long (1774). There were also among the u indented servants " a few free immigrants, who came out under indentures for terms of years. But their experience was a sad one; litde difference could be discovered between their condition and that of the transported offenders. The conditions of life were intolerable, but there was of course no return until the indenture was worked out. In Barbados there was a settlement made of some poor Whites on small holdings. They did not prosper; and their position between the Upper Whites 1 The tales of Defoe, Captain Jask and Mali Flanders, contain so much that is coarse and brutal in both words and scenes that they niay well be left on the upper shelves now. The pictures drawn by Sir W. Besant in For Faith and Freedom are both faithful and vivid, and this novel may perhaps be taken as the final representation of this now long-closed episode. SOCIAL LtFE IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 33 and the great mass of the people left them an iso- lated group, with disastrous results. A remnant still remains there, and every traveller acknowledges to a feeling as if in the presence of something spectral and non-natural when these "outcasts" are met with in the two or three places where they have resided ever since. Such was the grouping of the White inhabitants of the Colonies. A few words as to the sources from which they were drawn. There were the original settlers of St. Kitts, Bar- bados, and Antigua, men of some property, accom- panied by a few mechanics; the officers and sailors who stayed behind after the Jamaica expedition; many sailors who remained at the close of the Spanish War of 172 1. Then there were many of the men engaged in piracy and buccaneering in the Caribbean Sea and along the Spanish Main, who finally settled down on the islands. There were also some cases of State emigration ; the Council of State in Ireland in Crom- well's time despatched a thousand Irishmen and a thousand Irish girls, who naturally became absorbed chiefly in the bondservant class. Then there were Cavalier Refugees of substance who fled from Crom- well, and Commonwealth men who hastened across the Atlantic at the Restoration, including at least two of the "Regicides" — the celebrated Mace ordered to be removed by Cromwell is said to have found its resting-place in Jamaica. A vein of strong common- sense was struck when these opposing partisans found themselves at close quarters on the islands, and a social treaty of peace was entered upon which in- cluded the absolute tabooing of the epithets "Cavalier" and " Roundhead " in Barbados society ; but the peace was not regarded as covering some members of the Society of Friends, who therefore removed to Jamaica. Then our colonists at Surinam in South America were c 34 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES deported to the islands when that Colony was ex- changed with the Dutch for New Amsterdam in North America (now New York), in 1675; as were the remnants of the unfortunate Scotch Colony at Darien twenty years afterwards. Antigua and St. Kitts received with welcome a number of Huguenot refugees from France, who speedily intermarried with the English settlers. It was chiefly in the earlier days that people of substance and steadiness of character went out to the West Indian Plantations. In later times there was a great medley of arrivals, and the result was a state of things which causes Long bitterly to reproach Great Britain in comparison with France, which was much more vigilant for the good order and wholesome con- stitution of her colonial dependencies than we were. Amongst the young men who went out as book- keepers, on their way to becoming overseers and attorneys, there was always a large element of Scottish lads, insomuch that Long estimates that one-third of the ruling class in Jamaica were Scotch — including one hundred Campbells. " The Scotchman hugging the Creole " was the West Indian parable of the cotton-tree clasped by its gigantic creepers and fading under their unremitting demand for nourishment. Nevertheless the parable is not to be forced; the Scotch lads brought with them as good as they received, and Long, who had abundant sources of observation, sets down his opinion that in the West Indies both Scotchmen and Irishmen flourished better than Englishmen; a conclusion made not unlikely by the achievements of these two nationalities in other parts of our outer empire. SOCIAL LIFE IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 35 IV. THE COLOURED PEOPLE AND THE FREE ELACKS. As time went on there grew up a considerable class of people of mixed blood. Inauspicious for the most part in the circumstances of their birth, in the Slavery times, physically weaker than the Negroes, and intellectually weaker than the Whites, the members of this intermediate group naturally betook themselves to the mechanical trades such as blacksmiths, masons, and carpenters, to clerkships and to storekeeping. There were also a few Negroes who had been freed or allowed to earn extra money sufficient to purchase freedom ; these were of course men of some merit, and they took their places in the trades or stores. Very frequently people of this class possessed a slave or two themselves. Dissociated as they were from the upper class and separated from the slave class by their own natural ambition, it was among these that the religious and educational efforts of the Missionaries found a most congenial field of operation. In Jamaica there was a peculiar group, not integral with the social life of the Colony, but important, as has been already indicated, by its influence on the minds of the more energetic of the Slaves, namely, the Free Negroes of the mountains. They are known as Maroons, or mountaineers. One group of them was composed of the Spanish slaves who fled to the mountains on our arrival — other groups were composed of the slaves who occasionally suc- ceeded in escaping from bondage. These Maroons seem ever hovering around the horizon of Jamaican history, keeping the Whites in a temper of hostility and the Slaves in a simmering feeling that their bondage was artificial, as the Negro was evidently quite able to sustain himself in joyous freedom if only the White man's greed would allow it. Many wars took place : in 1796 serious attempts to subdue them 36 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES were made and many were captured and deported. After emancipation the remnant were admitted to all rights and privileges. V. THE SLAVES. Grouped according to their employment, and con- sequent varieties of social life, these fall into four divisions : a. Mechanics : the Estate carpenters and smiths. b. Domestic Servants, both men and women. c. Head-men: the head-" drivers " not only of cattle and mules but of the slave-labourers ; head- watchmen, head boiling-house men. d. The field-hands and the boiling-house people. These went in three gangs : the First Gang, the mature and able-bodied, both men and the strongest of the women ; the Second Gang, the feebler and less efficient ; the Third Gang, children, aged, and infirm. The Slaves lived in wooden huts grouped near the works and screened by a thick plantation from the windows of the great house. They raised their own provisions : their clothes, rough and of extreme simplicity, were annually doled out. As an indication of the relative numbers of these classes it may be observed that in 1774 Jamaica con- tained about 17,000 whites ; 3500 coloured people and free negroes; and 170,000 slaves. The number of the governing families may be gauged from the fact that there were some 1500 "carriages of pleasure" on this island. A later view can be seen in an Antiguan return for 1820 (in which we must reckon that many women and children are included in the return for the lower classes, not in that for the higher) ; Official and Professional 163, Commerce 217, Mechanics 2531, superintendence of labour 338, Domestics 2017, SOCIAL LIFE IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 37 Labourers 13,202. Or again (in same year) the whole population, whites 1980, coloured and free 3895, slaves 31,064. Barbados in 1683 had 17,000 whites, 2381 "servants," 46,000 slaves; in 1773, 18,000 whites (coloured and free not stated), 68,000 slaves j in 1829, 15,000 whites, 5000 coloured and free, 83,000 slaves. FAMILY LIFE. Such industrial arrangements as these necessarily led to a melancholy condition in the domestic structure of society. Family life was disorganized, and there was wholesale relapse to inferior stages of morality. The institution of marriage was, practi- cally, confined to the upper class. The Overseers and Book-keepers, though white men, were not furnished either with incomes which would support families or with houses in which to form homes ; they lived a permanent barrack-life, and consorted with the Negro women without restraint, either from their own corrupted consciences or from public opinion. The coloured people having themselves issued chiefly from unregulated connections had little care for married life even when in independent circumstances ; nine- tenths of the coloured women were "housekeepers" to white men, and in later times the religious conver- sion of some of these and their consequent renuncia- tion of base connections gave the greatest offence to the white community. The slaves were not aliowed to marry ; nor indeed did their own stage of moral development lead them to desire the institution. It is not without foundation that Dr. Underhill, a Baptist visitor to the West Indies in i860, on reviewing the history, claims that among the slaves Marriage — so far as it was found at all — was a purely Nonconformist 38 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES institution. With the upper class alone was family life retained ; and even with them it was too frequently marred on the one hand by the prolonged absences of children at school in England, and on the other by the presence within the house itself of coloured "mistresses" and their offspring. The morality of the Planters was sapped by their surroundings ; open concubinage and secret licentiousness were rampant, and the moral atmosphere was such as to render the lives of West Indian ladies well-nigh intolerable. The ladies bore themselves well. Bryan Edwards and Long disagree, indeed, in their opinions ; but the weight of testimony is on the side of the West Indian matrons. And it is worthy of note that the oldest families were much the best, and that these reaped a manifest reward in greater longevity and in prolonged possession of property and position. HIGHER LIFE. It would be a matter of astonishment if in such a state of society the higher interests of human life had won attention or attained much development. In literature, science, and art, the history of the British West Indies is almost a blank. Where ex- ternal Nature is so profuse in scenes of beauty, the Fine Arts have scarcely any place even at this day, except the arts of Music and Dancing. The bareness of the walls of the drawing-rooms and dining-rooms of West Indian homes is at once explained when adjournment is made to the verandah in which so much of domestic life is passed. The balmy air of these balconies com- bined with the soft light of the moon makes evenings indoors out of the question. And thus it follows that reading is replaced by Conversation. For such a public no genius was impelled to exert itself in litera- SOCIAL LIFE IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 39 ture. The books published were chiefly on the public affairs of the Colonies or on their Natural History ; and most of these were written by visitors or temporary residents. Perhaps we may regard Bryan Edwards' West Indies and Long's Jamaica as the most nearly indigenous productions of a higher class in the period of Slavery. This is not different from what was the case in Virginia. Senator Lodge thinks that there was only one instance of any literary merit produced by that Colony, the writings^of a Colonel Byrd ; and, he says, " there were no arts, and literature also was next to nothing." So, too, of Georgia, he says, " there was no literature whatever." From which we infer that it was the state of society which was the chief bar, rather than the climate and the beauties of nature. It has been suggested that the Protestant religion had something to do with this meagreness, inasmuch as the arts and luxuries were much more cultivated in the Colonies where the Roman Church predominated. Certainly the general outward appearance of life was more graceful in Martinique than in Jamaica, in Trini- dad than in Barbados, and it is so still, to the eye of the visitor. But we hesitate in allowing any primary efficacy to religion in this respect, for reasons which will appear when we come to see presently how little of the Puritan there was in our Planters. AYe may be content with -referring the difference to variety of aesthetic temperament, whether of racial origin, or otherwise. But life in the West Indies had, of course, its aesthetic side in some form. The chief amusements were Conversation and Dancing. The conversation which chiefly filled the hours of social intercourse of the men was, after its kind, more artistic than the con- versation of a community which is largely absorbed in reading. In furtherance of it great dinners were in vogue, and every opportunity was seized for holding 40 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES them. Grand Jury dinners, Militia dinners, Vestry dinners, even Road-jury dinners abounded ; and the patron Saint of every parish received homage of this kind, if of no other. Seated round a table loaded with the varied products of these fertile regions, with the chief native liquor, rum, supplemented by im- ported wines and spirits of Europe, the hearts of West Indian Planters expanded with the chief enjoyment they knew, and tale and song and practical joke, too, filled up the long evening hours. For women and the younger men the supreme enjoyment was Dancing; in the late evenings and far into the cooler nights, in rooms with every window and door open to the ground and out on the balconies, this form of enjoyment was at hand, and it sufficed. In furtherance of both dinners and dances long visits were arranged ; a family would transfer itself to a friend's house for a week, and acquaintances from the neighbourhood would be invited every evening. There were also the Parish races ; occasional theatres and concerts in the towns ; and at Kingston there was a Vauxhall and a Ranelagh gardens. There was but little shooting ; and no other athletics. The amusements of the inferior whites were of the bachelor order, drinking and cards being of necessity the prominent features. The slaves on their holidays and during most of the Sundays passed the time in dances and jubilations of the African type. DEPENDENT CHARACTER. These Colonies must on no account be judged as if they were self-centred communities ; they were, in many ways, appanages of Great Britain. Their trade was regulated with a view to the interests of Great Britain, as Adam Smith shows; in fact they SOCIAL LIFE IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 4 1 were " exploited " for her benefit, as we should say to-day. And the growth of absenteeism led to a depletion of their natural wealth as the bulk of the net proceeds went direct to England. The situation is plainly shown in the attitude of the historian Long ; when he is propounding his scheme for boarding- schools in Jamaica he sets about defending himself against the hostility which he knew would be aroused on the part of those persons in Britain who were profiting by the education of the boys and girls of the West Indian Planters. We have seen how the chief offices were, many of them, nothing short of being money-sucking devices. Bryan Edwards estimates that at least .£30,000 a year was remitted to England by the deputies for great officers in Jamaica alone. But this money loss was the least part of the mischief. The Colonies sank socially into inferior positions through the non-residence of orricials, of owners of property, and of capitalists. "There never arose," says Mr. E. J. Payne, "in the British Plantations a class of wealthy and independent merchants like those of the French islands." Power- ful expressions of the grievousness of the loss were placed on record in the Journals of the Legislatures, especially of Jamaica, for it is pleasant to notice that the evil was much less marked in the smaller Colonies. A society of which the upper class is chiefly composed of agents and deputies has never been taken as an ideal by any constructor of Utopias. Roughley's account of the agents is depressing enough, and he is completely corroborated by what was found to be going on by " Monk " Lewis when he went over and took charge of his own estate for a time. We had in fact a patriarchal structure of society, but without the patriarchs. It may be allowed that some truth lies in what Herman Merivale says about the absenteeism being 42 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES not wholly discreditable to English character. The conditions of life were so unfavourable to social and moral elevation that the more a man considered the best interests of his family the less likely was he to keep them in a Plantation-house if he could possibly afford to maintain a household in England ; and naturally as soon as increased fortune allowed he followed his family home to London or Bath or Bristol. Still, as Merivale acknowledges, it was not very high morality to shirk all the disadvantages of a situation whilst flourishing on profits earned by those who had no option but to remain. It was, in fact, to quit the " world " for honour's sake, yet to sustain honour on the questionable profits of that very "world." CHAPTER III THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD, DOWN TO 180O The Church Established from outset — Toleration allowed — Pro- vision for the Clergy and Churches — Irreligious character of many of original settlers — Government of the Church — The Bishop of London's Jurisdiction — The Governor as Ordinary — No corporate body of Clergy — Refusal to appoint Bishops considered — Character of the Clergy — Education — The Church and the Slaves — Alleged incongruity between Slavery and Baptism — West Indian arguments for refusing Baptism — Nonconformist Missions : Moravian, Methodist, Baptist. It would be most misleading and unfair to examine the history of the Church in the West Indies as an isolated and self-determined episode. The general condition of the Church in England during the period 1600 to 1800 must be kept in view; and we could hardly think of a more judicious treatment than that of first reading the invaluable work of Mr. C. J\. Abbey and Mr. J. H. Overton, The English Church i?i the Eighteentn Century, in so far as the period covered by that work goes. Most especially it must be kept in view that the early lines of these Colonies were laid down during the great strife of the 17th cen- tury and the period of compromise inaugurated by the Revolution of 1688. The supremacy of the State over the Church was secured by the arrest of organic life in the latter, disguised by the semblance of pre-eminence in the sphere of religion granted to it by the continuance of Establishment on Erastian lines; the shackling of its 43 44 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES freedom by Acts of Uniformity ; and the complete sup- pression, after 17 17, of its legislative and administra- tive functions. The channels into which the strength of religious men was turned was controversy with Deists and Sceptics, and ethical and political discus- sion. For such channels West Indian life provided no streams. The utmost that could be looked for from Churchmen there was a holding the ground until the revival of personal and practical piety associated with the "Evangelical" movement. How far this was done we have now to inquire. From their original foundation the Colonies bore ample signs on the surface of the close union of Church and State prevailing in England at that time. " It has always," said Long, " been a rule in our West India islands to assimilate their religion, as well as laws, to those of the mother-country." It was taken for granted that ecclesiastical institutions crossed the water, and, together with political and industrial ties, assisted in maintaining — what was never for a moment questioned in those days — the integrity of the empire, which in the main implied, in spite of the many Scotchmen, identity with "the predominant partner." The Jamaica Expedition was provided by Cromwell with seven Chaplains, whose instructions were drawn up by John Milton himself. Succeeding governors of the various Colonies received explicit instructions on this point : " an orthodox ministry was to be en- couraged," and so on. Parishes were at once marked out, although in some the ecclesiastical side was un- worked. But in general the Parish was at once a civil and an ecclesiastical area : vestries were consti- tuted with the double range of duties ; churches were built (in which the vestries then met) ; and order was taken for the maintenance of the clergy. In very early times church attendance was enforced in some Colonies ; we even find Governor Bell of Barbados THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 45 going so far as to order family prayers and public catechizing of children. But the need for encouraging settlers soon caused practical men to see that toleration was a necessity, and must be applied more freely than the strife of parties allowed at home. In Governor Modyford's instructions, 1664, repeated to Governors Lynch, 1671, and Vaughan, 1674, it was ordered, by a Secretary of State responsible (if any one inquired at all about it) to a Parliament which enforced the Tests and Cor- poration Acts at home, that "persons of different judgments and opinions in matters of religion " should be encouraged to transport themselves with their effects, and therefore they were not to be "obstructed or hindered under pretence of scruples in conscience." It was, therefore, deemed sufficient respect for the law at home to require that the Governor and his Council should take both the oaths, that of political allegiance and that of ecclesiastical supremacy ; while the oath of allegiance alone was to be required for all the officers. At the same time, the Governor was enjoined to order his household after the manner of the Church of England. A little later, when opposition to the Romanists became more acute, the Oath of Supre- macy was insisted upon in order to keep them out of offices in the Colonies. The Toleration Acts of William and Mary were adopted by the local legis- latures, and Dissenting preachers might take out licences, but they were not permitted to instruct slaves or to open sehoois. The exclusion of Romanists from public office was shared by the Jews, who were, however, allowed to reside unmolested as traders, and were permitted to have a synagogue. The only share of the slaves in religious institutions was the suspension of all field-work on Sundays, as had been the case with the serfs of the Middle Ages ; and at the Festivals of Easter and Christmas certain 46 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES holidays were compulsory. For the slaves this came practically to mean that they had the Sunday for the cultivation of their own private grounds, and for holding their markets, as well as for such festivities as were not interfered with. The Sacraments and Sacramental offices of the Church were provided for the White people and the freemen ; and scales of fees were fixed by law. The clergy kept registers of Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials which had official validity. The Houses of Legislature had their Chaplains, and for years held their meetings in churches, where also elections took place until late in the last century. We also read of a Governor of Antigua holding a reception in St. John's Church (now the Cathedral) so late as 1799. The clergy were ex officio members of vestry, and in some Colonies were the Chairmen. Blasphemy was to be discountenanced as a vice along with drunkenness. The provision for the support of the clergy came partly from the Colonial Treasuries, partly from fees, and partly from Vestry allowances. Where they had glebes, although not actually freeholders, they were allowed the political franchise on that qualification as if they were. Their incomes varied greatly, but taken as a whole they were on a liberal scale. In 1748 the Jamaica Assembly showed a generous desire to secure the clergy some, independence of purely local control by forbidding further vestry allowances and substitut- ing increased grants from the Island Treasury. In fact, we record with pleasure that in the West Indian lay mind there was a remarkably considerate regard for the clergy : no West Indian historian when record- ing their failures, or worse, does so without lamenting them, and looking about for their causes. The legis- latures were always liberal in their financial treatment; everything we have read supports Gardner in saying* THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 47 that " when any kind of pressure was put upon the clergy concessions (in other directions) were always made." But the appearance on paper very much surpassed the reality. There were not a few parishes without clergy, and a good many without churches. In Port- land parish in Jamaica in Long's time there was neither church nor resident rector : " the services were per- formed in some planter's house about once or twice in the year; and St. George's Parish was in a similar position. Barclay, a partisan of the Colonies, allows that in some country districts churches were closed on Sundays for weeks and months together. But per- haps the extreme case of neglect was that of Tobago, where, so late as 1812, there were seven parishes with only one clergyman, and no church whatever. Such as they were the churches were small, and within reach of but few people except in the towns ; and they were, as a matter of fact, but thinly attended except at funerals or on special occasions. Baptisms and Marriages were performed in houses, and where there was no incumbent Churchwardens or Justices of the Peace officiated, as they did also at Burials, most of which were in private ground. Nor was the general character of the inhabitants such as to lead us to expect much attention to the claims of religion : a glance at the composition of the settlers, as given in the last chapter, suffices to reduce any surprise that may be felt at the great indifference. We find that the first batch of settlers in Barbados were of such a temper that their Chaplain left them in despair. And the rector of Port Royal declares that there was not " a more ungodly people on the face of the earth " than his parishioners. Ligon's ship-companions were in large proportions "vile and abandoned characters," with a sprinkling to whom he is able to assign a high character. Sir Robert Schomburgk — the historian 48 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES of Barbados, and author of the famous Schomburgk line between Guiana and Venezuela — says: "If we consult the history of our colonies it will generally be found that the first settlers were of that class of society in which morals and virtue are seldom to be met with ... it was not amelioration of their Christian virtues which led them to distant climes " (p. 92). But perhaps the most significant opinion is that of a Jamaica rector, himself an ardent advocate of the Planters' cause and a bitter opponent of the Dissenting Missionaries in the troubled times imme- diately preceding Emancipation — the Rev. George Bridges, rector of St. Ann's, Jamaica. Speaking of the situation at the close of the 18th century and the opening years of the 19th, he says: " Empty churches, the unhallowed burial of the dead — i. e. dead negroes — in fields and gardens, the criminal delay of baptism — even after permission was given — the discourage- ment of marriage, and the profanation of the Sabbath, are models which the Slaves can hardly be expected to improve. Fraught with pernicious consequences to the whole community, it is in vain that the clergy from eight-and-forty pulpits fearlessly denounce the wrath of heaven, and the loss of men, while none attend to hear them ; for it cannot be expected that the heathen, or the neophyte, will approach an altar which seems despised, or neglected, by the presumed superiority and higher attainments of his temporal master." Of the same period Stewart, whom we take to have been a Presbyterian, writes : " As to the respect paid to religion, it will be sufficient to say that, with a few exceptions, the congregations in the churches consist usually of a few white ladies, and a respectable pro- portion of free people of colour and blacks." Gover?ime7it of the Church. — It is not without THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 49 reason that another historian of Jamaica, Gardner, although himself a Congregationalist minister in that island, candidly ascribes a considerable de- gree of the blame for the failure of the Church to the lack of proper authority. During the whole of the period covered in this chapter the Church in the British West Indies was an anomaly. It was an Episcopal Church without Bishops ; it was a professedly Diocesan system without dioceses. The Colonies were all regarded as being under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. The source of this authority is obscure. Bishop Gibson, in 1723, inquiring into it, was told that although there was no ecclesiastical title to such authority, there was an Order in Council (/. e. the Privy Council) of the reign of Charles II. by which the Colonies were made part of the See of London. For this order he made diligent searcn, when he dis- covered that none such existed. Accordingly he declined to appoint a Commissary or Representative. Afterwards he obtained a special Commission from the Crown, and under it addressed inquiries to the Clergy. This Commission expired with his death in 1748. His successor, Bishop Sherlock, told Dr. Johnson of Connecticut that he would appoint a Commissary for the American Colonies 4 'as soon as I take a proper authority from the King." Bishop Wilberforce, in his History of the American Church (1846), says that the origin of this authority is " exceedingly uncertain," and considers that the most probable explanation is to be found in the hearty concurrence of the then Bishop of London in the earliest schemes of the Virginia Company. This may have led to his being requested to find chaplains for the expeditions and to license them, and from this be- ginning there may have grown up a notion that the Colonial Chaplains were in some way in his diocese. D 50 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES Anderson, in his History of the Colonial Church, refers to Collier as recording that some Chaplains in Holland and Germany were placed under the Bishop of London (Laud) in 1634 ; and to Heylyn as recording an extension of this surveillance to all Chaplains of Companies in foreign parts, including the Plantations. But later he cites a general authority in ecclesias- tical affairs in the Colonies given later on to a Commission composed of the two Archbishops, the Keeper of the Seal, the Lord Treasurer, and others, which brings obscurity again over the fact ; for in 1 681 a Report from the Committee of Council on Trade and Plantations mentions only the Bishop of London as licensing authority for clergy ; and Bishop Gibson certainly was led to suppose that he, and he alone, had any jurisdiction of the kind. In 1801 the question was raised formally, and the Attorney- General of England reported unequivocally in favour of the jurisdiction, and steps were taken to make it more real. It should be recorded that Bishop Gibson, though unable to see his way to any disciplinary action, did all he could by way of advice ; he wrote public letters exhorting the masters and mistresses of families in the Plantations, "to encour- age and promote the instruction of their Negroes in the Christian faith," and to the clergy themselves to assist in their several parishes in the same duty. And great pains were taken to have these letters circulated throughout the West India Islands as well as in North America. The jurisdiction of the Bishop of London was there- fore a very limited one. It did not in any way affect the laity, and even over the clergy it could not be made penal ; it began and ended with the issue of the licence. With regard to its limitation to the clergy the Colonists were very decided. Penal laws for ecclesiastical delinquencies were barred in Jamaica in THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 5 1 1 68 1, and most vigorously repudiated in a curious preamble to the Laws of Barbados, 1 7 1 9. This branch of jurisdiction stands on a different footing from the exercise of disciplinary authority over the clergy, and it is the absence of the latter which constitutes the standing grievances of Churchmen when thinking of the encroachments of the State during last century, a grievance which Long, for example, fully recognizes. With the issue of the licence, as has been said, all episcopal authority ended. Even when the Assembly of Jamaica ceased their protests against the nominal jurisdiction of the See of London in 1748, they would not allow it to extend to either presentation or induction, and would have objected to any rector being proceeded against in the Bishop's Court, if any one had been desirous of taking that course, and would have supported the rector in ignoring any sentence of suspension or deprivation. In some cases the Bishop appointed a Commissary, especially in the American Colonies, but previous to 1800 we can find only four instances of such appoint- ment in the West Indies — in Jamaica at Port Royal ; a " Surrogate " in Barbados, and a Commissary there mentioned by Poyer, and a succession of Com- missaries in Antigua. In 1800 five were appointed, but this was the commencement of the new era. The Ordinary of each Colony was the Governor, as deputy for the King. He issued marriage licences and probate of Wills, and with regard to parishes he not only " presented" the clergy as patron, but also inducted them : " institution " by the ecclesiastical authority there was none. He also " deprived " not only from temporal, but also from spiritual exercise of function. This was on petition of parishioners ; but it did not suit them to be scrupulous, as we have seen, and Long can give particulars of only a single case of such discipline. Bryan Edwards says that in estimating 52 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES the income of the Governor of Jamaica "it is sup- posed also that money has sometimes been made by the sale of Church livings"; shocking as this is, it is to be remembered that it is only the extreme case of mercenary abuse ; a similar source of revenue was the conferring of commissions in the Colonial Militia. If the military defences of the country were entrusted to people who received their appointments largely by purchase, it was not a very far cry to simoniacal induction into the offices of the Church. Of the corporate character by the " clergy " there was no sign: they were a number of individuals. The first trace of treatment as a body we find in 1798, when the clergy of Jamaica were subjected to a deduction of 10 per cent, from their Treasury stipends in order to form a Clergy Widow and Orphan Fund. Before passing onward it should be remembered at once that some flavour of Establishment was also granted to the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, u the sister Establishment," Bridges calls it. The Presby- terians received grants, and it was ordered that the minister should show a licence from the Presbytery of Edinburgh. The prolonged refusal by the British Government to permit the appointment of Bishops in our Colonies requires more careful judgment than the subject has always received. Throughout the 18th century we have, on the one hand, continuous appeal for Episcopacy, from clergy in the Colonies and from their friends at home ; on the other hand, a deter- minedly deaf ear on the part of the civil authorities at home. Noble and devoted clergy like Talbot and Johnson appealed from across the Atlantic ; at home such Churchmen as the leading men of the Propagation Society never rested, while successive Bishops of London were insistent on being relieved of the THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 53 appearance of an authority they knew to be a shadow.1 But when we find a man so universally respected as Bishop Berkeley visited with such sore disappoint- ment in the matter of his Missionary College in Bermuda (for North America), and remember the grant from Government which he could not induce them to pay, and which he finally abandoned all hope of see- ing, we feel that there was something deeper down than mere lethargy, such as that with respect to intellect- ual progress, for example, which caused a similar failure of Sir Hans Sloane's endeavour to have a Government Professor of Botany appointed for Jamaica. Some- thing of a political character underlay the objection, and not without reason. We find, for example, even in the 19th century, Ernest Hawkins, the esteemed Secretary of the Propagation Society, acknowledging that some political result might have been expected from the appointment of Bishops. In his preface to the history of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund (p. 5), this is clear, and the opinion leaks out that he and others consider it not impossible that the secession of the Thirteen Colonies might have been prevented. This is extremely doubtful. Remembering that in 1712 there was a Bill with a proposal to endow the Church in America with a share in the customs' duty, no strength of imagination is required to conceive how the flames of 1761 would have been increased had such a provision been part of the grievance between the Colonies and home. In any case, the secession of the Colonies is a political question, and one not specially concerning the Church. The dangerous association of the Church with party is recognized 1 The four Sees which it was desired to constitute were Barbados, Jamaica, Burlington in New Jersey, and Williamsburg in Virginia. The presidentship of the new Codrington College was to go with the See of Barbados, and it was thought other Bishops might have incomes from home, as from the Mastership of the Savoy Chapel, or St. Catherine's Hospital. 54 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES also in a work of the present Secretary of the Propa- gation Society, Prebendary Tucker: " Churchmanship and loyalty to the Crown had hitherto been synony- mous " (English Church i?i other Lands, p. 22): a fact that has proved of sad consequence in the history of our branch of the Church in the United States, if it may be taken as any explanation of its being even now only fifth in number of adherents. This is well expressed in the judgment of as unflinching a Churchman as ever wrote a line, Dean Burgon : " The difficulties which attended the just demand of the American Church for a native Episcopate grew out of the political troubles of those times. Because episcopacy was identified with the system of monarch- ical government, its introduction was resisted by a large party among the Americans themselves, who dreaded (clergy and laity alike) lest it should prove an instrument for riveting the yoke of a foreign dominion" (Lives of Twelve Good Men, vol. i. p. 30). The main ground of persistence in inaction was unquestion- ably the confusion in men's ideas between the spheres of Church and State. The compulsory jurisdic- tion of the Church had to be relinquished before any corresponding freedom for her own organization could be feasible. With regard to the Colonies it was the strong Colonies of North America which our statesmen had in mind, and the powerful ele- ments of Nonconformity, Quakerism, and Lutheran- ism which they contained, rendering out of the question any attempt to impose upon them the compulsory ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Church of England. To their minds the " Bishop " suggested rather the State official than the Religious Chief Pastor; the Prelate rather than the Spiritual director. Had the Church been a voluntary body the objection could not have been raised, but its interlocking with the State was close, and in that particular period it was THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 55 the Church that was in subordination, and Crown and Parliament as directors of the Church obscured her pastoral character. The intolerant policy of the Church of France which disallowed the liberties of the Huguenots naturally extended to the French Colonies, and we find Huguenots unable to settle in their own Colony of Louisiana for that reason.1 The English Dissenters and the German Lutherans were bound to oppose the Establishment of a Church which they conceived, however erroneously, to in- volve a resumption of the 17th-century difficulties; and even the Church Colony of Virginia took the same view. No sounder judgment has been expressed than that of the sagacious historian of the Fnpdkia. Church in the Colonies, Anderson, where he severely animadverts on Laud's proposals to send out a Bishop to New England, because of Laud's express inclusion of penal jurisdiction; and later on, when he condemns the insertion of an apparatus of fines and imprisonments in Governor Bell's ecclesiastical legis- lation for Barbados; but when he comes to the demand for Bishops in their Spiritual capacity he is warm in his advocacy and severe in his condemnation of the refusals of the home authorities to listen to the appeals. In vain did Bishop Butler in 1750 formulate most clearly the sphere of Episcopal jurisdiction : the Dissenters got the ear of the Ministry, and it was necessary to wait. For, after all, some event was necessary for the opening of the eyes of men to the possibility of separating spiritual from temporal juris- diction. This event came in the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain. The Churchmen 1 The argument was used in England that Colonial Episcopacy would tend to make the Colonies independent. Berkeley answered that that had not been its effect in French and Spanish Colonies. No : but these nations did not suffer Dissenters either at home or abroad. 56 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES of America then were manifestly beyond reach of any penal ecclesiastical laws of England. The objection ceased, and within three years their first Bishop was consecrated (Bishop Seabury). Three years after that the Churchmen of a colony, Nova Scotia, saw that they could have a Bishop without involving claims over other than Church people, the Government acquiesced and assisted, and Bishop Inglis was consecrated. The principle was now settled, but the West Indies had to wait forty years longer before they were placed in a similar position, and great was the loss of time and opportunity thereby caused. It is a learned and open-minded living Churchman, Dean Kitchin, who says that " as the vigour of the Church increases, it is seen that nothing is so valuable as an active Bishop" (Life of Bishop Harold Broivne). And it is a well-informed Wesleyan Missionary with long experience in the West Indies who wrote: "For many years little was done for the religious instruction of the inhabitants by the Episcopal Church of England j but more recently, since the appointment of Bishops to the West Indies, the number of clergymen has been increased, and new ecclesiastical life and vigour have been displayed " (Rev. W. Moister, The West Indies, Enslaved and Free). CHARACTER OF THE CLERGY. Surely never did the Church of Christ suffer more severely from the heresy of identifying it with the clergy than in the West Indies. Never did the laity more completely shift the burden of Christian duty wholly upon their pastors; and never were those pastors less able to bear it. The " clergy " itself was but a fragment, only one "order" was represented: no Bishops and no Deacons. And as to offices, there the church in the slavery period 57 were none but incumbencies; no supervising Arch- deacons or Rural Deans ; no Cathedral Chapters, no Colleges of clergy. The laity undertook no duty except that of Churchwarden, an office in which the secular duties far exceeded the care of the church- fabric, and some financial matters which gave them an appearance of being ecclesiastical. There were no lay-readers, or catechists j no Sunday-school teachers ; no district visitors. Long heads his chapter on the Church, " State of the clergy." He is right: the clergy, and the clergy alone, were the " church " in the eyes of West Indians. And the clergy were in no sense a " body " ; each held office by appointment of the Governor and at his pleasure ; and knew well that he was not likely to be disturbed except in case of sheer refusal to perform his formal duties, or of gross and scandalous conduct which somehow forced itself upon official notice and could not be overlooked. Long could remember only one example of this, in spite of what we shall see was his own opinion of the quality of the clergy of Jamaica. They met in no synod, nor in regular conferences ; nor indeed do we find any traces even of friendly and informal con- ferences upon their work. They had no journals, magazines, or reviews. We have, therefore, when estimating the work of the Church in the West Indies, to remember that we are thinking only of some fifty 1 clergy situated much as our Continental Chaplains and the Chaplains to the East India Company were for many years. The common bond was the licence which necessitated the use in the regular offices of the 1 la 1S00 Jamaica ... ... ... ... 20 ,, 1812 Barbados ... ... ... ... 14 Antigua ... ... ... ... 6 „ St. Kitts 5 Nevis ... ... ... ... ... 3 48 58 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES Church of a uniform Liturgy, and adhesion to the Creeds and Articles ; and there was also the tradition of the Church behind them, into the spirit of which no doubt the best of them entered. Even Bridges, the clerical Annalist of Jamaica, when he treats of the clergy, has nothing to relate of spiritual labours, and fills out his space with accounts of their status and emoluments. The clergy were married, and passed as educated men, by their position taking rank in the upper class of society. Canon Perry says that the clergy at home, during part of this period at least, were on a par with the tradesmen. It is doubtless true that their ranks were not largely recruited from the upper classes, and that their social position was rather conventional and at discretion of their squires. In the West Indies, for example, an examination of twelve copious pedigree tables of Antiguan families shows only seventeen cases of members of those families in holy orders, or daughters marrying clergy. Still, the clergy were associated with the upper class in a way that was important, because it determined their ambitions and their social sympathies. Few of the clergy were Creole, born in the Colonies ; there were a few unsuccessful planters, merchants, and ex-military officers who sought holy orders in England, and came back to enjoy the emoluments of island rectories. Dr. Walcot (Peter Pindar) was a medical man who returned with a licence from the Bishop of London, but how he secured it was never clear to his contemporaries. But in the main each clergyman was a fresh comer ; without colonial traditions or family ties, and almost certainly one who failed to see a clear course to promotion at home. Of the inferior quality of those who came out the evidence is crushing. Mrs. Lanagan says it was commonly understood that the Bishop of THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 59 London ordained men for the Colonies on lower qualifications than would have been accepted for home work. The first Bishop of Jamaica said candidly that he expected no good " until the old clergy were exterminated." "The cassock was put on with little discrimination," says Long, and he adds in his caustic way, "Some labourers of the Lord's vineyard have at times been sent who were much better qualified to.be retailers of salt-fish, or boatswains to privateers, than ministers of the Gospel ; " and again, he declares that in some parishes no rectory-house was built, as "the flock would rather the rector should live anywhere than among them." And he generalizes upon the grievance by commenting on the people at home who would make no scruple in sending over their footman, to benefit by any employment in the Colonies, eccle- siastical or civil. Perhaps the passage in which he passes his formal sentence should be given as it stands : he was a contemporary, a man of wide range of interest, writes in forcible English, and is one of those writers for whom the reader who passes days over his pages learns to feel a very considerable personal regard. In volume ii., chapter 10, he sums up: "Of the character of the clergy of this island (Jamaica) I shall say but little. There have seldom been wanting some, who were equally respectable for their learning, piety, and exemplary good behaviour; others have been detestable for their addiction to lewdness, drinking, gambling, and iniquity ; having no control but their own sense of the dignity of their function, and the censures of the Governor. The scandalous or irre- proachable demeanour of many will chiefly depend on their own quality of heart, or that of the commander- in-chief. If the cloth has suffered disgrace and con- tempt from the actions of a few, we must nevertheless consider the major part worthy the public esteem and 6o THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES encouragement . . . Let us, however, venture to assert," he says, two pages later on, " that although some may perhaps be found, who in their own con- duct would disgrace even the meanest of mankind, there are others, and in a much greater number, who, by their example and their doctrine, would be an honour to their profession in any part of England." We may note as among distinguished exceptions before the year 1800, the reference to the activity and zeal of the first rector of Port Royal ; to three clergy of Jamaica in 1722 "of unblemished lives,'' Galpin, Johnstone, and May (Gardner, p. 195); to Knox, and especially F. Bryan, successive rectors of St. John's, Antigua (Anderson, iii. p. 540); to Bryan Edwards' tutor (B. E., i. p. 308) ; to the pious rector (Dent) whom the Wesleyan, Dr. Coke, casually enter- ing St. George's Church, Grenada, found "preaching with pathos and energy"; the presence of such as these indicates how different might have been the history had there been Bishops, and had the education of Colonial clergy been such as was designed by Codrington, Berkeley, and Bishop Wilson. The clergy were numerically totally inadequate to any effective pastoral duty ; it was very seldom that all the parishes were occupied, e.g. only five out of eleven in Barbados in 1680; and even if all were filled, what could twenty clergy (1800) do in Jamaica, equal in area to Devonshire and Cornwall combined, with 400,000 people ? Some of the churches seated only 150 people; few were situated so as to be accessible, in a tropical country, to more than a fraction of their parishioners. The clergy had other engagements ; some public, as membership of the vestries; others they undertook privately, especially keeping private schools. Edvcatiofi. — The teaching of children was in the main a function of the Church throughout Christendom, THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 6 1 or of Church and State in union. In the West Indies we should hardly expect the fifty clergy whose con- dition we have just depicted to be either enlightened theorists or first-rate organizers of education. There is in fact painfully little to record so far as regards the upper and middle classes ; while for the masses we are in face of an absolute blank. We may well bear in mind that this was a barren period for Education in England itself ; never were the Universities at so low an ebb ; the Grammar Schools never so formal and ill-adapted to the needs of the middle classes; and no one of the famous public schools was founded within this period ; while what we now know as Elementary Schools were still in the womb of the future. In the West Indies there was no provision for University education at all. In the North American Colonies, Harvard, Yale, William and Mary, and Colum- bia Colleges were founded ; but in the West Indies the bequest of Codrington stands out alone, and this was abortive for college education until after 1800. However, the Plantation atmosphere seems to have had something to do with it, for none of the successful American colleges were in the region of tobacco or cotton ; William and Mary College in Virginia de- clined into a poor Grammar School. As for Grammar Schools, there was the partial employment of the Codrington bequest in the maintenance of a Grammar School, with varying effect ; a Free School was founded in the s&me Colony by Harrison, a merchant (1733), and another by Sir John Alleyn, Speaker of Assembly (1785). There were a few Schools endowed by private benefactors in Jamaica, but in 1764 three out of the seven were in abeyance, and others are de- scribed as being "of very trivial importance." Long advocates the establishment by the Legislature of Middle Class Schools, not for the upper class, nor 62 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES aiming at professional education ; and a boarding- school for girls ; and gives himself great pains in elaborating a detailed scheme for such schools. The curious fact is that there was more supply of bene- factors to endow schools than there was of adminis- trative ability, or else of will, to carry them on. In 1798 a bequest of 172 1 was found to be lying quite dormant; the money was recovered, and a Free boarding-school on Church of England lines was set up. But another endowment, in the parish of St. Andrew, estimated at ^14,000, was irrecoverably lost. In the Journal of Assembly of Jamaica there is a list of 218 legacies between 1667 and 1736, and yet only three schools were in existence. Most boys of the upper class were sent home for their education. The few who remained were placed under private charge of the clergy. Fewer girls were sent, because of the expense; those remaining had to be content with brief periods of governesses, with itinerating masters for music and dancing. The solitary case of a school for Negroes was that on the Codrington Trust Estates, or rather there were two, one on each Estate ; they are the only Schools scheduled in a Government Report of 181 2 in the whole region of Barbados, Antigua, Windward Islands and Trinidad ; but there was a school in Antigua be- longing to the Christian Faith Society, which somehow escaped mention. We cannot refrain from again placing Long on record ; of the boys and girls who went to England, he says, " they went like a bale of goods consigned to some factor, who placed them in some school of his own choice ; and they came too often from the feet of Gamaliel a disgrace to their friends and a nuisance to their country." For want of parental and tutorial guidance not a single young Jamaican of THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 63 whom he could hear thus sent out and supported until he was called to the Bar was of a character such as to lead him' to gain ^5 a year by his practice ; character, he says expressly, not abilities. Unhappy countries ! Unfortunate alike were the children whether they stayed at home compulsory spectators of a degraded moral and social system, or were despatched to England, the victims of mercenary tutors and schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. And in all this the disorganization of the Church rendered her powerless to intervene. THE CHURCH AND THE SLAVES. We are not to suppose that there was from the outset a denned purpose of keeping the Negroes in permanent savagery. In the French and Spanish Colonies there was a very distinct and formal regard paid to their being made Christian. The French Code Noir oi 1685 included specific provision for their Christian status. And in the very early days of our own settlements attention was constantly given to the beneficent opportunities of colonization as a method of bringing heathen people to Christ. In the American Colonies some little evangelical work among the Red Indians was encouraged; bat in the West Indies where the aboriginal Caribs had either dis- appeared, as in Jamaica and Barbados, or were soon disposed of, as in Antigua, it was the African slaves alone who constituted the heathen people, and with regard to them the narrowing influence of industrial exigency soon mastered the colonial mind. For a century and a half the doors of the Established churches were closed against the hundreds of thou- sands of heathens by whose physical labour the industrial structure was upheld. Here again the 64 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES Codrington bequest secured an isolated exception. The Propagation Society, as Trustees, maintained a Chaplain to the Estates, and provided a chapel, as they did schools. It was not only public worship but the beneficent institutions of the Church which were withheld from the slaves, especially Baptism and preparation there- for; Marriage; and preparation for Death and Burial in the hope of the Christian creed. u The slave has no hearth and no religion," with cold cruelty says Seneca the Elder. In the West Indies the old Roman exclusion of slaves from Patriotic worship was revived. In all this there was a gap between Law and its administration. The Law was explicit enough. The Slave Code of Jamaica (1696) contains the following injunctions — "All masters, mistresses, owners, and employers are to endeavour as much as possible the instruction of their slaves in the principles of the Christian religion; and to facilitate their conversion, and do their utmost to fit them for baptism : and as soon as convenient cause all such to be baptized as they can make sensible of a Deity and the Christian faith." It seems incredible that in face of this public injunction being on the statute book and unrepealed, the Agent of the Colony in England at the close of the 1 8th century, when asked, "What religious instruction have the Negro slaves ? " replied to Parliament, with graphic curtness, " We know of none such in Jamaica ! " • 1 It must not, however, be supposed that the West Indian mind was incapable of constructing a case before the bar of European judgment for the definite and continuous exclusion of the Slaves from Christian influences. Either by his own inventiveness, set to work by his imagined industrial needs, or by absorption of ideas from the West Indian community THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 65 in England, he achieved a copious facility for arguing out his case in many a verandah conversation, with his sugar-works and cane-fields before his eyes. It was seen very early that there was some incon- gruity between Christianity and the status of slavery, and that the whole trend of reform in England, both in the Church and in the laws of the State, was being crossed. Ligon in his invaluable contemporary account of the early days of Barbados had a Negro attendant allotted to him for a time, who asked him to make him a Christian. "I promised," says Ligon, "to do my best en- deavour, and when I came home, spoke to the Master of the Plantation, and told him that poor Sambo desired much to be made a Christian. But his answer was, 'That the people of that Hand were governed by the Laues of England, and by those Lawes we could not make a Christian a slave.' I told him that my request was far different from that, for I desired him to make a slave a Christian. His answer was, 'That it was true, there was a great difference in that : But, being once a Christian, he could no more account him a slave, and so lose the hold they had of them as slaves, by making them Christians ; and by that means should open such a gap, as all the Planters in the Hand would curse him.' So I was struck mute, and poor Sambo kept quite out of Church ; as ingenious, as honest, and as good a natur'd soul as ever wore black, or eat green." From this it is evident that at that time the Planters were innocent of knowledge of the old villenage laws, and simply had in mind the actual attitude of English law at that date, with all its gains from Christian influence in favour of civil liberty. But this simplicity was not of long continu- ance. In Virginia a law was passed in 1667 explicitly enunciating that Baptism did not enfranchise. And seventy years after Bishop Berkeley, in his Anniversary E 66 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES Sermon before the Propagation Society, showed that good men were prepared to disarm opposition to Missionary effort by withdrawing any claim that Christianity and Slavery were incompatible. The good Bishop in speaking of the Negro Slaves in the North American Colonies and the causes of the obstacles put by their owners to Missionary effort in their behalf says, " There is an erroneous notion that the being baptized is inconsistent with slavery. To undeceive them (the owners) in this particular, which had too much weight, it seemed a proper step, if the opinion of His Majesty's Attorney and Solicitor- General could be procured. This opinion they charitably sent over, signed with their own hands, which was accordingly printed in Rhode Island, and dispersed throughout the plantations. I heartily wish it may produce the intended effect." Coming from a man so eminent for nobility of character, and so devoted to the noble aim of elevating the Negroes and Indians, this passage is decisive as to the com- pleteness with which the status of slavery was accepted or acquiesced in by Christian leaders of that time. It was, however, felt by the Planters that Christianity did really enjoin a greater approach to equality of status among Christians than was consistent with slavery : for example, in an Act of Barbados of 1676, the religious instruction of slaves is disallowed expressly on the ground of " leading to notions of equality." But we must characterize as tergiversation their dis- allowance of slave evidence in Courts on the ground that the slaves were not Christians, when they them- selves would not allow them instruction. They might at least have adopted the method of Colonies in which the Roman Church was established and where both Baptism and Religious instruction were legal, and in consequence slaves could be witnesses on a lower footing ; their depositions were not full evidence, but THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 6? were considered as "bare narratives." But another ground was taken up by those who felt the inconsist- ency; they laid the burden of reproach upon the Negroes themselves and declared that they could not and would not become Christians. They discovered "an invincible inappetency " to it on the part of the slaves themselves; and they then drew to their side and declared themselves of opinion that as matter of fact their own tribal religions suited them well enough. Then they had recourse to the convenient doubt as to identity of race; and asserted that the Negro, though human in outward " resemblance," had not the full qualities of humanity; a notion which was forcibly characterized by Godwyn, an early Minister in Vir- ginia, and afterwards in Barbados, as "an idea of which atheism and irreligion were the parents, and sloth and avarice the foster-nurses." In support of it, the Colonists took very kindly to the suggestion of Ethnologists of the day, that the Negro was not of the same "species" as the European; they welcomed tin's convenient distinction between "genus" and "species." They resorted to the gradation theory of created beings, and the allotment of the Negro race to a lower grade; to the notion of variations from Mammalian Type, the Negro being alleged to be nearer to the Ape-variation than the White races were. This they thought to be established by comparative anatomy ; and further certified by review of the gradations of Intellectual Endowment. The counter-belief was expressed before the Propa- gation Society in resonant tones by Bishop Butler — " Despicable as they may appear in our eyes, they are the creatures of God, and of the race of mankind for whom Christ died." Then there was further resort to the Old Testament Scriptures ; a procedure in which our West Indian 68 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES Colonists trod the same path as the Puritan settlers of New England, where, as Berkeley says, M Our first planters (therein, as in certain other particulars, affect- ing to imitate Jews rather than Christians) imagined they had a right to tread on the foot of Canaanites or Amalekites ; " and as some of their ministers argued — M The heathen are driven out and we have their lands in possession : they were numerous, and we are few; therefore hath the Lord done this great work, to give His beloved rest.'.' What the Puritans thought of their rights towards the Red Indians, the West Indian Planters thought of theirs towards the African Negroes, and such was and we believe still is the attitude of the Dutch farmers of South Africa towards the natives of the Cape and the Transvaal. But the climax of consolatory justification was reached, in the West Indies at least, in a plea put for- ward by Long — evidently as a spokesman for the Planters of his day — that the ruling classes of those Colonies were really proceeding on profoundly Chris- tian principles. They stood forward as the genuine defenders of individual liberty and of the purity of Protestant ritual and doctrine. They were averse, they said, to even the appearance of tyranny in reli- gion ; they did not think that Christianity could be honoured by "adding involuntary proselytes"; they held compulsory conversion to be "a shameful hypocrisy and insult to the true worship." And, on the second head, they could not condescend to methods of the Romanists — and especially the Portu- guese— who incorporated many heathen rites and customs, and so composed "a medley of Paganism and Christianity." Now we have, as already expressed, a great regard for Mr. Long, and we are therefore all the more pained that he should have allowed himself to be spokesman for such barefaced hypocrisies as these. THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 69 In the mouths of men who seldom or never attended public worship, whose lives threw much reproof on morality, and demonstrated with saddening force to the student of history how terribly true it is that the gains of religion and civilization may soon be swamped when the circumstances of life change, it was base and contemptible to talk of fear of insulting worship by giving facilities for the instruction of degraded savages. In the utmost exercise of a liberal charity we yet are bound to despise a jealousy for personal liberty on the part of slave-owners, and a zeal on their part for purity of doctrine and ritual in a religion which they had abandoned in all but the shadow of a name. Yet even so we feel bound to try to look at the matter from the verandah of a Jamaica ''great house." There are worse hypocrisies than the enunciation of high-sounding pretensions to lofty motives in order to gloze over procedure impregnated with the common- place appetite for self-interest. And we are less pained as we listen to the average Jamaica planter as he uttered such sophistical pleas for inactivity as those above recited than when we read of the intolerable hypocrisy which too often underlay the apparently religious expressions of some of them. Can words describe the horrible depravity of mind which is implied in the lamentations of Sir Thomas Modyford, of Barbados and Jamaica, over the insufficient provision of clergy when he was himself held by contemporary opinion to be " the openest atheist and most professed evil-liver in the world " ? Better far for the Church, for the community, for the slaves themselves, open pro- fession of even the shallowest reasons for refusing religious instruction to the masses, than the participa- tion in supplying such instruction where its value is disapproved by intellectual conviction or its authority renounced by abandonment of all the ideals it would enforce. 70 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES On the whole situation, Long himself was too honest not to feel that the Planters' case would not hold water. He is himself in favour of admitting to Chris- tian privileges such Negroes as show promise of being benefited ; he advocates the reduction of the fee for Baptism ; which was 235. gd.' He is also discon- tented himself with the {bare ritual of 18th-century worship and looks with favour upon reform, whether in the direction of Roman methods or of the en- thusiastic rant and gesticulation of the new Dissent- ing sects, as containing, both of them, elements of appeal to the Negro nature which should not be despised or set aside. His accuracy is at fault in including the Quakers as using ranting methods ; and he does not include among the Romanist methods which he can approve, "the indulgences, injunctions, mummery, and legerdemain," which he seems to think part of that system. But on the whole, his attitude is clear: he is dissatisfied with the bare worship of that time as inadequate for the legitimate needs of a tropical race. Colonial opinion and practice being such as is above described, and such being the atmosphere in which a scanty and scattered and unguided clergy lived, we are not able to seek to minimize the failure of the Church in the Slavery period. West Indians themselves, looking back upon the past, do not scruple to speak of " Slavery with its inhuman and anti-Christian spirit," as "neutralizing all efforts for good." We cannot deny that for one hundred and fifty years the vast majority of our fellow-subjects in the West Indies lived in unrelieved heathenism amid the so- called "parishes" of Jamaica, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands. THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 7 1 THE NONCONFORMIST MISSIONS. Such being the maimed condition of the Church, and such being the opinions and practice of the formal adherents of the Establishment, no Churchman, how- ever devoted to his Church, can help feeling anxious to learn that Christianity had some other agencies at work in these islands during the slavery times. If so staunch a Churchman as Bishop Selwyn of New Zealand resolved that whatever the responsibility which his office conferred upon him he would welcome the efforts of the London Missionary Society in Poly- nesia, of the Wesleyans in Fiji, and of the Scotch Presbyterians in certain islands of the Pacific, to the extent of never preaching in any place already occu- pied by those Missionaries ; if great Bishops like Daniel Wilson and Cotton felt no jealousy of other Christians in the overwhelming task of evangelization in India, we may well put aside every feeling of scruple as we turn to ask what was done for the West Indian slaves in the days when the Church lay shackled and impotent there. Premising that the Church of Rome had no part in the English islands, occupied as she was in attending to those within dominions where she was still the Established Church herself, we find that among Evan- gelical Christians it was to the zeal of some newly- formed bodies that the first stages of religious instruc- tion were due. The older Dissenters did nothing. The Established Presbyterians of Scotland were in no different case from ourselves ; and the other Dissenters who were amongst the settlers " enjoyed their opinions in private, without forming congregations, or putting themselves to the expense of maintaining preachers or pastors." For these, as for Churchmen, fresh 72 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES impulse from Great Britain was needed. During the first century of Slavery nothing was done. The new efforts began about the middle of the 18th century. There were three bodies who took the case of the Negroes to heart, and made endeavours on their behalf : the Unitas Fratrum, or United Brethren, commonly known as the Moravian Brethren, from Germany ; the Methodists from England ; and the Baptists from America. The Moravians. — It was on a West India island, though not a British one, that the Moravians made a commencement of their memorable Missionary enter- prise— the island of St. Thomas in possession of Den- mark; this was in 1732. They first appeared in our territory in 1754, and it is worthy of note that for once some absentee proprietors have the honour of initiat- ing a beneficent enterprise on behalf of the slaves. Some proprietors of estates in the parish of St. Eliza- beth in Jamaica, the Fosters and Barhams, sent out Moravian missionaries, and directed their Managers to allow the plantation slaves facilities for being in- structed by them. But so strange and unique a situation proved wholly distasteful to these Managers, and the proprietors had to replace them by a Moravian as Attorney. He was there for seventeen years, but no one similar succeeded him. At the outset there was some success, but it was not great, and during fifty years not more than a thousand persons were baptized. Still, the Moravians were settled on the island, with five stations, preaching and visiting the sick on such estates as would allow it. They supported themselves, in part, by the labour of some slaves they saw fit to own; and they made at least one excellent use of this procedure, as they demonstrated that cruelty, and even harshness, were no necessary part of the slavery system. The Moravians, as is well known, did not believe in scattering Missionaries in solitude over a THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 73 country : in Jamaica they concentrated themselves in four parishes. In Barbados they began in 1765, but there they were able to make no impression for a long time: by 1795 they had only forty Negroes on their Communicants' roll. Very different was their progress in Antigua : there they impressed the Planters so favourably by their success with the Negroes that a favourable reception to a Church Society's Missionary later on was ensured ; and that the Church Society itself (the " Christian Faith Society") in its instruction to its first Missionary encouraged him by pointing to the success of the Moravians in that island. In 181 2 there were 8994 members of the Moravian community in Antigua, with four Missionaries. The Methodists. — The beginning of their missions in the West Indies is one of the most characteristic epi- sodes in that profoundly interesting movement. The Speaker of Assembly of Antigua, Mr. Gilbert, while staying in England, was brought into personal contact with John Wesley himself, and became a " Member of Society." On his return home he began to preach to his own slaves, reading Wesley's Sermons to them, and teaching them the new Methodist hymns. After his death his work was carried forward by an emigrant Methodist shipwright, John Baxter, who became the " leader " of the Society on the island. Then came, 1 789, the visit to Antigua of the indomitable Dr. Coke, General-Superintendent of Wesley's Missionary Work. He did not come on purpose, but was driven there by storm when on his way to visit the societies in America. But his visit had great effect, and thoroughly settled the work. By 1793 the Methodists had 6570 mem- bers in xAntigua, of whom the great mass were slaves (105 " coloured," and only 36 whites). In Jamaica their operations were carried on amidst ever-recurring opposition : when they converted a house into a chapel there arose a violent newspaper controversy 74 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES culminating in a riot. Afterwards preaching after dark was forbidden ; that is to say, at the only time when slaves could attend, except on Sundays, for in the tropics it is always dark by seven o'clock. On Sun- days there was the great obstacle that it was the day on which the slaves had to work on their provision grounds, as they had no other time regularly at their disposal : hence the insistence on some other oppor- tunity for their own work, that we shall find later on. Dr. Coke visited the island three times, and some small societies were formed, but from the causes above-mentioned they were chiefly composed of coloured people and free Negroes : the total at the close of the century was about 600. In Barbados their progress was slight ; they built a large chapel, but riots ensued, the jury of Planters and officials refused to convict the instigators, and the magistrates closed the chapel (1801). Three years after this a return of their membership shows only forty-nine; and in 181 2 it was only eleven whites, thirteen free people, and six slaves. The Baptists. — The Baptists began their West Indian I work from America, not from England. When the United States were formed a party of Loyalists left for Jamaica. Among them was a coloured Baptist deacon — the Loyalists were not entirely Church-people, evidently — from Virginia, named George Lisle. He at once began to preach in Kingston, with a licence, and erected a chapel. Bryan Edwards, the historian, was amongst those who assisted him with subscriptions.1 He was several times imprisoned, on flimsy pretences of having infringed the terms of his licence i but for a long period he laboured on, faithfully and Judiciously. Another immigrant was Moses Baker, who was care- 1 The Chapel is now replaced by a larger one on the same site : which has been occupied by a congregation under a Negro pastorate continuously for over a century, THE CHURCH IN THE SLAVERY PERIOD 75 less about religion when he arrived, but was drawn to the Baptist congregation, and became a pastor. He was less judicious in the difficult circumstances than Lisle, and made some mistakes; but he acquired a great influence over the smaller congregations. These men and some others who became pastors were left to work without any support or guidance from either America or England up to some years after 1800. What was the character of the reception given to these Nonconformist Missions ? The attitude of the Whites was generally that of decided opposition. The honourable exceptions were rare. Speaker Gilbert of Antigua has been mentioned; and we find that in that island Dr. Coke was at first welcomed with some warmth and accorded a public dinner ; indeed he was offered ^500 a year if he would settle there. But this was no proof that the White people wanted him for themselves ; four years afterwards Mr. Gilbert was still the only white member of his own Society of 600 members. In Jamaica Dr. Coke was granted the use of the Court-House of Port Royal to preach in ; in fact, "civilities abounded," he says; but nothing further came of them. Records occur, however, of some pious Planters and merchants, but very sparsely. Indeed, after the first acquiescent permission to begin, opposition began to increase rather than to diminish. As the time came when the Slave Trade, and even the Slave system itself, became subjects of hot political discussion in England, the Dissenting Missionaries could hardly fail to be regarded with suspicion as friends of the slaves, and as supported by the political Liberals at home. And the suspicion soon hardened into definite animosity. The Planters feared the influence of such leaders of the Negroes, and the Missionaries became identified in their minds with agitators against the social system of the Colonies. The plan was to avoid open breaches of the laws of 76 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES toleration : to grant licences, but to do so under such conditions as rendered them almost useless ; such as forbidding any preaching wherever owners and attor- neys did not themselves invite it, preaching after sunset, baptizing without notice and permission, and so on. In St. Vincent fines, imprisonment, even cor- poral punishment, banishment and on return " death," were enacted as penalties in connection with the preachers (i 790). One Wesleyan Missionary, Matthew Lumb, declining to waste a year in inactivity waiting to qualify, by residence, for a licence, began to preach : he was imprisoned and then expelled from the Colony under these acts. But they were going too far, and on arrival in England the royal assent to them was refused and they fell to the ground. In Jamaica Lisle was at one time in prison, in chains; Baker was silenced ; the first Missionary in Barbados could not preach, for years, — all that he was suffered to do was to keep a day-school. The actual results effected by the Nonconformist Missions under these circumstances were small ; but their presence in the islands was a standing declara- tion that there was an evangelical character in the Christian religion. By the upper class it was success- fully ignored ; but among the slaves, even the most ignorant, there was a consciousness of a brightness and a hope unknown before. That the roots struck in somewhat deeply became evident as time went on, and the opening was formed for a larger incursion of evangelistic agencies. CHAPTER IV EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW — REVIVAL OF THE CHURCH, 1800 — 1833 Political change in Britain — Increase of Evangelical influence — Resistance in W. Indies — Annals of Progress, 1797 — 1833 ; Mitigation of Hardships of Slavery — Discipline and En- couragement of Clergy — Legal protection of Nonconformist Missionaries — Registration of Slaves — Amelioration policy of Canning— Two Bishoprics formed, supported by Imperial Grants — Arrival of Bishops Coleridge and Lipscombe — Cod- rington College re-constituted — Riots in Jamaica — Deputa- tion to England — Emancipation — Religious character of reception by the slaves — Note on some recent additions to our territory, Trinidad, Guiana, etc. With the approach of the 19th century the dark- ness over the religious and moral condition of our West India Colonies began to lift; the fresh air of a new and brighter day breathed, faintly at first, and with much of what Carlyle would have called of the fuliginous in it, yet with ever-increasing exhilaration, over the night of European irreligion and Negro heathenism. It was, of course, no separate and isolated revolution, but a participation in the general uprising from a period of reaction and torpor. The era of the ascendency of the Middle class of society was commencing in England, tempered very largely with horror of the excesses of the French Reign of Terror ; the Reform Bill with the enfranchisement of the middle class was almost in view; in industry the Factory System was being founded; and in religion Evangelical convictions were beginning to shape policy 77 78 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES and to mould society in all classes. In alliance with a Utilitarian view of morality the spirit of Christianity was bringing about philanthropic reforms on every hand; an improved Poor Law was desired; the con- dition of prisons was investigated; the crude and almost ferocious system of the penal code was to be mitigated. From all this change no part of the British community was to reap more abundant or more bene- ficent fruit than our West India Colonies. The two channels in which the new force flowed in relation to the West Indies, were — (i) a participation in the Evangelical influence that was at work within the Church, and also among the older Dissenting denominations, as well as in the newly-formed organ- izations of Methodism: this was just spreading over into zeal for the evangelization of the Heathen at the close of the century; the Baptist Missionary Society was founded in 1792 ; the London Missionary Society, at first actually as it still is theoretically un- denominational, 1795; the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, 1799; the Religious Tract Society, 1799; the Bible Society, 1804; while the long-established Church Societies for Promoting Chris- tian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.), and the Propagation Society (S.P.G.) were participators in the uprising of enthusiasm, (ii) In combination with this influence political opinion was more and more setting in against the continuance of the Slave Trade and of Slavery itself. The ruling class in the West Indies, working as it did in intimate connection with the proprietors and merchants and capitalists and annuitants who formed the West Indian "interest" at home, were unable to contemplate the drift of change with any other feelings than alarm, abhorrence, and resentment. In Jamaica these feelings operated in full force ; in the Leeward Islands the transition was comparatively calm; in EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW 79 Barbados it was intermittently severe, but in Jamaica it was a period of great perturbation. For unfortun- ately in addition to past influences such as have been already described, the ruling class in Jamaica had in near view a West Indian " Reign of Terror " of their own; disturbing their minds as the violences of Paris disturbed Edmund Burke and the bulk of Englishmen at home. The French Colony of Hayti lay only 120 miles from Jamaica, nearer than Paris was to West- minster, and there the freeing of the slaves by the French Revolution had led to terrible disorders. In 1 79 1 a thousand plantations were wrecked, 2000 Whites and 10,000 Negroes perished in conflict. An English writer on Colonial history, Mr. E. J. Payne, considers that " the most remarkable spectacle of successful industry (then) in the world " was ruined {European Colonies^ p. 136). The alarmed Planters of Kingston heard, almost within sound of the shouts and the groans, of the establishment of a Black Republic; soon followed by the exodus of the French Planters, and a law forbidding the possession of land to Whites. What wonder that an outbreak of free Negroes in Jamaica followed ; and that the hearts of most of the Whites were hardened against any and every influence which seemed to them to weaken their legitimate control over the Negro population ? The Planting interest both at home and in the islands were compelled to show from time to time that they were alive to the fact that the British people were slowly making up their minds against the old system, and at the same time to endeavour to hold their own in the only way they could conceive to be possible. Consequently, the history of the Colonies from 1800 to 1833 is a story of rapid change, constantly resisted, but incessantly and steadily moving in one direction. Hurried along as they were, all but a few irreconcilables saw the necessity of formulating 8o THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES a policy which might arrest movement; " Amelior- ation " became the mot d'ordre of the Planting interest, as against " Abolition " j and their wits were set to work to produce ameliorations which would disarm opposition, with the least possible alteration in the actual situation. One of the first steps taken proved their recognition of the religious character of the reforming movement : they decided to liberate and strengthen the Estab- lished Church, though still resisting the efforts of the Dissenting Missionary Societies. Rightly or wrongly they associated these latter with the cause of Aboli- tion. It was, indeed, the fact that the leaders of the Emancipation movement were themselves Church- men : Granville Sharp, Clarkson, Wilberforce, James Stephen, Zachary Macaulay : but these did not con- stitute the Church officially, no Archbishop or Bishop was prominently with them; while the Dissenting leaders were more or less generally falling into line, at least sufficiently so to make the West Indians regard all Baptist and Methodist Missionaries as being in effect emissaries of the " Anti-Slavery Society" and the " African Institution." Compelled as they were officially to increase their freedom of access to the slaves, they made all the difficulties they could, and in private they took full advantage of the fact that the new laws and regulations and licences were admin- istered by themselves, and could easily be made almost nugatory in effect. In the movement of these thirty-three years the history of the Church is so closely bound up with the history of social changes, that it is impossible to treat it separately; and the changes themselves moved onward so dramatically towards the denouement of 1833, that their exhibition in the form of brief Annals of those years seems the most effective way of dealing with them. The following annalistic notes do not EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW 8 1 profess to be complete, but they have been gathered from many sources. 1797. A Resolution was passed by the House of Commons advising Planters to take such care of their slaves as would remove all necessity for fresh import- ations. Accordingly an Act is passed in Jamaica for strengthening the Church, containing these points: (1) the Parish authorities are ordered to carry out their duties with regard to providing and maintaining Churches, or the Legislature will take it out of their hands, execute the work and charge the vestries with the expenditure ; (2) every rector to be at once pro- vided with a house, and to enter into residence ; (3) the rectors required to allot a portion of each Sunday to the instruction of slaves; (4) Clergy-stipends to be equalized and paid quarterly by the island Treasury ; and (5) their widows and orphans to be provided for by a ten per cent, deduction from these stipends. 1 798. The Legislature of the Leeward Islands passed an Amelioration Act, providing that hours of labour should be restricted, protecting slaves against cruelties, abolishing iron collars and chains, ordering medical attendance to be provided, directing the encourage- ment of marriage, and forbidding restraints upon attendance at public worship. 1800. The question of the control of the clergy was faced in Jamaica. The Legislature proposed to place it entirely in the Governor's hands, but a reference home resulted in an official opinion by the Attorney- General that this was illegal, and that the Bishop of London's jurisdiction could not be ignored. The Colony accepted this opinion, and in consultation with the Bishop (Porteus, an excellent prelate, and himself long keenly interested in doing all that he. could for the slaves as President of the 14 Christian Faith Society ") passed an Act constituting a Com- missary Court in the island, consisting of five rectors, F 82 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES selected by the Bishop, with a registrar and apparitors, and certain powers of discipline over the clergy, including suspension or deprivation, with the con- currence of the Governor. Two cases are mentioned — the suspension of a curate for nine months, and of a rector for three years. 1802. The Jamaica Assembly specifically called the attention of Dissenting Missionaries to the neces- sity of taking out licences : they even went so far as to pass an Act against their preaching to slaves ; the Methodist Missionary Society at home appealed, and the Act was disallowed. The Barbados Legislature refused to agree to a Message from the Governor recommending that murder of a slave should be made a felony instead of being punishable only by fine, although it was asked that such conviction should be possible only when there was evidence of some white persons against the culprit. Three years later they thought better of it, and passed the Act suggested. 1804. In Jamaica further rules enforcing residence of rectors, and requiring them to appoint curates if absent for six months. 1807. The Imperial Act abolishing the Slave Trade passed. 1807. The stipends of clergy increased in Barbados, as " an act of justice to that worthy and respectable class of men," as the Assembly put it in their Address to the Governor, wishing, no doubt, delicately to ignore the existence of any external pressure. A strong "ordinance" against Dissenters passed by the Corporation of Kingston, Jamaica, with only one dissentient ; they were to conduct no services except in open daylight, /'. e. in Jamaica not much before six in the morning, or much after six in the evening ; and no persons were to lend their houses for worship. An Act passed fining proprietors who should allow Dis- .EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW 83 senters to instruct slaves, and Missionaries who should admit them to their chapels or houses. Disallowed at home. 1808. The Bishop of London (Porteus) issued a circular letter to the West Indian clergy, recommend- ing Bell's system for Sunday Schools; the rector of St. Joseph, Jamaica, at once commenced such a school, but another school on a private estate, with a schoolmaster specially sent out, proved abortive. 1809. The Governors in the West Indies instructed never to give consent to any laws relating to religion without reference home: this was directed against such Acts as that of Jamaica 1807. (It was really to prevent the Colonies taking action out of harmony with Imperial legislation ; just as when in 1749 the Leeward Islands passed an Act admitting Romanists to equal political rights, the Act was disallowed.) 181 1. The Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica took notice that services in church were given up if no "Whites were present, and complained of this to the Bishop's Commissaries, who accordingly issued a circular to the clergy. 181 1. A planter, Hodge, member of Council of Tortola (Leeward Islands), put on his trial for the death of five slaves; the Governor ordered the Solicitor-General of the Colony to prosecute, and the Councillor was hanged. This demonstration of secur- ity of slave-life shows how irrevocable was the progress made at this point. The correspondence on the case was printed by the House of Commons. 1814. Act of Jamaica raised the status of free "coloured people," admitting them as evidence, if Christians, and removing limits upon their capability of receiving bequests. The Assembly passed a Bill incorporating a Presbyterian body, but the Council rejected it ; the Assembly, however, voted ^5000 to the Presbyterian Church, and later ,£3500 more, and 84 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES later still ^500 a year, as if to show that they would recognize a religion if only it were Established. (The Presbyterians had not yet begun to move in the Missionary field.) 1 81 5. Formal adoption by the Legislature of Jamaica of the right of slaves to receive instruction. The Church strengthened for this purpose ; a curate with ^300 a year (later raised to ^500) attached to each parish, and chapels of ease to be built. Fees reduced; that for Baptism to be 2s. 6d.; and the Bishop of London to be applied to for a supply of additional clergy. This reads excellently, and as it appears definitely to initiate a fresh policy, it must be scrutin- ized. Doubts have been expressed whether it had any substantial purpose; whether, in fact, it was designed to initiate a new policy for the good of the slaves, or was little better than a blind drawn over the eyes of the watchful friends of the slave in England. It is quite certain that the Act had small results, so far as the slaves were concerned. What took place was that the rectors obtained at the public expense the assistance of curates for their ordinary duties, as already discharged ; in no way engrossing, as we have seen, except to the few who were thoroughly conscientious. For this miscarriage we are referred to two possible causes : {a) the feeble character of the curates who were secured, finding as they did the arduous work of instructing an ignorant and degraded slave-class less to their minds than the society of the higher classes, and so speedily absorb- ing from these the prevailing opinion that their proper enterprise was really Quixotic; or(b) that the Planters and attorneys made no real effort in support of the curates. If this latter was the principal cause, then the Planters stand convicted of double-dealing; by their representatives they voted large sums in the Assembly for a purpose which in their private capaci- EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW 85 ties they had no intention of assisting. Stewart is of opinion that this was the fact, and points out as an example, that no change was made in the necessity the slaves were under of employing most of their Sundays on their own plots. One curate wrote to a Jamaica paper, repudiating blame for himself and his col- leagues ; he said that in no instance had a plantation accepted his services or given him facilities. The rector of Clarendon parish found only two estates willing to receive his curate. And the Planters' advocate, Bridges, seems to testify to this being the truth, as he sets up a justification in the growing financial difficulties of the Planters, and the necessity of their working the slaves to their utmost capacity. The resolution of Assembly which gave rise to this Act had included an unreserved expression of antagon- ism to the Dissenters. The Assembly resolved to take into consideration " the means of diffusing the light of genuine Christianity " — the most rigid Erastian could hardly care to see the adjudication of "genuine- ness " as between the different Christian bodies placed in the hands of the Jamaica Assembly of 181 5 — " divested of the dark and dangerous fanaticism of the Methodists which has been attempted to be pro- pagated, and which, grafted on the African supersti- tions and working on the uninstructed and ardent temperament of the Negro, has produced the most pernicious consequences to individuals, and is preg- nant with imminent dangers to the community." 1815. Opposition to the Dissenters in Kingston relaxed ; the Methodist Chapel re-opened. In Antigua some lists of baptisms were printed showing since 1803, 2700 for the parish clergy; 2800 for the Church Missionary Society Missionaries ; 2000 for the Metho- dists and 1300 for the Moravians. The stipends of the Barbados clergy to be increased : but the Council did not acquiesce. 86 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES 1816. A Moravian Missionary u mentions with delight having for the first time met with a black man who was able to read " in Jamaica. 1 81 6. The Antigua Assembly thinks it unnecessary to provide for safety against insurrections, having confidence that moral and religious principles were increasing in influence over the whole community. 181 7. The slaves throughout the West Indies placed on Registers. This measure was due to the British Parliament. In Jamaica the local Act was passed only under strong pressure from the Governor, acting under his instructions from home. Bridges gives some pages of lamentation over the violation of con- stitutional liberties involved in this pressure — recalling inevitably to memory Dr. Johnson's impatient query with regard to the American Planters, " How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes ? " In Barbados the opposition was milder, and ostensibly was an objection to the expense. There were found to be 345,000 of all ages in Jamaica: in Barbados 77,000; that is to say, over half-a-million in all. The friends of the slaves were sagacious in pressing this measure forward : it was of more efficacy than might at first have seemed to be likely. Now that importation had been stopped, a periodical registration would show how the several estates treated their slaves, so far as total increase or decrease would show it. The resistance the Registration met with was the measure of the advantage to the slave-popula- tion. In this year many inhabitants of Kingston contri- buted handsomely to the erection of Wesley Chapel, including several members of the Corporation : no refusal through hostile motives was received by the collectors : several Magistrates attended the opening services. Per contra, the rector of St. Thomas parish declares against the value of church attendance for EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW 87 slaves, and acquiesces in their not coming to his catechizings on the ground of their " defects of under- standing." 1 8 18. In Barbados killing a slave, even by the owner, made a felony more clearly ; but it was not until 1826 that a conviction took place; possibly none was needed. The Custos (an official like a Lord- Lieutenant of a County) of Falmouth, Jamaica, invites a Missionary to settle in that parish. A young clergy- man, one of those who came out after the Act of 181 5, officiating for the rector of Kingston, raised the Com- municants to 600 within a year ; another, Mr. Trew, labouring earnestly, gained the esteem of Dissenters at the same time : the rector of St. David approves the issue of licences to Missionaries. The Combermere Charity School, Barbados, founded for children of colour and negroes : thirty-two out of eighty-nine of the scholars were children of slaves. 1819. The Central School for white children of the subordinate class founded in Barbados, by co-operation of legislature and vestry, with" private subscriptions. A local Committee of the Christian Knowledge Society founded in the same island. About this time a historian of Methodist Missions (Samuel, pp. 133, 168, 245, 274) records a most friendly magistrate at Port Antonio ; a physician at Bath opening his house for preaching; a vestry granting a Missionary ^100; an estate, Strong Hill, where all proprietors and managers were favourable ; a white man accepting the leadership of a Society Class. 1820. The Missionaries of the Christian Faith Society, being confined to the policy of "Amelioration," received support from the ruling classes ; a member of Assembly of Jamaica even officiating as " clerk " at some of their services, and the Missionaries reported home that they received assistance from many quarters of the island. 88 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES 1822. Owing to the prevalent opinion that the Commissaries' Court was of no use, the salaries of its officers were suppressed. 1823. A riot against Dissenters broke out in Bar- bados : the Wesleyan Chapel in Bridgetown was destroyed : the Governor proclaimed a reward for the detection of the offenders, but without result. Mr. Bridges the Annalist, a clergyman who came out in 1806, recites that he had about this time bap- tized in three years 12,000 slaves, and married 3897 couples, a recital which naturally raises strong doubts as to the substantiality of the proceedings in the mind of another historian, Gardner (a Congregationalist). In England the subject of the West Indies now definitely came to the front, and the Cabinet of the day met Parliament with a plan. Canning was the Minister in charge, and he based his proposals on Amelioration. He believed that enfranchisement would have to come, but at a more or less distant date : meanwhile he expressly declared that if the condition of the slaves is to be improved, "that im- provement is to be introduced through the medium of the masters." A series of Resolutions was proposed to the House of Commons, and passed, which they invited the Colonial legislatures to adopt, and which the Government decided itself to carry out in the newly-acquired Colonies of Trinidad, Demerara, and St. Lucia. These being directly under the Crown the Government could act in them as it pleased. Con- siderable attention was given in these resolutions to removing stigmas from the slaves : females were no longer to be flogged; the whip was not to be carried by the " Drivers " in the field, but used only in a sys- tematic manner as a punishment. These proposals met with different receptions in the Colonies : in St. Kitts they were accepted, in Barbados ignored, while Jamaica retained her grim pre-eminence by violently protest- EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW 89 ing against them. A new-comer among the Colonies (Dominica) seems to have contemplated organizing a Colonial resistance. The resistance to them in Guiana caused the " Smith of Demerara " outrage, one of the most signal instances of the blindness of furious men to their own objects. If the advocates of the slaves had desired to raise up uncontrollable indigna- tion on the part of people in England, could they have done better than invent the case of a man leaving England under the missionary impulse for an unhealthy clime, as it certainly was then, devoting himself with assiduity to his calling amongst a godless and neg- lected population, thrust into prison, sentenced to death, and dying from the foul confinement of a tropical prison before he could be executed, and all without the means of proof that he had anything to do with social disorders ? This wicked folly was perpetrated upon John Smith, an Independent missionary, and it won friends to the cause of Abolition in every corner of England. Churchmen are glad to be able to separate themselves wholly from these proceedings : the chief clergyman of Georgetown, W. S. Austin, was driven from the Colony because of his vigorous support of John Smith ; a support fully shared by a lawyer who became afterwards, as Sir William Arrindell, "one of the most respected Chief Justices the West Indies have ever known." But the main constructive feature in the measure showed how far the Evangelical revival had brought English thought through the scepticism of the 18th century, for we find the Cabinet turning to religion for aid. Canning announced that the Government had decided to strengthen the Church i?i the West Indies by consti- tuting two dioceses there : the administrative expen- diture of which would be provided from the Imperial Exchequer. Words would fail a narrator who should attempt to describe the feelings of loyal Churchmen as 9° THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES they saw the bread cast on the waters by the Berkeleys and Wilsons now after many days being gathered by the Church. It was now to be no consecration in Scotland like Seabury's for the United States ; but the prosperous precedent of the consecrations of Middle- ton (1814) and Heber (1823) for India was to be followed and the whole authority of Church and State officially engaged in the conferring of full Episcopacy upon our Caribbean Colonies. The year 1824 saw the new Sees constituted and a fresh era in the history of the Church in the West Indies inaugurated. The Colonies were grouped into two dioceses, that of Jamaica including also the Bahamas and our settlements in Honduras: that of Barbados including also St. Vincent, Grenada, Antigua and the other Leeward Islands, with Trinidad and Guiana. The Message of the Governor of Jamaica (the Duke of Manchester) to his Legislature announced this great event in the following terms : — "I am also to acquaint you that his Majesty has been graciously pleased to appoint a Bishop for this island to whom is to be intrusted the control of the clergy of the Church of England within his diocess, and the duty of reporting upon the state of the Eccle- siastical Establishment particularly as it relates to the slave population, and upon the best means of diffusing the benefits of religious instruction to (sic) that part of the Community. In order to prove the deep interest which his Majesty's Government feel in the encouragement of the religious and moral instruction of the negroes, they have taken upon themselves the whole charge of putting the clergy under episcopal control, and have placed funds at the disposal of the Bishop for the more immediate supply of persons in holy orders within his diocess ; and his Majesty con- fidently expects to receive every assistance from you in promoting the establishment of a system calculated to produce the most beneficial effects." EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW 91 The amount charged on the British Exchequer for Jamaica was for the Bishop ^5600 a year in Colonial currency, ^"2800 for an Archdeacon, and .£2500 for six additional curates, a total of ,£10,900, equivalent at six-tenths to ^6540 sterling. And similarly for Barba- dos. The Legislature of Barbados at once gave fall re- cognition to the Bishop : his Court was a " Court of the island " in which the same laws over the clergy would be administered as obtained in England ; they assisted by a reduction of fees for duties and a corresponding increase of Treasury stipend. In Jamaica a similar court was set up : the control of leave of absence to the clergy was transferred from the Governor to the Bishop. Fees were reduced, indeed for slaves abol- ished ; the services of the clergy were to be a common right of all classes of the population : slave marriages to be recognized and registered. In both Colonies Sunday markets were abolished (Barbados 1827) and a week-day granted for the cultivation of provision grounds. Workhouses, hospitals, and gaols were to be visited by the clergy. At a crisis like this much depended upon the men appointed to be the first Bishops. In both cases a suc- cessful choice was made. Dr. Christopher Lipscomb proved an administrator of energy and discretion in Jamaica. But the diocese of Barbados was par- ticularly happy in the acceptance of that See by a member of one of the most distinguished of English families, the Coleridges. William Hart Coleridge was a worthy member of that great family, and as one of the first Colonial Bishops added lustre to its distinc- tions : he very nearly took out John Keble as his Archdeacon, the only offer of preferment in the Church which the author of the Christia?i Year is known to have ever received. Novel, delicate, and arduous as was the work, by character and by training the first Bishops were fitted for it ; and very soon the Church felt their impulse in every parish of the West India 92 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES islands. A few figures seem necessary to show the extent of the new activity. Within a very few years thirteen new churches were built in Jamaica, the clergy increased from about thirty to forty-five, and thirty- two catechists and schoolmasters were at work, while religious instruction was in operation on 280 estates. In Barbados diocese ten years saw the clergy increase from fifteen to twenty-seven, schools from eight to 125. The supply of clergy was a difficulty. Bishop Coleridge saw that it would not be easy to keep up an adequate supply from England, although some good men were induced to go out, including men from the Universities. He accordingly took in hand the Cod- rington Trust bequest, and with his advice the Trustees (the Propagation Society) re-constituted it according to its proper design as a training college for clergy primarily, and a place of higher lay-education besides. A West Indian clergyman of singular gifts was on the spot as Chaplain to the Estates and was secured as the first Principal, John Hothersall Pinder. And it is a singular distinction for the West Indies that this Bishop and the man he chose for this post were able in after years to become pioneers of noble institutions in England : the Bishop was the first Warden of the fir«t Missionary College, St. Augustine's, Canterbury, and Mr. Pinder was the first Principal of the most successful of all the Theological Colleges, that of Wells. It was 1834 before the Bishop held his first Ordination ; and continuously since then Codrington College has supplied a large proportion of the clergy to the southern islands and some members to all. (See Chapter VIII.) 1824. A law passed in the newly-acquired Colonies Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice, now known as "British Guiana," giving State endowment to three Established Churches; the Church of England, the Scottish Presbyterian, and the Dutch Reformed ; and some provision for Romanists. 1825. A Ladies' Association for assisting the sick EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW 93 and poor formed in Barbados in connection with the Church. A Bill for admitting evidence of slaves if baptized, rejected in Jamaica ; the clergy divided on this in their opinion : Mr. Trew and the rector of Kingston for the law ; the rectors of St. Ann and St. John against it. In 1826 by the advice of the Governor the Bill was re-introduced, and passed as an experiment ; but on its arrival at home it was rejected by Mr. Huskisson as insufficient, and because it was interlaced with inadmissible matter, especially further restrictions on Dissenters. In 1827 the re- newal urged, in 1829 passed again, but again in a form that was disallowed. The Planters declared that the slaves would not hold themselves bound by oaths in our Courts so much as by their own oaths over graves with dirt-eating and blood-drinking. 1826. The first Moravian day-school opened in Jamaica. Evening schools attempted but abandoned : the children too tired to profit by them ; as one of them said, " sleep hab no massa." It was not different with the children in our factory districts at that very time ; a comparison, by the way, which the West Indians at home were by no means slow to make. The stipends of the clergy again increased in Barbados. 1827. The rector of St. Lucy, Barbados, agitated against as inculcating " equality " in his teaching, tried and found guilty of misdemeanour; fined one shilling, pardoned by the Crown ; he was supported by the Bishop, both personally and officially, and no doubt this settled the matter with the Crown advisers. Between 1825-27 attempts were made to brighten the Public Services in the parish church, Kingston, by musical rendering of the Canticles and responses to the Commandments ; an organ was built; the effect was greatly to increase congregations, especially as regards the Negroes ; but after ten months the new methods were suppressed by the Bishop, " without 94 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES reason assigned." " The service resumed its wonted monotony — the Dissenters triumphed, and the church was again deserted " (Bridges). The other diocese was more fortunate in the sympathy of the Bishop with such changes j Bishop Coleridge in his Charges frequently urged the adoption of music. 182S. The constitution of Codrington College com- menced. Committee of Jamaica Assembly reported against Dissenting Missionaries, alleging that a lengthy examination led them to hold that the principal object of the Missionaries was to extort money from their congregations, that doctrines of equality were incul- cated, and odium cast on the authorities. Rural Deaneries instituted. 1 83 1. It was at this time thoroughly believed at home that the Slaves were better off in the new Crown Colonies than in the old constitutionally governed Colonies. This was felt to be intolerable, and repre- sentations from home were so strong that at last the Jamaica Legislature passed a Slave Code without some of the clauses chiefly objected to, but still falling far short of what the Governor urged. Great animosity was felt against the Governor on account of the pressure he exercised. In this year there broke out the most serious Negro insurrection in the history of Jamaica ; no previous outbreak had involved over 500 people, as Bridges acknowledges. It was very commonly attributed to the Baptists, and a section of the White community became infuriated. In 1832 the infamous "Colonial Church Union " — noble name for an ignoble enterprise — was formed ; chapels were burned down, Missionaries assaulted and illegally im- prisoned; one rector at least (Hanover parish) was among the incendiaries. The purity of the Church feeling may be gathered from the fact that the Union included some Presbyterians, and it is said that the Jews took advantage of it in order to vent their EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW 95 animosity on the Missionaries. The slaves, on the other hand, were persuaded, or themselves caught up the idea, that the King had set them free, but the local authorities kept his act secret and would not carry it out. In this insurrection 200 slaves were killed in the open field, and 500 executed. 1830-31. Primary Charge of Bishop Coleridge, containing gratifying notices of the increase of clergy, churches, congregations, and schools ; of an improved observance of the Sabbath, of Marriage, of public Burial ; with better Psalmody. The great Hurricane of Barbados ; high commenda- tion of the action of the Bishop and clergy publicly given by the Governor and by the Assembly. 1832. The Reform Bill passed in England; a large section of the Middle class admitted to partici- pate in public affairs. . A Friendly Society formed among the Black la- bourers attending the parish church, St. John, Antigua. 1833. In April of this year there came to Eng- land the memorable deputation from the Baptists of Jamaica, Knibb, Burchell, and Philipps. They came home because as Baptist pastors they were unable any longer to restrain their vital sympathy with the slaves and their abhorrence of Slavery. They saw the flames of Slave-chapels replying to the flames of Planters' cane-fields and estate-houses, and in their consciences judged that the crisis had come. The English people must be asked as one of their very first political decisions whether slavery was acceptable and possible, or not. The Deputation was received at home with great warmth, and the natural gifts of these men proved the instruments of deciding the sentiment of all Evangelical Christians in a manner which could not be mistaken. The Parliamentary labours of Wilberforce and Buxton were now rein- forced by a volume of popular opinion and enthusiasm 96 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES which closed the controversy. Mr. Stanley (after- wards Lord Derby), as Secretary of State, said in his place in Parliament, that the careful and repeated recommendations sent to the Local Legislatures in the West Indies had failed to produce due results, and to satisfy the legitimate demands of the people of Great Britain and Ireland. The Government had therefore decided to call upon the Imperial Parliament to intervene. Slavery must be abolished. The Emancipation Act was passed that same year. To become law it had to pass the Local Legis- latures. But enough was conveyed to them by their friends in England of the peremptory tone of Parlia- ment to awe them from opposition. They all gave way, even in Jamaica. In fact four members out of the thirty in that Assembly voted for the immediate abolition of Slavery without the apprenticeship interval of seven years laid down in the Imperial Act. In the Barbados Assembly some mutilations were attempted which had to be put right before their share of the Compensation money was handed over. In Antigua it passed without the apprenticeship clauses at all; complete emancipation of the slaves in that Colony followed upon the passing of the Act. The great revolution was effected, one of the land- marks of the history of human progress set up. It is beyond question that the strengthening of the Church just nine years previously had untold effect in bring- ing Emancipation into the sphere of practical politics. In 1824 Canning thought it an approaching event, but still a remote one ; in that same year he was the Cabinet Minister who proposed one of the very measures which rendered its immediate arrival de- monstrably advantageous. The new Bishops and their clergy were a means of winning confidence and healing the breach between the upper and lower classes by the bond of Christian fellowship. Bishop EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW 97 Coleridge in his Charges to the clergy was most insistent on the great importance of endeavouring to secure the goodwill of Masters and Managers for the work with the Negroes. It lost half its value if done against them, he always said. Possibly the clergy were not as definitely and openly on the side of Emancipation as the Dissenters rapidly became, and as we in our day should like to have seen them. Where there was persecution there was protest, in some cases, at least. W. S. Austin, one of the earliest of our Demerara clergy, supported the persecuted Missionary, Smith, so strongly that he was driven from the Colony himself. But in the main they proceeded in a quiet confidence that the Church had the work of peace to perform before all things, and were content to leave the great change to be brought about without their intervention. From what we read in Bishop Coleridge's earnest Charges, ordination addresses, and sermons, we can be quite satisfied that in taking their stand upon their earnestness in pastoral work among all classes they were preparing a state of social opinion that went far towards rendering this mighty social revolu- tion one of the most peaceful ever accomplished in history. It had been asserted, and no doubt with genuine alarm, that Emancipation would immediately light up incendiary fires ; that devastated plantations and murdered planters and overseers, and their families would cover the fair face of the West India Islands, while in Saturnalian indulgences the enfranchised multitudes would run wild riot. And the recent example of Hayti was fresh enough in memory to give vividness to the excited imaginations. The eve?it ivas wholly different. No outrage whatever took place; and the very first two years after emancipation showed by reports of the stipendiary Magistrates of Jamaica a remarkable absence of ordinary crime ! G 98 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES Macaulay says that the two greatest reforms in English history were the amalgamation of the Norman and Anglo-Saxon races, and the gradual abolition of villenage ; and that both of these were won by the clergy from the laity. For " clergy " read "religion," and we can say that it stands out as one of the most signal triumphs of religion in human history that Emancipation was regarded by the freed slaves them- selves as a religious boon to be received with pious gratitude and celebrated with religious rites. The last hours of slavery and the first hours of freedom were spent in churches and chapels. And the new centres round which the emancipated rallied were neither ignorant agitators nor firebrand orators holding out plunder and rapine as now within reach, but the Missionaries, pastors, deacons and class-leaders of Christian congregations. By the Baptists at Kingston, a chain, a whip, and a collar were placed in a coffin, and with grim humour buried in the chapel-yard. The memorial tablet which was placed over this tomb of a moral tyranny bore the likenesses of Wilberforce, Sharp, and Sturge, with that of Knibb below. And the inscription beginning with Deo Gloria! went on to hail the abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies as " the Day-spring of Universal Liberty to all Nations of Men, whom God hath made of one blood." And underneath was inscribed the text — "Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God." If as Churchmen we have regretfully to remember that in this honourable leadership a larger share of the Negroes' confidence was possessed by the Dissenting leaders than by the clergy of the Church, we shall give honour where it is due, and only claim for our- selves that as our Church, little other than a parody for two centuries, had been her living self for less than a short ten years, the share we were permitted EMANCIPATION COMING INTO VIEW 99 to have was one for which we are grateful : we were nearly being excluded altogether. Thenceforward we had only to proceed on the lines laid down in those ten years, and a large share of the pastoral charge of the free Negroes of the West Indies was certain to be our high reward. Note. — During the period covered by this Chapter our atten- tion has been concentrated upon the older Colonies. Our recent conquests, Trinidad, Guiana and St. Lucia, hardly come into the main line of history yet. They were under direct Imperial authority. They were but sparsely settled, and the Roman Church was already in occupation (the Dutch Church in Guiana).* Consequently the Church of England has practically no history to show for the years 1800 — 1834 in these places, nor the Dissent- ing Missions either. A few scattered clergy, situated more like Chaplains than incumbents, ministered in the chief towns to very scanty congregations, that was all. Canning's resolutions of 1823 had included an undertaking that the Crown would apply itself to the amelioration of these Colonies, but official activity was confined to the inclusion of these islands in the jurisdiction of the Bishop and the Archdeacons of Barbados and the Leeward Islands. Dr. Coleridge and his Archdeacons certainly included these new Colonies in their anxious care, but their first efforts naturally were given to the older and more thickly peopled Colonies. From figures collected by the Bishop, we can glean the follow- ing representative information : Population in 1834. Trinidad ... 41,000 Tobago ... 14,000 St. Lucia ... 18,000 \ St. Vincent 22,000 Grenada ... 30,000 Guiana ... 75,000 Dominica ... 17,000 Clergy 812, 1825. 1834. report 2 2 1 1 0 1 1 1 2 4 3 2 5 1 7 10 1 1 2 Church Schools for Poor 1812, 1825, 1834. 024 o o 13 003 o o 16 o o 27 o o 37 004 Remembering that these few clergy would be occupied chiefly with the white people, we are prepared to accept the opinion of the Baptist Commissioner, Dr. Underhill, on the condition of one of these Colonies, Trinidad, that it was utterly unprepared for giving Emancipation any religious character. CHAPTER V THE PERIOD IMMEDIATELY SUCCEEDING EMANCIPATION, 1 833 — 1870 Imperial assistance to Religion and Education— Liberality of * EGeaftaeglslatures— y.F.G. Negro Education Fund— C. M.S., Nonconformist Societies — Increase of Clergy — Catechists and Schoolmasters — Increased resort to Offices of the Church — Lay Help — Education — Benevolent Institutions — Encourage- ment of Industrious Habits — Missionary Enterprise engaged in — The Church in Colonies acquired since 1763 : Relation to Church of Rome in some of these — Endowment question — Education — Denominational system secured — Compromise as to Establishment in Guiana — The Bahamas — British Honduras — Statistics of religious bodies in 1870. The great social revolution was accomplished. Al- though the legal status of Apprenticeship still confined the liberties of the Negroes in all the Colonies ex- cept Antigua, the vital principle was asserted in the Act ; and as the Apprenticeship period was afterwards shortened, and actually ceased in 1838, it may be neg- lected ; from the date of Emancipation, August 1, 1834, freedom in all substantial respects began. From the point of view of the Church, this meant on the one hand full recognition of human personality and consequent absolute removal of all restrictions on the contact of the Church with the Negroes j and on the other hand full liberty to the Negroes themselves to listen to the Christian message, to accept its invita- tions, and to enjoy its benefits and its promises. We 100 THE PERIOD SUCCEEDING EMANCIPATION IOI are able now to see how timely was the restoration of Church order in 1824 : a priceless ten years was granted in which to set out the first lines of work, and then, when Emancipation came, the Bishops were at their post with an increased clergy, and some little ex- perience already acquired. The clergy were no longer a number of isolated pastors: Bishops with their Arch- deacons, and, since 1828, Rural Deans, inculcated order and exercised authority ; an illustration of the effect is seen in the Bishop of Barbados' statement at his visitation, that 72 out of the 73 Clergy in that diocese were in residence on their cures. In coping with the new situation the Established Church obtained some slight assistance from the Im- perial Government. The ,£20,000 a year voted in 1824 was continued; although when the number of Bishops and Archdeacons was increased in 1842, no addition was made to the grant. A " King's Letter " was granted to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, that is, authority in the name of the King to make collections in all churches. There was also a Grant of ^5000 for Normal Schools, ,£25,000 for School-houses, and Education Grants of some ,£30,000 a year until 1842, and lesser grants till 1846. Of these amounts ,£62,000 were paid to the special Negro Education Fund of the Society for the Propa- gation of the Gospel, and ,£6600 to the Scottish Missionary Society. Much more important however was the procedure of the Island Governments. Freed as the ruling classes now were from the obstruction of the Slave system, they could choose between the benign influ- ences of the rising spirit of progressive philanthropy at home, or the sullen rancour which too often remains in the hearts of supporters of lost causes. To their honour it was the former influence which prevailed. Throughout the islands both legislatures and vestries 102 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES braced themselves up to the immediate furtherance of the instruction of the emancipated labourers, and it was upon the clergy and the missionaries of all de- nominations that they relied. In Jamaica the vestries came forward with so much money that the Bishop was obliged to write that it was difficult for him to meet their votes with the corresponding supplies from other sources which the vestries required. In 1840 the Jamaica Assembly doubled the number of curates by a single vote, and increased the stipends by .£100 a year. In 1841 ^66,000 were paid out to the Church, including Vestry grants, besides the grants to Nonconformists. " Co-operation is universal," writes the Bishop. In Tobago a grant from the S.P.G. of ,£433 for a School- Chapel was met by the Legislature with ^2200: an additional rector and curate were placed on the list, and a vote in aid of schools passed. In Trinidad the Bishop found " a noble spirit throughout all classes connected with our Church, from the Governor down- wards"; the island was divided into seventeen parishes, and a stipend allotted to each as soon as clergy should be found, and a grant to the extent of half the cost promised for every new church. In Guiana the legislative grants for the years 1836-7-8 amounted to ,£15,635 for churches, £19,373 for clergy and catechists, and £3615 for houses or rents. As time went, and the S.P.G. felt that the crisis was over, and that its funds were required for other parts of the world, the Society gradually withdrew most of its aid to the West Indies, when the Island Gov- ernments promptly took up the responsibility : in Barbados, for example, six "Missionaries" were at once placed on the list of stipendiary clergy. The State authorities did well : but the Church at home was at least equally forward in coming to the THE PERIOD SUCCEEDING EMANCIPATION 1 03 assistance of the West Indian churches. The Propa- gation Society resolved upon " a great and immediate effort." It took the form of a " Negro Education Fund," to which the Society itself allotted in the sixteen years commencing with 1835 no less than ^85,000 ; some ^24,000 besides was added to it by the S.P.C.K., the Christian Faith Society, and West Indians in England ; and the Government, as already mentioned, added some ^62,000 more. The aggregate of ^171,000 was divided (except £7000 which went to Mauritius) almost equally between (1) Missionaries, (2) Teachers, and (3) Church and School buildings. The Christian Faith Society made direct grants to the Bishops for curates, catechists, and schools ; the grant to Jamaica diocese was .£500 a year, to Barbados diocese £700'. to be spent in small sums and on schools rather than clergy, and always to be temporary, and not so as to become settled expectancies. The Church Missionary Society increased its agents and its stations in Jamaica, and secured some excellent Mis- sionaries. The S.P.C.K. made free grants of Prayer Books, and the Bible Society of Bibles, and the Religious Tract Society also assisted. The crisis was adjudged to be surmounted in about fifteen years, so far as these Societies were concerned. The C.M.S. Missionaries were gradually placed on the Establishment in Jamaica, and fresh ones were not sent out, as this Society — formed, be it remembered, "for Africa and the East"— discontinued expenditure in the West Indies. In 1849 the S.P.G. considered that its work in the older islands might safely be left, and during the remainder of this period its connection was confined to the Trusteeship of the Codrington Estates. In Trinidad and Guiana it continued, for special reasons. But in another quarter the Colonial (now amalgamated with the Continental) Church Society began operations about this time, sending a 104 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES lay-agent to the Bahamas in 1843. Their scale of operations, however, was always small. With these efforts we may compare those made by the London Missionary Society, which resumed some operations in Demerara brought, to nn untimely Hnsp tenyears before by the " Smith drsturbances," and also th Jamaica; the Wesleyan Missionary Society, which at one time expended ^4000 a year in Jamaica ; and the Baptists, and the Society of Friends, sent contribu- tions to schools and some friendly visitors. These Societies also considered that they were not called upon to regard these Colonies as permanent objects for Missionary expenditure. The Baptists of Jamaica celebrated the Jubilee of the Baptist Missionary Society by relieving the Society from all farther claims, their 142 chapels, with 3 i,ooocommunicants, having become self-supporting, except as to their Ministers' College ; but the Society continued to assist in other islands. The Wesleyans of Jamaica were involved in some differences with the home Society, and with a final donation of ^"6000 became independent ; the London Missionary Society continued assistance somewhat longer, but by 1867 had only one Missionary in British Guiana. The Moravian church was dependent upon Central authorities still longer, until 1879, when resolutions for separation were adopted. CHURCH ACTIVITY IN THE WEST INDIES. Strengthened by well-wishers at home, and enjoying the co-operation of the Colonial Governments and "Vestries, the Church of England in the West Indies proceeded with vigour and courage to her noble task. (1) The Clergy. — The first care was the increase of the Ministry, and its better organization. This pro- ceeded so rapidly that ten years after 1833, when the new Bishop of Jamaica (Spencer) held his primary THE PERIOD SUCCEEDING EMANCIPATION 105 visitation, he was met by seventy-five clergy, " a larger number than had ever before been assembled out of England and Ireland." In the Southern islands Cod- rington College began to assist in the supply, and in the Barbados diocese the 37 clergy of 18 15, the 50 of 1825, the 81 of 1834 had become 99 in 1838. As to quality, a lay writer in Antigua (Mrs. Lanagan) speaks of there being, in 1844, "an enlight- ened and evangelical clergy " in that island ; and Dr. Underhill, in 1862, ascribes some decline of Baptist congregations to the fact that many Negroes were now resorting to the churches. The Bishops them- selves were increased in 1842, on the retirement of Bishop Coleridge ; the diocese of Barbados was relieved of the charge of Antigua and the Leeward Islands, which were formed into the new diocese of Antigua ; and of British Guiana, now the diocese of Guiana. All three of the new Bishops were men of West Indian experience : Archdeacon Parry (Barbados), Daniel Gateward Davis (Antigua), and William Piercy Austin (Guiana). This increase led to a more constant supervision of the labours of the clergy ; to their being called together to visitations, to their furnishing reports of their work for the Bishops' inspection and advice, and, when necessary, their authoritative direction : and the general movement towards that order which is implied in the Episcopal constitution of the Church. A sign of unity was seen in the institution of a Central Church Fund in Jamaica, but that proved premature, and it failed to be effective. (2) Subsidiary Orders. — The first Bishops were quick to see the advisability of supplementing the pastoral labours of the clergy by the institution of other offices, Catechist, Reader, and Schoolmaster, often held in combination. Some of these were held by men giving their whole time to religious work ; others, e. g. the 106 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES Schoolmasters, undertook it in addition to their ordinary duties, although the large place occupied by religious instruction in the school-teaching made that work by no means one that could be adequately described as secular, even on week-days. Some of the Catechists had fixed stations, others itinerated from estate to estate, or village to village, as these sprang into existence. Perhaps the Bishops and clergy were somewhat over-eager in making appoint- ments before men were quite ready ; Gardner says that some " book-keepers in Jamaica who were employed in this way were in no sense religious men." But the same historian says of many of the Baptist deacons that they were "drawbacks to the advance of the people." Still, everything could not be of very high order at the outset, and as time went on more selection was possible. Bishop Coleridge required of his Cate- chists that they should be " men able to read well, instructed in psalmody; " — the good Bishop always had his ear open for Music in the public services, — 14 and competent to explain in a familiar way to the Negroes any common word or passage of Scripture, or in the lesson-books of School." And he always invited these men to his Visitations, and addressed special words of advice and encouragement to them in his Charges. The time had not come for Lay Readers as purely voluntary workers but with definite status and duties, either there or in England. (3) The Offices of the Church. — Civil freedom carried with it, of course, open access to the offices of the Church, and there now lay before Churchmen the noble task of impressing upon the enfranchised the virtues of the Christian Sacraments and Sacramentals. {a) Baptism. — Baptisms and Confirmations in- creased rapidly. There were difficulties and perplexi- ties in abundance, of the same kind as those which face all Missionaries in their work; whether sponsors THE PERIOD SUCCEEDING EMANCIPATION 107 should be insisted on; who should be regarded as fit to be sponsors; the precise degree of instruction required for adult baptism, and so on. Bishop Cole- ridge's Charges abound in careful expressions of advice upon these important points. (b) Holy Communion. — The pressure to become Communicants showed the strong inclination of the Negro for religious rites; here was the highest rite, and he- was impulsively eager to take part in it. The Altar required guarding rather than being made easy of access. A system of tutelage was perforce adopted by the clergy, such as is common in Missionary work among impulsive races. Suspension from privilege was freely enforced; and, it should be added, humbly acquiesced in by offenders. Sentences of suspension, and the withdrawal of " tickets," were accepted without murmur, and on their expiry the offender — we cannot but believe genuinely repentant in his own conscience — seldom failed to present himself for penitential discipline and readmission. From the outset Bishop Coleridge remonstrated strongly against the continuance of the custom of leaving an interval between the retirement of the Whites from the Altar and the approach of the Blacks. (c) Marriage. — The celebration of the marriage of white people in private houses and outside canonical hours was steadily discouraged. Upon the Negro population the institution was pressed with unfailing insistence, a course in which the Nonconformists vied in honourable emulation with the Church. But the movement was very slow. At first there was an appearance almost of a " rush." The Barbados returns for 1835 (a Year after Emancipation), and next follow- ing years, show as follows — 634, 939,980, 1471, 1909, 1 37 1, 1 1 20, 1 139, 1047, 779. This is out of a popu- lation of 130,000; according to the marriage rate in England at that time the number would have been IOS THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES just about iooo; but the point to be observed is the rise up to 1909 followed by decline. Even so, these numbers are the result of many marriages being entered upon by people of middle life, who could not marry before Emancipation, and are not the normal marrying population, which has not even yet attained to any- thing like the English ratio, as we shall find later on. There were some obstacles to Marriage, such as the fact that many Negroes were already involved in con- nections polygamous and other. But the greatest obstacle appeared to be ingrained in the Negro character, a reluctance to rise to the level of Christian marriage, which even the unswerving exhortations of respected clergy, pastors, and class-leaders, backed by his own strong leaning for religious society and religi- ous ceremonies, proved unable to overcome. Further attention will be given to this vital point later on ; for this period we can only record that the Church made marriage easy, that many of the upper classes assisted with personal persuasion, but that progress was exceedingly slow. With regard to the White classes the prevailing open concubinage received a great check, although there was a very unsatisfactory dilatoriness in allowing the subordinate whites either stipends or residential accommodation such as to render marriage feasible. The remedy for this came about partly in the shrinking of the book-keeper and overseer class of whites, and their replacement more and more by men of some colour. The opening out of emigration to the States and Australia carried the young men of Great Britain elsewhere than to the Sugar plantations. But the general elevation was undoubted. A sagacious ob- server, Dr. Davy, a brother of Sir Humphrey, goes so far as to say ( West Indies, p. 74.), " What the hurricane of 1 83 1 did for the physical atmosphere of Barbados, Emancipation effected for its moral and domestic the Period succeeding emancipation 109 atmosphere." And of the people of colour he under- stood that whereas formerly "a woman of colour considered it an honour to become the mistress of a white man, and coveted the connection, she now — 1853 — avoids it as a disgrace." (d) Burial. — This was transformed into a Christian rite. Hitherto many burials had taken place in retired places on the Estates; in the case of the slaves without any rites other than the heathen customs which they had brought over from Africa. The burials soon began to take place in churchyards and chapel yards, and, of course, with religious services. At the same time the burial of the rich white people in vaults underneath the churches was discouraged, on sanitary grounds, of course. The Registration of Baptisms, Marriages, and Deaths was made the rule so far as the Church was concerned : in Jamaica the Government sent for sets of Register- Books from England at great expense for use in the vestries. (e) Public Worship. — Attendance became common on Sundays as a matter of course. Bishop Coleridge pressed on his clergy the observance of Holy Days and Public Prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays. The churches themselves were not notable examples of architecture. The older ones were fitted with galleries, and with increased seating accommodation on the ground floor, to provide for the increased con- gregations. The great pressure to get the new ones built would have prevented much thought being given to architecture, even had it not been that there were also two other obstacles to this : (1) the liability of many islands to hurricane with frequent ruin of buildings, and consequent disinclination to add ex- pensive ornamentation, and (2) the depressed state Of Church architecture in England itself at that time. As this period advanced more attention was given, but 110 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES yet not enough to give a solution to the great contro- versy as to the best form of tropical churches, i. e. between what we may call the idea of a Cavern, thick walls and small openings, and the Open style, spacious windows and wide open doors. The former is really more nearly indigenous, and characterizes the churches of Spanish America ; the latter became the favourite in the British West Indies. The large church of St. John's, Antigua, costing some ^"40,000, is in the Italian style, and might stand in Bath or Cheltenham; the parish churches of Barbados — all rebuilt after the hurricane except one — were of the style of stone churches built in English towns about that same period, with round-topped windows, and galleries, but the provision for openings in the windows was much more liberal. Perhaps the finest church built in this period was that of St. George, Basseterre, St. Kitts. It was erected under the rectorship of Jermyn, after- wards Primus Bishop of the Scottish Church, and its design was commended by Beresford Hope in the Art Journal. The Altars were Communion-tables covered with red cloth, placed in a carpeted sanctuary, within a heavy rail of dark native wood. Fonts were provided in most churches, and Bishop Coleridge always required that they should be properly placed at the West end. In Church Music this Bishop, as previously intimated, was unwearied in pressing for Congregational singing, although only within the narrow limits of Psalmody, i. n°t stated. (This statement omits to notice that the Dominica Schools are not all denominational.) Trinidad. — The schools are of two kinds, secular and denomi- national. Schools, 187 (61 secular); scholars, 21,895 (6984 secular); grant, not stated. (Fees are exacted, twopence per week.) Tobago. — Denominational. Schools, 24; scholars, 2300; grant, £doo. Windward Islands. — Government and denominational : viz. 16 and 101 (117); scholars, 17,080; grant, ^5179. (Fees in Grenada. ) SOCIAL AND MORAL LIFE. The most prominent question of social life in the West Indies is that of the relations of the Races. Mixture is proceeding, but slowly, the class of coloured people is increasing in numbers and in intelligence, and yet there is not anything that can be called absorption ; indeed the whites are, naturally, in the orderly and recognized relationships of life at least, farther than ever from mixing with the humbler races here as in South Africa. But there should in any case be sought a spirit of mutual goodwill between the two races, and general respect for each other's " talent" in the present order of things; and this the Church is constantly fostering. With no abstract prejudice in her Gospel, which is neither for Jew nor Greek, as such ; with no pressure on her conscience that it is committed to her to guide the working laws of racial difference by anything more definite than care that they are not a barrier to Gospel brother- REORGANIZATION AND PROGRESS 1 93 hood, she asserts spiritual equality, and leaves the relations of Race to work themselves out in the light of belief in a common destiny. To the ranks of her ministry there is open access. Any special caution is based upon known weakness of stability in the lower race, and consequent necessity for longer proof of sincerity on the part of each in- dividual before he is entrusted with grave responsi- bility. Just as the mixed race has an advantage in its unexplained immunity from several serious forms of disease, and can apply that advantage for its own benefit; so it is only common sense to recognize that they do not shine in endurance of purpose, but are prone to lives of ease and luxury. And the consider- ation of candidates for the ministry must take the disqualification into account just as it rejoices to give weight to the special advantage. The prejudice felt against colour in high places is being quietly worn off in the offices and employments of the Church, but not very quickly ; the preference for a white man as parish priest still prevails, and a parish considers itself under something of an indignity if one cannot be secured. Some ten years ago the Bishop of Barbados for the first time in the island history presented a coloured Curate to one of the eleven Rectories. A protest was at once raised. But the Bishop was firm, opposition soon died down, and the parish learned that it had gained an able priest. At Codrington College it has been an honourable distinction that the coloured students, though few, have learnt to feel at no disadvantage. In public worship in the churches there is, indeed, some keeping apart, but if this is looked into it will be found that it is social distinctions which are being observed, much as in an English parish church. No coloured man, much less a Negro, has yet become a British West Indian Bishop ; but the majority of the Bishops have N 194 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES come from England, and so long as men of the same stamp can be secured there is likely to be a preference for them, as there is for presidents of the Wesleyan Conferences or pastors of the chief Congregation- alist churches or principals of Calabar College. In fact the number of coloured people whose education and attainments have placed them, man for man, on an equality with the white people is very small. And there is evidence that neither in these Colonies nor in the Southern States of America is there any genuine demand for an unlearned priesthood on the part of the people of colour. The education, the stability of character, the power of leading must come first. But when a generation shall have passed in which men of colour, and Negroes too, have acquired experience in the various offices and employments detailed in earlier pages, they, or at least their sons, will offer a growing source from which native clergy will more and more be drawn. When we are thinking of Races of lower organization, perhaps the first question asked of religion by four people out of five is — How does it influence Family life? And especially, what is its effect in bringing the Family to the Christian type by means of the marriage of one man to one woman, and mutual fidelity to the vow? Other institutions and other virtues may to some appear of greater importance — sobriety, industry, or honesty. But Englishmen are fairly sure to look upon this as the foremost question. It is just on this point that Churchmen in the West Indies cannot conceal feelings of bitter dis- appointment and ever-recurring regret. They know well that the redemption of the Negro in this respect is very far from being in an advanced stage. Allow- ing fully for such casual and individual lapses as are found also in English towns and villages, it is plain from the proportion of illegitimate births in the West REORGANIZATION AND PROGRESS 1 95 Indies that home-life after the Christian manner is not yet attained by the bulk of the Negro Race ; for it the home built upon a lifelong pledge and a conjoined responsibility for children is not yet the rule. It is not only that there is sad want of restraint on the part of the young, but also that libertinage, in the sense of numerous and brief attachments, marks the relationship of grown-up Negro men and women, in place of the single-hearted union to which the Church is bound to confine her blessing, and upon which civilization builds its hopes. Fair minds have always been ready to refer this to the recency of removal from African life, and to the wretched degradation of the Slavery period. And so it is that the Negro has not yet attained to the elevation of character necessary to sustain the higher order of family life. There is in him a reluctance to enter upon the pledge for life, born, in the case of the conscientious and religiously disposed, of self-distrust. Both men and women among them are aware of the difficulty of controlling fancy, and of the transitory character of most of their affections. And they shrink from the promise of constancy. With them it is the women as much as the men who are thus constituted ; there is in the Negro race a nearer approach to equality between the sexes than is found in European races. The woman is almost as capable a breadwinner as the man ; at any rate she can, in early and middle life, easily earn enough to keep a house for herself and two or three children \ and not infrequently it is the woman whose affection cools or changes, and from whom arises the abandonment of the connection and the choice of another mate. There are indeed numberless cases of lifelong attachments outside the bonds of marriage j in these, if only they could have known that they could be constant, they might have asked for the Christian rite. .96 THE CHURCH IX THE WEST INDIES In overcoming this reluctance to make the pledge of constancy even resort to the religious motive — cherished in other ways — has failed them. In Slavery days Mr. Pinder in his early labours on the Codrington Estates found the slaves docile and impressible in even- way but this : he was pleased with their gener- osity, their affectionate regard for himself, their desire for all other religious ordinances ; but on this he had to report — "Although the marriage of slaves was a point which I had at heart from the first, and formed one of the early regulations, still none could be prevailed upon to marry according to the rites of the Church." There will always be instability in Negro com- munities until this change is effected ; an instability within the community. As Bishop Branch said in his first Charge, under the present lawlessness " Maternal feelings are blunted and paternal very often almost obliterated." And to this all Christian bodies have borne unwavering witness. Xo plea of adapting social system to Negro character has ever had recog- nition in their counsels. Even in slavery times the Nonconformist Missionaries worked hard for Mar- riage : the Church from the time when she began to be free to move has never ceased to put it in the forefront : and to-day it is a chief anxiety, and a permanent object of pastoral care. Has any progress been made? At first after Emancipation many marriages were celebrated on the part of those who had been waiting, and hopes rose high. But when things settled down, it was seen that the influences noted were to operate for many years to come. The number of illegitimate births in these Colonies is considerably greater than the legitimate. In Jamaica the returns of 1SS5 were sixty per cent; in Barbados 1891. 2S47 legitimate to 4510 illegiti- mate: in Antigua in 18S4 it was S37 legitimate to REORGANIZATION AND PROGRESS 197 1517 illegitimate: 1886, 892 to 1457: 1892, 813 to 1293 ; in Guiana 1889, 1327 to 2155. When allowance is made for the legitimate births of the White people, and for those of such coloured and Negro people as hold offices in the Church, or in other Christian bodies, the condition of the rank and file of the Negroes is distressing. The Church has this ever in mind ; chiefly and most effectively in her parochial and pastoral work. Church Discipline is invariably exercised when open breach is discovered ; the Communion ticket is with- drawn until there is expression of repentance and sufficient time has elapsed to furnish evidence of its sincerity. This is acquiesced in by the offender, and approved by the people; to its operation we owe multitudes of cases of reform. In Windward Islands their first draft of Canons proposed that only a part of the Marriage Service should be used, and no bell or hymn allowed where there had previously been cohabitation ; but on revisal this was not retained ; nor was a provision for baptizing illegitimate children separately from legitimate. There are in several dioceses Purity Societies or branches of the White Cross Army carefully endeavour- ing to promote elevation. In 1896 the Bishop of Jamaica called a Conference of twenty-four ministers of religion on " Moral teaching." The Synod of that year addressed itself to such practical measures as peti- tioning Government on the provision and inspection of the humbler class of dwelling-houses, especially in the direction of providing separate accommodation for the sexes; and on the more efficient registration of illegitimate children ; on the employment of women in field-agriculture, and their lack of instruction in domestic arts, such as cooking and needlework, which enable a woman to make a home in which she finds her happiness so much involved that the vagaries of I98 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES the lower passions find a controlling influence, and the waywardness of affection receives a check. Of the relations between white people and black people a much more cheerful account can be given. While there is some individual laxity, and the rejec- tion in Jamaica of a Bill for registering fathers of illegitimate children along with the mothers has not a pleasant look, the general tone has completely changed. It is here as between the educated and the ignorant, the rich and the poor at home. Of this change a casual traveller is no competent judge. At the ports of the West Indies as of Europe there gathers a scum which is in no sense representative of the peasantry of the country. But in the villages the clergy and the catechists and the ministers and class- leaders can testify that in this respect the storm cloud has lifted from these communities within these last two generations. Sobriety. — The Negro has not fallen so deeply into the vice of Intemperance as the working classes of England have done. In the Slavery times they had little opportunity ; so no ill balance is carried over from them. Indeed, after Emancipation it was that a tendency to fall appeared. The Negro is considered by competent observers to be abstemious by natural disposition, and this is not enumerated among the vices most hindering Christian work, in the report of Bishop Tugwell or that of Dr. Barrett upon what they heard in Jamaica. Still, the Bishop of Jamaica's Conference of 1895 included it, and adopted petitions to the Legislature on the licensing laws. Veracity. — There is large room for improvement in this virtue, as is always the case with a weaker race in social contact with a stronger; resort to " strata- gems of helplessness," to use Bishop Thorold's phrase, is sure to be made. But whatever be the cause the Church will continue to work assiduously to remove it. REORGANIZATION AND PROGRESS I QQ Steadiness, Perseverance. — Here again we find a lack, "a painful deficiency of sustained effort," as Dr. Barrett puts it. This, too, is racial character, and the replacement of individual fancy by Christian motive must be looked to as the remedy. Industry. — Misconceptions on this point are rife. The Negro is commonly described as constitutionally indolent or lazy. Even Sir L. de Verteuil says that he is exceedingly indolent and ready to rely on others' work. But his vindication is not far to seek. Things are comparative : regard being had to the fewness of his pressing needs, to the ease of their satisfaction, and to the inherent difficulty of prolonged exertion in the tropics, we must be chary of admitting the applicability of a term of moral reprobation on this head. And in these days when opinion at home is setting in strongly against the ceaseless round of toil of the Factory regime, and the Eight Hours Day is becoming a fixed article in the Labour programme, the sympathy of workers will rather be with the Negro than against him, providing he keeps himself from pauperism — as he does. The value of leisure must be allowed even to him. In the Colonies where land was scarce, as Barbados, he has continued to be a trusty labourer. Often, indeed, he adopts the plan of energetically clearing off his work in the first three days of the week and reposing during the remainder, but there is nothing reprehensible in such an apportionment of toil, though it may be unwholesome or unwise. In other Colonies he has resorted to the cultivation of small holdings, in heartfelt hate of the old plantation driving. The fact is that the gross produce of these Colonies has been increased all along the line — by other means, of course, as well, but also not without some vigorous co-operation on the part of the labour- ing class. The Coolie population stands on a different footing, and no one has ever thought of accusing it 200 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES of labouring beneath its capacity, however modest that may be. Thrift. — De Verteuil thinks the Negro improvi- dent ; but there is some development, as is seen in the Savings Bank returns; e.g. Jamaica, the 7970 de- positors in 1881 had become 27,000 in 1896; Barba- dos, 4036 to 11,200 (amount ,£35,000 to £180,000); Antigua, 720 to 1790; St. Vincent, 640 to 1012; Nevis, 33 to 86. And Friendly Societies abound. Possibly a large part of this is due to the coloured people. Still, pauperism is not common; "real pauperism is hardly known in Jamaica," says Mr. Lucas. Honesty. — Dr. Barrett's Congregationalist friends placed dishonesty, along with untruthfulness and im- purity, as the three chief defects in the people as observed by them. And the daily doling out of household supplies to cook and "butler " in a West Indian household, with a similar proceeding for corn and fodder for the stable, is not a cheerful feature of West Indian domestic life. A still more serious offence is Predial larceny, i. e. robberies from gardens and fields. This is serious because of the open nature of these places, more especially on the smaller properties ; expensive walls and gates are out of the question, and the injury arising from such larcenies falls most heavily on the labouring class. A rise in honesty could easily be demonstrated to be the best policy for them all, if such a mode of persuasion could be effective. The Bishop of Jamaica advocates the diminution of temptation by replacing "plots" at a distance by gardens surrounding the homesteads. Robbery with personal violence is very rare. Persofial offe?ices. — Offences of a personal kind are due chiefly to the quarrelsome disposition of the Negro. Any attempted resort to the knife has to be sternly punished, as it is too frequent on the occasion REORGANIZATION AND PROGRESS 20i of the slightest misunderstanding. But deliberate assaults are rare, and murder very infrequent. In the crowded island of Barbados there was only one execution in seven years. The magistrates' courts are fully occupied, but chiefly with very small offences. And some allow- ance must be made for a love of litigation on the part of the Negro. To his simple mind the pomp and ceremony of appearance in a law-court as prose- cutor, witness, or even defendant, is a source of very considerable enjoyment. Cheerfulness is everywhere recognized as a prominent quality of Negro character, even to exuberance. Un- questionably religious ritual should recognize this. .Our Church has profited from such reflections on ritual as those of Long and Bridges, and the "Psalmody" of Bishop Coleridge is now added to by ample supply of hymnody and some ritualistic display. Fortitude under suffering must also be allowed to him, especially after a preliminary outburst of expression has been allowed its course. Devotion to a leader or an employer who has won his regard is another strong point with which all readers of the troubled times of West Indian history are familiar. On these points of social and moral character the bearing of religious influence is close and direct, and the experienced clergy and lay-workers of the Church, along with the ministers, deacons, and class-leaders of the other Christian organizations, form the agencies to which we must look for effective progress. It is, however, usually thought that the Negro mind is of a compartmental order; it can hold in one part to religious profession, and in another to vicious practice to an extent quite inordinate and unlike what is true of the European mind. The Negro, it is said, will join vigorously in the hymns, say emphatic Amens to 202 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES the Prayers, and listen with rapt interest to the Sermon, and not the less for these things on his way home rob a garden, or quarrel violently with a com- panion. This must be allowed for ; and so far as it is really prevalent the clergy are wide awake to it, and for this reason their pastoral work is pre-eminently practical. Attention is assiduously paid to the necessity of giving religion its due practical force ; and here it is that the primary importance of Church discipline stands out, and it is with this, combined with regular use of the offices of the Church, public worship included, that the pastoral care of West Indian clergy is largely occupied. Certain it is that the godless Negro, with mind wholly unmoved by religious motive, unoccupied with religious aspirations, and untrained by any religious discipline, is a lamentable object of pity. And the people of colour find the same necessity in an accentuated form ; with mental abilities more acute the clever but unprincipled Mulatto is a still more forbidding character, acting as a beacon on the minds even of those outside Christian bodies against tampering with the institutions in which intellectual and moral training are never separated. In 1895 the Bishop of Jamaica called a conference of the leaders of religious bodies at the suggestion of a retired Moravian minister. Presbyterians, Congre- gationalists, and Methodists met and united with the Church in adopting a circular letter to the congre- gations, and in setting apart a week (September 1896) for its public reading. The Romanists declined to join. This chapter shows us that it is in no vaguely sentimental spirit that the West Indian Church pro- ceeds with her task in shaping the character of the populations committed to her. Churchmen are con- REORGANIZATION AND PROGRESS 203 stantly called upon to be active in their civic capacities, as when the Bishop of Jamaica in his widely con- ceived address to Synod in 1897 included such pro- blems as the housing of the poor among the subjects for consideration by this " religious " body. And in the variety of the agencies which her mind is now bringing to bear, the Church is seen to be very practical in her conception of godliness and of her own duty. Her sacramental system, as worked by diocesan and parochial and missionary agencies, is supplemented by societies for the special purposes of temperance and chastity, for the banding together of boys and girls, for protection of the poor and friendless. Agencies such as those found effective in guiding upward social and moral life in Great Britain and Ireland are being applied in those tropical countries. And the whole constitute on the part of the Church an impelling force towards the civilization and the evangelization of these communities. CHAPTER VIII SPECIAL TOPICS The Coolie System — Responsibility of the Church — Efforts made — The Aboriginal inhabitants : In the Islands, in Guiana — Brett's Missionary Labours — Recent work — Work in Non-British Islands — Foreign Missionary Work : The Pongas Mission in W. Africa — Codrington College : Its Foundation and Early History ; Re-constitution by Bishop Coleridge ; Principal Rawle ; Recent History — The Con- nection of W. Indian Church with English Church Societies : S.P.G., S.P.C.K., C. M.S., and Colonial and Continental — The New England Company — The Christian Faith Society, its origin and history — The Ladies' Negro Education Society. THE COOLIES Soon after emancipation the Sugar Colonies began to look elsewhere than to Wrest Africa for a supply of the labour by tropical Races. No free Negro emigration from Africa seemed ever contemplated, a fact which shows pretty plainly the one-sided character of the Slave Trade so far at least as the wishes of Africans were concerned. In Jamaica the freed Negroes were resorting to peasant cultivation, and for the undeveloped lands of Guiana and Trinidad no labour was forthcoming at all. Our Colony of Mauritius was the first to look to India with its vast " coolies " (or labour) population. And for the West Indies the plan was largely due to a very capable Governor of Trinidad, Lord Harris, and a very able 204 THE COOLIES 205 Colonist, Charles Warner. Steps were soon taken in Guiana also, and to a small extent in Jamaica. We need not here argue out the Ccolie question, if it be a question any longer. Philanthropists were reasonably suspicious at the outset; jealous lest under a different name the old evils should be resumed with another race of people as the victims. And a some- what excitable English writer, Ernest Jenkins, some- time member of Parliament for Dundee, went over, and on his return argued with violence against the system. But the British mind was reassured by the different report of so tried a friend of labour as "Parson Lot " (Charles Kingsley), who was thoroughly pleased with what he saw j and the Nonconformists could specially rely upon a similarly favourable one, given by the General Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, Dr. Underhill, when he visited the West Indies officially for that Society in 1862, after having been in India and seen native life there. Then there was further confidence arising from the fact that Guiana and Trinidad were both Crown Colonies, directly under control, and that Jamaica not long afterwards became so. The vigilance and scruple had been of service. The Colonial Governments were obliged to see that in inviting systematic and State-aided immigration they were incurring a moral responsibility. No longer was the caprice of individuals to be the ruling force, but there was to be regulation throughout by the Govern- ment itself, it was to be The Coolie System. At the India end Guiana and Trinidad each support a Government Emigration Agent, and in each Colony there is a Department with a staff of inspectors and medical officers, the whole costing in Trinidad ,£65,000 a year; immigration from China is regulated by a con- vention between the Chinese Government and ours. The terms of indenture are a Government affair, as 206 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES are the quarters, the wages, the food, and the medical attendance. Under this scrupulous management there is no reason for supposing that the system is not a sagacious and beneficent industrial enterprise. In conception certainly it is economically sound. It relieves India of some surplus population and it supplies some countries which require labour and offer fertile soils with the necessary workpeople. They come over in sufficient numbers to maintain their own social institutions, taking up life again on then- traditional basis. And they know that they are perfectly free to return when their indenture ends. Meanwhile some of them remit to India their savings (from Trinidad in 1894 ^11,663). The returns show in Guiana under indenture 20,000; on plantations, but no longer under indenture, 35,000: no longer on estates, but engaged in small industries, 43,000; total 98,000, which with 16,000 Chinese makes up 40 per cent, of the population of the Colony. In Trinidad in 1895 there were 84.000, 30 percent, of the population. In Jamaica this immigration assumes a different character, and is open to grave question. There can be.no plea of insufficiency of working-people, and the Coolie is only resorted to for the maintenance of plan- tation labour. In fact, the immigration was suspended in 1886, but it was resumed in 1891, and the Depart- ment is still retained; the total number in the Colony in 1893 was 13,000 only. From the point of view of religion the system has brought a very serious addition to the responsibilities of the Church. Their situation is not, of course, the same as that of the old Slaves; the Coolies are not removed from their own forms of social and religious life. In their villages they enjoy freedom of religious observance, and even on the melancholy occasion in Trinidad, when life was lost in the suppression of a Mohammedan festival, the blunder was caused only by THE COOLIES 207 the officials thinking it necessary in the interests of public order that such celebrations should be confined to the villages and not take place in streets and public places. Our relation to them is, therefore, not differ- ent from what it is to the population of India. But their presence constitutes an opportunity; here are Hindus and Mohammedans brought away from their ancient temples and mosques, and possibly therefore more open to evangelical work; here they no longer form the mass of the people with Christians as the strangers, but they are aware that they are the visitors in Christian countries. The Church authorities took full note of this. Great and varied as were their existing responsibilities and gravely as they regarded this addition — "a slice of somebody else's mission- field floated to our shores," as Bishop Rawle said, — in Guiana Bishop Austin and Mr. Brett at once en- deavoured to secure some Christian teaching for them. An important step was taken wThen a leading West India merchant, Mr. Quentin Hogg, well known in London as founder of the first great Polytechnic, founded a Mission station on his estate at Bel Air. Other laymen subscribe to the Bishop's fund, the S.P.G. give a grant, and the Government allow the Bishop ^600 a year for this purpose. Three Mission- aries and ten catechists are at work in seven mission centres, and there are five students at the college. On some estates the proprietors have given to the clergy the appointment of teachers and the oversight and management of the estate schools. In Trinidad the local Association of the S.P.G. at once appealed to the Colonists. " By immigration properly conducted," they said, "that is to say on Christian principles and in a Christian spirit, Trinidad may be a Missionary Country, an asylum as it were to multitudes from the darkness and misery of heathenism ; a centre from which light may radiate 208 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES upon them, and from them perhaps be reflected upon their native lands." Bishop Rawle secured a Missionary from Chota Nagpore, who began well, but failed in health, after which the work languished; on the arrival of Bishop Hayes in 1889 it at once revived. He has had the advantage of the co-operation of an experienced English clergyman, Canon Trotter, who resigned the important vicarage of Alnwick to go out to his assist- ance, and now in season and out of season works for these mission stations and schools. Catechists are employed, estates are visited, schools and orphanages opened. The special need as expressed by the Bishop was for a Hindu priest to be at the head of the work, and in 1896 he reports that he has secured one who is now at work. The Presbyterians of Nova Scotia also have mission schools for Coolies in the islands. In Jamaica the Home and Foreign Missionary Society has set apart ^150 a year for Coolie work, distributed in various grants; there are about 12,000 Coolies in the Colony. There is certain advantage in the immigrants being of low caste, or of no caste at all. But a great obstacle is felt in the variety of the regions from which they are drawn, causing them to be exceedingly varied in tradition, languages, and religion. Afghans, Nepau- lese, and Madrassees are all found; the bulk now come from the "North West Province." As was previously mentioned, in the Mission College no two of the five students could work together. The fact that many return home has two sides; it renders them more difficult of impression; but in the cases where an impression is made, opportunity for carrying it back to India opens out. The Chinese immigration is not extensive ; in Guiana they numbered 3714, and they soon become store-keepers. When they first arrived Bishop Austin THE ABORIGINAL INHABITANTS 209 wisely persuaded the Government not to scatter them, and in this way approach to them was rendered more easy. The Chinese have responded much more than they do in China ; they have built chapels, and cate- chists' houses, and "they make model Christians,"says a rector in whose parish a body of them reside. "Bright, intelligent, liberal-minded, self-denying," says the present Primate. And the possibility of far-reaching effect is illustrated in a gratifying manner by the report of one of our clergy in Hong Kong, that " one of the best catechists there is a Chinese who had been instructed in the Church Missions in Guiana." A Guiana rector records a Harvest Festival Service in which the English clergyman was assisted by a Chinese catechist and a Hindu catechist, a Chinaman was at the harmonium, and the hymns and chanting were, simultaneously, in three different languages* THE ABORIGINAL INHABITANTS The occupation of America by the aborigines whom we found there is now referred to the Age of Stone. Homo Americus had branched off from Homo Mon- golicus in that early period, and whatever culture was found was of indigenous growth save what was common to the Mongolic race in the period before metals came into use. They are of a coppery brown colour, with hair straight and black; and we found many grades of social progress, from the savages of the Brazil forests to the city dwellers of Mexico and Peru, of Yucatan and the plateaux of the Andes. Those wrho inhabited the islands and the N.E. coast of South America belong to what is best known as the Carib family. (i.) Aborigines of the Isla?ids. — The sweeping away of the Aborigines from the larger Islands by the Spaniards is one of the most terrible phenomena of o 2IO THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES the history of European expansion. In Jamaica, for example, we found none. But there were two groups on islands now occupied by us — one of milder nature in the Leewards, and a fiercer tribe on the Windwards. Hunters and fishermen, living much on the sea, expert in canoes, and given to cannibalism ; this is the race through whom every schoolboy is introduced to savage life in Robinson Crusoe. Their presence in the early stages of our settlements is not sufficiently remem- bered now, perhaps because these were absent from Barbados as well as from Jamaica. Bat the history of Antigua, St. Kitts, and St. Vincent was much affected by them ; a spirit of unrest and of dissimilarity from England was kept up in the colonists. Our first settlement in St. Lucia was effectively expelled by them (1641). Here as in other places the French were more acceptable to them. Once the French and ourselves agreed to leave St. Vincent and Dominica to them (1660), and they were to help us elsewhere. In 1674 the Antigua settlers were so much harassed by incursions from Dominica that they sent an expedition under Warner, son of the Governor, who had to oppose Caribs headed by his own half-brother. In Grenada a French official roused hostility and a war of extermination set in there ; and the Caribs were driven into the sea from a hill still named " Morne des Sauteurs ! " In St. Vincent there are both yellow and black Caribs, the latter partially descended from ship- wrecked negroes; these prevailed over the others, and afterwards resisted the English; when we took over the island in 1763, we had to send troops from North America, and allotted the Caribs some "reserves." There are only about 200 there now; some were deported later on, like the Maroons of Jamaica, to an island in the Bay of Honduras : they have since been removed to the mainland and number about 2000. In Dominica there are perhaps 300 in the forests on the N.E. side. THE ABORIGINAL INHABITANTS 211 In Trinidad, 1082 at the capitulation of the island have declined to less than 100; their women were appropriated by both whites and Negroes, so that there is a strain of their blood in that island, though they themselves have almost gone. A few with some Spanish blood linger in the Virgin islands. Tobago, the veritable Crusoe island, has none. Those in St. Vincent are Christians, both yellow and black, forming a district in the parish of St. Patrick; those in Honduras have attention from our Church. The other fragments seem to be fading quietly out of existence beyond reach; much as the gipsies of England. It is thought that many really got away to the mainland from these islands of ours; if so, the history of the race, so far as British influence is con- cerned, has been not one of extermination, nor even of crushing slowly out, but of displacement to wider forests and broader rivers on the Main. This had been effected before the Church awoke ; since then, as we have been led to extend our Colonial empire to Guiana, we have had work to do among the Carib race and have done it. (ii.) On the main/and, i.e. for us, Guiana. — The family here is composed of four different tribes, known as Arawaks, Acawaios, Waraus, and Caribs proper; each has its dialect, and they do not at all associate freely. Their occupations are chiefly fishing, growing cassava for the cakes which constitute their " staff of life," weaving baskets and hammocks (at once their bed and chair), spinning cotton, and making simple pottery. But slight clothing is needed, although now, through the growing resort to markets on the coast for the sale of their produce, they are beginning to wear European woven cloths, and in more abundant quantity; somewhat to the detriment of the older people, at least, as these cannot get into the habit of changing their dress when wet. 212 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES In character they are phlegmatic ; their demeanour is impressive, and they have something of the Mongo- lian wariness. They are capable of great self-control; enduring, for instance, the rubbing of red pepper into their eyes before they shoot a rapid, as a propitiation to the local spirit; a ceremony so painful that the younger men cannot quite repress a sobbing, although the full-grown endure it without a sound. And yet they have a childish sense of fun. Mr. Brett records their boyish glee when a Warau sitting on his heels in church rolled over and cannoning against the others caused a general downfall ; so hilarious was the party that there was nothing for it but for all to get up and leave the chapel. Remembering Humboldt's opinion of the gravity of manner and general look of sadness of these very tribes, the historian feels some relief at an incident like this, as an insight into a brighter region of their character. Those in the Pomeroon district are the wildest; the Acawaios of the Potaro, Pierce described, after living for six weeks in the midst of a camp of 1200 of them cooped up like bees in a hive, as 11 honest to an extraordinary degree, pure in morals and modest in demeanour, perfectly good- humoured, kind and gentle in mind and manner." In some districts their vigour was such as to cause them to be employed by the Dutch against the escaped Negroes. They are far from being numerous within our territory ; indeed estimates vary from 7000 to 50,000 ; but this is partly because some are speaking only of the settled part of the Colony. The Colonial Office List for 1897 says 17,000; but only 7000 were enumerated in the censusof 1891 inthesettled districts. Considering the difficult character of the work already in hand in Guiana, the judgment of history could hardly have been severe if the Church in those days had not seen its way to following these wild people up their rivers and swamps. But they were THE ABORIGINAL INHABITANTS 213 brought by Providence to the notice of men who could not do otherwise than move in their behalf. The first Bishop when Guiana was part of the exten- sive diocese of Barbados, Coleridge, did not fail to initiate action; assisted by his Archdeacon Austin, afterwards himself to be Bishop, and a rector, Duke, of Holy Trinity parish, adjacent to the N.W. district. But there had already been some attempts in another part of the Colony towards what is now Dutch Guiana. In the Berbice district the Moravians had a mission from 1738 to 181 2, when it was destroyed by Bush Negroes and never renewed. The Church Missionary Society sent out two Missionaries to the Essequibo district, but the Brazilian neighbours interfered ; twice they expelled Mr. Youd, and finally he was poisoned by a sorcerer, and his successor died of fever. So the mission " suddenly collapsed." It had never been suc- cessful; it was always in leading strings, and there was an error of policy in admitting half-breeds to squat on the Mission lands, as these repelled the Indians. In later times the remnants of this early work were gathered together, and now the Essequibo Mission forms an important link with the others. The present Missions date from an act of Bishop Coleridge. Within four years of his arrival in the West Indies he took up the case of the River Indians of Guiana, by sending Mr. Pinder to report on them. When the three Colonies were united, the Bishop visited them and included in his inspection some of the great rivers (1839). In 1840 at his instance the S.P.G. sent out a clergyman and a catechist. The latter was destined to be the great benefactor of these tribes; and to leave a name of distinguished honour in Missionary history. William Henry Brett proved to be singularly gifted tot Missionary work ; his religion was lucid in its simplicity and complete in its hold upon his character, his patience was without 2I4 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES limit, his powers of organization unusual ; supported as he was by his Bishop, Archdeacon, and rector, the plans and execution were all his own. His intellectual abilities were precisely what were required for a Missionary pioneer : though without Grammar School education he had a forcible style of his own, was able to read Latin and Greek for his own edification, and to take interest in Spanish, Portuguese and French, and so to be in contact with the nations across the border of his district. He was able to reduce to writing all the four dialects of the three tribes with which he was concerned. He was himself another of the results of the memorable Missionary influence which commenced with David Brainerd and passed to Henry Martyn, as he himself narrated, and he was physically endowed sufficiently to endure forty years of energetic life in a tropical country, breaking down however at the close, and ending his -days in consider- able bodily suffering. That Christian humility which penetrates true Christian workers was strikingly exemplified in the man who in his last illness, after his forty years of toil, was overheard to murmur as his closing petition, "Gentle Saviour, pass me not by." On the arrival of these two the clergyman was at once struck down with fever and ordered home again. The young catechist had to make his choice of a course, and he decided to go up the rivers. He was directed to go to "The Wild Coast," between the Essequibo and Orinoco, towards that region which has so long been the subject of dispute between Venezuela and Great Britain. Here the rivers are still the roads and the Indian tracks the only means of cross-communication. For a long time he was alone under the roof of an old Negro woman, who had occupied a deserted cabin on the river bank. The Indians kept aloof and shot by in their canoes if they saw him approach them. THE ABORIGINAL INHABITANTS 215 The change began with the visit of a remarkable man, an Arawak chief who had travelled over the whole of that region and had seen something of Christianity in the coast towns, although it could not by any possi- bility have been much. This man attached himself to Brett, was baptized with the name of the first Gentile convert, and for no less than twenty-eight years was his right hand, dying in full faith and charging his sons to continue to be loyal and active Christians. From the influence of Cornelius the work began, and it went on continuously. Brett lived in the river districts (with a wife in later years) for a long period, and then was appointed rector of Holy Trinity, the adjacent parish, and so kept them still under his super- vision. Little congregations were formed, not always continuous ones, but assemblies for a period, breaking up as the various avocations of the seasons required; and schools somewhat similarly. Tribal prejudices were broken down, insomuch that at Holy Communion members of all tribes gathered together, who would not consent to meet for any secular purpose. And is there anywhere a more touching instance of the uni- versal brotherhood of Christians than that of the poor Waraus and Arawaks of this Wild Coast appearing as contributors to the Irish Famine Fund of 1847? A contemporary, McClintock, the Postholder or stipend- iary Magistrate of the district, wrote — " When I first arrived in this district, a more disorderly people than the present Arawaks could not be found in any part of the province; murders and violent cases of assaults were of frequent occurrence. But now the case is reversed, no outrage of any description ever happens; they attend Divine service, their children are educated, they themselves dress neatly, are lawfully married, and as a body there are no people, in point of general good conduct, to surpass them. This change, which has caused peace and contentment to 2l6 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES prevail, was brought about solely through the mis- sionary labour." With so striking a testimony before us it is useful to know Brett's method. His " body of divinity " for missionary purposes was composed of St. Matthew's Gospel, the Creed, Lord's Prayer, and Command- ments, with two sets of original questions and answers on the Creed and Sacraments, simple and brief. These he translated into dialect, and the S.P.C.K. printed them for him. As time went on he added por- tions of the Bible and of the Prayer-Book, and wrote out a larger Catechism. He was a thorough believer in pictures, and got the same Society to print some little engravings round his printed cards. His translation work was done very largely by the help of Cornelius' wife, Wilhelmina, who often was able to supply him with words when his male assistants failed; and he refers with quiet humour to a " Translation Com- mittee," composed of two Arawaks who spoke Warau, two Caribs similarly qualified, and two young Waraus. i( To these was added the old Warau chief, who was dull and could not construe a sentence; but his presence gave importance to the work, and was supposed by his people somehow to ensure its correctness." On this noble man the title of " The Apostle of the Indians of Guiana " was conferred by popular speech throughout the Colony, and as such it will go down in Missionary history. The race for which he laboured was one which will never be large or important; but the quality of the work and the worker are a possession of the West Indian Church for ever. During the forty years of Brett's labours, and in- spired by his success, fresh stations were being opened out up other rivers. In these the industrial element was always a feature, in the shape of gardening and carpentering with boat-building (as distinct from THE ABORIGINAL INHABITANTS 217 hollowing out canoes). The carpenters' shop of St. Augustine's, Canterbury, enabled many a Missionary to be an accomplished industrial manager: such as Heard, F. L. Quick, T. E. Quick, and G. W. Matthews. The Pomeroon Mission is the oldest of all ; that of the Potaro the newest. It was in this latter river that a terrible catastrophe saddened the story of Guiana missions. William Edward Pierce, a Cambridge man who relinquished a Jamaica parish for this out- post work, and a man of great promise, was returning with his family from a visit to this mission when his boat was capsized in a rapid, and, though the boatmen were all able to save themselves, he was drowned with his wife and three out of his four children. This was before he had completed a single year of work (1881). " Who knows whether life is not death, and dying the real life ? " was the question of Euripides found written out in Pierce's note-book. The rivers Demerara, Berbice, Essequibo, Maz- zaruni, and Corentyn all have their stations now, one of them on the site of the old Moravian endeavour. The regular clergy of the Colony have been assiduous in their encouragement of the Indian work : to such as Duke, Bernan, the Austins, Butt, May, and Farrar much is owed, and some of them have been able to help by reason of their having previously served up the rivers themselves, as Veness and Gwyther. The Bishop reported in 1896 that he had received an offer from two American clergy to go there : but at the time of his writing this there were no funds available for a new departure. Some change in the condition of the Indians is contemplated by those resident in the Colony : they are likely to come more and more into contact with the white men as the latter explore farther, and as they themselves learn to work more for the coast-town markets. The impression of Christian teaching and 2l8 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES training upon them now is all the more urgent, and the steady maintenance of this Missionary work becomes the more imperative. The Missions would be greatly assisted if each one possessed a steam launch : much valuable time would be saved and the range of each Missionary's operations much enlarged. WORK ON NON-BRITISH ISLANDS, AND ON THE ADJACENT CONTINENT But little energy is yet to spare for going afield, and at such a cost of time and money as West Indian travelling requires. To go to Cuba from Jamaica in ordinary course it is easiest to go round by New York ! What has been done in these quarters has been to form congregations in such places as there seemed to be a nucleus of English life. We have not attempted to displace the Church of Rome with regard to the populations as a whole. The great island of Cuba is, in this way, cared for from the U.S.A. under the Bishop of Florida. In the Republic of Hayti there is an independent Church ; American Bishops had visited the island, and in 1870 Bishop Spencer of Jamaica joined with them in con- secrating a Negro priest as Bishop, J. L. Holly, who is still officiating there. There are some dozen clergy, nearly twenty congregations and as many mission stations. The Republic of San Domingo is occasionally visited by us from Turks Islands. On Porto Rico (Spanish) we have a congregation, and another on Viecques Island close by ; these have two clergy (one black), and are under the Bishop of Antigua, who is assisted by the Colonial and Continental Society with grants. To Martinique and Guadeloupe we have not found occasion to send clergy ; but we have one on the FOREIGN MISSIONARY WORK 2I9 French island of St. Bart's, who receives £40 a year and £20 for a house from the French Government. On the Dutch island of Saba there is a congregation. In the Danish islands St. Thomas and St. Croix there is a goodly proportion of English Church- people : St. Thomas being a cosmopolitan resort, and, in fact, the chief depot of the Royal Mail Packet Company. Our people are returned as 3200 out of 12,000 in the capital of St. Thomas, and 4000 out of 10,000 in Saba. The chaplain at St. Thomas receives an allowance from the Danish Government, and also from our Foreign Office as Consular-Chaplain; the present Chaplain is Archdeacon of the Virgin Islands (dio. Antigua). On the continent there have long been some coast stations superintended from Jamaica ; their existence was one ground for forming the diocese of British Honduras, which has, of course, taken them over. If any stations should be placed in Venezuela they would be directed from Trinidad, and any in French or Dutch Guiana from our own division of that region. FOREIGN MISSIONARY WORK Soon after the Church settled down to work, the evangelization of heathen peoples began to be pre- sented to the congregations as an indispensable part of Christian duty. What was done at first was to form local Associations, in connection chiefly with the S.P.G., the Society which had been the chief agency in help- ing the West Indian Church after emancipation. The S.P.C.K., the C.M.S., and the Bible Society were similarly represented in some Colonies. Small con- tributions to these societies were sent up from year to year; and this is done still, to a small extent: e.g. the Jamaica Home and Foreign Missionary Society 2 20 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES sent in 1896 to West Africa Mission £60, C.M.S. ^35, S.P.G. £2$ ; in 1897 .£100, £20, and ^20 respect- ively. The Synod of Antigua soon after formation ordered an annual collection for Foreign Missions, and intercession services, in the Octave of St. Andrew. But the chief field of heathenism to which these Churches have looked is naturally West Africa. Their work here requires a connected narrative of its own. THE PONGAS MISSION The idea of turning the growth of the West Indian Church to the advantage of West Africa may have occurred to more than one West Indian. Certainly both Archdeacon Trew, of the Bahamas, and Bishop Parry, of Barbados, had entertained it. But it first took effectual form in the ardent mind of Principal Rawle. From his windows at Codrington he looked over the Atlantic, and the thought of causing the en- slavement of the Guinea Negro to be like the carrying of Joseph into Egypt, a means of benefiting the family, grew upon him : wholly congenial, too, as it was with the missionary purpose of the College itself. At a meeting in Bridgetown in 1850 he broached the idea, and in 1851 an Association was founded. It was to be in connection with S.P.G. as trustees of the College, and the principal adapted a portion of his Lodge for the reception of students, to be specially trained. It was four years before a Missionary was secured, when Hamble Leacock, a Barbadian clergyman of long standing, saying—" The Church calls and some one must answer," went out in 1855 with Duport, a coloured student, who had been a mechanic. The region selected was the country around the estuaries of the Pongo river, about 130 miles north of Sierra Leone ; a district from which many a slave-ship had secured a cargo in the days gone by. THE PONGAS MISSION 221 When the Chief of Fallangia, who had spent some time in England twenty years before, heard that a Missionary had come he sent for him and received him with great emotion, and the first station was at once founded. But the climate was too trying for a man of Leacock's years, and he succumbed before the close of 1856, the first " Martyr of the Pongas." Duport was left alone for a time, but before i860 two other white men had gone out and died there, Neville and Dean. Coloured students were supplied from time to time from the West Indies continuously; amongst whom were several men of great ability, notably Duport who died there after eighteen years' work ; Rev. P. H. Doughlin (now of Trinidad) who served for nineteen years ; and the present Superin- tendent, Rev. J. B. McEwen, who has been there twenty-six years. Since 1864 the Missionaries have all been men of colour. At the stations of Fallangia, Domingia, Isles de Los (a kind of Sanatorium for the Mission, with a boarding-school), and Farringia, thorough Church work has been organized; in 1887 a new station was opened further inland at Bramaia, in 1890 another at Cassa; the last opened was at Kambia, further south and within British territory, in 1895. A notable conversion took place in 1878, when Mrs. Lightburn, a great " lady chief" (a Negress), and the principal slave-dealer of the district, opened her house for services and, later on, was baptized. In 1896 three fresh students left the West Indies for the Pongas country, and the Mission at the end of that year consisted of three ordained Missionaries with seven assistants, working at eight chief stations. The West Indian Churches have supplied the bulk of the funds, and Barbados was for some time the seat of administration. But an assisting committee had been formed in England which raised supplementary funds, notably from Clifton ; and S.P.G. contributed 2 22 THE CHURCH EN THE WEST IXDIES to the stipends. Owing to certain difficulties the control was transferred in 1886 to the English Com- mittee in consultation with the authorities in the West Indies. The Mission has exercised a very beneficial reflex effect on the West Indian churches them- selves. Missionary meetings addressed from time to time by workers from the Pongas have kept the con- gregations in close contact with the great needs of Africa. Besides purely Evangelistic work the little band of Pongas missionaries have been enabled to aid the progress of the Susu people in the Pongas in most important ways : the extinction of the Foreign slave trade in one of its chief strongholds ; the mitigation of domestic slavery ; the opening of the rivers to trade ; and the improvement in dwellings, and in methods of cultivating the soil. At the close of 1897, however, the friends of this Mission find themselves in face of a crisis, arising from two causes. First, a large portion of the district has "been definitively included in French territory. This means that the Government influence is now wholly on the side of French missions (whether Roman or Protestant) ; the French language, for example, is compulsory in all aided day schools. No open opposition takes place, of course, but in a backward country it is a serious thing to feel that the Government influence is undisguisedly in favour of other efforts than ours. This quite precludes the idea of our extending the Mission in the old region ; for fresh work we must tum rather to the hinterland of our own territories, as was done when the station was opened at Kambia. Secondly, the grievous depression in the West Indies is diminishing the number of parishes which can support their own ministrations, and colonies which have to apply for replacement on the list of THE PONGAS MISSION 223 English Missionary Societies themselves cannot continue the substantial contributions to African work hitherto received. The Committee, therefore, is considering whether the whole Mission may not have to be attached to the diocese of Sierra Leone as the primary source of funds and the seat of control. The new Bishop, Dr. Taylor Smith, has gone to his diocese with this possibility under careful consideration. But it is intended that, in any case, the connection with the West Indian churches be maintained, as to the supply of men and their training. However depressed the West Indies may become the religious atmosphere ought not to be affected, and the very fact of industrial stress in the islands may lead to some emigration, a part of which would, we trust, be emigration of Christian young men ready for Missionary work in Africa. In this connection it should be noticed that the Church Missionary Society, which is so largely com- mitted to West Africa, has recently given its attention to the West Indies as a possible source of Missionary supply. In 1895 Dr. Ingham, when Bishop of Sierra Leone, visited Jamaica for the express purpose of inquiring into this possibility; and in 1897 Bishop Tugwell, of Western Equatorial Africa, and Mr. Wilkinson, one of the C.M.S. secretaries, went over to Jamaica and a four days' Missionary Conference was held at King- ston ; their report {C.M.S. Intelligencer, April 1897) is of a general character, but it concludes with an ex- pression of belief that the proposal for selecting and training young men is a workable one, and should be pushed forward. Their visit was confined to Jamaica, through lack of time to go farther. Thus a century which began with the Slave Trade still in operation (to 1807) and yearly conveying thousands of Africans to servitude, whilst denying 2 24 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES them access to our churches, is closing with confer- ences and meetings upon the ways and means of engaging the children of Negro freemen as messengers of the Gospel to the regions where their ancestral tribes are raising their heads and asking to share in civilization and enlightenment and in Christian privilege. CODRINGTON COLLEGE, BARBADOS On the walls of the house of the Society for the Pro- pagation of the Gospel in Westminster is a board which records the chief benefactions for the work of the Society received during the very nearly two centuries of its existence. Of the two most munificent gifts, the first comes near the beginning, the other at the close of this period — the Codrington bequest in 1710, and the Marriott bequest in 1897. The former con- sisted of a mansion in the West Indies with two fine estates then worth ^2000 a year, in full working order. The purpose was laid down in the Trust- deeds; it was education, religious education, in our then new colonies in the Caribbean Sea. Splendid as was the gift, its nobility was enhanced by the character of the donor. Christopher Codring- ton was a native of the Colony of Barbados, son of the Captain-General of the' Leeward Islands. He studied with distinction at Oxford, where he was a Fellow of All Souls', the College which shared his thought when distributing his property, by receiving the endowment for its Library : in its Chapel he was buried. He left Oxford for the Army, was colonel of the First Foot Guards, and served in Flanders. But ere long he went over to the West Indies, and succeeded his father in the governorship of the Lee- ward Islands. Planning an attack on Guadeloupe which miscarried, the soldier-student indulged his CODRINGTON COLLEGE, BARBADOS 225 original bent for study by retiring to his estates in Barbados, to study theology and metaphysics. Here he died on Good Friday, 1710. His Will conveyed the mansion and estates to the newly-formed Propagation Society, to found a College "for the use of the Mission in those parts of the British dominions, which should be a nursery for the propagation of the Gospel, providing a never-failing supply of labourers into the harvest of God." The Society gratefully accepted the Trust, and began erecting College buildings near the mansion in 1 7 16; some litigation with the heir led to delay, and it was 1743 before the buildings were finished. Unfortunately the architect employed had no instruc- tions to prepare a design for the tropics, and the range of buildings, although dignified, would have been more in place at All Souls'. In the conception of a Colonial College Codrington, like his successors the great Bishops Berkeley and Wil- son, was ahead of the possibilities of his time. No young men were forthcoming as students, and the Society avoided appointing Professors, but at once despatched a clergyman as Chaplain and catechist to the Estates. For a time the buildings were employed as a Grammar School. But the great hurricane of 1780 nearly destroyed them, and the school was suspended. The estates were ill-managed, and all was very gloomy when a second benefactor arose in the person of a planter, who undertook to lease the estates and pay ^500 a year ; but in the course of ten years he handed to the Society £1 2,000 more, and they ordered the name of John Brathwaite to be enrolled as a benefactor to that amount. The school was reopened in 1797, and for thirty years was of considerable ser- vice to that Colony : not to all the West Indies, be it observed : amongst its " Presidents " was Samuel Hinds, D.D., afterwards Bishop of Norwich. Part 226 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES of the funds was employed in sending out boys to England for medical or legal education. During all this period the estates were being worked as Codiington intended, as sugar-estates on the usual lines of slave labour; there were 315 Negroes on the estates when handed over. The question at once arises, in some minds, why did not the Society liber- ate the slaves ? Indeed, we have seen the fact that it retained these very estates quoted as a standing proof that Church ideas, even in England, were never opposed to Slavery. But first, it is to be noted that it was a condition of the Will that the estates were to be so continued. It was the legal system of the Colony, and Codrington would have manumitted them himself had he desired to protest against the system. And it is to be remembered also that the piety of the Moravian Brethren, dissociated as it was from all political alliances, did not preclude them from holding slaves in their missionary stations in the West Indian island of St. Thomas. Bishop Fleetwood of St. Asaph, in a sermon before the Society, expressed the prevalent view when he said that the Society's business was to treat the slaves well, not to free them. The Society all along regarded it as its peculiar and honourable responsibility to work these estates as models ; to be in the van in every improvement of the condition of the labouring classes which did not involve social revolution, and especially to strike out a new line with regard to their religious instruction. They employed a Chaplain, either solely or one of the masters of the Grammar School, and a school- master or mistress, or both, for the Negro children. In 1825 the two estate schools were the only ones reported to Government as existing on the island. The management of the estates was on lines laid down from home, such as, that the slaves should be invited to service in the Society's Chapel ; that not CODRIXGTON COLLEGE, BARBADOS 227 only should no Sunday labour be exacted, but that half of Saturday should be theirs for their own food- growing. There were Sunday Schools for children, and adults too; Baptism and Holy Communion were open to them, and burials with Christian rites, with leave to attend on the part of relatives. Marriage was encouraged (although in 1822 there was but one married couple there), and a hospital opened. Further, no slaves were sold off the estates, and very seldom were any bought ; the " hard " system was not allowed. At the same time it is open to Churchmen to wish that a still stronger line had been taken, if not at once, at least some time before Emancipation was forced on the Colonies from England. If Bishop Wilfrid on receiving an estate with 250 slaves could emanci- pate them on religious grounds a.d. 670, it was retro- grade of the S.P.G. as a religious Society in 17 10 to accept the Trust ; and it may be taken as an illustra- tion of how far from uniform has been the flow of social progress, even within the Christian Church. In 1833 the Trust received as "Slave-Compensa- tion" ^8823 Ss. gd. ; a sum which was at once invested as a reserve, and to this day part of it appears in the list of funds administered by the Society under the item, " Codrington estates, Slave compensation, ^5880," with a net income of ^356, which may be said to be the sum still expended annually in the support of chaplain, the chapel, and the schools attached to the estates. The use of the funds for a Grammar School for the sons of the upper class in Barbados was in no sense in the spirit of the Trust, although in the 18th century no other employment seemed to open out. But among the reforms due to the new Bishop, Coleridge (1824), was that of a scheme in accordance with the foundation; and in 1830 the history of the College in the proper sense commences. The income at that 2 28 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES time was ^2500, and this admitted of a Grammar School being opened at the " Lodge," a mile from the College, as a feeder. The Bishop was extremely happy in having a gifted man ready to be the first Principal. John Hothersall Finder was of West Indian family ; he had been chaplain to the estates, and afterwards the Bishop's Commissary in Guiana. He began his new work by receiving a few students at a house in Bridgetown ; in 183 1 he took up residence in the College, on the windward side of the island, where the Principal's Lodge is the old mansion-house ; and the College was publicly opened by the Governor. At the opening there were 16 Divinity students, 1 medical, 1 law, and 25 boys in the Grammar School. Here for ten years Mr. Pinder conducted the training of candidates for holy orders, just as the need for their increase was being accentuated by emancipation. In 1835 he retired, but it was to resume similar work in England with even more conspicuous success ; for it was Pinder who, as Principal of the new theological college for graduates of Oxford and Cambridge at Wells, made the college such a success as to encourage the system and give rise to many other colleges since. Here some 600 graduates passed under his instruction, and carried his name far and wide in honour. Bishop Coleridge met with much opposition from within Barbados itself : there was in the Colony, and is still, an invincible conviction that the benefits of the foundation belong primarily to that island, ignoring the fundamental idea that the property was devised away from theCodrington family for no less a purpose than the welfare of the West Indian group of colonies at large. Even Sir R. Schomburgk, the historian of Barbados, judicious as he usually is, thought the change unwise ; but later on he came round to acknowledge that the Bishop and the S.P.G. CODRINGTON COLLEGE, BARBADOS 229 were right. One of the Principals of the College afterwards stated that up to 1829 only one parochial clergyman had been given to the West Indies by the foundation. If so, it was time to recast it indeed. On Mr. Pinder's retirement, the Society was not fortunate in its choice of a successor, and the College languished, while its funds were sadly reduced. At this time there were only eight students : the Tutor was also curate of two chapels, and chaplain of the Lower Estate ; the chaplain of the Upper Estate was also Master of the Grammar School : hence it is not surprising that the pastoral work also was very weak ; no Sunday Schools were open, and not a handful of children were in the Estate day school. But in 1847 the Society received an offer of service abroad from one of the ablest Cambridge men of the day, Richard Rawle, third Wrangler and fourth Classic in 1835, who after his Fellowship at Trinity was serving a College parish, Cheadle. His offer was an open one, and they most gladly at once placed Codrington College under his care. He was Principal for seventeen years, and in many ways left a deep impression on Church life in Barbados and the adjoining Colonies. Systematic in his churchmanship, thorough in his theological teaching, he supplemented his purely collegiate labours by assiduous pastoral work, and besides that took in hand education gener- ally. He taught regularly at the Lodge Grammar School; he invited elementary schoolmasters to the College in vacations and instructed them. And besides, faithful to the Missionary idea which had primarily removed him from his English parish, he became the real founder of the Pongas Mission, as has been seen. For the students for this he fitted up part of the premises at the Principal's Lodge as a Hostel. During his time the controversy as to this endowment being used for anything besides a Grammar 23O THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES School, and exhibitions to England, was revived by the Chief-Justice, Sir R. B. Clark; and Principal Rawle had to fight Bishop Coleridge's battle all over again. Strange would it have been had the Church been despoiled of this College, by having its Theo- logical and Missionary purpose cut out, just about the time when another great English Missionary Society — the Baptist — was establishing in Jamaica its Calabar College for precisely parallel purposes. When Principal Rawle had, as he considered, finished his constructive work for the College, and the educational system of the whole island besides, he retired, and became vicar of Tamworth. About this time he was sounded by the great Bishop Selwyn as to whether he would be the man to take up his work in New Zealand. But he would not: just as before he had declined the Bishopric of Antigua. But when in his English parochial work a new West Indian appeal came to him, to organize the Church in Trinidad as its first Bishop, he went and served there for seventeen years. He was succeeded at Codrington by a favourite pupil of his own, William Thomas Webb, who had gone out for his health as a young man and found the climate such as to enable him to work there for twenty years as Tutor, and twenty years as Principal, being also Rural Dean, and Archdeacon of Grenada. Though lacking the prestige of having been at an English University, the tradition of steadiness and industry was well preserved by Mr. Webb, who for five years had the assistance of a Classical Tutor who became attached with singular devotion to the Codrington ideal, and has been a consistent friend to the West Indies, the present Earl of Stamford. In 1875 an important step was taken when Bishop Mitchinson, as President of the College Council, successfully carried out a scheme of affiliation with CODRINGTON COLLEGE, BARBADOS 231 the University of Durham. This plan secures guid- ance to study and also a test for the results attained, so far as examinations can test, from an educational body of authority in England. The curriculum is guided by the Durham Calendar ; the questions are sent to Codrington, the answers examined in Durham, and a list issued, supplementary to the Durham one by reason of lapse of six weeks, but in every other sense of identical significance. Another move of Bishop Mitchinson's was the addition of a Training Department to the College, but for reasons given in Chapter VII. this has been abandoned. In 1884 the present writer succeeded Archdeacon Webb as Principal. In 1886 the Principalship vacated by his resignation was occupied temporarily by Pre- bendary Meyrick, and then, owing to the diminution of funds, was suspended for a time; and in 1889 Bishop Rawle acceded to the request of the Society to resume his old post, on his retirement from Trinidad. But he was worn out, and within the year he died, in the Lodge where Codrington died, and where he had himself passed the prime years of his middle life. A stone cross on a massive pedestal stands on the hill overlooking the terrace on which the College is placed, and in full aspect of the Atlantic Ocean — a memorial of a name ever to be honoured in VVest Indian annals. In 1890 the Society saw its way to resume the appointment of a Principal, and the present Rev. T. H. Bindley, B.D., of Merton College, Oxford, now Canon of St. Michael's and Examining Chaplain to the Bishop, went out. But he has to work with a diminished staff, with some feeling of precariousness, and with a sense of the diminished range of the work by the falling off in lay-students. In qualifying for theological students there is no cessation of industry ; in 1892 Principal Bindley initiated resort to the 232 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES Oxford and Cambridge Preliminary Examination as a further test. If the income could only be maintained, the plan of the College at present is — A Principal, a Tutor, a Chaplain to the Estates, a Medical Lecturer, and a Teacher of Hindi and Urdu : six Foundation Scholars (Theological), a Theological Scholar for each West Indian diocese (with ^25 to- wards each from the S.P.C.K.), four Island Students (Barbados Government, lay), two Leacock Students (a Barbados endowment), a Rawle scholarship, and some Pinder Studentships for Missionary work. Some of these can be held together. In 1886 there were twenty-three students in the College (not including any in the Mission-house) ; during the interregnum they declined, but twenty-two has been reached again. The majority of them are white. There is a local Council, of which the Bishop of Barbados is President, and all West Indian Bishops Vice-Presidents. It is an advisory board for the Trustees, and has been of some service. But as it is exclusively a Barbados body, except for the Bishops, who are seldom able to attend, its actual contribution to the guidance of the College, on fundamental and expansive lines, has not been great. From 1830 to 1895 373 students passed through the College, of whom 135 became Associates or Licentiates of the University of Durham ; and about 135 were ordained. In 1895 there were, besides Barbadians, students from Guiana, Trinidad, St. Vincent, Antigua, St. Kitts, and Jamaica. The opening of the Jamaica Theological College has affected Codrington College ; but it is difficult even for an ardent Codringtonian to see what else Jamaican churchmen could have done. The S.P.G. has recog- nized the expediency of their action by granting them ;£iooo out of the Marriott bequest. The " Mission House " is continued in a sense, but CODRINGTON COLLEGE, BARBADOS 233 the Mission students are not now lodged in a separate building. The number of such students has never been large, but. there have been some Negroes or coloured men of high quality, notably Duport, Doughlin, and Mr. J. B. McEwen, past and present Superintendents of the Pongas Mission, in whose work the history of that Mission has its central thread; and lately the Jamaica men, Mr. Burris and Mr. March, came here for a short period before going out to Africa, as Mr. Farquhar had done, from the Mico Institution in Antigua. The history of Codrington College forms " a strik- ing and almost romantic episode in the history of the Transatlantic churches," as Lord Stamford expresses it. It is the senior college in the British Colonies. From under the cloud of financial depression which terribly hampers it and forbids any efforts for expan- sion, it looks proudly on its Founder as the man who stimulated Bishop Berkeley to his noble design, as one who laid down the method of Brotherhoods for Missionary work 150 years before the Cambridge Mission to Delhi or the Mission in Zanzibar ; and, generally, as one of the thin line of staunch Church- men who connect the " golden age " of English Theology with the Oxford Movement of our day. It looks back also upon its second benefactor, John Brathwaite, as the type of the West Indian Planter at his best ; upon its reorganizer, Bishop Coleridge, who learned from his organizing here how to guide the first Missionary College in England itself, St. Augustine's, of which he was the first Warden ; upon its first Principal, Pinder, the practical inaugurator of the Graduates' Theological Colleges in England ; upon its great Principal, Rawle ; upon its first Scholar, Bishop Jackson, and his son in the faith, Bishop Branch, West Indians born and educated, and honoured Bishops of Antigua; upon capable and devoted clergy; upon 234 THE CHURCH IN , THE WEST INDIES , some intelligent planters and some able lawyers who laid at least the foundation of their academical studies in the College ; and upon all the rank and file of those who went to their life-work having learnt, without leaving West Indian soil, the joy of having an Alma Mater of their own. The preservation to West Indians of this institution is one of the essentials of their self-respect and their progress. THE CONNECTION WITH ENGLISH SOCIETIES i. The most intimate connection has been with the S.P.G. ; the " Plantations " were the earliest object of this society, the heathen to be mainly approached by our own Colonies. Through the 18th century, how- ever, the Trusteeship of Codrington was its chief care, as the Church was established in all these Colonies, the Aboriginal inhabitants were few, and the Slaves were assumed to be under the established clergy ; special help was sent to the Bahamas and the Mosquito Coast. But when emancipation came, the " great and immediate effort " known as the Negro Education Fund was the chief means by which English Churchmen assisted in the crisis. After this the Society again withdrew from some Colonies, but (i) the disendowment of the Churches, (2) the decline of the sugar industry, and (3) the opening of Coolie missions and the Indian missions in Guiana, and (4) the expansion of Honduras, obliged her to come again to their help. For 1897 the grants were: Honduras (with Panama) ,£952, Antigua ^850, Guiana ^775, Trinidad ^675, Nassau .£508, Wind- ward Islands ^"ioo, Jamaica and Barbados nothing. In return ^67 was received from the local associa- tions. Grants have also been made to the endowment of Sees. The Colonial Bishoprics Fund has assisted CONNECTION WITH ENGLISH SOCIETIES 235 largely in this; as have the S.P.C.K. and the S.P.G., both separately and through the Fund. 2. The S.P.C.K. has assisted and still assists in supply of literature, and in grants to Schools and Mission Chapels, and in endowing Sees. In 1895 it sent ^73 to Jamaica for studentships, ^795 to build- ings in six of the dioceses, ^1500 See endowment (Guiana and Jamaica), ,£50 in lantern slides to four dioceses, and books to all. 3. The C.M.S. has at times maintained Missionaries, as has been recorded in each place. It now has no work here ; but receives a contribution instead, for its work in other lands. 4. The Colonial and Continental Society has given some assistance since 1843, amounting at one time to ^400 a year; it now sends some ^130 to Jamaica, and assists the congregations in the foreign islands and in Central America. 5. There is an old society called the " New England Company," the oldest of all our Missionary Societies, founded by the Long Parliament in 1649, and greatly supported by Robert Boyle in his day. It assisted the West Indies with about £600 a year between 1823 and 1829, and then ceased; it resumed again 187 1 — 1879 with a grant to a Jamaica student for medical education, but has done nothing since. It may be a question whether a portion of its income, all from endowments, might not fairly be allotted to West Indian work. 6. There is, however, a special West Indian Society in existence, " The Christian Faith Society." It was originated by the piety of Robert Boyle, who was also first governor of the New England Society for the benefit of " Infidels," and he left to it the greater part of his personal estate ; with this a property was pur- chased in Yorkshire. In the 18th century little intel- ligence was shown in the use of the funds, the whole 236 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES being despatched for many years to William and Mary College, Virginia, for the education of Indian children. The separation of Virginia from the empire put an end to this method. The then Bishop of London, Porteus, an able and conscientious prelate, found that a sum of ^22,000 had accumulated, and his thoughts turned to another part of the Plantations under his episcopal charge. He secured from Chancery permission to transfer the funds for the benefit of the West Indies, and a society was chartered under the title " The Society for the Conversion and Religious Instruction and Education of the Negro Slaves in the British West Indian Islands ; " this was in 1792. Bishop Porteus had large and generous ideas for the Slaves ; the income of the Society, about £660, was to be only the nucleus round which voluntary subscriptions were to be gathered ; missionaries and schoolmasters were to be sent out in large numbers to aid the West Indian parish clergy ; the thought of 500,000 slaves, " all Infidels and Heathen, with a very few exceptions," and also of the Caribs, caused him genuine pastoral anxiety. Planters were represented by their English friends to be willing to assist in such efforts. The " Court " of the Society was composed of many dignitaries, including the Secretary of State, the Lord Mayor, the Deans of St. Paul's and Westmin- ster, the heir-at-law of Robert Boyle, and retired West Indians. But the working out was on a much more modest scale. The great officials seldom attended a " Court," as might be supposed ; but what was worse was, that neither were clergy and catechists forthcoming to go out, nor were the Planters in any sense worth speaking of ready to stir in the matter at all. The records of the Society furnish a melancholy instance of ample designs gradually being reduced, until at last there is a dull sense of acquiescence in CONNECTION WITH ENGLISH SOCIETIES 237 the Society merely maintaining one or two clergy and a schoolmaster or two, seeing its income accumulate idly at the bankers', and, in very conscience, ceasing from soliciting subscriptions any farther. It cannot be said that any great generosity was shown in the treatment of the few agents secured ; the stipend was only ^200, and voyage expenses were grudgingly added : one of the missionaries had his salary raised because he was hopelessly in debt, for reasons which he very fully explains, being responsible for the ex- penses of his work as well as of his own maintenance. On the early death of one they allowed only a single sum of ^50 to his daughter, who wrote on behalf of herself, sisters, and brothers, and this just when funds were lying so evidently superfluous that they ceased asking for subscriptions. It may be that it was because they had no confidence that they had secured men of the right stamp, and that their reports were so dis- couraging, that at one meeting one of the agents was instructed to write less frequently, and with more brevity. In the islands the clergy looked upon such agents as went as interlopers : the Planters cordially endorsed their view, and so another .£32,000 soon accumulated. The Bishop in 1806 altered the policy; no more clergy were to be sent, but only school- masters ; and he took trouble to get the West Indians to know of the new " Bell " system of education, in the hope that they would apply to the Society for schoolmasters to carry it out far and wide. But they did nothing of the kind. In 1814 the Court (Howley, Bishop) looked round again, and took counsel's opinion as to whether they might use the money in giving additional stipends to the parish clergy, on condition that they worked among the slaves. It was favourable, and they added £200 to the stipend of a Nevis rector, Davis (after- wards Bishop of Antigua) ; he, however, " exceeded 238 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES in zeal," as he attended a Wesleyan Missionary Meeting, and was reproved by Dr. Howley both as his Diocesan and as President of this Society. In 1823 the Society spent some money in printing some lectures on the "gospels by Mr. Harte, rector of St. Lucy's, Barbados, and sent a representation to the Colonial Secretary, urging the abolition of Sunday markets. In 1823 the Society participated in the general brightening which was commencing: they had four " ministers " allowed to work in Jamaica, and some in Demerara, and they resumed collecting, as applications to go out were becoming more numerous than the regular income would meet. And the new Secretary thought that all classes in the Colonies were becoming so united that it was unnecessary to devpte their funds to slaves as a separate class. In 1825 the Bishops of Jamaica and Barbados appear on the scene, and gradually the Society's responsibilities diminish, as they feel more and more that the best thing they can do is to hand the funds over to them. In 1832 they raised ,£10,000 after the Barbados hurricane. In 1833 they asked the Bishops to prepare schemes for covering the islands with a network of schools ; one from the Bishop of Barbados was received, but none from Jamaica : the former, however, in his energy exceeded his grants by ^3739. When the great benefactor to the Colonies, Charles James Blomfield, became Bishop of London, he thought, as slavery had gone, of amalgamating this Society with the S.P.G., but there were difficulties. He procured a new Charter, and the title was altered to the present one, " The Incorporated Society for Advancing the Christian Faith in the British West Indian Islands and elsewhere, and in the Mauritius." All communication was to be with the Bishops : the income was only ^1315 just tlien; of this ^500 was CONNECTION WITH ENGLISH SOCIETIES 239 allotted to Jamaica, ^700 to Barbados (with a protest on the part of the former), to be expended on schools rather than on clergy stipends, and in small sums, so as to evoke other assistance ; the Bishop of Jamaica was several times remonstrated with for neglect of these conditions. In 1843 tne grants were rearranged by the division of the Diocese of Barbados — that island, ^400; Guiana, ^200; Antigua, £200. The'S.P.G. was now withdrawing, and this Society also desired the Bishops to see that their money was not given in a way that would set up permanent claims ; no bodies were " to lean upon them as settled pensioners." In 1850 the second Secretary, Dr. Barrett, resigned : " I have lived," he writes to the Bishop of Barbados, after thirty-eight years of office, " to see Episcopacy not only established in the West Indian Colonies, but the number of churches increased, and the clergy improved in character beyond expectation." He was succeeded by Dr. Bailey, the new Warden of St. Augustine's, Canterbury, who is still the secretary, with forty-seven years' experience. In 1867 Nassau diocese came in, £100 a year; 1877, Trinidad, £60 — later, ^100; from the Barbados grant. In 1874 the Society declined a request to make a great collection in Eng- land for the disendowed churches. On the re-estab- blishment of Barbados diocese, its grant was allotted to the Windward Islands. From 1881 ,£50 of the Jamaica grant was given to Honduras. The Society's statement for 1895 shows its position now. Receipts : Rents, less 10 per cent, returned, ^1700; Dividends on ^23,400, ^640; Total ^""2340. Expenditure ; on the Estate ^250; salaries, ,£225; obligatory payment to the New England Company, ^90; grants, ^1550; Total ^2115. The Grants were — Jamaica, ^400; Honduras, ^£50 ; Barbados (it should be Windward Islands), £200 ; Trinidad, ^200; Guiana, -£200; Antigua, ^200; 240 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES Nassau, £200; and Mauritius (as by the new Charter), ;£ioo. 7. In 1825 there was formed in London "The Ladies ' Society for the Education of the Children of Negroes in the West Indies." It was expressly for the children of the Slaves, and was a part of the general.movement in their behalf. Grants were to be given to clergy who would open schools ; but schools of other Christian bodies were also aided, especially Moravian. Several Refuges for young girls and Orphanages were also assisted liberally. For seventy years this good work went on, but of late in gradually diminishing amount. In 1897 the Committee decided that as the Churches were now mainly self-supporting, and as, moreover, the local Legislatures were liberally providing for education in conjunction with the Church and in supplement to it, the need for their seek- ing fresh subscribers had gone, while old ones kept year by year disappearing. The Society, therefore, closed by distributing its balance among the institutions at that time on its books. It had for seventy years given effective assistance of that most valuable kind, " help in time of need." In closing the Society the Committee made an appeal to its present subscribers to become supporters of the Pongas Mission, as akin in its object to the aim for which the Society had worked so long. CHAPTER IX SOME SPECIAL POINTS AND FINAL OBSERVATIONS Antigua — Windward Islands — Trinidad and Tobago— Guiana — Nassau — British Honduras — Other Christian Bodies and their present position : Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Moravians, Salvation Army — Statistics — Misrepresentations : Froude, Mr. Salmon — Final Reflec- tions : The Industrial Depression ; Grounds for Encourage- ment of W. Indian Churchmen — The time not yet come for entire self-maintenance. Diocese of Antigua (the Leeward Islands). — The work here really includes that of several distinct com- munities. The diocese consists of the Islands of Antigua (Cathedral at St. John's), St. Kitts,1 Nevis, Montserrat, Dominica, the Virgin Islands, with juris- diction over our work in Danish, Dutch, Spanish, and French islands adjacent. It formed the Archdea- conry of Antigua, in the diocese of Barbados, until 1842 : it now consists of three Archdeaconries : Antigua, St. Kitts, and Virgin Islands. There has always been a pleasant character about this diocese ; in its attitude to the Slave population it was less exact- ing, and more hopeful of the amenability of the Negro to instruction. The people were the first to abolish the whip as a driving instrument ; to allow the Negroes 1 This is our oldest permanent settlement in the West Indies, 1623. Barbados was occupied by the planting of a flag in 1605, the first settlement was in 1625. 241 q 242 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES trial by jury ; and on Emancipation they set the slaves free at once without Apprenticeship. Moravian efforts obtained fair reception, and our own early missionaries from the Christian Faith Society found here a support, or at least sufferance, not paralleled in Jamaica or Bar- bados. The Wesleyans were always strong here, and harmonious relations have always been maintained among the Christian bodies. After disendowment it was a great assistance to the diocese that the Colonial Office acted liberally in the matter of the retirement of Bishop Jackson. In view of his forty-seven years of ministerial work in the Established Church he was allowed to live in England on full stipend, leaving a Coadjutor in Antigua ; this enabled him to set aside a sum which has resulted in the full endowment of the See — ^20,000, 1894. His Coadjutor, Bishop Branch, was a very able deputy, and was accustomed always to face the situation of affairs with sanguine cheerfulness. In his first Charge he encouraged voluntary efforts, and showed that in his Cathedral Parish the ^150 a year raised when the Church was endowed, had become nearly £1200 on the free system. He charged against concurrent endowment and carried the Synod with him, and it was not adopted here. Even so late as 1892, when the pressure of distress was becoming severe, the amount raised in the diocese was the largest yet known. Windward Islands Diocese. — When the attempt to federate the smaller islands of the West Indies in the seventies failed, and Barbados remained a separate Government, its neighbours, St. Vincent and Grenada and their dependencies, with Tobago, were formed into the Windward Islands Government, with one Governor but separate Legislatures. Ecclesiastical arrangements followed the same course : the Estab- lished Church of Barbados could not be part of a SPECIAL POINTS ABOUT SOME DIOCESES 243 diocese, and Bishop Mitchinson arranged for the formation of the Windward diocese, of which he took Episcopal supervision without salary, an arrange- ment continued by his successor, Bishop Bree. The Provincial Synod approved the arrangement, but expressed an opinion that these islands should eventu- ally be joined with Trinidad. In their Synod III. there were three courses discussed — (1) going on as at present, (2) joining Trinidad, (3) dividing, St. Vincent to Barbados, Grenada to Trinidad. The first course was carried by ten to one. But in 1897 Bishop Bree has resigned, so that some action will be required. Tobago, however, which has recently been placed politically with Trinidad, was passed into that diocese at its own wish. The churches in St. Lucia have recently joined the Windwards; when invited to do so by Synod they accepted, the Provincial Synod approved, and the instrument of Incorporation from Canterbury was duly issued. In Grenada there is some industrial activity, as the island has abandoned sugar (only ^15 worth exported in 1895) and has taken to cocoa and "spices": it is mostly in the hands of peasant proprietors. But in St. Vincent distress has been acute ; the parishes were abruptly disendowed, and several clergy had to leave (as did also several Wesleyan ministers) j and in 1885 a rector was starved out after fourteen years' service ; the clergy were reduced to six. The S.P.G. grant for 1897 for the diocese was £100 \ but for 1898, and three years following, there will be ^170 a year specially added. In St. Lucia there is more modern industry, several usines, with 2500 East Indians, but a large part of the island is still unoccupied. It is to be the head-quarters of the military and naval forces. Trinidad. — In this island we find ourselves side by side with the Roman Church, which retains a 244 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES majority of the old inhabitants. Accordingly Bishop Rawle always designated himself Bishop of the Church of England in Trinidad. Besides the white and coloured people who come under our direct care, there is also, as already indicated, a large scope for Missionary work to the East Indians. Mr. Froude was so much impressed by the foreign aspect of the Colony as to say that its value to us was wholly dubi- ous ; in it we are the transient element : of course, this much affects the situation, and our work there is rather that of maintaining congregations, with evangel- istic work of the purely missionary type to the Coolies. The capitalist system of this island enables it to accommodate its industry to low prices more effectively than the older Colonies could do, and distress is not yet severe. Tobago offers an instance of good work seriously threatened by terrible industrial depression. Its little Legislature after Emancipation most liberally supported the Church in her efforts, voting ^2200 to meet the S.P.G. ^433, and divided the single parish into three. The people responded admirably, and soon the island ceased to need extraneous help, except for occasional hurricane distresses. But disendowment came, and again the S.P.G. was appealed to. Now there are seven parishes with twelve churches, and 10,000 of the 18,000 people definitely attached to them, ministered to by only three clergy. The island was attached to the diocese of Trinidad in 1889. The Bishop is dis- tressed with its poverty ; skin-diseases are becoming rife through insufficient food. But the churches are full, and the schools. He says that the Trinidad Romanists have their eye upon it should our minis- trations shrink, and dreads their occupation of what is " an old and loyal Church centre." It is a pathetic sign of the life of this little community that when Mr. Froude visited the island, a deputation from one of the SPECIAL POINTS ABOUT SOME DIOCESES 245 island parishes called upon him and asked leave to act on the ship, their play being the Merchant of Venice. Guiana. — The character of its population is singu- larly complex: in 1891 British and Dutch, 4500; Portuguese, r 2,000; Negroes and coloured, 140,000; East Indian, 105,000; Chinese, 4000; Aborigines, 1 7,000. The peculiar features of this diocese have been brought out as our narrative has proceeded. Our Church works conjointly with the Presbyterians and the Dutch qua establishment, and other bodies also receive endowment. We have — (1) our own parishes and con- gregations in the Presbyterian parishes ; (2) the Coolie Missions, both East Indian and Chinese ; and (3) the River Missions to the Aborigines. As large-scaie production here, as in Trinidad, prevails, the distress is not so great ; but there is less room in this coast- colony for substitution of other products for sugar. The gold-mines, however, may prove a source of wealth, curiously carrying the country back to the idea of it in the Raleigh period, but it will alter the character of the Colony if these remote regions be- come the centre of its prosperity. The future is in no way clear ; but the unique episcopate of Bishop Austin has put good heart into Churchmen, and there is reason for expecting them to be alive to any change in the character of the Colony, and to endea- vour to adapt Church organization to meet it. Nassau (the Bahamas). — This group of islands con- stitutes a diocese of peculiar character by reason of their scattered character and sparse populations, only some 50,000 people altogether. Their poverty has been alluded to, and there is little substantial im- provement to record since 1870. Communication with U.S.A. is improved, and some summer visitors resort to the islands, but not in large numbers as yet. In 1876 Bishop Venables found himself struggling at one and the same time against Disendowment ; a 246 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES hurricane distress; and paralysis of trade after the American War, and emigration in consequence : yet he did not lose heart, but increased the stations from fifty-seven to seventy-eight And Bishops Roberts and Churton have increased the clergy to twenty, five at Nassau, the rest in the islands ; there are ninety-nine catechists, all unpaid but one, and some schoolmasters. The diocese is helped by the Church Societies at home, and the Bahamas District is not yet required to be independent by the \Vesle5-ans. There is a Mission to sailors in Nassau Harbour. A very pleasing evidence of the effect of the work done is given by the experi- ence of a U.S.A. missionary in Florida, who testified to the excellent character of some Church emigrants from Nassau, who settled there. This form of bene- ficial work is likely to continue in these islands, as some continuance of migration from them to the mainland seems probable. British Honduras. — In this Colony two-thirds of the people are Romanists, and the adherents of the Wesleyan Missions come next in number. On dises- tablishment the two congregations of Belize elected a "Synod," which the local Legislature invested with autocratic powers. The S ^P.G. clergy outside invoked the Bishop of Jamaica, and by the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Colonial Office the formation of a schismatic body was avoided. Progress was continued both in the settlements and the mis- sions, aud in 1883 it was formed into a diocese, although without a separate Bishop until 1891. The first Bishop was Henry Redmayne Holme, a Cam- bridge man who had served admirably in the diocese of Antigua, and whose devotion to Missionary work had led him to make the voyage to West Africa to examine and encourage the Pongas Mission. Conse- crated at Bridgetown — the first Bishop ever consecrated in the West Indies — he started for Belize, but was OTHER CHRISTIAN BODIES 247 wrecked on the way. He shared the sufferings of the crew and passengers on a rock for ten days, but thought that he was restored, and at once visited the Honduras congregations ; but his health was ruined, and in the July of the year of his consecration he died. Dr. Ormsby, a South London rector, accepted the charge after two years of vacancy, and the diocese is now vigorously worked, the clergy being raised to eighteen. By the Provincial Synod of 1895, it has been extended to cover any English congregations formed on the Caribbean sea-board of the States of Colombia, in Panama on the Pacific side, or at the works of the Panama Canal. Of the eighteen clergy twelve work outside the Colony. Other Christian Bodies. — The Roman branch of the Church continues its influence in the British West Indies, as has been pointed out, in those islands taken over from countries where she was the . Established Church at the time of their cession to us : in Trinidad, Dominica, St. Lucia, and Grenada the members of her communion are more numerous than those of ours. She has shared our fortunes in several ways ; disestablished by transfer of sovereignty, she still was endowed concurrently with others, and when disendowment came had to pass through the same experience as ourselves. But in the above islands complete disendowment has not yet been applied. Without formulating any union, she has worked with us in educational policy, and in combination we have succeeded in retaining the denominational system. But even in social reform her authorities are unwilling to be publicly associated with ours. The Archbishop of the Province has his seat at Port of Spain, Trinidad. There are Bishops of Roseau, Dominica, Demerara, Jamaica, and Honduras. The Presbyterians are numerous in Jamaica and Guiana : in the former they have sixty-five congrega- 248 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES tions (eight as a Presbytery of the Scottish Establish- ment, fifty-seven as an independent Presbyterian body in Jamaica). In Guiana, as was seen, they share estab- lishment and endowment with the English Church and the Dutch ; there are congregations in Grenada, the Bahamas, and St. Lucia. The Congregationalists have ten Pastors in Jamaica, who have increased their membership within the last twenty years, although their situation was such as to call forth a Deputational visit from the Congregational Union at home in 1895, consisting of Dr. Barrett (son of a former Jamaica Minister) and the Union Secretary. A careful report was presented, the gist of which was that the circumstances of the island seemed to call for a renewal of help from home for a time. Their opinion of the spiritual condition was on the whole favourable. In Guiana they have thirteen ministers. Up to 1894 the London Missionary Society assisted, but since then they only "help and advise" through the " Colonial Society " : the claims of the heathen world being the expressed grounds for withdrawal. A little help in assisting ministers to go out was what might still be granted from time to time. The Congregation- alists object to all endowments, concurrent or other. The Baptists have a great hold in Jamaica, which indeed figures in the reports of their Missionary Society as the most successful of all the fields in which they have been engaged. Sixty-one ministers with 179 stations and 36,000 members constitute a large and successful Union. No chapel is complete with- out its Day School, they hold, but they are strangely content to leave these undenominational. In Turks Islands, Trinidad, and Bahamas they have one minis- ter in each, with a total of 5500 members. Progress is slow, with occasional relapses, and keenness of struggle with financial depression. They are not only OTHER CHRISTIAN BODIES 249 self-supporting (except for the Tutors and buildings at Calabar College), but they send out to Hayti, Cuba, Honduras, and Costa Rica, and also to the Home Society's Missions in West Africa. This is the more honourable because they never accept endowment, even on the concurrent method. To the Wesleyan Methodists also the West Indies are "classic ground": and now they are the most numerous of all denominations outside the Church, and their strength is widely distributed. They divide the West Indies into two "Districts" with two Confer- ences, which unite biennially. But the Bahamas and Honduras districts are still under the Home Conference. When we reflect on Wesleyan Methodist organiz- ation and much of their teaching, the difference between them and Churchmen seems here reduced to a minimum. We have followed them in reviving "Conferences" (our Synods), in bringing in lay help, and in going beyond the Act of Uniformity in Public worship; and they too learn from us. There is, however, no thought of union at present, and it would not be in this part of the empire that so immensely important a project would be discussed. It is from home that the impulse for a mighty reform like this would have to come. But there is little in West Indian Methodism which would need altering, should such happy times ever arrive. The United Free Methodists have nine ministers in Jamaica with 3500 members. But we have not met with any record of Primitive Methodists, or of those of the New Connexion, or the Bible Christians. A U.S.A. denomination calling themselves the " Christian Church," known usually as Campbellites (President Garfield's denomination), has eighteen con- gregations in Jamaica. The Moravians continue to hold their ground in forty-nine stations, chiefly in Jamaica, the Leewards, 250 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES and Barbados. They have two Provinces, Jamaica the Western, the rest the Eastern, each with its Bishop. The last report shows eighty-three Missionaries, of whom thirty-eight are Sisters ; twenty-nine are Natives. Their baptized members are given as 46,000 — this includes children who have been baptized but are not yet communicants : in 1887 the number of com- municants was 16,000. In 1897 the Herrnhut author- ities decided that these Provinces must be self- supporting. They accept concurrent endowment when offered. To the Moravians, as to the Wesleyans, their West Indian work counts very largely in their returns : the above 46,000 constitute half the member- ship of their whole mission field, and Surinam (Dutch Guiana) takes up 27,000 of the other half. They work peacefully and amicably with us ; and it was from the West Indies that the request came to an early Lambeth Conference to examine their " orders " in relation to ours. Salvation Army. — The latest organization to enter into work here is the Salvation Army. It commenced operations in Jamaica in 1892, in Guiana in 1895. In September 1897 there were in Jamaica sixty-one stations and 100 officers, " Evangelists who are entirely given up to the work " \ in Guiana, five stations and twenty-two officers. Local editions of the War Cry show the usual methods in force ; and from the con- geniality of some of their methods with Negro tem- perament it will be surprising if the Army does not make considerable impression. To construct a single table which would exhibit all the forces of Christian work proves impossible, through the varieties of circumstance and the varying manner in which statistics are formed and given. The first table is given as at least interesting as endeavour- ing to give an idea of the relative positions of the Denominations, and also the general range of Chris- OTHER CHRISTIAN BODIES 25* tian enterprise. Others are appended as offering comparative views of particular regions. gy. s or aries. Members, >> '£ V O'cS S Full members or "5 O Day Schools. CI Past Communicants. Sui Sell Church of England... 3.S i27,ooo(H.C.) 57,200 700 about Wesleyan Methodists 124 52,000 (Full 35>°°o 35,000 schl. members) Baptist 70 42,000 (Full 33>ooo 272(undenl.) members) Congregationalist ... 23 Presbyterian 55 19,000 Moravian 83 19,000 1 16,000 131 Jamaica : — Church of England Communicants ... 45,000 Wesleyans Full members ... ... 24,000 Baptists ,, ... 36,000 Congregationalists ,, 3,600 Presbyterians ,, ... 12,600 U. Methodist Free C. ,, ... 3,500 Moravians ,, ... 6,500 Barbados : — The Government Grant estimated membership : — Church of England Wesleyans Moravians Romanists or by census returns of 1891 : — Church of England ... Wesleyans Moravians Romanists Jews Others Not stated according to £ 10,000 700 400 50 156,500 14,400 7,000 800 22 1,560 2,600 (Church Communicants were 22,475.) 1 These are estimates : it has proved impossible to obtain exact figures. 252 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES Windward Islands: Church of England, 19,000 members; Roman 29,000; Wesleyan, 3000; Presby- terian, 400. Leeward Islands : Church of England, 33,000 of population; Roman 29,000; Wesleyan, 30,000; Moravian, 17,000. Trinidad : Church of England, about one-fourth of the population ; Roman, the majority of the other Christian people ; East Indians, one-third of the whole. Guiana : The Government grant is allotted as follows : Church of England, ^10,800; Church of Scotland, ^5100; Roman, ^2500; Wesleyan, ^1700; Mora- vians, one station only. The Provincial Synod of 1895 considered the subject of union among Christians. They saw no way towards "formal and organic union," but placed on record their "appreciation of the true work done for Christ within our dioceses by many individuals and Christian Bodies not of our Communion," declared their " love for all who love our Lord Jesus Christ," and called for prayer for " removal of divisions." The Primate appended to his address to this Synod some statistics " defective but as complete as inform- ation would permit," of which the following is a summary of some principal points : — Diocese. Clergy. Communicants. Sunday Scholars Church Day Schools. Jamaica 104 45,000 30,600 318 "Barbados 58 22,000 3,200 Windward Islands ... 16 6,000 Antigua 37 13,000 8,800 ? Trinidad 26 7,000 2,200 43 Guiana 45 13,000 6,700 100 Nassau 23 5,000 4,IOO ? Br. Honduras 9 1,300 700 10 3i8 112,300 56.300! about 700 MISREPRESENTATIONS 253 MISREPRESENTATIONS Controversy is not itself attractive, and at the close of the review of a period of Church history is peculiarly unpalatable. But there are three sources of misrepresentation from which the work of the West Indian Church during these last sixty years suffers wrong, and which does them an injury with their brethren at home which their sense of gratitude for great kindness in recent years makes intolerable. The first is from representations of religious work as ineffective by reference to the prevailing vices and even the childish simplicities of the Negro popu- lations. West Indian Churchmen are the last to wish to veil these from their own knowledge, or to conceal their existence from inquirers; all they ask is that inquirers should regard things relatively, taking into account both the condition of the working classes in other countries, and the condition of these Negroes before Emancipation. From observers thus prepared to observe properly they never fail to find sympathy and encouragement. The second is from representations due to careless- ness, haste, and absence of anything approaching scientific collection of facts. The hasty traveller passing from port to port with a few days' sojourn in one Colony or another, gathering his information from the chance company of ships' decks, hotels and boarding-houses, or at most from a few circles of acquaintance here and there, is unfortunately the very man who can write a book in an easy way, and by his very lightness of heart and hand catch the popular taste ; to the confusion of knowledge and the defamation of solid work. It is impossible not to mention in this regard the late Mr. Froude. Pos- sessing as he did the ear of the educated public of 254 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES England, he has placed on the shelves of all our Public Libraries a volume which has given rise to the deepest resentment on the part of the West Indian Colonies on their civil and political side, and caused the greatest pain to English Churchmen by reason of its travesty of the results of their work for sixty years. From the Governor's pew at a Sunday morning service he judges of the whole Church in Jamaica, and writes it down as still the Church of the Whites ; from the casual sources he thought it sufficient to consult he can learn nothing of any good done by it for the masses of the people, and so on. The previous pages of this book supply the answer Church- men can otfer. For example, if the Church is still only for the Whites, whence came the 45,000 registered Communicants in Jamaica, where there are now less than 15,000 white people, children and all? And by whose subscriptions, have the increasing numbers of the clergy been supported? And who are the 100 Catechists and their congregations in the remoter valleys and plains ? What do the Moravians say of the chief centre of population? "There has been, during the past few years, a very active movement set on foot by the Anglican Church, with a view of supplying the spiritual needs of Kingston, and under the direction of the Bishop of that Church, several churches have been erected in the outlying townships of the city." {Periodical Accounts, September 1897.) Are these churches built either by or for the Whites, decreasing as they are in numbers and wealth ? Or again, did Mr. Froude ever seek to attend a sitting of a Committee of Synod, or a meeting of the Church Temperance Society ? Did he enter a Sunday School, or make friendly inquiries of the Negroes in their own homes? The most careful study of his most careless book discloses no such attempt to verify MISREPRESENTATIONS 255 the sweeping statements his imagination was con- structing, and he must go down to posterity as a man who could speak irresponsibly from a position of responsibility in which he was placed by his talents, and could write carelessly when his evidence was important, and with bias when justice was imperative. The third source of misrepresentation almost in- variably accompanying the other two is the carrying up to our day of statements which were true before the Church awoke to her duty in this region. Every one acknowledges that the Negroes were neglected for centuries ; the appeals of our Church Societies at the time of Emancipation are based upon this very fact, and this history has made no attempt to dis- guise it. But when men write now they should not carry on stock phrases descriptive of sixty; years ago ; they might as well describe English industry now as it was before Free Trade, or English politics now as they were before the Reform Bill, as the English Church in the West Indies now as it was before the Bishops came out. And yet it is only on the sup- position of being thus benighted that such statements as appear in a work of Mr. C. S. Salmon, and issued witli the stamp of the Cobden Club {The Caribbean Confederatio?i)> can be accounted for. We have shown that Churchmen fully recognize the neglect of days gone by, and they cordially acquiesce in the grati- tude felt for the other Christian influences which have co-operated with theirs so nobly and with such success; but these pages will have been written to no purpose if English Churchmen do not now feel that their brethren in these old Slave Colonies, from Nassau to the southern confines of Guiana}> have taken part in a quickening of life as real as that which has been vouchsafed to the Church at home. 256 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES FINAL The work of the Church in a community is neces- sarily affected by the vicissitudes of the industrial condition. In the West Indies the last ten or fifteen years have been a period of increasing stress and anxiety. Without going in any detail into the causes, it is advisable to point out that the change is mainly due to the fact that West Indian sugar has met with a competitor in Beetroot which has brought prices below the old cost of production. It is not that the islands have stood still in population or energy ; the exported produce of Barbados kept in- creasing in volume to 51,000 hogsheads of sugar in 1881, and rose still higher, to 63,000, in 1894; but the prices were such that the value even of this increased amount was 25 per cent, lower; in Trinidad 870,000 tons rose to 1,092,000, but the value was 14 per cent, less. Rents, interest, profits, and wages therefore had less to divide among thern. Adjustment has proved possible to some extent, in two ways : (1) as in Barbados, Guiana, and Trinidad, the value of property has been taken as reduced ; rents and interest have been lowered, fixed charges have been compounded for or reduced by means of the Courts of Chancery, or even the Bankruptcy Courts. With these items on a new level, and with more of the sugar-growers and manufacturers residing, much has been done. But there seems little room for further adjustment of this kind. (2) By resort to other industries. In Jamaica the sugar export fell from 580,000 cwt. in 1S84 to 390,000 in 1896, but sugar itself was only one-tenth of the export instead of two- sevenths. In Grenada only £15 worth of sugar was exported in 1875, tne produce of the island now being chiefly cocoa and spices. In Trinidad cocoa is FINAL OBSERVATIONS 257 increasing j in Guiana the recent gold discoveries have fiiled up something of the gap. The development of " minor " industries is in all the Colonies a prominent object of anxious attention. But there is a natural reluctance to give up a once profitable staple, and many colonists cannot refrain from wishing that there should be some change in the system by which the Imperial Government compels these Colonies to con- tinue a policy of Free Trade. Their Beetroot com- petitors, Germany, Austria, France, are assisted by protecting Bounties on the one hand, while their second great natural customer, the United States, is protectionist, and will not trade with them on the Free principle. The recent Royal Commission (1897) has very fully recognized the peculiar circumstances, the acuteness of the distress, and the grave peril to social and civilized life.1 In spite of industrial depression the Colonies are in every way stronger than they were at the time of Emancipation. The elements of material well-being are immensely improved : railways within the islands, steamers without, telegraphs, posts, telephones, high- ways, medical attendance, hospitals, and sanitation, are in operation ; while in the administration of jus- tice, the equitable incidence of taxation, the diffusion of education, the spread of inducements to industry and thrift, and other factors of social welfare, the Colonies have participated in the general progres- siveness of the Victorian era. The cause of religion has in these civilizing agencies ground for confidence — so far as religion walks by sight — that her work will not for any length of time be frustrated by a lamentable retrogression towards a 1 The Queen's Speech of 1898 contains a promise of measures of relief which will be under discussion when this volume is in the press. R 258 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES struggle for the bare necessaries of life. The Church feels grateful beyond words for the advance she has been permitted by Divine Providence to make in her organization, and in her hold on the people. If any one point were to be selected, perhaps it would be the increase of lay work. The spiritual energy of the clergy is doubtless the central force in religious in- fluence ; but in these islands the masses are not yet at a point of stability which enables them to recruit largely the ranks of the priesthood, which is therefore of necessity somewhat of an external influence to them still. The Baptists learned that it was danger- ous to press on too rapidly in admitting to the pastorate or the charge of congregations, and found themselves in difficulties ; and the Methodists had a like ex- perience to a less degree. But our quiet advance by means of minor orders, Catechists, Lay Readers, Sunday School teachers, schoolmasters, Church Army officers, members of St. Andrew's Brotherhood, workers for Missionary and Temperance Societies and the like, is most promising. Trained in these posts of honourable toil, a body of men is being formed upon whom the Church is even now largely depending, and from whom she looks for an ever- increasing advance towards self-sufficiency even in the highest spiritual forces. Next to this we would place the continual increase of opportunity for laymen, and for women, of education and position. The enterprises of the Church in works of religion and beneficence are becoming not only so numerous, but of such a nature, that they absolutely pre-suppose an increasing Christian laity, and these openings must act on generous minds as an effective call. It is pleasant to be able to quote a local opinion that the response is being made. The preface to the Barbados Church Calendar of 1886 closes with these words — " Last but not least, there FINAL OBSERVATIONS 259 is a manifest interest and zealous co-operation in the work and welfare of the Church shown by many of the laity — two or three of whom may be found in each of the parishes, encouraging the Clergy and sharing in their work, wherever and whenever there is an opportunity." Another point of leading importance is the advance towards elasticity in worship. It has been the settled conviction of many observers that the Moravian and the Methodist modes of worship and devotion on the one hand, and the Roman on the other, are congenial to the Negro in ways in which the old 18th-century Anglican type is not. Long thought thus a hundred years ago, Dr. Underhill and Mr. Salmon are examples of men who think so to-day. If, therefore, progress such as has been shown has been possible even within the lines of the Act of Uniformity — so useful as a con- trolling measure in times of fierce strife — now that the Church has resumed its authority in these Colonies adaptation is both possible and safe. And thus room and scope will be offered more freely than hitherto for methods and means such as special features in West Indian character and West Indian circumstance require. Another point. These Churches most cordially cherish their membership of the great Anglican Com- munion; daughter churches, they are still of the house- hold. And thus unity of faith, worship, and the ordering of life is in no danger. Other bodies have suffered from premature independence. The loose organization of the Congregationalists and Baptists has over and over again led to a feeling of helpless- ness in times of difficulty, and to appeals to England for Deputations to set things right. Our West Indian Churches feel that they have this assistance in a regular and continuous way, by their constitutions and their episcopate. The Methodists have a similar 260 THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES advantage, and they profit by it : as do the Moravians. But the latter look to Germany for direction and can never become the popular Church in British Colonies; the former will run side by side with us here as they do at home; but even they are not so organically connected with the British centres as we are. And we can have no feeling other than of gratitude for the effectiveness of our loyalty to ancient Church principle in giving us confidence that we have in it a distinct advantage in the direction of becoming the popular Church of the British West Indies. One last reflection. English Churchmen must not yet regard these churches as on a par with the colonial churches in Canada or Australia. The Missionary character belongs to them still. Even the most northern portion, the Bahamas, scattered islands with sparse populations, presents many of the features of Missionary life ; and the rest of the region is wholly within the tropics. As James Stephen said long ago, no Englishman goes out to these islands for any motive except two, religion and gold. This is true still, if we add share in governmental or professional work. In Guiana out of a list of 146 clergy given by Farrar, ninety-four had retired, only fifty-two had died there;1 and civilian records show a still greater proportion of temporary sojourns. The masses of the inhabitants are of tropical race; the Negro is only on his way to civilization and Christianity, and the East Indian is still heathen in social life and religion. And behind the settlements, in the swamps, are the Abori- ginal tribes. The white people in these Colonies form only a nucleus, and a diminishing one, and they must not be left by English Churchmen to bear the whole burden of evangelization. Of support from home the call is mainly for men. It might well be that a 1 See Appendix III. FINAL OBSERVATIONS 26l system of visits by Missioners would be of great service, regularly, say every Lent. A few men must go out annually to keep up the strength of the clergy; and the episcopate, though not necessarily to be supplied direct from home, and entirely so, must be the means of bringing out at least some of a higher calibre than could be expected to go out to incumbencies. The Nonconformist bodies all feel this. The West Indies as classic ground must not be prematurely left alone as if they were simply communities of our own race. They suffered in the past; and two genera- tions do not suffice to render them self-sufficient. Tenderness, generosity, and kindly training, such as in a family an elder sister gives to those just emerging from the nursery, are asked for still by these West Indian churches. They contain the elements of a future independence, but there is not yet maturity. APPENDIX I THE WEST INDIAN EPISCOPATE ANTIGUA. D. G. Davis, 1842. S. J. Rigaud, 1858. W. W. Jackson, i860. C. J. Branch, 1882 (coadj.). C. J. Branch, 1895. H. Mather, 1897. Barbados, 1824. W. H. Coleridge, 1824. T. Parry, 1842. H. H. Parry, 1868 (coadj.). J.- Mitchinson, 1873. H. Bree, 1882. British Honduras, 1883, H. R. Holme, 1891. G. A. Ormsby, 1893. Guiana. W. P. Austin, 1842. W. P. Swaby, 1893. Jamaica. 1824. C. Lipscombe, 1824. A. G. Spencer, 1843. R. Courtenay, 1853 (coadj.). W. G. Tozer, 1S79. E. Nuttall, 1880. C. F. Douet (Assist.), 1888. Nassau, 1861. C. Caul field, 1S61. A. R. P. Venables, 1863. F. A. R.Cramer-Roberts, 1878. E. T. Churton, 1886. Trinidad, 1872. R. Rawle, 1872. J. T. Hayes, 1889. Windward Islands, 1879. T. Mitchinson, 1879. H. Bree, 1882 (res. 1897). Primates: William Piercy Austin, first Bishop of Guiana, 1883. Enos Nutall, fourth Bishop of Jamaica, 1893, first Archbishop. 262 APPENDIX 2 •42 ci rj o o o o o o o o o o o CO O CO CD NO M 88888888 -T ro o? dec «-T ^■vn^-o -rf (N IN oooooooooooo OOOOOOOOOOOO q_ q q_ o q cd q on p-T lo d d" r^oo vO -O rO ro CM h n n h u"* O fin « i-5 "3 N rorOCN i^i n ro ro C\ n ro in vO rv-jvo vO O CT\ O 00 pu e j_t c c s „_r cs c „_r 'C 73 ■£ 2i £J 5 „ 159 ; education of, 180- 182 Codrington, Christopher. See College Codrington College, 53 n., 61, 64, 92, 94, 105, 172, 180, 182 ; history of, 224-229 Colenso, Bishop, case of, affected all Colonial churches, 151 Coleridge, Bishop, 91, 95, 106, 107, in, 112, 121, 174, 213, 228, 233 Colonial and Continental Church Society, 103, 130, 235 Colonial Clergy Act, 173 Colonists, the original settlers and early colonists, 33, 47 Colour, 'people of colour,' 35, 37, 83, 109, 193 Confirmation, 106 Congregationalists, 248 Coolies, the system, and the Church's work, 117, 204-207 Cromwell, and West Indies, 10, 3i> 33, 44 Cruelties of West Indian slavery considered, 21-25 Cuba, 218 Dependence, marked feature of West Indian colonies, as to slave-trade, 17 ; slavery, 25 ; absentees, 27 ; also 40-42, and 260 Diocesan Constitutions, general features of, 153; an example, Jamaica, 154-167 Dioceses constituted, 89 ; re- arranged, 105 ; again, 171 Disestablishment and disendow - ment commenced, 134 ; causes of, 1 34-1 4 1 ; not demanded locally, 141 ; effects of, 145, 148 Dissenters, toleration, 45 Dominica, 10, 126 ; disendow - ment, 140, 210 Durham University, 232 Dutch in West Indies, 11, 15, 34, 118, 126 Education, in slavery period, 60-63; later, m-113; de- nominational v. secular, 124- 126; recent account, 182-192 Emancipation, 77, 95-99 Endowment, not identical witli establishment, 123 Endowment, concurrent, in Ja- maica, 52 ; Trinidad, 140 ; Guiana, 140 ; refused in An- tigua, 141 ; in Barbados, 144 Episcopacy, jurisdiction of Bishop of London, 48-51 ; local epis- copate refused .by British Government, 52-56 ; effects of refusal, 56-63 ; granted by • INDEX 273 Canning, 89 ; removed from Crown jurisdiction, 135 ; char- acter of, in West Indies. 171 Establishment, concurrent, in Guiana, 92, 128 Establishment, simultaneous with original occupation, 44 ; in conquered colonies, 1 18-122 Falkland Islands, 269 Family life, 37 Fertility of soil, 12 P'inance, diocesan, 163 Free trade, as affecting West Indies, 13, 257 French, in West Indies, 9-12, 14, 118; treatment of slaves, 22, 25, 63 ; care of colonies, 34, 41 Froude, J. A., misrepresentations of Church, 253 Government in West Indies, 14 Governors, act as Ordinary, 51 Grenada, 26, 241 , 242. See also Windward Islands Guiana, British, 10; Smith of Demarara case, 89 ; three colonies united, 92 ; religion in, concurrent establishment, 126- 128, 140; coolies, 117, 204; missions to, 117, 211-218; Catechists' College, 182; special points, 245 Hayti, 10, 11 ; influence on Jamaica, 79 ; English Church in, 218 Higher life, in slavery period, 38-40 Hindus. See Coolies Holy Communion, refused in slavery period, 46 ; after emancipation, 107, 161 Honduras, British, 10 ; history of, 131, 210, 219; special points, 246 Indented servants, 31, 32 Industrial system, 15 ; present depression, 256 Ireland, disestablishment of Church, 135 Jamaica, 10; harsh slave policy considered, 22, 23 ; effect of maroons, 35 ; of Hayti, 79 ; resistance to abolition, 77-79 ; labour policy afterwards, 115; disestablishment, 139 ; diocesan constitution and ' church agencies, 154-166; education, 180-190 Jews, 31 Keble, John, 91 Kidnapping, 32 Kingsley, Charles, 205 Ladies' Negro Education Society, 240 Lambeth Conference, 150, 152, 170 Laws of colonies, 14 1 Lay offices and work, 57, 106, no, 153, 177, 258 ! Letters patent, discontinued, 135 Lipscombe, first Bishop of Jamaica, 91, 112 London, Bishop's jurisdiction in West Indies, 45-51, 81 London Missionary Society, 194 Longevity, cases of, 264 Maroons, 24, 35 ; Marriage, forbidden to slaves, 37 ; after emancipation, 107, 117, 161 ; in recent years, 194-197 Methodists, 73, 104 ; accept en- dowment, 123, 130, 131, 132; present position, 249-252 Mico charity, 112, 189 Milton, John, 44 S 274 INDEX Morality, 37, 38. 108, 194-197 Moravians in West Indies, 72, 104; accept endowment, 123, 132, 226 ; present position, 249-252 Music, Church, 94, 95, 106, no Nassau. See Bahamas Negro, condition in Africa, 24 ; features of character, 114-116; importance of religion in edu- cation, 191-202. See Slaves Nevis, 10, n ; and in Antigua diocese New England Company, 235 Nuttall, Archbishop, 147 ; Bishop of Jamaica, 159 ; second Primate, 167; first Archbishop, 167, 174 Ordinary, the Governors act as, 51 Parishes, marked out at outset, 44 ; not always had churches, 47 Pinder, J. H., 92. 131, 213. 228, 233 Plantations, the system, 12, 15 ; features of, 25, 27, 61 Pongas, mission in West Africa, 116; history, 220-224 Porteus, Bishop, 236 Porto Rico, 218 Portuguese, 15, 52, 247 Presbyterians, 52, 71, 83, 1 1 7,! 130, 132, 208, 247-252 Province, the West Indian, 167 Races, relations between whites and negroes, 107. 192 Rawle, Bishop, 113. 116, 153, 173, 180, 229, 233 Re-establishment, in Barbados, 142 Reference, Committee of, it England, 170 Religion and morality, 201 Religious education, 182-192 Rodney, 13 Rome, Church of, in West Indies, 71, 82, 118, 124-126, 132, 247-252 Salvation Army, 250 San Domingo, 218 Schools. See Education Scotch in West Indies, 32, 34, 126 Slavery, considerations on, 18- 25 ; abolished, 96 Slaves, condition and mode of life, 36, 37 ; the Church in relation to, 63—70 ; gradual amelioration of condition, 81- 89. See Negro Slave Trade, commenced, 16 ; dimensions and character, 16- 18 ; abolished, 82 Societies, local religious and benevolent, 92, 95, 113, 158, 197 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 87, 103, 116, 180, 181, 219, 235 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 32, 53, 92, 102, 103, 116, 130, 132, 180, 207, 213,219,221,234. As Trust- ees of Codrington College set Codrington College. Spanish, in West Indies, 9-12, 22, 24, 25, 63 St. Kitts, 10 ; disestablishment, 140 ; work in, 178. See Antigua, diocese St. Lucia, 10, 126, 210; join Windward Islands, 244 St. Thomas (Danish), 219 St. Vincent, 10, 126 ; concur- INDEX 275 rent endowment, 140, 201. 1 See Windward Islands, diocese 1 Sugar introduced, 12 ; import- 1 ance of, 15 ; decline of, 256 Sunday observance, 45 Sunday schools, 57, 83. 112, 161 ; not so full as day schools, ; 186 Synods, Jamaica, 139 ; consti- 1 tution of, at length, 154-164;! vitality of, 164 Theological College in Jamaica, ' 180, 232 Tobago, 47, 126, 169, 243, 244 j Toleration, adopted in West i Indies, 45, 118, 120 Training Colleges, 180-190 Trinidad, 118; emancipation' in, 102 ; Church establishment question, 1 18-123; educational conflict, 124-126; coolies, 117, 204 ; concurrent endowment, 210; special points, 244 Villenage, the European parallel to Negro slavery, 19-21 Virgin Islands, 210 Walpole, Horace, an absentee official, 29 Windward Islands, diocese, 242 Women's work, in, 179 Worship, public, 93, 109. 201 ; uniformity or elasticity, 152, 161, 259' Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London & Bungay. 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