INDIA AND THE ANGLICAN EVANGELICALS

Anglican clergymen had been active in India since the beginning of the seventeenth century. Throughout the eighteenth century the SPCK in London had given generous help to the Lutheran mission in South India; but chaplains had always been few, and Anglican missionaries were nowhere to be found. By the middle of the nineteenth century the situation was entirely different. That this was so was due more to one cause than to any others – the development of the evangelical revival in the Church of England.

Some of the followers of John and Charles Wesley separated themselves from the Church of England and formed the various branches of the Methodist fellowship; but a good many of the most highly educated and most influential among them remained in the church of their origin and gradually formed the evangelical wing of the Church of England.

Among the Anglican evangelicals one man stands out, in the range and depth of his influence, far above all others. Charles Simeon (1759–1836) never held any office in the church other than that of incumbent of Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge. For fifty-four years he expounded the Gospel as he understood it from the pulpit of that church, and gathered round himself a group of devoted, and in some cases distinguished, disciples. His attention had early been directed to India, to which he referred as ‘my diocese’, and later as ‘my province’.