CHAPTER IV - CALCUTTA AS IT WAS

Summary

Having secured full power to carry out his own plans unfettered by conditions in Scotland or on the spot, and having failed to obtain from his Church any instructions for his guidance save one, Mr. Duff's first duty was to refuse to give effect to that one. He had been forbidden to open his mission in Calcutta. Why, it is difficult to understand, in the absence of all reasons assigned for such a prohibition. So the agents of the Scottish Missionary Society before Dr. Wilson had neglected Bombay city, while shut out from the Maratha capital of Poona, and had wasted years in the obscure villages of the Konkan. The example of the Apostles, beginning at Jerusalem, might have sufficed. The first of all Protestant missions and colleges in Bengal had, indeed, been established outside of the capital, but that was because the East India Company's early intolerance had driven Carey and Marshman to the protection of the little Danish Government at Serampore. Bishop Middleton had followed, spontaneously, the unfortunate precedent, by building his Gothic pile so far down the right bank of the Hooghly that his college has proved useless for its great object ever since. This only had been determined on by Dr. Inglis and Mr. Duff, that the first missionary was to open a school or college, just because that line of proselytising work had been neglected by the few other missionaries then in Calcutta.