Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE FRENCH PROTESTANT MI33ION. Go CHAPTER III. The First Protestant Mission—Ziegenbalg and Plutscho—Missionary Efforts at Tranquebur—Encouragement of the Company's Chaplains—Schwartz and Kiernander. In the meanwhile some hopeful symptoms of energetic religious action in the Reformed Church were slowly evincing themselves in the Western world. The Protestantism of Europe was beginning to bestir itself. The Hollander and the Dane preceded the Englishman in fields of missionary enterprise ; but at the commencement of the eighteenth century, England herself was right royally connected both with the Hollander and the Dane; and now that Protestant ascendancy was securely established at home, it began to move, somewhat sluggishly it must be admitted, in new directions, and to feel its way towards propa- gandism in foreign parts. Cromwell had thought of this some time before; and at the end of the seventeenth century, Prideaux, Dean of Norwich, had put forth a scheme for the dissemination of Christianity in the East, of which the establishment of bishoprics was a more prominent feature than the Nonconformist Protector would have approved. But out of these good intentions nothing had really come; and it was not until the year 1709 that England made a pecuniary contribution towards the support of missions in the East; and that contribution was made by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which had been established in 1/01 ; the amount of the contribution being 201., with a case of books and some encouraging letters. The mission to which this contribution was made, through the intervention of one of the chaplains of Prince George of Denmark, the husband of our Anne, was a Danish Mission. Early in the seventeenth century the Danes had established them...