A Church is Born: Church of South India Inauguration

Christianity Comes to India > Settlement

It then arrived in the ships of Vasco da Gama who, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, found a new route to India and its rich trade.

Chaplains of the British East India Company, a hundred years later, established the first Protestant churches in India.

The typical British station was a port of call, with wharves, a warehouse, a government building, a fort and, later, a church to minister to the Europeans stationed there.

Among the earliest of these settlements was Madras where this fort was built over three centuries ago.

Close by the fort was St. Mary's, the first of all Protestant churches to be established in India. The present building, two and a half centuries old,

With its simple beauty and its quiet dignity, has an especial interest for Americans because, among its furnishings

Is this plate, the gift of Elihu Yale, the benefactor of our Yale University, who was British Governor at Madras in 1687. These first churches, however, were not a missionary enterprise, — they were for Europeans, not Indians.

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