The Church of South India Sin, — Your correspondence columns of November
18th contained mn further references to the relationships of S.P.G. with the Church of South India which call for some notice. The case quoted by Rey. R. P. C. Hanson, in which his married brother was allowed by the Society to go out to work in Dornakal in March, 1947, deserves and has received considerable sympathy. But his complaint scarcely does justice to the dilemma in which the Society was placed. The final report of its advisory group could not be prepared until the General Council of the Church of India, Burma and Ceylon had registered its decision in January, 1947, and in the following March there was every reason to anticipate that the continuance of grants to individual missionaries would be countenanced. There was, therefore, no conscious breach of good faith or intention, and the unfore- seen character of subsequent events did not affect the anxiety of the Society at that critical time to avoid any action which would have seemed to denote a loss of faith in the negotiations. If any culpable negligence was involved, which I do not think has been established, it was due to an error of judgement on the part of an individual officer in quite abnormal circumstances and constitutes an inadequate ground for distrusting the policy or administration of the Society as a whole.
It would be unprofitable to follow Dr. C. S. Carter into a discussion of Article XXIII. But on the question of the employment by S.P.G. of non- episcopal continental missionaries in South India I may refer him to a reliable review of the whole subject in the East and West Review of October, 1948, and the Guardian of November 18th, 1948. My statement that this expedient was "an exceptional and temporary anomaly" is there fully substantiated, and it is also shown that a succession of contemporary Bishops of Calcutta and the Society itself repeatedly expressed their dis- satisfaction with the arrangement.—Yours faithfully, is Tufton Street, Westminster, S.W.:. BASIL C. ROBERTS.
[This correspondence is now closed.—Ed. Spectator].
Secretary, S.P.G
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