Anti-Christian Indians
p. 28 · Read in the full issue
In Mission Schools
From Our Own Correspondent SUVA, Sept. 20.
“TT would seem that the Indians want X our schools for the sake of what we can give them in the way of secular education, but they are not interested in becoming Christians,” said the general secretary of the New Zealand Church of England Board of Missions (the Rev. W.
S. Southward) in a report made after a tour of some of the main centres of the diocese of Polynesia.
All Christian bodies in Fiji are faced with the same problem, the report states.
There is a flood of Indian children in the mission schools, but they are sur rounded by a wall of indifference or hos tility to any form of Christian religious teaching. Out of Fiji’s 120,000 Indians only 2,000 profess Christianity.
The report adds: “The general atti tude of the Indians is largely coloured by the political situation. To become a Christian is in their eyes to become pro- European, and thus a traitor to their own people.”
Mr. Charles Ross, who spent a lifetime in the New Hebrides, and who owned a plantation on Efate Island, died re cently in Melbourne.