ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY. 



37 



clergy from settlement to settlement, and unexpected deaths 

 had been a great draw-back. They were however busily pre- 

 paring the way for their successors, by compiling dictionaries 

 and grammars. They had succeeded in making a Tamil and 

 Dutch, a Portuguese and Singhalese, and a Singhalese and 

 Dutch dictionary; and also translated into Tamil the 1st Epistle 

 of Peter. 



They state that they laboured under the difficulty of 

 finding suitable words in the native languages to convey just 

 ideas of gospel truths. Instructions were sent from Holland 

 " that a few native children in their tender years should be 

 taken under the care and tuition of the clergy, to be brought 

 up from their childhood in the knowledge of Christianity and 

 afterwards to be fitted for the work of preachers." This year 

 two new clergymen arrived from Holland, but one of them, 

 Livius, a young man, met with a watery grave in the Colombo 

 roads, four days after his landing, while fetching his luggage 

 from the ship. His death was deeply regretted as he was re- 

 ported very promising, full of zeal and application. 



In 1692 the East India Company replied favourably on 

 the Calany question ; that they would not allow heathen prac- 

 tices in the neighbourhood of their chief town, upon which the 

 clergy opened an establishment there and ordered the priests 

 to remove. The classis of Walcheren writing generally on the 

 influence of heathenism, asked the clergy to communicate in 

 their next letter a few prudent rules or measures that might 

 be applied to prevent the evil, as suggestions to the XVII 

 Representatives. It appears all along that the clergy had a 

 great idea of the interposition of the civil arm to put down 

 both buddhism and popery. 



In connection with the Calany question, the following 

 paragraph occurs in the Annual Ecclesiastical Report, which 



