Truth Triumphant - Benjamin G. Wilkinson

until the judgment. For the first six hundred years
the churches of southern India grappled
successfully with dominant Buddhism; then for the
succeeding one thousand years they contended
with a degraded and wily Hinduism. But the real
struggle began in the seventeenth century when the
Jesuits, supported by the guns of Portugal, entered
their parishes. It was not the missionaries from
Rome, therefore, who first entered India. The type
of New Testament faith first planted on the
Malabar Coast nineteen hundred years ago is still
there and is similar to that of the rest of the
Protestant world.
For sixteen hundred years the St. Thomas
Christians refused to put the church above the
Bible. They found their starting point in the Sacred
Scriptures, rather than in the catch phrase that the
church was “instinct with heavenly life.” They
refused to accept the teaching that the clergy only
and not the laity were capable of interpreting the
Bible. Accordingly, they clung to the Sacred
Writings as the only channel through which the
saving and transforming influence of the Holy
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