Planting Seeds in Young Hearts

Abstract

Overwhelmed by her experiences after she had arrived in India, in 1918 a young missionary by the name of Esther Færing wrote a long account of her impressions and sent it to the board of the Danish Missionary Society (DMS). Although she asked for the account, which she called ‘My Confession’ (Min Bekendelse), to be published in Dansk Missions-Blad, it never made its way into its pages.1 This is perhaps not surprising, for it contained an unequivocal condemnation of the distorted image of India and its people that she felt the Danish missionaries had painted with their relentless obsession with ‘the dark sides’ of Hinduism. To put it briefly, it was the description of the heathen world as St. Paul paints it in The Epistle to the Romans chapter one…about the deep darkness of heathenism, of the moral looseness in all relations, the curse of child marriage, the unbearable fate of widows and Hindu superstition, of all this did the missionaries speak.2