This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
Charles Theophilus Ewald Rhenius (5 November 1790 – 5 June 1838) was a German-born missionary of the Church Mission Society (CMS). He was the first CMS missionary to arrive in India. For his missionary work in the Tirunelveli district, he came to be known as the "Apostle of Tirunelveli". He was involved in the attempt to revise the Fabricius version of the Tamil Bible and also published a Tamil grammar book. Rhenius’ split from the Anglican Church in 1830 and started his own congregation. Rhenius' work was recognized in 1980 by the Reverend Daniel Abraham, the then Church of South India (CSI) bishop of Tirunelveli diocese. Rhenius's work was given official recognition by the Anglican Communion during the Tirunelveli diocese bicentenary celebration in 1980, in which, all the bishops, including Anglican bishop Stephen Neill and all the presbyters, took an oath in front of the tomb of Rev Rhenius to follow the path of the resting soul, regard to evangelism.