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William Careyâs Pleasing Dream and Its Antecedents
On May 15, 1806, William Carey, the pioneer Baptist missionary to India, wrote from Calcutta to Andrew Fuller, secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society:
Two months later Carey outlined his plan to his neighbor Henry Mar-tyn, the Anglican chaplain in Calcutta. Martyn was very much pleased with the idea ânot on account of its practicality, but [because of] its grandeur.â
However, Andrew Fuller rejected the proposal, declaring that âin a meeting of all denominations, there would be no unity, without which we had better stay at home.â He represented the dominant view of the period that Christians of different denominations could not meet without quarreling and thereby intensifying their differences.
The seed of what Ruth Rouse has called âthe most startling missionary proposal of all timeâ had fallen on stony ground. Walls of divisionâthe results of historic church conflictsâremained intact. Yet for missionaries working among the Bengalis of Calcutta, or later among the Chinese of Canton, or in other fields, such divisions increasingly were judged to be both unbiblical and unnecessary.
Revolution and Religious Dissent
Carey was not the only visionary in 1806. In that year Napoleon Bonaparte had his own visionâthat of military conquest. In 1806 sixteen minor German states formed the Confederation of the Rhine, throwing their futures in with Napoleonâs ambitions. They were Napoleonâs spoils of war following his victory at the battle of Austerlitz. Although the British had destroyed the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, Napoleonâs army, which had swept eastward in Europe, could now move westward again. Until his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was to convulse the continent with his ambitions of empire.
Earlier the ideals of the French Revolution had been welcomed by English Dissenters at a time when they were battling for religious liberty. Carey, serving as secretary of the Dissentersâ Committee in 1790, watched Franceâs awesome drama with sympathy and hope as âa movement towards a completer humanity.â At first he believed it was âGodâs answerâ and that âa glorious door opened, and likely to be opened much wider, for the gospel, by the spread of civil and religious liberty, and by the diminution of the papal power.â Carey hoped that religious liberty would spread from France to England. Parliamentâs rejection of a motion to repeal the detested Test and Corporation Acts, which placed restrictions on Dissenters, could only have reinforced Careyâs radical opinions.
Careyâs âradicalism,â however, was that of a stalwart defense of religious liberty, which had been and remained a hallmark of religious independency, especially among Quakers and Baptists. The old dissenting sects, which 140 years earlier had provided foot soldiers for Cromwellâs army, had become more prosperous and less politically radical. Presbyterians and Independents were strongest in the commercial and wool manufacturing centers, while Baptists attracted small tradesmen, small farmers, and rural laborers. All these dissenters were inspired to holiness of life by reading John Bunyanâs Pilgrimâs Progress more than to political action by reading Thomas Paineâs Rights of Man.
Ălie HalĂ©vy believed that England was spared a political revolution, toward which her contradictory polity and economy might have led her, through the stabilizing effect of evangelical religion. âThe influence of Methodism,â the French social historian wrote, âcontributed a great deal, during the last years of the eighteenth century, to preventing the French Revolution from having an English counterpart.â
At the time, however, the jury was still out. On the one hand, John Wesley remained an Anglican clergyman and a good Tory throughout his life. In contrast to other Dissenters, he had defended Lord North against the American revolutionists at some considerable cost to his fledgling movement there. On the other hand, Methodism in England attracted many of the working class who shared political grievances and the appeals of the radicals. After Wesleyâs death in 1791, many politicians and Anglican clergy reacted with paranoia at the prospect of there being over 100,000 Methodists under the tight discipline of their Committee of One Hundred. They were the only body of organized people capable of making a revolution.
HalĂ©vy argued cogently that Methodism aroused the passions of Englandâs working class, but for revival and reformânot political revolution. The concern for a new morality spread from them to other Dissenters, and through the evangelicals into the Church of England. The visible expression of this new persuasion was to be found in the activities of voluntary associations.
On June 1, 1792, the Baptist Association, meeting in Nottingham, approved the groundbreaking proposition of Andrew Fuller âfor forming a Baptist Society for propagating the Gospel among the Heathens.â The next day the Nottingham weekly Journal was filled with the latest developments of the revolution in France, riots in Birmingham, and executions at Newgate. The action taken by the Baptist Association did not even rate a line, yet would be an event remembered over two hundred years.
It is significant that the voluntary associations for missions developed in the eighteenth century in those states in Europe in which religious toleration had been accepted. The dream of a Christian society, a corpus Christianum, cherished by many throughout the Middle Ages, was not entirely shattered by the sixteenth-century Reformation. Calvinâs Geneva, while a haven for oppressed Protestants, was also to be a holy commonwealth of those who believed in a common catechism. Dissenters were to be expelled or, like Servetus, exterminated. Menno Simons, the Anabaptist, faced persecution from both Roman Catholics and Lutherans. The turmoil of the Thirty Years War (1618â1648) was ended not by guarantees of religious freedom, but by the power of the ruler to determine the faith of all his subjectsâthe principle of cujus regio, ejus religio. The resulting state-church pattern, whether Protestant or Catholic, did not encourage independency.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries two new factors provided the seedbed for voluntarism in missions. The first was colonialism. Once European powers ventured to the East, where subject peoples could not be converted by the sword, they accepted a de facto religious plurality. British North America posed a special situation, where almost all the chief European strains of Christianity were present yet none was in the ascendancy. This provided a second seedbedâthe recognition of a plurality of churches and ultimately a separation of church and state.
Careyâs Mission Antecedents
His imagination fired by reports of the voyages of Captain Cook, William Carey hoped that he might serve his Master in the South Pacific. In doing so he was part of the long line of missionaries from St. Paul onwards who heard the call âto come over and help us.â Since fifteenth-century explorations were sponsored largely by the rulers of Spain and Portugal, the first link of missions with colonialism was by Roman Catholics. By the seventeenth century, Dutch and English commercial companies joined in the competition for trade with the East, and added chaplains to their payrolls. Initially they ministered to company employees, but often branched out to work with local peoples, as with the Dutch in Java.
Royal and Company Initiatives
Anglicans led in ecumenical initiatives in mission in the eighteenth century. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), founded in 1698, maintained close connections in cooperation with Lutheran and Reformed churches on the continent and with their clergy who had recognition as Corresponding Members. Using the corporate model, Anglicans established in 1701 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). An incorporated society with royal charter, its main work was to care for Anglicans while overseas in the Caribbean or North America. However, missionaries were also to be sent to work with Native Americans, and with the slaves being brought from Africa. During the same period King Frederick IV of Denmark took royal initiative to send missionaries to the tiny Danish settlement of Tranquebar on Indiaâs southeast coast. Lacking Danes ready to serve, he asked the Pi...