Page:A History of American Anthropology.pdf/17

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INTRODUCTION
5

It is possible that the leaven of religion was one of the greatest factors in this period. Even in early pre-Buddhist India we find the ancient sages in one such period of national activity crying out, "Srinvantu visve Amritasya putrah" "Hear ye all in the world oh ye children of immortality." The sense of a high mission, which is but the vague expression of the rapidly expanding soul of a people, a dynamic phase, cause peoples to burst their bonds. It is found later on rationalized by vested interests in such cants as Papal inheritance, Nordic superiority or the Hellenization of the earth, or the White Man's burden. But the unmistakable hiss of a new cultural compound in the making, is always heard.

When Boniface and other Christian missionaries were working on the Slav frontier humane Buddhist missionaries were carrying their Hindu-Buddhist religious culture to the furthest limits of the Japanese-Ainu frontier. It might seem at first that the objective pagan outlook of the Renaissance would result in the withering of missionary activities. But the Renaissance came to England in the chrysalis of the Reformation, burst into the beauties of Elizabethan literature and the intensities of a Puritan passion which could load the Mayflower with carriers of the torch of a new culture to come. An individual, as well as a group, first exhausts the well-tried behaviour patterns, and so we see the Roman Catholic Church astir, missionaries requisitioned and dragooned to convert the newfound heathen and bring them to the papal heritage. It was not merely the belief in the Kingdom of God on the earth (as the sincere Christian naturally expected when he thought of the whole world becoming Christian), but of a veritable earthly appendage to Popedom that colored the serious thinking of the time. This is nowhere so clearly brought out as in the memorable document of the Requisition drawn up in 1509 by Dr. Palacio Rubios, at the command of King Ferdinand—a precious document for all students of group motivation for all time. "...The Lord our God created the heaven and earth and one man and one woman. Of all