planted and used as well in the said colonies as also as much as
might be among the savages bordering among them”; and the
honoured names of Nicolas Ferrar, John Ferrar, John Donne
and Sir John Sandys, a pupil of Hooker, are all found on the
council by which the home management of the colony was
conducted.
In the year 1618 was published The True Honour of Navigation and Navigators, by John Wood, D.D., dedicated to Sir Thomas Smith, governor to the East India Company, and about the same time appeared the well-known treatise of Hugo Grotius, De veritate religionis christianae, written for the express use of settlers in distant lands. Grotius also persuaded seven law students of Lübeck to go to the East as missionaries; the best known of them was Peter Heiling, who worked for 20 years in Abyssinia. A good deal of work was done by Dutch evangelists in Java, the Moluccas, Formosa and Ceylon, but it was not permanent.
The wants, moreover, of the North American colonies did not escape the attention of Archbishop Laud during his official connexion with them as bishop of London, and he was developing a plan for promoting a local episcopate there when his troubles began and his scheme was interrupted. During the Protectorate, in 1649, an ordinance was passed for “the promoting and propagating of the gospel of Jesus Christ in New England” by the erection of a corporation, to be called by the name of the President and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, to receive and dispose of moneys for the purpose, and a general collection was ordered to be made in all the parishes of England and Wales; and Cromwell himself devised a scheme for setting up a council for the Protestant religion, which should rival the Roman Propaganda, and consist of seven councillors and four secretaries for different provinces.[1] On the restoration of the monarchy, through the influence of Richard Baxter with Lord Chancellor Hyde, the charter already granted by Cromwell was renewed, and its powers were enlarged. For now the corporation was styled “The Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the parts adjacent in America,” and its object was defined to be “not only to seek the outward welfare and prosperity of those colonies, but more especially to endeavour the good and salvation of their immortal souls, and the publishing the most glorious gospel of Christ among them.” On the list of the corporation the first name is the earl of Clarendon, while the Hon. Robert Boyle was appointed president. Amongst the most eminent of its missionaries was the celebrated John Eliot, the Puritan minister of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who, encouraged and financially assisted by Boyle, brought out the Bible in the Indian language in 1661–1664. Boyle displayed in other ways his zeal for the cause of missions. He contributed to the expense of printing and publishing at Oxford the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles in the Malay language, and at his death left £5400 for the propagation of the gospel in heathen lands.
The needs of the colonial church soon excited the attention of others. George Fox, the Quaker, wrote to “All Friends everywhere that have Indians or blacks, to preach the Gospel to them and their servants.” Great efforts were made by William Beveridge (1637–1708), bishop of St Asaph, William Wake (1657–1737), archbishop of Canterbury, John Sharp (1645–1714), archbishop of York, Edmund Gibson (1669–1748), bishop of London, and afterwards by the philosophic Bishop Berkeley, and Bishop Butler, the famous author of the Analogy, to develop the colonial church and provide for the wants of the Indian tribes. In 1696 Dr Thomas Bray, at the request of the governor and assembly of Maryland, was selected by the bishop of London as ecclesiastical commissary; and, having sold his effects, and raised money on credit, he sailed for Maryland in 1699, where he promoted, in various ways, the interests of the Church. Returning to England in 1700–1701, and supported by all the weight of Archbishop Tenison and Henry Compton, bishop of London, he was graciously received by William III., and received letters patent under the great seal of England for creating a corporation by the name of the “Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts” on the 16th of June 1701.
Meanwhile, in 1664, Von Welz, an Austrian baron, issued a stirring appeal to the Church at large for a special association devoted to extending the evangelical religion and converting the heathen. He was told that each Christian country should be responsible for its non-Christian neighbours, e.g. the Greeks for the Turks, and that as for the heathen it was no good casting pearls before swine. Finding no better response, he went himself as a missionary to Dutch Guiana. The opening of the 18th century saw other movements set on foot. Thus in 1705 Frederick IV. of Denmark founded a mission on the Coromandel coast, and inaugurated the labours of Bartholomew Ziegenbalg, Henry Plutschau and C. F. Schwartz, whose devotion and success told with such remarkable reflex influence on the Church at home. Again in 1731 the Moravians (q.v.) illustrated in a signal degree the growing consciousness of obligation towards the heathen. Driven by persecution from Moravia, hunted into mountain-caves and forests, they had scarcely secured a place of refuge in Saxony before, “though a mere handful in numbers, yet with the spirit of men banded for daring and righteous deeds, they formed the heroic design, and vowed the execution of it before God, of bearing the gospel to the savage and perishing tribes of Greenland and the West Indies, of whose condition report had brought a mournful rumour to their ears.” And so, literally with “neither bread nor scrip,” they went forth on their pilgrimage, and, incredible as it sounds, within ten years they had established missions in the islands of the West Indies, in South America, Surinam, Greenland, among the North American tribes, in Lapland, Tartary, Algiers, Guinea, the Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon.[2] Up till this time all missionary enterprises had been more or less connected with the state. The era of modern missions, based on associate organizations, begins with William Carey (q.v.), and is closely connected with the great evangelical revival of the latter part of the 18th century. That revival had intensified the idea of the worth of the individual soul, whether Christian or heathen, and “to snatch even one brand from the burning” became a dominant impulse. In 1792, Carey, a Baptist, who was not only a cobbler, but a linguist of the highest order, a botanist and zoologist, published his Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, and the book marks a distinct point of departure in the history of Christianity. Under its influence twelve ministers at Kettering in October 1792 organized the Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen, and subscribed £13, 2s. 6d. In June 1793 Carey was on his way to India. Letters from him quickened interest outside his own communion, and in the autumn of 1794 a meeting of Evangelical ministers of all denominations resolved to appeal to their churches, especially with a view to work being started in the South Sea Islands. The chief movers in the enterprise were the Congregationalist, David Bogue of Gosport, and the Episcopalian, Thomas Haweis, rector of Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire. With them were associated Wesleyan and Presbyterian divines, and in September 1795 the London Missionary Society, emphasizing no one form of church government, was formed. £10,000 was subscribed by June 1796, and in August 29 missionaries sailed for Tahiti. Societies formed in Glasgow and Edinburgh in the spring of the same year gave their attention to the continent of Africa.
The need of this continent was also the means of creating the distinctively Anglican organization known as the Church Missionary Society. The evangelical movement had produced philanthropists like Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, and the Eclectic Society, a group of clergy and laymen who fell to discussing the new missionary movements. In April 1799, under the guidance of John Venn and Thomas Scott, was established the Church Missionary Society, originally known as the “Society for Missions to Africa and the East.” Its promoters declared their intention of maintaining cordial relations with Nonconformist
