THE MISSIONARY POSITION:
Protestant Missionaries Go to India to Save Heathen Souls (1812)
A little more than a hundred years after the German Pietists reached Danish India, the first American Protestants joined the missionary fray. They were bit players in a country-wide religious revival, now known as the Second Great Awakening, that began in the late 1790s.
A central theme of this Awakening was called “disinterested benevolence,” developed by a Congregationalist minister named Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803). Hopkins believed that the root of all sin is self-love; so he taught that to eradicate sin from our lives we should transform self-love into unconditional love for others. We must act, in other words, for the welfare of our neighbors without concern for our own reward or salvation. This idea spurred a period of fervent social activism and world-wide missionary activity intent on Christianizing heathens everywhere, whether native or foreign.
Our American Protestants’ journey began, oddly enough, in a haystack one rainy afternoon in 1806 in western Massachusetts. That’s where five male students from Williams College took shelter from the storm and, during an impromptu prayer session, were inspired to dedicate the rest of their lives to the missionary cause. Four years later, after many trials and tribulations, the Haystack Prayer participants were instrumental in organizing the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) for the “purpose of devising ways and means, and adopting and prosecuting measures, for promoting the spread of the gospel in Heathen lands.”
In 1812, sponsored by the ABCFM, five eager, newly-minted reverends were selected to carry the Good News to the “poor heathen”of India. Since the journey was perilous with storms and pirates, the pioneering party was divided onto two ships heading for Calcutta. Adironam Judson and Samuel Newell would sail with their wives from Salem on the Caravan; Samuel Nott and his wife, along with Luther Rice and Gordon Hall, both single, would leave nine days later from Philadelphia on the Harmony. While they all reached India safely, their paths after that proved rocky at best, fatal at worst.
Gordon Hall, one of the Haystack men, was the first American missionary in Bombay. In his 12 years there, he established over 20 public schools and produced a Marathi translation of the New Testament. Hall married an English woman and they had two sons, but by the mid-1820s all four were in poor health. So while Hall stayed behind in India to do his “Master’s work,” his wife and kids sailed for the US for some R & R. Unhappily the older brother died along the way, and not long after, in 1826, Hall died of cholera at the age of 42. His motto was the benevolently indifferent “Duty is ours, consequences God’s.”
Samuel and Harriet Newell were denied permission by the EIC to settle in India–America and England were at each other’s throats again and John Company was in no mood to accommodate American preachers. So they wound up in Mauritius (then known as the Isle of France) where, only a few months after leaving the US, Harriet Newell died at the age of 19, five days after the death of her newborn daughter. Samuel was devastated, as is plain in this heart-breaking letter he wrote to Harriet’s parents:
Come, then, let us mingle our grief and weep together, for she was dear to us both; and now she is gone. Yes, Harriet, your lovely daughter, is gone, and you will see her face no more! My own Harriet–the wife of my youth, and the desire of my eyes, has bid me a last farewell, and left me to mourn and weep alone. Yes, she is gone. I wiped the cold sweat of death from her pale face while we traveled together, down to the entrance of the dark valley. There she passed through and took her upward flight, and ascended to the mansions of the blessed, but I sit weeping here.
Two years after Harriet’s death, Newell published her memoirs, Life and Writings of Mrs. Harriet Newell, which went through several editions. In 1818, he and Hall authored a pamphlet, The Conversion of the World, or the Claims of Six Hundred Millions and the Ability and Duty of the Churches Respecting Them, in which they supported a then-popular belief that the entire world could be Christianized within one generation. They urged churches to “send forth preachers in sufficient numbers to furnish the means of instruction and salvation to the whole world.” Newell survived his wife by nine years, succumbing to cholera in Bombay in 1821. His epitaph in part reads:
He labored with unyielding energy, but without ostentation. All his aims and efforts were subordinated to the sense of Christian duty, and pervaded by habitual piety. In his early removal the church lost a faithful servant, the world a wholehearted philanthropist, a wide circle of friends their hope and joy, and heaven gained a jewel such as earth does not often present to adorn the holy city.
A funny thing happened to the Judsons on their way to India. Like the other members of their party, they were Congregationalists, who practiced (and still do) infant baptism. As you may know, this is different from the Baptists, who limit baptism to adults–believing only adults can understand the import of the sacrament–and baptize not just by sprinkling a few drops of water, but by dunking the whole person in water. The Judsons realized that, because English Baptists were already well established in India, they’d have to convincingly explain and justify to prospective Christians the desirability of Congregationalist baptism over Baptist baptism. So they spent their four months at sea studying what the scriptures had to say about baptism. And lo and behold, after some intense soul-searching, both came to the uncomfortable but unavoidable conclusion that the Baptists were right about baptism, the Congregationalists were wrong.
And so it came to pass that the Judsons, who started their trip as perfectly satisfied Congregationalists, converted into rather apologetic though committed Baptists. While we may shrug at the Judsons’ change of heart over baptism, they felt their world had been flipped upside down. Judson’s wife Ann wrote to a friend that the couple became Baptists “not because we wished to be, but because truth compelled us to be ... We anticipate the loss of reputation, and of the affection and esteem of many of our American friends,” an expectation which proved prescient.
When the Judsons arrived in Calcutta, they quickly cut themselves loose from the Congregationalists and were just as quickly welcomed into the Baptist fold. Unfortunately they weren’t equally welcomed in India. Once more the EIC reared its ugly head and kicked the Judsons out. They eventually landed on their feet in Burma (nowadays known as Myanmar). Adoniram spent most of the next 37 years there, including nearly 18 months between 1824 and 1825 in a brutal Burmese “Death Prison” ... where, malnourished and tortured, he worked surreptitiously on a Burmese translation of the New Testament. Ann, the first American woman to preach in a foreign country, died in 1826 (the same year as Gordon Hall), age 37. Judson died at sea in 1850 at the age of 62.
OTHER MISSIONARY EVENTS
1824 Baptist historian David Benedict publishes History of all Religions.
I resolved to use the precise language of each in presenting their peculiar dogmas and rites, and let them speak for themselves in all that pertains to their distinctive characters.
1825 Congregationalist minister Charles Augustus Goodrich mostly wrote children’s books (as did his brother, Samuel, under the pen name Peter Parley). In this year he publishes Religious Ceremonies and Customs, based on the 9 volumes of Religious Ceremonies and Costumes of All the People of the World (1722, 1728) by a well-known French illustrator and engraver, Bernard Picart. While some early writers on comparative religion at least pay lip service to objectivity, Goodrich is vociferously pro-Christian. He prompts his readers to look at the “picture” he’s drawn of the “religious world” and then straight out tells them what they’ll see:
... many dark and distressing shades; he will see in what varied and unhallowed forms, mankind have worshipped the common Parent of all; he will be led to contemplate the delusions practiced upon millions ... the unholy devotion demanded of other millions, by an intolerant hierarchy; and the debasing superstitions and cruel abominations inculcated upon still more millions ... by an earth-born system of idolatry. [tweed/prothero 58]
1829 CA Goodrich, A Pictorial and Descriptive View of all Religions.
1837 Indian missionary Hollis Read publishes Babajee, the Christian Brahmin.
1849 Indian missionary Caleb Wright publishes Curiosities and Remarkable Customs in Pagan and Mahammedan Countries: Costumes and Remarkable Personages in India.
The author has travelled more than forty thousand miles, for the express purpose of collecting information respecting the various races of people whose peculiar manners, habits, and superstitions he describes.
1852 C Wright publishes India and its Inhabitants, with 92 wood engravings.
To the mind of a Hindu, whatever is customary is proper; for he believes that the customs of his forefathers, civil, social, and religious, were instituted of the gods, and are therefore incapable of improvement.
1855 Abolitionist, women’s rights activist, novelist and journalist Lydia Maria Child publishes The Progress of Religious Ideas, Through Successive Ages. She writes in the Preface:
I would candidly advise persons who are conscious of bigoted attachment to any creed, or theory, not to purchase this book. Whether they are bigoted Christians, or bigoted infidels, its tone will be likely to displease them.
My motive in writing has been a very simple one. I wished to show that theology is not religion; with the hope that I might help to break down partition walls; to ameliorate what the eloquent Bushnell calls “baptized hatreds of the human race.” In order to do this, I have endeavoured to give a concise and comprehensive account of religions, in the liberal spirit of the motto on my title page. The period embraced in plan extends from the most ancient Hindoo [sic], to the complete establishment of the Catholic church.
1858 H Read publishes India and its People, Ancient and Modern.
1870 Medical doctor and Methodist missionary Clara Swain arrives in India, the first female doctor in Asia. In 1874 she opens the first Asian hospital for women.
1872 Methodist missionary William Butler, The Land of the Veda: Being Personal Reminiscences of India; Its People, Castes, Thugs and Fakirs; Its Religions, Mythology, Principle Monuments, Palaces and Mausoleums, Together With the incidents of the Great Sepoy Rebellion and its Results to Christianity and Civilization.
Of all the curses under which India and her daughters groan, it may safely be said that this profession of the Fakirs is one of the heaviest and most debasing. The world has not often beheld a truer illustration of putting “darkness for light” than is afforded in the character and influence of these ignorant, beastly-looking men–fellows that in any civilized land would be indicted as “common vagrants,” or hooted out of society as an intolerable outrage upon decency. ...
I have often stood and looked at them in the wild jungle ... filthy, naked, daubed with ashes and paint, and thought how like they seemed to those wretched creatures whom a merciful Saviour released from the power of evil spirits, and so compassionately restored to decency, to friends, and to their right minds.
From pages 197-198.
1879 Former slave and missionary Amanda Smith arrives in India for a two-year stay. Her autobiography, published in 1893 (sub-titled The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist), is one of the most popular books written by an African American woman in the 19th century.
1883 Phillips Brooks, called the “greatest American preacher of the nineteenth century” (and author of the hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem”), travels in India
A little more than a hundred years after the German Pietists reached Danish India, the first American Protestants joined the missionary fray. They were bit players in a country-wide religious revival, now known as the Second Great Awakening, that began in the late 1790s.
A central theme of this Awakening was called “disinterested benevolence,” developed by a Congregationalist minister named Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803). Hopkins believed that the root of all sin is self-love; so he taught that to eradicate sin from our lives we should transform self-love into unconditional love for others. We must act, in other words, for the welfare of our neighbors without concern for our own reward or salvation. This idea spurred a period of fervent social activism and world-wide missionary activity intent on Christianizing heathens everywhere, whether native or foreign.
Our American Protestants’ journey began, oddly enough, in a haystack one rainy afternoon in 1806 in western Massachusetts. That’s where five male students from Williams College took shelter from the storm and, during an impromptu prayer session, were inspired to dedicate the rest of their lives to the missionary cause. Four years later, after many trials and tribulations, the Haystack Prayer participants were instrumental in organizing the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) for the “purpose of devising ways and means, and adopting and prosecuting measures, for promoting the spread of the gospel in Heathen lands.”
In 1812, sponsored by the ABCFM, five eager, newly-minted reverends were selected to carry the Good News to the “poor heathen”of India. Since the journey was perilous with storms and pirates, the pioneering party was divided onto two ships heading for Calcutta. Adironam Judson and Samuel Newell would sail with their wives from Salem on the Caravan; Samuel Nott and his wife, along with Luther Rice and Gordon Hall, both single, would leave nine days later from Philadelphia on the Harmony. While they all reached India safely, their paths after that proved rocky at best, fatal at worst.
Gordon Hall, one of the Haystack men, was the first American missionary in Bombay. In his 12 years there, he established over 20 public schools and produced a Marathi translation of the New Testament. Hall married an English woman and they had two sons, but by the mid-1820s all four were in poor health. So while Hall stayed behind in India to do his “Master’s work,” his wife and kids sailed for the US for some R & R. Unhappily the older brother died along the way, and not long after, in 1826, Hall died of cholera at the age of 42. His motto was the benevolently indifferent “Duty is ours, consequences God’s.”
Samuel and Harriet Newell were denied permission by the EIC to settle in India–America and England were at each other’s throats again and John Company was in no mood to accommodate American preachers. So they wound up in Mauritius (then known as the Isle of France) where, only a few months after leaving the US, Harriet Newell died at the age of 19, five days after the death of her newborn daughter. Samuel was devastated, as is plain in this heart-breaking letter he wrote to Harriet’s parents:
Come, then, let us mingle our grief and weep together, for she was dear to us both; and now she is gone. Yes, Harriet, your lovely daughter, is gone, and you will see her face no more! My own Harriet–the wife of my youth, and the desire of my eyes, has bid me a last farewell, and left me to mourn and weep alone. Yes, she is gone. I wiped the cold sweat of death from her pale face while we traveled together, down to the entrance of the dark valley. There she passed through and took her upward flight, and ascended to the mansions of the blessed, but I sit weeping here.
Two years after Harriet’s death, Newell published her memoirs, Life and Writings of Mrs. Harriet Newell, which went through several editions. In 1818, he and Hall authored a pamphlet, The Conversion of the World, or the Claims of Six Hundred Millions and the Ability and Duty of the Churches Respecting Them, in which they supported a then-popular belief that the entire world could be Christianized within one generation. They urged churches to “send forth preachers in sufficient numbers to furnish the means of instruction and salvation to the whole world.” Newell survived his wife by nine years, succumbing to cholera in Bombay in 1821. His epitaph in part reads:
He labored with unyielding energy, but without ostentation. All his aims and efforts were subordinated to the sense of Christian duty, and pervaded by habitual piety. In his early removal the church lost a faithful servant, the world a wholehearted philanthropist, a wide circle of friends their hope and joy, and heaven gained a jewel such as earth does not often present to adorn the holy city.
A funny thing happened to the Judsons on their way to India. Like the other members of their party, they were Congregationalists, who practiced (and still do) infant baptism. As you may know, this is different from the Baptists, who limit baptism to adults–believing only adults can understand the import of the sacrament–and baptize not just by sprinkling a few drops of water, but by dunking the whole person in water. The Judsons realized that, because English Baptists were already well established in India, they’d have to convincingly explain and justify to prospective Christians the desirability of Congregationalist baptism over Baptist baptism. So they spent their four months at sea studying what the scriptures had to say about baptism. And lo and behold, after some intense soul-searching, both came to the uncomfortable but unavoidable conclusion that the Baptists were right about baptism, the Congregationalists were wrong.
And so it came to pass that the Judsons, who started their trip as perfectly satisfied Congregationalists, converted into rather apologetic though committed Baptists. While we may shrug at the Judsons’ change of heart over baptism, they felt their world had been flipped upside down. Judson’s wife Ann wrote to a friend that the couple became Baptists “not because we wished to be, but because truth compelled us to be ... We anticipate the loss of reputation, and of the affection and esteem of many of our American friends,” an expectation which proved prescient.
When the Judsons arrived in Calcutta, they quickly cut themselves loose from the Congregationalists and were just as quickly welcomed into the Baptist fold. Unfortunately they weren’t equally welcomed in India. Once more the EIC reared its ugly head and kicked the Judsons out. They eventually landed on their feet in Burma (nowadays known as Myanmar). Adoniram spent most of the next 37 years there, including nearly 18 months between 1824 and 1825 in a brutal Burmese “Death Prison” ... where, malnourished and tortured, he worked surreptitiously on a Burmese translation of the New Testament. Ann, the first American woman to preach in a foreign country, died in 1826 (the same year as Gordon Hall), age 37. Judson died at sea in 1850 at the age of 62.
OTHER MISSIONARY EVENTS
1824 Baptist historian David Benedict publishes History of all Religions.
I resolved to use the precise language of each in presenting their peculiar dogmas and rites, and let them speak for themselves in all that pertains to their distinctive characters.
1825 Congregationalist minister Charles Augustus Goodrich mostly wrote children’s books (as did his brother, Samuel, under the pen name Peter Parley). In this year he publishes Religious Ceremonies and Customs, based on the 9 volumes of Religious Ceremonies and Costumes of All the People of the World (1722, 1728) by a well-known French illustrator and engraver, Bernard Picart. While some early writers on comparative religion at least pay lip service to objectivity, Goodrich is vociferously pro-Christian. He prompts his readers to look at the “picture” he’s drawn of the “religious world” and then straight out tells them what they’ll see:
... many dark and distressing shades; he will see in what varied and unhallowed forms, mankind have worshipped the common Parent of all; he will be led to contemplate the delusions practiced upon millions ... the unholy devotion demanded of other millions, by an intolerant hierarchy; and the debasing superstitions and cruel abominations inculcated upon still more millions ... by an earth-born system of idolatry. [tweed/prothero 58]
1829 CA Goodrich, A Pictorial and Descriptive View of all Religions.
1837 Indian missionary Hollis Read publishes Babajee, the Christian Brahmin.
1849 Indian missionary Caleb Wright publishes Curiosities and Remarkable Customs in Pagan and Mahammedan Countries: Costumes and Remarkable Personages in India.
The author has travelled more than forty thousand miles, for the express purpose of collecting information respecting the various races of people whose peculiar manners, habits, and superstitions he describes.
1852 C Wright publishes India and its Inhabitants, with 92 wood engravings.
To the mind of a Hindu, whatever is customary is proper; for he believes that the customs of his forefathers, civil, social, and religious, were instituted of the gods, and are therefore incapable of improvement.
1855 Abolitionist, women’s rights activist, novelist and journalist Lydia Maria Child publishes The Progress of Religious Ideas, Through Successive Ages. She writes in the Preface:
I would candidly advise persons who are conscious of bigoted attachment to any creed, or theory, not to purchase this book. Whether they are bigoted Christians, or bigoted infidels, its tone will be likely to displease them.
My motive in writing has been a very simple one. I wished to show that theology is not religion; with the hope that I might help to break down partition walls; to ameliorate what the eloquent Bushnell calls “baptized hatreds of the human race.” In order to do this, I have endeavoured to give a concise and comprehensive account of religions, in the liberal spirit of the motto on my title page. The period embraced in plan extends from the most ancient Hindoo [sic], to the complete establishment of the Catholic church.
1858 H Read publishes India and its People, Ancient and Modern.
1870 Medical doctor and Methodist missionary Clara Swain arrives in India, the first female doctor in Asia. In 1874 she opens the first Asian hospital for women.
1872 Methodist missionary William Butler, The Land of the Veda: Being Personal Reminiscences of India; Its People, Castes, Thugs and Fakirs; Its Religions, Mythology, Principle Monuments, Palaces and Mausoleums, Together With the incidents of the Great Sepoy Rebellion and its Results to Christianity and Civilization.
Of all the curses under which India and her daughters groan, it may safely be said that this profession of the Fakirs is one of the heaviest and most debasing. The world has not often beheld a truer illustration of putting “darkness for light” than is afforded in the character and influence of these ignorant, beastly-looking men–fellows that in any civilized land would be indicted as “common vagrants,” or hooted out of society as an intolerable outrage upon decency. ...
I have often stood and looked at them in the wild jungle ... filthy, naked, daubed with ashes and paint, and thought how like they seemed to those wretched creatures whom a merciful Saviour released from the power of evil spirits, and so compassionately restored to decency, to friends, and to their right minds.
From pages 197-198.
1879 Former slave and missionary Amanda Smith arrives in India for a two-year stay. Her autobiography, published in 1893 (sub-titled The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist), is one of the most popular books written by an African American woman in the 19th century.
1883 Phillips Brooks, called the “greatest American preacher of the nineteenth century” (and author of the hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem”), travels in India
