After 1780 enthusiasts sought more purposefully to solve these intellectual and practical problems. Many Anglicans had concluded that their Church lacked both the efficiency and sympathy required for missionary enterprise. The SPCK and SPG had financed plenty of colonial clergy, garrison chaplains, and schoolmasters for Britons overseas, but missionary work with indigenous peoples remained primarily the incidental product of personal initiatives by ‘pious chaplains’, such as David Brown in India. Such efforts never matched those of the Moravians or the Methodists, and were rapidly overshadowed by the voluntary lay missionary societies that sprang up in the 1790s: the Baptist Missionary Society (1792); the London Missionary Society (LMS; 1795, originally non-denominational but eventually Congregational); and the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS; 1799). Methodists extended their operations, and the Glasgow and Edinburgh societies were both formed in 1796. Everywhere lay and Nonconformist activity was remarkable. The evangelical businessman Henry Thornton observed of the LMS in 1795, what a striking thing it is that a Bishop of London [Beilby Porteous] is hardly able... to scrape a few hundred Pounds together for the missionary Plans in his hands among all the people of the Church Establishment & that £10,000 should be raised in such a few days by the Irregulars who are also so much poorer a Class of People than the others.
The institutional Anglican Church was slow to act: lay missionaries smacked of ‘Methodism’ or the embarrassing and dangerous excesses of religious ‘enthusiasm’, and were disliked for their low educational and social standing. Moreover, objections were raised against missions to non-Europeans on practical and theological grounds, including supposed threats to imperial security from colonial subjects provoked by proselytization.
Nonetheless, by 1840 missions not only had impressively extended Britain’s global presence, but had won widespread public acceptance and even official support. The CMS’s early reliance on German Lutherans had given way to steady recruiting of men less likely to attract scorn. Its income averaged £58,655 per annum, derived from a wide social and geographical area. Overseas the LMS was well established in the western Pacific and South Africa, the CMS in Sierra Leone and India, the Baptists in Bengal and the West Indian colonies. Methodist and Presbyterian missions were also similarly scattered and poised for a new phase of expansion.
There is no simple causal connection in this period between religious expansion and Britain’s imperial outreach. It is difficult not to be struck by the insignificance of Empire in many evangelical minds, whose thinking was dominated by the concept of an all-embracing, superintending Providence unfolding a Divine plan for the world. Although there was a certain mystery about the operations of Providence, the French and American revolutions, European wars and economic disruption provided abundant scope for millenarian speculations, based on their supposed congruence with eschato-logical signs in the Bible’s prophetic books. In 1793 the newly founded Evangelical Review was in bullish mood:
That there is a time of peace, prosperity, and purity awaiting all the nations of the earth, appears evident from the prophecies and promises in the sacred Scriptures ...from a serious attention to the signs of the times, we may indulge the hope that this grand jubilee is at hand. The present period is a crisis replete with great events... It seems evident that the time will come, when there will not be one nation remaining in the world, which shall not embrace the Christian religion.
The new missionary societies set out to engage with Catholics in Ireland and continental Europe. The LMS and the CMS played crucial parts from 1801 in the formation of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews (1809). ‘All three conversions, of heathens, Jews and Catholics were held together in a web of prophetic interpretation. All three, in some manner, would accompany the Second Coming and the millennium.’ Although Baptists and Methodists displayed less specifically prophetical enthusiasm than members of other denominations, all shared the view that in this divinely driven world it was for ‘the modern missionary’ to discern the means available for spreading true religion. In such a world national developments might have their place, Empire might provide an arena for providential fireworks, but no necessary priority was to be attached to either. Empire in the form of British rule was never more than one among many such means to be employed or ignored as Providence thought fit. Thus evangelicals also identified exploration, commerce, science, individual Christians, as well as the new missionary societies, among the necessary and efficacious means now available. Empire held limited potential when set within the global perspective of evangelical Christianity. Christ’s death was for all mankind, as were the promises of grace and salvation. The interpretation of prophecy, the dynamic consequences of the millennium and Second Coming, the demonstration of the historical case for and against particular mission strategies, all hinged on the use of examples or evidence gathered worldwide, and on a universal outcome.
In 1812 Thomas Haweis of the LMS emphasized that missionary enterprise was no crudely national or British monopoly. As CMS ties with Berlin and Basel illustrated, it was increasingly an international or ecumenical undertaking. Haweis recalled how the early LMS circular letters to foreign Protestant churches had produced enthusiastic responses. Not only had most newly formed missionary associations in Scotland become auxiliaries of the LMS, but also ‘on the Continent, from places as far apart as Rotterdam and Basle, Frankfurt and Norkopping, letters of sympathy and liberal contributions came promptly to this appeal’. Contacts were made in Holland and Switzerland; an agent for the Society was established in Paris to push on the Continental work; and students trained in Berlin and Rotterdam for the Netherlands Missionary Society were taken on by the LMS for work in Java. Haweis also linked British missionary fortunes with America—‘still a land of real Protestants . . . destined with us to spread the everlasting gospel to the ends of the earth’—where the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (founded 1810) was already in contact with British societies.
Providence notwithstanding, the new missionary societies recognized the necessity to establish the basic terms of their cooperation with government and adjust to local circumstances the religion they wished to impart. They began by explicitly distancing themselves from expanding colonial rule, wary of its chauvinism, secular persuasion, and commercial ambitions. Throughout the century, however, such detachment was easier for theorists or home organizers to assert than for missionaries to apply. Involvement with imperial government was difficult to avoid as missionaries soon found in India, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and the Caribbean.
In 1814 a British East India Company (EIC) chaplain, Thomas Thomason, complained, ‘we have annihilated the political importance of the natives, stripped them of their power, and laid them prostrate, without giving them anything in return’. His proposed remedies were support for missionaries and an Anglican ecclesiastical establishment. His fellow chaplain, Claudius Buchanan, recommended such a religious establishment as a means of attaching colonial subjects to their government. Despite the initial misgivings of officials and exclusion from certain areas—Surat and Mysore— missionaries’ position slowly improved. Local resistance to their work taught them the value of staying on good terms with officials. While some administrators like Thomas Munro continued hostile, official fears of missions declined as a common interest in the transformation of colonial society became evident. William Bentinck (Governor-General of India, 1828-35) disliked the intolerance of extreme missionary lobbyists, but shared the moderate evangelicals’ real commitment to missionary enterprise. As he reminded Charles Grant in 1833, ‘it is Christianity, the whole Christian Church, whose cause in this heathen country we are to cherish’. Missionaries impressed observers by their perseverance, good intentions, translation and educational work, and their scholarship. Episcopal support for missionary work steadily grew, and in Daniel Wilson (Bishop of Calcutta, 1832-58) the CMS had an ardent backer. Support in Britain grew still faster. Missionary publications, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and local missionary associations, all improved missions’ image, and contributed to the government’s endorsement of their work in the 1813 and 1833 revisions of the EIC’s charter.
Elsewhere, at Freetown, Sierra Leone—a community largely composed of liberated slaves from many different parts of West Africa—the CMS and Wesleyans became indispensable through the education, religion, and common language they provided. Their political authority as magistrates or village superintendents helped to make the colony governable. The obstruction missionaries met from local whites in the Caribbean and the Cape, and their persecution by planters during the Demerara and Jamaica rebellions of 1823 and 1831, aligned missions with the burgeoning anti-slavery and humanitarian movements, commensurately increasing metropolitan respect and sympathy.
This convergence of missionary thinking with official and public opinion generated an increasingly explicit association of evangelical Christianity with commerce and civilization. While missionary boards saw in wealth, stability, and expansion a divinely ordained, providential role for Britain, commercial money flowed through subscriptions to missionary societies. The private fortunes of the Clapham Sect and the establishment of the Sierra Leone Company for trading purposes rescued the evangelicals’ West African settlement, the ‘Province of Freedom’, in 1790-2. Pacific missionaries commonly felt their survival depended on trade, and Samuel Marsden struggled vainly to persuade CMS employees in New Zealand to take subsistence agriculture seriously. In the Cape Colony the LMS Superintendent John Philip felt pushed into trade by cuts in the LMS’s budget and still more by the need to preserve his converts’ independence from the ‘system of oppression . . . on which the whole principle of the colonial government was conducted’. Missionary coupling of commerce and Christianity meshed neatly with the growing confidence of Britain’s governing classes in Britain’s worldwide commercial pre-eminence and the expansion of British India. By the 1830s missions both claimed and were accorded a place in a refurbished British national identity.