Religious revival in the nineteenth-century Church of England was, at least in part, centred on different understandings of what is inevitably the somewhat elusive idea of truth. While evangelicals and Tractarians both upheld very particular concepts of truth, which they identified in terms of their differing ecclesiologies, both parties agreed in locating truth within the confines of the Church, guaranteed by its Scriptures and tradition. A desire to share such Christian truth quickly provided a huge impetus for mission, including its educational work. Yet these partisan models were certainly not the sole expressions of Anglican understandings of truth, which some refused to locate within the confines of the visible church. For many – indeed, perhaps most – Anglicans, the idea that the Church was in exclusive possession of the truth was highly contested: a classical education revealed a far broader conception of truth. The paradigms of truth and, by extension, of salvation offered by the church parties were far from dominant. For many in the Church of England, both at home and overseas, the Christian religion was but one expression of a wider understanding of truth, which was also to be found beyond the confines of the Church and which was to be acquired through education in the human virtues. On this model, Christianity was intimately connected with an educational model based on the idea of a growth into truth through the development of character. For many missionaries, the Christian religion was to be propagated through this educational paradigm rather than by dogmatic teaching. Indeed, many of those in the mission field, especially in those places where converts were few, soon began to realize that neither godliness nor civilization – the principal goals of education – were confined to Christianity. I would consequently suggest that Norman Etherington's statement that ‘[f]ew missionaries treated education as an end in itself; schooling was ancillary to the primary object of Christian evangelism’ needs some nuancing.Footnote 1 While it may have been an accurate account of the impetus behind Christian mission in the first place, many missionaries through the nineteenth century came to see education rather than conversion as the primary means of Christian evangelism: an educational understanding of salvation began to supplant the doctrinal.
This article traces some aspects of this emphasis on education in the human virtues as it developed in missionary thinking in the British empire. Its time frame is limited to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its focus is on the Anglican Communion. Its main concern is with those churches that grew in places where there were already well-established world religions: in the deeply problematic racialist jargon of the time, I am interested in what were called the ‘higher civilizations’. Evangelism, education and salvation, I would suggest, came to be understood as aspects of the same process, which did not necessarily require explicit acceptance of Christian doctrines.Footnote 2 These ‘higher civilizations’, which were normally identified with the societies of the East, especially those of India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), China and Japan, were frequently understood as capable of expressing something of the virtues of Christianity as it was realized in universal human truths.
The question of religion and the closely related theme of missionary education in the British empire are obviously hotly contested and complex,Footnote 3 not least when considering the developments at the turn of the twentieth century in Asia which form the main focus of this article. It is often difficult to extract missionary from imperialist goals: as Etherington suggests in the introduction to Missions and Empire, ‘although missions and the official Empire were quite different operations, they play related parts in a larger drama – the spread of modernization, globalization, and Western cultural hegemony’.Footnote 4 At the same time, there was undoubtedly what Andrew Porter calls ‘a subtle interplay of influences in missionary encounters with non-European peoples’.Footnote 5 Especially with reference to Asia, there was a complex set of interactions that make simple identifications of the Bible and the flag highly problematic. The impact of mission on the critique of the imperial project, as well as on the development of nationalism, and even in the formation of clearer non-Christian religious identities in British colonies is much contested.Footnote 6 In colonial Ceylon, for instance, there was even use of the concept of ‘protestant Buddhism’.Footnote 7 What is undisputed, however, is that there is a close connection between the development of Christianity and the spread of empire, and that both were related to broader understandings of race and progress. What is striking about missions to Asia is the lack of success in conversions, especially among the cultural and social elite. While many might have been inspired by the great commission at the end of Matthew's Gospel to go out and baptize, there was very limited success. At the same time, however, missions became crucial in the establishment of educational institutions, which became increasingly respectful of indigenous religions and cultures. Indeed, although it falls outside the scope of this article, there was significant interest in categorizing and shaping the religions themselves, as C. A. Bayly has suggested in his lengthy discussion of religious encounter: ‘the emerging world of print and the public sphere promoted religions as much as philosophical or political beliefs’.Footnote 8 Evolutionary ideas of religion, with the categorization of so-called ‘advanced religions’, along with related ideas of a hierarchy of races and higher cultures, all of which feature in the literature discussed here, are a key aspect of the imperial educational project which is particularly important in the Indian sub-continent, where many parallels were drawn between Western and Eastern religions, and where in the process the religions themselves were frequently reshaped.Footnote 9
As they grew through the nineteenth century, educational missions became increasingly important as a key mechanism for carrying a set of ideas with an accompanying ethos across the British empire. In this they mirrored something of the domestic educational ideals of broad church Anglicanism as it had developed earlier in the century. The term ‘broad church’ itself emerged in the 1840s, supposedly in a sermon of 1847 by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, the future dean of Westminster,Footnote 10 and was later used by W. J. Conybeare in his famous essay ‘Church Parties’, published in the Edinburgh Review during 1853.Footnote 11 Key to the broad church understanding of Christianity was a belief that it was not sui generis but was part of a shared human quest for truth. As many have observed,Footnote 12 there was an underlying Platonism to broad churchism: nothing could contain the whole of truth, since truth was ultimately to be found only with God. Such an understanding of Anglicanism was promoted by Thomas Arnold through his reforms at Rugby,Footnote 13 and quickly achieved dominance in the ethos which became established at the public schools. Many public school headmasters were appointed to the bench of bishops, including James Prince Lee of King Edward VI School in Birmingham, who became bishop of Manchester,Footnote 14 as well as Edward White Benson, first headmaster of Wellington College, and A. C. Tait and Frederick Temple, both headmasters of Rugby, all of whom became archbishops of Canterbury. The impact of the public school ethos spread far and wide: the vast majority of those entering colonial church leadership had passed through the public school system and had imbibed its educational ethos.
As they developed through the nineteenth century, boys’ schools were to serve to help make boys into men through a combination of the practical with the intellectual.Footnote 15 This is what was meant by education in ‘manliness’ (thymos), which was closely related to the Greek aristocratic notion of aretē, a notion shared by the Romans, as well as Renaissance thinkers. This form of virtue ethics, as the practical expression of Christian truth, made an enormous impact on the development of the public school ethos, as well as that of the universities, through Arnold and many others. As Edward Thring, headmaster of Uppingham School from 1853 to 1887, put it: ‘The whole efforts of a school ought to be directed to making boys manly, earnest and true. … First make them true, make them men, by the work and life in and out of school’.Footnote 16 The cultivation of what to future generations might have been considered an effete and perhaps even effeminate form of manliness was well expressed by B. F. Westcott, who would become not only bishop of Durham and one of the greatest Cambridge New Testament scholars of his generation, but also the father of four missionaries to India, two of whom will be discussed below. At the beginning of 1849, he wrote to his future wife:
You have often heard my views of life, yet hear them once again … . To live is not to be gay or idle or restless. Frivolity, inactivity, and aimlessness seem equally remote from the true idea of living. I should say that we live only so far as we cultivate all our faculties, and improve all our advantages for God's glory. The means of living then will be our own endowments, whether of talent or influence; the aim of living, the good of man; the motive of living, the love of God.Footnote 17
For Westcott, as for Arnold, all human faculties were to be improved for the glory of God.
While, for some, such an educational model of Christianity as growth into God's truth was disparaged as liberalism, it nevertheless had many advantages for Christian mission in places where there was little hope (or evidence) of mass conversion. In British India, for instance, as Etherington notes: ‘When boarding schools sprang up, they acquired some of the characteristics of elite public schools in the British Isles.’Footnote 18 Indeed, ‘in many places the term “native elite” was synonymous with “Christian-educated”’.Footnote 19 Where conversions were few, formation of character, rather than explicit evangelization, became central to the principles of missionary education. The reasons for this were simple: on the one hand, the instinct for Christian survival in an often hostile environment meant that there was a need to respect pre-existing religious and cultural traditions. On the other hand, there was also a more positive sense in which the desire to educate people into a universal truth meant that missionaries were able to see aspects of this truth in non-Christian religious traditions. This allowed for a form of pluralism (which had already been tacitly recognized through a public school curriculum based on the pagan classics of Greece and Rome). Indeed, there were strong similarities between education in the classics of the Greco-Roman world, which dominated the syllabus of English further and higher education, and respect for the texts and traditions of the great world religions of the East.
Henry Hutchinson Montgomery
I begin my discussion of the shift in Christian missions towards a more educational ideal using the example of Henry Hutchinson Montgomery (1847–1932),Footnote 20 general secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) from 1901, and previously bishop of Tasmania, who was to dominate early twentieth-century Anglican missionary thinking.Footnote 21 Despite the existence of the semi-official and partially established historic missionary societies, much Church of England mission had been something of a private enterprise, and was often dominated by enthusiasts from the different church parties.Footnote 22 However, by the turn of the century there was a degree of consolidation in Church of England missionary thinking. This was in part focused on the person of Montgomery, who proved more capable of working across the partisan divides than his more angular predecessor, H. W. Tucker. The SPG, after all, had been established in 1701, long before the creation of modern church parties.
Montgomery had been born in India, and had later imbibed something of the spirit of public school character formation at Harrow, even if he was somewhat better at games than the classics. As he wrote in his memoir: ‘I think I learnt as much from games as from anything. They are a real education for life, helping to build up character, to endure adversity patiently, to fight uphill games, to keep one's temper, to practise unselfishness for a common object.’Footnote 23 This sense of a common ideal of character formation, of education for life, later shaped his approach to Christian mission, which he regarded as a form of education in the Christian virtues which was expressed most clearly in missionary educational establishments. On receiving news of his appointment as SPG general secretary, he wrote to his father-in-law, F. W. Farrar, dean of Canterbury, who had been one of his masters at Harrow:
I can truly say that there is no post in all the world I would rather hold. To create a sort of foreign secretaryship of Anglican missions with a bishop at its head, to be a referee and guide in all Greater Britain questions. The outlook is terrifying in its possibilities. Had one the gifts, one could almost transform the general ideals of the Church and make them actually embrace the world. It strikes me at times as more Pauline in scope than that of any bishop in the Anglican Communion, and therefore most episcopal. This last point was the greatest difficulty at first, but I am clear about it now.Footnote 24
Inevitably, the contested question in missionary thought concerned precisely what constituted such ‘general ideals of the Church’, as it sought to embrace the world through the work of Montgomery, who humbly saw himself as Anglican foreign secretary and modern-day St Paul.
It was also not clear about what Montgomery meant by ‘Greater Britain’. This term was much used at the time. In his Donnellan lectures at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1900–1, G. Robert Wynne, archdeacon of Aghadoe in Ireland, had spoken of the church in ‘Greater Britain’.Footnote 25 His principal concern had been the so-called ‘settler empire’, those churches which had simply transplanted English and sometimes Irish Anglicanism overseas to serve the white dominions. As has recently been documented by Joseph Hardwick, although they had their particular problems, these colonial churches shared much with the Church of England.Footnote 26 They usually lacked the privileges and burdens of establishment, there was often conflict over land, property and relations with colonial legislatures, and finance proved a perennial problem, as in Australia and Canada,Footnote 27 but the Anglican churches of the predominantly white dominions, most of which had developed systems of self-government by the twentieth century, retained much of the character of the Church of England, including its division into church parties.
Montgomery's concerns, however, went far beyond the settler churches. The role of religion in Greater Britain was not simply synonymous with ‘[t]he spiritual expansion of England’, which had formed the subtitle to Tucker's book, The English Church in other Lands, published in 1886 as part of Mandell Creighton's series ‘Epochs in Church History’.Footnote 28 Instead, Montgomery was concerned with the establishment of something different. While he remained an undoubted apologist for the British empire, regarding ‘clergy as officers in an imperial army’,Footnote 29 he nevertheless came to see a need for cultural sensitivity as he became increasingly aware of the complexity of the missionary context. At the same time, he also saw the importance of the reverse effects of overseas mission on the Church in England. He thus felt – somewhat in vain – that Christian mission within ‘Greater Britain’ might even help the Church of England overcome what he regarded as its petty domestic party squabbles.Footnote 30
Montgomery's overall approach to mission is evident in his 1902 book, Foreign Missions, which is essentially a global survey of religions and cultures and the challenges they presented for Christian mission. While he shared many of the presuppositions about race and human development of his contemporaries, his general approach was nonetheless significant: as a key figure in Church of England mission he was beginning to pay what he regarded as due attention to the achievements of other religions and ‘races’ and trying to understand them in their own terms as best he could. As he wrote in the introduction:
Signs, too, are discernible of an abatement of pride upon the part of the white races. It is beginning to be doubted whether after all God has given ten talents to them, and to yellow and black races only two and one. Bearing in mind, indeed, the lack of vision, of imagination, and of power to live in view of the spiritual, without great effort, among some of the leading Christian nations of to-day as compared with the more refined natural qualities of races still largely non-Christian, it is a question whether the work already done by the Gospel has not been more difficult than any task still left for it to do.Footnote 31
While, hardly surprisingly, Montgomery saw Christianity as supreme and he retained a somewhat fanciful hope of mass conversions in India, he nevertheless placed great stress on the importance of the non-Christian world, and especially Asia, in the development of religion and human culture. He had even come to realize that Christianity was itself an Asian religion. Geographically, he claimed, ‘all the great existing intellectual faiths of the world are Asiatic. Again, only in Asia have great sacred books been composed. … The Bible, Hindu, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese Scriptures close the list. The classical nations of Europe produced every branch of noble literature, except books of their religion.’Footnote 32 The missionary encounter with the non-Christian world raised significant questions about the European character of the Christian Church which meant that ‘it is for her to welcome any race to a position of equality that is worthy of it; to revise her own opinions as to colour if those opinions need revision’.Footnote 33 He concluded:
When the better spirit has become predominant, yellow and black perils will no more be discussed, and the great governments of the world will confess that in the deepest and most serious problems of life it is to the Church of God that men will have to turn for solutions achieved without bloodshed.Footnote 34
Similarly, three years later, in a lecture given as part of a series which he shared with Eugene Stock of the Church Missionary Society, Montgomery noted the rise of the East:
The twentieth century sees the general interest shift from Africa to Asia. The East awakes. For the first time in modern history the nations of the West have discovered that there is to be a limit to their conquests in Asia. Many are vexed, as though it were an unwarrantable impertinence upon the part of any race that is not white to have an independent existence.Footnote 35
In 1907 Montgomery published an edited collection of seven essays, all by bishops, entitled Mankind and the Church. Footnote 36 The subtitle of the book is illuminating: it speaks of the Contribution of Great Races to the Fulness of the Church of God. Like Montgomery's earlier book on mission, the volume as a whole seeks to illuminate the context in which the ‘great races’ have developed, while at the same time discussing what they have given to human civilization. In the period of what was one of the high points of British imperial consolidation and despite frequent racial stereotyping, the book nevertheless displays a degree of openness towards other ‘great races’, especially those of the East. In his introduction, Montgomery raised the issue of what would later be called ‘hybridity’ in the relationship between missionary and imperial discourse and the categorization and development of the indigenous religions. He was especially concerned with the religions and cultures of the Indian sub-continent:
India, so far as the educated class is concerned, is feeling the effect of Western ideas of liberty, and the Church has added its quota to the same movement. In religion observers tell us that there is among the same class a turning, albeit often unconscious, towards [an] atheistic attitude of mind. Perhaps, as part of the same effect, educated Indian thought certainly does not now adopt a contemptuous tone towards the Faith of the Gospel, but is just so much impressed by it as is shown by references in newspapers which praise the Christian standard of public life: and in their more religious writings the Indian is anxious to prove that Hinduism accepts all that is vital in the Christian Faith. History repeats itself. Nor can we doubt that the existence in India of men and women for centuries who have come to give their best and to take nothing must have had a deep effect. The growing wisdom of these men and women in their dealings with Hindus and Moslems, has mitigated a good deal of the veiled opposition to missions by English civilians which is one of the most strange phenomena of British Christianity.Footnote 37
He regarded such an open Christianity as implicitly strengthening the ethical teachings of the major religions. The impact of other religions was also being felt nearer home:
The effect of the Faith of Christ in quickening Hinduism and Mohammedanism into greater activity is paralleled by the same result on Buddhism in Ceylon and Burmah; for the missions of Christendom are no longer a negligible quantity anywhere. There is, of course, a certain reflex action on our own race. We hear of a Moslem mosque in Liverpool under the charge of an Englishman who has embraced Islam. We have Englishmen in Burmah and Ceylon who are preaching neo-Buddhism; and a certain section of English people play with Oriental cults as an improvement upon the Gospel message.Footnote 38
On this account, the success of mission was being measured not simply in the numbers of converts, but through the ways in which Christianity had begun to reshape the indigenous religions and cultures themselves. There was a sense in which all people, regardless of religion, were capable of hearing and receiving the Christian ethos. Missionary educational institutions were to become central in this universalist and pluralist understanding of Christian truth which could be expressed in other religions and cultures. Education became one of the dominant themes at both the Pan-Anglican Congress held in London from 15–24 June 1908 and the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops from 5 July to 6 August that year.
The Pan-Anglican Congress of 1908
Montgomery's collection of essays was preparatory to the congress and conference. Montgomery, who was a close friend and confidant of Randall Davidson, archbishop of Canterbury from 1903, was the mastermind behind the congress, which proved to be the closest thing that Anglicans ever staged to a World's Fair. Over seventeen thousand people from across the Anglican world attended daily sessions in various London venues.Footnote 39 Unlike the Edinburgh Missionary Conference two years later, which followed similar methods and included questionnaires and reports,Footnote 40 it was not simply a gathering of missionaries: delegates also included a number (admittedly modest) of indigenous laity and clergy from the relatively new Anglican churches from across the world.
As part of the preparation for the congress, every bishop of the Anglican Communion was asked a number of simple questions about what they saw as the most important problems for the Church of God within and outside their own region, as well as what they saw as the ‘chief corporate duty of the whole Anglican Communion at this time’.Footnote 41 Montgomery hoped not only that this fact-finding exercise might help clarify the distinctive challenges facing Anglicanism worldwide, but also that it might provide an impetus for renewal in the Church of England.Footnote 42 The congress itself was divided up into different sections and groups, each focusing on problems facing the Church in different parts of the world. Along with the subsequent Lambeth Conference, the congress offers a huge wealth of information about the changing presuppositions behind the Anglican missionary churches, which had grown exponentially in the previous sixty years or so.
Before the congress, very large numbers of preparatory papers were composed which offer important insights into the cultural assumptions of missionaries and, more generally, of Western perceptions of other religions and cultures and, in the language of the time, other races. These papers, which were bound into the volumes of proceedings, are frequently highly informative and often betray the overwhelming recognition of the importance of missionary education as a means of expanding the influence of the Christian ethos. The preparatory papers and proceedings of the congress stretched to seven lengthy volumes.Footnote 43 The fifth was explicitly devoted to reports and debates on the church's missions in non-Christian lands. Although much of the discussion was practical and descriptive, many of the participants also addressed some of the wider issues in the relationships of missionaries with local cultures and religions.
The educational paradigm of Christianity shaped much of the discourse, and for many it was predicated on a hierarchy of races characterized through strong racial stereotypes. For instance, in his opening lecture, which introduced a rationale for mission to non-Christian lands, Stuart Alexander Donaldson (1854–1915), son of the first premier of New South Wales, and from 1904 until his death master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, clearly distinguished what he regarded as the higher civilizations from the lower. His language clearly illustrates the prejudices of Edwardian England and the shadow – and explicitly racist – side of missionary education in an imperial context:
It is not only the acute intellect of the Hindu, or the practical industry of the Chinaman, or the marvellous adaptability of the Japanese which is feeling the birth-throes of a new life: the same is true of the degraded Australian aboriginal, of the ignorant Kaffir, of the licentious and blood-stained South Sea Islander, of the simple Eskimo, of the ignorant wild native of South America … . Never before in the history of the world has such an opportunity been offered for the permanent amelioration of the race. The responsibility is ours, ours of this generation.Footnote 44
For Donaldson, Christian responsibility for the non-Christian was to be expressed chiefly through education. Indeed, he felt, education rather than conversion would become the means through which the moral values of Christianity were to be spread. In short, he claimed, the ‘basis of missionary work’ was ‘education based on Christianity’. This attempt to work indirectly by establishing institutions of education rather than through direct evangelization marked, he felt, a ‘new departure for the development of Christian Missions’. This method was particularly applicable for the higher civilizations. Again using unfortunate language, he suggested that the educational method was ‘certainly true already for China, Japan, and Ceylon. I think it is also true for races far less developed, and of a lower type of civilization. … . Our aim must be to strengthen the weak, so that they may be able to walk on their own legs, not on crutches.’Footnote 45 Perhaps with a degree of ironic foresight, given the educational background of many of the post-colonial elite, Donaldson consequently concluded that Christian education must become the crutch with the support of which other civilizations might be able to rise up to walk unaided.
Something similar, but without such explicit racist presumptions, was observed by many of those reporting on their experience in different missionary contexts. A good example is offered by two of the seven sons (and three daughters) of Brooke Foss Westcott. For them, education had offered an opportunity to help the population acquire the virtues of character that would allow them to express the ideals of Christian civilization even if they did not accept the faith itself. This would then be of benefit in the reshaping of Indian society. George Herbert Westcott (1862–1928), educated at, and subsequently assistant master of, Marlborough College, was an SPG missionary at Cawnpore (Kanpur) in Uttar Pradesh from 1889 to 1910 and afterwards bishop of nearby Lucknow. He was born while his father was a schoolmaster at Harrow, where he imbibed a strong sense of moral and social duty as well as a sense that all faculties are to be improved for the glory of God.Footnote 46 George's younger brother Foss (1863–1949), educated at Cheltenham, was bishop of Chota Nagpur in north-east India from 1905 to 1919 and bishop of Calcutta and metropolitan from 1919 to 1945.Footnote 47 Two other brothers also joined the work of the SPG in India. Foss had earlier been with George at Cawnpore, where they established industrial training. As bishop, Foss established schools that offered educational opportunities to about four hundred Anglo-Indian boys.
Foss and George Westcott, who remained extremely close until George's death, saw education as central to the missionary task. Both also retained an ideal of a non-dogmatic Christianity that was open to the influence of the wider culture and religious milieu (and which later paved the way for the development of Christian unity in South India). In this they clearly drew on their father's example. Brooke Foss Westcott offered his own thoughts on the role of the schoolmaster, which provided a model to his sons. He wrote of his time at Harrow:
The frank questioning, the interchange of thought, the influence of personal enthusiasm, the inspiring power of living words, which come in the free intercourse of the class-room, give a force and a meaning to facts and theories which the book cannot convey. It is spiritual. The end of the teacher whose work we strive to follow is not fixed by the communication of his special lesson. He will seek, indeed, to do this as perfectly as possible, but he will at the same time suggest the vast fields which lie unexplored even in his own department; he will make clear the limitations and assumptions under which his results are obtained; he will add, if I may so express the truth, the symbol of infinity to the provisional statements which represent the actual attainments of man; he will use the most effective technical education as the vehicle of wider culture. Literature, art, and science will be for him partial revelations of a boundless life, and it will be his object to make the life felt through the least part with which he deals.Footnote 48
Education was consequently an explicit invitation to explore the higher truth, which in turn relativized the provisional statements and partial revelations of human life. In this the influence of Plato is obvious. Brooke Foss Westcott wrote to his intimate friend F. J. A. Hort on 6 April 1859: ‘Each Christian, so far as he is a Christian, is an ideal Christian, or rather is such by partaking in the idea. In “idea” he is one with Christ, and all that Christ did he did in Christ. But the work of all life is to realise this idea.’Footnote 49 It was through life rather than through doctrines that the Christian ideal was to be realized.
George Westcott drew on such ideas in the opening address of the Pan-Anglican Congress section on education on 16 June 1908. His opening paragraph is explicit, and clearly expresses something of the public school ethos:
We Christians believe in education, since through it are developed those powers which distinguish man from the lower animals; we believe in religious education, because we regard the spiritual faculty as the most precious of human possessions. Religious education is dependent upon direct teaching and personal influence. … Such personal influence makes itself felt, not only in the class-room, but in the teacher's study, in the playing field, and, above all, in the hostels or boarding houses which are now regarded as almost a necessary part of every school or college.Footnote 50
In turn, he maintained, Christian teachers had generally stopped ridiculing popular religion, but instead preferred ‘to emphasize the truths common to all religions … . They urge their pupils to be truthful, to be honest, to be loving, and to be pure; they help them to sympathize with all that is good, and to cultivate self-discipline and self-restraint.’Footnote 51 Although he regretted the fact that the number of converts was small, he nonetheless rejoiced ‘that the Spirit of Christ is exercising so strong an influence upon those who consciously or unconsciously live as His disciples’.Footnote 52 While he admitted that some found the emphasis on education to be at the expense of evangelization, George Westcott felt it was the method Christ himself would have chosen had he come to cotemporary India. In subsequent discussion he repeated his point, at the same time emphasizing the importance of ensuring that missionary schools did not simply focus on educating the poor and dispossessed at the expense of the rich and influential. The reporter observed that George Westcott
hoped that every one would applaud the proposal that it was necessary to preach to the educated classes as well as to the poor. The greatest danger before them at present was the risk of a boycott of Christianity in India, and it was therefore only wise that friendly relations with the educated classes should be cultivated. He thought the time would come when the educated classes would move towards Christianity as the uneducated classes were doing at present.Footnote 53
George Westcott clearly illustrates both the pragmatic need to maintain cordial relations with Indian culture, as well as a desire to use education to promote what he understood as the truths common to humanity.
In a similar manner to George Westcott, Henry Whitehead (1853–1947),Footnote 54 bishop of Madras and brother of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, highlighted the importance of educational work among both the higher and lower castes of India. Educated at Sherborne, Whitehead was the son of Alfred Whitehead (1827–98), headmaster of Chatham House School in Ramsgate, Kent. He went on to appoint the first Indian bishop, V. S. Azariah, as bishop of Dornakal in 1912. Like the Westcott brothers, Whitehead was to promote the scheme for reunion, also supporting a pluralist approach to revelation. In a short lecture on ‘Village Populations versus Educated Classes’, he was clear that there was a need to focus not just on lower castes and aboriginal tribal people but also on the higher castes. Despite the small number of converts, he held, Christianity had had a beneficial effect. It was crucial, he thought, to note that
[the] effect produced by our educational work among the higher castes has been to spread among them a leaven of Christian ideas, to promote kindly feelings between the students and their Christian teachers, and to stimulate reform movements within Hinduism itself: but not, except in a few cases, to bring men to faith in Christ. These results have a very definite value, and I do not wish for a moment to depreciate them.
At the same time, however, he went on express a note of regret. ‘After all,’ he noted,
the object of Christian Missions is not merely to Christianize men, but to make them Christians. It is possible, of course, that this educational work is gradually preparing the way for some great movement among the higher castes in the future. That, however, must of necessity be a matter of doubtful speculation. I heartily wish that I could think that the educated classes are nearer to the acceptance of Christianity now than they were five-and-twenty years ago.Footnote 55
Whitehead was also aware that the education of the poor and the education of the higher castes were closely related. It was, he maintained, the witness of Christian education of the poor that was ‘the one thing that is capable of touching the hearts and consciences of thoughtful and educated men in India, and convincing them of the truth of Christianity. Let us exhibit Christianity to them in the future, not simply as a doctrine, but a life.’Footnote 56 Whitehead's words display a resemblance to the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge which is too close to be accidental. As Coleridge, who was one of the most important influences behind the formation of educational thinking in the early nineteenth century, put it in a famous aphorism in his most important work on pedagogy, Aids to Reflection: ‘Christianity is not a theory or a speculation … but a life and a living process’.Footnote 57 For Whitehead, such a form of life was ‘the most convincing proof to earnest and thoughtful men in India of the truth of Christianity’. It was to be found most clearly in ‘the simple fact that it is indeed a gospel to the poor’.Footnote 58 Indeed, he felt, by raising up the poor and educating them, difference of caste might even begin to disappear, which would have a lasting effect on the people of India.
In much the same way, Foss Westcott, speaking on a similar theme, observed the success of missionary education in raising people from the lower castes. He noted:
Some years ago I made a religious census of the clerks employed in the mercantile offices at Cawnpore, where I was then stationed, and I found that while from the proportion of the followers of the three great faiths Christianity, Hinduism, and Mohammedanism in the population of the city, we should expect to have found six Christians, the actual number was forty-two. Doubtless in some measure this excessive proportion was due to the influence of missionaries in securing them appointments, but this does not wholly account for it. These men were not converts from the educated classes of India, but for the most part the sons of parents who had been won for Christ from the humbler castes.Footnote 59
Foss Westcott went on to discuss the growth of the missionary schools which had succeeded in educating large numbers of boys and girls in his own diocese of Chota Nagpur, as well as in parts of South India. Most effective, he thought, were the boarding schools, ‘because it is in these that Christian character is most surely built up when dealing with those who have been won for Christ from among the lower ranks of life in India’.Footnote 60 In turn, he felt that out of this might emerge a genuinely national expression of Indian Christianity:
The desire for a really national Church is rapidly gaining strength. It seems to our Indian brethren intolerable that they should be taught to repeat the shibboleths of Western sectarian Christianity, or that a Church in which the universal faith is dressed in a Western garb should be reproduced in every particular in an Eastern country.Footnote 61
In response, R. S. Copleston, bishop of Calcutta and metropolitan of India, also noted the delight of ‘those of high station’ at seeing the work of the churches in elevating the lower castes through education.Footnote 62
Similar observations were made by Indian Christians themselves. An important preparatory pamphlet was written by Susil Kumar Rudra (1861–1925), a second-generation Christian and the first Indian principal of St Stephen's College, Delhi. With C. F. Andrews (1871–1940), he helped move the college away from its dependence on the Cambridge Brotherhood.Footnote 63 Rudra observed the interaction of Western and Eastern ideas that had been brought about by Christian education. Like Foss Westcott and Whitehead, he distinguished between work among the low-caste Hindus and aboriginal peoples and the higher-caste Hindus and Muslims. Even though there were far fewer converts among the latter, Christianity's influence had still been strongly felt through its social and ethical effects, rather than through conversion and the explicit acceptance of Christian doctrine. Rudra wrote:
A high order of Western training is now open to educated Indians, and they are rapidly learning organized methods of life and action according to modern principles. If the Church loses touch with these new forces, she will be left ‘high and dry’; as they sweep past her, cutting out their own channels. In order, therefore, to make the Church of India Catholic, to make it progressive, to fill it with power and spirit, to ensure its touch with the genius of the Indian mind, educational missionary work must be carried on among the higher castes with far greater determination than before.Footnote 64
Rudra was clear that missionary societies should work together to achieve these goals, but he also stressed the need to ensure that they retained independence from the government, lest Christian institutes of education should lose their distinctive identity. According to Rudra, history had shown that it was all too easy to lose sight of the divine Master as the inspirer of their work.
Rudra went on to discuss other successes which had been brought about through education, even among Hindu reform movements such as the Brahmo Samaj:Footnote 65
Christian truths have been popularized; and though we cannot point to many remarkable baptisms of individuals, we can show a most remarkable baptism of thought. There has been a leaven of Christianity very widely spread over the country which has influenced each new indigenous religious movement in turn. The Brahmo Samaj, for example, has been influenced on every side by Christian ideas, and the same is almost equally true of other movements also. Still further, the very basis of the structure of Hindu society has been modified, and the constructive elements in this change have been unquestionably Christian.Footnote 66
However, despite such powerful examples, which showed how Christian ideals had been able to influence wider society, for the most part Christian schools had insufficient resources to ensure the persistence of the Christian ethos. Although many individuals continued to inspire, this was not the case with the institutions as a whole: ‘Individual missionaries’, Rudra wrote, ‘have reflected that glory and have impressed individuals, but the living power of the body corporate is still wanting, and it is the witness of the Body of Christ which carries conviction.’Footnote 67
Rudra's remedy was to expand the numbers of dedicated teachers, both lay and ordained, in order to increase what he called ‘intensive influence’. At the same time, he claimed, it was important to ensure the indigenization of the gospel to enable the appropriate expression of theology. He went on:
Christian thought, Christian ideals, have already been accepted as the highest in the land. The profoundest reverence is paid to Christ Himself. The Christian theology of the West, however, is often a very great intellectual stumbling-block. Can anything be done to present Christian truths in a form which will be acceptable to the Indian mind? Ought this not to be a special aim to be attained by Christian educationalists in India? Can Christian literature jointly undertaken by Eastern and Western Christians become a stepping-stone to Eastern theology?Footnote 68
If such reforms could be brought about, this might then lead to a genuinely Indian church, which, he suggested, ‘must be governed and moulded by Indian ideas and sentiments which are in accord with the spirit of Christ. For this Indian bishops are needed as well as an Indian Liturgy.’Footnote 69
Others had made similar observations on the example of missionary education and the establishment of an Indian church. In a preparatory booklet on the Equipment of Native Workers in India, the CMS educator, Edmund Francis Edward Wigram (1864–1933),Footnote 70 warden of St John's Divinity College in Lahore from 1896 to 1915, asked a simple question:
How can our divinity schools, which are and must probably for a long time be manned chiefly by European teachers, turn out men fitted to present the truths of the Christian revelation in a manner that will not sound far off and foreign to their hearers[?] … We come with our English basis of training, and this is so strong on its own lines that it threatens to smother individuality and initiation on the part of our pupils.Footnote 71
Whatever they did and however much they tried to assimilate, missionaries would always remain ‘exotics to the last’. It was consequently impossible simply to graft ‘on Western ideas and ideals to the Eastern stock’.Footnote 72 Instead, what seemed required was a ‘nationalized Christianity’, which alone would become the means by which India would ‘most truly attain the goal of her newly born hopes and longings’.Footnote 73
From a different perspective, Copleston,Footnote 74 who before his appointment as metropolitan of India had spent a lengthy time as bishop of Colombo from 1875 to 1902 in the predominantly Buddhist culture of Ceylon, also emphasized the importance of education. Copleston, a high churchman who resisted the appointment of CMS missionaries in Ceylon, had nonetheless become acutely aware of the problems of missionary arrogance and Western superiority.Footnote 75 In his presentation at the 1908 congress, Copleston noted that ‘missionaries were too patronizing, and patronage was a thing people did not like. Missionaries must not be content with pity, with condescension, with patronage or even sympathy; they must go to the nations with reverence and respect. Persuasion was of little value in dealing with the Buddhist.’Footnote 76 For Copleston, far more important than explicit evangelization was the need to detect a common ethical framework among those who practised other religions:
Missionaries must address themselves to the Buddhist very much as they addressed themselves to any other sinful man. What the missionary had to do was to try and rouse his conscience and direct his thoughts to that which he did not deny, the evidences of the working of a living Creator in the world around him; to make him see that his conscience was naturally Christian; that he did call, in spite of all his atheistic profession, upon God in his time of need; and so to impress upon his prejudice-bound mind and sin-bound conscience the message of the goodness and love of Him in whose name he was seeking to win him.Footnote 77
In his preparatory booklet on The Missionary's Equipment: India, Copleston had noted the importance of Indianization. Discussing what he called the missionary's ‘intellectual outfit’, he emphasized the importance of education in Indian culture and literature.
There is a want of men who set themselves seriously to study the language, literature, and history of the peoples to whom they are sent. … There are two distinct uses of such knowledge, one of which is within the reach of comparatively few, while the other concerns all. Such knowledge, in the first use, qualifies a man to translate, to lecture and discuss, to debate and instruct; in the second use, which is even more important, it helps a man to cherish sympathy and respect for India and for Indians.Footnote 78
Copleston detected what he felt to be an extraordinary ignorance of both the literature and history of India among missionaries. Yet, he felt, without an awareness of the indigenous culture there could be little sympathy with the Indian population. It was crucial to understand that ‘much of what means most to him lie[s] in the privacy of his domestic religion and of his caste associations, but he is moulded, in some of his best and most intimate thoughts and desires, by the ancient ideals and traditions of his country’.Footnote 79 Copleston concluded:
let it be said, that a missionary to India can bring with him, as part of his equipment, few things more valuable than a certain humility in the presence of those among whom he is to work; a conviction that they have something which they do not owe to him, and which he could not have given them, but which is not altogether to be despised.Footnote 80
In the discussion of Copleston's paper that followed, James Pereira, a lay representative from Ceylon, developed these ideas, even suggesting a Christianization of Buddhism. In Ceylon, as in India, there was, he claimed, a distinction between the educated and the uneducated:
two classes of Buddhists had to be dealt with in Ceylon, the educated and the uneducated. The former were not true Buddhists, because they did not believe in the doctrines of Buddhism as laid down in the books, and they were largely influenced by people who had incorporated into Buddhism Christian ideas, thereby endeavouring to bolster up their faith. The ignorant Buddhists were superstitious, and had to be dealt with in another way. Christians should approach Buddhism with true sympathy, and point out that Buddhist doctrines had to be supplemented with something higher and nobler, namely, the essential principles of Christianity.Footnote 81
Humility in the face of a higher truth, which shared much with the broad church ideal permeating the public schools, was thus clearly shaping missionary discourse.
Later, at the mass meeting in the Albert Hall on 18 June, A. G. Fraser (1873–1962), principal of the CMS Trinity College in Kandy from 1904 to 1924, spoke of the importance of educational missions and of moving towards a more culturally relevant curriculum, and the need to ‘put the natives more and more into power – the men who knew the country and were less likely to make mistakes than the British’.Footnote 82 Fraser, who also served as CMS educational adviser in southern India, had supplied one of the preparatory papers, ‘The Problem before Educational Missions in Ceylon’,Footnote 83 where he wrote of the national movement ‘rooted in the very depths of Eastern religious patriotic feeling, … the expression of the growing self-consciousness of the peoples’.Footnote 84 He reported on a conference of Anglican missionaries the previous year in Ceylon, which had claimed:
A college education divorces a young man from his own language, national traditions, and sympathy with his own people, and therefore greatly weakens his power for good among the race to which he belongs. … We recognize the fact, also, that our better educated Christians are so westernized by their education that they hold the Christian Faith too far apart from all mental comparison or contrast of its tenets with their old non-Christian faiths, and so are weak both for defence and for convincing those whom they ought to influence for Christ.Footnote 85
According to Fraser, the result was that ‘educated Christians and native clergy are too often only undeveloped Europeans, and they present the Gospel to their people in its foreign dress’.Footnote 86 The question was how to win the national movement for Christ. The solution, he felt, was that ‘we must, in our educational missions learn to preach the Christ of India and Ceylon’,Footnote 87 for ‘Christ came not to destroy but to complete all that is best and truest in their ancient learning and faith, and we have the privilege of proving it. Only in the power of the risen Lord and Christ can a disciple fulfil the ethic of Buddha.’Footnote 88 This required schools to educate leaders so that ‘natives are not only hewers of wood and drawers of water but brothers and men’.Footnote 89 His respect for the culture of Ceylon was deep:
We are working amongst a people who, as a race, have a deeper spiritual genius, who have more gentleness and humility, a greater sense of discipleship and readiness to sacrifice themselves and their all, and it behoves us to walk reverently and with fear. They have a noble past, a profound philosophy, much that we have little time or opportunity to learn. Our ignorance in all that counts amongst them is almost boundless. But nowhere do humility and love, and kindly camaraderie meet a readier and more generous response than in India and Ceylon.Footnote 90
A lasting tangible result of Fraser's time in Kandy was the magnificent chapel designed by his deputy Lewis John Gaster (1879–1939), modelled on Buddhist buildings in Polonnaruwa, an ancient capital of Sri Lanka, and later painted with striking images of an Asian Christ by David Paynter.Footnote 91 Here is an excellent example of the model of missionary education discussed here: a Christian school with a chapel built in a Buddhist vernacular style was educating predominantly Buddhist boys in the liberal virtues of the pursuit of truth and the acquisition of character as the fulfilment of the Christian ethos.
Conclusion
While it would obviously be wrong to assume that the approach exemplified by the missionaries presented in this article means that they were not interested in conversion, it is nonetheless the case that there was a tendency to see education as central to the missionary task, at least among the elites of India and Ceylon. It was through education that the Christian ethos was to function as a leaven for wider society and thus exert a powerful influence in social and political reform. In the hierarchy of races that continued to dominate Edwardian missionary thinking (and survived for much longer), it was accepted that the more ‘developed’ societies and thus the colonies of the East presented hugely different challenges for mission from those of other parts of the world. The concept of missionary trusteeship, which understood Christian missionaries as ‘trustees’ of a society until that society had reached a certain level of Christian civilization and which was widely shared among many missionaries at the time, simply did not hold: at least among the elite, the levels of education and civilization appeared to many missionaries to have reached levels comparable with those of the West.
This meant that the challenges of mission might best be met through education in the moral principles of Christianity, even where this did not lead to conversion, especially among this elite. Consequently, although few seemed prepared to acknowledge it at the time, there was in practice a recognition that the Christian Church would be likely to remain marginal to wider society and unlikely to make huge numbers of converts. As so many contributors observed at the 1908 congress, Eastern cultures simply did not seem to require the ‘benefits’ of Christian civilization in quite the same way as other parts of the world. While it is beyond the scope of this article, the language of racial hierarchy tended towards seeing African cultures as ‘childlike’ and innocent,Footnote 92 or as ‘heathen’ and in need of the light of the gospel.Footnote 93 Matters were usually understood quite differently in India, even if some missionaries derided Indian ‘heathenism’.Footnote 94 In a non-Christian society which, as I have shown, many missionaries had come to see as of almost equal standing to those of the West, the sorts of moral responsibility that Christians felt for the wider society – and which the wider society might be persuaded to embrace – had to be exercised cautiously (and almost exclusively) through education and welfare. Only in this way, it was felt, would Christianity prove acceptable to the wider society. In the end, Christianity was forced to express itself more in terms of social and ethical mores and styles of behaviour than in doctrines and propositions to be accepted for salvation.
On this model, which might seem quite alien from much of the earlier rhetoric of Western mission and which remained quite different from other forms of evangelistic activity of the time which paid little attention to education,Footnote 95 churches had a particular role to play in the development of Eastern societies, but through education rather than conversion. The idea of a culturally sensitive church which gradually came to dominate Anglican missionary thinking later in the twentieth century emerged from its role in shaping and guiding morals and education, which would ultimately exert an enormous influence. Although seldom explicitly stated, it would seem that the quest for conversion and recruitment was not the main focus of Church of England mission to India and most other Eastern societies. This recognition came less from the inner logic of Christian theology and more from the gradual realization that Christianity and civilization were not synonymous, and even that Christianity was a form of life concerned with truth rather than a set of doctrines. As Frykenberg observes, by the early twentieth century, the Christian task
was not so much to convert peoples of India as to permeate Indian society with Christian values. In order to accomplish this, missionary scholars and thinkers needed to influence the elites who were taking to Western education in such droves. ‘Conversion’ as such was no longer deemed to be such a worthy goal.Footnote 96
The broad church principle had consequently triumphed. As Frederick Temple noted in his contribution to Essays and Reviews, education of the human race was about growing up, about accepting that ‘the mature mind of our race is beginning to modify and soften the hardness and severity of the principles which its early manhood had elevated into immutable statements of truth’.Footnote 97 This educational ideal was demonstrated perhaps most clearly in the mission field. While missionary thinking was predicated on the assumptions of imperialism with its often explicit racial stereotyping and cultural and economic domination, the examples of missionary education I have discussed marked a significant change. They may not seem to today's readers to have gone far, and some of the literature cited makes very difficult reading, but they did sow the seeds for questioning the assumptions of the superiority of Western civilization.
