The Oxford Movement and mission

The original Tractarian leaders were not much interested in overseas mission. As an Evangelical the young John Henry Newman did exhibit some interest in the area, serving as secretary to Oxford's branch of the Church Mission Society for a year from 1829 to 1830.Footnote ¹ But as a leader of the burgeoning Oxford Movement from 1833 he was preoccupied with recreating and subverting the Church of England, to give it a radical makeover as a Catholic Church by expunging or explaining away its Protestant dimensions and history. Newman was until August 1844 a subscribing member of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the oldest Anglican missionary society, and his correspondence does reveal a concern for colonial bishops, but not a major one; it is in that context that Ernest Hawkins wrote with regret accepting Newman's resignation.Footnote ² John Keble, though the heir to a family High Church concern for the Episcopal Church in Scotland, was more concerned to be a spiritual guide to the perplexed of the movement than to advocate new missionary initiatives. Edward Pusey came closest through an awareness of the need for Christian evangelism to the urbanised and unchurched masses of industrial Britain. In 1833 Pusey published a pamphlet in defence of cathedrals, about which a contemporary debate was raging in relation to the proposals for reforming the Church of England which led, in 1835, to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners Act. However, Pusey's advocacy of well-endowed cathedrals as centres of theological learning lacked the contemporary focus on general utility.Footnote ³ While he demonstrated in the pamphlet a concern for the unchurched urban poor, he was vague on solutions.Footnote ⁴ Such a solution did take shape for him when, in 1842, the foundation stone of a church that he financed was laid in one of the poor areas of Leeds. Pusey planned for it to encapsulate his ideas of mission to Britain's urban poor. It would have a staff of priests living communally, supporting each other in active pastoral work, whose centre was the eucharist, the mystery and ritual of which would act to attract the poor to the beauty and wonder of Christ in their squalid world.Footnote ⁵

This domestic mission, conceived more as recapturing the lapsed rather than evangelising the unChristian, was quickly developed by some Tractarian clergy in the second half of the nineteenth century. It gave rise to the so-called ‘slum priests’, ritualist priests living as celibate clergy among the ‘undeserving poor’, using the parish church as the liturgical centre of a dynamic and colourful religion centred around the presence of God in the eucharist and a sacerdotal, sacramental ministry. Urban mission work was also engaged in by Anglican nuns, working alongside the priests.Footnote ⁶ Ritualist parishes had a quite explicit theory of mission, similar to that of Pusey. They believed that dramatic and ritualistic services, centred around the eucharist, drew the labouring poor and the working classes to church, because it offered them an appealing contrast to the drabness of their everyday lives. Ritual, it was maintained, had a power to teach Christianity to the illiterate and uninstructed. But, while some ritualist churches did attract a genuine working-class adherence, this was more limited than supposed. One historian of Victorian ritualism believes that such success as it did achieve had more to do with the self-sacrifice and devotion of the Anglo-Catholic priests, coupled with an outreach that was more accepting of working-class culture than were their Evangelical and Nonconformist competitors.Footnote ⁷

The historiography of Anglo-Catholic missions

While there has been some analysis of ritualist domestic urban mission,Footnote ⁸ compared with the vast scholarly investigation into Evangelical missions those of the Anglo-Catholic Anglicans have been accorded little attention by scholars. The volume on missions and empire published as a supplement to the influential series The Oxford history of the British Empire (1998–9) pays some attention to the SPG, but almost none to the more autonomous Anglo-Catholic missions. And indeed, what attention has been paid to Anglo-Catholic missions has been obscured by a terminological confusion. Even knowledgeable scholars of mission use the term ‘High Church’ in a reductionist binary presentation of Anglican mission as either ‘High Church’ or Evangelical. In fact, Anglo-Catholics, with their advanced ritualism, exaltation of religious life and celibacy, their Romanist wing and thorough dislike of the English Reformation were distinct from the older High Church tradition in the Church of England. This latter group, which did embrace the English Reformation and a more moderate ritualism, dated from the seventeenth century. It was this grouping that predominated in the SPG until the very late nineteenth century, though there was a minority of Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic sympathisers among SPG members, numbers that burgeoned as more and more of the younger clergy adhered to the Oxford Movement. Consequently, SPG missions from the beginning of the eighteenth century to nearly the end of the nineteenth were High Church but not Anglo-Catholic. So Jeffrey Cox subsumes Anglo-Catholic missions under the vague term ‘High Church’ Anglican,Footnote ⁹ while Robert Frykenberg's magisterial study of Christianity in India, critical of the imperialism of Anglican missions generally, only notes in a brief aside the comparative paucity of all Anglican missions in India, including Anglo-Catholic ones.Footnote ¹⁰

A distinction also needs to be made between ‘Tractarian’ and ‘Anglo-Catholic’. Although both groups developed directly out of the Oxford Movement, the term ‘Anglo-Catholic’ is used here to refer specifically to those Anglicans who realised their Oxford Movement catholic theology with some explicit degree of liturgical ritualism. ‘Tractarians’ refers to the earlier generation of Oxford Movement followers, who, like the leaders of the movement, were generally restrained in ritualism.Footnote ¹¹

Recently, some attention has been paid by Andrew Porter and Steven Maughan to distinctive Anglo-Catholic missions. Particularly with regard to his work on the Universities Mission to Central Africa but noting also the similarly Anglo-Catholic Oxford Mission to Calcutta and the Cambridge Mission to Delhi, Porter points to the prevalence of ideas like ‘sympathy’ and ‘consideration’ for indigenous cultures in these missions.Footnote ¹² Porter finds in them not only sympathy for local cultures, but also suspicion toward the corrupting influences of aspects of western civilization.Footnote ¹³ Maughan points to imperialist fervour among various Anglo-Catholic influences within the SPG in the Edwardian period.Footnote ¹⁴ Enthusiasm for an imperial mission by the Church of England was also shared by the leader of English Anglo-Catholics, Charles Gore, bishop of Birmingham.Footnote ¹⁵

This article looks at possibly the first Anglo-Catholic theorist of mission through the development of two of the earliest Anglo-Catholic missions, one in England in 1869, and the other in India in the 1870s. Both these missions were inspired by the same man, Father Richard Benson of the Society of St John the Evangelist. Thus this is not primarily a study of mission in Britain or in India, but rather of the missionary mind-set of an important Anglo-Catholic instigator of missions, as exemplified in the two missions. In so doing I am conscious that I could be accused of perpetuating an historiographical approach from above that views Christianity in India as completely manufactured in Britain and exported to a passively accepting Indian population, with an over-accentuation on missionary instrumentality. This focus is perhaps a problem of sources, as letters to Benson about the development and reception of SSJE's inaugural mission by Fr O'Neill ssje in Indore have not survived, and there are few other contemporary sources interested in this short-lived, small mission. But focus on a British instigator of mission is also something that can be justified. It is true that Indian Christianity under the Raj was a hybrid created out of the British Christianity from which the missionaries came and the local culture and religion that Indians (converts and non-converts) received, adapted or contested. A study of one component of that hybridity is certainly not a complete analysis of the SSJE Indian mission (that must await more lengthy investigation than is possible here); but it is an important and fundamental dimension of it. Notwithstanding the very significant historiographical trend begun by Robert Frykenberg – where Christianity in India is written ‘from below’ so that it is Indian Christianity – this paper argues that there is still a place for investigating the role and the thought of the missionaries themselves as they understood it. Admittedly, this is a partial treatment of missions, but it is one that addresses the criticism of Norman Etherington with respect to African church history, where he finds that the prevailing historical construction of illegitimate western missionaries and legitimate non-western religion has effected a marginalisation of missionaries.Footnote ¹⁶ This paper is an attempt to do what Jeffrey Cox did on a much larger scale for colonial Punjab, and reconstruct the outlook and practice of the missionaries of a small innovative Anglo-Catholic mission.Footnote ¹⁷

The society that Benson founded in 1866 as a community of mission priests was the first religious order for men to survive permanently in the Church of England. As the society was explicitly devoted to mission this paper explores the configuration that Benson gave to the early Anglo-Catholic missions undertaken by his society. It will argue, first, that Benson was a major figure in the inauguration of Anglo-Catholic missions, both in England and overseas; second, that Benson was instrumental in the initial public success of Anglo-Catholic domestic mission because he was prepared to moderate the ritualist extremes of some of his Anglo-Catholic confreres; third, that in the Indian mission Benson had a clear theological preference for disconnecting evangelism from Europeanising. Consequently, although most Anglo-Catholic missions, including those of his own society, quickly reverted to the usual large missionary infrastructure and civilising agenda common to most Protestant missions, this initial Anglo-Catholic theorist of missions clearly preferred a more radical approach as a consequence of envisaging mission being undertaken by a religious order, an entirely new phenomenon for Anglican missions.

The 1869 Twelve-Day mission to London

The evangelistic focus of Anglo-Catholicism transcended the parish in the first ever Anglican mission to London in 1869. In September that year Benson invited a group of twelve clergy to Oxford for two conferences to discuss mission in the Church of England.Footnote ¹⁸ The priests were all explicitly Anglo-Catholic, most of them members of the avant-garde Society of the Holy Cross which had been founded by the slum priest Charles Lowder, in 1855, as a community for urban mission, modelled on the seventeenth-century ‘Congregation of the Mission’ of St Vincent de Paul, or the Lazarists as they were popularly known.Footnote ¹⁹ City clergy were canvassed for support, as were the bishops of London, Winchester and Rochester. Eventually, 120 parishes participated in the mission which ran from 14 to 25 November 1869. Participating clergy met for a day of preparation beforehand, again halfway through the mission, and on the final day when 150 parish clergy were present at Sion College in London.Footnote ²⁰

While this was an Anglo-Catholic initiative, flexibility was demonstrated by the organisers in allowing clergy to determine the actual shape of the mission in their own parishes. At St Laurence Jewry, where Fr Benson was the missioner, the evening mission service was a metrical litany based on the penitential Psalm li, followed by his sermon. In another parish the prayerbook was used; at the ritually advanced St Michael's, Shoreditch, the stations of the cross were prayed; and at St Augustine's, Haggerston, the mission priest led an outdoor procession with banner and cross, singing the litany of the Holy Name.Footnote ²¹

Other mission techniques involved a devotional booklet for optional use, produced by SSJE as the Book of the mission; hymns set to secular tunes; and extempore prayer before afternoon mission services. But other facets clearly pointed to the Anglo-Catholic origins of the mission. Eucharistic celebrations predominated, but only in the morning to allow for fasting communion; the renewal of baptismal vows was used as a technique of re-dedication; and, more contentiously, the optional use of sacramental confession was included in the Book of the mission. This led to the inevitable letter of objection in The Times from Charles Westerton, a prominent Protestant opponent of ritualism.Footnote ²² On the same issue, the guardians of the Marylebone workhouse also wrote to The Times to disavow earlier reports of their association with it.Footnote ²³

There are indications that there was a deliberate policy of making this mission as appealing to as many parishes as possible by restraining the excesses of ritualism that some Anglo-Catholic priests delighted in. George Body's invitation to confession in his parish during the mission, as reported in the Times, was an exemplar of measured care:

The official face of the mission and the chair of its committee was a reassuringly establishment figure, Robert Gregory, canon, and later dean, of St Paul's Cathedral. Gregory wrote to The Guardian disavowing the authority of the Book of the mission from which the optional use confession was drawn. The committee of the mission had not, Gregory claimed, authorised any mission book, on the principle that the local clergy dictated what form of mission service was to be used in their own parish.Footnote ²⁵ Discretion around a ritualist agenda was arguably a deliberate policy on the part of Benson. It was in keeping with his actions in founding the SSJE, where he exercised that same carefulness with regard to the ritualist excesses of Anglo-Catholicism. In establishing the SSJE Benson had sought the prior approval of his High Church non-ritualist diocesan bishop, Samuel Wilberforce of Oxford; and the members of the society wore, as habits, ordinary plain black cassocks.Footnote ²⁶ This was in contrast to the romantic emulation of Roman Catholic practice by other would-be monastic founders, such as Joseph Lyne.Footnote ²⁷

According to the public reports the London mission was a success, indicating that such moderation paid off. Not only were 120 parishes involved, many more than the number of definite Anglo-Catholic parishes in the city at that time, but full churches were commonly reported in the newspapers, especially for the evening mission services. Both Protestants and Roman Catholics claimed to be the inspiration for the mission, a measure of its favourable reception and outcomes. The English Independent, as reported in The Guardian, claimed that sermons were the main feature of the mission, fashioned upon Wesleyan revival addresses. On the other hand, there was a report in the Tablet that sermons, exhortations to confession and the renewal of baptismal vows pointed to the essentially Roman Catholic origin of the mission's methods.Footnote ²⁸

Benson and the 1869 mission to London

Scholars of the mission have also pointed to various sources of inspiration for the London mission. Dieter Voll claimed an Evangelical background, along with Robert Jeffrey who suggested that there was Methodist revival methodology deriving from the former Methodist lay preacher and later Anglican priest, Robert Aitken, and also from Richard Twigg, Tractarian vicar of St James's, Wednesbury.Footnote ²⁹ But John Kent has shown that Aitken was not involved in the 1869 mission.Footnote ³⁰ Twigg certainly was, but there is no evidence of his involvement in the early planning conference held at the SSJE house in Cowley, Oxford. The biographer of the Anglo-Catholic priest, George Wilkinson, claimed his subject as the source of Evangelical roots for the 1869 mission, and Wilkinson's own parish mission at Bishop Auckland in 1865 as ‘the earliest of the kind in the Church of England’.Footnote ³¹ But both Lowder and Benson had conducted an earlier mission in the parish of Bedminster in Bristol in 1862, which Benson described in a manuscript book as ‘the first of our modern missions’.Footnote ³² Jeffrey and Kent point to the missions of the Lazarists in eighteenth-century France as the source of the 1869 mission's methods, through the influence of Charles Lowder.Footnote ³³ This seems more likely, as Lowder was certainly involved in planning the mission. But while Lowder was the Anglican transmitter of these French Roman Catholic missionary methods, it was Benson who was probably the catalyst for their direct application. His place in that mission was more prominent than Lowder's, both as initiator of its planning conference, and in two of the subsequent parish missions; he also gave the final address at the thanksgiving service that concluded the mission.Footnote ³⁴

Kent claims that the renewal of baptismal vows, used by the most ritualist parishes as the culmination of the mission, was ‘the most convenient’ aspect of the Roman Catholic missions of the Vincentians for these Anglicans to emulate.Footnote ³⁵ But if Benson was indeed the mission's major guiding hand then the choice of baptismal vows may have been more deliberate than merely a convenient adaptation of Roman Catholic practice. There are strong indications in Benson's life and writings that the sacrament of baptism was fundamental to his theology of mission.

Benson called baptism ‘the major sacrament’, and the source of a supernatural, objective reality of regeneration.Footnote ³⁶ He maintained that the world and the Church were essentially in spiritual conflict because the latter was dedicated to God while the former was not. The Church, as a divinely founded society, was sustained by the indwelling Holy Spirit, whose presence was authenticated by a life of holiness as a consequence of being united to the Spirit through baptism.Footnote ³⁷ Mission, therefore, was a participation in the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, whereby the Spirit made the baptised holy, in the likeness of Christ, and consequently attractive to non-Christians.Footnote ³⁸ It is possible that the practice of renewing baptismal vows came from Roman Catholic sources via Lowder. But its inclusion in the mission, when the planners must have known that it could possibly generate opposition, and was potentially at odds with their deliberate strategy of judicious moderation in ritualism, seems more than a matter of convenience. It points to Benson's profound and firm theological commitment to the sacrament of baptism as the divine basis of Christian life and mission.

The 1869 mission to London exemplifies a number of features of Anglo-Catholic mission, even if not all of them would necessarily recur in later missions, including those of the SSJE itself. Priestly leadership was common to many missions: it was expected that the ordained would be leaders. However, the emphasis on the sacerdotal authority of the priest, as indicated in the publicity surrounding the use of confession, was certainly more explicit than even the High Church SPG was comfortable with at the time. The similarity to Roman Catholic missions, pointed out gleefully by The Tablet, was a consequence of the evangelistic influences from that Church playing upon both Benson and Lowder. But the use of cautious ritualism, and the involvement of more moderate figures in the mission, undoubtedly helped to defuse the contentiousness of much of this dimension of the mission's public profile. The flexibility demonstrated by such tactics was probably what encouraged the active participation of non-Evangelical, non-ritualistic, parishes. It was a strategy of moderation that was definitely at odds with the views of some of the more contentious ritualists of the period,Footnote ³⁹ and derived most probably from Richard Benson himself. But it would not always be the hallmark of Anglo-Catholicism. Under Benson, emerging Anglo-Catholic mission would focus on the development of holiness: an evident sanctification originating in baptism to which the unconverted would be attracted, and upon which basis the lapsed would be revived.

Benson and the origin of SSJE missions to India

Anglo-Catholic missions began in Britain on a transparochial scale with the 1869 mission to London, following a small number of parochially-based initiatives earlier in the decade. A few years later, the energies of Benson and his small religious community prompted a mission to India. This came just a few years after the more well-known non-Evangelical Anglican initiative of the Universities Mission to Central Africa led by Bishop Mackenzie in 1857. But it preceded the more obviously Anglo-Catholic Cambridge University Missionary Brotherhood in Delhi founded in 1877, and the Oxford Mission to Calcutta in 1881. Within the SSJE mission to India was a unique undertaking centred on the work of one of the founding members of the society, Samuel Wilberforce O'Neill. Ordained in 1864 while he was a mathematics teacher at Eton, O'Neill served curacies under two of the leading ritualist priests of his day – T. T. Carter at Clewer and William Butler at Wantage – both of whom founded religious orders for women in their parishes.Footnote ⁴⁰ O'Neill was one of the priests who gave an address to participating clergy before the Twelve-Day Mission to London, during which he led the mission at the ritualist parish of St Alban's, Holborn.Footnote ⁴¹

On 15 January 1874 O'Neill sailed from Southampton to begin the SSJE mission in India, along with his confrère R. L. Page.Footnote ⁴² They would be the first Anglo-Catholic missionaries to the sub-continent, although, of course, SPG missionaries from the older High Church tradition still prevailing in that society had been in India since the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴³ A Tractarian, A. W. Street, was appointed to the teaching staff of Bishop's College in Calcutta in 1839, but he was only indirectly involved in evangelism of the local population, and there is no evidence of any ritualist Anglo-Catholicism in the young man.Footnote ⁴⁴ The letters that O'Neill received from Benson, as his superior and confidante, form the principal source for this exploration of an unusual Anglican missionary venture. The mission undoubtedly derived from Benson's earlier desire to go as a missionary priest to India. In 1859 he wrote to the warden of St Augustine's College, a training college for Anglican missionaries at Canterbury, laying out parameters for an Indian mission that were largely followed by O'Neill. In this letter Benson emphasised a communal life of prayer and poverty, and for missionary priests to be as indigenous as possible in their lifestyle, as a means of attracting converts. ‘I want some men to join me in a devotional college … living on our own funds, as much in poverty as possible, and as much orientally in every habit and mode of life as possible.’ There was an emphasis on personal mission rather than institutional support: ‘I feel very strongly that missionary work ought to begin with me, and not with money … It pauperizes and paralyses the mission status when the men are agents of a monied Society, and not simply dependent on Him to the extension of whose Kingdom they are devoted.’ As an evangelising strategy, Benson accepted that this sort of mission would be insignificant amidst the vast population of an Indian city, but was confident that the prayerful, ascetic life would become known locally and would attract potential converts. ‘[T]he habitual prayer would make it acceptable before God, and He will draw to us those whom He wishes to train for Himself.’Footnote ⁴⁵

Arriving in India O'Neill went to see Bishop Milman at Calcutta, who sent him to revive a moribund SPG mission station at Bankipur near Patna; but O'Neill had to leave this mission soon afterwards because the Indian government had purchased the buildings as a medical school. On learning of this development, Benson expressed his satisfaction that O'Neill was separated from such a substantial mission plant: ‘Large premises are a serious hindrance to poverty … I would much rather our mission should do its work, principally witness, prayer, preparation, with as little of external surroundings as possible.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Benson's suspicion of substantial mission infrastructure also surfaces in another letter to O'Neill about mission schools. He opposed beginning a school because it would be contrary to the ‘apostolic character’ of O'Neill's mission and would identify the SSJE missionary with European ‘social superiority’.

Opposition to conversion achieved through colonial and social elites questions Jeffrey Cox's generalisation that ‘virtually all’ Anglican missionaries believed that this top down approach was unquestionably the right one.Footnote ⁴⁸ It was also repudiated in practice by other near contemporary Anglican missionaries, including the Anglo-Catholic Godfrey Callaway in Africa and John Coleridge Patteson in Melanesia.Footnote ⁴⁹ Benson was definite in his opposition to the sort of ‘civilizing’ mission which sought to introduce the Christian gospel to people indirectly via the supposedly beneficial advantages of British education and civilisation:

Benson wanted converts neither drawn by the possible material or cultural advantages offered by Christian missions, nor because Christianity was understood to be the religion of the social or colonial elite. A religion that was attractive because it was the religion of the colonising power was not the Christian faith as Benson understood it.

Benson's concern for an indigenous, or ‘orientalised’ mission, was further motivated by his suspicion towards a Christianised society such as had predominated in European Christendom. He had no desire to see a Christian India where Christianity, as the religion of the rulers, would be a debased religious force. Benson viewed Christianity as essentially a demanding, uncompromising, minority religion, but one that was not to be confined within western culture:

O'Neill's mission, as closely guided by Benson, was not only in contrast to western colonial society, but also to the society's other mission under Fr Page which was begun first at Bombay and then later extended about a hundred and twenty miles inland to Pune, with a school, a church and a hospital.Footnote ⁵² But this raises the obvious question. Why, if Benson wanted a mission without Europeanizing infrastructure, with missionaries living poorly and indigenously in ways that were recognisably religious to the local culture, did he also agree to the more conventional Bombay and Pune mission with its substantial plant and Europeanising educational system?

Both SSJE missions began in response to a request from Bishop Milman of Calcutta in 1873.Footnote ⁵³ But the Pune mission was very much under the direction of Fr Page and was targeted, at first, to the Europeans and Anglo-Indians in Bombay who expected the usual European ecclesiastical infrastructure. The extension of the mission to Pune was indeed established in the local part of that city. However, with Page in control, the SSJE mission there developed a Europeanising infrastructure – including technical schools, industrial workshops and a fruit farm. In 1877 a school was built and staffed by sisters of the Community of St Mary the Virgin; and this was followed by a church, hostels, a primary school and a hospital in 1901.Footnote ⁵⁴ There are indications that Benson was not comfortable with these institutional developments. He urged repeatedly that a large infrastructure was deleterious to the society's life of poverty, calling the Pune mission buildings ‘the sepulchre rather than the home of the living church’.Footnote ⁵⁵ So there seems little doubt that the developments at Bombay and Pune owed most to the local leadership of Page, who favoured institutional developments with their Europeanising purpose.Footnote ⁵⁶ Benson's own conception of mission had a more accurate expression in the form adopted by O'Neill, which was an early departure in Anglo-Catholicism from the prevalent Europeanising institutional form adopted by most Anglican, and many Protestant missions.

Nilkanth/Nehemiah Goreh and the SSJE mission

This departure from a civilizing institutional agenda was facilitated by a significant Indian influence in O'Neill's mission. While O'Neill was at Bankipur he was joined by the Brahman Christian Nilkanth/Nehemiah Goreh. Goreh was baptised as a young man in 1848 under CMS Evangelical influence after a short public career in Benares as an opponent of Christianity. His conversion created a local furore and, as a new convert, he was initially an opponent of asceticism both in his former Hinduism and in Christianity. However, by 1860, influenced by a more sympathetic understanding of his former faith shown by James Ballantyne, the principal of the Presbyterian Sanskrit College in Benares, Goreh had written a book in Hindi upholding world-renouncing contemplative practices.Footnote ⁵⁷ By this time Goreh had a much wider experience of the Christian world. He had previously visited England in 1853, as tutor to a young Sikh nobleman who had also become a Christian, and had been introduced to the queen as a prize convert. Returning to India in 1855 as a prominent Indian Christian, Goreh gradually began to loosen his ties with the CMS as he reacted to the obstacles that society erected to his ordination, and as he came into increasing contact with Tractarian theology, principally through the moderate High Churchman William Kay, Principal of Bishop's College, Calcutta.Footnote ⁵⁸ Through Kay, Goreh began a correspondence with Pusey.Footnote ⁵⁹ Goreh was finally ordained deacon in 1868 and sent by Bishop Milman to begin a mission at Mhow and Indore in Central India.Footnote ⁶⁰ Then, in 1870, Milman ordained him a priest to begin a mission at Chanda in the north-west. It was at this time, in 1873, that Goreh began to correspond with Benson, a connection initiated by a mutual friend of both men in the Indian government. This eventually led to Goreh's return to England in 1876 to become a novice with SSJE the following year.Footnote ⁶¹

Goreh met O'Neill in Calcutta soon after his arrival in India. The Englishman raised the possibility of the two of them establishing the Bankipur mission together, as occurred in June 1874. After the closure of this station after just a few months O'Neill began again in Indore, the city where Goreh had previously begun a mission. He was joined almost immediately by Goreh, until Goreh left for England in early 1876.

Notwithstanding Goreh's indisputable influence on O'Neill's mission, it did not originate with him but with Benson's earlier aspirations to go as a missionary to India. Both O'Neill and Page had left for India in November 1873 at a time when the correspondence between Goreh and Benson had only just begun. Even by 1875 Goreh and Benson were not necessarily regular correspondents. In May that year Goreh acknowledged in a long letter to Benson that he had by then received three or four letters from him to which he had not replied.Footnote ⁶² Although Robert Frykenberg portrays Goreh's association with SSJE as ‘marginal’,Footnote ⁶³ the connection was in fact much more substantial. After returning to India from the SSJE house in Oxford in 1877 – after a year and a half as a novice it was discerned that he had no vocation to the religious life there – he maintained his correspondence with the SSJE founder for the whole of his life. In 1877 Goreh went to live with O'Neill and remained there until 1882, when he joined the SSJE mission at Pune: he remained part of that mission, and did not formally sever his status as a SSJE novice until 1882, the last year of his life.Footnote ⁶⁴ An association of that length and variety was hardly marginal, even if SSJE was too western in its monasticism for it and Goreh comfortably to adapt to each other. Goreh's deep understanding of his former Hinduism, and of Indian culture, alongside the evolving self-understanding of his life as a Christian sannyasi (ascetic), can only have reinforced the indigenising, ascetic, non-institutional viewpoints that were already coming to O'Neill in Benson's letters. Together, Benson and Goreh significantly contributed to shaping this idiosyncratic Anglo-Catholic mission. Like most high-caste Christians in India, Goreh was no subaltern in the SSJE mission but a catalyst bringing together Benson's ascetical western Christian spirituality with the life of the sannyasi that Goreh had already begun to recapture from his anti-ascetic CMS years.Footnote ⁶⁵ Goreh's input into the evolving SSJE mission in India came from a Brahman who had been a Christian for some three decades, and was increasingly influenced by Anglo-Catholicism through his reading of Pusey, his correspondence with Benson and his involvement with the SSJE and its mission in India.

The Indore mission

At Indore, in October 1875, O'Neill rented a room in the home of a local family. The house had just three small mud-brick rooms and a narrow verandah at the front. Goreh described their thoroughly local living conditions.

In 1875 Benson counselled O'Neill about identifying too explicitly with European lifestyle and culture in India, advice of a piece with his 1859 letter to the warden of St Augustine's College about an Indian mission that was as ‘oriental as possible’. He wanted O'Neill to avoid owning or renting a European house, envisaging his friend sleeping in a single room in a local house with a portable altar in the corner, or even on the roof, with no more belongings than he could pack in two hours. A chapel would not be needed for years, as Indians should not be admitted to services until they were Christians.Footnote ⁶⁷ Seven years later, in 1882, Benson was still convinced that European self-assertion and public preaching would not be as attractive as ‘devout retirement’ in recommending Christianity to local Hindus. He was as convinced as any Evangelical Christian that Hinduism was ‘false worship’, but thought that Hindu reverence for the ascetic constituted a kernel of truth in a bogus religion. The ‘Hindu has his own truer conception of reference. The Indian people take knowledge of any devotee in their neighbourhood, and are sure in due time to gain a reverence for him’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Benson understood that this patient presence would take time to attract converts, but maintained that a few gathered after ten or fifteen years ‘would be worth ever so many thousands addressed in the bazaars’.Footnote ⁶⁹

O'Neill did use some standard missionary strategies. He began to translate the Prayer Book catechism and the psalter, though Benson counselled him that time spent in conversation was better than print.Footnote ⁷⁰ Although O'Neill understood Marathi, the local language, with great difficulty, he and Goreh did embark on preaching tours, and lectures in local halls. Again, Benson thought this a waste of time compared with the attraction of living a quiet prayerful life in the one place. Emphasising repeatedly the attraction of a life lived in prayer and asceticism, Benson remained hesitant about the value of translation. He was aware how long it would take to acquire a sufficiently insightful knowledge of local language and culture for any useful translation work to be done.

Demonstrating a knowledge of local conditions, and the social and familial ostracism that converts had to endure, Benson advised that such men and women would have to be cared for materially once their Christian adherence was known to their Hindu or Muslim families.Footnote ⁷² Until his first visit to India in 1890 Benson had no direct experience of either India, or Hindu or Muslim cultures; he was, however, not completely ignorant about them, at least in westernised theory. He delivered a paper on comparative religion to an undergraduate society in Oxford in 1875, and was familiar with the writings of Max Müller, the nineteenth-century Oxford Sanskritist and pioneer of the study of comparative religion. Undoubtedly a more direct and personal knowledge of the local culture, and of the obstacles facing a Christian convert within it, would have resulted from Benson's acquaintance with Goreh. But it could also have come from missionaries in India whom Benson could have met in England.

Working with a mission strategy that relied on an ascetic communal Christian life conformed to local cultural indicators of what constituted an authentic dharma (religion), O'Neill needed a base for the mission that would give him greater freedom than that permitted by being a tenant in another person's home. He and Goreh first tried a house in the nearby village of Silotiya, where a local house of three rooms and a surrounding verandah was built.Footnote ⁷³ But by 1880 this house had been given up and a new St John's Mission House built in Indore itself.Footnote ⁷⁴ It was situated three miles outside the European canton, and constructed in the commonest local style of two long rooms above one another with a low verandah front and back. The house had little furniture. The upper room was a chapel, the lower partitioned into ‘cells’ for the missionaries. Despite Benson's scepticism about translation work, here O'Neill did his writing, including his translation of the psalter into Hindi. At nights O'Neill slept upstairs on the floor behind the altar. The non-monastic members of the mission, including Samuel Gopal, O'Neill's principal Indian assistant and catechist, and his wife and children, lived in an adjoining smaller house, but the whole mission met for worship and meals, eaten in Indian fashion. It was a largely local diet, with meat only on Sundays.Footnote ⁷⁵ O'Neill was probably the only European living in the local city, and a point of curiosity to many.Footnote ⁷⁶

There is little evidence for the local reaction to such a short-lived, idiosyncratic and personal mission. The major source is a short hagiographic article written in 1905 by Samuel Gopal.Footnote ⁷⁷ The mission had a deliberate policy of providing charity for the most destitute poor by dividing the city up into visiting districts for the Indian catechists who were learning Christianity under O'Neill. Working under Gopal's overall supervision, and resourced by the savings engendered by O'Neill's ascetic lifestyle, the students would distribute small amounts of money weekly, and shelters and blankets in the rainy and winter seasons. They reported to Gopal on all applicants for charity, and recounted their stories to O'Neill over dinner on Saturday evenings. O'Neill also quizzed Gopal about the condition of each local applicant before they were admitted to the mission's charity list. O'Neill would frequently accompany the students to speak with the poor about Christianity. Clearly, these neglected destitute, who included the lepers living far beyond the outskirts of the city, were grateful for the charity and the human contact, for Gopal reported that ‘this systematic and well regulated method of caring for the poor made a deep impression on the citizens of Indore’. But it does not seem to have translated into conversions, as Gopal also goes on to say ‘who can dare gauge its results. The last day will reveal it’. Clearly results, in terms of conversions, had not materialised during the days of the mission itself.

While the poor may have welcomed the mission for its charity, there does seem to be some evidence that the higher castes did not. Gopal recounted one consequence of the outdoor preaching engaged in by O'Neill and other members of the mission. They would march in procession through the streets, barefoot, and chanting the litany in Hindi, stopping at various places for O'Neill or one of the others to give a short address in simple Hindi. Christian books and tracts were also sold, despite the mission being warned against this by the police. One of the catechists was in fact arrested for selling Christian literature. The magistrate, a Maratha Brahmin, fined him 50 rupees or 200 days in gaol. When O'Neill protested that the student was just following his instructions and that he should be gaoled in his place, the magistrate had the missioners evicted from the court. It was only when O'Neill informed Sir Henry Daly, agent to the governor-general at the court of the Maharajah, that the student was released. The incident suggests resistance to the mission among the local Brahmins, but also a willingness by O'Neill to use imperial power to correct what he understood to be an injustice by local authorities towards those for whom he was responsible. He was, however, prepared to undergo the gaol sentence himself without protest.Footnote ⁷⁸

There is only one other possible indication of local response to the O'Neill mission in Gopal's account. The missioners used a local bathing place close by their street. It was frequented by Hindus as it was connected to a Hindu tomb, and Goreh expected there would be an objection to O'Neill using it, but no such protest emerged.Footnote ⁷⁹ This may have been because of the mission's charitable work among the lower castes of the city, or because O'Neill's lifestyle did indeed conform to indigenous parameters of holiness.

O'Neill died on 28 August 1882 from cholera which he had contracted from his servant whom he had been tending.Footnote ⁸⁰ His unique mission in India lasted just eight years.

The significance of the SSJE missions

How unique was the O'Neill-Benson-Goreh mission? A similar, but even more thorough going enculturated lifestyle would be adopted by Salvation Army missionaries when they arrived in India in the 1880s. They not only, like O'Neill, adopted local habits in clothing, furnishings and diet, but also used local music in their worship and took Indian Christian names.Footnote ⁸¹ More famously, from the 1950s the Benedictine Dom Bede Griffith would take this emphasis on the Indianness of mission even further by seeking a genuine theological dialogue between Christianity and Hinduism, and to fashion a Christian faith in India that genuinely incorporated insights from the other religion.Footnote ⁸² However, O'Neill's mission, though more circumscribed, not only preceded these two, and was peculiar among contemporary Anglican missions, but its origins were even earlier, embodying as it did the mission ideas of Benson from at least the late 1850s.

So what does this investigation into the initial missions, both domestic and foreign, of the Society of St John the Evangelist tell us about the historiography of contemporary missions and the history of Christian missions in the later years of the mid-Victorian period? The Twelve-Day Mission to London in 1869 was an indicator of the importance of Richard Benson as an early instigator of Anglo-Catholic missions, and of his theology in which he understood mission as a contest between the Church and the world, exemplified in Christian holiness resourced by the sanctification of the Holy Spirit imputed through baptism. It enables us to determine that his foundation of a community dedicated to living the vowed religious life in the Church of England and with St John the Evangelist as patron was not mere personal preference for a particular saint, but a theological statement about that community's purpose. The Society had been in existence less than three years when the London mission took place. At a time when the Church of England was still theologically opposed to the idea of a life of vowed celibacy, and there were just four professed members of SSJE, Benson, as Superior, made the decision to involve his little band in the planning and execution of a major initiative in public domestic mission. It was a sizeable task for a small group whose corporate life had only just begun. But the rule drawn up by Benson for the Society enshrined the explicit connection between mission and sanctification that lay at the heart of his theology of mission, and encompassed much of the methodology of the 1869 mission to London:

In the recent plethora of scholarship on missions and missionaries the overwhelming focus of scholarly attention has been on Protestant Evangelicals. Scholars working on British Evangelical missions have identified a number of predominant characteristics. These have included an ambivalent relationship with imperial authorities which generally involved increasing cooperation as the nineteenth century progressed.Footnote ⁸⁴ Underlying this ambivalence, however, was a common mission view that the British Empire was a providential grant to facilitate global conversion by a Christian Britain, a theological understanding that dated back to the beginnings of British missions with the SPG in 1701,Footnote ⁸⁵ but which disguised the coercive nature of much British colonialism. The typical Protestant Evangelical missionary of the mid-Victorian period was still male, usually married, although single female missionaries became more common in the later nineteenth century often due to the segregated condition of women in the non-Christian societies that the missions were targeting. According to a number of historians this social and gendered configuration of missions made them largely adopt and seek to inculcate the idealised domestic and gendered arrangements of British middle-class culture as the ‘norm’ for converts.Footnote ⁸⁶ Protestant missionary families were supposed to model this standard for their converts, notwithstanding the emotional costs and ways in which the ideal was fractured, as when children were sent back to England for their schooling only to be alienated permanently from their families.Footnote ⁸⁷ However, the single-sex and celibate culture of religious life took the missions of the SSJE outside this norm, so that both of them were to some extent on the margins of Anglican and Protestant missions, that of O'Neill more so than Page's. They were missions of a religious order which was barely accepted by its own Church, both because of its vowed life and its Anglo-Catholicism, however restrained its ritualism might be. O'Neill's mission was influenced by the marginality of Goreh, living between two cultures and two religious traditions, but well within the local culture and geography of the town of Indore. This meant that the O'Neill-Goreh-Benson mission participated deliberately in the hybrid marginality that lay at the heart of the British Raj, where all people, British and Indians, participated in the blends of cultures to which Robert Frykenberg has repeatedly drawn attention.Footnote ⁸⁸

However, the O'Neill mission was not just a western mission adapting itself to a non-western culture for the purpose of evangelistic strategy, something other missions increasingly tried to do from the later nineteenth century. It is clear that this mission was a deliberate hybrid from the beginning. The knowledge and input of Goreh's religious and cultural experience played an indispensable part in shaping O'Neill's mission on the ground in Indore, albeit the religious shape of the mission was determined beforehand by Benson‘s longstanding missionary desire. However, Goreh's intimate understanding of local conditions, society, culture and religion was what enabled O'Neill effectively to realise Benson's vision. The O'Neill mission was the endeavour of a partnership in which both men gained something. O'Neill, the knowledge to navigate the implementation of Benson's vision on the ground; and Goreh the co-direction of a mission more in keeping with his own sannyasi ideals and hopes for Christian mission in India, as well as the recognition from Europeans that his attachment to the SSJE mission gave him.

Much of the focus in recent mission historiography has been on the world and motivations of converts, rather than of missionaries. However, in the O'Neill mission there were no converts, just inquirers; and given Benson's view of a long catechesis for potential converts it is unlikely that this would have changed very much if the mission had continued longer. This was not understood, either by Benson or O'Neill, as a failure, but rather as the expected outcome of an ascetic mission relying on no social or political colonial connections to recommend its religion to locals, but only its coenobitic resonances with Indian religious culture. For Benson, Christianity was necessarily a minority, counter-cultural religion, notwithstanding his view was that of an Anglican whose Church had a long history of establishment as part of the ruling hegemony in England and the British Empire. Benson's model of mission was not just contrary to that of most Anglican and Protestant missions which clearly sought numbers of converts, and even the conversion of their host society; but it was also counter to the prevailing model of Anglo-Catholic ritualist mission in Britain. Anglo-Catholic apologetic identified ritualism as a missionary model suitable for reclaiming the labouring poor among their dreary slums by its colour and dramatic performance. Benson, as superior of the SSJE, as instigator and arguably the driving force of the 1869 mission, whose missionary model was personified in India by O'Neill, would eschew ritualism, advocating in its stead the attractive power of a community or individuals living simply and in poverty according to the same theology that the ritualists strove to commend through spectacle. The recent work of Jeffrey Cox makes it clear that what he calls ‘High Church’ Anglicans, that is, Anglo-Catholics, could challenge the prevalent Protestant missionary model of the missionary family by sending celibate vowed religious missionaries; yet he also shows that such missions generally adopted the institutional mission exemplified by Page's mission. By contrast, this paper demonstrates that such a mission was not the preferred method of the founder of the Cowley Fathers, and that institutional mission was not the invariable outcome of these new Anglo-Catholic forms of Anglican mission. The theological perspective and missionary strategies preferred by Richard Benson also suggest a nuancing of the imperial-mission nexus that was prominent in Anglican mission in the high Victorian period, most especially under the leadership of Bishop Montgomery in the SPG.Footnote ⁸⁹ While the SSJE mission under Fr Page in Bombay and Pune did indeed build upon existing British imperial presence and populations, Benson's clear preference for the O'Neill mission indicates that at least some early Anglo-Catholic missions exhibited an explicit antagonism to the imperial connection because it associated Christianity with worldly power and a colonising culture. More research into specifically Anglo-Catholic missions is needed in this respect, but if antagonism to the imperial British state proved to be more common in subsequent Anglo-Catholic missions, it may have derived from the initial Tractarian impulse of opposition to the liberal British domestic state and its erastianism.Footnote ⁹⁰

The early diversity in Anglo-Catholic missions is a reminder that not only did missions vary enormously in perspectives and local forms, but also that the Christianity that they advocated and propagated was not a monolithic phenomenon. There is a greater need in the study of missions to delineate the varied characteristics of the Christianity that the hugely diverse missions propagated. Mission Christianity was a much more multivalent phenomenon than the study of what has come to be known as ‘Christian mission’, an all too monochrome term.

The first two SSJE missions indicate four further points of significance. First, that a deliberate appreciation of indigenous culture (common in most successful Christian missions), and even of limited aspects of indigenous religion, began to emerge among Anglo-Catholic missionaries by the 1870s, though more explicitly in the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁹¹ Benson is an early example, possibly even the earliest explicit Anglo-Catholic example, of this. The sympathy of Anglo-Catholic ritualist priests for British working-class culture has already been noted, and certainly the ritualist moderation of the 1869 London mission similarly indicated patience with the diverse ecclesiastical cultures of contemporary Anglicanism, as well as with the different cultures of the social classes of 1860s London. However, Benson's appreciation of Indian religious culture was strictly confined to its asceticism and unworldliness, and he remained as firmly antagonistic as an Evangelical to any suggestion of Hindu religious truth. He made a clear distinction between Hindu asceticism as a natural practice and Christian ascesis as a divine outworking of the supernatural gift of baptism:

Benson, therefore, maintained the usual Christian dichotomy of Christian truth against non-Christian falsity, which was hardly surprising as it was the basis for all nineteenth-century Christian mission. But while Benson shared this common facet of nineteenth-century Christianity, it is clear that he did not share a common missionary assumption of ‘christianise and civilise’.Footnote ⁹³ Benson's concern that a mission life be appropriate to the culture in which the potential convert lived meant that the outward form of the mission adopted by O'Neill was dictated by Indian conditions and beliefs. It was a sort of back-handed acknowledgement of the religious values of the missionaries’ Hindu adversaries. So the house of the mission at Indore was fundamentally the same as those around it; there was little in the way of European furniture that, presumably, O'Neill would have found more comfortable; and the chapel demanded that the worshipper sat on the floor as he did in an Indian temple, rather than in the pews of the neo-gothic colonial churches. The adoption of an Indian diet with limited meat was part of the same local pattern.

Given Benson's hostility to other religions it is unlikely that he wanted O'Neill to enter into any sort of in-depth dialogue with Hindus which would have enabled O'Neill's mission to adopt something more than an outward similarity to the Hindu pursuit of holiness. Such an assessment is supported by much of the advice that Benson gave to O'Neill as his mission unfolded. It indicates that Benson thought that converts brought little of value from their previous religion:

However, in the letter that he wrote to O'Neill in 1877 he was explicit in hoping for an Indian Christianity that was different from that of the west, a view which suggests that encultured adaptation to the externals of local culture might have gone further had O'Neill's mission survived longer.

Secondly, the connection between Benson's theology and his real but limited appreciation of Indian culture points to the importance of including theology within the purview of the history of missions. This is a dimension of mission studies that Andrew Porter and Robert Frykenberg have long advocated.Footnote ⁹⁵ Belief, and how it is constructed and understood, is an obvious historical dimension of the mission enterprise.Footnote ⁹⁶ Theology is not always, or only, a cover for other, more nefarious motivations. To date, those historians who have embraced a consideration of theology in their study of missions have largely confined their explanations of missionary theology to providence and millennialism, largely because these themes were prominent in the Evangelical missions that have been the overwhelming subjects of most mission studies.Footnote ⁹⁷ But this research would indicate that there is a case for a much wider theological investigation into the connection between missionary theology and the work and outcomes of missions. Benson's understanding of mission points to other seminal themes, at least in developing Anglo-Catholic missions from the later nineteenth century: theologies of an inherent antagonism between Christianity and the world; the Incarnation of Christ; holiness; and baptism and the Holy Spirit.

Thirdly, the O'Neill mission is an early example of an Anglican mission undertaking an enculturation policy. The adoption and adaptation of Hindu ideas had already been espoused by the ‘fulfilment’ theology of some non-Anglican missions, such as that of William Miller of the Free Church of Scotland and principal of Madras Christian College, who, from the 1860s, saw Christianity as the fulfilment of Hinduism.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Benson-O'Neill-Goreh strategy was also similar to the enculturation agenda of the so-called ‘faith missions’ made most famous by Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission, and contemporary with the SSJE mission initiative. While Taylor's initiative derives from a conservative Evangelical theology and culture and the O'Neill mission from an Anglo-Catholicism that was more or less at war with Evangelical Christianity in England, there are more similarities than partisan ecclesiastical politics would suggest. In both these missions there was a common downplaying of the institutional model, though in Benson's case this was a more explicit preference for rejecting such a model. There was a similar commitment to simple living and personal sacrifice by the missionary, coupled with an intention of adapting to local norms; and there was a theological reliance on the providence of God for sustainability.Footnote ⁹⁹ Though divine provision was demonstrably assisted by excellent public relations at home in the case of the China Inland Mission, the theological emphasis on a division between the Church and the world was yet another similarity between these two missions at different poles of the Christian spectrum. Such areas of similarity indicate that mission history would benefit from a greater degree of cross-denominational study, including denominations formerly antagonistic to one another. Certainly studies of Anglo-Catholic missions need to incorporate comparative studies of Roman Catholic missions, as both missions centred on personnel drawn from religious orders.

Fourthly, Benson's theology and preferred mission practice was sharply antagonistic to the perpetuation of a Christendom model of mission which saw the objective of mission as being the remaking of the local society into a Christian one. His was an anti-Christendom model that, demonstrably in O'Neill's case, sought to achieve a distance between mission and British imperialism, though this was less successful in the case of the Page mission. Benson's ideal of mission, seen in O'Neill's work, brought together two strands which Andrew Porter has seen as separate in mission history. The Evangelical strand stressed the fundamental importance of the individual experience of conversion. The ‘High Church’ strand emphasised the communal and ecclesial vision of a converted community.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Benson straddled these two dimensions with his belief in conversion as a long, individual and arduous process, unattractive to most persons in the local society. Yet this conversion was best achieved by the missionary living in a community of prayer, asceticism and sacramental life into which converts would eventually be inducted, which was removed from, and even contrary to, the usual lives of the British in colonial society. Evangelical and High Church strands, though increasingly divided and antagonistic in the British metropolis, were not always so remote from each other in the mission field. Benson's emphasis on an arduous process of conversion, with converts largely few in number and hidden from public view, yet attracted to a Christian communal life of prayer and sanctified asceticism, suggests that not all Christian missions should be studied for their influence, benign or malignant, as agents of social change in the local culture which has been the focus of much recent mission history.