The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) was the first organization in Scotland dedicated to missionary activity. Constituted by royal charter in 1709, the SSPCK grew out of a number of smaller societies for the reformation of manners that had proliferated across Edinburgh and the Lowlands during the 1690s, all dedicated to improving national morality, piety and virtue.Footnote 1 Operating as an auxiliary arm of the Church of Scotland, which had been re-established as Presbyterian in 1690, the society founded charity schools across the Highlands to instruct children ‘in the principles of the Christian reformed Protestant religion’, part of a wider arsenal of efforts to eradicate Catholicism from the region.Footnote 2 But the SSPCK's foundation charter also expressed broader ambitions: to spread Christianity across ‘Popish and Infidel parts of the world’.Footnote 3 In pursuit of this aim, from 1729 the society sponsored three ministers to convert Native Americans in New England, and in 1735 financed a separate mission to Native Americans and emigrant Highlanders in Georgia.Footnote 4
The SSPCK's domestic and foreign initiatives emerged at a time when missions were becoming increasingly important to British overseas expansion. Widespread conviction that the extension of Protestantism was the nation's safeguard drove much of the growth in eighteenth-century British missions, giving the empire a moral foundation and protecting it against the encroachments of foreign Catholic powers.Footnote 5 Consequently, historians have interpreted the SSPCK primarily as a civilizing agency: it deployed religious instruction as part of a broader campaign of cultural assimilation, designed to strengthen loyalty to Britain at home and overseas.Footnote 6 Yet this was not the sole aim of its work. The SSPCK also promoted an agenda of Christianization, cultivating religious knowledge and piety for the salvation of souls. It was an agenda that paralleled, and often outstripped, political and civil objectives, but which has received little attention. This article remedies that neglect by re-examining the relationship between the SSPCK's Highland and American missions.
Hitherto, Christianization has occupied a limited position in the history of eighteenth-century Scottish missions. Donald Meek's assertion that the SSPCK's objectives shifted ‘from civilization to salvation’ only in the later eighteenth century has proved highly influential.Footnote 7 Scholars have connected Christianization exclusively with the rise of evangelicalism – that activist Protestant movement which rejected the scepticism of earlier generations about the possibility of conversion by human agency, and which imparted knowledge of Scripture to inspire a profound, individual conversion experience.Footnote 8 A crucial turning point in this process was the ‘Great Awakening’.Footnote 9 For Andrew Porter, the religious revivals that blossomed across the British Atlantic world in the 1740s occasioned a fundamental change in the society's priorities: convinced that the revivals signified the approaching millennium, its focus shifted from cultural assimilation to securing conversions and inculcating piety in anticipation of the Second Coming.Footnote 10 The transatlantic evangelical network that developed through the revivals included many SSPCK members; in 1749 the American minister Jonathan Edwards published posthumously the diaries of David Brainerd, perhaps the society's most famous colonial missionary, in an attempt to inspire a new awakening.Footnote 11 Yet closer examination of the SSPCK's records and publications calls into question this emphasis on the role played by evangelicalism. As we shall see, the society's commitment to Christianizing ideals long predated the revivals, and was present from the beginning in its Highland schools. As for millennial expectations, these were not exclusively an evangelical concern either. Recent research has challenged the dominance of evangelicalism in the SSPCK after 1750.Footnote 12 Closer scrutiny of the connections between Christianization and evangelicalism during the first half of the eighteenth century thus prompts a reassessment of Scottish ideas of mission, and of the relationship between the Scottish Church and Britain's eighteenth-century empire.
This article outlines firstly the SSPCK's activities in the Highlands from 1709 until 1729. It demonstrates the centrality of Christianization in the society's schools, and suggests that its religious instruction was emphatically Presbyterian, weaving together individual conversions with the extension of the Church of Scotland's influence through the region. It then explores the SSPCK's expansion to New England and Georgia. The society was praised for bolstering Britain's imperial security; the Highland colony in Georgia in particular was perceived as an essential strategic block against Spanish incursions.Footnote 13 Yet this was not the main objective of its endeavours. The society used colonial expansion to further its own agenda of spreading Reformed Christianity, articulating a distinctly Scottish vision for mission. However, this vision became more important in America than it did in the Highlands. The tendency to present the SSPCK's domestic and foreign missions as twin pillars of a civilizing scheme has overlooked the fact that the society's activism against Highland Catholics waned in the 1730s, with greater attention being devoted to the colonies. The final part of this article suggests that this shift in priorities was entwined with growing anxiety that Scotland had lost providential favour. Linda Colley has argued that the connection between Protestantism and imperial expansion in the eighteenth century was overwhelmingly positive: flourishing missionary organizations confirmed for contemporaries Britain's place among elect nations.Footnote 14 The SSPCK's response to the imperial venture suggests that, in Scotland, the relationship between Church and empire was more problematic.
Highland Missions, 1709–29
The SSPCK's ambitions to extend Christianity across ‘Popish and Infidel parts of the world’ first found expression in the Highlands. The region was widely regarded as the equivalent of a foreign mission field, in desperate need of receiving true religion and the rule of law.Footnote 15 Presbyterianism had only a marginal presence in the Highlands in 1690; most inhabitants adhered either to Episcopalianism or Catholicism, a considerable challenge to the re-established Church's authority. The deposition of James VII in 1689 had occasioned renewed efforts to counter the perceived ‘increase of popery’ in Highland parishes.Footnote 16 The SSPCK had a vital role to play in extending Presbyterianism's foothold. Operating through an Edinburgh-based committee of directors and a subcommittee, both composed of clergy and laity, the society collected donations in Scotland and England to fund Highland schools and schoolmasters to supplement existing parish schools.Footnote 17 Besides giving a basic grounding in writing, arithmetic and church music, its schoolmasters taught pupils ‘to read the Holy Scriptures, and other good and pious books’; they were also obliged to ‘catechise their scholars at least twice a week’ and ‘pray publickly with them twice a day’.Footnote 18 The SSPCK's schools provided a vital bulwark against Catholicism. Schoolmasters were selected according to their ability to engage in the ‘popish controversie’ and expose Rome's errors, thereby preventing apostasies and, it was hoped, reclaiming Catholics from superstition.Footnote 19 In this the tract A Protestant's Resolution, shewing his Reasons why he will not be a Papist proved particularly useful: the society's subcommittee noted in 1728 that ‘the papists in the north hav[e] found, That their interests hath suffered’ through its distribution.Footnote 20
While its schools were open to all, ‘Popish as weil as Protestant of all denominations’, the society was uncompromising in the Presbyterian nature of its education.Footnote 21 Schoolmasters had to subscribe the Westminster Confession and be approved by local presbyteries, which automatically excluded Episcopalians.Footnote 22 In some ways this confessional emphasis is surprising. The society had been established jointly between Presbyterians and Episcopalians; the Episcopal minister James Kirkwood was instrumental in its formation.Footnote 23 Yet willingness to extend membership to non-Presbyterians did not dilute the religious education offered in SSPCK schools. Schoolmasters were obliged to teach all children the Shorter Catechism and secure their pupils’ attendance at Presbyterian ordinances.Footnote 24 Such policies often proved difficult to implement in practice; nevertheless, the underlying principles of Presbyterian education remained central to the society.Footnote 25 And although loyal Episcopalians were acknowledged to be useful against rival Catholic missionaries, cooperation between the two confessions was limited: in 1711, John Clow refused to settle as schoolmaster in the parish of Blair Atholl because its minister was Episcopalian.Footnote 26 For the SSPCK, educational initiatives were entwined with entrenching the Church of Scotland's authority in the Highlands.
Presbyterianism was viewed by many as the means to secure loyalty among the Highlanders, who were thought to be Jacobites.Footnote 27 In 1726, the SSPCK established a school in the heavily nonjuring parish of Lochalsh in direct response to ‘the violent opposition given by the enemies of the present establishment’ which was reported there by the presbytery of Gairloch.Footnote 28 More broadly, the society's apparent antipathy towards Gaelic, coupled with its designs to introduce industry among the Highlanders, seemingly reinforced the connections between education and civilization.Footnote 29 In 1723, the SSPCK proclaimed that industry was essential for ‘civilizing that rude, ignorant and deluded People, who are now hurtful to the Commonwealth’.Footnote 30 Proposals followed in 1729 that ‘any who please may erect manufactories near their charity schools’, aligning education with economic improvement.Footnote 31 Yet such commitments were conveyed predominantly in public petitions aimed at securing financial support from central government or the general public.Footnote 32 Schoolmasters showed no inclination to set up industrial schools, and while the society enshrined a commitment to teaching ‘Husbandry, House Wifery, Trades and Manufacture’ in 1737, no steps were taken to establish such schools until 1754.Footnote 33 Beyond the rhetoric of its official publications, the SSPCK's civilizing policies lacked definition and drive.
Closer examination of the SSPCK's records reveals a striking emphasis on using education to cultivate piety and devotion. In 1729, for instance, the society ordered the erection of ‘Petty Itinerant Charity Schools’ to supplement its existing fixed establishments, ‘finding from their patent that the main design of their erection was the further promoting of Christian Knowledge, and the Increase of piety and virtue’ against ‘Error, Idolatry, Superstition and Ignorance’.Footnote 34 The importance of inculcating religious knowledge for its own sake was reflected in the accompanying demand for
Itinerant Teachers, who understand the principles of our holy religion, and can teach children to read, tho they do neither write a fair hand themselves, nor understand Arithmetick . . . there is a good number of pious young men that have been at their own charity schools, abundantly qualified . . . for teaching these petty Itinerant schools . . .Footnote 35
Schoolmasters were also charged with the spiritual edification of the wider population. A report of the death of Alexander Fraser in the parish of Abertarff in 1720 noted that ‘he not only had a flourishing school, but on the Lords day kept diets for prayer reading and catechising which were punctually attended by the Countrey people not excluding the papists themselves’.Footnote 36 Donald McQueen, minister of Sleat in Skye, similarly confirmed in 1727 that the local schoolmaster ‘reads, prays and sings Psalms with the people on the Lord's day in [my] absence, and in his spare hours catechises the people’.Footnote 37 In tandem with these efforts, the society also sought to improve religious knowledge in areas entirely free from Catholic or Jacobite influence. Its first school was established in 1710 on the nominally Presbyterian island of St Kilda. A 1729 visitation reported that the minister-schoolmaster there, Alexander Buchan, ‘determined to know nothing among them but Jesus Christ and him crucified’, with the pleasing result that ‘as to Christian Knowledge, they are not inferior to their Equals in our bounds, so they far exceed them in piety’.Footnote 38 Far from being subverted to the causes of political stability and cultural assimilation, Christianization assumed an importance in its own right in the SSPCK's Highland missions. These priorities would later come to the fore when the society became involved in the imperial project.
Colonial Expansion: New England and Georgia
By 1729 the SSPCK was running seventy-eight schools across the Highlands, although its success in converting large numbers of Catholics was mixed at best.Footnote 39 During its early years of operation, expansion to other ‘Popish and Infidel parts of the world’ had been given little practical thought. This changed in 1717, when Daniel Williams, a Presbyterian minister in London, left the SSPCK a substantial bequest to ‘maintain a competent number of well qualify'd Ministers in Infidel Foreign Countries’ to bring heathens ‘to the Knowledge of Christ Jesus’.Footnote 40 Williams left £100 for this purpose, along with the revenues from his estate at Catworth, near Cambridge. However, this would only be made available after the society had sponsored at least three ministers overseas for one year at their own expense.Footnote 41 This prompted the SSPCK to consider seriously the prospect of overseas missions, although its immediate reaction was unfavourable.Footnote 42 In 1722 it attempted, unsuccessfully, to modify Williams's legacy in favour of the Highlands, claiming that ‘the Great Ignorance that prevails’ in those ‘vast and desolate bounds necessarily requires a greater number of schools than [we] have been yet able to support’.Footnote 43
After more than a decade of wrangling about the terms of the bequest, in 1729 the SSPCK announced New England as its mission field. Williams had not specified a particular country, but America was an obvious choice: English missionary organizations were already operating there, albeit focused more on the white colonial population, and the existing church structures would provide the support needed for missionaries to function effectively.Footnote 44 A board of correspondents was established in Boston in 1730, authorized to recruit three ministers to go among Native Americans ‘to endeavour their conversion to God in Christ’.Footnote 45 By late 1732 these missionaries were in place, based at separate forts close to indigenous settlements in the Massachusetts borderlands.Footnote 46 In 1735 the society additionally agreed to sponsor a Gaelic-speaking Presbyterian minister, John McLeod, to minister the Gospel among Native Americans and emigrant Highlanders in the new settlement of Darien, Georgia.Footnote 47
The decision to embark on colonial missions immediately elevated the SSPCK's work from national to imperial significance. Like its English counterparts, the society was lauded at home for its role in strengthening the empire through the extension of Protestantism.Footnote 48 Its presence in Georgia in particular was viewed as an essential means of entrenching British influence in the region. Georgia's trustees had specifically requested Highland emigrants for the colony, playing on their distinctive martial culture to garner native support for Britain over Spanish colonists.Footnote 49 John McLeod's dual ministry to Highlanders and Native Americans was a crucial element in forging this alliance.Footnote 50 The attempted integration of so-called ‘alien’ cultures was underlined by the society's instruction to missionaries to teach Native Americans ‘to understand and speak the English language’, thus incorporating them within the fold of the empire and fostering loyalty towards Britain over the rival territorial claims of Spain and New France.Footnote 51
At first glance, then, the SSPCK's provision of colonial missionaries suggests that the society was lending the imperial venture spiritual authority, facilitating the extension of Protestantism as a means of strengthening the ties between Britain and its colonies, and enhancing Scotland's status in the empire in the process.Footnote 52 This should not, however, obscure the equally forceful Christianizing agenda underpinning the SSPCK's work; indeed, the society's approach to colonial missions indicates that its aims and strategies were more likely to be in tension with the political necessities involved in imperial expansion than to endorse them wholeheartedly. This quickly became apparent in the continuing confessional emphasis of the SSPCK's missions. Britain's government pragmatically viewed most branches of Protestantism as co-defenders against the international Catholic threat; contemporary commentators noted that English colonial missions possessed an ecumenical flavour far less likely in a domestic context.Footnote 53 Yet the society participated little in this irenic missionary tradition, and often acted in outright opposition to it.Footnote 54 Its intended colonial outpost was Presbyterian Pennsylvania; only when the synod of Philadelphia proved noncommittal about the project did the SSPCK look to other colonies for a missionary base.Footnote 55 New England was the second most preferable location, as its Congregationalists were ‘nearest to the Church of Scotland in Religious matters’.Footnote 56 As with the society's Highland schools, Reformed religion infused its missions in New England and Georgia. Outlining ‘the lamentable circumstances’ in America ‘for want of the Light of the Blessed Gospel’, the society commissioned its missionaries to impart:
The Christian Reformed Protestant religion; and in order thereunto, not only to preach and catechise, But also . . . teaching the foresaid heathens, To read the holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and other good and pious books . . . to direct them how to pray, and to carry on as becometh the Gospel . . . .Footnote 57
Missionaries were instructed to ‘use your best endeavours to confirm such [i.e. Native Americans] in the truth of our holy religion, and engage them to persevere therein’, administering ‘the seals of the Covenant of Grace’ to them ‘when you judge them fit to receive . . . the same’, and were further exhorted to ‘Let the Glory of God, and salvation of precious souls be your chief motive, you are employed upon a very Important and Glorious work’.Footnote 58 Reports from the colonies emphasized the spiritual progress being made. A letter from the society's Boston correspondents in 1733 confirmed that the missionaries ‘daily converse[d] with the Indians’ and were ‘sometimes Invited to pray and keep Sabbath with them’, expressing hopes that they would soon ‘clearly see the way of their Salvation’.Footnote 59 The centrality of spiritual edification to the SSPCK's missions was underlined in 1737, when the society dismissed its New England ministers: all three had refused to live within indigenous communities, but instead had acted primarily as military chaplains in their respective forts.Footnote 60 It was not enough simply to maintain a peripheral presence alongside native settlements or establish cordial relations with individual Native Americans. The successful spread of the gospel depended upon missionaries who ‘undertake to live and inhabite with the Indians . . . and thereby have access to instruct them in principles of the Christian religion’.Footnote 61 The society's colonial missions were a vehicle to extend Reformed Christianity's reach, transplanting the methods of evangelization that it had deployed in the Highlands. Civilization, so central to imperial ambitions, was a distinctly secondary objective.
Presbyterian Fragmentation, Providence and the Conversion of the World to Christ
The importance of Christianization to Scottish missions found expression in the SSPCK's rhetoric about its progress at home and abroad. It portrayed colonial expansion as part of its plan to ‘advanc[e] the Knowledge of Christ, in Places needing the Means thereof’, saving the souls of Highlanders and Native Americans alike, whose ignorance rendered their conversion so necessary.Footnote 62 Parallels between the two fields were repeatedly reinforced in the society's publications. Preaching at its annual meeting in 1730, the minister John Matthison spoke of:
Vast numbers of mankind sitting in Darkness, and in the region of the shadow of death, living in the utmost Barbarity, and stupid Ignorance, not only in foreign parts, but even at home in the remote Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Our Bowels should yearn towards these miserable Creatures . . . we should contribute our utmost Endeavours to deliver those precious Souls that are perishing for lack of Knowledge.Footnote 63
However, the parity presented between domestic and foreign missions was not reflected in practice. From the later 1720s the SSPCK, and indeed the wider church, had expressed doubts about the viability of converting large numbers of Highland Catholics. As the 1730s progressed, schools were removed from heavily Catholic parishes and resettled in areas ‘safe’ from ‘popish’ incursions, to the chagrin of ministers struggling against Catholic populations.Footnote 64 While it never abandoned the Catholic Highlands entirely, the society claimed that its reformation was largely accomplished, thereby allowing advancement to other fields of endeavour.Footnote 65 ‘The Society have extended their Views and Care even to foreign parts’, the minister William Hamilton proclaimed in 1732; ‘this they have done, after having erected great Numbers of Schools in our own Highlands and Islands’.Footnote 66
This change of direction did not go unnoticed. ‘Our Society ought certainly to keep at Home, till the Means of Instructing their own Inhabitants and Countrymen be put upon a solid lasting way’, argued the anonymous author of The Highland Complaint in 1737. This pamphlet denounced the SSPCK's decision ‘to take in the whole habitable World’ before the Highlands were fully reformed, a step which the author claimed ‘has proven fatal to our Reformation’.Footnote 67 Responding to this accusation, the society somewhat defensively explained that it ‘endeavoured to chuse such places as missionaries had most encouragement in’.Footnote 68 The SSPCK's enthusiasm for ‘preaching the Glorious Gospel of Christ for the Instruction and conversion of the poor Indians’ far outweighed the actual numbers of missionaries in the colonies, which were destined to remain small due to financial constraints.Footnote 69 Nevertheless, in terms of converting ‘heathen’ souls, its gaze had turned decisively towards America, eclipsing the reclaiming of the Highlands from ‘popery’.
Several motivations informed the SSPCK's shift in priority, not least the prospect of material benefits. Its directors noted in 1735 that sponsoring a minister in Georgia ‘may be followed with new donations’, further raising the society's profile at home and overseas.Footnote 70 Historians have also suggested that the SSPCK, unable to make significant headway in the Highlands, increasingly viewed Native Americans as more capable of receiving Christianity.Footnote 71 William Hamilton expressed such sentiments when, in a possible rebuke to Highland Catholic hostility, he argued that the plight of Native Americans ‘calls the louder for a remedy, in as much as we find . . . that these poor Souls, destitute of the Means of Knowledge, are not filled with those Prejudices against the Gospel’.Footnote 72 Yet the SSPCK experienced multiple difficulties in America too, not least as a result of questionable missionary zeal. The setback caused by the society's dismissal of its New England missionaries was compounded by a series of disastrous events in Georgia. Over half of the colony's Highland population was killed in the 1740 siege of St Augustine, Spanish Florida; McLeod left Darien the following year, complaining of inadequate conditions and insufficient pay, and the society's efforts ceased in the American South.Footnote 73 The SSPCK was subsequently reluctant to sponsor emigrant schemes elsewhere, declining, for instance, to supply a minister for Highlanders in North Carolina.Footnote 74 However, there was no suggestion of paring back the quest for Native American conversions. Indeed, the society appointed a second board of correspondents in 1738 for missions in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania alongside those in New England.Footnote 75
The SSPCK's increased enthusiasm for colonial missions becomes clearer when we consider the wider theological context in which the society existed. Scottish Presbyterians were acutely aware of the millenarian implications of missionary work. Belief that the widespread conversion of heathens signalled the approaching millennium became prevalent after 1700.Footnote 76 Robert Millar, minister of Paisley, exemplified this view in The History of the Propagation of Christianity, and Overthrow of Paganism. Published in 1723 and dedicated to the SSPCK, Millar stressed the necessity of new missions ‘to promote Christianity among heathens’ and expressed his ‘sincere Concern for the Success of this important Affair’.Footnote 77 Such influences prompted much speculation within the society about the divine implications of its work. The minister James Smith observed in a 1733 sermon to the SSPCK that:
The Endeavours of the Society here have been remarkably blessed of God, not only for spreading the Knowledge of the Gospel in the remote and barbarous Places of our own Country, but are beginning to take place in America also. What promising Appearances are these? . . . What if this be the dawning of these happy Times, When the Earth shall be full of the Knowledge of the Lord? Footnote 78
Smith's sermon highlighted the ideological significance of America in millennial expectations. The religious significance of the New World had long occupied a place in European thought; but for Scottish Presbyterians, the disastrous Darien expedition in the 1690s had occasioned profound anxieties that Scotland had lost divine favour.Footnote 79 These fears were compounded in 1733 when long-simmering theological and doctrinal disputes erupted, and four ministers seceded from the Church of Scotland.Footnote 80 Confronted with the visible fragmentation of Scottish Presbyterianism, providential favour was in grave doubt. And though the colonies were far from immune to theological rifts, Scots perceived blossoming Protestant piety in America, enhanced by events such as the awakening at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734–5.Footnote 81
Against this background of Presbyterian dismay at the fractured state of the Church, the SSPCK's determined involvement in converting Native Americans was not so much a triumphal expression of an elect nation winning souls for Britain and Providence, but rather an anxious desire to secure Scotland's place in what it believed to be the site of the world's spiritual renewal. While it refused to expand elsewhere, for instance rejecting overtures in 1742 to send missionaries to East India, the society repeatedly stressed that American missions would encourage Providence to favour it and the Church.Footnote 82 ‘Nothing [is] more likely to draw down a Blessing from Heaven’, it proclaimed upon announcing the New England scheme.Footnote 83 ‘Our Encouragement otherwise to promote this good Design is great’, agreed James Smith; ‘the Blessing of God seems visibly to accompany the pious Design of propagating the Gospel’.Footnote 84 The society's colonial missions were motivated increasingly by objectives distinct from the standard rhetoric of Christian conversion and territorial expansion. The conversion of heathens would not only save souls; it would secure divine favour towards the SSPCK and Scotland as the instigators of missionary activity.
Such opinions were not confined to the evangelical wing of Scottish Presbyterianism. Certainly, prominent evangelicals seized on the millenarian implications of America: in 1741 the minister Alexander Webster entreated the society to ‘scatter the mist of Barbarity and Ignorance’ to facilitate ‘the happy Time’ of Christ's coming.Footnote 85 However, this position was equally advocated by more moderate members of the SSPCK. John Gowdie's sermon to the society in 1735, for instance, devoted considerable attention to the conversion of the world to Christ and the paramount importance of the SSPCK's endeavours in divine plans. Failure to support this work, he warned, would provoke ‘the dishonour of God, the reproach of our holy religion and the ruin of . . . precious souls’.Footnote 86 The society was united in the belief that colonial missions were vital for regenerating Scottish Presbyterianism's status as divinely favoured. The empire provided the crucial framework for this to occur, but also awakened serious doubts within the society as to Scotland's place among the elect. In this environment, the more prosaic reality of extirpating Highland Catholicism took second place.
Conclusion
The SSPCK's activities in ‘Popish and Infidel parts of the world’ offer multiple insights into Scottish ideas of mission in the eighteenth century. At a time when missions were regarded primarily as a means of civilizing savage heathens, the society articulated a distinct concept of mission, in which Christianization and the salvation of souls sat alongside civil and political goals, and in many respects superseded these secular aims. Through its endeavours in the Highlands and America, it established a blueprint for conversion based on spiritual edification which future generations of missionaries would replicate. The SSPCK's legacy was particularly evident in India; the missions of Alexander Duff in Calcutta in the 1830s and William Miller in Madras in the 1860s demonstrated that education, piety and conversion had become firmly interwoven in the imperial context.Footnote 87
That the SSPCK placed such emphasis on Christianization before the outpouring of religious revivalism began is particularly significant. While the society became increasingly evangelical in the 1740s, this did not occasion a fundamental shift in its missionary objectives; the need to impart religious knowledge and inculcate piety to save souls had been the central objective of its Highland charity schools from their inception. The revivals may have enhanced the importance of these aims, but did not stimulate their creation. Consequently, we should be wary of ascribing civil and religious goals to particular wings or factions within Scottish Presbyterianism. Future research should explore how the society's priorities of civilization and Christianization interacted as the century progressed, both in the Highlands and overseas.
More broadly, examining the SSPCK's missions compels us to question the relationship between Scottish Presbyterianism and Britain's emerging empire. The society's missionaries certainly sought to inculcate loyalty through religious education and to establish a level of political stability in peripheral territories. In 1740 the society proclaimed that its work had contributed to ‘the lasting and increasing Interest of the British Empire’.Footnote 88 However, its missions embraced a much more ambitious remit than providing a buffer against Jacobite insurrectionists or the encroachments of foreign powers. From the beginning, the SSPCK's colonial missions were an extension of its evangelizing agenda that had first found expression in the Highlands. But the way in which the society pursued its objectives at home and abroad shows that its attempts to claim souls for Christ were bound up with deeper questions about the Scottish Church's spiritual authority. In the Highlands the society sought to extend and entrench Presbyterianism's influence by pursuing a strictly Reformed educational programme, rather than seeking ecumenical cooperation. This approach also underpinned its work in New England and Georgia, going against the grain of increasing confessional collaboration that characterized English missions. For the SSPCK, participation in the imperial venture did not mean subsuming Scotland's own religious ambitions in favour of the wider political needs of an expanding empire.
Underlying anxiety about the Scottish Church's status as divinely favoured led to the gradual growth of a conviction within the society that its greatest impact could be made in the colonies, rather than in the Highlands. The SSPCK's growing enthusiasm for colonial missions at the expense of reclaiming Highland Catholics as the 1730s wore on stemmed from considerable disquiet that Scotland had lost divine favour. Introducing Native Americans to Christianity was an important goal in its own right, but by doing so the society was attempting to give Scottish Presbyterianism an active role in the site of the world's spiritual renewal. This indicates a fundamentally more complex relationship between the Scottish Church and Britain's empire than we might expect. Colonial expansion provided multiple opportunities for more sustained, successful missionary endeavours than had been previously possible. Yet far from viewing missions as a reflection of the superiority of an elect nation, the SSPCK's relationship with Britain's American colonies was decidedly ambiguous, exposing the fragility of Scottish religious confidence, rather than confirming it. Further research is needed to trace how these attitudes developed over time. But during this formative period of Scottish missionary endeavour, Britain's expanding empire provoked profound anxiety, uncertainty and doubt about Scotland's place within the divine schemes of Providence.
