HOME MISSIONS.
Spanish Missions (§ 1).
French Missions (§ 2).
Missionary Purpose of English Settlers (§ 3).
Organization of Congregational Effort, 1798-1807 (§ 4).
Other Early Denominational Organizations (§ 5).
Work in the Northwest Territory (§6).
The American Home Missionary Society (§ 7).
Denominational Societies (§ 8).
Effect of the Louisiana Purchase (§ 9).
Work in Later Accessions (§ 10).
Work for Negroes and Immigrants (§ 11).
Summary (§ 12).
The religious movement known as American Home Missions may be said to have begun with the
discovery of the country. Columbus 1. Spanish was both explorer and missionary. His Missions, first act upon landing on the wooded
island which he named San Salvador was to erect two standards; one, the ancient flag of Leon and Castile, and, by its side, the elder banner of the Cross, thus dedicating the New World at its southern entrance to civil rule and to the spiritual dominion of the Church. On his second voyage (1494) he brought with him twelve Franciscan monks, whose sole business was to be the conversion of the native races to Christianity. This dual purpose of Spain is repeatedly recognized in the early patents issued by the Spanish Court to successive bands of emigrants. Charles V., successor to Ferdinand and Isabella, in one of these royal patents
Home Missions
THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
plainly declares: " You are bidden to attract the natives to receive preachers who shall inform and instruct them in the affairs of our holy Catholic faith, that they may become Christians; " and he significantly adds: " Our -principal intent in the discovery of new lands is that the inhabitants and natives thereof, who are without the light of the knowledge of faith, may be brought to understand the truth of our holy Catholic faith, and that they may come to the knowledge thereof and become Christians and be saved." For more than 200 years this double intent, civil conquest and spiritual dominion, was persistently followed, the one as devotedly as the other. Whatever may be thought of the religious creed of Franciscan and Dominican monks, or of their some time violent methods of church extension, their missionary zeal has never been questioned. To make a convert they counted no cost and dared every danger. Sacrifices became luxuries. They undertook long and perilous journeys which led them into the heart of hostile and cruel tribes, where the reward was often death or torture worse than death, which they bore with composure. And everywhere they went missions were established, chapels and convents sprang up, whose ruins still bear silent witness to the devotion of these men. They patiently conquered the native dialects that they might add the printed page to the spoken word. They put the Christian truths into meter, and meter into music. It is little wonder that they made converts or that their heroic labors, and more especially their personal bravery and contempt for every form of terror, commended them to the admiration of these children of the wilds. In 300 years Spain had extended her domain from the Atlantic to the Pacific, south of the thirty-eighth degree of latitude, a territory including the present States of Florida, Alabama, Texas, New Mexico, and California, and in all that vast and rapid advance missionaries were pioneers. " Over a hundred thousand of the aborigines," says T. O'Gorman, the Catholic historian, " were brought to the knowledge of Christianity, and introduced, if not into the palace, at least into the antechamber, of civilization " {American Church History Series, ix. 112, New York, 1895). Such were the early conquests of Spain, civil and religious; but, with all their promise, they were destined to ultimate failure. The same historian confesses the Spanish defeat in language equally true and pathetic: "As we look around to-day we find nothing of it that remains. Names of saints in melodious Spanish stand out from maps in all that section where the Spanish monk toiled, trod, and died. A few thousand Christian Indians, descendants of those they converted and civilized, still survive in New Mexico and Arizona, and that is all."
The French entered America at the northern gate,
by way of the St. Lawrence, and with the same
double purpose of conquest and con-
2. French version. Their missionaries were Jesuit
Missions, priests who treated the Indian with
great kindness, seeking to make him
a friend and partner in their plans of conquest.
Not less brave or devoted than their Franciscan
predecessors, they were more shrewd and politic,
with the result that their success was proportionately rapid. Eighty years from the founding of Quebec the French posts, " military, commercial and religious," had been pushed westward to Lake Superior. The vast domain of Canada, half the present territory of Maine, half of Vermont, more than half of New York, the entire valley of the Mississippi, and the whole of Texas became a vast French possession, " in which," says O'Gorman " all the North American Indians were more or less extensively converted." It is impossible not to admire the flaming zeal, the tireless devotion, the almost superhuman bravery which accomplished these astounding results in less than 300 years. Their converts were still multiplying when the ambitious schemes of both Spain and France were brought to an end by the opening of the Seven Years' War, which prepared the way for a new civilization and another type of missionary enterprise which were destined to survive. [For additional matter on this and the preceding paragraph see Indians of Nohth America, Missions to; Missions Among the Heathen, A.]
To the English pioneers was reserved the middle
way of approach. First at Jamestown in 1607, and
later at New York, Plymouth, and
3. Mission- Boston; and again it is to be noticed ary that the spirit of civil conquest and
Purpose of missionary zeal moved hand in hand. English Perhaps no nation in history, unless it Settlers, be the chosen people, was ever more distinctly religious and missionary in the character of its early settlers than the United States. The different charters and commissions under which they emigrated from the Old World contain, almost without exception, an explicit recognition of the divine claim. " The thing is of God," said the London Trading Company, in its letters patent to the Plymouth Pilgrims. " In the name of God, amen!" are the opening words of the Mayflower compact, and the full meaning of that document is summed up in the phrase following — " For the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith." The signers of this historic compact paused on the threshold of their great enterprise, " at a time," says Bancroft, " when everything demanded haste," to keep a Sabbath of prayer and praise on Clark's Island. Governor Bradford, in his history of the Plymouth Colony, declares that the colonists " had a great hope and inward zeal of laying some good foundation for propagating and advancing the Gospel of the kingdom of Christ in these remote parts of the world, yea," he adds, " though it should be as steppingstones to others." In this germinant and prophetic sentence lies hidden the seed of all the wonderful missionary history of the nineteenth century. The early settlers of North and South Carolina declared themselves to be actuated " by a laudable zeal for the propagation of the Gospel." Even Virginia, not always regarded as a distinctly religious colony, urges upon its first governor " the using of all possible means to bring over the natives to a love of civilization and to a love of God and of his true religion." Georgia, the last of the colonies to be settled, was a religious enterprise from the start,