RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Missions to the Heathen
hard (q.v.) and the Wittenberg theological faculty. Their argument is essentially twofold: (1) The apostles have already proclaimed the Gospel throughout the whole world; (2) the missionary vocation of the Church became extinct with the death of the apostles. Accompanying this polemic against missions, a few voices began to be raised in their favor, especially in Germany, Holland, and Denmark. One can divide these advocates into three groups: (1) those who, though not recognizing the duty of the Church to send out missions, still admitted the duty of the Christian powers to Christianize their heathen subjects; (2) those who in principle believed in a mission duty of the Church, but for reasons of expediency did not think it should be fulfilled at this time; and (3) those who without any reservations required obedience to the missionary command. However, they all lacked practical energy and they attained no positive results whatever. Only one enterprise can be noted and this bears a thoroughly individualistic stamp. It was the journey to Abyssinia of Peter Heiling, a lawyer of Liibeck who, probably influenced by Hugo Grotius, went thither to restore to life the moribund Abyssinian Church (see Abyssinia and the Abyssinian Church; and Africa, II., Abyssinia). Outside of the translation of the New Testament into the Amharic language, the twenty years' stay of Heiling in Abyssinia had no results and no one continued his work. German Lutheran Christianity was for the first time earnestly reminded of its missionary duty by Baron Justinian von Weltz, who was born in 1621 in Chemnitz, educated in Ulm, and descended from an old and noble Austrian house. He was an ardent Pietist, and demanded the founding of a missionary society in connection with the efforts for spiritual regeneration. He urged this in three tractates issued in 1664-66, of which the first was the most important. It contains questions and appeals to all those addressed, and then is divided into three principal divisions : (1) the reasons which prove the necessity for the founding of a mission; (2) a refutation of the objections made by orthodox theologians to the continuous missionary obligation, as stated above, and (3) definite propositions as to the way in which a mission should be instituted. This tractate, as well as the second similar one, Weltz presented at the corpus evangelicorum at Regensburg, where, however, no action was taken. Disappointed, he wrote a third essay, went to Holland and, after being ordained there, departed as a missionary to Surinam, where this prophet of missions, who had been denounced as a fanatic and dreamer, soon found a lonely grave. For a time this appeal for an awakening remained the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Johannes Heinrich Ursinus, the superintendent of Regensburg, issued a tract opposing Weltz, but the tone adopted in this writing is rather violent than cordial, and the argumentation is exceedingly weak ; naturally the author does not defend the assumption of Gerhard, but he declares a mission to be inexpedient because of the obstacles on the part of the Christians, the heathen, and God himself which hinder its realization. It was in Holland after the deliverance from the
Spanish yoke and when it became a colonial power
that the first missionary activity was developed
among the Protestants. However,
5. Dutch considerations of colonial politics rather
Work in than of religion were the cause of this East Indies.movement in 1602. The Dutch East India Company, which at that time had authority over the colonies, sent out missionaries and supported missions; the clerical convocations and synods participated only by providing, colonial pastors who were at the same time missionaries. A seminary for the education of these missionaries opened by Professor Walaus in Leyden existed only during 1622-34. The theory of the missionary duty of the colonial government was here first put into practise on a large scale. It is true that there was no lack of excellent, spiritualminded colonial pastors in the mission, which gradually extended over the whole Malay Archipelago, but most of them performed their duties in a formal manner and soon returned to their homes. Although hundreds of thousands were baptized, Christianity was little more than a veneer. The rather degenerate remnants of this old Dutch mission became, however, once more the object of special pastoral care in connection with the missionary revival in the nineteenth century.
In England, which, after the destruction of the
Spanish Armada (1588), also became a sea-power,
the long-continued political and re-
6. Work of ligious struggle was the principal
English! hindrance to the awakening of an Colonists, interest in missions. This struggle, however, led to the first attempt at missionary work among the Indians of North America, and it was then that the first interest in missions was aroused in England. After the so-called Cavaliers had founded the first English colony in North America (Virginia), in 1584, there occurred, in 1620, under the religious oppression of the Stuarts, the second and larger Puritan emigration, that of the so-called Pilgrims who settled in Massachusetts, and in 1682 there followed a third headed by William Penn (q.v.), who settled in Pennsylvania. The Puritans immediately included the conversion of the Indians in their colonial program. But it was not till 1646 that the missionary task was pursued in a really Evangelical spirit by John Eliot (q.v.). He succeeded in establishing thirteen communities of "praying Indians"; unfortunately, at the end of his self-sacrificing life he experienced the sorrow of seeing most of these communities destroyed by the dreadful Indian wars which had meanwhile broken out. The heroic and successful missionary activity of Eliot aroused attention in England and a general collection was resolved by the Long Parliament, and in 1649 a Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England was founded which was, however, essentially confined to the collection of donations. Only in 1695 and 1701 were two societies founded which gradually attained importance for missions: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, which was especially helpful to the Danish and Halle mission in India, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which, however, confined
Missions to the Heathen