The Puritan Hope

Iain Murray

‘I well remember the late Rev. Andrew Fuller reporting, at my father’s house, in the year 1792, the impression which had been made upon an association meeting of his own denomination, by Mr. Carey’s sermon on the address to the church (Isaiah 54.2), Lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes; from which Mr. C. pressed the two propositions, that we should expect great things, and attempt great things. Hence originated the Baptist Missionary Society. The London Missionary Society followed; then the Church Missionary Society; then the Bible Society; and, in succession, various other institutions, all, we trust, destined to contribute their share to that great and blessed consummation,

‘By prophecy's unerring finger mark’d
To faith’s strong eye.

JOHN SCOTT The Life of Thomas Scott, 1836, 115

‘If I should die, I shall be able to say to the rising generation, God will surely visit you. A work is begun that will not end till the world be subdued to the Saviour. We have done a little for him, accompanied with much evil; the Lord grant that that may not be laid to our charge in that day.’

ANDREW FULLER in a letter, May, 1812. Life of Andrew Fuller, John. Ryland, 1816, 536

FOR a decade and more in the mid-seventeenth century England had appeared to be on the threshold of an era of worldwide missionary endeavour. But the vision —clear to the eyes of faith in the 1640’s — was to recede. Cromwell’s plans to divide the world into four great mission-fields were of no interest to the government which succeeded his, and a century and a half had to pass before the Churches were ready to take the gospel to all the ends of the earth. The indifference to doctrine in the Established Church together with the struggles and consequent decline of Nonconformity make it a matter of no surprise that missionary work practically stood still after 1660. John Eliot’s name, instead of being found at the head of a succession of missionaries endowed with a common purpose, remained practically alone in missionary annals until eighty years later when the Great Awakening in New England saw his mantle passed on to David Brainerd.

Yet elsewhere in Protestantism there were already foreshadowings of what was to come. Amid the cold rationalism into which Lutheranism had fallen in Germany, Philipp Jacob Spener (1635—1705) relit the fire of evangelical piety and simultaneously called the Church to her missionary obligation. Spener was followed by August Hermann Francke, Professor of Theology at Halle, who sought to make that ancient university not only a ‘seat of wisdom and piety’1 but a centre for missionary purposes. When the King of Denmark required missionaries for Danish colonies in India in 1705 it was Francke who supplied two men of sterling worth — the first of a long line of eminent men who were to go overseas from Halle.

Of the disciples of Spener and Francke who were to remain at home, none was more eminent than John Albert Bengel (1687—1752). It is striking to find in Bengel both the same general views of the prophetic future of the Church of Christ as we have seen in the English Puritans and also a like insistence upon missionary endeavour. ‘The approach of better times for Christianity’, he writes, ‘may be compared to the gradual peep of verdure through the dissolving snow, with here and there a green patch more or less conspicuous. The large wintry covering spread over all the nations, and which we are waiting to see dissolved, consists of Mohammedism, Popery and Infidelity. These are alike, as amounting to one and the same usurpation over immortal souls.’ All such obstacles to the incoming of the Gentiles ‘will be broken through at the proper time’, and when an abundance (Bengel’s interpretation of ‘fulness’ in Romans 11.12 and 25) of the Gentiles have been converted ‘the hardening of Israel will terminate’. The full conversion of Israel will then lead to the wider blessing of the world.

‘At present’, he wrote in 1740, ‘the age of missions to the heathen and to the Jews is not fully arrived. But though it is too early for the general conversion of Jews and Gentiles, it appears a sin of omission on the part of Protestant churches, that they have not begun long ago to send missions to both. I, at least, cannot help thinking, that endeavours of this kind would have been far more noble, than the hitherto excessive painstaking of Protestants to settle every subtle question in polemical divinity, or rather, to gain themselves only credit and celebrity in controversy.’

From Halle, however, a stream of missionary influence far wider than the Danish mission of 1705 was to ensue. As an infant in his grandmother’s castle of Gross-Hennersdorf in Saxony, Count Zinzendorf met the saintly Spener. A few years later he heard read in the Great Room of the Castle reports from the Halle missionaries. ‘There and then,’ he later recorded, ‘the first missionary impulse arose in my soul’. The impulse became a settled purpose during Zinzendorf’s six years of studying at Francke’s school at Halle (1710—16). He writes of a solemn covenant made with a friend in 1715, ‘We resolved to do all in our power for the conversion of the heathen, especially for those for whom no one else cared.’ In 1722 Zinzendorf gave shelter on his lands at Herrnhut to Moravian Christians expelled from Austria, and it was from the humble and fervent community then formed that ten years later the first Moravian missionaries left for the West Indies.

In 1736, as an unsuccessful missionary to Georgia, John Wesley first met the Moravians. After his return to England in 1738 — ‘I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh, who shall convert me?’ — it was from the Moravians that much of his new light came. At Herrnhut Zinzendorf told him: ‘The word of reconciliation which the apostles preached, as the foundation of all they taught, was: That we are reconciled to God, not by our own works, not by our own righteousness, but wholly and solely by the blood of Christ.’

This was now the universal message which the Methodists were to preach, and of the distant consequences one of the most important was the departure of Dr. Thomas Coke in 1784 with the first Wesleyan missionaries to America. In 1813, at the age of sixty-six Coke was still working tirelessly for missions. In that year he laid before the Methodist Conference ‘the grand duty of preaching the Gospel of the Grace of God to the perishing millions of the East’ and proposed that he should lead a party of missionaries to India. The dissension of his brethren was countered with the burning words, ‘If you will not let me you will break my heart!’ Leaving England the same year, Coke died on the last stage of the voyage to Bombay and was buried at sea. His companions, three missionaries for Ceylon, two for India and one for Java, laid the foundations of Weslevan missions in the Far East.

Coke was used to turn others, outside his own denomination, to behold the world’s need, one of the most important examples of his influence being Samuel Pearce, whose name will recur later in this story. Pearce writes:

‘I do not remember any wish for foreign service, till I heard Dr. Coke preach at one of Mr. Wesley’s chapels, from Psalm 68.31: “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” Then it was that, in Mr. Home’s phrase, ‘I felt a passion for missions.’ Then I felt an interest in the state of the heathen world far more deep and permanent than before, and seriously thought how I could best promote their obtaining the knowledge of the crucified Jesus.’

Though Moravian—Wesleyan influence was thus an important contributing factor, in the rise of the new missionary era it was not, however, from this source that the great momentum for foreign missions came. For this we must look elsewhere and the facts are not hard to find.

In and after the 1790’s there arose in Britain a series of new missionary societies, which were to be so strongly supported that for more than a century Britain was to remain in the foremost place in the world-wide spread of true Christianity. This small country down to 1900, and beyond, was to contribute more men and more money to the missionary cause than any other nation. (Footnote: Of the 13,607 Protestant foreign missionaries in 1900, 5,901 were from the British Isles, and 4110 from the United States. In that same year, of the $17,161,092 contributed to Protestant foreign missions, $8,225,645 was from the British Isles and $5,403,048 from the United States. Ecumenical Missionary Conference, New York, 1900, vol. 2, 424. Quoted by K. S. Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, 1945, vol. 4, 95.) Reflecting on this position of leadership in his preface to Robe’s Narrative of the Revival of Religion, reissued in 1839, Robert Buchanan spoke of the opportunity given to Britain ‘to bring an influence to bear on the rest of the world, unexampled perhaps in the history of mankind’. He further writes:

‘Britain is manifestly at this moment the citadel of the Christian world: . . . Britain’s Christianity and Britain’s singularly favoured position together, appear in the eye of the thoughtful Christian like the streak of light which glimmers at early dawn along the horizon’s verge. Let the Spirit of God give the impulse to our Christianity, causing it to spread more widely, and burn more brightly here, and we can see nothing exaggerated or over sanguine in the hope that the light now gathering behind the mountains of Britain, shall arise like the morning sun, and pour out a flood of glory over the whole habitable earth.’

This attitude, shared by so many at the time Buchanan wrote, was not unconnected with a recognition of such providences as the advance of the Industrial Revolution and the spread of the Empire which had given Britain rule over many millions across the globe. Yet it was not from wealth, machines and commerce that the great momentum came. We believe it can be conclusively shown that the inspiration which gave rise to the first missionary societies of the modern era was nothing other than the doctrine and outlook which, revitalized by the eighteenth-century revival, had come down from the Puritans.

In the transmission of this inheritance from the seventeenth century to the pioneers of the new missionary age which dawned at the end of the eighteenth, the connecting links were, supremely, George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. In the late 1730’s it was from such Puritan divinity as Matthew Henry’s Commentary that Whitefield learned much of his theology; his subsequent thirteen crossings of the Atlantic, his preaching to Negroes and to all classes of hearers witnessed to his contemporaries and to the following generation what that theology could inspire. There is often to be found in Whitefield’s letters such expressions as this: ‘My soul is athirst for the salvation of poor sinners. These words, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature, have been particularly pressed upon my heart.’ Similarly, Edwards, not simply by his preaching in the Great Awakening in America, but more specifically by his books reasserting the experimental and doctrinal Calvinism of the Puritans, by his Life and Diary of the Rev. David Brainerd (1749), and by the witness of his last seven years spent as a missionary to the Indians and whites at a frontier settlement, gave a lead to posterity which was to be all-important.

The evangelical Anglican party which Whitefield did so much to establish, and which was born of revivals at the parish level, was characterized in its second generation by its attention to foreign missions. Thomas Haweis, Thomas Scott, John Venn and Charles Simeon were leaders among the many in the Established Church who shared Wliitefield’s outlook. And so united were they in doctrine that in 1786 Wesley’s Methodist Conference acknowledged ‘the fact that nearly all the converted clergymen in the kingdom were Calvinists’. In that same year the Anglicans had designated a chaplain to Australia and India and sought, through the aid of the newly converted William Wilberforce, to gain government backing for a ‘great official Church Mission to India’. The bid failed. At about the same time the hopes of others were also meeting with disappointment, and in this connection mention must be made of the endeavours of David Bogue.

Bogue is one of the greatest of the forgotten figures of Church history. Born in Berwickshire in 1750, and converted while still a child, Bogue trained at Edinburgh University and Divinity Hall for the ministry of the Church of Scotland. But the evil of patronage which placed the presentation of the churches in the hands of gentry blocked his way. He thus came south and commenced preaching in London in 1772. In 1777 he was called to the Independent Church at Gosport, a seaport on the west side of Portsmouth. A powerful preacher and a man of prayer, Bogue’s influence soon grew. In 1789 a London Nonconformist banker arranged to meet the expenses of three students who would be trained by Bogue for the ministry. From this insignificant beginning there commenced what was to be one of the most influential theological schools in Nonconformist history. On March 30, I 792, Bogue had the opportunity of preaching the annual sermon in London of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. This Society, like the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.), had been founded at the beginning of the century with an express missionary purpose. Yet, despite royal patronage, the subscriptions of the nobility and the general approval of clergy, these agencies seem to have made comparatively little impression abroad. Their British personnel had indeed only attempted work in the colonies of North America. It was the S.P.G. which had sent John Wesley on a salary of £50 a year to Georgia in 1735 — ignorant though he then was of the gospel. The Scottish Society had the honoured name of David Brainerd on the roll of its early missionaries, but in the near half century which had passed since Brainerd’s death it seems to have given little attention to what was involved in that honoured missionary’s prayer, ‘that God might be known to be God in the whole earth’. Now in 1792, David Bogue stood before the Society as an impassioned advocate of the wider vision. His sermon, based on the text ‘Thy. kingdom come’, was in stark contrast to the parochialism and complacency reflected in earlier annual sermons preached for the same Society:

‘We call ourselves the disciples of Christ: but is it owing to the coldness of the zeal of Christians for the glory of God and the salvation of their fellow-creatures, that in so great a part of the world the darkness of paganism envelops the people? . Had we employed our most active endeavours for the conversion of the heathens, and had God frowned on the attempt in every place, we might have sat down with some degree of quietness of mind, concluding that the time to favour them was not yet come. But this is far from being the case. We have been slothful, I wish we may not also be found wicked servants. To our coldness and want of zeal it is owing that millions of our fellow-creatures are still sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death. And shall we sit unconcerned under such a charge? God forbid! . We pray daily for the conversion of the heathen, and for the glory of the latter days. So far we do well. But if there be a plan proposed by which we may be instrumental in conveying the gospel to them, our prayers, if unaccompanied with exertions to carry the plan into execution, are nothing better than hypocrisy. . .

‘Great good has been done by the Society.... In the northern parts of this kingdom it has been peculiarly successful….. The Society can likewise boast of many hundreds of converts among the rude tribes of Indians in North America.... And ought it not to be our earnest wish that this noble work may be continued, and may increase? I confess to you I am anxious to promote it; and I appear here this day before you as an advocate for the heathen tribes in America,, in Africa and in Asia. . . . I ardently wish to see the Society extend its efforts for propagating the gospel in every quarter of the globe.’

The lead which Bogue clearly hoped the Society would give —he specified their commencing work in Africa — was not forthcoming. Two years later in September, 1794, he renewed his appeal, this time to the Christian public in general, in an address on Missions, published in the Evangelical Magazine. By that time, however, events had occurred which were already electrifying the interest of Christians and which were to set in motion endeavours, hitherto unparalleled, for the evangelization of the earth.

What had not been achieved by the Christians of London was put in hand by a few churches, poor and unknown to the wider world, in the English Midlands. There, in a back-parlour, twelve feet by ten, in the town of Kettering, twelve ministers, a student and one deacon, formed the Baptist Missionary Society on October 2, 1792. Their combined resources for the enterprise, not in cash but in promised contributions, amounted to a mere £I3 2s. 6d. The one possession which secured the anticipated success was the faith given to the five leaders —John Ryland, John Sutcliff, Andrew Fuller (the first secretary), Samuel Pearce and William Carey. This faith was all the stronger for the slowness of its growth. Through the previous eight years the missionary need had been a subject of thought, discussion and prayer among the Strict Baptist pastors of the Northampton Association. Carey had joined the number of these men in 1785 when he commenced the work of the ministry in the country village of Moulton. Here he eked out his small stipend with school-mastering and shoemaking, but his thoughts were never far from the need which pressed upon him. ‘His pupils’, writes his biographer, ‘saw sometimes a strange sight, their master moved to tears over a geography lesson, as, pointing to continents, islands and peoples, he would cry, “And these are pagans, pagans!” Andrew Fuller, his close friend, writes of this period:

‘I knew Carey when he made shoes for the maintenance of his family; yet even then his mind had received an evangelical stamp, and his heart burned incessantly with desire for the salvation of the heathen…. even then he had drawn out a map of the world, with sheets of paper pasted together, besmeared with shoemaker’s wax, and the moral state of every nation depicted with his pen; even then he was constantly talking with his brethren on the practicability of introducing the gospel in all nations.’

Though it is very doubtful if the story is true of the rebuke Carey is supposed to have received from the elder John Ryland when he first broached the missionary issue at the Northampton Association of ministers, there were certainly few encouragements for Carey and his friends in their hope of the speedy establishment of a new work in the Far East. Carey persisted, believing with John Eliot, in whose steps he followed, that ‘Prayer and pains through faith in Jesus Christ, will do anything’. On May 31, 1792, the great turning point came. Preaching before the Northampton Association’s meeting at Nottingham, Carey took as his historic text, Isaiah 54.2-3:

‘Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them
Stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations:
Spare not,
Lengthen thy cords, and
Strengthen thy stakes;
For thou shalt break forth on the right hand and on the left; and
Thy seed shall inherit the Gentiles, and
Make the desolate cities to be inhabited.
Fear not:’

From these words, in a sermon which has been called ‘a burning bush of missionary revelation’, Carey delivered the prophet’s great message, which he summarized as: ‘Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.’ The next morning the proposal was passed that a plan be prepared ‘for forming a Baptist Society for propagating the Gospel among the heathens’. This was the plan which came to fruition at Kettering the following October.

In June of 1793 from the deck of the Krön Princessa Maria, Carey saw England for the last time, at the commencement of his 15,000-mile voyage to India. With him were his family of six and a colleague, John Thomas. Five months later he began his forty years’ work in Bengal. The obstacles were immense. Problems of poverty and illness, overshadowed by the darker burden of a land where in Carey’s words, ‘ten thousand ministers would find scope for their powers’, were constantly with them. Through the first five and a half years they saw not a single Indian convert. Yet though sometimes cast down, Carey’s faith did not waver:

‘When I left England, my hope of India’s conversion was very strong; but amongst so many obstacles, it would die, unless upheld by God. Well, I have God, and His Word is true. Though the superstitions of the heathen were a thousand times stronger than they are, and the example of the Europeans a thousand times worse; though I were deserted by all and persecuted by all, yet my faith, fixed on that sure Word, would rise above all obstructions and overcome every trial. God’s cause will triumph.’

And again, he writes to Pearce:

‘I would not abandon the Mission for all the fellowships and finest spheres in England.... The work, to which God has set His hands, will infallibly prosper. Christ has begun to besiege this ancient and strong fortress, and will assuredly carry it.’

The first evidences of progress — the conversion of Krishna Pal in 1800, and the appearance of Carey’s Bengali New Testament in 1801 — were so small as to be unnoticed by the world. But to Carey and his colleagues the Hindu’s conversion was momentous; ‘He was only one, but a continent was coming behind him. The divine grace which changed one Indian’s heart, could obviously change a hundred thousand.’ Such was their interpretation of the event. The Bengali New Testament was likewise only the beginning of what they expected could be done; the Scriptures must go out in all the languages of India, indeed by 1806 they had conceived the purpose of translations to reach the three hundred millions of the Chinese Empire. In this spirit they wrote home, ‘We only want men and money to fill this country with the knowledge of Christ. We are neither working at uncertainty nor afraid for the result.’‘He must reign, till Satan has not an inch of territory’

With these objectives before them the Baptist missionaries regarded their base at Serampore as a ‘red-hot centre from which the light and influence of Christianity might radiate throughout a gradually widening circle’. By 1813 more than five hundred had been baptized — some at the cost of their lives (Footnote:Carey was slow to accept a profession of Christianity even though the sacrifice involved was often great: ‘Let nothing short of a radical change of heart satisfy you in your converts was one of his sayings) — and the Scriptures were being printed in fifteen languages. In 1818 a College was erected at Serampore to accommodate two hundred men who would be native evangelists or who would generally benefit from Christian education. Carey was already sixty by the time this new venture was completed, and though progress was slow when compared with the enormous need, he worked steadfastly on in hope: ‘We are ready to think that our labours may operate effectually. . . We are certain to take the fortress, if we can but persuade ourselves to sit down long enough before it. We shall reap if we faint not.’

When Carey died, in 1834, he had lived to see twenty-six gospel churches planted in India, with more than forty fellow-labourers engaged in the work. He had himself translated the Scriptures or parts of them into no less than thirty-four languages, including six completed translations of the whole Bible and twenty-three of the New Testament!

Within these same forty years, following Carey’s step in 1792, an immense change had taken place in Britain as the best strength of the Church began to be devoted to the furtherance of the missionary cause. In 1795, the Missionary Society (later renamed the London Missionary Society) was formed, the first public meetings being attended by thousands. This interdenominational society was followed in 1799 by the Church Missionary Society, formed by the evangelical party which had arisen in the Establishment since Whitefield’s day. Between 1793 and 1834 no less than thirteen British missionary societies came into being, including the Jews’ Society in 1809. Writing of this amazing expansion, which he rightly traces to ‘the awakenings of the seventeenth and especially of the eighteenth century’, the American Church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette says:

‘This Protestantism was characterized by an abounding vitality and a daring unequalled in Christian history. Through it, for the first time, plans were seriously elaborated for bringing the Christian message to all men and to make the life of all mankind conform to Christian ideals. In the first century some Christians had believed it to be their obligation to “preach the Gospel to every creature”. Never before, however, had the followers of any faith formulated comprehensive plans covering the entire surface of the earth to make these purposes effective.’

* * *

We have already stated above the conviction that the theological impetus which lay behind the new missionary era came from the Puritan divinity of the seventeenth century. As this has been so little recognized it deserves further consideration, both in regard to the general beliefs of the missionary leaders which must be classified as Calvinistic, and also in regard to their particular view of unfulfilled prophecy. In both the general and the particular, the best expositions of their faith were those written some hundred or more years before their day. On the printed page the influence of the Puritans had lived on and many of the leaders of the eighteenth-century revival were indebted to them for their first understanding of historic Christianity. George Whitefield’s debt to Matthew Henry was matched by William Grimshaw’s to Thomas Brooks and John Owen; by Augustus Toplady’s to Thomas Manton and so on. Nor was this mid-eighteenth-century return to the Puritans limited to the clergy; it equally affected the common people, the change in whose reading habits is frequently alluded to by those who reported the several revivals. Samuel Blair, writing in 1744, says:

‘Those awakened were much given to reading in the Holy Scriptures and other good books. Excellent books that had lain by much neglected, were then much perused and lent from one to another: and it was a peculiar satisfaction to people to find how exactly the doctrines they heard daily preached, harmonized with the doctrines maintained and taught by great and godly men in other parts and former times.’

Of the same period Thomas Prince of Boston, Massachusetts, reported:

‘The people seemed to have a renewed taste for those old pious and experimental writers, Mr. Hooker, Shepard, Gurnall, William Guthrie, Joseph Alleine, Isaac Ambrose, Dr. Owen and others.... The evangelical writings of these deceased authors, as well as of others alive, both in England, Scotland, and New England, were now read with singular pleasure; some of them reprinted and in great numbers quickly bought and studied.’

In Britain many of the evangelical revival leaders personally recommended Puritan reprints. Daniel Rowland, for instance, wrote a preface to Bunyan’s Holy War, and James Hervey gave his support to the reissue of The Works of Robert Traill. Whitefield, not long before his death in 1770, especially commended the books of Henry, Flavel and Owen, along with Bunyan, and these authors, he noted, ‘are enquired after, and bought up, more and more every day’. Of the Puritans in general, he asserted: ‘Though dead, by their writings they yet speak: a peculiar unction attends them to this very hour; and for these thirty years past I have remarked, that the more true and vital religion hath revived either at home or abroad, the more the good old puritanical writings, or the authors of a like stamp who lived and died in communion of the Church of England, have been called for.’

The great popularity of these authors is evidenced by the number of times that they were reprinted. In the case of Matthew Henry, for instance, the British Museum Catalogue lists eleven editions of his Commentary and two American reprints. Of this work, it is said, ‘more than two hundred thousand single volumes had been circulated up to 1840’.

The Calvinistic understanding of the gospel embodied in this literature powerfully influenced the whole general thought of the later eighteenth century. Whitefield unashamedly owned his position: ‘You know how strongly I assert all the doctrines of grace as contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith, and in the doctrinal Articles of the Church of England.’ This outspokenness contrasted markedly with the defensive and accommodating attitudes of the moderate Calvinists who had led Nonconformity in the early eighteenth century. Even more remarkable was the difference between this and the attitude of practically all Anglican clergymen before the revival who dreaded bearing the stigma of anything ‘Puritan’. While Whitefield’s open avowal of the old theology was not the direct cause why Henry Venn, John Berridge, Augustus Toplady, John Newton and other Churchmen became Calvinists, he was in considerable measure responsible for the general change of climate. Calvinism, far from being a thing to be apologized for, had become a source of inspiration for those engaged in the spread of the gospel.

Much could be said on this in the case of the pioneers of the Baptist Missionary Society. Carey was by upbringing a latitudinarian Anglican who, after his conversion, became a dissenter. Yet it was Thomas Scott, an Anglican of Whitefield’s school, who did much to mould his convictions in the early years of his Christian life. In the autumn of 1779, when Carey first met Scott, the curate of Weston Underwood, Bucks, had just come into the public eye by the publication of his testimony The Force of Truth. In this he told how since his entrance into the Christian ministry his beliefs had been transformed. In fact, Scott had become an avowed defender of Calvinistic orthodoxy. In later years his Commentary upon the Bible was to be second only to Henry’s in popularity. He was the author of several books, including a History of the Synod of Dort. This was the international Synod convened in the Netherlands in 1618 to counter the rise of Arminianism, and the five ‘heads’ of doctrine which it drew up, affirming the effectual redemption and final salvation of all whom God has sovereignly chosen, became known to history as the Canons of Dort. It is significant that it was a writer who wrote to defend the theology of that Synod who should have been used to put mettle into Carey’s beliefs, while the latter was still a teenager, a fact which Carey always remembered with gratitude: ‘Pray give my thanks to dear Mr. Scott for his history of the Synod of Dort,’ he writes from India to John Ryland. ‘I would write to him if I could command time. If there be anything of the work of God in my soul, I owe much of it to his preaching, when I first set out in the ways of the Lord.’

Carey plainly found no inconsistency between the theology of Dort and urgent missionary endeavour. He held the same balance as characterized the Puritans. This is well illustrated in his ‘Form of Agreement respecting the great principles upon which the Brethren of the Mission of Serampore think it is their duty to act’, drawn up in 1805. We read in the first paragraph:

‘We are sure that only those who are ordained to eternal life will believe, and that God alone can add to the church such as shall be saved. Nevertheless we cannot but observe with admiration that Paul, the great champion for the glorious doctrines of free and sovereign grace, was the most conspicuous for his personal zeal in the work of persuading men to be reconciled to God.’

In the case of all the leaders of the Baptist Mission it appears that the evangelical Calvinism or Puritanism which they held was not the traditional outlook of their personal background.

Andrew Fuller, second only to Carey in his influence upon the mission, has written of how he was led to what he calls ‘strict Calvinism’. In one of the last letters Fuller dictated before his death in 1815 he responded warmly to the charge that some of the leaders of the Mission would have been more useful if they had paid less attention to Jonathan Edwards: ‘If those who talk thus preached Christ half as much as Jonathan Edwards did, and were half as useful as he was, their usefulness would be double what it is. It is very singular that the Mission to the East should have originated with men of these principles; and without pretending to be a prophet, I may say, If ever it falls into the hands of men who talk in this strain, it will soon come to nothing.’ The same day as he dictated this letter, says his biographer, ‘he lifted up his hands and excllaimed, “If I am saved, it will be by great and sovereign grace”, which last words he repeated very emphatically — “by great and sovereign grace”.’

John Ryland, another of the original five, went through the same change of outlook. ‘Though the pastor of Northampton’, writes James Bennett, ‘had commenced his ministry on what would be called high principles, he soon joined Mr. Carey and Mr. Fuller in adopting the more just views of the reformers and puritans.’ Among the Puritans whom Ryland and his friends studied were Richard Blackerby (1574—1648), who had been converted under Perkins, and John Rogers. From such sources these Baptists of the Midlands strengthened their souls in the years preceding Carey’s departure to India. An extract from Ryland’s diary reads:

‘January 21, 1788. — Brethren Fuller, Sutcliffe, Carey and I, kept this day as a private fast, in my study; read the Epistles to Timothy and Titus, Booth’s Charge to Hopkins, Blackerby’s Life in Gillies [Historical Collections] and Rogers of Dedham’s Sixty Memorials for a Godly Life, and each prayed twice. Carey, with singular enlargement and pungency. Our chief design was to implore a revival of the power of godliness in our own souls, in the Churches, and in the Church at large.’

Precisely the same general theological convictions were in evidence in the London Missionary Society. Speaking of the new missionary movement of the 1790’s, Dr. E. A. Payne writes: ‘Throughout it is an evangelicalism with a strong Calvinistic strain.... The historian of the L. M.S. states categorically that almost all the first generation of L.M.S. missionaries would have had no difficulty whatever in signing the full Westminster Confession (Footnote: It is remarkable that during the voyage of the missionary ship, The Duff, to the Pacific in 1797, two of the company of missionaries were suspended from Church privileges by the majority until they renounced Arminian errors on the extent of Christ’s death and on failing from grace. cf. The History of the London Missionary Society, Richard Lovett, 1899, vol 1, 48—9.)

Some of the first leaders and pioneer missionaries of this great Society had been nurtured from childhood in the old theology. Robert Morrison, pioneer missionary to China in 1807, for instance, wrote before he commenced training: ‘With respect to my principles, it will perhaps be sufficient to observe that, being educated in the doctrines of the Church of Scotland, as contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith; so far as I have been enabled to examine them as yet, I have espoused them from principle.’

Others came to the same position through a revolution in their own beliefs. Such was the experience of John Love, first secretary of the Society. In his Fathers and Founders of the London Missionary Society, John Morrison writes of Love: ‘From being an Arminian of the lowest school, he was brought, from the study of the great question of his own acceptance with God, to renounce the entire system of theology which had engaged his early speculations, and to rank himself with that section of the Church of Scotland, then a small one, in which the doctrines of the Westminster Confession were not only subscribed, but cordially believed and faithfully proclaimed.’

Thus, though the L.M.S. was intended to be thoroughly inter-denominational in its principles, affirming no one system of church government, it did not disguise for a moment the conviction that the doctrines of grace, generally known as Calvinism, provided a common platform for the best missionary action. Rowland Hill was not embarrassing his colleagues when in one of the sermons which marked the formation of the L.M.S. in September, 1795, he acknowledged the commencement of overseas work by Wesley’s followers but wished them a better theology. ‘I heartily pray that the Arrninian Methodists, so called in their mission, may send a free grace Gospel throughout the world.’

The commitment of the Society is also illustrated by its decision to entrust the training of students for the mission field to David Bogue at Gosport. Bogue’s Academy had a number of limitations. The only accommodation was that provided by his chapel, a red-brick building able to hold a thousand people, with an adjoining vestry, thirty feet by eighteen, which was used as the classroom. Students lodged in the cottages of members of the church situated nearby. Added to these practical difficulties was the fact that Bogue seems to have carried the tutorial burdens practically alone, despite his many other public commitments. Yet one thing Bogue could do thoroughly, and John Angell James, who went to Gosport at the end of 1802, tells us what it was:

‘Dr. Bogue, though possessing a great mind and noble heart, was not a great scholar. His forte was theology — that is, the systematic theology of the Puritan school — the theology of Owen, Bates, Charnock, Howe and Baxter, together with the foreign divines, Turretin, Witsius, Pictet and Jonathan Edwards. . . . We certainly acquired a great deal of acquaintance with old divinity, and a relish for the writers and their works of bygone times.’

Listed among the practical matters of ministerial ethics which Bogue dealt with is the question, ‘What proportion as to expense ought a minister’s library to bear to his furniture?’ Whether James was following the advice given on this question when he paid £3 13s. 6d. for Thomas Manton’s Works in 1805 we are not told! It was a princely sum in view of the fact that a student had to live on £30 a year maintenance grant.

The comparatively small group of men trained under Bogue were to have an influence across the world upon the lives of nations — Morrison and Milne, fellow-labourers in China, Richard Knill in Russia; and several more outstanding men, some of whom, like John Angell James, served the Church at home. It was a testimony to the far-flung influence of Bogue that a translation of his publications was even in the possession of Napoleon I at the time of his death and marked with the Emperor’s pencil. Yet this influence was, as we have sought to show, nothing more than the force of the revitalized Puritan divinity which the Gosport pastor represented. The driving force of the missionary movement came from its theology.

* * *

We have sought above to show that the evangelicalism of the age of modern missions which began with Carey was in essence that of Puritan Christianity. It remains to be said, in conclusion, that the particular view of unfulfilled prophecy which the leaders of the new missionary era held in common was also, in its main features, the view which had come down from the Puritans. This has been little recognized. Some have traced the global aspirations of the Church in the late eighteenth century simply to a renewed optimism which the mid-century revivals had brought. It is certainly true that revival created a wider expectancy. Whitefield, for example, is often to be found writing, ‘O for faith to expect great, and very great things from God!’ Yet this renewed confidence — epitomized in Carey’s Nottingham sermon of 1792 — was bound up with their understanding of Scripture. So Whitefield, in 1763; after he had seen thousands on both sides of the Atlantic brought into the Kingdom of God, asserts that the anticipation of yet greater revivals is a biblical duty. In his Observations on some Fatal Mistakes in a book by William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, he writes:

‘The Scriptures are so far from encouraging us to plead for a diminution of divine influence in these last days of the gospel that on the contrary, we are encouraged to expect, hope, long, and pray for larger and more extensive showers of divine influence than any former age hath ever yet experienced. For, are we not therein taught to pray, “That we may be filled with all the fulness of God”, and to wait for a glorious epoch, “when the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the seas”?’

This was the very belief which we have noted in an earlier chapter as inspiring missions in America in the mid-seventeenth century. It was the same faith which had been preached in the dark years of the early eighteenth century and which, when there were scarcely any signs of that darkness breaking, had been sung by Nonconformist congregations across England.

Jesus shall reign where’er the sun
Doth his successive journeys run;
His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
Till moons shall wax and wane no more.

The hymn, published in 1719, was a paraphrase of Psalm 72 by a successor to the pastorate of Joseph Caryl and John Owen, the eminent Isaac Watts.

The remarkable unanimity of prophetic views to be found among the multiplied ranks of evangelicals after the 1740’S throughout the English-speaking nations is itself indicative of the formative influence of the Puritan school. Everywhere the belief held sway that through the work of the Holy Spirit in fulfilment of scripture promises, Christ would yet possess the earth. (Footnote: The indispensable necessity of the Spirit was much emphasized. Speaking of the men needed, Carey writes, ‘The Missionaries must be men of great piety, prudence, courage, forbearance; of undoubted orthodoiy1n~their sentiments... and, above all, must be instant in prayer for the effusion of the Holy Spirit upon the people of their charge.’ An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, 1792, 75—6. John Venn, one of the founders of C.M.S., laid down these four principles: ‘(i) Follow God’s leading. (2) Begin on a small scale. (3) Put money in the second place, not the first; let prayer, study and mutual converse precede its collection. (4) Depend wholly upon the Spirit of God.’ History of the C.M.S., Eugene Stock, vol. i, 67.)

A bright day would come when, in Jonathan Edwards’ words, ‘the work of conversion will go on in a wonderful manner and spread more and more’. Sometime in that same future period the Jews would be called and the world enjoy a ‘latter-day glory’ or ‘millennium’, as the same period now became more commonly called.

This was the view of all the leaders in the Welsh revival. Daniel Rowland’s colleague and friend, William Williams, put it to verse in his beautiful hymn of 1772:

O’er those gloomy hills of darkness
Look, my soul; be still, and gaze;
All the promises do travail
With a glorious day of grace:
Blessed jubilee!
Let thy glorious morning dawn.

Thomas Charles held the same hope fervently;” as did John Elias who could write, ‘All that we have witnessed is but the dawn of a brighter day.’ The same is true of Scotland, as we shall subsequently notice.

The importance of this international oneness of belief should not be overlooked as it had vital consequences in terms of the help and corporate endeavour which flowed from it. In 1744, several Scottish ministers determined together to observe the first Tuesday of February, May, August and November (or the first convenient day after these dates) for special prayer. A Memorial to this effect was circulated in America and led Jonathan Edwards to publish a Call to United Extraordinary Prayer in 1748. Edwards’ book is best known by the first words of its sub-title, the whole of which is worth giving in full, An Humble Attempt to Promote an Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s people through the world, in Extraordinary Prayer, for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth, Pursuant to Scripture Promises and Prophecies concerning the Last Time. This work, which underlines the links between prayer, prophecy and the world’s evangelization, was warmly received in Scotland, and endorsed by James Robe of Kilsyth in the Preface to a volume of his sermons published in 1750. In a moving plea to others to join in prayer, Robe says:

‘Methinks I hear the nation of the Jews (for such is the cry of their case) crying aloud to you from their dispersion, We were once the church of God, beloved, while you were not; we have now been rejected of God more than sixteen hundred years, because of our unbelief and for this long, very long while, wrath to the uttermost hath been lying upon us! There are many promises and predictions that we shall be grafted in again.... Pray therefore, and wrestle with God, that he may, according to his promise, “pour forth upon us the Spirit of grace and supplication, that we may look upon him whom we have pierced, and mourn”…

‘Methinks, I hear the many populous kingdoms and nations of Mahometans and Pagans, dolefully crying, We are perishing, as aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenant of promises, without God, without Christ.... Help us with your prayers.’

In April, 1784, John Erskine, Church of Scotland minister in Edinburgh and an earnest circulator of good literature, sent a copy of Edwards’ Humble Attempt to John Ryland at Northampton. It was the year after Carey’s baptism and the book played a part not only in the Northampton Association’s decision to establish a prayer meeting ‘for the general revival and spread of religion’ but also in moulding the thought of the five young men whose crucial action in 1792 was to be a turning point in history. It was one of the ‘five’,John Sutcliff of Olney, who reprinted the Humble Attempt in 1789, and four years later, when Carey left for India, Jonathan Edwards was the treasured author whom he carried with him. Incredulous at the audacity of the Baptist Mission the Edinburgh Review wrote, ‘We see not the slightest prospect of success; we see much danger in making the attempt.’ But Carey and his brethren could see what the world saw not, - and they voiced the authentic Puritan hope in their Form of Agreement at Serampore:

‘He who raised the Scottish and brutalised Britons to sit in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, can raise these slaves of superstition, purify their hearts by faith, and make them worshippers of the one God in spirit and in truth. The promises are fully sufficient to remove our doubts, and make us anticipate that not very distant period when He will famish all the gods of India, and cause these very idolators to cast their idols to the moles and to the bats, and renounce for ever the work of their own hands.’

It would astonish the modern reader to observe just how prominent the driving power of this hope was in all the missionary activities which followed 1792. At the formation of new societies and at the thronged annual sermons it was a constant theme. It was preached at the inauguration of the L.M.S. in 1795, at the meeting of the New York Missionary Society in 1797, at the meeting of the Glasgow Missionary Society in I802, — these being some of the first of innumerable similar sermons. The leaders of the Church Missionary Society, 1799, held the same view no less certainly. Old Henry Venn, the friend of Whitefield, looked forward to hearing in heaven of the general conversion of the heathen. John Newton, Richard Cecil and Thomas Scott (first Secretary of the C.M.S.) preached the same view of unfulfilled prophecy in London pulpits, while in Cambridge Charles Simeon communicated it, along with a profound missionary concern, to the many students who filled the pews of Trinity Church just as they had done for Richard Sibbes’ preaching in the same building over a hundred and fifty years earlier. (Footnote: Richard Sibbes ministered from Trinity pulpit from 1610 to 1615, and again from 1634 to 1635. Simeon was minister of the parish for fifty-four years, 1782—1836)

Best known among those who left Cambridge in Simeon’s day for overseas was Henry Martyn who sailed for India in 1805. His Journals illustrate the heroic endurance which this belief served to strengthen. After little apparent success, Martyn died at Tokat in Asia Minor, in 1812, at the age of thirty-one. But in all his labours in India and Persia as a pioneer Bible translator Martyn took the long-term view. Challenged by a Mohammedan why Christianity was so weak in the world ‘if the heathen nations have been given to Christ for an inheritance’, ‘I rejoined’, says Martyn, ‘that he was not yet come to the end of things.’ For that end he longed. While toiling on his Persian translation of the New Testament, aided by natives who had no concept of the significance of their labour, the frail Englishman looked forward in hope: ‘They are employed in a work, of the importance of which they are unconscious, and are making provision for future Persian saints, whose time is, I suppose, now near. “Roll back, ye crowded years, your thick array!” Let the long, long period of darkness and sin at last give way to the brighter hours of light and liberty, which wait on the wings of the Sun of Righteousness.’

By this whole evangelical school, from whom we have been quoting in this chapter, the conversion of the Jews was also awaited with keen anticipation. Their interest, as we have seen, was world-wide, and it was indeed for that very reason that their desire for the recall of Israel was quickened, believing as they did that it would gloriously advance the gospel among the Gentiles. ‘Though we do not know the time in which this conversion of Israel will come to pass,’ writes Edwards, ‘yet thus much we may determine by Scripture, that it will be before the glory of the Gentile part of the church shall be fully accomplished, because it is said that their coming in shall be life from the dead to the Gentiles’ (Rom. 11.12, 15 ) So Carey and Martyn, in India, tempted to weariness, thought thankfully of the promise of the Jews’ ingathering.

So also Andrew Fuller thought it worth while at home to write his Expository Remarks Relative to the Conversion of the Jews, even though his primary duties concerned the Mission to India. We read also of Charles Simeon, who gave much of his attention to the extension of Christ’s kingdom, that the conversion of the Jews was perhaps the warmest interest of his life. Once at a missionary meeting Simeon had seemed so carried away with the future of the Jews that a friend passed him a slip of paper with the question, ‘Six millions of Jews and six hundred millions of Gentiles — which is the most important?’ Simeon at once scribbled back, ‘If the conversion of the six is to be life from the dead to the six hundred, what then?’

We may say in conclusion that, given beliefs like these, there should be no surprise that the century following the 1740’s witnessed the greatest outburst of praise in missionary hymnody that the world has ever heard. Isaac Watts and William Williams were followed by a whole host of writers who breathe the same spirit: Edward Perronet’s ‘All hail the power of Jesu’s Name’, William Shrubsole’s ‘Arm of the Lord, awake awake!’, James Montgomery’s ‘Hail to the Lord’s Anointed’, Thomas Kelly’s ‘Zion’s King shall reign victorious’, Thomas Hastings’ ‘Hail to the brightness of Zion’s glad morning’ — all these, and many more, gave voice to the great hope. The most characteristic of all was perhaps Reginald Heber’s ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’ with its lines:

Waft, waft, ye winds, his story
And you, ye waters, roll,
Till, like a sea of glory
It spreads from pole to pole.

When these hymns ceased to be sung in the faith with which they were written a memorable age had passed away. Why that change in evangelical belief came about will be the subject of a later chapter.