HOME MISSIONS

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Spanish Missions (§ 1).

French Missions (§ 2).

Missionary Purpose of English Settlers (§ 3).

Organisation of Congregational Effort, 1798-1807 (§ 4).

Other Early Denominational Organisations (§ 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 i. 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 0to 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 pur pose of Spain is repeatedly recognized in the early patents issued by the Spanish Court to successive bands of emigrants. Charles V., successor to Fer dinand and Isabella, in one of these royal patents

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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 cons. 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 North 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. Missionary

Boston; and again it is to be noticed - 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,

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dominated by godly Moravians from Germany and Presbyterians from the Highlands of Scotland. Thus, for continuous years, a soil was being prepared into which in due time the seed of organized home and foreign missions should fall and spring up again to make glad the City of God.

Yet it was not until 1798, nearly 200 years after the Pilgrim landing, that American home missions began to assume this organ4. Organiza- ized form. Previous, to that date

tion of missionary efforts had been mostly Congrega- sporadic. Before the war of the Revo- tional lution individual churches of the Con- Effort, gregational order in Connecticut were

x798-rSo7. sending out their pastors on missionary errands to what were then known as the New Settlements (Vermont, New York, and Ohio)For this service they were paid four and one-half dollars a week, and were allowed four dollars more for the supply of their pulpits during their absence, which usually covered about four months at a time. These missionary pastors followed the new settlers to their forest or prairie homes, preaching the Word, administering the ordinances, setting up the Church and the Sunday-school, and carrying- the greeting of old friends and neighbors to their distant kindred on the frontier. Yet it was something more than mere kinship and friendship that prompted these missionary journeys. There was also a great fear of barbarism, a profound dread of new States gathering strength and coming into the Union without churches or schools, without the Christian sabbath or the Christian home. Such fears seemed to haunt the churches of Connecticut and Massachusetts, which at that time were predominantly Congregational, until, in 1798, organization against an evil so threatening became a necessity. In June of that year the Missionary Society of Connecticut was organized, and one year later the Massachusetts Missionary Society came into being. These two organizations, with slight changes of name, are in existence to-day. Both of them were Congregational in origin, and, for more than a hundred years, they have been the twin springs from which an everbroadening stream of home missionary interest and effort has flowed. It is important to remember that both these mother societies, while bearing the names of the States where they originated, and supported by the States whose names they bear, were not primarily for the benefit of Connecticut and Massachusetts. The object of the Connecticut society, as defined in its charter, was " to Christianize the heathen (Indians) of North America, and to support and promote Christian knowledge in the new settlements of the United States." The charter of the Massachusetts Society describes its object as being " to diffuse the Gospel among the heathen (Indians) as well as other people in the remote parts of our country." Both societies, therefore, while local in their origin and support, were truly national in spirit and aim. Other New England States followed the lead of Connecticut and Massachusetts; New Hampshire in 1801, Rhode Island in 1803, Maine and Vermont in 1807. Thus, within ten years of the first movement, the Congregational churches of the six New England States

were organized for home missions. The four States last named were animated by the same broad spirit as Connecticut and Massachusetts. If they attempted less for the new settlements to the westward than their elder neighbors, it was only because they were themselves new settlements, needing more help than they were able at that stage to bestow.

To the same fruitful decade belongs the origin of Baptist home missions in New England. Its genesis is singularly like that of the Congrega-

g.Other tionalists. The Massachusetts DoEarly mestic Society, the first organization

Denomina- of its kind among American Baptists, tional dates from 1802. Its object, as de-

Organiza- fined by its constitution, was "to furtions. nish occasional preaching and to promote the knowledge of evangelistic truth in the new settlements of the United States, or further, if circumstances should reader it proper." This organized movement was preceded, as in the case of Connecticut and Massachusetts, by intermittent effort on the part of individual churches. Indeed, the significant feature of all these early organizations is that they were the natural outgrowth of an evangelistic spirit within the churches, and in no single instance were they forced upon the churches by outside influence. Baptist home missionary effort, like Congregational, looked beyond the place of birth, sending its missionaries into Maine, lower Canada, western New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri. To the same year, 1802, belongs the first systematic effort of the Presbyterians of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, acting under the same broad charter with the movement of Congregationalists and Baptists in New England, namely, "to send forth missionaries well qualified to be employed in mission work on the frontiers, for the purpose of organizing churches, administering ordinances, ordaining elders, collecting information concerning the state of religion in those parts, and preparing the best means of establishing a Gospel ministry among the people." Meanwhile the Reformed Church of America had not been idle. Sporadic missionary work began with them as early as 1786, culminating in 1882 in the organizing of the Missionary Society of the Reformed Dutch Church, differing nothing in spirit from its forerunners, but with wider scope, as it included home and foreign missions under a single organization. Methodist and Episcopalian missions, as well as Lutheran and those of the Disciples of Christ, belonged necessarily to a later period.

At the opening of the nineteenth century the new settlements, so called, were found mainly in northern New England, eastern and cen-

6. Work tral New York, and in northern and in the southern Ohio, and these were naturalNorth- ly the first points of home missionary west attack. The opening of the Northwest

Territory. Territory (including the present States of Ohio Indiana Illinois Michigan and , , Wisconsin) and the passage by Congress of the ordinance of 1787 attracted a stream of immigration from the East, mingled with a considerable element from Great Britain, Holland, Scandinavia, Germany

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and Moravia, Belgium and Switzerland. The earlier settlers of New York, Ohio, and Illinois, were generally Protestant in their sympathies, but unable at once, with a new country to settle and homes to be built, to provide for themselves the institutions of worship. To the help of these hopeful but destitute settlers came the organized missionary societies of the East. Their missionaries were hurried forward to every needy point, not only in the wilds of New York and Ohio, but to the remoter sections of Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. They even found their way down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico and they crossed the northern borders into Canada. A specially promising field of effort was the section of Ohio bordering on Lake Erie, which had been settled chiefly by families from Connecticut, and for that reason commonly known as New Connecticut. At the beginning of the century this tract contained about 1,400 inhabitants. In 1804 it had 400 families. One year later the 400 had grown to 1,100, one-half of them from New England. In less than thirty years from the beginning of organized home missions ninety churches had been planted in this section, all of them by missionaries sent out and supported by Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. To sum up in a sentence, the Missionary Society of Connecticut, at the end of thirty years of work, had employed 200 missionaries, by whom 400 churches had been established in the new settlements of the nation. With what wear and tear of body, with what sacrifice of comforts in the wilderness, with what patience of hope and courage of faith and labors of love no words could fully portray. Not a mile of railway had been built. The river and canal, the stage-coach, the emigrant wagon, and the saddle were the only conveniences of travel, and to these the missionary often added foot-sore and weary tramps from settlement to settlement. No Franciscan, Dominican, or Jesuit missionary of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, toiling over the same ground on missionary errands, accomplished a grander service or endured hardships more cheerfully.

All the earlier efforts above described were marked by a commendable absence of sectarian rivalry. The vastness of the problem