3. Two Early Attempts

Nevertheless in the years 1555 and 1559 two enterprises were initiated which were designated mis- sions, one of the Reformed and the other of the Lutheran Church. One of these was established in Brazil in older to found there a French colony by a French adventurer, Durand de Villegaignon, who, however, turned out later to be a traitor to Protestantism. The colonists were accompamed by four pastors from Geneva, who were also to preach the Gospel to the native heathen; but the whole enterprise was a failure, and a mission was never established. A similar fate befell the attempt of the Swedish King Gustavus Van, when, in the sixteenth century, he tried to bring into the Evangelical church the nominal Roman Catholics among the Laplanders. This was an attempt at reformation by the exercise of the territorial authority of the Church, and it consisted only in the sending of priests (little qualified for the task) and the building of par. sonages. The undertaking failed and a real mission to the Laplanders was first realized by Thomas von Westen and Nils Joachim Christian Stockfieth (qq.v.).

4. Reformed and Lutheran Opposition

Still more decidedly than the Reformers, the rep- resentatives of the old Protestant orthodoxy, Lu theran as well as Reformed, denied the continuous missionary duty of the Church in spite of the charge repeatedly theran Op. brought in the Roman Catholic polem- vosition. ice of the time that the Church of the Reformation could not be the true Church because it did no mission work among the heathen. The chief leaders of the opposition to missions were the great dogmataem Johann Ger

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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 Lübeck 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 Non 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, 6. 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 convow tions 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 Wal#us 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 searpower,

the long-continued political and ree. Work of ligious struggle was the principal

English hindrance to the awakening of an Oolonists. interest in missions. This struggle,

however, led to the first attempt at mis.. sionary 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 Stuarte, 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

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its activity for the first century of its existence principally to the religious care of the colonists. The powerful East-India Company, which received its charter in 1600 from Queen Elizabeth, gave no thought to missions.

Denmark also possessed colonies after 1620 in the East Indies and after 1672 in the West Indies. The first Lutheran mission started from Denmark

in 1705, on the initiative of King Fred 7. Early crick IV. But as no missionaries could be

Danish found in Denmark, the court preacher Missions. Luetkens of Copenhagen, who had

been called from Berlin, turned to his pietistic friends in Germany. In this way the Danish mission came into relationship with the German Pietists and soon also with August Hermann Francke (q.v.). Two of his pupils, Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg (q.v.) and Heinrich Phitschau, went as "royal missionaries" to East India (Tranquebar), where they opened the way for an Evangelical mission. In Copenhagen there was founded a royal "College for Advancing the Cause of the Gospel," but Francke was the effective leader. Through him Pietism was combined with the mission and this combination kept the latter alive. Still another mission was established by Denmark, namely in Greenland, not however by the king but by a pastor of the Lofoden, Hans Egede (q.v.), who succeeded in reaching the land for which he longed only in 1721, after unspeakable efforts and only by connecting himself with a commercial company enjoying a royal privilege.

2. The Era of Pietism and Rationalism: Pietism (q.v.), the first great reform movement inside the churches of the Reformation, insisted upon personal Christianity instead of mere submission to external

authority, upon a Christianity of deeds 1.Franeke's instead of a Christianity of words;

Services. upon Bible Christianity instead of dog-

matism; and upon the general priesthood instead of adherence to a rigid rule of office. Its insistence upon an active faith qualified Pietism for the mission task as soon as its attention was directed to the non-Christian world. Pietism was the father of the heathen mission as of all the institutions for rescue work, a combination which was illustrated by Francke, who became the standardbearer of the missionary movement emanating from Pietism. By his far-reaching pedagogical plans, by his correspondence with Leibnitz, and by the call of two of his pupils to aid in the Danish mission, he was led to mission work to the heathen. His chief services in the field are: (1) that he provided it with workers. A pedagogue of great talent, he was able to make his orphan asylum a means of education of workers of all descriptions in the service of the kingdom of God; (2) that he awoke in Evangelical Christendom the consciousness that it should itself carry on the mission task by sus. taining the missionaries with its prayers and gifts; (3) that by a periodical publication he diffused knowledge and understanding of mission work. Francke was the first to collect a praying, giving, and striving missionary society, and so began to lift from missions the ban of being merely the official duty of the Christian colonial government.

Naturally, for the time being, it was only the Pietists of North and South Germany who took part in the work; orthodoxy still fought it bitterly. The institutions of Francke graduated in the course of the eighteenth century about sixty missionaries, among them, besides Ziegenbalg, Fabricius, and Christian Friedrich Schwartz (q.v.), so that the Tranquebar mission is rightly called the DanishHalle Mission. Amid much trouble caused by petty annoyances from colonial officials, by war and disputes of various kinds, this mission endured until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when it was undermined by rationalism at home. English aid saved it from entire destruction; later, the Leipsic Lutheran Mission entered into the old inheritance, so far as it had not already been absorbed by Anglican societies.

A thoroughly new life came into the missionary movement by the entrance of the United Brethren into the field. Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (q.v.) was the instrument whom God used to raise the missions to a higher plane. Zinzendorf can well be called a missionary genius.

2. Zinzen. His lest impulses to mission work were

dorf and received in the house of Francke, and the United the last impulse to the practical real-

Brethren. ization of his missionary plans was given by the sojourn in Copenhagen, 1731, where he became acquainted with a negro from St. Thomas, West Indies, and with Greenland ers. But the inclination toward the mission was implied in the whole quality of his religious nature. He was full of Christian zeal which animated him to collect around him and to organize coworkers, for whose sphere of activity he recognized no local limits. In the winning of these coworkers, the Provi dence of God is unmistakable. Zinzendorf found them among those heroic Moravians who were driven from their fatherland because of their faith and were ripened by suffering and persecution. From them and certain pilgrims who came to Herrnhut, the organizing genius of the count formed a commu nity which became in the highest degree a mission church. That a community was then established which put all its energy into the heathen mission, so that its very existence became identified with this work and has remained so to this day, is the great achievement of Zinzendorf in the history of missions. At the death of the count (1760), the missionary success of the Moravian Church sur passed everything that had been done by the Prot estant world for the conversion of the heathen. They bad sent out 226 missionaries to all parts of the earth, except Australia, and not alone to Prot estant colonial possessions. In this business-like haste, the restless genius of the count shows itself, but, nevertheless, there is something heroic in the fact that such a small community could operate enterprises which extended over nearly the whole world.

Nevertheless the missionary activity, till then unheard of, developed by this community, failed to inspire the Protestantism of the eighteenth century to missionary effort. The missionary era of Zinzendorf fell in the transition period between the decline of orthodoxy and the rise of rationalism, and

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neither of these had any comprehension of the missionary task. The dislike nourished by orthodoxy for the Pietist mission was also felt 8. Apathy toward that of Hermhut; the ration under Ra- alistic spirit, however, which soon tionalistic spread over the whole Christian world, Influences. had for all missions the same contemptuous dislike, since toleration was its chief glory. But since the Moravian brotherhood cherished Zinzendorf's inheritance faithfully and bravely, even in such an unfortunate time it came to form a living bond with the great missionary movement of Germany and England in the nineteenth century; a movement that owed more of its inspiration to Hermhut than isolated facts prove. As in Germany Rationalism dug the grave of the Danish and Halle mission, so in Holland, also, it proved destructive. Under its baleful influence, the Dutch Colonial Mission, which had grown more and more mechanical and feeble, became nearly extinct. Besides this, the colonial government changed its policy, considering it wiser to favor Mohammedanism, and this attitude was maintained until the latter half of the nineteenth century. In England from 1698 and 1701 existed the two societies already mentioned. In Scotland, also, a Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge was founded, which from 1740 sent some missionaries to the North American Indians, among them David Brainerd (q.v.). Otherwise there was but little interest and no activity in missions up to the last decade of the eighteenth century, although Great Britain had in the mean while become the foremost sea-power. The cause lay in the low level of .moral and religious life which obtained after the Restoration (1660). In the fifth decade of the eighteenth century an awakening took place which did not immediately develop a missionary activity, but in which lay hidden the motive power that, in the following generation, caused the great mission movement with which the present missionary era began. John Wesley and George Whitefield (qq.v.) were the instruments of the impressive awakening which extended to the following generation and from it to the European countries and North America. It was the great importance of the English revival that, accompanied as it was by a series of great events in the world's history, it opened the ears of the awakened part of Evangelical Christianity to the voice of the Holy Ghost, reminding it of the nearly forgotten missionary command and rendering it both capable and willing to obey this command.