Dawning of a vision
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Dawning of a vision
Amy Carmichael, for several reasons a fascinating character, was born in a turning point in political, social and spiritual British history. Her life reveals something of the amazing diversity and depth of the changing and sweeping missionary efforts when her mission activity was beginning to expand effectively and to reshape missionary thinking. At her birth Queen Victoria had been on the throne for nearly 30 years. The rise of Britain under this monarch – Victoria’s name became descriptive of the era – was huge and every decade in the 19th century brought Britain further advances and discoveries. Raised and educated during the Victorian era Amy’s identity was shaped according to this tradition. We meet her as an adult in the then closing age of nonconformity, in the liberty of the individual in life and conscience, and swept up in the religious fervour that had gone across the country since the 1870s. The vitality of the society in which Amy was growing up, the attitudes it created and its new involvement in the world were to have some influence on Amy Carmichael’s contribution to and in India. Her practical as well as her mystical approach found little in common with the then generally received missionary opinion, while her approach preluded fresh thinking of about keeping together word and deed in mission work.
Victorian women who served the cause of the Kingdom of God often involved themselves in philanthropic enterprises and charitable volunteer organisations, but few went far beyond the circumscribed boundaries. The role of women serving the cause of the British Empire through their professional work and the way they were portrayed in the literature of the colonial and imperial British nation, both as writers and as subjects of representation, has been widely explored.55 Many Victorian women lived vicariously through the lives of other people. Their work offers a close look at the intersection of gender and race in Victorian times. Rule Britannia traces this connection from the early 19th century nostalgia for masculine adventure to later female assertiveness. The women stood out strongly in discussions about English education, class conflicts sparked by colonisation and patriarchal
55. P. Barr, The Memsahibs: In Praise of the Women of Victorian India (London: Penguin, 1976); P. Barr The Dust In The Balance, British Women in India 1905–1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989). A. Hayes & D. Urquhart, ed., Irish Women’s History (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004).
How to cite: Kommers, J. (Hans), 2017, ‘Dawning of a vision’, in Triumphant Love: The contextual, creative and strategic missionary work of Amy Beatrice Carmichael in south India, pp. 23–36, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2017.tl41.02 responses to fears about feminine influence. Women’s ambitions in the 19th century reached further than the British shores and the hundreds who went into the unique venture of Christian womanhood, the mission field, were the cause of ‘the largest mass movement of women in Britain in the 19th century’.56
Disturbing times
When 18-year-old Queen Victoria ascended to the British throne in 1837, very few of her subjects had travelled more than 10 miles from the rural spot in which they were born, goods and messages could only travel as fast as a horse could carry them, and only half of the English citizens could read and write. When the queen died in 1901, the pace and texture of life had dramatically transformed. About 80% of English citizens now lived in towns and cities, and some of their homes were fitted with electric lights, had cabinets stocked with canned foods, and sat on gaslight-dotted streets. Telegraphs carried messages in a blink, phone connections made the world smaller for many, railroad tracks crisscrossed the land, and luxurious steamships fairly whisked passengers from England to America in only nine days. A man could now write a letter on his typewriter, get the family portrait taken by the local photographer, or have an X-ray, vaccination or chloroform administered by his doctor. Education for the young had become compulsory, and literacy soared to nearly 100%. Not only in Britain: outside the British Isles the world at that time was also becoming a swiftly changing scene. Earthly powers emerged, others perished; wars and revolutions, new inventions and social changes intoxicated many with dreams of a better world. Just before Amy’s birth in 1867, Madame Curie, the French scientist, had discovered radium, Alfred Nobel patented dynamite and Eiffel’s tower in Paris, meant to stand only for a few years, still stands in full glory in the second decade of the 21st century.
Nineteenth-century British Protestantism saw a shift in its relationship to the world of thought after the rise of the Enlightenment57 and Romanticism58 as a reaction to rational philosophy. Many thinkers took for granted the truth of biblical revelation and creeds and the centre of epistemological authority moved from revelation to reason. Religion was removed from the authority of the state and the public arena. Authors such as John Locke (1632–1704), George Berkeley (1685–1753) and the Scotsman David Hume (1711–1776) found no ‘principles of science’ or of morality taught by the ‘Almighty Lecturer’. They had prepared the ground for this secular thinking and they wielded great influence along a secular arc. The earthquake that devastated Lisbon on All Saints Day in 1755 inspired Voltaire’s Candide and the French Revolution fostered much scepticism among the population of the European continent and the British Islands.59 All this had many implications for British Christianity.60
Negatively, many British churchmen adopted not only the categories of early modern philosophy but also its ideas; theological content began to reflect culture more and traditional belief less. An example of
56. In M. Taylor Huber & N.C. Lutkehaus, ed., Gendered Missions, Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 18.
57. For W.R. Ward, the Enlightenment is a ‘body of human knowledge resting upon foundations whose truth is self-evident to any rational human being’ (P. Helm, ‘Religion and Philosophy’, in C. Partridge & D.R. Groothuis (Eds.), Dictionary of Contemporary Religion in the Western World (Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 101).
58. Romanticism arose in the late 18th century. The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) had his roots in Pietism, and stressed feeling and experience in his thinking: personal confession combined with critical thinking about the Bible.
59. Cf. D. Edwards, Christian England, Vol. 3, From the 18th Century to the First World War (London: Collins, 1984), 13–19.
60. See M.A.G. Haykin, ‘Evangelicalism and the Enlightenment’s,’ in M.A.G. Haykin & K.J. Stewart (eds.), The Advent of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2008), 37–62.
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this range is to be found in a rationalist-influenced Aryanism in the Irish Presbyterian Church up to the subtle changes in biblical theology taught by evangelical leaders like Philip Doddridge (1702–1751).61 It was one of the deadest times in the history of the church in England since the Reformation. In too many cases, the clergy paid lip service to the Christian creed to which they had no heart attachment:
The churches of mid-eighteenth century England all but abandoned orthodox, historical Christianity and now preached a tepid kind of moralism that seemed to present civility and the preservation of the status quo as the summum bonum. […] and a fog of hopeless and brutal superstitious spiritualism crept over the land.62 Despite several local revivals during the 18th century, evangelical pulpits in the national church were few in number.63 In those times when the savour and unction of divine grace was gone, a positive side can be mentioned: a large number of theologians and pastors recognised the changes – overt and subtle – to theology and sought to develop new ways to express and preserve what they saw as the faith once and for all delivered to the saints.64 At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries a new biblical, evangelical vision dawned. This new era often for polemics and apologetics made use of the categories and methods of the Enlightenment but without essential changes to orthodoxy.65 Many theologians engaged the challenges to traditional theology from the doctrine of God, Christology and salvation to the integrity of biblical authority. Many saw the aridity and dead scholarship of modernism and focused on experimental Christianity and on a faith that subordinated everything to the Bible. ‘The preparation for eternity should be the main business and anxiety of time’.66
The early years of the 19th century were more or less anxious ones for the British people as they were poised between the old order and the new. They were the dark days of the industrial revolution, with unmitigated economic slavery, labour done by workers who came from a background of centuriesold rural servitude.
The shadow of the French Revolution had lain darkly across Europe. A whole generation feared the probable eruption of corresponding tumults at home. Aristocracy and church knew about the mob at the gates with farm cart and guillotine. There was the fear that a complete social order could be wiped out when France would invade the country with military power, followed by cities thrown down, looting, rape and murder and a country tyrannised by evil powers. These terrors were subdued and these miseries ended only in 1815 with the decisive Battle of Waterloo, leaving many grieving wives and children, whose husbands had died on the battlefields in Belgium, Spain, Egypt and the West Indies. In
61. H. Leebody, ‘Henry Cooke, D.D., and Arianism in the Irish Church,’ The Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review, 1(2), (April 1872), 205–231; for Doddridge see his A Dissertation on the Inspiration of the New Testament, in Miscellaneous Works (London: T. Longman, 1793). Doddridge argued for three degrees of inspiration: superintendence, elevation and suggestion.
62. E. Metaxas, Amazing Grace. William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery (Oxford: Monarch Books, 2007), 7.
63. ‘If the people go to perdition in these days it is not for want of ministers. The clergy are likely to become soon as plentiful as the locusts in Egypt, and which of them is the greatest plague of the two, time and experience of the Church will discover’ (“The Happy Man: The Abiding Witness of Lachlan Mackenzie” (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth), 45, quoted in W. Hanna (ed.) Letters of Thomas Chalmers (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth, 1979), IX.
64. When Robert and James Haldane after their conversion preached the Gospel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they spoke to multitudes that had never heard of salvation by grace. See Hanna, Letters of Thomas Chalmers, IX.
65. Examples are Anglicans like Charles Simeon (1759–1836) in England, Congregationalists like Robert (1764–1842) in Scotland, Edward Williams (1750–1813) in Wales and England and Baptists such as Andrew Fuller (1754–1815) in England and Alexander Carson (1776–1844) in Ireland.
66. Thomas Chalmers in Hanna, Letters of Thomas Chalmers, XVIII. the years following the end of the Napoleonic wars, bread, the staple food, was expensive and there was a surplus of labour. Revolutionary upheavals rocked the country, harvests failed repeatedly, cholera swept through the cities and social unrest was everywhere. In 1832, ‘after fifty years of proposals, disappointments and agitation’ culminating in scenes of protest and riotous anarchy and public rallies in several parts of England, the old parliamentary system was swept away.67 In society, the contrast remained between the gentleman, who was seen as rich, cultured and clean, and on the other side the labouring man, who was considered to be poor, rough and dirty. The ‘us’ and the ‘them’, the upper class and the working people required differentiation.
Women got a voice and many were able to make their mark as writers, artists, travellers and actresses, breaking away from the accepted family roles for women and from patriarchal domination. British lifestyle came with government officials and missionaries to the colonies and this made dramatic and far-reaching changes in the signs and practices that constituted their worlds. Concern for decorum had wide-reaching implications for the role that women were to play in the family and society. It tended even to narrow the already restricted range of behaviours and choices deemed appropriate for women.68 In the 19th century in politics and society, the contrast remained and between the rich and the poor came an element of fear, suspicion and resentment, which disturbed their relations.
Meanwhile, Enlightenment prepared the emergence of the evangelical version of Protestantism and, interpreting Protestant mission, we can argue that the Enlightenment shaped the vision. Many missionary enterprises were based on intellectual foundations with reason prominent.69 Romanticism became a popular movement. Believers strictly defending the Bible and, holding firm the doctrines of Calvinism, were now open for more feeling, experience and personal explanation, which paved the way for Evangelicalism.70 During Queen Victoria’s reign, the queen herself was very outspoken about the role of women in society.71 Biblical values were interwoven in a rapidly changing society. Industries and offices forced the men to work outside the home the whole day, whereas the women had to create a home and a safe environment for the children and could use their free time to help the sick and the poor. The ideas of true womanhood were derived from the Bible. Queen Victoria did not believe the woman’s natural place was in politics or in public, and she strongly opposed the ‘women’s rights movement’.72 Enlightenment and Romanticism held wider ramifications as we will see for Amy Carmichael’s era when strict biblical thinking, holiness movement and vital Christian involvement in church and society influenced the Brighton and Keswick Conventions and shaped Amy’s thinking about her involvement in society and about mission.
67. J.F.C. Harrison, Early Victorian Britain 1832–51 (Glasgow: Fontana, 1979), 180. The Reform Bill of 1831 pushed through by the party in power (the Whigs) against the resistance of the opposition (the Tories), gave a vote to the larger tenant farmers in the country and to men owning their own homes in the new industrial centres, but it still left the real political power in the hands of the landed aristocracy.
68. For an extensive study about these issues, see Kent, Converting Women.
69. See D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (London: Routledge, 2005), 74; U. Gäbler, Auferstehungszeit. Erweckungsprediger des 19. (München: Jahrhunderts, 1991), 161 vv. ‘Bebbington notes that the evangelical doctrine of assurance, itself an outworking of Enlightenment empiricism, gave the confidence necessary for wide proclamation of the gospel as the Bible and personal religious experience combined. This became a powerful driver for mission’, (C.E.M. Wigram, The Bible and Mission in Faith Perspective, J. Hudson Taylor and the Early China Inland Mission (Zoetermeer, The Netherlands: Boekencentrum, 2007), 52.
70. ‘The chief explanation for the transformation of Evangelicalism in the years around 1830 is the spread of Romanticism’ (Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 103).
71. See C. Erikson, Her Little Majesty: The Life of Queen Victoria (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
72. See ‘Victorian Women: Keepers at home’, in Severance, Feminine Threads. Women in the Tapestry of Christian History. (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 2011), 257–278. Quotation p. 257.
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Exciting times
The old rural England, peopled by sturdy farm workers and independent artisans, was set on a course that would see the rise of Britain to the ‘zenith of its power as the workshop of the world’; they were really ‘exiting times’.73 The labouring poor were sucked into the furnace of the industrial age, where the factory, the mine and the mill had to employ thousands on never-ending shifts. Major cities such as Manchester and Birmingham almost doubled in size within 20 years. The coming of the railway – 6000 miles of track were laid in Britain alone – and the establishment of penny post and telegraph changed the face of the kingdom. Business was booming, but the changes were traumatic in the extreme. ‘It is hard to escape the impression that very large numbers of people in the 1840s were completely bewildered by the environment in which they found themselves’.74 Meanwhile, the British Empire ruled the seas, the British flag stood proud on every continent and British influence was felt in the new dominions on every continent. The Victorian times stood for a loyal society where law and order, prudence, advances and discoveries meant Britain was looked at by the rest of the world. It was the time of the dispersal of English law and language across large parts of the globe.
The Bank of England was synonymous with a healthy credit system and spurred the growth of London City, making it the commercial and financial centre of the empire. The mood of society was excited with the visible material changes in the country, and there was individual commitment to self-improvement. Queen Victoria supported the Mines Act of 1842, which banned women and children from working underground. By 1870, education was compulsory for all British children. The rapid expansion of the railway network opened up travel possibilities both in Britain and on the continent. Thomas Cook organised excursions in 1841 and by 1860 large numbers of well-to-do middle class men and women were enjoying holidays in France, Italy and Switzerland.75
For the rich, horse riding was very much the fashionable recreation in Regency London. The importance of the Victorian Age is best epitomised by the Great Exhibition, which Prince Consort Albert organised in Hyde Park in 1851 to display to the world Britain’s supremacy and leadership in industry and technology. The new Crystal Palace showed the world the rise, the grandeur and the greatness that the new time stood for. Exhibits of modern inventions were erected in the Crystal Palace. In the first few years, the average daily attendance was estimated at no less than 43 000. Taylor and his sister Amelia were also among the visitors for Amelia’s 16th birthday76 and it was there that Taylor met a German missionary from China, Wilhelm Lobscheid, who gave him some advice and encouragement about becoming a missionary.
Scientific knowledge expanded, a science-based industrial revolution was to make life new and urban, and the popular wind was to become largely secular.77 Among thoughtful believers, there was a
73. See N. Cliff, A Heart for China (London: Authentic, 1998), 1.
74. Harrison, Early Victorian Britain, 35. Trade unions were still illegal, and throughout 1840–1846 the infamous Corn Law imposed high duties on imported grain, thereby protecting British agriculture at the expense of the poorer people for whom the cost of bread was crucial.
75. Cf. the Swiss Letters of F.R. Havergal (1881) and Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands of H. Beecher Stowe (1854). Havergal advised over-tired Christian workers, urging them to escape to the beauty of the Alps as a tonic for mind, body and spirit. She also used the opportunities for evangelistic work and gave testimony of how she witnessed to many people on every day of her trip. Passing with her friend Elizabeth through Paris, torn apart by the war, they spent nearly three hours giving out tracts. See S. James, In Trouble and Joy (Darlington: Evangelical Press, 2003), 170–172.
76. See P. Thompson, Each to Her Post. The Inspiring Lives of Six Great Women in China (Sevenoaks: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982), 19.
77. ‘The old doctrines of Christianity and the Bible had served their purposes in their day, but the idea of believing them and preaching them in the late 18th century simply seemed wilfully anachronistic and silly’ (Metaxas, Amazing Grace, 45). revival of the glowing religious emotions and memories and the surrender of self-sufficiency in exchange for an emotional biblical assurance beyond the reach of the cold hand of science. Many Christians, in a reborn faith, believed in the revelation of God in Christ Jesus. When around 1730 several young men arrived at Oxford University, religion of the heart changed things profoundly. Of this generation of young students, the Wesley brothers and George Whitefield formed a small group, which was called the Holy Club.
Bible study and prayer kept them together and as they did this rather methodically, others soon labelled them as ‘Methodists’. It was Whitefield who urged that living in a biblical way, holy and perfect, is a work of grace. From these young men, who preached where they were called, people heard many new things. It was like a new revelation for them; the old Gospel now fresh in plain language. For the starched theological establishment it was shocking, but now the banner of truth and grace waved over the countryside. Even open-air meetings were held and often Whitefield preached before crowds of 30 000 people. The Great Awakening would become a vibrant form of Christianity, which would ultimately change the whole of Britain’s social order and religion of the 19th century. William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was definitely an exponent of this Awakening, which gave him the fuel to campaign as a social reformer to abolish slavery. Wesley’s and Whitefield’s preaching certainly was coined a century later when many evangelical Christians would refer to them as their ‘founding fathers’. The change of the religious climate could also be seen in the political sphere. When Wilberforce entered parliament in 1780 there were about three or four MPs who identified themselves as seriously Christian, but half a century later there were nearly 200 members of Parliament who were known as real Christians.
The old faith was given new life. Many turned to the belief of the old Puritans, expressed to be a powerful religion, and private Bible study, an enthusiasm for hymn singing and Christian fellowship. A new missionary zeal was dawning. Years before, in New England, the Presbyterian preacher Jonathan Edwards revived the religion of the Puritans.78 George Whitefield crossed the Atlantic 13 times. Never to be tied to any one parish, by talk and by letter he told the people about the new birth and urgently invited them to share it. If he was not allowed to preach in a church, many locations in the open field are now silent witnesses of the thousands – sometimes more than 30 000 – who once gathered there and were fascinated by the extraordinary power of his voice. Whitefield preached extempore in an age when the reading of sermons had become standard. At first, he regarded the still more famous preacher John Wesley as his spiritual father. On the surface, the split between them in 1740 was due to Whitefield’s Calvinism. Whitefield objected to Wesley’s optimistic teaching that converted Christians could and should be ‘perfect’. Wesley, however, knew that he was not perfect himself and never expected others to be.
Wesley emphasised that Christians should be holy before God and men. ‘O insist everywhere on full redemption, receivable by faith alone, consequently to be looked for now […] we must have a thorough reform of preachers’.79 The influence of these two, Whitefield and Wesley, in awakening the religious conscience of the 18th and 19th centuries went very deep. Wherever Wesley went, his ‘revival societies’ sprang up. These were groups of converts who were united together to worship the Lord.
The 18th century evangelical revival had ‘fanned the embers of English-speaking Protestantism into a blazing fire’. There were, according to Bebbington, four main features of evangelical religion: there was conversion, activism (spreading the experience of conversion to others), a love for the Bible and a
78. Edwards presented man as a whole person who had to choose between darkness and light, as a figure in a tragedy, in that he habitually chose darkness, but who by grace, through belief in Christ Jesus, a son of God, was filled by God’s grace with God’s light.
79. In Edwards, Christian England, 58.
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concentration on the atoning death of Christ on the cross.80 Through the evangelical revival, Christianity gained an important place in national life and gave great impetus to people to work among children; social work followed the Gospel preaching, and instilled a new missionary vision.
In spite of all the achievements, starting an industrial revolution that transformed the entire world, restoration of the bridge in human relations with one another was utterly poor. The gulf dividing capital from labour was never bridged. There was still shocking inequality and scandalous poverty all over the country. The days of the industrial revolution, with unmitigated slavery, revealed many difficulties and horrors. At a rapid tempo, England was transformed from a rural society to an urban, industrial society, with all the attendant shocking issues of a society in major transition.
The novels of Charles Dickens reveal a lot of the poverty and bitterness in many socially low families, and that it was not easy to survive. In 1845 the Tory leader, Benjamin Disraeli, spoke of ‘the two nations’, rich and poor, living side by side in respectable Britain. The slums in east London were famous at that time for danger, crime, prostitution and social unrest. Many factory owners exploited women and children as a means of cheap labour. Men often spent all their earned money on alcohol, which hastened their deaths. Murray Pura wrote: ‘The cities spawned poverty for the workers while they spawned wealth for the factory owners. Children could not be fed and infanticide resulted.’ It is said that around 1830 three-quarters of all the children born in London died before reaching the age of 5.81
The poverty in the country was debilitating and immorality was shocking, with villages all over ‘abounding in sin and wickedness’. One place was called ‘Little Hell’ and ‘not one could read, but alas! everyone could, and did, swear’.82 Prison conditions were cruel and inhumane, to say the least. London’s Newgate prison was one of the worst. In his Great Expectations Charles Dickens depicted in a very explicit way what was going on in Britain’s prisons.
Women who could not tolerate factory conditions, or who could not find work, resorted to prostitution. Prostitution was practised blatantly; the neighbourhood of Victoria Station was known to be one of the worst areas, where girls stranded in the city sold their bodies. There grew to be 30 000–50 000 prostitutes in and around London alone, one in four of the population of single women. Girls between the ages of 11 and 14 were involved, while young boys turned to petty crime and joined gangs of up to 20 or 30.83
Meanwhile, influential British citizens became more and more involved in reforming work and opened windows on various terrible aspects of Victorian practices. For many, their eyes were opened and this produced a national wave of indignation to those who had access to the news and knew the true facts. They started to raise their voices and influence. To mention just one, Lord Shaftesbury (1801– 1885) for more than 50 years fought against industrial child abuse and ‘in some ways became the conscience of the evangelical wing of the Church of England’.84 In the first decades of the 19th century the heritage of the 18th century was deeply seen and felt:
Life in eighteenth-century Britain was particularly brutal, decadent, violent, and vulgar. Slavery was only the worst of a host of social evils that included epidemic alcoholism, child prostitution, public dissections and
80. In D.W. Bebbington, Victorian Nonconformity (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 2–3.
81. R. Elliott Kendal, Charles New and the East Africa Mission (Nairobi, Kenya: Literature Bureau, 1978), 8.
82. In K.S. Prior, Fierce Convictions. The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More – Poet, Reformer, Abolitionalist (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2014), 143.
83. In M. Pura, Vital Christianity. The Life and Spirituality of William Wilberforce (Fearn, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2002), 27.
84. In G. Davies, Genius and Grace (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992), 124. burnings of executed criminals, and unspeakable public cruelty to animals. […] Britain […] would staunchly retain the outward trappings and forms of religion – which were all well and good and would help keep the lower classes better behaved – but it would deny religion any real power.85 So outwardly, religion was kept in place, but under the surface the decaying process in society continued. The corrupt and hypocritical government could not relieve the situation of the lower classes. In the church, the pulpits were filled with just such:
[L]ukewarm professors lukewarmly professing a lukewarm faith that thrilled no one and challenged no one, lacking, as it did, the indispensable tang of otherness that is at the heart of Christian belief.86 How did all these developments influence the ordinary men and women? The Irish girl, eldest daughter of a middle class family and subject of this book, had seen and experienced many of the exiting things and was involved in the misery of the working class. The vitality of the society in which she was growing up, the attitudes it created and its new involvement in the world, were to have deep influence on Amy’s contribution to India. The effects of the 1859 revival were such that by 1875 all missionary societies were beginning to receive more candidates. Among the Christians of various denominations, all these unsettling developments – social, political and religious – brought the feeling that the last days as pictured in the last Bible book Revelations were upon them, that their generation would see the stars fall and the Saviour coming in the clouds.87
Yet before this great moment of Christ’s return to gather his flock, the word of salvation must surely go out to the furthest parts of the earth. The times were ready for that. The Pax Britannica bringing law and order gave many Christians the idea that the time of the first mission endeavour of the early church was again at hand.88
Side by side with the exciting industrial and economic expansion came a remarkable growth in missionary endeavour. The spirit of enterprise and adventure, which impelled people to explore and extend commerce, also drove Christians to carry the Christian message to tribes and peoples who had not heard it. Technological advance became the handmaid of missionary pioneers. Easier travel and more rapid communications assisted in the spread of the Gospel. Railways and steamships carried the messengers of the Cross to new fields across the world. Cable and telegraph improved communications between home bases and distant mission stations. Now the printing press could be used effectively to inform the Christian public in Britain of the spread of the Gospel in faraway countries, and to publish newly translated Bibles or portions of the Bible.
Victorian England was permeated with evangelical influence. The Established Church in the 18th century, characterised by worldliness and complacency, now changed under the powerful influence of the evangelical revival. A vital and living religious life came up. It was the Clapham Sect in the late 18th century who paved the way for the evangelicals to reform the church and everyday life in Britain. Its domestic reforms expanded outward across the globe: school, prison and Sabbath reforms extended to reforms for resettling former African slaves in Sierra Leone. The reforms also influenced the 1813 East India Company’s charter in favour of allowing missionary work in the colony and the establishment of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1799. Karen Prior says ‘the reforms they
85. In Metaxas, Amazing Grace, 69 and 71.
86. In Metaxas, Amazing Grace, 170.
87. In Germany we see the same strong expectation, due to the prediction of Johann Alfred Bengel that Christ would return in 1835.
88. The pax romana enabled the first Christians to go out, unhindered till the heart of the Roman Empire, to Rome and as far as the northern part of Africa and the south of India.
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[Clapham Sect] sought and achieved set the tone for the coming Victorian age with its emphasis on religion, morality, family, and duty’.89
Many supposed that the spread of the Gospel was imminent and this worked as a window into the thought culture of 19th century evangelicalism in general. As evangelicals from reformed and free church backgrounds answered the challenges posed from without and within, changes in England were significant. Churches had to be revived and industrial workers newly arrived in the cities encountered fresh ideas and gathered in barns, rooms and chapels where, due to continuous evangelistic enterprises, many were converted. Dissenters ‘dissented’; nonconformists would not ‘conform’; Anglicans looked further than their clerical traditions and Presbyterians saw the need of the Gospel implications. All were inclined to radical politics and concern for the poor. There came a real concern that Christianity is something of the heart and not just a clerical issue. This is evident in an exclamation of Bishop Ryle who was frustrated by the general attitude to baptism:
Why is it, he asked in 1858, that the sacrament of baptism appears to bear so little fruit? How is it that thousands are every year baptized, and never give the slightest proof of having received benefit from it? […] Parents bring their children to the font, without the slightest sense of what they are doing. […] Such baptisms may well be barren of results. They are not baptisms according to the mind of Christ.90 In the 18th century the Great Awakening had taken place largely within the Church of England. The brothers John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield had remained members of the Established Church, although they found more response outside it. Though many Methodists had left the Church of England after John Wesley’s death in 1791, many others remained within it. During the first decades of the 19th century, the Anglican evangelicals gained strength. Methodism in its evangelism did unite the pair so long disjoined: knowledge and vital piety. In their leanings, Evangelicals were Calvinistic and they wielded an influence beyond their numbers through such leaders as William Wilberforce and Charles Simeon. John Wesley’s footprints are all over the 19th century evangelical movement.
By the 1830s, however, Anglican evangelicalism was starting to decline. The urgent call for individual conversion and personal holiness instigated by Wesley and Whitefield had given way to a more pragmatic desire for unity – an emphasis on loyalty to the Church of England. The great 19th century Irish evangelist William Arthur in talking about the declining influence of the Gospel gives us a catalogue of hindrances as he saw it in the 19th century. It included neglect of prayer, unbelief, lack of faith, the lure of respectability, idle speech, party politics, sensual indulgence, the desire for literary and oratorical effect, reductionist naturalism, scepticism, nominal Christianity, the reduced versions of Christianity to be found in the churches and a host of social sins.91
In the first two decades of the 20th century, partly due to the dramatic events of World War I, the awakening drive that had brought many denominations in the 19th century to start with mission work was utterly strangled. The approach of this minimising influence of the Gospel and yet the growing mission enterprise is sensed in Cowper’s song:
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.
89. In Prior, Fierce Convictions, 182.
90. J.C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: Luke (London: J. Clark & Co., 1969), 102.
91. In W. Arthur, Tongue of Fire (Epworth, UK: Epworth, 1956 [1856]), 369–376.
Changing times
The spectacular growth of mission endeavour in the 19th century is a phenomenon still studied, especially in missiological studies in which lives of men and women, some until now totally unknown, are published revealing the most interesting details and methods to reach the unreached peoples. But the rise of the missionary movement did not occur in a theological and spiritual vacuum. In the 17th century it was the Puritans who enflamed the cause of missions. The honour of God and his sovereignty all over the world gave them the zeal to purify the existing church and to spread the Word of God. Many Puritans, in times of persecution, emigrated to America. From them, a large group went via Rotterdam – Delfshaven – in the Netherlands to the new continent.92 They were part of God’s plan or God’s mission strategy. The theological works of the Puritans were read by many Christians in the 18th century and by these writings they, too, were set aflame. English Puritanism encouraged the practice of a devout, holy life and man’s personal responsibility in response to God’s initiative for the salvation of man through faith in Christ Jesus.
Evangelical Christianity moved away from traditional Calvinist beliefs in total depravity and predestination, and instead emphasised a person’s free will and that salvation was open to any who chose to believe and cultivate an inner faith. At the same time evangelical Protestants preached that a continued relationship with God was predicated on living righteously and that believers should strive for individual moral perfection, while also working to purify society, reform corrupt practices and uplift the downtrodden. The times and the religious scene in the first decades greatly changed. In sermons pastors tried to create an effect as much as impart information. The Scottish Presbyterian minister Edward Irving – a close friend of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) – tried to recapture the beauties of primitive simplicity and to recapture the idealised past. The emphasis was shifting from ‘reason’ to ‘sentiment’, from ‘thinking’ to ‘feeling’, from the head to the heart. Ministers urged for more personal religious experience:
Especially in the dissenting chapels ordinary working people learnt to follow Christ. They acquired a simple faith, a concern for others, an assurance of personal salvation and the hope of a better age to come; and they invited their friends and neighbours to join them.93 Many committed Anglicans had learned from the Methodists about salvation through personal faith in Christ.94 The feelings among Presbyterians differed. Many among them were suspicious towards the others outside the established churches because of their narrowness, alienation and bitterness. Staunch Irish Presbyterians considered it sheer presumption that anyone could be sure of being saved, while others made assurance of salvation the keystone of their doctrinal system.95 It was seen now that nothing truly effective could be done without the personal activity of the Holy Spirit. The CIM missionary James Hudson Taylor, looking for missionaries for China, advised them to be ordained before they went, in order to give them more respect and recognition in China from other missionaries. Sometimes this required a lot of deliberation as he found that the English Presbyterians
92. Cf. the plaque in the Pilgrim fathers church in Delfshaven (The Netherlands). Between 1627 and 1640 about 15 000 people emigrated from England to America carrying with them their Bibles and the Puritan hope to see God glorified in the new settlements in America.
93. In R.B. Dann, Father of Faith Missions. The Life and Times of Anthony Norris Groves (1795–1853) (Bath: Authentic Media, 2004), 543.
94. In Dann, Father of Faith Missions, 543.
95. In D.J. Beattie, Brethren, the Story of a Great Recovery (Kilmarnock: J. Richie Ltd, 1940), 292. About the Presbyterian church in Ireland we will learn further because Amy Carmichael’s family in Millisle was from a strong Scottish Presbyterian background.
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were too Calvinistic and the Anglicans too controlled by their bishops. The missionaries of the London Missionary Society (LMS) were of high calibre; they were lovers of books and knowledge and they worked with a reasonable degree of freedom under their society. British evangelical piety in the 18th and 19th centuries was essentially Puritan piety, as taught by preachers like Baxter, Owen, Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards and John Newton. The writings of these men plus personal ministry shaped the faith and devotion of many.
As shown earlier the spiritual need of countries beyond the British shores received more attention. After William Carey’s Enquiry,96 a stream of mission enterprises emerged. As faith became more personal, a desire for salvation of other peoples and places grew. Wars and commerce took many Englishmen far and near into the world, where they met many different peoples and languages. Had not Christ died for them, too? The Protestant churches were waking up to the reality of the big wide world and its vast spiritual need. Saved, they were now aware of eternal truth and spiritual riches, which should be proclaimed as widely in the world as possible.
After Carey left for India in 1793 ‘the day of the English-speaking peoples in overseas missions’ began.97 To support Carey the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) was formed in 1792. Three years later the LMS was founded, sponsored largely, and soon entirely, by Congregationalists. The CMS of the Anglican church followed in 1799 and the Wesleyan Missionary Society (WMS) in 1818. By that time, missionary work had spread to several countries in the Middle East, to India, south-East Asia, to the west African coastal countries and to North and South America.
We see a boost in missionary affairs when in 1856 David Livingstone was touring Britain after his epic journey on foot from the west to the east coast of Africa. The following year saw the publication of his Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. Livingstone’s exploits were recounted in churches and this provided a great stimulus for many in the younger generation. In his moving addresses, he pleaded urgently for missionaries. ‘Can the love of Christ not carry the missionary where the slave trade carries the trader?’ He closed his impressive speech before the University of Cambridge on 04 December 1857 with: ‘I cleared the path […] do you carry out the work which I have begun? I leave it with you’.98 This last sentence, a loud cry from the heart, pierced many people’s hearts. From that memorable meeting men and women came forward longing to enter missionary service. Livingstone’s effort resulted in the establishment of a mission in Africa, to be known as the ‘Universities Mission to Central Africa’. Thirty years after Livingstone’s appeal, a young Irish girl Amy Carmichael heard the Voice and obeyed, following in her master’s footsteps, never turning back, for 56 years keeping her eyes on him in faraway India. In the Far East, hundreds of young men and women, eager to spread the Gospel, undertook mission endeavour. One missionary couple held daily medical clinics and evangelistic gatherings during their honeymoon!99
At that time England was ripe for a fresh wind of spiritual vitality. Conferences held at Broadlands, the country estate of Lord and Lady Mount Temple, brought many evangelical leaders together. Here, fundamental issues of the soul were dealt with. ‘The Broadlands Conference was in fact more a “spiritual
96. W. Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen (Leicester: Ann Ireland, 1892).
97. In S. Neill, A History of Christian Missions (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1982 [1964]), 262.
98. In J.E. Chamblis, The Life and Labors of David Livingstone (Philadelphia, PA: Hubard Bros, 1875), 303–314. Also in R. Mackenzie, David Livingstone, The Truth Behind the Legend (Fearn: Christian Focus Publications, 2002), 196.
99. Like Horace and Lilias Horton Underwood, Presbyterian missionaries to Korea, during their honeymoon, an in-country journey in North Korea in 1889. clinic” than a conference in the traditional sense.’100 In particular, the 1874 summer convention was very well planned and eventually would grow into a worldwide institution, the Keswick Convention, vital to the 21st century. In London, Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle was completed in 1861, which seated 6000 people. Until his death in 1892, Charles Haddon Spurgeon dominated with his sermons the evangelical field in London. He was known in every corner of England and many Christians abroad knew him. His printed sermons sold over 25 000 copies each week and were translated into 20 languages.101 As a result of the Moody and Sankey Evangelical Revival in 1873 and 1874, the various strands of the ‘holiness’ movement, and the start of the Keswick Convention in 1875, many underwent a religious experience which changed their lives as they gave up everything and went as missionaries to the East or to Africa. Famous were the ‘Cambridge Seven’, among them C.T. Studd the famous cricketer, who gave up a life of leisure, promising to invest in the bank of Heaven and dedicating themselves to ‘saving souls’, choosing a life under the obedience of Christ. The Cambridge Seven, as the press labelled them, were ‘one of the grand gestures of 19th century missions’. A ‘dream team’ composed of athletes, military officers and people with wealth and intellect.102
For those who are not aware of the story of the Cambridge Seven, it is one of the great stories in missionary history. In the 1880s, Taylor and others of the CIM became keenly aware that they desperately needed men who had not only passion, but also leadership and organisational abilities if they were going to reach and preserve the harvest in China. They began praying for ‘Cambridge’ men. In 1885, D.L. Moody was preaching at Cambridge and seven of its most prominent students were converted to Christ and heard the call to go to China. Within a few years of their departure to work with the CIM, the size of the CIM quadrupled! Leaving England on 05 February 1885, the Cambridge Seven sailed for China; their whole-hearted consecration to the service of Christ awakened worldwide reactions. They stirred the evangelical world and gave a new mission impulse. ‘The characteristic, very human slump in interest a few months after the Seven had left Britain, was offset by continuing enthusiasm in the universities and colleges’ in England as well in America.103 American universities were feeling it: in Princeton Robert Wilder and John Foreman lit the torch of missionary flame, soon to set on fire the Student Volunteer Movement, which in 1888 adopted its watchword: the evangelization of this world in this generation.104
The involvement of women in mission
Between 1880 and 1920, the expansion in numbers and activity on the part of Western churches reached its climax. The expansion of overseas missions in that period is one of the chief causes of
100. M. Huffmann Rockness, A Passion for the Impossible. The Life of Lilias Trotter (Grand Rapids: Discovery House, 2003 [1999]), 59.
101. In C.H. Spurgeon, Sermons on Prayer (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2007), XIV.
102. Cf. Huffmann Rockness, A Passion for the Impossible, 96; also A. Austin, ‘Missions Dream Team,’ Christian History XV (1996): 52, 19.
103. A.J. Broomhall, It is not Death to Die! Hudson Taylor & China’s Open Century, Book 7 (Sevenoaks: Hodder & Stoughton and the OMF, 1989), 39. The year 1887 saw the completion of sending out one hundred new missionaries for the CIM to China.
104. According to I.H. Murray this slogan was a direct product of Finney’s theology. W.R. Nicoll believed that the phrase was born of ‘a young impatience’, and commented: ‘This feverish, superficial conception of things springs from that “irreligious solicitude for God” to which Christian men are strangely addicted, and more than ever in this pragmatic age’ (I.H. Murray, Revival & Revivalism (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1996), 413).
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this development. In particular, the growth of the involvement of women in mission work is remarkable. In the last two decades of the 19th century, the call to single women began to gain momentum:
The warmth and the flexibility of the Evangelical movement, which transcended denominational and national boundaries, was also the key to the rapid acceptance of the ministry of women in overseas mission work as the century progressed.105 Evangelicals preached vital, living religion: Christians should examine their lives, seek continually holiness, and above all be useful in eternal spiritual terms and in seeing and assisting others in spiritual and basic life needs. Not only the songs of the Sankey–Moody duo, but also the hymns of Frances Ridley Havergal (1836–1879), Fanny Crosby (1824–1915) and Elizabeth Prentiss (1818–1878), was Christ’s saving love brought deep into the hearts and minds of the evangelicals. Christian poets like Elizabeth Barret Browning (1806–1861) and Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) were read in many homes throughout the country. In many of the hymns and poems the mission enterprise was hailed and they were the cause of many Christian men and women hearing in them God’s voice to go into the mission field.106
A.J. Broomhall, the historian of the CIM, remarked that 1875 was ‘the point at which the tide of all missions to China turned […] The dawn of 1878 brought in the age of Protestant missionary expansion’. Broomhall’s publication The Evangelization of the World influenced John R. Mott. Some years after the publication the title of this book became part of the motto of the Student Volunteer Movement: ‘the evangelization of the world in this generation’.107
Although many became involved in mission work, still the majority of the church leaders and church members were only focused on their own local church affairs. A missionary from south India on furlough at the beginning the 20th century was not so enthusiastic about England’s spiritual situation:
He did not always find, even among true Christians, the depth for which he looked; there was less intensity of purpose, and a greater worldliness than he had expected, and a startling increase in pleasure-loving and luxurious living. […] It’s as if people were so afraid of intolerance that they are beginning to have no convictions at all. […] I want something far deeper than I find here. […] One feels a stranger in England in spite of relations and friends. […] God save us poor English folk.108 In the Victorian era modern people’s minds turned to the ideals of honour, honesty and integrity, university honour codes like ‘women and children first’ and well-mannered behaviour. This era represented the birth of the modern mindset, and what was honoured seriously in their way of life developed in response to technological, sociological and economic factors that are still with us today. History does not always mean distance, objectivity or relativity. That can be its meaning, but there is another art of historical encounter, which is close proximity. We see that in the 19th century women’s
105. J. West, ‘The Role of the Woman Missionary, 1880-1914,’ in Lucas 21 & 22 (June & December, 1996): 1. 106. See R.A. Tucker & W. Liefeld, Daughters of the Church. Women and Ministry from New Testament Times to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1987), 245–327; R. Tucker, Guardians of the Great Commission. The Story of Women in Modern Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1988); Griffiths, Not Less Than Everything; Kommers, ‘A flame of sacred love’.
107. I think that this watchword was not a prophecy that the world would be evangelised in the present generation. It is the affirmation that it might be and should be so evangelised in the sense that every generation of Christians is responsible for evangelising the world of that present generation, which cannot be realised by human activities and efforts. The conversion of men is a work of grace and is in God’s hands.
108. In Walker of Tinnevelly, 434, 435, 439, 441. perspectives widened drastically. However, motherhood was still glorified and mothers deemed most responsible for the passing on of religion and morality to future generations. Married or single, women often became leaders in the reform movements:
The office of mother is the highest a human being can hold. On its faithful and intelligent performance hangs the hope of the world. Next the sacred office of the mother in her family, who takes the children God had given her and trains them for His service on earth and His Kingdom in heaven, comes that of the Mother in Israel, the faithful female Missionary, who gathers under her loving care the lost lambs of Christ’s flock.109 If we want to see Amy Carmichael as the person she really was, we have to discover her in the reality of the last four decades of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries and – more important by far – her life with the living God. Seeing her in these two worlds, the fascination of the past gives way to a fascination for the future.
109. In S.J. Hale, ‘Women’s Record: Sketches of all the distinguished women from the creation to A.D. 1854.’ in Internet Archive/texts (London: Harper, 1855), 899. Also Severance, Feminine Threads, 258.
‘The Vows of God are on me’, and for life. From the Fight, 61.
These folk I find have all been given a gracious, teachable
simplicity of obedience and love to Christ. J.G. Miller about the Ulster Christians
in A Day’s March Nearer Home (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth
Trust, 2010), 152.