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An American Errand into the South African Wilderness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Norman A. Etherington
Norman A. Etherington
Affiliation:
lecturer in history in theUniversity of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia
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Extract

The flowering of foreign missions in nineteenth-century America owed so much to evangelical Protestantism in Europe, that historians looking for uniquely American features in missionary enterprises have had very little to go on. Historians who have attempted to identify the uniqueness of American missions have generally seized upon the links between the missionary spirit and ideas of manifest destiny. Ralph Gabriel taught a generation of historians to see American missions as one aspect of a “mission of America” with ramifications that went far beyond preaching to the heathen. Perry Miller traced the roots of the mission of America to the Plymouth Colony itself and rewrote the history of American development in terms of an “perrand into the wilderness.” Nineteenth-century foreign missions were for Miller the most typical expression of national self-consciousness.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 1970 , pp. 62 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1970

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References

1. Gabriel, Ralph, publisher, The Course of American Democratic Thought (New York: Ronald Printing Co., 1940), pp. 22–5.Google Scholar

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13. Much of the mission's theological conservatism can be traced back to the East Windsor Theological Institute, which trained more of the early Zulu missionaries than any other institution.

14. Lewis Grout, “The Influence of Republican Institutions Upon National Intellect,” 1841, Yale Manuscripts, Sterling Library, Yale University.

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22. Ibid.

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36. Aldin Grout to Anderson, Umvoti, December 24, 1852. ABC: 15.4.

37. Mellen to Anderson, Inanda, November 26, 1860. ABC: 15.4.

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