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Exporting Godliness: The Church, Education and ‘Higher Civilization’ in the British Empire from the late Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2019

Mark Chapman
Mark Chapman*
Affiliation:
Ripon College, Cuddesdon
*
*Ripon College, Cuddesdon, Oxford, OX44 9EX. E-mail: Mark.chapman@rcc.ac.uk.
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Abstract

This article discusses the impact of the educational method pioneered in the English public schools on the development of education in Anglican schools in the British empire, with a particular focus on the Indian subcontinent from the turn of the twentieth century until the outbreak of the First World War. It discusses how the focus of missionary activity changed from a desire for overt evangelism into a sense of the transmission of moral and ethical values though a system of education in the Christian virtues. An educational understanding of salvation began to supplant the doctrinal. This is connected with the thinking on ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ civilizations of the period. A central focus is on the preparatory work for, and discussions around, the Pan-Anglican Congress of 1908 and the role played by Bishop H. H. Montgomery.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 55: CHURCHES AND EDUCATION , June 2019 , pp. 381 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2019 

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References

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2 See Bellenoit, Hayden J. A., Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860–1920 (Abingdon and New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

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7 See, for example, Berkwitz, Stephen C., ‘Hybridity, Parody, and Contempt: Buddhist Responses to Christian Missions in Sri Lanka’, in Sharkey, Heather J., ed., Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia (Syracuse, NY, 2013), 99–120Google Scholar; Harris, Elizabeth, Theravada Buddhism and the British Encounter: Religious, Missionary, and Colonial Experience in Nineteenth-Century Sri Lanka (London, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hettiarachchi, Shanthikumar, Faithing the Native Soil: Dilemmas and Aspirations of post-colonial Buddhists and Christians in Sri Lanka (Colombo, 2012)Google Scholar. More generally, see Cracknell, Kenneth, Justice, Courtesy and Love: Missionaries and Theologians Encountering the World Religions, 1846–1914 (London, 1995), 181–260Google Scholar; Warren, Missionary Movement, 119–38.

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24 Ibid. 49.

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36 Montgomery, H. H., ed., Mankind and the Church, being an Attempt to estimate the Contribution of Great Races to the Fulness of the Church of God, 2nd impression (London, 1909; first publ. 1907)Google Scholar.

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40 See Stanley, Brian, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910, SHCM (Grand Rapids, MI, 2009)Google Scholar. On education, see Jensz, Felicity, ‘The 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference and Comparative Colonial Education’, HE 47 (2018), 399–414Google Scholar. Commission III of the conference was dedicated to ‘Education in Relation to the Christianization of National Life’.

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43 Pan-Anglican Congress, 7 vols (London, 1908).

44 Stuart A. Donaldson, ‘The Rationale of Foreign Missions’, ibid. 5: 5–8, at 6.

45 Ibid. 6–7.

46 See Gerald Studdert-Kennedy, ‘Westcott, George Herbert (1862–1928)’, ODNB.

47 See idem, ‘Westcott, Foss (1863–1949)’, ODNB.

48 Westcott, ed., Life of Westcott, 1: 190.

49 Ibid. 235.

50 G. H. Westcott, ‘General Statement, Missionary Methods (2) Educational 1’, Pan-Anglican Congress, 5: 29–31, at 29.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid. 30.

53 Pan-Anglican Congress 5: 161.

54 Jeffrey Cox, ‘Whitehead, Henry (1853–1947)’, ODNB.

55 Henry Whitehead, ‘Village Populations V. Educated Classes’, in Pan-Anglican Congress, 5: 150–3, at 151.

56 Ibid. 153.

57 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the several Grounds of Prudence, Morality and Religion, illustrated by select Passages from our elder Divines, especially from Archbishop Leighton (London, 1825)Google Scholar, 195 (‘Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion’).

58 Bishop of Chota Nagpur [Henry Whitehead], Pan-Anglican Congress, 5: 153–7, at 153.

59 Ibid. 154.

60 Ibid. 156.

61 Ibid. 157.

62 Pan-Anglican Congress 5: 158.

63 On Andrews, see Lockley, Philip, ‘Social Anglicanism and Empire: C. F. Andrews's Christian Socialism’, in Brown, Stewart J., Methuen, Charlotte and Spicer, Andrew, eds, The Church and Empire, SCH 54 (Cambridge, 2018), 407–21Google Scholar.

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69 Ibid. 7.

70 On Wigram, see Mehta, Ved, Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles (New Haven, CT, 1976), 240Google Scholar. Returning to England, Wigram went on to become CMS secretary for India (1915–29) and CMS secretary (1929–32).

71 Wigram, E. F. E., Equipment of Native Workers: India, Pan-Anglican Papers, Pamphlet S.D. S (k) (London, 1908), 4–5Google Scholar.

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73 Ibid. 3.

74 On Copleston, see Michael Laird, ‘Copleston, Reginald Stephen (1845–1925)’, ODNB. Copleston was married to Edith Chenevix Trench, whose father, Richard Trench (1807–86), archbishop of Dublin from 1864, had set up the first higher educational establishment for women in Ireland in 1866. From his Cambridge days, Richard Trench had been, and remained, a close friend of F. D. Maurice, another educational pioneer who displayed an interest in other world religions.

75 See his Boyle Lectures, The Religions of the World and their Relations to Christianity (London, 1847).

76 R. S. Copleston, ‘Presentation of the Christian Faith to the Buddhist’, Pan-Anglican Congress, 5: 177–81, at 178.

77 Ibid.

78 R. S. Copleston, The Missionary's Equipment: India, Pan-Anglican Papers, Pamphlet S. D. 5(a) (London, 1908), 1.

79 Ibid. 3.

80 Ibid.

81 Copleston, ‘Presentation’, 181.

82 Ibid. 274.

83 A. G. Fraser, ‘The Problem before Educational Missions in Ceylon’, Pan-Anglican Papers, no. S. D. 2 (c). These are bound into volume 5. Fraser later chaired a commission on village education in India for the Conference of Missionary Societies in Great Britain and Ireland: see Fraser, A. G., Village Education in India: The Report of a Commission of Inquiry (London, 1920)Google Scholar.

84 Fraser, ‘Problem’, 1–2.

85 Ibid. 3.

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid. 4.

88 Ibid. 5.

89 Ibid. 7.

90 Ibid. 8.

91 A description of the chapel can be found in ‘Trinity College Chapel’, online at: <https://www.trinitycollege.lk/chapel/>, and there are photographs in ‘Building the Trinity College Chapel’, at: <https://www.trinitycollege.lk/chapel/building-of-the-chapel/> both last accessed 20 November 2018.

92 This understanding was even adopted in Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant: Africa was now proclaimed to be a responsibility undertaken in the name of higher civilization, with ‘the tutelage of such peoples … entrusted to advanced nations’: Betts, R. F. (rev. M. Asiwaju): ‘Methods and Institutions of European Domination’, in Boahen, A. Adu, ed., UNESCO General History of Africa, 7: Africa under Colonial Domination 1880–1935 (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 314Google Scholar.

93 See also D. Chanaiwa, ‘African Initiatives and Resistance in Southern Africa’, ibid. 194–220, at 198; Wole Soyinka , ‘The Arts in Africa during the Period of Colonial Rule’, ibid. 539–64, at 563; R. D. Ralston, ‘Africa and the New World’, ibid. 746–81, at 780–1.

94 See Esme Cleall's work on medical missions in India and the pathologizing of heathenism: Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840–1900 (Basingstoke, 2012).

95 Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine’, 261.

96 Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 339.

97 Temple, Frederick, ‘The Education of the World’, in Essays and Reviews, 10th edn (London, 1862; first publ. 1860), 1–58Google Scholar, at 52.