Evangelist at the Gate: Robert Morrison's Views on Mission

2012 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 306-330
Author(s):  
FUK-TSANG YING

The arrival of Robert Morrison in Macau on 4 September 1807 marked the beginning of the nineteenth-century Protestant missionary movement in China. The most familiar and important legacy of Morrison is his translation of the Bible into Chinese and the compilation of A dictionary of the Chinese language. When Morrison concluded his work in 1832, only ten Chinese had been baptised. However, the true measure of his accomplishment is not to be sought in the harvest of souls, but in the foundations that laid for future work. As a pioneer missionary in the nineteenth century, Morrison lived in an alien ‘heathen’ world for twenty-five years. How did he hold on to his evangelistic vision and passion in such an adverse and unfavourable environment? This essay aims to sketch Robert Morrison's views on mission, focusing on the way in which he responded to traditional Chinese culture and religion and the huge political obstacles in early nineteenth-century China.

Author(s):  
Brian Stanley

In any survey of influential British missionary thinkers, Scottish names would occupy a prominent place. The Scottish contribution was not confined to those who served with the missions of the Presbyterian churches: some influential Scottish missionaries served with English societies, and some were not even Presbyterians. Nevertheless, five generalizations can be offered: (1) Scots Presbyterians opted to do mission through ecclesiastical structures, rather than through voluntary societies. (2) Scottish Presbyterian missions aimed to bring the entire life of Christian communities under the rule of Christ. (3) Scottish missionaries tended to insist that education was integral to the missionary task. (4) Scottish missionaries trained in the early nineteenth century drew deeply from the Scottish Enlightenment. (5) From the late nineteenth century, Scottish (like English) missionary theology was affected by philosophical idealism, though the mid-twentieth-century ascendancy of Barthianism may have helped to sustain the Scottish missionary movement in the turbulent post-war environment.


1975 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Chandler

The “holy man's” (nak sel) rebellion against the Vietnamese that broke out in 1820 along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border is the best-documented one of its kind in pre-colonial Cambodia, and makes a useful addition to the literature of such revolts in Buddhist Southeast Asia. Its importance in Cambodian terms lies in its anti-Vietnamese character, the participation in its ranks of Buddhist monks, the collusion of Cambodian authorities, and the way in which these themes foreshadow Cambodian political thinking, before and after the arrival of the French.


2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Bargheer

The article analyzes the emergence of moral concern for animals in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England. This concern was fuelled by a developing aristocratic discourse on civility that was accompanied by a drastic increase in the factual visibility of violence inflicted on animals in the growing cities. In opposition to interpretations based on the concepts of discipline and distinction, the article elaborates the way in which the emergence of moral concern for animals was class-structured without being class-interested.


1995 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Alexander

The name of the Romantic painter and printmaker John Martin has long been associated with the Brontës. His pictures hung on the Brontë Parsonage walls; the Brontë children both copied his images in paint and transposed them into "print" in their tiny handsewn magazines. His sublime landscapes and gigantic imaginary scenes of ancient architecture-an amalgamation of Classical, Egyptian, and Indian styles-provided unlimited scope for the young architects of Glass Town and Angria. Yet the dynamic relationship between Martin's lurid canvases and Charlotte Brontë's writings extends beyond the simple use of pictorialism. In his work she found an analogue for her own frustrating experience, and her response to his work significantly contributed to her personal development as an artist. This essay attempts to trace the way in which Brontë's writings register her early-nineteenth-century response to Martin's work in a gradual shift from her initial enthusiasm for his landscapes toward a distrust of his illusive promises of grandeur.


2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 409-429
Author(s):  
Benjamin Fischer

In the first few decadesof the nineteenth century, the experience of missionaries among peoples as diverse as the ancient civilizations of India, the highly organized Zulu kingdoms, and the cannibal tribes of the South Seas had sparked a national debate concerning whether or not the “civilization of the heathen” was necessary before they could be converted, or whether Christianity would be the best means of civilizing them. Unresolved as far as public policy was concerned, this question entered discussions of the 1835 Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), a committee convened to address problems arising between British settlers and indigenous communities, including important trade sites in Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the Pacific. As with several other areas where significant British imperial pressure never took the form of direct colonial rule, the trade ports in China fell outside the committee's explicit considerations. Along with forbidding foreign settlements, Chinese culture did not fit the terms or assumptions of the committee's conversation. Since the first Jesuit mission to China in the late sixteenth century, there had been little doubt in Europe that Chinese civilization was far advanced. As a tightly controlled bureaucratic state confident of its own position as the Middle Kingdom of the world, China simply did not work within the discourse of civilization. This essay explores one attempt to adjust the terms of that British discourse in order to accommodate a civilized China.


1994 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Pickering ◽  
Alex Tyrrell

Few places in early nineteenth-century Britain had as grim a reputation as the Manchester suburb of Ancoats. In this concentration of “dark, satanic mills” and festering slums were some of the worst social problems of the Industrial Revolution. Angus Reach, a journalist with the Morning Chronicle, who visited Ancoats in the late 1840s, described it as “entirely an operative colony” containing “some of the most squalid-looking streets, inhabited by swarms of the most squalid-looking people which I have ever seen.” While making his way through this “labyrinth,” Reach saw no promise of anything better. Even the handful of chapels seemed to complement the scene of hopelessness; in a pathetically futile attempt to carry the eye up to a vision of something better their “infinitesimal” Gothic arches and ornaments only served to reinforce “the grimy nakedness” of the surrounding factories.


1985 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini

When in the summer of 1902 Helen Bosanquet published a book called The Strength of the People she sent a copy to Alfred Marshall. On the face of it, this might seem a rather unpromising thing to have done. Mrs Bosanquet, an active exponent of the Charity Organisation Society's ‘casework’ approach to social problems, had frequently expressed her dissatisfaction with what she regarded as the misleading abstractions of orthodox economics, and in her book she had even ventured a direct criticism of a point in Marshall's Principles. Marshall, then Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and at the peak of his reputation as the most authoritative exponent of neo-classical economics in Britain, was, to say the least, sensitive to criticism, and he had, moreover, publicly taken issue with the C.O.S. on several previous occasions. But perhaps Mrs Bosanquet knew what she was about after all. In her book she had taken her text from the early nineteenth-century Evangelical Thomas Chalmers on the way in which character determines circumstances rather than vice versa, and, as the historian of the C.O.S. justly remarks, her book ‘is a long sermon on the importance of character in making one family rich and another poor’. Although Marshall can hardly have welcomed the general strictures on economics, he was able to reassure Mrs Bosanquet that ‘in the main’ he agreed with her: ‘I have always held’, he wrote to her, ‘that poverty and pain, disease and death are evils of greatly less importance than they appear, except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character’.


2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Beech

This article analyses notions of ‘transfer’ in the literature of comparative education, searching for continuities and discontinuities in the way that the process of educational transfer has been construed. The analysis shows that the theme of transfer has been fundamental in comparative education from the early nineteenth century until the present day. Although some of the questions addressed in the field since its origins are still crucial today, it is suggested in the final part of the study that these problems should now be addressed in a world in which educational space has become more complex, as supra-national and sub-national actors become increasingly important in the production and reproduction of specialised knowledge about education.


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