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Show On November 13, 1622, the Virginia Company of London, then engaged in opening up the Atlantic Coast of North America, held a feast at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall. The subscription was three shillings a head: ‘And for that at such great feasts venison is esteemed a most necessary compliment, the Court hath thought fit that letters be addressed in the name of the Company unto such noblemen and gentlemen as are of this society to request this favor at their hands, and with all their presence at the said supper.' Before the feast, the Company listened to a sermon at St Michael's Cornhill, delivered by the Dean of St Paul's, John Donne. Dean Donne told the four hundred well-to-do merchants present that their object in crossing the Atlantic should not be so much the amassing of wealth as the recovery of souls, ‘Act over the Acts of the Apostles; be you a light to the gentiles, that sit in darkness. . . God taught us to make ships, not to transport ourselves, but to transport Him.’. Let them all be missionaries, he concluded, ‘and you shall have made this island, which is but the suburbs of the' old world, a bridge, a gallery to the new: to join all to that world that shall never grow old, the Kingdom of Heaven.’ We have no means of knowing how seriously the Virginia merchants took Donne's exhortations to act in the spirit of the first Apostles. The universalist urge which had animated the early Christians had never wholly disappeared. But it had become inextricably mingled with other motives and often completely subordinated to them. Moreover, it appeared to have lost some of its dynamism. In the seventh century, Christianity's expansion to the south and east was sealed off by the various Monophysite heresies, and by Islam, which constituted, and indeed still constitutes, an almost impenetrable barrier to Christian progress. Byzantium abandoned its efforts in these directions, except in pursuit of purely political and military aims, and sent missions only to the northern pagans of Russia. The crusaders would not, or could not, proselytize in Africa or Asia, or even assist existing Christian communities to maintain themselves. The Latin mercantile cities were not primarily interested in converts, and certainly made few. From the early thirteenth century, the Teutonic Knights, assisted by the Dominicans, undertook the systematic conversion of Prussia and the Baltic. Force was used. One of the treaties specified: 'All who are not baptized must receive the rite within a month.’ Those who declined were banished from the company of Christians, and any who relapsed were to be reduced to slavery. Pagan rites were banned, monogamy enforced, and churches built. Neophytes were obliged to attend church on Sundays and feast-days and provide support for the clergy; and converts had to observe the Lenten fast, confess at least once a year and take Communion at Easter. But the prime object was conquest and settlement. So long as it instructed the pagans, the order was authorized to possess any lands it conquered; and when the new territories were divided into bishoprics, the bishops received a third. Thus paganism was finally eliminated from Europe, the process being completed in the last decades of the fourteenth century when Lithuania was settled. But during this long process, which had begun early in the sixth century, two propositions had become deeply rooted in Christian minds, both alien to Christian teaching or indeed to the practice of the early Church. The first was the association of conversion with conquest, or at any rate with economic penetration; the second was the identification of Christianity, or Christendom, with the European continent and its races. Just as the Latin crusaders had treated the eastern Christians (even when they were in communion with Rome) as inferiors, or even as enemies, so there was a tendency to regard non-European converts as second-class Christians. This may help to explain the failure of the earliest European missions. For there were some, even though their ostensibly religious purpose was combined with the political and military object of weakening Moslem power. There were a number of Franciscan missions in both Central Asia and India in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with the aim of reinforcing the semi-Christian element among the Mongol tribes. Early in the fourteenth century an ‘Archbishop of the East' was established in or near Peking, and a team of fifty friars was dispatched there in 1335. But the scheme was never very successful; and it collapsed when the Chinese retook Peking from the Mongols before the end of the century. Missions to Moslem and pagan 92 |