their potentialities. Whereas the Acts of the Apostles, for example, while drawing attention to gentile wickedness, never refers to cultural and economic inferiority of a kind to make the reception of Christianity difficult or the emergence of fully-fledged Christians impossible, the European evangelists tended to feel themselves confronted with a different, and inferior, kind of being. The New Testament seemed to give them no guidance on this point. Charles Grant, who cannot fairly be accused of prejudice against non-European races, who was one of the prime organizers of the anti-slavery campaign, and who strongly urged the case for missions, formed a very pessimistic view during the many years he spent in India. Writing in 1797, just eight years before Carey, he admitted: '. . .we cannot avoid recognizing in the people of Indostan a race of man lamentably degenerate and base; retaining but a feeble sense of moral obligation; yet obstinate in their disregard of what they know to be right, governed by malevolent and licentious passions, strongly exemplifying the effects produced on society by a great and general corruption of manners, and sunk in misery by their vices.’ Here, one feels, there is an almost total confusion between economic, cultural and moral ‘inferiority’. This was very common. The missionaries were not anthropologists or sociologists; they found it exceedingly difficult to think in terms of relative scales of moral values. They did not see EuropeanChristian notions of right and wrong as the indices of a particular culture and society but as absolutes, Springing from divine revelation. A man's conscience was a kind of direct line to the Deity. Everyone had such a thing. The Baptist George Grenfell wrote of the Congo: ‘The chief characteristics of the Bolobo people appear to be drunkenness, immorality and cruelty, out of each of which vice spring actions almost too fearful to describe. In hearing of these, anyone living out here almost gets to feel like calling the people terrible brutes and wretches, rather than poor miserable heathen. The light of their consciences must condemn them in most of their sins.’ Another missionary, Holman Bentley, commented on cannibalism: ‘To this awful depth have these children of the Heavenly Father fallen, until they have indeed become children of the devil. . . . This is how they live up to their light! Again we say, if the light that is in them be darkness, how great is that darkness!’ lt was hard indeed for missionaries with such feelings, and they formed by far the majority, to visualize the emergence of a predominantly native clergy, or indeed to visualize natives as fully-fledged Christians at all. They were seen to approximate to Christianity in so far as they successfully imitated European modes of behavior. Thus missionaries found themselves exporting not so much Christianity as European or western culture - including, of course, its moral culture. The idea of Christianity as a series of matrices, capable of being applied to all societies, and indeed to all individuals, tended to be smothered in the cultural packaging. When it came to selecting native converts for training as clergy - and very few missionaries objected to the idea in principle - the most Europeanized tended to be chosen. Naturally, the influence they had among the unconverted diminished pari passu with their departure from native norms; they were, not unjustly, regarded as poor imitations of European missionaries. Thus experiments in training native clergy were liable to be classified as failures, or as not justifying the amount of trouble and debate they involved. These points are worth a digression because it is important to realize that the methods adopted by the early German missionaries in India, though they became standard, always remained subjects of debate. Missionaries differed greatly and sometimes violently among themselves on virtually every issue. There was no such thing as a missionary ‘attitude’, and it is hazardous indeed to generalize about missionary history. All one can do is to try to indicate certain salient features. Of course, missionary effort tended to reflect the level of religious commitment and enthusiasm in the Christian West. The Catholic missions undoubtedly decayed after the Treaty of Westphalia and the end of religious warfare. During the eighteenth century they virtually ceased in most areas, especially after the dissolution of the Jesuits led to the ‘enforced withdrawal of over 3,000 of the best field-workers, and by far the most efficient international organization. In the eighteenth century, then, the Protestants were left with virtually a clear field. They were slow to take 122