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Show games, such as The African Picture Game; What Next?, which had thirty-six cards, four series of nine each devoted to famous missionaries; A Missionary Tour of India, like snakes and ladders; Missionary Outpost, ‘an instructive round-game for children’; missionary jigsaws and painting-books, and, for adults, Missionary Lotto. \n Catholic countries there were elaborate money raising schemes, run by convent schools, by which schoolgirls could buy stamps and ‘adopt’ African orphans. The climax of missionary expectations coincided with the climax of European imperialism, and it was very widely supposed that the entire world would be Christianized in the process of being westernized - that is, incorporated politically, economically, or at any rate culturally, in a system which was still wholly identified with Christendom. It is this optimistic background of global predominance which helps to explain the triumphal ism of the age. For it is important to realize that there were two kinds of triumphalism. As we have seen, there was the populist triumphal ism of the reinvigorated papacy, whose new victories in the missionary field were seen as adumbrating an ultimate - if still far distant reinstallation of Rome as the world centre of a ubiquitous Christian creed; every baptized black and yellow baby was bringing that inevitable day nearer. But there was also, during these decades, a species of Protestant triumphalism, linked closely to the huge industrial paramount of the Protestant powers, to their burgeoning economic and political empires, and to the very widespread conviction that Protestant theology and moral teaching were intimately, indeed organically, linked to worldly achievement. The picture we have, then, is of two forms of Christianity struggling, peaceably but persistently, for a world religious supremacy which both believed was inevitable. Nowhere was this conviction more strongly held than in the United States. The American Christian Republic was a gigantic success. It was a success because it was, essentially, Protestant; failure was evidence of moral unworthiness. In the 1870s, Henry Ward Beecher used to tell his congregation in New York: 'Looking comprehensively through city and town and village and country, the general truth will stand, that no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault - unless it be his sin. . . there is enough and to spare thrice over; and if men have not enough, it is owing to the want of provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality and wise saving. This is the general truth.’ And a related general truth was that God's will was directly related to the destiny of a country where success breeding virtue was predominant. The dynamic of Protestant triumphalism was American triumphalism. George Bancroft, in his History of the United States (1876 edition) began: 'It is the object of the present work to explain. . he steps by which a favoring providence, calling our institutions into being, has conducted the country to its present happiness and glory.’ Was it not, as Jonathan Edwards had termed it, 'the principal kingdom of the Reformation’? Sooner or later the world would follow suit - it was urged to do so, in 1843, by the American missionary Robert Baird, in his Religion in America, projecting the principal of Protestant voluntarism on to a global frame. History and intervention list theology were blended to produce a new kind of patriotic inillenarianism, as in Leonard Woolsey Bacon's History of American Christianity (1897): 'By a prodigy of divine providence, the secret of the ages (that a new world lay beyond the sea) had been kept from premature disclosure. . . . If the discovery of America had been achieved. . . even a single century earlier, the Christianity to be transplanted to the western world would have been that of the Church of Europe at its lowest stage of decadence.’ Hence he saw ‘great providential preparations as for some "divine event" still hidden behind the curtain that is about to rise on the new century.’ The ‘divine event' could only be, in some form, the Christianization of the world according to American standards. Hence in the period 1880-1914 America, too, developed its own form of Christian imperialism, linked generally to missionary endeavor but sometimes embodying armed Christian - indeed Protestant - force. In the McKinley-Roosevelt era, the Protestant churches were vociferous supporters of American expansion, especially at the expense of Spain, since they saw it as a God-determined process by which "Remish superstition’ was being replaced by ‘Christian civilization’. President McKinley justified the 131 |