American seizure of the Philippines - where Philip I had imposed Catholicism by the sword » in Christian evangelical terms: '! am not ashamed to tell you, Gentlemen, that | went down on my Knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance that one night. And one night late it came to me this way... . There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.’ It was among the evangelical sects, with their predominance in the missionary field, that the consciousness of a national or racial destiny was strongest. In 1885, when the movement was just getting under way, Josiah Strong, General-Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, argued in Our Country: its Possible Future and its Present Crisis: It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is here training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the World's future. . . the final competition of races for which the AngloSaxon is being schooled. . . this race of unequalled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it - the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization - having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. And can anyone doubt that the result of this competition of the races will be the survival of the fittest?’ In 1893, in The New Era: or, The Coming Kingdom, he pushed the argument further. ‘Is it not reasonable to believe that this race is destined to dispossess many weaker ones, assimilate others, and mould the remainder, until in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind?’ such racial theories were not uncommon in the 1890s: they reflected popular misconceptions of Darwin. What was significant in the United States was that they radiated from a Christian context, and could be, and were, presented in less strident and offensive terms as part of a scheme to Christianize the world. Just as America was now the leading missionary force, so the Anglo-Saxons in particular, but the white races as a whole, would succeed in bringing to reality Christ's vision of nearly two millennia before - a universal faith. The nineteenth century had been a period of such astonishing, and on the whole welcome, progress that even this great dream now seemed possible. In the 1880s, the young American Methodist John Raleigh Mott had coined the phrase ‘The evangelizing of the world in one generation.’ He repeated it in 1910 at Edinburgh, when the First World Missionary Conference, of which he was chairman, met to give ecumenical shape, and a specific program of action, to Protestant triumphalism. Here was the modern and Protestant alternative gathering to the Vatican Council of 1870. Of course, by evangelization in one generation Mott did not mean actual conversion; he meant that Christian preaching would be made available to everyone in the world during that period - the rest was up to the spirit. And the proposition, he argued, was hard-headed. It is true that the Catholics and the Greek Orthodox churches had boycotted the conference. But the rest of Christianity was there - including eighteen of the 'new' churches from missionary territories. Except in Tibet and Afghanistan, two places which, it was hoped, would soon be opened, missionaries were at work in every country in the world. The discoveries of tropical medicine had made it possible for white Christian preachers to be present in strength even in the harshest climates. There were now more missionaries than ever before. There were as many recruits as could be handled. Finance was no problem. The language barriers were being progressively removed. The New Testament had been translated into all the main living languages, and the entire Bible would soon follow. The worst opposition, as in China and Japan, had been broken down. There were converts in every single area, and from all religions; no missionary now stood alone. There were 45,000 missionaries, backed up by more than ten times that number of national workers, and a wonderful generation of native Christian leaders was beginning to emerge. The tone of the summary was optimistic; but much of its factual content was solid and unarguable. It did not seem wholly absurd, at Edinburgh in 1910, to predict that the work of St 132