The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens

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СКАЧАТЬ Indians asked missionaries four years later, John Eliot told his readers, “You might perceive how these dry bones begin to gather flesh and sinnews.”⁵⁰ As he implied the presence of a divine spirit at work, Eliot sounded like an anxious parent fretting over a sickly child. He emphasized this parent-child relationship in letters to Robert Boyle, president of the New England Company from 1662 until his death in 1691. Eliot began a letter of 1684 by addressing Boyle as “Right honorable nursing Father” and then wrote, “Your hungry Indians doe still cry unto your honor for the milk of the word in the whole book of God, & for the bread of life.”⁵¹ The description of Boyle as a “nursing Father,” a term traditionally applied to monarchs in allusion to Isaiah’s prophecy, “Thou … shalt suck the breast of kings” (60:16), also echoes references to nursing from the biblical epistles. These references stress spiritual immaturity, as when the epistle to the Hebrews notes, “[E]very one who useth milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness” (Heb. 5:12), even as they assert a desire for spiritual nurturance in response to 1 Peter’s advice, “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word” (2:2). In both private correspondence and published fund-raising texts, the heathen soul was described as an emaciated or infantile body nurtured by the English.

      As poet laureate for the City of London, Elkanah Settle also discriminated between a nurturing British mission and the cruel incursions of Catholics. In the preface to his Pindaric Poem on the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1711), he praised Queen Anne for supporting the SPG’s plans to establish a mission among the Mohawks by distinguishing her “bloodless Crosade” from medieval crusades and Catholic missions: “Yes, Royal Christian Heroine, You send Your Deputed Champions over to those pitied Infidels, on a more sacred Expedition; whilst by thus truly performing the Vicegerency [sic] of God in so shining and so merciful a Charity to so many Thousand wandring Souls, You set up the Standart of Your own British Cross amongst them, not like the Romish nor Spanish Cruelty, for the sacrificing of so many innocent Lives; but laying them the Foundation of your own Eternal One.”⁵² British mission is described here as a curative endeavor. While the Spanish sacrifice America’s innocents, the British minister to them. Under the guidance of their benevolent queen they express their pity through charity, alleviating the effects of Spain’s empire.

      Settle relied on Anne’s gender as well as her domestic initiatives to create an image of British benevolence. Howard Weinbrot has shown that in their efforts to imitate but morally supersede classical poetic models, many eighteenth-century odes supplanted the glory of Rome’s military empire with a British empire of peaceful commerce. “Many [odes] celebrate not Marlborough’s victory at, say, Ramillies or Blenheim, but Queen Anne’s arms as extended by Marlborough on behalf of the nation.”⁵³ Settle exemplified this effort as he praised Anne for building new churches throughout London and supporting the SPG, describing her as a nursing mother to British and foreign Christians: “What a Glorious Aera of Christianity shall this Age commence … when turning our Eyes into our Holy Temples, we find not only so many Trebble Voices added to the Hallelujah Song, in the Religious Infant Nurseries now spread around the Kingdom: But not content with bounding so tender a Compassion to her own Native Sphere alone, we see the Royal Piety laying those yet greater Plans of Glory, resolv’d to make her Britannia, with such expanded Arms and flowing Breasts, a more Universal Nursing Mother in so extensive a Filial Adoption.”⁵⁴ The references to motherhood, painfully ironic when considered alongside Anne’s ill-fated attempts to bear children, translate physical into spiritual fertility and personal into national maternity. They echo Isaiah’s vision of Jerusalem as a mother suckling her children (Isa. 66:10–11). Britain becomes a boundless, compassionate body engaged in the nurturing of foreign souls, all of whom will rejoice with the new Jerusalem.

      All these images valorize British mission by linking it to the tending of the domestic sphere. This spacial association echoes an ancient Greek distinction between the oikos, the private household space of agriculture and economics, and the polis, the arena of war and public affairs. The rhetoric of husbandry, when understood in its broadest sense, thus insists on the domestic and peaceful character of British mission. It let the British think of themselves as giving more to the Indians than they took from them.

      “To Barter Gold for Brass, and Pearl for Trifles”: Missionaries and the Trope of Trade

      When British missionaries and their supporters raised funds to convert Indians, they often did so by invoking their readers’ sense of Christian duty even as they evoked their acquisitive desire. Sometimes they attempted this twofold task directly, arguing that contributions to missions would enhance Britain’s colonial wealth. Martin Benson, Bishop of Gloucester, insisted in his SPG sermon, “For were we but wise enough to consider only the Advantage of our Trade in America … we should take care to propagate the Christian Revelation which … enjoins all those Virtues that make Commerce gainful, and prohibits all those Vices that bring Poverty in their Rear.”⁵⁵ Nathaniel Eells, a minister involved with Wheelock’s Indian school, paired a commercial mission with a Christian one: “[T]he vast Consumption of british Manufactures among ym,” he claimed, “would teach the Nation how to make a Gain by promoting Godliness.”⁵⁶ Although they would lose short-term profits through their charity, contributors to mission would enhance colonial wealth in the long run, turning savages into consumers as well as Christians.

      Most missionary texts did not make so direct a link between charity and trade. Rather, they spoke through a metaphorical language that imitated the Gospels’ treatment of riches. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus emphasizes the importance of giving up wealth, because ‘“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’” (19:24). But he also relied on the language of wealth to emphasize the value of this kingdom: “[T]he kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it’” (13: 44–46). Such images allowed Jesus to use material acquisition as a metaphor for spiritual gain, even as he demeaned riches in the face of spiritual reward. These images also can be seen to equate material with spiritual value. The Kingdom of God may be greater than all one’s wealth, but there is a suggestion of equivalence in the parables, brought about by references to purchase. The Kingdom of God is costly and more valuable than all earthly treasure. Although it is priceless, it is like something that can be bought. Whether it is meant by its writers to do so, the Gospels’ adoption of a metaphorical economy can lend itself to an economic vision of religion.

      In his epistle to the Romans, Paul also juxtaposes material with spiritual wealth. At the end of his letter to the church in Rome, he wrote, “But now I go unto Jerusalem to minister unto the saints. For it hath pleased them of Macedonia and Achaia to make a certain contribution for the poor saints which are at Jerusalem. It hath pleased them verily; and their debtors they are. For if the Gentiles have been made partakers of their spiritual things, their duty is also to minister unto them in carnal things” (15.25–27). Paul’s formulation suggests not just the virtue of charity but also the imperative of spiritual and material exchange. Unlike the gospel parables, Paul asks his readers to take literally the exchangeability of money with spiritual wealth. Describing the gentiles’ charity as a debt for the Jewish church’s communication of the good news has the effect of placing a fulcrum between the balanced values of material and spiritual wealth. Generosity is there, but it is prompted by obligation. As Paul would have it, the conversion of the gentiles has merited material compensation to the Christian Jews.

      Drawing on these references, many writers of missionary texts evoked images of wealth to make two claims. First, they communicated that the conversion of heathens was as valuable as it was costly, meriting donations and superseding in importance any wealth the British would gain from colonial trade. Second, they suggested that Christianity was a compensation Indians deserved for the wealth they had lost. Taken together, and read through Paul’s formulation, these claims could be (and eventually were) made to suggest a fair payment of Christian conversion for colonial wealth. A survey of the missionaries’ references to exchange suggests a gradual shift from stressing СКАЧАТЬ