MODERN MISSIONS Early Movements. (I) Roman Catholic.—Modern Missions begin with the new world-outlook to which the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the discovery both of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope and of the American continent all con duced. The outlook of Christendom was magically changed. No longer were Christian nations in central and western Europe pent up into a corner with the Moslem hosts barring the way to an East virtually unknown to Christendom. The Roman Church first embraced the missionary implications of this new world outlook, beginning with proselytizing in the Portuguese and Span ish colonies, as at Goa, but stimulated later by the counter Reformation to unprecedented missionary efforts as for example in Mexico and Peru. Loyola founded the Society of Jesus, and one of his chief associates, Francis Xavier, landed at Goa on May 6, 1542. Ten years later he died on the Isle of St. John (Hiang Shang). In that short span he had roused the Christians at Goa to a new life, laboured with a success whose effects still endure among the fisher folk near Cape Comorin, gathered many con verts in Malabar, visited Malacca and founded a mission in Japan.
The Jesuits produced other men of the first rank as mission aries. Matteo Ricci laboured in China for 27 years, and Robert de Nobili tried in India to be a Brahman to the Brahmans, an experiment which has probably been misunderstood by its critics. Other Jesuits evangelized Paraguay in 1582, and pioneers in Canada added some rare stories of martyr-courage to the annals of missions. By the close of the 16th century a committee of cardinals was appointed under the name of the Congregatio de propaganda fide to give unity and solidity to the missionary work of the Roman Church. The scheme originated with Gregory XIII., but was given plenary authority by a bull of Gregory XV.
(2) Protestant.—Contrasted with the great missionary activity on the part of the Church of Rome, the Protestant Churches were backward in realizing the missionary implications of the faith. The opportunity for imperial expansion came to Spain and Portu gal earlier than to England or Holland, and the Protestant Churches had to take time to define and consolidate their position. We see this in the instructions given by Edward VI. to the navigators of Sir Hugh Willoughby's fleet, in the efforts of Sir Walter Raleigh in Virginia, and in the expressed recognition, in the charter given to "the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading with the East Indies" by Queen Elizabeth in 1600, of higher duties than those of commerce. When James I. granted letters patent for the occupation of Virginia it was directed that the "word and service of God be preached, planted and used as well in the said colonies as also as much as might be among the savages bordering among them."
In 1618 was published The True Honour of Navigation and Navigators, by John Wood, D.D., dedicated to the Governor of the East India Company, and about the same time appeared the famous treatise of Grotius, De veritate religionis Christianae, written for the use of settlers in distant lands. Dutch evangelists worked in Java, the Moluccas, Formosa and Ceylon.
The North American colonies received some attention, first from Archbishop Laud who designed a scheme for the establish ment of a local episcopate, then during the Protectorate when a corporation for the propagation of the Gospel in New England was planned and renewed later in the Restoration period. Crom well himself characteristically planned a council for the Protestant religion, to rival the Roman Propaganda, and to consist of seven councillors and four secretaries for different provinces. Among the most eminent of the missionaries of the New England cor poration was the famous John Eliot who produced the Bible in the Indian language in 1661-64. Eliot received much assistance from the Hon. Robert Boyle, who gave other proof of his zeal for missionary work by contributing to the expense of publishing the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles in Malay. George Fox, the Quaker, wrote to "All Friends everywhere that have Indians or blacks, to preach the Gospel to them and their servants." Efforts were made by several bishops to develop the colonial church, supplemented by the work of Dr. Thomas Bray, who with a number of laymen founded the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and was later selected on the request of Maryland as commissary of the Bishop of London. His efforts were crowned in 1701 by the grant of letters patent under the great seal of England for the creation of a corporation under the name of the "Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts." On the Continent the first Protestant missionary enterprise was initiated by King Frederick IV. of Denmark who in i 705 founded a mission on the Coromandel coast of India, begun by those re markable men Ziegenbalg, Pliitschau and Christian Friedrich Schwartz, with whom the S.P.C.K. co-operated. The Moravians began in 1731 that astounding missionary career which has made them one of the great missionary churches of the world. Driven from Moravia by persecution, they had scarcely secured a place for themselves in Saxony before they formed the design of carry ing the Gospel to the heathen of Greenland and of the West Indies. Within ten years they had established missions in the West Indies, South America, Surinam, Greenland, among the North American tribes, in Lapland, Tartary, Algiers, Guinea, the Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon.