Minimal presence of the Church

Ashley Pelczynski

ENGL 327

Dr. Coronado

28 March, 2016                                         

Absence of the Church

           When the colonists first settled in North America they focused on surviving, which made them blindly follow what they had always been taught in Church since they had no time to think about the details of their religion. A century or two later the colonies were well settled and towns were growing and expanding, meaning people were able to move farther into the continent. However this also caused them to be farther from the influence of a church, and from the influence of the Church of England. This distance from the Church caused some groups to be more susceptible to questioning God and the Church of England. Some of these questions made it onto letters that were sent back to family members in England. At some point the letters got into the hands of a man named David Humphreys who wrote the book An Historical Account of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. He mentions in this book how there is a lack of representation of the Church in every single colony that Britain controls and how the society sent missionaries to fix this problem. This book should be part of the cannon of American Literature because it mentions the individual colonies and how much strength religion had in each of them, how the SPG(Society for the Propagation of the Gospel) went about educating black slaves, as well as the relationship between the colonists and the British in the late 17^th century and early 18^th century.

        Not much is known about the author, David Humphreys. What we do know is that he lived between 1689 and 1740 and that he was a secretary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Little more is known about the society he was a part of. According to Caroline Brick, who researched for the Mundus Project, the society was created in 1701 because of a charter that King William III issued in June of 1701.  The mission of this society at its creation was to send priests and schoolteachers from England to the colonies. This was because the ones in the colonies were weak in their teachings and spirituality. A few years after they first went to the colonies, the SPG began to go to other nations that had a small presence of the Church in them. Such countries include: India, China, the Carribbean, and various countries in Europe.

        In his book Humphreys also mentions the black slaves and that he and the society feel that they should be allowed to be taught. However, according to Carter Godwin Woodson in his book The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861: a History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War, the masters believed that if the slaves were taught they would want freedom, which would not have been good for the masters since the masters needed the slaves to run their plantations, or in some cases maintain the household. The colonists also said things like how the slaves don’t have a soul so they can’t be converted or saved. They used this to go around the belief of that time that a Christian cannot be held as a slave under any circumstances. This was where the SPG stepped in and began to educate as many slaves as they could, believing that every person has a soul and that everyone can be saved, be they slave, master, or average person. However there were three groups of people that sided with the society and aided in the quest of education for the slaves. These were “masters who desired to increase the economic efficiency of their labor supply; second, sympathetic persons who wished to help the oppressed; and third, zealous missionaries who, believing that the message of divine love came equally to all, taught the slaves the English language that they might learn the principals of the Christian religion” (Woodson, 3.)

      There is a lot we can learn from this book since it is an inside scope into what a specific religious organization did for the advancement of the colonies, as well as how each colony was and the direct effects expansion has on the beliefs of the colonists. Not only that but we can see a that the idea of educating slaves is becoming more widely spread and more people are beginning to agree with it.

     

Cited Sources

Brick, Caroline. “Lambeth Palace Library: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.” Lambeth Palace: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Mundus Project, 22, Mar. 2002. Web. 28 Mar, 2016

Humphreys, David. An Historical Account of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. New York: Arno, 1969. Print.

Woodson, Carter Godwin. "Chapter 1 Introduction." The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 a History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1915. 3-5. Web.

Click here for David Humphreys book