Chapter 6. The 'Faculty of Faith': Evangelical missionaries, social anthropologists, and the claim for human unity in the 19th century^[1]

In the century that followed, descriptions of religious activity from around the world became evidence in debates on whether the capacity for religious belief was a universal human attribute and whether the supposed presence or absence of religion could help define the nature or extent of human difference. This chapter traces these discussions in Britain and the Australian colonies, focussing on the personal, theological, and political tensions that shaped the observations and the theoretical texts from which they were formulated. The evidence and the findings tacked between two related questions. First, whether indigenous people had a priori religious beliefs — a question that went to the heart of the relationship between faith and humanness in the debate over single or multiple human origins. Second, whether such people had the intellectual or spiritual capacity to respond to Christian doctrine. Those who believed that all people did have such a capacity tended to presume that all non-Christians held some form of spiritual belief, however erroneous. Yet the questions were distinct and the evidence relating to them was used to service different arguments.

Prior to the nineteenth century, across different eras and religious denominations, Europeans concerned with European exploration and expansion had debated the relationship between indigenous rights and the capacity for religious thought. The sixteenth-century Spanish jurist and theologian Francisco de Vitoria (1486?-1546) argued for the political and legal status of Native Americans (1991:233-92), contending that, while they were barbarians and unbelievers, they undoubtedly carried the capacity for Christian knowledge and that it was the duty of the Spanish representative to present the means for their salvation. In his theological musings on the question (1992:75), the Dominican friar and contemporary of Francisco, Bartolomé de las Casas (1474-1566), argued for the natural faculty by which men are led to 'the worship of God, or of what they believe to be God'. Therefore regardless of the barbarity or state of the nation, human society could not exist 'without the worship of the true or false deity'. The Moravian Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1760) insisted that the nature of heathen deities was less significant than their existence. Any spiritual response to the natural world was proof of God's immanence. He sent his missionaries to the field in 1734 with the comforting text from Paul's letter to Roman Christians on the heathen experience of God: 'for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse …' (Romans 1:19-20).^[2] Therefore, Zinzendorf insisted, the heathen 'know already that there is a God' and are ignorant 'only of the Son' (Hutton 1923:21).

The 'eminent divine' referred to by Collins was Hugh Blair (1718-1800), Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh and a significant figure in what came to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment, whose Sermons were among the best-selling works of the English language in the eighteenth century.^[3] Blair (1777-1801, I:4-5) preached on natural religion, arguing that if there is any sense 'which man is formed by nature to receive, it is a sense of religion…. Cast your eyes over the whole earth…. You may discover tribes of men without policy, or laws, or cities, or any of the arts of life: But no where will you find them without some form of religion'. The theological argument that humanity possessed a natural capacity for faith was central to debates amongst Calvinist Evangelicals in the eighteenth century over whether civilization should precede Christianity. The historian Brian Stanley (2001:180) described it as the belief in an 'innate moral sense or conscience' by which the Holy Spirit, in conjunction with the human will and the essential knowledge provided by the missionary, could bring about salvation.^[4]

In the nineteenth century, the question of the presence or absence of natural religion was contested on scientific as well as legal and theological grounds. The battle line was drawn initially and most sharply between Christians who supported missionary work, a task predicated on the universal capacity for religious thought, and certain 'natural historians' or 'philosophers'. Some men of science sought to prove either that multiple human species had developed from separate origins that could be tracked through evidence of physical, intellectual, or religious distinctions or that long isolation had created physical differences which reflected the intellectual or moral divergence of different races. The former position, which was professed by relatively few philosophers or naturalists, was completely beyond the pale for all Evangelical Christians. The latter — that differences in intellectual or spiritual abilities had developed as a result of the early separation of human populations — was more common but was equally threatening to the missionary project. As the discipline of anthropology was being established in British universities in the late nineteenth century, the argument over the significance of religion in the role of human unity changed. Now, the absence or presence of a religious sensibility became a sign of the evolution of the psyche and implicit evidence for the maturation of human beings from apes. Here, theorists such as Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) and Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) lined up against Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and John Lubbock (1834-1913) on the evidence, or otherwise, for a 'primitive' religious sensibility, particularly amongst Aboriginal people in the Australian colonies.

The development of the British missionary movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries coincided with Evangelical alarm about increasingly strident philosophical assertions against original human unity emanating in particular from France (Stanley 2001:11). In a sermon preached in 1824, Reverend Richard Watson (1781-1833), a Methodist intellectual and secretary of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society that had been founded eight years earlier, advocated the religious instruction of the slaves in the West Indies. Taken from the text 'Honour all men' (1 Peter 2:17), Watson's sermon was a direct attack on literature which claimed that black people were either immutably distinct or a different species altogether from Europeans. Watson dismissed as self-serving the observations of slave owners on the essential inferiority of their charges and castigated those who used Biblical texts to claim Negro inferiority. Noah's curse on Ham, he argued, was not on Africans but on the Canaanites who were made the slaves of the Israelites. Therefore the curse, if it could be said to exist in any general sense, was on a tiny portion of Asia rather than any of the African tribes. Watson also turned his scorn on 'minute philosophers', one of whom, he said, had claimed in the previous twelve months that the degeneracy of Africans denied 'all cultivation of mind, and all correction of morals'. He dismissed as 'affected philosophy' attempts to 'measure mind by the rule and compasses; and estimate capacity for knowledge and salvation by a scale of inches and the acuteness of angles!' While acknowledging the supposedly low state of African civilization, Watson insisted that it was the result of political oppression by the 'civilized' nations, which had systematically enslaved millions of Africans over centuries, and not of the base nature of the African people.^[5]

Against those who 'by the dreams of a theory' challenged the concept of a single human species and in so doing banished millions 'out of the family of God', Watson put forward one criterion for essential and original human unity. In a test that simultaneously denied human difference, claimed Christian jurisdiction, and was a call for missionaries to the cause, he insisted that unity between humankind could be proved where congregations showed themselves to be 'capable of loving God'. The findings from this test were already to hand: missionaries to the slave plantations of the Caribbean and in the missions to Africa described their converts as 'flashing with the light of intellect, and glowing with the hues of Christian graces'.^[6] Watson's sermon was a clever subversion of the philosophical discussion on the 'natural' state of man and the claims that black people were intellectually and morally inferior. He urged mission supporters and philosophers alike to look to the outcomes of Christian preaching for the proof of human similarity. Addressed to a large and respectable congregation, Watson's sermon was a triumph: it was immediately published and went rapidly to a fourth edition. The readership included Members of Parliament and non-Methodists who found it an eloquent statement on human difference and the role of Christian mission during the turbulent years when church-goers backed the Anti-Slavery League and became increasingly involved in questions of Christianity and civilization amongst the native populations in the colonies of Tasmania, New South Wales, and New Zealand.^[7]

There were at least two possible candidates for Watson's unnamed philosopher who disputed African equality. In the previous twelve months, the French naturalist Julien-Joseph Virey (1775‑1846) had published the second edition of his Histoire naturelle du genre humain, 'Natural History of the Human Genus' (1824), in which he claimed that black Africans were biologically, mentally, and morally inferior to whites as a result of separate origins (Augstein 1996:xxvi). Less heterodox but still unacceptable to Evangelical missionaries was a popular edition of Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man (1822) by the anatomist William Lawrence (1783-1867). Lawrence (1822:473) upheld the important doctrine of the unity of the human species but insisted that differences of 'physical organisation and of moral and intellectual qualities' between the 'several races of our species' were the result of 'native or congenital varieties' which were then transmitted to offspring in 'hereditary succession'. This analysis was an insidious challenge to Evangelical Christians for it implied that human difference, while classified as 'varieties' rather than as original, was nonetheless immutable or biological. Lawrence (1822:423) even claimed to provide proof that members of the 'black variety' were aware of their inferiority with the poignant tale of an African found weeping and moaning that 'black men are nothing'. His volume amounted to an attack on the primary theology of imago dei, that man is made in God's image with universal abilities. It was also a threat to important new political initiatives such as the establishment of Liberia in 1821 as a haven for former slaves, an experiment that was followed keenly by naturalists and Evangelical missionaries alike.^[8]

Data for Lawrence's lectures came from around the world and included a large footnote transcribed from Collins's account of the Aborigines of Port Jackson. Based on Collins's relatively benign descriptions, Lawrence (1822:413, 433) wrote a damning analysis: these were a people of 'remorseless cruelty, … insensible to distinctions of right and wrong, destitute of religion, without any idea of a Supreme Being, and with the feeblest notion … of a future state'. He acknowledged tensions with the Evangelical movement with a nod to their motivations of 'philanthropy and benevolence' but insisted that his analysis was based on unsentimental reason and that political decisions relating to slaves and colonized people 'must be limited by the natural capabilities of the subjects'.