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Sectarianism versus Ecumenism: the Impact on British Churches of the Missionary Movement to India, c. 1800–1860

In October 1826, an impassioned letter appeared in The Times, written by an outraged correspondent whose house had been entered unceremoniously by two offensive females who demanded first a donation towards the construction of a missionary training college and then a justification of his refusal to subscribe. He fulminated against the triumphalism of voluntary religious societies: ‘It seems “to grow by what it feeds on”’ The first half of the nineteenth century in Britain was certainly an age of ‘evangelical aggression’, and probably the modern missionary movement was making an impression on British society far deeper than it made on such countries as India and Africa, to which missionaries were sent. Missionary enthusiasm appears to have increased lay giving for home missions as well as foreign missions; it probably stimulated interest in home missions and increased the number of candidates for the ministry; it almost certainly provided a fillip to theological education; it reinforced the already existing tendency to express piety in activity rather than quiescence; it helped to bury fatalistic and deterministic theological systems; it appears to have appealed, like the later temperance movement, to all classes of society; and (perhaps related to the last claim) it declared war on denominational bigotry.