An Analysis of the Missionary Methods of the Puritans

Abstract

For the English, as well as for the Spanish of the sixteenth century, the first vision of America was highly paradisical and full of promise: this new land was without doubt the best of the world. The Indian who inhabited this land was the beautiful and docile “noble savage” of the Renaissance, favored with the highest physical and ethical qualities. The English at first defended the Indian, using all the niceties of expression and representation then in vogue. Even though the Indian was innocent, he was civilized: that is to say, he was outside the scheming, egoistical, harsh world of Europe. This stereotyped image was accepted by such writers as Le Moyne, De Bry, and White, who embellished and poetized the gentleness and goodness of the redskin; but it was not sufficient to assure the Indian a place in the Protestant spiritual milieu since it did not measure up to the biblical and predestinarian model. The first attempts at evangelization, for instance, the identification of the Indians as human, were carried out by simple Anglican colonists. These men, lacking true evangelical spirit, soon forgot about their earlier mission and instead of impressing spiritual ideas on the hearts of the Indians, they dedicated themselves almost exclusively to exploiting them and to demanding temporal riches of them without giving them in exchange the necessary doctrinal truths. However, since the Protestant God was much less patient and casuistic than the God of the Catholics, He soon became angry and the divine punishments were so terrible that the Anglican colonizers were wiped out in the sixteenth century. The English explanation for the failure was a spiritual one and not a material one. In reality the men of that age seemed to be able to find an excuse for their failures only from a religious point of view.