American Missionary Motivation Before the Revolution
Sources for discovery of the missionary motivation of the Indian evangelists and their supporters in seventeenth century New England are scanty. Nevertheless, the most compelling factors come clearly to view. The avowed missionary intent of colonization, as voiced in the Plymouth and Massachusetts Charters, was not one of these. The directors of the colonial companies might have had the notion of serving God and checking Roman Catholic political expansion through Protestant missions, but such an aim was of little force in the thinking of the colonist and his children. They were, indeed, creating a Christian commonwealth. They were completing the Reformation also in a place at the end of the earth. It had to be wrested from the heathen who possessed it. But this extension of Christendom was by the displacement of the heathen, not by their conversion.