The achievement of SS. Cyril and Methodios may be summarized as follows: in 863 the Byzantine emperor sent to the Prince of Moravia, at the latter’s request, a mission led by the brother saints to develop the evangelization of his lands, since Frankish missionaries were becoming politically more and more personae non gratae in Moravia. By the time that the surviving brother Methodios died in 885, as archbishop and papal legate in Moravia, the principle of the mission had not only been maintained in the face of constant opposition but also accepted, if only partially and grudgingly, elsewhere. This principle was that any people, especially neophyte, must be allowed to praise God in its own language: only through one’s native tongue can one fully understand the promises of baptism, the liturgy, and the Holy Scriptures. During those twenty years a form of the Slav language was elevated to literary status and recorded in a specially designed alphabet, and many clerks had been trained in it. From Moravia its use spread first to those lands which came under Moravian rule in the 870s and 880s—Bohemia, Pannonia, and (very probably) south Poland. On Methodios’s death the Frankish clergy regained the upper hand in Moravia and dispersed the saints’ colleagues and disciples, who then found support for their ministry in yet other Slav lands, namely Croatian Dalmatia and Bulgaria.

In the year 1000 the Emperor Otto III went on a grandiose pilgrimage to Gnesen, to the tomb of his friend St Adalbert of Prague, martyred by the Prussians on the borders of their country on St George’s Day, 997. This visit has been seen as a significant moment in the development of the emperor’s imperial policies, but it may also be taken to mark the end of the first great age in the history of Christendom. By the time that Otto came to pay his respects at the shrine of this Germanized Bohemian, St Vojtiekh, and to raise it to metropolitan rank, Europe was outwardly Christian. The tenth century had completed the process begun with the first urban apostolic missions, and had seen the absorption of the Viking settlers into the Christian community, the conversion of the Magyars, the establishment of the faith in Bohemia, Poland, Russia and Denmark, the beginnings of successful missionary activity in the more northerly Scandinavian lands, and the reconversion of Crete. Whatever problems might remain in Islamic Spain, or with the tenacious paganism of the eastern Baltic, by the year 1000 Europe was Christian, and the missionary millennium was over.

In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People Bede includes a deservedly famous letter of Gregory I containing the Pope’s instructions to his missionaries in Kent on how to go about converting the heathen English to Christianity. The letter is addressed to Abbot Mellitus, one of the band of reinforcements sent to England from Rome in June 601. In it Mellitus is asked to instruct Augustine, established at Canterbury for the last four years, that ‘the sanctuaries of the idols among this nation should on no account be destroyed’; by all means, let the idols go; but the temples, if they be soundly constructed, need only be sprinkled with holy water and consecrated to the worship of the true God. In this way hardened English minds may be won to a stepwise ascent and not be required to make too large a leap of faith.

My subject has been under discussion recently, for example by Ludwig Bieler in the 1966 Spoleto Settimane and at a more popular level by Brendan Lehane in his Quest of Three Abbots. But for me the question was raised fourteen years ago, when I was editing the Latin works of St Columban, and Aubrey Gwynn showed me much kindness in correspondence. He mentioned inter alia the comments of Bishop Galvin, then nearing the end of his long life as a missionary to China. Galvin first went out as a young priest in 1912 to serve a mission in Hanyang. Returning on furlough in 1918, he made a celebrated appeal to the members of Maynooth College for the conversion of the Chinese, as a result of which he was joined by Father John Blowick in founding the Irish Congregation of St Columban, popularly known as the Maynooth Mission to China. Soon appointed Vicar Apostolic, Galvin later became Bishop of Hanyang, and stayed in his diocese under a series of trials, persecution, and house arrest, until he was expelled from the country in 1952. He told a friend that he would never have survived his experiences had it not been for a constant memory of Columban’s example, and he felt that he had enjoyed the saint’s companionship for forty years. Though not an academic scholar, Bishop Galvin is entitled by the circumstances of his life to judge the spirituality of Columban, and he criticized my original statement that his patron was ‘a monk, not a missionary’.

On this, the anniversary of the bringing to Mainz of the martyred body of St Boniface, it seems appropriate that any remarks about the Anglo-Saxon mission to Germany should be confined to his activities alone. Unfortunately, the story of his life has been told by many people at many times, and in default of new facts and documents, it is not possible to do more than repeat what is already well known.

To me the life of St Boniface appears to fall into three main periods: his mission from Gregory II to preach the gospel ‘ad quascumque gentes infidelitatis errore detentas’; his work in Thuringia among a partly christianized people; and his organization of the Church in Germany together with the reform of the Frankish Church. In other words, his activities as priest, as bishop, and as archbishop. These three divisions illustrate not only the problems he had to face, but also the methods with which he attacked them.

The wide span of years which I have boldly claimed in my title is intended to enmesh and hold together for our inspection the first great age of the medieval city, the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the medieval Church first faced the problem of evangelism in growing mercantile communities, and the age when it deployed in the cities and towns of Europe a new army of missionaries in the persons of the friars. The missionary techniques of the friars are familiar and comparatively well documented; the evangelism of the tenth and eleventh centuries is scarcely documented at all. In recent years the dramatic nature of urban history in this early period has been becoming increasingly apparent; and it was in the conviction that the Church’s hand in it could not wholly escape detection that I chose the title for this lecture. Many aspects of this problem have been traced with the closest care; but I justify the breadth and cloudiness of my theme by a conviction that it has rarely been looked at quite from this point of view.

A learned Jesuit historian of the Japan mission recently observed: ‘The aim of Christian missionary activity in every mission land is to establish the Church. The goal of the foreign missionary is primarily to prepare the ground and lay the foundation of the future Church. What he envisages, therefore, is the idea of a fully matured hierarchy of native-born bishops and priests capable of carrying on the work of the Church without foreign assistance.’

Identical sentiments have been voiced by other erudite Jesuit historians of Portuguese India and the Spanish Philippines; but their own well-documented works show very clearly that, however much this was a consummation devoutly to be wished, the road to its achievement was a long and an arduous one. Indeed, at times this objective was actively opposed by those very missionaries who should have been most anxious to attain it. Whatever the theory may have been, in practice the indigenous clergy were apt to be kept in a strictly subordinate condition to the European priests, particularly where these latter were members of the Regular clergy. How this discrimination arose, and the length of time for which it endured, is the theme of this paper.

In the course of the past century the centre of gravity of the Christian world has shifted completely. Europe, once the centre, is now at best an outpost on the fringe of the Christian world, some would say an outpost likely to be overwhelmed. The great majority of Christians, and the overwhelming majority of practising Christians are, and are clearly going to be, Africans, Americans or Asians. And of these, the most startling expansion—the greatest Christian expansion since what were for Europe the Middle Ages—has been in Africa, where Christians have been increasing in geometrical progression, doubling their numbers every twelve years or so, for over a century. The greater part of African Church history, however, has still to be written. Hagiography we have in abundance, and hagiography, like mythology, is a valid literary genre; but (again like mythology) it is a poetic, not a scholarly category. Of missionary history we have a little, though very little in proportion to the vast resources which the missionary society archives supply; but missionary history is only one specialized part of African Church history; by far the greater part of African Christian life and African Christian expansion goes on, and has long gone on, without the presence, let alone the superintendence, of the European missionary.

Anyone who studies the techniques and strategy of early nineteenth-century missionaries and (even more) of early nineteenth-century missionary societies can hardly avoid gaining the impression that they suffered from a romantic casualness. It is as if zealous Christians of the period were so convinced that the Lord would guide and provide for the missionary that he really did not need much mundane preparation. Nineteenth-century missionaries often simply disappeared into bush, desert or jungle, stopped when they came to a site where there was food, water and heathen, and preached in whatever language happened to be available.

The publication of Mr Norman Longmate’s book King Cholera in November 1966 served as a reminder of the terrible scourge which afflicted this country on no less than four separate occasions during the nineteenth century. While this volume was, no doubt—as the ‘blurb’ on its dust-jacket affirms—‘an important contribution to social history’, so far as the part which the Church played during those critical years, the half was not told in its pages. In this short paper it will be my task to try to repair this omission in regard to just one of the four major outbreaks of the disease in England, the last in fact, that of the year 1866; and to say something of the response made by churchmen and women to the cholera outbreak of a century ago.

Everyone knows that the Christian world mission exists. Not everyone would be prepared to agree that the mission should be regarded as a fit subject for academic study.

There is an interesting difference in the manner in which this question has been dealt with in Germany, in the United States, and in Britain.

The Germans are the great theorists; it is not surprising that Germany was the first country to develop a full-scale theory of missions and to invent the unpleasing hybrid ‘missiology’. The first plan for academic teaching of missiology came from Karl Graul, director of the Leipzig mission, who in 1864 drew up a plan for such teaching in the university of Erlangen, and had actually delivered an admired introductory lecture on the subject. His early death made impossible the realization of the plans that he had drawn up. The first full-time professor of missions was Gustav Warneck, whose immense Missionslehre began to appear in 1897, the year in which its author was appointed as professor in the old pietistic university of Halle. Warneck the theorist was followed by the historian Julius Richter in Berlin. Richter was a typically German toiler, whose volumes on various regions of the earth are full of minutely accurate information, a little marred by the all too obvious view of the writer that only Germans understand how to carry out the task of mission, and that the British have never done anything but make mistakes in the political as well as in the religious field.