- American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Special Report of the Prudential Committee, on the control to be exercised over Missionaries and Mission Churches. Printed for the use of the Board at the Annual Meeting. Revised edition. Press of T. R. Marvin.
- Correspondence between the Cherokee and Choctaw Missions, the Rev. S. B. Treat, and the Prudential Committee. Missionary Herald, October, 1848.—PRINCETON REVIEW, January, 1849.
IT is a matter of notoriety that the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, have for several years been sorely harassed on account of their supposed patronage or tolerance of slavery. Those known to the country as abolitionists, have felt it to be a duty to expostulate with the Board from time to time, for receiving money from the owners of slaves, for employing slaveholding missionaries, and for sustaining mission churches in which slaveholders were received as members. The Board have thus been constrained to take action on the subject, and on several occasions have given deliverances which seemed to satisfy for the time, the great body of their patrons. Still the matter has not been suffered to rest. With a view apparently of having the subject finally disposed of, the Board in 1847 adopted the following resolution, viz.: “That the Prudential Committee be requested to present a written report at the next annual meeting, on the nature and extent of the control which is to be exercised over the missionaries under the care of the Board; and the moral responsibility of the Board for the nature of the teaching of the missionaries, and for the character of the churches.”
In the meantime, the Prudential Committee directed the Rev. S. B. Treat, one of the secretaries, to visit the Cherokee and Choctaw Missions, “to ascertain, as fully as practicable, the state and prospects of those missions; and to enquire more particularly into their relations to the subject of slavery.” Mr. Treat devoted seventeen weeks to this visitation. He held full conference with the missionaries, and at his request, each mission addressed a letter to the committee, exhibiting “their views and principles in detail,” on the subject of slavery. Subsequently he drew up a report to the Prudential Committee of his visit, which report, together with the letters just mentioned, and the reply made by the committee through Mr. Treat, are all published in the Missionary Herald for October, 1848.
The report of the Prudential Committee, above mentioned, was submitted to the Board at its late meeting in September last, “but as the members had not time to give the subject that considerate attention which its importance demanded, the final disposition of the same was postponed.” Mr. Treat’s report on his mission, and the correspondence to which it gave rise, were read to the Board, and by them referred to a committee who reported that they abstained from expressing any opinion either on the letters of the missions or on that of Mr. Treat in reply, because they constitute a part of an unfinished correspondence, and because no final action could, with propriety, be had at that time. It was therefore resolved, that “the whole subject should be left for the present, where it now is, in the hands of the Prudential Committee.” Neither of these important documents, therefore, has yet received the sanction of the Board. In the meantime they are published, in various forms, for information and discussion.
There are several reasons which determine us to call the attention of our readers to these documents. In the first place, the principles contained in the Report of the Prudential Committee on the control of missionaries, are of great importance, affecting the whole nature and organization of the church. In the next place, those principles, and the whole subject, have as direct a bearing on the missionary operations of our church, as upon those of the American Board. Thirdly, it is to be presumed that the very design of the extensive publication of these papers, is to elicit friendly discussion. And finally, the first and most stringent application of the principles of Mr. Treat’s letter, is to ministers and churches of one of our own presbyteries.
The questions embraced in the Report are discussed with singular skill and wisdom. In most points we are happy in agreeing with its excellent authors. From some of their positions we are forced to dissent; and as far as Mr. Treat’s letter is concerned, dissent must assume the form of a solemn protest, which, in that particular case, every Presbyterian is entitled to enter.
The first class of subjects discussed in this Report relate to the general principles of ecclesiastical polity.
It is specially interesting to find that principles which retired men have gathered, after much study, from the Scriptures, are those which practical men are led to adopt from stress of circumstances. The providence of God is forcing on the church views of its nature and polity, very different from those which theorists have in many instances entertained. It is well known e. g. that it was the common doctrine of all denominations that ordinations sine titulo are unscriptural; that the office of an evangelist was confined to the early age of the church; that those thus designated in the New Testament, were the vicarii of the apostles, vested with extraordinary powers for a special purpose and a limited time. To congregationalists no less than to prelatists, a bishop without charge was as much a solecism as a husband without a wife. A call from the people, in some form, was regarded as an essential part of a call to the ministry. Even Presbyterians, though their principles involved no such conclusion, were led by their circumstances, to entertain a like disapprobation of such ordinations. They were an inconvenience. The whole land was possessed. No more ministers than parishes were needed, and therefore it was thought wrong to create them.