By referring to Paul’s epistle, Waugh was able to suggest the worthlessness of worldly goods even as he stressed the bargain that his readers would enjoy by funding missions. The British suffer only an “easie Expence,” in exchange for which they receive both material wealth and the awareness of Indian conversion. The “Infidels” of foreign lands lose wealth they hardly knew existed, and in return they receive the invaluable word of God. Everyone gains and nobody loses in this vision of intercontinental exchange.
The trope of trade allowed the British in their most optimistic moments to imagine an inexhaustible circulation of wealth around the Atlantic basin, enriching every participant and saving every soul. As Philip Bisse, the Bishop of Hereford, said, “All Zeal naturally spreadeth, without spending its Force; and rather increaseth its Fervour, the farther it goes.”71 Long before Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations, missionary texts taught their readers to transcend the zero-sum game of a mercantilist vision, seeing piles of wealth made endlessly expandable through global circulation. While raising money for the salvation of the Indians, they transformed a symbol of the Indians’ exploitation into one of their spiritual compensation.
Later missionaries were focused far less on tropes of exchange. In his fund-raising narratives of the Indian Charity School, written in the 1760s and 1770s, Eleazar Wheelock rarely described his work as part of a trade with or a debt owed to Indians. When he discussed his school in financial terms he was more likely to stress the comparative bargain Indian conversion presented in comparison with the price of waging war. Near the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War he speculated, “[I]f one half which has been, for so many Years past expended in building Forts … had been prudently laid out in supporting faithful Missionaries … the instructed and civilized Party would have been a fair better Defence than all our expensive Fortresses, and prevented the laying waste so many Towns and Villages.”72 After he announced his intention to focus on the education of Anglo-American missionaries rather than Indians, his focus shifted altogether.73
Factors including the Seven Years’ War, a growing sense of British entitlement, and a weakening of transatlantic ties between Britain and the colonies probably influenced this rhetorical shift in missionary writings.74 Another important factor no doubt was the growing poverty of those Indians who remained in areas now filled with European colonists. In his SPG sermon of 1766 William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, juxtaposed spiritual with material wealth, but with an important change. He wrote, “[T]he Aborigines of the Country, Savages without Law or Religion, are the principal Objects of our Charity. Their temporal, as well as spiritual, condition calls loudly for our assistance.”75 Unlike his predecessors, Warburton did not refer to an exchange, reciprocal or not, but rather stressed the Indians’ temporal and spiritual needs. A sense of specific obligation disappeared under the general rubric of charity.
In 1633, George Herbert’s “Church Militant,” the penultimate poem of his collection The Temple, included a prophecy of true religion moving westward from its seat in England to a new home in America. Prompting this transfer was an eastward flow of wealth from America to Europe, which it was corrupting. Of America Herbert wrote,
My God, thou dost prepare for them a way,
By carrying first their gold from them away,
For gold and grace did never yet agree;
Religion always sides with poverty.
We think we rob them, but we think amiss:
We are more poor—they are more rich by this.76
Celebrating the arrival of Protestants in the New World, Herbert portrayed the church on the brink of transition, about to abandon a corrupt Europe for an innocent America from which the Spanish already had taken much wealth.77 He transformed the impoverishment of America into enrichment, toying with the term as he linked colonialism to divine will. By having the Spanish take their gold, God prepares Indians for Christianity. The English also help the natives by making them financially poor, while transforming that poverty into spiritual wealth.
Writing when the only English attempt to convert America’s indigenous peoples had been the abortive establishment of Henrico College near Jamestown, Herbert reversed Paul’s description of financial generosity repaying spiritual, by seeing spiritual conversion as a compensation for theft. That his vision influenced at least some missionaries is suggested by the fact that these lines appeared forty years later in Daniel Gookin’s Historical Collections of the Indians in New England. Gookin, who was the superintendent of Indian affairs in Massachusetts during King Philip’s War and a supporter of Eliot, quoted this poem as he described the piety of the praying Indians, mourned their treatment during the war, and called for more missionary efforts.78 Two of Herbert’s lines also appeared in Thomas Randall’s SSPCK sermon of 1763. Randall suggested that his audience could prevent the flight of religion from Britain by returning some of their wealth to the society’s mission in America.79
Many poems of the Restoration and the eighteenth century expanded on this vision of riches flowing eastward from America in exchange for intangible forms of wealth. Herbert’s poem also influenced British understandings of empire, although the alterations made to his vision of exchange are as telling as its appropriations. After Herbert, English and then British visions of empire rarely saw gold and grace flowing in opposite directions. Rather, they imagined an organic expansion of grace both prompted and proved by the wealth that the world brought to Europe. In Annus Mirabilis (1667), John Dryden adapted Isaiah’s prophecy of gentiles worshipping Yahweh (Isa. 60) to a future in which merchants flock toward a glorious, gold-paved London like “suppliants” before a beautiful woman.80 Christopher Smart’s “On the Goodness of the Supreme Being” (1756) envisions a scene of worldwide thanksgiving, in which peoples across the globe converge to offer their wealth to God and a well-armed “Europa” guards the loot. After describing caravans of elephants bearing “frankincense and myrh” from Araby and trains of camels bearing gold ingots from Africa, Smart addresses an American Indian maiden:
And thou, fair Indian, whose immense domain
To counterpoise the Hemisphere extends,
Haste from the West, and with thy fruits and flow’rs,
Thy mines and med’cines, wealthy maid, attend.
More than the plenteousness so fam’d to flow
By fabling bards from Amalthea’s horn
Is thine; thine therefore be a portion due
Of thanks and praise: come with thy brilliant crown
And vest of furr; and from thy fragrant lap
Pomegranates and the rich ananas pour.81
Identified with organic abundance rather than the luxury of the east, the “fair Indian” also mirrors and belies the bodies of upper-class British women who displayed the wealth of colonial commerce.82 Described as Amalthea, who nourished the infant Jupiter with goat’s milk, she is termed “wealthy” because of the “fruits and flow’rs … mines and med’cines” with which she can enrich others. Identified with the products of a fertile and generous land, she becomes inseparable from them.
Although both America and Europe are female, Smart deploys their gender in different ways, illustrating the power dynamics between the continents. America is a nurturing Amalthea, but “Europa” is a fierce Athena, “Clad in the armour of the living God,” whom the poet beckons:
Approach, unsheath
