word for “reward,” and compassion, meaning “to suffer with,” a term that suggests imagined identification but not sameness.23 The missionaries often referred to “compassion,” and I sometimes use it interchangeably with “pity.”
Milton also distinguished between sympathy and pity in Paradise Lost (1667). When the Son of God decides to clothe the fallen Adam and Eve, he does so because he is “pitying how they stood / Before him naked to the air.”24 At the same moment, Satan’s monstrous daughter Sin is able to sense, from her place at the gates of Hell, that the Fall has occurred in Eden. She attributes this awareness to
… sympathy, or some connatural force
Powerful greatest distance to unite
With secret amity things of like kind
By secretest conveyance.25
“Sympathy,” as Milton uses it here, is a morally neutral term that conveys an awareness of shared feeling. “Pity,” on the other hand, suggests the benevolence bestowed by an all-powerful God.
In the seventeenth century pity usually was understood as an emotion that emerged from an acknowledgment of obligation, suggesting the goodness of the one who feels it. When expressed for one deprived of salvation, therefore, “pity” can suggest a gap of morality and entitlement between those feeling and those receiving it. An address by Cotton Mather to the Indians of New England configured “pity” in this way: “[I]t is God that has caused us to desire his glory in your salvation; and our hearts have bled with pity over you, when we have seen how horribly the devil oppressed you in this, and destroyed you in another world.”26 In this text the bleeding hearts of the English distinguish them from the Indians, evidencing their blessing as much as it suggests the Indians’ damnation.
While earlier usage gave “pity” a connotation quite different from the similarity suggested by “sympathy,” these terms began to overlap in the eighteenth century. Many writers and speakers in this era came to connect “sympathy” with sorrow for another creature’s suffering by rooting that sorrow in the ability to imagine oneself in the situation of the sufferer. This connection, established by moral philosophers and popular novelists alike, fostered a popular culture of “sensibility,” a term Janet Todd has defined as “the capacity for refined emotion and a quickness to display compassion for suffering.”27
Missionary writings intersected pity with sympathy, although in a less direct manner. This intersection was the result of the writers’ attempts to answer a difficult question: Why should British readers contribute to the assistance of a foreign people when there were dire needs at their own doors? However commendable and however useful for competition with France and Spain, missions in America were not obviously connected to most readers’ immediate concerns. The proponents of mission had to develop ways of linking their readers conceptually to this distant work.
Some missionary texts simply relied on the boundless compassion of their audience. When he delivered the sermon of 1763 before the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), Thomas Randall, a minister of Inchture, titled his text Christian Benevolence. Throughout this sermon, delivered just as “so many Indian tribes ha[d] fallen under the dominion of Great Britain” at the end of the Seven Years’ War, Randall encouraged his listeners to support missions to Indians as an expression of their “desir[e for] the happiness of others.”28 He rehearsed pragmatic arguments for missionary projects, such as “the unceasing activity of the priests of Rome … to pervert more of these Heathen tribes,” but his focus was on the pleasure his audience would feel at “a happy opportunity for exerting our Christian benevolence.”29 As a reward for their charity he offered only “an elevation in their minds,” while they imagined the joy brought to converts, and an enhanced closeness with others: “[B]y … communication with the knowledge of others, their love, and their attainments, we enter into their joys, and make them all our own.”30 If they extended their sympathy throughout Britain’s empire, donors in Scotland would enrich their own sense of self.
Randall’s assumption of his audience’s boundless compassion reflected a tradition of optimistic moral philosophy that extended from the Cambridge Platonists of the Restoration through early eighteenth-century deists to the moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Reacting against cynical visions of an egoistic human nature developed by Thomas Hobbes and then by Bernard Mandeville, many British intellectuals had come to rely on emotion, particularly a tendency to feel sorrow at the sight of suffering, as proof of humans’ natural selflessness.31 Early in the century the third Earl of Shaftesbury linked the moral sense to taste, suggesting that most humans would find what was good also to be pleasing. Francis Hutcheson extended this view by “reducing reason to an ancillary role in ethics,” as Norman Fiering has noted, and by asserting the universal range of human compassion.32 Randall’s sermon emerged from the efforts of orthodox Scottish Presbyterians to integrate secular enlightened principles with evangelical Calvinist ones after the transatlantic revivals of the mid-eighteenth century.33
Writing at a moment of imperial optimism and in the midst of a culture steeped in ideals of benevolence, Randall alluded to his audience’s limitless compassion as an obvious matter. Yet few authors of missionary tracts, especially earlier ones, so casually assumed that their readers would be able or willing to extend their compassion across an ocean to a foreign recipient.34 While some philosophers argued for the limitless range of pity, others denied that humans could feel compassion across a distance. David Hume insisted in 1739 that “pity depends, in a great measure, on the contiguity, and even the sight of the object.”35 Although he granted pity a wider range, Adam Smith insisted that humans were not obliged to extend it into distant quarters. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he berated “those whining and melancholy moralists” who suggest that no one should feel pleasure while a single person in the world suffers.36 Rather than arguing that one might feel joy by expressing compassion, Smith described boundless pity as an obstacle to pleasure. Even as he made intelligible the complex global systems that make distant suffering discernable, he denied the emotional tug of that suffering.37
Smith suggested that when compassion is stretched too far, it depletes the spectator without benefit to the sufferer. This distaste for the “artificial commiseration”38 the sentimental spectator feels for distant sufferers became more pronounced as Smith revised this text. When he added a discussion of benevolence to the sixth edition in 1790, he juxtaposed the infinite scope of benevolent feeling with its limited effectiveness: “Though our effectual good offices can very seldom be extended to any wider society than that of our own country; our good-will is circumscribed by no boundary, but may embrace the immensity of the universe.”39 While they feel sorrow at the most distant distress, humans should help those nearest themselves and leave the rest to God’s care: “The care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department … the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country: that he is occupied in contemplating the more sublime, can never be an excuse for his neglecting the more humble department” (VI.ii.3.6, p. 237). This commentary expanded on Smith’s theory that sympathy, which he defined as a sense of shared feeling and situation, directs one’s pity, which he defined as “fellow-feeling with the sorrow of others.”40 Benevolent feeling may be universal, but benevolent action should be local. Echoing classical definitions of pity, such as Aristotle’s, but incorporating aspects of the egoistic philosophy forwarded by Mandeville, he argued that selfishness guides selflessness.41
When they asked readers in Britain to assist in alleviating the spiritual plight of Indians, missionaries would seem to have fit within Smith’s category of “whining and melancholy moralists.” If it were even possible for them to extend their readers’ sympathetic capacity
