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"They Cut Themselves with Cruel Kimes"

© Jessica Powers

In Great Britain, the literary world was scathing in its indictment of the attempt to "civilize" and "Christianize" the "natives" (the derogatory term for colonial subjects stretching from Africa to Asia).

Sending missionaries to Christianize the "Natives" was just an excuse to make money, they argued. Furthermore, the missionaries they sent were so stupid, they might not be much better than the "natives" themselves.

Bernard Shaw, nineteenth and twentieth century playwright, described the way traders used missionaries to make money in his 1898 play "The Man of Destiny":

"When [an Englishman] wants a new market for his adulterated Manchester goods, he sends a missionary to teach the natives the Gospel of Peace. The natives kill the missionary; he flies to arms in defense of Christianity, fights for it; conquers for it; and takes the market as reward from heaven."

But even when writers accepted the idea that money justified the British presence in its colonies, they still felt that that did not justify the sorry excuse called "missionaries" sent over to "civilize" the colonial subjects.

In 1808 and 1809, Sydney Smith, founder of the Edinburgh Review, predicted the failure of the missionary movement. He called the true nature of Methodism (i.e., the impetus for evangelism) the "evil of fanaticism." This evil, according to Smith, changed a normal, decent Englishman into a deranged, deceptive character who wandered around uttering idiocies.

For his readers' benefit, Smith used the Methodist missionary and writer John Styles as an example. Smith argued that Styles had presented his cause in a deceptive manner in order to produce "a great degree of mysterious terror" in people at home. Apparently, he had described the Hindu as piercing themselves with cruel kimes, a newspaper misprint that should have read "knives." Smith mocked the misprint. But of course, he said, we must be "noble" and send missionaries to a country where people cut themselves with cruel kimes.

It is ridiculous, he argued, to think that we can teach the religion of the British to a country and then pack up and go home, leaving it to their management. Besides, he stated, the type of men who were sent out for missionary purposes were worse for religion than a thousand pagans "who cut themselves with cruel kimes." If they were going to send out missionaries, why did they forget "common sense and decency?" Why did they send such a "foolish set of men?" What good does it do for a man to say he has walked a thousand miles with peas in his shoes unless he has a purpose for it? (Edinburgh Review 14, 40-46).

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