'A selection of fundamentals': The intellectual background of the Melanesian Mission of the Church of England, 1850-1914

The Melanesian Mission of the Church of England was created to propagate Christianity in the Melanesian Islands of the southwestern Pacific at the height of the Victorian missionary movement. In its assumption of the universal validity of Christianity and the duty of the Church to place Christianity before all men regardless of their cultural circumstances, it reflected the historical and contemporary values of Christian mission. But in its presentation of the Christian message and its assessment of the indigenous peoples it served, it was distinctive.The Melanesian Mission revealed an unusual sensitivity to the nuances of Melanesian culture and a willingness to accommodate it whenever possible. Its leadership--principally Bishop John Coleridge Patteson and Robert Codrington--sought to separate the fundamental moral and spiritual precepts of the Christian faith from the context of Western civilization and allow the development of a Christianity suited to Melanesian needs. In this effort, the Mission made extensive use of Melanesian languages and attempted to establish a Melanesian clergy and Melanesian teachers as the primary transmitters of the Christian message.;While conditions in the field undoubtedly infuenced this policy of accommodation, this dissertation focuses on those elements in the religious and intellectual background of the Mission's leadership that predisposed them to such an approach. The common threads in that background were a university education and at least some affinity for the High Church variant of the Anglican tradition. But past that, an intellectual definition of this peculiarly flexible mission becomes a matter of "placing" it in the varied, often confusing intellectual life of Victorian England. By examining the correspondence, diaries, and other writings of the mission's leadership with a view to correlating their reading matter with their thinking on the goals of Christian mission, it is possible to discover the broad range of perspectives on "primitive" culture available to those encountering it in the mission field. The Melanesian Mission's willingness to utilize the least ethnocentric of these perspectives suggests the need for a reappraisal of common assumptions about both the relationship between belief and secular knowledge and that between Christian mission and Western civilization.