ABSTRACT
Although in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries England had become an important commercial nation with an increasing overseas empire in non-Christian parts of the world, she was slow in accepting any religious responsibility towards their peoples. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, founded in 1699, tried to send English missionaries to work among the natives in the East India Company's settlements, but without success. In the event, since no English clergymen were prepared to go to India as missionaries, the Society during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had to be content with appointing and supporting Lutheran missionaries from Germany and Scandinavia to work in the Company's territory. In 1793 Carey went to India as the Society's first missionary. The missionary societies themselves were generally in favour of the extension of British rule overseas, not only because it was on the whole animated by moral ideals to which they subscribed, but also because it ensured freedom for their own work.
