ABSTRACT
There has always been something odd about the title "The Church Missionary Society", in the sense that the word "Church" made the others unnecessary. It is intriguing to realize that the Great Commission itself in Matthew 28:18-20 could have been formulated in its trinitarian shape only in the sequel of obeying it instinctively already. Its origins lay in the significance of Christ, crucified and risen for humanity, read and loved in terms inclusively redemptive. A certain theology of inspiration may have underwritten this confidence, though a careful attention to the experience of Philip and the Ethiopian in Acts 8 might have given it pause. The art of navigation is an exacting realm for those who think themselves straightforward. The wily Palmerston, as well as Samuel Gobat, has to figure at the junctures of history in the tally of the Ottoman decades throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
