ABSTRACT
Missionaries in Sri Lanka were faced with a new situation in these later decades characterized by a more aggressive Buddhist Revival, the consequences of Arnold’s poem and anti-Christian Western free-thought movements. Yet, the scholarly missionary writings they turned to either belonged to the century’s middle years or were identical in content to those that did, with Robert Childers added to them.1 The consequence was that the growing popularity in the West of what the missionaries saw as idealized constructions of Buddhism were met by an even stronger emphasis on Buddhism’s nihilism and the prevalence of demon cults on the ground. Some were aware, through Arnold and theologians such as Maurice, that Buddhism could no longer be condemned as totally degraded. But this led either to straightforward inconsistency or to recanting if the sympathetic crept in. It also resulted in an intra-missionary dialogue on the limits to condemnation. In everyday contact with Buddhists, however, most missionaries were courteous and respectful.
