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‘Hunting for Souls’: The Missionary Pilgrimage of George Sherwood Eddy1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2016
Extract
As I look back upon life it seems one glorious adventure. From early boyhood days of camping in what we loved to think of as the ‘wild West’, to shooting elephant and tiger in the jungles of my own mission station in India, and on into that bigger and greater hunt for men, life has seemed one long adventure.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2000
Footnotes
1
Research for this paper was conducted under the auspices of the North Atlantic Missiology Project, co-ordinated by the University of Cambridge and financed by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Pew Charitable Trusts. I am grateful to Martha L. Smalley and Joan Duffy of the Day Missions Library, Yale Divinity School, for their assistance in giving me access to the Eddy and Mott papers.
References
2 Eddy, [G.] Sherwood, Eighty Adventurous Years: An Autobiography (New York, 1955), pp. 13–14.Google Scholar
3 Nutt, Rick L., The Whole Gospel for the Whole World: Sherwood Eddy and the American Protestant Mission (Macon, GA, 1997).Google Scholar
4 Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, p. 17.
5 Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, p. 27.
6 Nutt, The Whole Gospel, pp. 27–8.
7 Pollock, John, A Cambridge Movement (London, 1953), pp. 99, 131Google Scholar; Harford, J. B. and MacDonald, F. C., Handley Can Glyn Moule Bishop of Durham: A Biography (London, nd), p. 124Google Scholar; Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, p. 39.
8 Tatlow, Tissington, The Story of the Student Christian Movement of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1933), pp. 38–9Google Scholar. The article appeared in The Student Volunteer for January 1893.
9 Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, p. 96; Nutt, The Whole Cospel, p. 23.
10 Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, pp. 112–13, and Religion and Social Justice (New York, 1927), pp. 11–12.
11 Nutt, The Whole Gospel, pp. 43, 46. Eddy took a further vow to forego all medicine in favour of total reliance on divine healing; for a year he even abandoned his spectacles in the assurance that God would correct his eyesight.
12 Sherwood Eddy, A Pilgrimage of Ideas: or the Re-Education of Sherwood Eddy (London, 1935). p. 7.
13 Nutt, The Whole Gospel, p. 31.
14 Nutt, The Whole Gospel, pp. 13, 28.
15 Yale Divinity School Library, Special Collections, MS Group 32, G. S. Eddy papers [hereafter Eddy papers], Box 3, Report Letters, especially No. 3 (March 1897).
16 Eddy papers, Box 3, Report Letter No. 5 (May 1897). Eddy applied to India the judgements on spiritual apostasy of which God warned Israel in Deut. 28. 58-61.
17 Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, p. 79; see also Nutt, The Whole Gospel, p. 28.
18 Eddy Papers, Box 3, Report Letters Nos 14 (Sept. 1898), 20 (Dec. 1899) and 25 (Sept. 1901).
19 Eddy Papers, Box 3, Report Letters Nos 4 (April 1897) and 7 Quly 1897).
20 Eddy Papers, Box 3, Report Letter No. 6 (June 1897). Eddy is alluding to Mark 9. 14-29. See also Letter No 2 (Jan. 1897).
21 Eddy Papers, Box 3, Report Letter No. 10 (Dec. 1897).
22 Nutt, The Whole Gospel, p. 44.
23 Eddy Papers, Box 3, Report Letter No. 18 (July 1899).
24 Nutt, The Whole Gospel, p. 100. For an illuminating discussion of the connections of hunting with imperialism, muscular Christianity, and the American frontier spirit see MacKenzie, John M., The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988), ch. 2.Google Scholar
25 Eddy Papers, Box 3, Report Letter No. 16 (March 1899); see Fullerton, W. Y., F. B. Meyer: A Biography (London, nd), pp. 205–6.Google Scholar
26 Eddy Papers, Box 3, Report Letter No. 28 (1902).
27 See Harper, S. B., In the Shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V. S. Azariah and the Travails of Christianity in British India (Grand Rapids, MI, and Richmond, 2000), pp. 73–90.Google Scholar
28 Hopkins, C. H., John R. Mott 1865-1955: A Biography (Grand Rapids, MI, 1979), pp. 391–2.Google Scholar
29 Eddy papers, Box 3, Report Letter No. 44 (15 Jan. 1913).
30 Hopkins, John R. Mott, p. 391. Eddy had expressed the hope to E. C. Carter in January 1912 that his tour with Mott later that year might prove that the time had at last come ‘to break through the ranks of caste and reap among high-caste students’ (Yale Divinity School Library, Special Collections, MS Group 45, Mott Papers, Box 25, Eddy to Carter, 24 Jan. 1912).
31 Eddy Papers, Box 3, Report Letter No. 19 (Oct. 1899).
32 Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, pp. 41–2; Nutt, The Whole Gospel, pp. 51–4.
33 Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, p. 54.
34 Eddy, G. S., ‘A national church for India’, The Harvest Field, 31 (1911), pp. 213–19Google Scholar, cited in Stanley, Brian, ‘The reshaping of Christian tradition: western denominational identity in a non-western context’, in Swanson, R. N., ed., Unity and Diversity in the Church, SCH 32 (1996), p. 411Google Scholar. As early as 1902 Eddy had commented on the inadequacy of Congregationalism to cope with the strains produced by mass movements in Travancore; see Eddy papers, Box 3, Report Letter No. 30 (30 Oct 1902).
35 Eddy, Sherwood, India Awakening (New York, 1912), p. 53.Google Scholar
36 Nutt, The Whole Gospel, pp. 116–18.
37 Eddy Papers, Box 1, Eddy to his mother, 19 Aug. 1916; and to his wife, Maud, 21 Aug. 1916.
38 Eddy papers, Box 1, Eddy to his mother, 30 Sept. 1916.
39 Ibid.; also Eddy to Maud, 21 Aug. 1916; and Eddy, A Pilgrimage of Ideas, p. 181.
40 For Maud’s ‘uncontrollable eagerness’ to join Arden in the other world see Nutt, The Whole Gospel, p. 283.
41 Eddy Papers, Box 3, undated Report Letter [1917], ‘Somewhere in France’, and circular letter dated 31 July 1917; Eddy, Sherwood, With our Soldiers in France (New York, 1917), pp. 101–3.Google Scholar
42 Eddy, Sherwood, You Will Survive Death (Reigate, 1954), p. 9.Google Scholar
43 Eddy Papers, Box 1, Eddy to his mother, 3 Aug. 1917; Box 3, circular letter from Eddy dated 1 March 1917.
44 Eddy, Sherwood, The Right to Fight: The Moral Grounds of War (New York, 1918).Google Scholar
45 Eddy, Sherwood and Page, Kirby, The Abolition of War: The Case against War and Questions and Answers concerning War (Garden City, NY, 1924).Google Scholar
46 Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, pp. 117–19.
47 Showalter, Nathan D., The End of a Crusade: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and the Great War (Lanham, MD, and London, 1998), pp. 88–9.Google Scholar
48 ‘Youth and missions’, The Christian Century, 15, 2 (12 Jan. 1928), p. 40, cited in Anderson, G. H., ‘American Protestants in pursuit of mission, 1886-1986’, in Verstraelen, F.J., et al., eds, Missiology: An Ecumenical Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI, 1995), p. 394.Google Scholar
49 Fox, Richard Wightman, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 104–5, 262.Google Scholar
50 Nutt, The Whole Cospel, pp. 202–17.
51 Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, pp. 112–13.
52 Eddy, Religion and Social Justice, p. 185, cited in Nutt, The Whole Gospel, p. 185.
53 Nutt, The Whole Gospel, pp. 191–2.
54 Ibid., pp. 192–8.
55 Ibid., p. 261; Hocking, W. E. (ed.), Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years (New York and London, 1932), pp. 44–59.Google Scholar
56 Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, p. 77.
57 Nutt, The Whole Gospel, pp. 223–4, 252-4, 309-10.
58 Ibid., pp. 292, 334; see Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, pp. 136–7, 140.
59 Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, pp. 80–1, 234-6. He continued to believe in bell only as a limited period of self-exclusion from the presence of God.
60 Eddy, You Will Survive Death, pp. 145–8. For the explosion of interest in spiritualism in the aftermath of the war see Brandon, Ruth, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1983), pp. 220–2.Google Scholar
61 Eddy, You Will Survive Death, p. 7; Mott Papers, Box 25, Mott to Eddy, 24 Sept. 1940, and Eddy to Mott, 26 Sept. 1940.
62 Eddy, Sherwood, You Will Survive After Death (New York, 1950)Google Scholar. The book was published in Britain as You Will Survive Death (Reigate, 1954). I have used the British edition.
63 Eddy, Eighty Adventurous Years, p. 224.
64 Eddy, You Will Survive Death, pp. 137–8.
65 Ibid., p. 127; Nutt, The Whole Gospel, pp. 333–4. ‘Father Tobe’ was the ‘control’ of the medium, E. A. Macbeth, and, as Tobias McCarthy, had been an Irish monk in the nineteenth century.