The eighteenth century was an age in which self-confidence in human intellectual abilities went hand in hand with the most abysmal social conditions. It was the age of reason, amelioristic optimism and philanthropy. But philanthropy did not always
The eighteenth century was an age in which self-confidence in human intellectual abilities went hand in hand with the most abysmal social conditions. It was the age of reason, amelioristic optimism and philanthropy. But philanthropy did not always mean selflessness. Often it was motivated by class interest. As one interpreter phrased it - "Charity must promote the glory of God by promoting the usefulness of man."
Education became the field on which practical knowledge, philanthropy, and plain denominational self-interest blossomed into a most fruitful symbiosis affecting not only the social conditions and cultural ambitions of England but even the most remote communities in her colonial empire - to wit, the ancient settlement of Bonavista on the wind- swept rock called New-Found-Land.
One of the major instruments of societal betterment through education in eighteenth-century England was the Charity School movement. Its institutional patrons were the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.) and her younger missionary twin, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.). While the S.P.C.K. had a direct educational intent and sought to counter Dissenting pedagogical initiatives and anticlerical attitudes, the S.P.G. sought to further Anglican missionary endeavours at home but especially abroad. Thomas Bray, the Ecclesiastical Commissary for Maryland, was the driving force behind both societies, although their support was broadly based and effective on account of episcopal patronage. And both had relations with Newfoundland almost from the beginning. In fact, Newfoundland served as Bray's example to illustrate the religious needs of the colonies and encourage the founding of the S.P.G. In A Memorial Representing the Present State of Religion on the Continent of North America, published in 1700, he implored his English readers
Is it credible, that in a colony of so many thousand souls, who are all of them native from England, from whence our shipping do sail to it, during many months in the year, and in whose Navigation our best seamen are bred up; and where so many hundred families abide perpetually, some 20 years, most the whole course of their lives, and from whose trade such profit accrues to the nation...to turn the balance of Europe in commerce on our side? Can any one believe it, when he is told, that from such a nation so little care has been taken, with respect to such a colony, that there neither was, nor is, any preaching, prayers, or sacraments, or any ministerial and divine offices, per