missionaries

• Prince’s staff sent m. back to own people

50:4.3In the head­quar­ters set­tle­ment on your world ev­ery hu­man habi­ta­tion was pro­vided with abun­dance of land. Al­though the re­mote tribes con­tin­ued in hunt­ing and food for­ag­ing, the stu­dents and teach­ers in the Prince’s schools were all agri­cul­tur­ists and hor­ti­cul­tur­ists. The time was about equally di­vided be­tween the fol­low­ing pur­suits:

• Prince’s staff sent m. back to own people

50:4.10From such a world cen­ter of cul­ture and achieve­ment there grad­u­ally ra­di­ates to all peo­ples an up­lift­ing and civ­i­liz­ing in­flu­ence which slowly and cer­tainly trans­forms the evo­lu­tion­ary races. Mean­time the ed­u­cated and spir­i­tu­al­ized chil­dren of the sur­round­ing peo­ples who have been adopted and trained in the prince’s schools are re­turn­ing to their na­tive groups and, to the best of their abil­ity, are there es­tab­lish­ing new and po­tent cen­ters of learn­ing and cul­ture which they carry on ac­cord­ing to the plan of the prince’s schools.

• emissaries of Onagar were first

63:6.7On­a­gar main­tained head­quar­ters on the north­ern shores of the an­cient Med­i­ter­ra­nean in the re­gion of the pres­ent Caspian Sea at a set­tle­ment called Oban, the tar­ry­ing place on the west­ward turn­ing of the travel trail lead­ing up north­ward from the Mes­o­po­ta­mian south­land. From Oban he sent out teach­ers to the re­mote set­tle­ments to spread his new doc­trines of one De­ity and his con­cept of the here­after, which he called the Great Be­yond. These emis­saries of On­a­gar were the world’s first mis­sion­ar­ies; they were also the first hu­man be­ings to cook meat, the first reg­u­larly to use fire in the prepa­ra­tion of food. They cooked flesh on the ends of sticks and also on hot stones; later on they roasted large pieces in the fire, but their de­scen­dants al­most en­tirely re­verted to the use of raw flesh.

• Prince’s staff sent m. back to own people

66:3.8The Prince’s cor­po­real staff con­tin­u­ously gath­ered about them the su­pe­rior in­di­vid­u­als of the sur­round­ing tribes and, af­ter train­ing and in­spir­ing these stu­dents, sent them back as teach­ers and lead­ers of their re­spec­tive peo­ples.

• Prince’s staff sent m. back to own people

66:6.4Each of the ten plan­e­tary com­mis­sions set about slowly and nat­u­rally to ad­vance the in­ter­ests in­trusted to them. Their plan con­sisted in at­tract­ing the best minds of the sur­round­ing tribes and, af­ter train­ing them, send­ing them back to their peo­ple as emis­saries of so­cial up­lift.

66:6.5For­eign emis­saries were never sent to a race ex­cept upon the spe­cific re­quest of that peo­ple. Those who la­bored for the up­lift and ad­vance­ment of a given tribe or race were al­ways na­tives of that tribe or race. The one hun­dred would not at­tempt to im­pose the habits and mores of even a su­pe­rior race upon an­other tribe. Al­ways they pa­tiently worked to up­lift and ad­vance the time-tried mores of each race. The sim­ple folk of Uran­tia brought their so­cial cus­toms to Dala­ma­tia, not to ex­change them for new and bet­ter prac­tices, but to have them up­lifted by con­tact with a higher cul­ture and by as­so­ci­a­tion with su­pe­rior minds. The pro­cess was slow but very ef­fec­tual.

66:6.6The Dala­ma­tia teach­ers sought to add con­scious so­cial se­lec­tion to the purely nat­u­ral se­lec­tion of bi­o­logic evo­lu­tion. They did not de­range hu­man so­ci­ety, but they did markedly ac­cel­er­ate its nor­mal and nat­u­ral evo­lu­tion. Their mo­tive was pro­gres­sion by evo­lu­tion and not rev­o­lu­tion by rev­e­la­tion. The hu­man race had spent ages in ac­quir­ing the lit­tle re­li­gion and morals it had, and these super­men knew bet­ter than to rob man­kind of these few ad­vances by the con­fu­sion and dis­may which al­ways re­sult when en­light­ened and su­pe­rior be­ings un­der­take to up­lift the back­ward races by overteach­ing and over­en­light­en­ment.

• Christian missionaries wrought confusion in Africa

66:6.7When Chris­tian mis­sion­ar­ies go into the heart of Africa, where sons and daugh­ters are sup­posed to re­main un­der the con­trol and di­rec­tion of their par­ents through­out the life­time of the par­ents, they only bring about con­fu­sion and the break­down of all au­thor­ity when they seek, in a sin­gle gen­er­a­tion, to sup­plant this prac­tice by teach­ing that these chil­dren should be free from all pa­ren­tal re­straint af­ter they have at­tained the age of twenty-one.

• Prince’s staff sent m. back to own people

66:7.5The Prince’s staff lived to­gether as fa­thers and moth­ers. True, they had no chil­dren of their own, but the fifty pat­tern homes of Dala­ma­tia never shel­tered less than five hun­dred adopted lit­tle ones as­sem­bled from the su­pe­rior fam­i­lies of the An­donic and San­gik races; many of these chil­dren were or­phans. They were fa­vored with the dis­ci­pline and train­ing of these super­par­ents; and then, af­ter three years in the schools of the Prince (they en­tered from thir­teen to fif­teen), they were el­i­gi­ble for mar­riage and ready to re­ceive their com­mis­sions as emis­saries of the Prince to the needy tribes of their re­spec­tive races.

• continental nation should train foreigners and send them back to own land as
• mistake to force superior culture, religion upon others

72:12.2Just now this su­pe­rior gov­ern­ment is plan­ning to es­tab­lish am­bas­sado­rial re­la­tions with the in­fe­rior peo­ples, and for the first time a great re­li­gious leader has arisen who ad­vo­cates the send­ing of mis­sion­ar­ies to these sur­round­ing na­tions. We fear they are about to make the mis­take that so many oth­ers have made when they have en­deav­ored to force a su­pe­rior cul­ture and re­li­gion upon other races. What a won­der­ful thing could be done on this world if this con­ti­nen­tal na­tion of ad­vanced cul­ture would only go out and bring to it­self the best of the neigh­bor­ing peo­ples and then, af­ter ed­u­cat­ing them, send them back as emis­saries of cul­ture to their be­nighted breth­ren! Of course, if a Mag­is­te­rial Son should soon come to this ad­vanced na­tion, great things could quickly hap­pen on this world.

• Adamites went forth from Mesopotamia

78:2.2The hero­ism dis­played in the lead­er­ship of the sec­ond gar­den con­sti­tutes one of the amaz­ing and in­spir­ing epics of Uran­tia’s his­tory. These splen­did souls never wholly lost sight of the pur­pose of the Adamic mis­sion, and there­fore did they valiantly fight off the in­flu­ences of the sur­round­ing and in­fe­rior tribes while they will­ingly sent forth their choic­est sons and daugh­ters in a steady stream as emis­saries to the races of earth. Some­times this ex­pan­sion was de­plet­ing to the home cul­ture, but al­ways these su­pe­rior peo­ples would re­ha­bil­i­tate them­selves.

• Adamites went forth from Mesopotamia

78:3.1The vi­o­let race re­tained the Edenic tra­di­tions of peace­ful­ness for many mil­len­ni­ums, which ex­plains their long de­lay in mak­ing ter­ri­to­rial con­quests. When they suf­fered from pop­u­la­tion pres­sure, in­stead of mak­ing war to se­cure more ter­ri­tory, they sent forth their ex­cess in­hab­i­tants as teach­ers to the other races. The cul­tural ef­fect of these ear­lier mi­gra­tions was not en­dur­ing, but the ab­sorp­tion of the Adamite teach­ers, traders, and ex­plor­ers was bi­o­log­i­cally in­vig­o­rat­ing to the sur­round­ing peo­ples.

• early m. spread culture

81:3.7The trav­el­ing trader and the rov­ing ex­plorer did more to ad­vance his­toric civ­i­liza­tion than all other in­flu­ences com­bined. Mil­i­tary con­quests, col­o­niza­tion, and mis­sion­ary en­ter­prises fos­tered by the later re­li­gions were also fac­tors in the spread of cul­ture; but these were all sec­ondary to the trad­ing re­la­tions, which were ever ac­cel­er­ated by the rapidly de­vel­op­ing arts and sci­ences of in­dus­try.

• Salem missionaries › teachings were foundation for later religions

92:5.102. Era of the Mel­chiz­e­dek mis­sion­ar­ies. Uran­tia re­li­gion was in no small mea­sure re­gen­er­ated by the ef­forts of those teach­ers who were com­mis­sioned by Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek when he lived and taught at Salem al­most two thou­sand years be­fore Christ. These mis­sion­ar­ies pro­claimed faith as the price of fa­vor with God, and their teach­ings, though un­pro­duc­tive of any im­me­di­ately ap­pear­ing re­li­gions, nev­er­the­less formed the foun­da­tions on which later teach­ers of truth were to build the re­li­gions of Uran­tia.

• Salem missionaries

93:6.8Upon the con­sum­ma­tion of the solemn covenant, the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion be­tween Abra­ham and Mel­chiz­e­dek was com­plete. Abra­ham again as­sumed the civil and mil­i­tary lead­er­ship of the Salem colony, which at its height car­ried over one hun­dred thou­sand reg­u­lar tithe pay­ers on the rolls of the Mel­chiz­e­dek broth­er­hood. Abra­ham greatly im­proved the Salem tem­ple and pro­vided new tents for the en­tire school. He not only ex­tended the tithing sys­tem but also in­sti­tuted many im­proved meth­ods of con­duct­ing the busi­ness of the school, be­sides con­tribut­ing greatly to the bet­ter han­dling of the de­part­ment of mis­sion­ary pro­pa­ganda. He also did much to ef­fect im­prove­ment of the herds and the re­or­ga­ni­za­tion of the Salem dairy­ing projects. Abra­ham was a shrewd and ef­fi­cient busi­ness man, a wealthy man for his day; he was not overly pi­ous, but he was thor­oughly sin­cere, and he did be­lieve in Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek.

93:7.1Mel­chiz­e­dek con­tin­ued for some years to in­struct his stu­dents and to train the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies, who pen­e­trated to all the sur­round­ing tribes, es­pe­cially to Egypt, Mes­o­po­ta­mia, and Asia Mi­nor. And as the decades passed, these teach­ers jour­neyed far­ther and far­ther from Salem, car­ry­ing with them Ma­chi­venta’s gospel of be­lief and faith in God.

93:7.2The de­scen­dants of Adam­son, clus­tered about the shores of the lake of Van, were will­ing lis­ten­ers to the Hit­tite teach­ers of the Salem cult. From this one­time And­ite cen­ter, teach­ers were dis­patched to the re­mote re­gions of both Eu­rope and Asia. Salem mis­sion­ar­ies pen­e­trated all Eu­rope, even to the British Isles. One group went by way of the Faroes to the An­don­ites of Ice­land, while an­other tra­versed China and reached the Japanese of the east­ern is­lands. The lives and ex­pe­ri­ences of the men and women who ven­tured forth from Salem, Mes­o­po­ta­mia, and Lake Van to en­lighten the tribes of the East­ern Hemi­sphere pre­sent a heroic chap­ter in the an­nals of the hu­man race.

93:7.3But the task was so great and the tribes were so back­ward that the re­sults were vague and in­def­i­nite. From one gen­er­a­tion to an­other the Salem gospel found lodg­ment here and there, but ex­cept in Pales­tine, never was the idea of one God able to claim the con­tin­ued al­le­giance of a whole tribe or race. Long be­fore the com­ing of Je­sus the teach­ings of the early Salem mis­sion­ar­ies had be­come gen­er­ally sub­merged in the older and more uni­ver­sal su­per­sti­tions and be­liefs. The orig­i­nal Mel­chiz­e­dek gospel had been al­most wholly ab­sorbed in the be­liefs in the Great Mother, the Sun, and other an­cient cults.

93:7.4You who to­day en­joy the ad­van­tages of the art of print­ing lit­tle un­der­stand how dif­fi­cult it was to per­pet­u­ate truth dur­ing these ear­lier times; how easy it was to lose sight of a new doc­trine from one gen­er­a­tion to an­other. There was al­ways a ten­dency for the new doc­trine to be­come ab­sorbed into the older body of re­li­gious teach­ing and mag­i­cal prac­tice. A new rev­e­la­tion is al­ways con­tam­i­nated by the older evo­lu­tion­ary be­liefs.

• Salem missionaries › most enthusiastic and aggressive ever
• Salem missionaries › spread teachings through native converts
• Salem missionaries › went to ends of earth

94:0.1The early teach­ers of the Salem re­li­gion pen­e­trated to the re­motest tribes of Africa and Eura­sia, ever preach­ing Ma­chi­venta’s gospel of man’s faith and trust in the one uni­ver­sal God as the only price of ob­tain­ing di­vine fa­vor. Mel­chiz­e­dek’s covenant with Abra­ham was the pat­tern for all the early pro­pa­ganda that went out from Salem and other cen­ters. Uran­tia has never had more en­thu­si­as­tic and ag­gres­sive mis­sion­ar­ies of any re­li­gion than these no­ble men and women who car­ried the teach­ings of Mel­chiz­e­dek over the en­tire East­ern Hemi­sphere. These mis­sion­ar­ies were re­cruited from many peo­ples and races, and they largely spread their teach­ings through the medium of na­tive con­verts. They es­tab­lished train­ing cen­ters in dif­fer­ent parts of the world where they taught the na­tives the Salem re­li­gion and then com­mis­sioned these pupils to func­tion as teach­ers among their own peo­ple.

• Salem missionaries › failed in Arabia

95:7.1The Mel­chiz­e­dek teach­ings of the one God be­came es­tab­lished in the Ara­bian Desert at a com­par­a­tively re­cent date. As in Greece, so in Ara­bia the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies failed be­cause of their mis­un­der­stand­ing of Ma­chi­venta’s in­struc­tions re­gard­ing overor­ga­ni­za­tion. But they were not thus hin­dered by their in­ter­pre­ta­tion of his ad­mo­ni­tion against all ef­forts to ex­tend the gospel through mil­i­tary force or civil com­pul­sion.

95:7.2Not even in China or Rome did the Mel­chiz­e­dek teach­ings fail more com­pletely than in this desert re­gion so very near Salem it­self. Long af­ter the ma­jor­ity of the peo­ples of the Ori­ent and Oc­ci­dent had be­come re­spec­tively Bud­dhist and Chris­tian, the desert of Ara­bia con­tin­ued as it had for thou­sands of years. Each tribe wor­shiped its olden fe­tish, and many in­di­vid­ual fam­i­lies had their own house­hold gods. Long the strug­gle con­tin­ued be­tween Baby­lo­nian Ishtar, He­brew Yah­weh, Ira­nian Ahura, and Chris­tian Fa­ther of the Lord Je­sus Christ. Never was one con­cept able fully to dis­place the oth­ers.

• Christian missionaries were austere and unyielding in Arabia; should have been more gracious, less stringent in social requirements

95:7.3Here and there through­out Ara­bia were fam­i­lies and clans that held on to the hazy idea of the one God. Such groups trea­sured the tra­di­tions of Mel­chiz­e­dek, Abra­ham, Moses, and Zoroaster. There were nu­mer­ous cen­ters that might have re­sponded to the Je­su­so­nian gospel, but the Chris­tian mis­sion­ar­ies of the desert lands were an aus­tere and un­yield­ing group in con­trast with the com­pro­mis­ers and in­no­va­tors who func­tioned as mis­sion­ar­ies in the Med­i­ter­ra­nean coun­tries. Had the fol­low­ers of Je­sus taken more se­ri­ously his in­junc­tion to “go into all the world and preach the gospel,” and had they been more gra­cious in that preach­ing, less strin­gent in col­lat­eral so­cial re­quire­ments of their own de­vis­ing, then many lands would gladly have re­ceived the sim­ple gospel of the car­pen­ter’s son, Ara­bia among them.

• Salem missionaries › forbidden to accept fees, create exclusive congregations

98:1.1The Salem mis­sion­ar­ies might have built up a great re­li­gious struc­ture among the Greeks had it not been for their strict in­ter­pre­ta­tion of their oath of or­di­na­tion, a pledge im­posed by Ma­chi­venta which for­bade the or­ga­ni­za­tion of ex­clu­sive con­gre­ga­tions for wor­ship, and which ex­acted the prom­ise of each teacher never to func­tion as a priest, never to re­ceive fees for re­li­gious ser­vice, only food, cloth­ing, and shel­ter. When the Mel­chiz­e­dek teach­ers pen­e­trated to pre-Hel­lenic Greece, they found a peo­ple who still fos­tered the tra­di­tions of Adam­son and the days of the And­ites, but these teach­ings had be­come greatly adul­ter­ated with the no­tions and be­liefs of the hordes of in­fe­rior slaves that had been brought to the Greek shores in in­creas­ing num­bers. This adul­ter­ation pro­duced a re­ver­sion to a crude an­i­mism with bloody rites, the lower classes even mak­ing cer­e­mo­nial out of the ex­e­cu­tion of con­demned crim­i­nals.

• zeal of early Christian, Sethites, Salemites, Buddhists

98:7.2It is not the prov­ince of this pa­per to deal with the ori­gin and dis­sem­i­na­tion of the Chris­tian re­li­gion. Suf­fice it to say that it is built around the per­son of Je­sus of Naz­a­reth, the hu­manly in­car­nate Mi­chael Son of Neb­a­don, known to Uran­tia as the Christ, the anointed one. Chris­tian­ity was spread through­out the Lev­ant and Oc­ci­dent by the fol­low­ers of this Galilean, and their mis­sion­ary zeal equaled that of their il­lus­tri­ous pre­de­ces­sors, the Sethites and Salemites, as well as that of their earnest Asi­atic con­tem­po­raries, the Bud­dhist teach­ers.

• should not require God-conscious men to reject historic leadership

99:5.11What a mis­take for Chris­tians to make when, in pre­sent­ing Christ as the su­preme ideal of spir­i­tual lead­er­ship, they dare to re­quire God-con­scious men and women to re­ject the his­toric lead­er­ship of the God-know­ing men who have con­tributed to their par­tic­u­lar na­tional or racial il­lu­mi­na­tion dur­ing past ages.

• Salem missionaries › went to ends of earth

131:0.1Dur­ing the Alexan­drian so­journ of Je­sus, Gonod, and Ga­nid, the young man spent much of his time and no small sum of his fa­ther’s money mak­ing a col­lec­tion of the teach­ings of the world’s re­li­gions about God and his re­la­tions with mor­tal man. Ga­nid em­ployed more than three­score learned trans­la­tors in the mak­ing of this ab­stract of the re­li­gious doc­trines of the world con­cern­ing the De­i­ties. And it should be made plain in this rec­ord that all these teach­ings por­tray­ing mono­the­ism were largely de­rived, di­rectly or in­di­rectly, from the preach­ments of the mis­sion­ar­ies of Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek, who went forth from their Salem head­quar­ters to spread the doc­trine of one God—the Most High—to the ends of the earth.

• Salem missionaries › in India in times of Buddha

131:3.1Ga­nid was shocked to dis­cover how near Bud­dhism came to be­ing a great and beau­ti­ful re­li­gion with­out God, with­out a per­sonal and uni­ver­sal De­ity. How­ever, he did find some rec­ord of cer­tain ear­lier be­liefs which re­flected some­thing of the in­flu­ence of the teach­ings of the Mel­chiz­e­dek mis­sion­ar­ies who con­tin­ued their work in In­dia even to the times of Bud­dha. Je­sus and Ga­nid col­lected the fol­low­ing state­ments from the Bud­dhist lit­er­a­ture: