The Gathering Storm

“Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, ye who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; looking to thyself, lest thou also be tempted.”

— Galatians 6:1, ASV

A Mission Stretched Thin

This chapter and the next tell the hardest part of Crowther’s story. They are hard in two ways. They are painful, because they end with an old man’s life’s work taken apart around him. And they are difficult to tell fairly, because the two sides have been told very differently. The missionary society’s own historians, writing soon after, presented a necessary if regrettable cleansing of a corrupt mission. Nigerian historians, and in time the Church of England itself, have presented a betrayal. The truth, as best it can be found, includes things that both sides would rather leave out.

Begin with the problem, which was real. By the late 1870s the Niger Mission stretched from the Delta to Lokoja and beyond, over some three hundred miles of river, among many peoples and languages. Its stations were staffed almost entirely by African clergy, catechists, and schoolmasters, most of them recruited from Sierra Leone. Some were men of great devotion. Others were not. They lived far from any supervision, among trading posts where money, drink, and women were easily had, and where the example set by many European traders was bad. The bishop visited each station at most once a year, and for years he had no boat of his own. Paul had written of “that which presseth upon me daily, anxiety for all the churches” (2 Corinthians 11:28, ASV). Crowther knew the feeling. It was impossible for one man, however faithful, to know what was happening in every station.

He was also, by temperament, lenient. He found it hard to believe the worst of the men he had trained, and hard to dismiss them when he did. Where the evidence was uncertain, he gave them the benefit of the doubt. Where a man had fallen, he hoped for his repentance. Some of his letters from these years show both his seriousness about sin and his instinct for mercy. Of converts who had been drawn, under pressure from the chiefs, into heathen rites, he wrote in 1885 that “our severe punishment to maintain Christian discipline must be moderated with sympathy and guided by due allowance for the measure of knowledge and experienced Christian principle which the converts possessed.” That is the spirit of the verse at the head of this chapter: “restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.” But gentleness can become weakness, and some of his own friends thought it had.

Ashcroft and Wood

The first sign of trouble came through the mission’s business affairs. In 1878 the society sent out the steamer Henry Venn with a European lay agent, J. H. Ashcroft, to manage it and to take charge of the mission’s money and supplies. It was a sensible arrangement in some ways, since the bishop had no training in accounts, but it meant that the finances of his own diocese were in someone else’s hands.

At about the same time the society set up a committee at Lagos to oversee the mission, and asked the Rev. J. B. Wood, an experienced English missionary in the Yoruba country, to visit the Niger stations and report. Wood’s report on his first visit, in 1880, was unfavourable. It brought a series of charges against the African agents. Wood himself, according to the society’s historian Eugene Stock, thought that some of the charges “might be false or exaggerated,” but he found “a manifest lack of real spirituality and evangelistic zeal among them.” Some later Nigerian historians have argued that the charges were forwarded to London before the accused had any chance to answer them. The report was sent to the bishop for his comments. It reached him, as Stock recorded, just when he was “suffering the sorest of bereavements.” His wife died that October.

Madeira

In the early months of 1881 the society called a conference on the island of Madeira, halfway between England and West Africa. Crowther, Dandeson, two other African clergy, and Ashcroft met the society’s lay secretary and another senior clergyman there. Wood could not come. They agreed on a series of reforms, including a training institution at Lokoja and the appointment of an English clergyman as secretary of the mission, who would live on the Niger and be, in Stock’s words, “the Bishop’s friend and counsellor.”

The man chosen was Thomas Phillips, a graduate of Dublin in middle life who had been in business. After some theological study in London he was ordained deacon by an English bishop, and then, in 1882, a few weeks later, ordained priest by Samuel Crowther, who was in England that year. Stock called it “this first ordination of an Englishman by a Negro bishop.” It was a moment that Henry Venn would have loved. The slave boy from Osogun laid his hands on the head of an Englishman and made him a priest of the Church of England.

Phillips lasted nine months on the Niger. He found the difficulties great, returned to England, and resigned when the society would not fully accept his views. After his return, the society took stronger steps. In 1883 the society went further. Some agents against whom there was no trustworthy evidence for a church trial were simply let go, as a society may let go any paid employee. It was a distinction that mattered: they were not found guilty of anything. They were no longer wanted.

The Crime at Onitsha

Then came a scandal that could not be explained away. In September 1882 the London newspapers reported that two agents of the Church Missionary Society had been convicted at Sierra Leone of treating a girl at Onitsha so cruelly that she died. For a few days the society’s friends in England feared that two young English missionaries had become murderers. In fact the two men were Africans. One was a schoolmaster whom Crowther himself had dismissed for bad conduct, but who, out of pity, had afterwards been taken on again as a clerk or storekeeper. The other was an interpreter. The crime had been committed about five years earlier, and it was Wood who had helped to bring the men to justice.

It is important not to leave this out. A girl died. Her killers were employed by the mission. And one of them was employed only because mercy had been shown to a man who did not deserve it. No source suggests that Crowther knew of the crime. But it was the kind of failure that lenient, thinly spread supervision made possible, and it gave his critics a terrible example.

In April 1883 the Duke of Somerset used the case to attack the society in the House of Lords. Earl Cairns rose at once to defend it, and the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward Benson, made his first speech as primate in its support. But the damage was done. The Niger Mission had become, in the minds of many in England, a byword for scandal.

“I Did Not Shut Mine Eyes”

Crowther did not pretend that all was well. He listed the cases in which he had himself suspended or dismissed agents, and wrote: “Surely I think these facts must show that I did not shut mine eyes to the faults of the agents of the Niger Mission during a period of now over twenty-five years.” When one of the tutors of his own training institution, an able and apparently respectable man, was found guilty of adultery, he wrote from Lokoja in October 1884: “This is another proof that we are apt to be misled by the outward appearance or intellectual qualifications of men; whereas the Lord looks into the heart.”

He agreed that the mission needed better men, and said so. “None but the best and well qualified of the sons of the African churches,” he wrote in 1884, “whose hearts are fired with ardent zeal,” should be employed as agents. “They should be decided spiritual men, because spiritual men can only teach spiritual things.” But he would not accept that the answer was to replace African agents with Europeans. The answer was to choose and train Africans better.

In February 1884, in a letter that shows how deeply the criticism had hurt him, he offered to step aside. “If others are delicate to tell me of my incompetency in the superintendence of the Niger Mission,” he wrote, “it is my duty to relieve their minds of that delicacy. I am ready to yield place to others to act as leading managers of the Niger Mission. I am willing, as long as my health lasts, to labour as a pioneer in opening fresh grounds, while the already established stations can be worked by superior intellects and better managers.” The society would not hear of it.

Hamilton

For a few years things improved. In place of Phillips the society sent James Hamilton, an older missionary who had served in Sierra Leone and understood African work. He travelled with the bishop from station to station, holding inquiries and dismissing agents where the evidence was sufficient. According to Page, he found the bishop “always ready to concur in any suggestion for improvement and the better supervision of the work.” A new Henry Venn replaced the old one. Archdeacon Henry Johnson, a gifted African scholar who had been given an honorary degree by Cambridge, worked at Lokoja, preaching at times with four interpreters beside him. The Delta churches were growing and largely paying for themselves.

Hamilton and Crowther showed that it was possible for an English secretary and an African bishop to reform a mission together, with firmness and without contempt. It was a lesson that the next generation did not learn.

Gentleness and Looking to Thyself

Paul’s instruction to the Galatians has two halves. The first is about the one who has fallen: “restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.” The second is about the one who restores: “looking to thyself, lest thou also be tempted.” Crowther’s critics accused him of neglecting the first half, of letting fallen men stay fallen, and to some extent they were right. But they were soon to neglect the second half entirely. Those who judged his mission most harshly did not look to themselves. They did not ask whether their own certainty, their own zeal, or their own assumptions about Africans might lead them into sin.