1818 AMERICAN MISSIONARY MANIFESTO. Moses Stuart Commissions Early American Missionaries Around the Globe.

The 1818 publication of The Missionary; An Essay to Assist in Christianizing the Heathen provides a significant window into the ideas animating the formative first decade of the American foreign mission movement. Emerging shortly after the 1810 establishment of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and the historic 1812 departure of Adoniram Judson and his contemporaries, this work epitomizes the American Church's shift from sporadic local evangelism to engagement in a highly organized, strategic global enterprise. A very early articulation of the missiological theories, structural strategies, and theological arguments used to mobilize the domestic church.

The text is, in essence, both a practical manual and a promotional manifesto designed to inspire and coordinate the cross-denominational support needed for the global endeavor. By framing global evangelism not just as a spiritual ideal but as an organized duty requiring systematic funding, rigorous missionary training, and strategic planning, the work helped institutionalize the missionary impulse within the fabric of early American evangelicalism. It directly reflects the expansionist spirit of the era, where American Christians increasingly viewed their young nation as having a unique providential role to play on the world stage, transforming foreign missions from a novel experiment into a defining religious crusade of the century.

Stuart, Moses. A Sermon Preached in the Tabernacle, Salem, Nov. 5, 1818, at the Ordination of the Rev. Messrs. Pliny Fisk, Levi Spaulding, Miron Winslow, and Henry Woodward, as Missionaries to the Unevangelized Nations. Andover. Flagg and Gould. 1818. 44pp.

Good, textually clean and complete with some light scattered foxing as shown. Removed from a larger sammelband with attendant flotsam on spine and tenderness to binding.