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Presbyterian Church U.S.A., Annual Reports of the Board of Foreign Missions, 1850-1920.

Until last summer (2002), I had always assumed that the history of American Presbyterian missions in Siam was a book waiting to be written, and in one sense I was not wrong on that score. But, in another sense the assumption, based on a long familiarity with the subject, was incorrect—and happily so! While enjoying the luxury of several weeks of research at Speer Library, Princeton Theological Seminary, I took the opportunity to inspect more closely the chapters on the Siam and Laos Missions contained in the annual reports of the Board of Foreign Missions (BFM) of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. (PCUSA). I had long assumed that those chapters were nothing more than a reprint of the two missions' annual reports, microfilm copies of which are located at the Payap University Archives. It turns out that they are something quite different and far more useful, namely original chapters describing and commenting on the events of the year for each mission based on various reports and personal correspondence received from the field. When photocopied and brought together, these chapters constitute a massive chronicle, running to many hundreds of pages for the years 1850 to 1921—from, that is, the first Board annual reports containing material on the Siam Mission until the two missions were merged in 1920-1921. They are an invaluable source of information on each year in each station of the two missions, and while they do not comprise a history of the missions, in a technical sense, they certainly are a fulsome chronicle charting the events of each year in considerable detail.

It should be stated from the beginning that these annual chapters from 1850 to 1921 are by no means a perfect record of the two missions. It is particularly difficult to determine precise dates. The slowness of communication, especially in earlier years means that "last year" in the chapter for 1850, for example, probably refers to 1848 rather than 1849. By the same token, the mission year never followed the calendar year, and it was adjusted at least once over the years, so that one is not always sure if the phrase "early in the year" refers to the present calendar or mission year. Where possible, that is, dates will have to be checked against other records for the missions. Because these chapters were compiled by people who were not

immediately familiar with the missions and the peoples and cultures of Siam, furthermore, there are inaccuracies, misspellings, and misinterpretations that would not appear (one hopes) in a professional history. The authors of these chapters also leave out the names of places and peoples, probably to save space and on the assumption that most readers would not know the places and people involved.

Possibly the most significant problem regarding this chapters, however, is their relative inaccessibility. One has to locate a set of PCUSA annual board reports, which is a massive multi-volume set of huge books filling considerable library shelf space. One assumes that these volumes are available at most or all of the Presbyterian seminaries and may be available in some Presbyterian colleges and universities as well. In spite of this being the age of interlibrary loan (ILL), this is a case where the reader will have to go to the books; the books simply cannot physically come to the reader. Also, working through volume after volume to locate the chapters on Siam is, in and of itself, a laborious process—especially if one intends to photocopy it all!

These problems do not detract, however, from the value of the chapters themselves. To begin with, each chapter (usually a single chapter divided into two sections, one each for the Siam and Laos Missions, respectively) contains basic factual material concerning the missionary members of each station, including arrivals and departures for the year and the names of those on furlough. Deaths and serious illnesses are invariably noted. Statistics are usually given for the amounts of books and tracts printed and distributed by the mission presses, and beginning in 1862 statistical summaries for Siam and Laos (north Siam) churches are available in the statistical reports for PCUSA churches (separate from the chapters). The chapters generally report on the work according to station and mission institution. For most years, a good map of Siam, locating Presbyterian mission stations, is included. Some of the chapters are illustrated with excellent photographs that are not elsewhere available.

It needs to be emphasized, again, that while these annual reports contain frequent quotations of and references to missionary reports and correspondence, they are original pieces of work. They reveal, that is, something of the thinking of the Board itself including not only what it saw to be important in the work but also an often heavy overlay of theological (ideological) interpretation that came from the home offices rather than the field. They provide, thus, a somewhat different

perspective on the work in Siam. As one very important example, they describe the work of each of the two missions, the Siam and the Laos Missions, in parallel with each other and, at times, actually draw comparisons between the two missions. This perspective is very different from that of the missionaries, who generally did not know what was going on in the "the other" mission. The Board perspective was also concerned about political and economic developments, which influenced the work of the missions.

Once located, the individual chapters are not difficult to use. For earlier years, they amount to only two or three pages, while by 1910 the average chapter runs to 20 to 30 pages. The 1910 report, for example, is 31 pages long. The categories under which material is presented tend to remain the same from year to year, so that it is not difficult to trace particular histories, such as that of a station or an institution, for example. Those who want to track the movements of one missionary will also find these chapters useful, although in all cases the sheer physical bulk of the volumes involved is as already mentioned, a problem. In Speer Library, the volumes are located in a far corner of the basement stacks in a narrow isle; one either sits on the floor there, or carts the volumes upstairs to find a place to sit more comfortably. The only other set I've seen is at the Presbyterian Historical Society, where they are much more conveniently located in the reading room; several of the volumes, unfortunately, are in such poor physical condition as to be virtually unusable. One can only hope that someday all of this material will either be microfilmed or put on line.

For those who can locate these volumes, however, the material they contain on the Siam and Laos Missions is important and useful—if it is remembered that they constitute a chronicle of events rather than a history of those events.

Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club. London: Flamingo, 2002.

The nineteenth-century American Protestant missionaries to Siam lived in a much larger world than we often realize, a world as complex and multi-faceted as our own. Menand's The Metaphysical Club offers a reminder of that fact and helps us to better understand "where the missionaries were coming from," especially in the years after the American Civil War (1861-1865). The book itself won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in history, and while one might quibble with certain aspects of his

presentation—such as long digressions that seem off the subject—Menand offers an excellent description the American intellectual climate after 1865. He renders philosophical jargon comprehensible and captures something of the fundamental shifts in thinking that were taking place in the United States in the later nineteenth century. Although he focuses on the intellectual lives of just four men (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Pierce, John Dewey), Menand manages to weave the thought of many more individuals into the story of how the American intellectual climate changed in the wake of the Civil War.

Those changes, according to Menand, included a significant shift in attitudes concerning belief, knowledge, and truth. He does not describe the Antebellum intellectual scene, but it is apparent from he does write that the Civil War shattered the trust of a numerous influential thinkers in the trustworthiness of strongly held beliefs. They believed that strongly held beliefs lead to violence, oppression, and injustice and that "true" believers, such as the militantly anti-slavery abolitionists, created the conditions that led to war. These thinkers, thus, rejected the idea that beliefs are divinely inspired truths and insisted that we humans create our own beliefs, which are nothing more than guesses about the nature of things. Holding on to a set of beliefs too strongly is dangerous.

More largely, the new intellectual climate promoted the idea that we create knowledge and truth itself socially with the purpose of making the world over into what we want it to be. Knowledge and truth are not static. Facts are not fixed. Truth is nothing more than what we agree it to be. Many educated people thus embraced Darwinism with its emphasis on chance and variation. Science was no longer considered a matter of discovering fixed laws that govern a stable, unchanging universe. The world was no longer certain, but rather a matter of averages, statistics, and shifting patterns that depended on the person of knower as much as the nature of the known.

Menand's commentary on nineteenth and early twentieth-century American thought makes it clear that various individuals thought various pieces of this pie in their own various ways. Some rejected organized religion, for example, while others embraced it. Some experienced the trauma of war directly and deeply, others felt the war as only a superficial impact, if that. The American intellect, nonetheless,

increasingly cast off the settled, stable, and immutable Antebellum world and embraced a less fixed, more uncertain one in its place.

The Metaphysical Club is important to the study of Protestant church history in Thailand because it helps us to understand the ways in which the two American Presbyterian missions in Siam, the Siam and Laos Missions, "located" themselves in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Siam. The members of those two missions largely ignored the changes described by Menand. Their members continued to live for the most part in the older world that existed before the Civil War, a world that believed that facts are solid and unchangeable and that humans can know reality for what it really is. They continued to believe, that is, in their beliefs and took those beliefs to be a true description of unchanging divine and human realities.

Menand, thus, helps us to see that the Presbyterian missionaries in Siam from the 1860s onwards actually operated in three contexts, two of which they largely ignored. Their own intellectual context was primarily the pre-Civil War era, the one in which many of them were born and raised (Daniel McGilvary, for example, was born in 1828). While the Civil War was an important experience to these missionaries, it did not have the same impact on their thinking that it had on the protagonists of Menand's narrative. They remained committed believers, and they largely rejected the new, second intellectual context that emerged after 1865. Or, perhaps, it is better to say that they only gradually came to inhabit the post-Civil War world and even then not completely or particularly comfortably. It is important to understand that prior to the Civil War, these missionaries thought in ways that fit very well with their national cultural and intellectual context. They reflected the best, most forward-looking, and deepest thought of the time. After the Civil War, however, they swam against the currents of contemporary thought and thus quietly, progressively de-contextualized themselves in terms of the main stream of American thought.

Conservative American Presbyterians, generally, felt constrained to reject the new thinking that emerged after 1865 because that thinking seemed to them to deny that humans can have a saving, true knowledge of God. It refused the idea that scientific facts are eternal and unchanging and that humans can achieve a true, unquestionable knowledge of reality. The post-Civil War world was a doubting world exemplified by Darwinian thought, and conservative Presbyterians, including nearly

all of the missionaries who served in Siam, could not accept such a world. Hence, they clung to their earlier context and spurned their contemporary one.

The Presbyterian missionaries' resistance to the changing intellectual climate in the United States had a direct bearing on the way in which they situated themselves in their third context, Siam. They could no more accept the Thai context as a viable intellectual and religious one than they could accept the changes in thinking taking place in their homeland. If there was a difference between their contemporary American and the Siamese intellectual and religious contexts, it would have been that the American context still included a great deal that was familiar to them and large numbers of their compatriots also rejected the changes that were taking place. There was nothing familiar about Siam, other than a pervasive "heathenism" such as they thought was described in the Bible. Everyone around them, meanwhile, accepted this heathen context as natural and good.

Menand's The Metaphysical Club, in sum, helps us to place the Presbyterian missionaries who worked in Siam in their own intellectual and religious time. It provides important insights, if negatively, into the mentality and methods the missionaries brought with them. It reminds us that conservative Presbyterians in the United States felt a degree of alienation from their intellectual and religious context at home much as the missionaries felt that same alienation in their expatriate context in Siam—if not to the same degree. I would argue that we cannot fathom the unfolding of Protestant history in Siam/Thailand apart from an understanding of that dual alienation.