Missionary in Victorian Britain

The role of missionaries was well known in late Victorian Britain. As one contemporary writer remarked, the boys at the St Mary's Redcliffe School in Bristol were asked one day to write an essay on a British colony. One of the boys wrote,
'Africa is a British colony. I will tell you how England makes her colonies. First she gets a missionary; when the missionary has found a specially beautiful and fertile tract of country, he gets all his people round him and says, "Let us pray," and when all the eyes are shut, up goes the British Flag!' The commentator realized that the 'great mass of the people of Nigeria [had] come under the protection of the British flag with their eyes shut'.

Excerpt from 'Ghosts of Empire' by K Kwarteng