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 BV 2063 .M344 1898 
 Martin, Chalmers. 
 Apostolic and modern 
 missions 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
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 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/apostolicmodernmOOmart 
 
STUDENTS' LECTURES ON MISSIONS 
 ^PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 M DCCC XCV 
 
 Apostolic and Modern 
 Missions 
 
 BV 
 
 Rev. Chalmers Martin, A.M. 
 
 SOMETIME MISSIONARY IN SIAM 
 
 ELLIOTT F. SHEPARD INSTRUCTOR IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 DEPARTMENT, PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 New York Chicago 
 
 Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 M DCCC XCVIII 
 
Copyright i8g& 
 
 by 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company. 
 
TO THE 
 FACULTY AND STUDENTS 
 OF PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 AT WHOSE INVITATION THESE LECTURES WERE 
 
 WRITTEN AND IN RESPONSE TO WHOSE 
 
 KIND URGENCY THEY ARE NOW 
 
 PUBLISHED 
 
Preface 
 
 In the year 1894 the author was invited 
 to deliver the Students' Lectures on Missions 
 at Princeton Theological Seminary. In re- 
 sponse to this invitation the lectures embod- 
 ied in this book were written. They were 
 delivered in the spring of 1895. They were 
 afterward (1897) published in the Presby- 
 terian and Reformed Review. In deference 
 to the estimate put upon them by several 
 persons whose judgment is entitled to great 
 respect they are now presented to the Chris- 
 tian public in a permanent form. The mat- 
 ter, originally disposed in four lectures, has 
 now been arranged in eight chapters. Ex- 
 cept for this, and some minor changes and 
 additions, the lectures appear as they were 
 delivered. C. M. 
 
 Princeton, N. J., Jan. 1, 1898. 
 
Contents 
 
 chapter I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Peinciples of Apostolic Missions - 15 
 
 The necessity for some authoritative standard for 
 the missionary work of the church. Such a stand- 
 ard may be found either in the Great Commission 
 or in the example of the Apostles. The relation of 
 these to each other. Our question is, Are modern 
 missions essentially apostolic ? Some limitations to 
 be observed. 
 
 Under principles of missions we inquire particu- 
 larly as to aim and motives. What was the aim of 
 apostolic missions? Bearing of the Great Commis- 
 sion on this question. Evidence drawn from Acts 
 i.-xii. as to way in which the eleven understood the 
 last command, and as to their aim as missionaries. 
 
 Did Paul also receive the Great Commission? 
 Review of Paul's work with a view to discovery of 
 his missionary aim. Negatively, this was not 
 merely the widest possible proclamation of the gos- 
 pel, nor the winning of the largest possible number 
 of converts. Positively, it was the establishment 
 of self-governing, self-supporting, and self-extend- 
 ing churches. 
 
 The motives of apostolic missions : (1) Obedience 
 to the command of Christ ; (2) Love to Christ and 
 zeal for His honor ; (3) Compassion for a world per- 
 ishing in sin. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 The Principles of Modern Missions - - 46 
 
 The aim of modern missions. Some have pro- 
 posed ' ' The evangelization of the world in this gen- 
 
 9 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 eration " as a statement of the true aim. Criticism 
 of this view : (1) It ignores the difficulties attend- 
 ing an intelligible proclamation of the gospel to the 
 heathen ; (2) It ignores our responsibility for re- 
 sults in conversions ; (3) It ignores the aim of 
 Christianizing the world as well as evangelizing it; 
 (4) It depends for its support upon certain eschato- 
 logical theories of doubtful value; (5) It is incon- 
 sistent with the Great Commission ; (6) It is incon- 
 sistent with the example of the apostles ; (7) It is 
 not the aim cherished by the great leaders of the 
 modern missionary movement. 
 
 The real aim of modern missions as shown in la- 
 bors of Eliot, Brainerd, Ziegenbalg and Pliitschau, 
 Schwartz, Carey and his associates, and the plat- 
 forms of the great mission boards and conferences. 
 
 The motives of modern missions the same as those 
 which actuated the apostles, Testimony of Eliot, 
 Zinzendorf, Carey, Judson, Livingstone. The unity 
 of all motives iu Christ Himself. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 The Peoblem of Apostolic Missions - 72 
 
 The problem, not the problems. Importance of 
 the subject thus defined. It divides into the exter- 
 nal and the internal problems. 
 
 External difficulties in way of apostolic missions: 
 (1) Physical difficulties — extent of Roman world, 
 lack of facilities for travel ; (2) Intellectual diffi- 
 culties — diversities of language, influence of dom- 
 inant philosophies ; (3) Moral and spiritual diffi- 
 culties — pervasive influence of false religions, op- 
 position offered by ministers of these religions, by 
 the Roman state, and by Judaism, the moral cor- 
 ruptions of the time. 
 
 Obstacles within the apostolic church itself: im- 
 perfect conceptions as to simplicity and universality 
 of the gospel, influence of the Judaizing party. 
 
 Some influences favorable to missions : evidences 
 that "the fulness of the times" had come; con- 
 
 10 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 tribution to the preparation of the world for mis- 
 sions made by Rome, by Greece, and by Judaism. 
 
 The preparation of the church for missions : the 
 providential training of the eleven ; the special 
 missionary vocation and qualification of Paul. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Peoblem of Modekn Missions - 104 
 
 The modern world very different from the world 
 in the first century, and the modern church from 
 the apostolic church. Despite these differences the 
 problem of missions substantially the same now as 
 then. 
 
 The difficulties of modern missions, arising (1) 
 From the preoccupation of the heathen world by 
 false religions ; (2) The opposition offered by priests 
 and sacred men ; (3) Resistance on grounds of com- 
 mercial interest, and (4) of government policy. 
 
 The unreadiness of the early Protestantism for 
 missions. 
 
 The providential training of the modern church. 
 The challenge of Von Welz. The stimulus af- 
 forded by actual contact with heathens in New 
 England and the Dutch East Indies. Quickening 
 of missionary zeal through the Pietists, the Mora- 
 vians, and the Wesleyan revival. 
 
 The external preparation for modern missions: 
 (1) Through geographical explorations and discov- 
 eries ; (2) Through the transfer of naval and com- 
 mercial supremacy from Roman Catholic Spain and 
 Portugal to Protestant England and Holland. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 The Methods op Apostolic Missions - - 128 
 
 The term ' ' missionary methods " to be taken in 
 a wide sense. 
 
 The geographical plan of primitive missions. This 
 divinely indicated for the eleven in the Great Com- 
 mission itself; and for Paul by the providential and 
 
 11 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 supernatural guidance vouchsafed to him. It con- 
 sisted in the occupation of the great centres of in- 
 fluence in the Jewish-Roman world. 
 
 The missionary agencies of the apostles. (1) 
 Preaching. The place given to this in the Great 
 Commission, in the practice of the eleven, and of 
 Paul. The methods and scope of apostolic preach- 
 ing; (2) Supervision. This included (a) personal 
 visitation, (b) the employment of assistants, and (c) 
 the use of the pen ; (3) Miracles, — specially, the 
 gifts of healing and the gift of tongues. Did the 
 first missionaries use the gift of tongues in the 
 proclamation of the gospel ? 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 The Methods of Modern Missions - 165 
 
 Modern methods seem to he more numerous than 
 those employed by the apostles. The great meth- 
 ods, however, are still the same. 
 
 Preachiug in modern missions: the importance 
 assigned to it ; the variety of forms it assumes; the 
 subordination of other agencies to evangelism. 
 
 Supervision as a method of modern missions : 
 recognition of its importance by the Serampore 
 men and by Livingstone ; the details of its applica- 
 tion 
 
 No miracles in modern missions. To what ex- 
 tent do medical missions serve the same purpose ? 
 
 Vindication of education as a missionary method, 
 and one which the apostles would have made use 
 of had they lived and labored in modern times. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 The Results of Apostolic Missions - - 191 
 
 "These that have turned the world upside 
 down." How far did the apostles justify the 
 charge ? 
 
 (1) The extent to which the gospel was pro- 
 claimed in the apostolic age; (2) The results at- 
 
 12 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 tained in converts and churches ; (3) The stage of 
 development reached by the churches of the first 
 century ; (4) Results exhibited in the character of 
 individual converts; (5) New social forces set in 
 motion by apostolic missions. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The Results of Modern Missions ... 215 
 
 Is not comparison with results of apostolic mis- 
 sions precluded in view of greater length of time 
 in which modern missions have been prosecuted? 
 Answers to this criticism : (a) If the results have 
 been of same sort it matters little whether they 
 have been same in amount ; (6) The Roman empire 
 far more compact and homogeneous than the hea- 
 then world in modern times ; (c) Present day re- 
 sults of missions have, for the most part, been 
 achieved since Carey. 
 
 Extent to which the gospel has been proclaimed 
 by modern missions ; seen in the number of places 
 where it is regularly preached, and the number of 
 those who make it their chief business to proclaim 
 it. 
 
 Results of modern missions in converts and 
 churches. Modern missionaries have not won con- 
 verts at once as the apostles did. Reasons for this. 
 Missionaries themselves not disheartened by this 
 state of things. Cases of great ingatherings after 
 long waiting. 
 
 Results of modern missions in Christian character 
 of individual converts. 
 
 13 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE PKINCTPLES OF APOSTOLIC MISSIONS 
 
 In the United States Mint on Chestnut 
 street, Philadelphia, may be found, carefully 
 preserved under glass, a brass rod and a 
 brass disc. The rod is the standard yard, 
 the disc is the standard Troy pound of the 
 United States. Sets of weights and measures 
 derived from these two originals have been 
 presented by Congress to the several States, 
 and are by them preserved for reference and 
 comparison. Thus it comes to pass that 
 wherever throughout the land a pound, a 
 yard, a gallon, or a bushel is spoken of, men 
 feel that the term used represents a definite 
 and fixed value. The importance of estab- 
 lishing and maintaining these standard units 
 of measurement, the damage to business in- 
 terests that must result should any uncer- 
 tainty arise as to the length of a yard or the 
 number of cubic inches in a gallon, is so 
 
 15 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 obvious that throughout the recent presi- 
 dential campaign the opponents of the free 
 coinage of silver felt that they could not 
 more effectively illustrate the disasters 
 which, in their judgment, must follow the 
 adoption of free coinage, than by a compari- 
 son with the inevitable results of any tam- 
 pering with our standards of weight and 
 measure. Every one understands why the 
 power to establish such standards is lodged 
 by the Constitution in Congress. Every one 
 understands also that the importance of 
 maintaining such standards unquestioned in- 
 creases with the growth of the nation and 
 the expansion of its trade. Every new 
 factory, every wheel set turning, every fresh 
 acre brought under the plow, every ton of 
 ore or coal that is mined, every new in- 
 dustry, every new market, enhances the im- 
 portance of maintaining our weights and 
 measures at their true equivalency ; en- 
 hances also the disaster that must ensue from 
 any failure of public confidence with regard 
 to them. 
 
 But it is not business alone that depends 
 for its successful prosecution on the main- 
 tenance of authoritative standards. The 
 
 16 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 same necessity obtains in every department 
 of human activity. The astronomer, the 
 physicist, the financier, the jurist, the meta- 
 physician, the theologian, have each their 
 accredited measures of time, volume, effi- 
 ciency, their authoritative patterns of ex- 
 pression, procedure, belief. Such standards 
 are the legal money of the world's thinking ; 
 and so soon as doubt arises, in any depart- 
 ment of thought, whether these standards 
 are being faithfully adhered to, uncertainty, 
 hesitation, loss of efficiency, must be the in- 
 stant result. 
 
 Now all this has its application to missions. 
 For this activity also there must be some- 
 where a standard, a regulative pattern. It 
 cannot be that of all things necessary to the 
 life of the church — her doctrine, her sacra- 
 ments, her ministry — missions alone, which is 
 but another name for her aggressive activity 
 in the world, should have no pattern among 
 the things shown her in the holy mount. 
 For only as the church feels that she has 
 such a standard for her missionary endeavor 
 can she go forward in it with energy, and 
 only as confidence prevails that this standard 
 is being faithfully adhered to can she suc- 
 
 .17 
 
V 
 
 Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 cessfully appeal to all her members for its 
 prosecution. But where is such a norm of 
 missions to be found ? Obviously in the New 
 Testament, and to be more specific, first of 
 all in the Great Commission, and then in the 
 example of the apostles as it is preserved to 
 us in the Acts and the Epistles. These two 
 sources of authority with respect to missions 
 may be said to be related to each other as 
 the rod and disc in the Mint at Philadel- 
 phia are to the set of weights and measures 
 to be found in the State Capitol at Harris- 
 burg, for example. The former are the origi- 
 nal and absolute standard : the latter have 
 only a derivative value ; but when made, as 
 they have been, by proper persons and under 
 proper conditions, they are also authoritative, 
 and for practical purposes may be quite as 
 important as the originals. Such a value be- 
 longs also to apostolic example in missions. 
 For while it must be acknowledged that the 
 original warrant for the missionary enterprise 
 and the original standard for its prosecution 
 lies in the Great Commission, it must on the 
 other hand be granted that what the apostles 
 did in obedience to that command of Christ 
 has an authority which, though derivative, is 
 
 18 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 practically final, and may be more convenient 
 to appeal to, since it presents the mission 
 enterprise in a far more detailed form. 
 
 We therefore regard apostolic missions as 
 depicted in the Acts and Epistles as a norm, 
 a regulative pattern of legitimate missionary 
 endeavor. We believe that the apostles, 
 under the illumination of the Holy Ghost, 
 understood aright their Master's bidding that 
 they "make disciples of all the nations." 
 We are confident that the work which, as we 
 read the New Testament, we see them doing 
 is the very work which the Lord Jesus had 
 in mind when he laid his last command upon 
 them. Believing this, the question which we 
 raise and to which we seek an answer, is 
 this, Is the work of modern missions the 
 same work as that carried on by the apostles? 
 In other words, Are modern missions truly 
 
 apostolic ? 
 
 In entering upon such a comparison as an 
 answer to this question involves, several 
 limitations need to be observed. First, by 
 apostolic missions is meant the attempt of 
 the apostles and the primitive church under 
 their guidance to proclaim the gospel and to 
 bring men under its power, as this attempt is 
 
 19 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 made known in the New Testament. What 
 lies beyond the limits of the apostolic age and 
 what is recorded elsewhere than in the New 
 Testament has value only for purposes of 
 illustration. Secondly, by modern missions 
 is meant specially Protestant missions since 
 the Reformation, with particular reference to 
 the organized form in which they have been 
 carried on from the time of William Carey. 
 Romish missions are passed by, not because 
 they are not important, but because some 
 limitation of view is necessary, and because 
 it is Protestant missions in which our interest 
 centres, and for which we have peculiar re- 
 sponsibility. Thirdly, this comparison as to 
 apostolic and modern missions must have re- 
 gard to essentials, not to accidentals. It 
 need not disturb us if, on the one hand, the 
 modern mission enterprise differs in many 
 minor respects from missions as prosecuted 
 by the apostles ; on the other hand, we must 
 not be misled by mere coincidences. Coin- 
 cidences, indeed, are many and striking, but 
 they have value only as they spring from fun- 
 damental causes — the nature of man, for ex- 
 ample, or the character of the gospel, or the 
 unchanging relations of God to His church. 
 
 20 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Bearing these limitations in mind, the line 
 of comparison between apostolic and modern 
 missions which it is proposed to follow in 
 this chapter and the following one has refer- 
 ence to the principles involved, particularly 
 the aim and the motives. 
 
 The Aim of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Our first question then is, Does it appear 
 that apostolic and modern missions have had 
 the same aim? What was the conception 
 entertained by the apostles of the end to be 
 accomplished, and has the same conception 
 guided the missionary endeavors of modern 
 
 times ? 
 
 In order to understand the aim of the 
 apostles as missionaries it is necessary to 
 glance first at the Great Commission in its 
 various forms. In saying this we are not 
 shifting the basis of comparison from 
 apostolic example to the command of Christ. 
 Our purpose is not to make a critical study 
 of that momentous utterance, but rather to 
 hear it through the ears of those who first re- 
 ceived it. The question we ask is not, What 
 do these last words of Christ mean? but, 
 What did the apostles understand them to 
 
 21 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 mean ? And certainly a tentative answer to 
 this question may be found in the words 
 themselves, for the presumption is that they 
 were understood in their most obvious sense. 
 Let us recall them, therefore, under their 
 fourfold form : 
 
 Matt, xxviii. 
 18-20. 
 
 "All authority 
 hath been given 
 unto me in 
 heaven and on 
 earth. Go ye. 
 therefore, and 
 make disciples' 
 of all the nations, 
 baptizing them| 
 into the name ofi 
 the Father and 
 of the Son and of 
 the Holy Ghost 
 teaching them to 
 observe all 
 things whatso 
 ever I com- 
 manded you 
 and lo, I am with 
 you alway, even 
 unto the eud of 
 the world." 
 
 Mark xvi. 15, 16. 
 
 "Go ye into all 
 the world, and 
 preach the gos- 
 pel to the whole 
 creation. He 
 that believeth 
 and is baptized 
 shall be saved ; 
 but he that dis- 
 believeth shall 
 be condemned." 
 
 Luke xxiv. 46-49. 
 
 " Thus it is 
 written, that the 
 Christ should 
 suffer, and rise 
 again from the 
 dead the third 
 day ; and that 
 repentance and 
 remission of 
 sins should be 
 preached in 
 name unto 
 the nations, 
 ginning 
 Jerusalem 
 
 his 
 all 
 be- 
 from 
 Ye 
 
 are witnesses 
 of these things. 
 And behold, I 
 send forth the 
 promise of my 
 Father upon 
 you : but tarry 
 ye in the city, 
 until ye be 
 clothed with 
 power from on 
 high." 
 
 Acts i. 8, 4, 5. 
 
 "But ye shall 
 receive power, 
 when the Holy 
 Ghost is come 
 upon you : and 
 ye shall be my 
 witnesses both in 
 Jerusalem, and 
 in all Judsea and 
 Samaria, and un- 
 to the uttermost 
 parts of the 
 earth." 
 
 " He charged 
 them not to de- 
 part from Jeru- 
 salem, but to 
 wait for the 
 promise of the 
 Father, which, 
 said he, ye 
 heard from me: 
 for John indeed 
 baptized with 
 water ; but ye 
 shall be baptized 
 with the Holy 
 Ghost not many 
 days hence." 
 
 If now we separate from these " last words " 
 
 the elements of command, we see that the 
 
 apostles were bidden to go, from Jerusalem as 
 
 a centre, to all Judaea and Samaria, to the 
 
 22 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 uttermost parts of the earth, into all the 
 world ; that they were to bear witness every- 
 where of Christ, particularly of His death 
 and His resurrection, and of salvation, re- 
 mission of sins, through repentance and faith 
 in Him ; that they were to make disciples, bap- 
 tize them into the name of the Trinity, and 
 teach them to observe all things that Jesus 
 had commanded. So much lies upon the 
 surface for us, and must equally have lain 
 upon the surface for the apostles. 
 
 But we are not left to inference upon this 
 point. There is abundant evidence that 
 these parting commands of their Master made 
 a deep impression upon the eleven, and be- 
 came in fact the program for their subse- 
 quent conduct. Bidden to tarry at first at 
 Jerusalem, we find them waiting there ; 
 bidden after the reception of the Spirit to 
 go, to preach, to make disciples, to baptize, 
 to instruct and train, we find them so en- 
 gaged, first in Jerusalem, and then in just 
 those ever-widening circles which the Saviour 
 had indicated. The record of all this, so far 
 as the eleven are concerned, is contained in 
 the first half of the book of Acts ; and it is 
 worth while to notice how, in the twelve 
 
 23 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 chapters which compose it, the words of the 
 Great Commission, particularly as it is given 
 by the author of this book in his "former 
 treatise," are echoed and reechoed. " Thus 
 it is written, that the Christ should suffer, 
 and rise from the dead on the third day ; 
 and that repentance and remission of sins 
 should be preached in his name unto all 
 the nations, beginning at Jerusalem. Ye 
 are witnesses of these things." So ran the 
 command (Luke xxiv. 46-48). Now read 
 Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost. 
 What is the point of it ? It is that the death 
 and resurrection of Jesus were in accordance 
 with Scripture (Acts ii. 31, 32), and that 
 therefore it was the duty and privilege of his 
 auditors to repent and be baptized for the 
 remission of their sins (ii. 38). And that the 
 apostle, as he spoke, had, as it were, the very 
 words of the Great Commission ringing in 
 his ears becomes even more evident when we 
 compare his " whereof we are all witnesses " 
 and "having received of the Father the 
 promise of the Holy Ghost " (ii. 32, 33), with 
 the " Ye are witnesses of these things " and 
 '* Behold I send the promise of my Father 
 upon you " of Luke's account. Or hear 
 
 24 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Peter again a few days later, as he ad- 
 dresses the multitude in Solomon's porch : 
 44 Ye killed the Prince of Life ; whom God 
 raised from the dead ; whereof we are wit- 
 nesses " (Acts iii. 15). Or listen once more as 
 the same apostle replies to the arraignment 
 of the Sanhedrin : " The God of our fathers 
 raised up Jesus, whom ye slew, hanging him 
 on a tree. Him did God exalt with his right 
 hand to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give 
 repentance to Israel and remission of sins. 
 And we are witnesses of these things" (v. 
 30-32). Or hear him, finally, as he addresses 
 Cornelius and his friends : " And we are wit- 
 nesses of all things which he did both in the 
 country of the Jews and in Jerusalem ; whom 
 also they slew, hanging him on a tree. Him 
 
 God raised up the third day And 
 
 he charged us to preach unto the people, and 
 to testify that this is he which is ordained of 
 God to be the Judge of quick and dead. To 
 him bear all the prophets witness, that 
 through his name every one that believeth 
 on him shall receive remission of sins ' 
 (x. 39-43). In view of these utterances, is 
 it not manifest that Peter's apostolic con- 
 sciousness was, so to say, saturated with the 
 
 25 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 words of the Great Commission, and that he 
 had deliberately adopted it as the pro- 
 gram for his whole activity as an apostle ? 
 And have we not the right to take what 
 Peter and his fellow-apostles did as an em- 
 bodiment of their conception of what their 
 Master had bidden them to do ? 
 
 What, then, do we find them doing? 
 " With great power gave the apostles their 
 witness of the resurrection of the Lord 
 Jesus " (iv. 33). " And every day, in the 
 temple and at home, they ceased not to 
 teach and to preach Jesus as the Christ " 
 (v. 42). Here is witnessing, teaching, 
 preaching. But was this the extent of 
 their activity? By no means: multi- 
 tudes were converted (ii. 41, 47, iv. 4, 
 v. 14) ; in other words, the apostles " made 
 disciples." And these disciples they bap- 
 tized (ii. 41). They instructed them also 
 (ii. 42) ; formed them into a community (ii. 
 44) ; provided them with simple forms of 
 worship (ii. 42) ; exercised discipline among 
 them (v. 1-11) ; superintended the distribu- 
 tion of their alms (iv. 37) ; as occasion arose, 
 guided in the establishment of the diaco- 
 nate (vi. 1-6) ; took oversight of the efforts 
 
 26 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 to evangelize Samaria (viii. 14ff.). In such 
 fashion did the eleven " begin at Jerusa- 
 lem " ; and not until they had made such a 
 beginning do we find Peter going forth to 
 Lydcla and Joppa and Cassarea, to Antioch 
 and Corinth, to Babylon and Rome. 
 
 Turn now from the apostle of the cir- 
 cumcision to the apostle to the Gentiles. 
 We have right to claim Paul as being above 
 all else a missionary. This is involved in 
 the very title which he gives himself of 
 " apostle to the Gentiles " ; applied to a 
 Jewish Christian, it embodies the essence of 
 foreign missions. How strenuously Paul 
 maintained his claim to apostleship is well 
 known. He, as well as Peter or John, had 
 seen the Lord Jesus after his resurrection, 
 and could therefore be a witness to that great 
 fact (1 Cor. ix. 1). He, not less than they, 
 had learned at first hand the great facts and 
 doctrines of the Christian faith (Gal. i. 11, 
 12). How full and accurate his knowledge 
 was we may gather from the account he 
 gives of the resurrection in 1 Cor. xv., or of 
 the institution of the Lord's Supper in the 
 eleventh chapter of the same epistle. We 
 might assume, therefore, that among other 
 
 27 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 facts and teachings which he thus " received 
 of the Lord," the Great Commission would 
 have a place. But more than assumption is 
 possible. We know that Paul was aware of 
 the Great Commission, for he received it in 
 person. It was repeated for his special 
 benefit. Of all the facts of our Saviour's 
 earthly history two only do we know to 
 have been made part of the personal experi- 
 ence of the thirteenth apostle. One of these 
 was the resurrection ; the other — and this 
 may well give us a new sense of its impor- 
 tance — was the command which Jesus gave 
 His disciples at the mountain in Galilee. 
 The form in which Paul received this com- 
 mand was, it is true, slightly different from 
 that in which it was made known to the 
 eleven ; but there is no mistaking the iden- 
 tity of the two utterances. Let us hear 
 Paul's own account of the matter as he gives 
 it to King Agrippa (Acts xxvi. 16-23) : " But 
 arise, and stand upon thy feet : " — such, he 
 says, was the bidding of Him who met him 
 by the gate of Damascus, — " for to this end 
 have I appeared to thee, to appoint thee a 
 minister and a witness both of the things 
 wherein thou has seen me, and of the things 
 
 28 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 wherein I will appear to thee ; delivering 
 thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, 
 unto whom I send thee, to open their eyes, 
 that they may turn from darkness to light, 
 and from the power of Satan unto God, that 
 they may receive remission of sins and an 
 inheritance among them that are sanctified 
 by faith in me." This was the command 
 which he had received, and in obedience to 
 that command, so he makes haste to add, his 
 life had been spent. " Wherefore, O King 
 Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the 
 heavenly vision : but declared both to them 
 of Damascus first, and at Jerusalem, and 
 throughout all the country of Judaea, and to 
 the Gentiles, that they should repent and 
 turn to God, doing works worthy of repent- 
 ance. . . o . Having therefore obtained the 
 help that is from God, I stand unto this day 
 testifying both to small and great, saying 
 nothing but what the prophets and Moses 
 did say should come; how that the Christ 
 must suffer, and how that he first by the 
 resurrection of the dead should proclaim 
 light to the people and to the Gentiles." 
 Could Paul make it more plain that in his 
 own esteem he was first of all a missionary, 
 
 29 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 and that his whole activity as a servant of 
 Christ may be accepted as his interpretation 
 of the work of missions ? 
 
 What, then, let us ask, was the work of 
 Paul and to what end was it directed ? Was 
 it the widest possible proclamation of the 
 Gospel ? A recent writer, urging the evan- 
 gelization of the world in this generation, il- 
 lustrates the feasibility of doing so by the 
 success of the directors of the Columbian 
 Exposition in advertising that enterprise 
 throughout the world. He says that in a 
 tour made about the time the Exposition 
 was opened, he heard the word Chicago in 
 the mountains of western Persia, in the heart 
 of Kurdistan, on the Euphrates, in the 
 mouths of old women on the slopes of Leb- 
 anon ; and what a company of energetic busi- 
 ness men did in eighteen months for the 
 name of Chicago, the Church of Christ, he 
 urges, ought to be able to do in thirty-three 
 years for u the name which is above every 
 name." 
 
 Now no man ever labored more earnestly 
 to extend the knowledge of this blessed name 
 than did Paul. Paul was indeed a preacher, 
 a herald, a witness (1 Tim. ii. 7). He counted 
 
 30 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 it his highest honor that to him, less than the 
 least of all saints, had this grace been given, 
 that he should preach among the Gentiles the 
 unsearchable riches of Christ (Eph. iii. 8). 
 If Christ were only preached, whether by 
 him or others, whether of love or of faction, 
 whether in pretense or in truth, he rejoiced 
 and would rejoice (Phil. i. 15-18). And he 
 was solicitous, also, that the Gospel should 
 be proclaimed as widely as possible. Though 
 he could say (Rom. xv. 19), " From Jeru- 
 salem, and round about even unto Illyricum, 
 I have fully preached the Gospel of Christ," 
 yet he was anxious to preach in Rome also, 
 could he get thither (Rom. i. 13), and he 
 purposed to make Rome a stepping-stone for 
 passing into Spain (Rom. xv. 23f.). He 
 made it his aim to preach the Gospel where 
 Christ was not already named (Rom. xv. 
 20); he had always in his thought the 
 regions beyond (2 Cor. x. 16). And yet 
 how obvious it is that this widespread proc- 
 lamation of the Gospel was not Paul's only, 
 nor even his chief and ultimate aim ! 
 
 Nor was his aim merely the conversion of 
 the greatest possible number of souls. The 
 conversion of souls was, it is true, an object of 
 
 31 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 intense longing to him. He counted himself 
 an ambassador for Christ whose business it 
 was to beseech men to be reconciled to God 
 (2 Cor. v. 20). His heart's desire and prayer to 
 God for Israel was that they might be saved 
 (Rom. x. 1); and for their sakes he could 
 wish that he himself were accursed from 
 Christ (Rom. ix. 3). He became all things 
 to all men, that he might by all means save 
 some (1 Cor. ix. 22). His converts were his 
 hope, his joy, his crown of rejoicing (1 Thess. 
 ii. 19, 20). But we have only to compare 
 Paul's work with the work of those excel- 
 lent men of our own day and nation who 
 make it their specific business to secure con- 
 versions — I mean those whom we call " evan- 
 gelists," of whom Mr. Moody, Mr. Mills, Dr. 
 Chapman, Mr. Yatman, may be taken as ex- 
 amples — to see how different from this, and 
 how much larger, was Paul's work as a mis- 
 sionary ; to see, also, how impossible it is to 
 explain that work on the theory that the 
 apostle's purpose was merely to bring about 
 the conversion of the largest possible num- 
 ber of individuals. Paul preached, indeed, 
 and he longed that his preaching might be 
 the means of salvation to his hearers; and 
 
 32 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 God honored his longing in making him 
 spiritual father to a great multitude : but 
 Paul accomplished, and was manifestly aim- 
 ing to accomplish, something far other and 
 more than this. 
 
 For Paul baptized Ms converts^ either with 
 his own hands, as at Philippi (Acts xv. 15, 33), 
 or by the hands of his helpers, as at Cornith. 
 For when he writes (1 Cor. i. 14ff.) to the 
 church in the latter city that he thanks God 
 that he baptized none of them but Crispus 
 and Gaius and the household of Stephanas, 
 and that Christ sent him not to baptize but 
 to preach the gospel, he does not mean that 
 he neglected baptism or thought it of little 
 importance, but only that he considered it 
 subordinate to the proclamation of the truth, 
 and that, in view of the factional strife which 
 was prevailing in the Corinthian church, he 
 considered it providential that most of its 
 members had been baptized not by himself 
 but by his assistants. 
 
 Paul instructed and trained his converts. 
 
 Read his address to the elders of Ephesus 
 
 (Acts xx. 18ff.), and mark his solemn 
 
 attestation of the diligence and fidelity 
 
 with which he had declared to them the 
 
 33 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 whole counsel of God, warning, admon- 
 ishing, and in all things setting them an 
 example. 
 
 And how came it, we may well ask in 
 this connection, that there were in Ephe- 
 sus elders whom Paul could summon to 
 Miletus, and on whom he could lay the 
 charge to feed the flock of God over which 
 the Holy Ghost had made them bishops? 
 Recall the fact that Paul made it his rule not 
 to build on another's foundation (Rom. xv. 
 20), or to intrude into another's territory (2 
 Cor. x. 15), and that therefore the arrange- 
 ments which we find prevailing in the 
 churches founded by him must be credited 
 to his authority ; recall also what is written 
 of him and Barnabas on their first tour 
 through Asia Minor, that "they appointed 
 for them elders in every church " (Acts xiv. 
 23) : and we are brought face to face with 
 another important element of Paul's activity 
 as a missionary. He organized his converts 
 into churches. Indeed, it is not too much to 
 say that wherever Paul labored as a mission- 
 ary, except perhaps in Cyprus and Athens, 
 he left a church behind him. There were 
 churches in Lystra, and Derbe, and Iconium, 
 
 34 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 and Pisidian Antioch (Acts xiv. 21-23, xvi. 
 1-5) ; in Philippi, and Thessalonica, and Cor- 
 inth, and Cenchreae (Rom. xvi. 1) ; in Ephe- 
 sus and Troas (Acts xx. 7) ; in Colossae, in 
 Hierapolis and Laodicaea (Col. iv. 13-16). 
 We read of churches in Syria and Cilicia 
 (Acts xv. 41), churches of Asia (1 Cor. xvi.] 
 19), churches of Galatia (Gal. i. 2), churches' 
 of Macedonia (2 Cor. viii. 1), churches of 
 Achaia (2 Cor. viii. 23, 24). 
 
 And the Pauline epistles, particularly 
 those addressed to the Corinthians, enable 
 us to understand something of the degree of 
 development to which the apostle carried, 
 or sought to carry, these churches which 
 he founded. They had bishops and dea- 
 cons. They had ordered public worship. 
 They observed the sacraments. They ex- 
 ercised discipline over their own members. 
 They had efficient arrangements for the 
 support of their own poor. They were 
 able on occasion to cooperate with each 
 other in sending relief to the Christians 
 in Judaea. The duty of supporting their 
 ministry, the right of the ministry to such 
 support, was acknowledged among them, 
 though in some cases it might be wise 
 
 35 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 for the ministers to forego their right 
 as Paul had done. They were already 
 centres of aggressive attack upon the 
 heathen about them. On his second tour 
 Paul found the churches of Lycaonia increas- 
 ing in number daily (Acts xvi. 5). In his 
 first letter to the Corinthians, he describes (1 
 Cor. xiv. 23ff.) the convicting and converting 
 effect of prophesying upon the heathen who 
 should come into their assembly for worship. 
 He says that the Philippians were partakers 
 in his labors for the defense and confirmation 
 of the gospel (Phil. i. 7). 
 
 Is it not manifest, as we read the Acts and 
 the Epistles, that it was to the establishment 
 of such churches — self-governing, self-sup- 
 porting, self-extending — that the whole of 
 Paul's work as a missionary was directed? 
 Such churches were the units in which he 
 reckons the progress of the gospel. To such 
 churches he addresses his letters. And that 
 which constituted his heaviest burden of 
 responsibility was his daily care for all the 
 churches (2 Cor. xi. 28). Turn back once 
 more to the address to the elders of Ephesus 
 (Acts xx. 17ff.). Paul knew that his work 
 at Ephesus was finished. He was going to 
 
 36 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Jerusalem ; thence he meant to go to Rome, 
 and then on to Spain (Acts xix. 21 ; Rom. 
 xv. 28). He had the witness of the Spirit 
 that he should never see his converts in 
 Ephesus again. He could not but be deeply 
 affected at the thought ; but he felt no ques- 
 tion as to the propriety of thus leaving them. 
 They were an organized church; they had 
 been fully instructed in Gospel doctrine and 
 duty ; they had elders set over them by the 
 Holy Ghost ; and now they must stand alone. 
 As the Saviour had said to the twelve, " It is 
 expedient for you that I go away," so could 
 Paul say to his converts in Ephesus, " And 
 now I commend you to God, and to the word 
 of his grace, which is able to build you up, 
 and give you the inheritance among all them 
 that are sanctified." So he bade them fare- 
 well. 
 
 Thus have we followed, in the light of the 
 Great Commission, the labors first of Peter 
 and his fellow-apostles in Judsea, and then of 
 Paul in Asia Minor, Macedonia and Achaia; 
 and what is our conclusion as to the aim of 
 apostolic missions ? It is that the aim of the 
 apostles was the establishment, in as many 
 and as important centres as possible, of self- 
 
 37 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 governing, self-supporting, and self-extending 
 churches. 
 
 The Motives of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Let us turn now from the question of 
 aim to that of motive. When we ask 
 what were the springs of motive which 
 inspired and sustained the apostles in 
 their work, so vast, so difficult, so fraught 
 with danger, of planting, in all the great 
 centres of the Roman empire, living, self- 
 propagating churches, we must remind our- 
 selves, first, that in a certain sense missions 
 are a vital function of Christianity, are in- 
 cluded in its very nature as a glad tidings, a 
 spiritual and universal religion ; and there- 
 fore it might have been expected that, with- 
 out any command on the part of Christ, and 
 even without any distinct realization of mo- 
 tive on the part of the early church, an at- 
 tempt would have been made to impart to 
 others the blessings of the gospel. The 
 apostles, after the resurrection and Pentecost, 
 were like the four leprous men who made 
 the discovery that the Syrians had fled from 
 before Samaria and left behind them rich 
 supply for the famine of the beleaguered city. 
 
 38 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Their news was too good to keep. "We can- 
 not but speak the things which we have seen 
 and heard," said the apostles (Acts iv. 20). 
 A gospel of salvation — a salvation based on 
 the finished work of the Son of God, a sal- 
 vation conditioned simply on faith, a salva- 
 tion to be realized by the power of the Holy 
 Spirit now poured out — faith in such a 
 gospel told itself. It needed no express 
 command of Christ, nor any formal vote of 
 the church; but by the same spontaneous 
 impulse which led Andrew to tell Peter, 
 and Philip to tell Nathaniel of the new- 
 found Saviour, those that were scattered 
 abroad on the persecution that arose about 
 Stephen, and indeed all the early Christians, 
 went about preaching the word (Acts viii. 
 4). And it is upon the basis of this 
 spontaneous, joyful, almost unconscious wit- 
 nessing that we must explain much of the 
 wide diffusion of the gospel in the apostolic 
 age. Made light in the Lord, these first 
 Christians shed light, made salt, they im- 
 parted their savor, not so much in response 
 to conscious motive as because they could 
 not do otherwise. 
 
 But the sacred cause of missions would 
 
 39 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 not have been safe had it rested upon no 
 other basis than this inherent tendency of 
 the gospel to become, as it were, self-sow- 
 ing. When controversies arose within the 
 church and thus drew in her attention upon 
 herself, when persecution arose from with- 
 out and the very avowal of Christian faith 
 exposed to death, when the first joyful feel- 
 ing of new-found treasure had passed away, 
 other motives would be needed. And such 
 were given, and it is plain that the apostles 
 realized them and were moved by them. 
 
 And the first of these was obedience to the 
 command of Christ, Attention has already 
 been called to the evidences of the deep im- 
 pression made upon the eleven by the Great 
 Commission, to the repeated echoes of it in 
 the language of the apostles as reported in 
 the Acts. The sense of having received 
 from Christ a definite command, of having 
 been charged by him with a definite duty, 
 appears in their whole conduct. " We are 
 witnesses of these things." " We must obey 
 God rather than men" (Acts v. 29, 32). 
 M He charged us to preach unto the people 
 and to testify that this is he that is ordained 
 of God to be Judge of quick and dead" 
 
 40 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 (Peter to Cornelius, Acts x. 42). So the 
 eleven explain the zeal and boldness with 
 which they proclaimed the truth. 
 
 So was it with Paul also ; it was because he 
 could not be " disobedient to the heavenly- 
 vision " which he saw and the commission 
 which accompanied, it that he " declared to 
 them of Damascus first, and at Jerusalem, 
 and throughout all the country of Judsea, 
 and also to the Gentiles, that they should 
 repent and turn to God " (Acts xxvi. 19). 
 So strong was this sense of acting under a 
 divine commission that he seemed to himself 
 to have been created and saved only for the 
 accomplishment of this one work of preach- 
 ing the gospel. He was " separated unto 
 the gospel of God," even " from his mother's 
 womb " (Rom. i. 1 ; Gal. i. 15). God had 
 called him by His grace and revealed His 
 Son in him just in order that he might preach 
 Christ among the heathen (Gal. i. 16). He 
 had " received grace and apostleship unto 
 obedience of faith among all nations " (Rom. 
 i. 5). He counted not his life dear unto 
 himself, if he might finish his course with 
 joy, and the ministry which he had received 
 from the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel 
 
 41 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 of the grace of God (Acts xx. 24). There 
 was mighty power in such convictions of 
 direct command from Christ. As long as 
 that command and the promise that went 
 with it rang thus in their ears, these 
 first missionaries rose superior to difficul- 
 ties, hardships, perils, opposition of men. 
 "Christus vult" made them heroes to attempt 
 and suffer, and clothed them with a noble 
 persistency to which victory was sure. 
 
 And not only obedience to Christ, but 
 love to Christ, zeal for His honor, for the ex- 
 tension of His Church, the triumph of His 
 kingdom,, was one of the motives that under- 
 lay apostolic missions. By faith beholding 
 Him exalted to the right hand of God, they 
 burned to see Him throned in the faith and 
 love of men. Sure that to Him belonged all 
 the splendid promises made in the Old 
 Testament to the Messiah, they were filled 
 with holy zeal to bring about the fulfillment 
 of these predictions. Believing that to Jesus 
 had been given the name which is above every 
 name, they could not rest until to Him every 
 knee should bow. The eleven "rejoiced 
 that they were counted worthy to suffer 
 
 shame for the Name" (Acts v. 41). Paul 
 
 42 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 took pleasure in persecutions and distresses 
 for Christ's sake (2 Cor. xii. 10). He had 
 but one ambition : it was that Christ might 
 be magnified in his body, whether by life or 
 by death (Phil. i. 20). 
 
 And Paul was moved by zeal for God as 
 well as for Christ. That jealously for God's 
 honor which made him at first a persecutor 
 was not rooted out by his conversion ; it was 
 but purged and quickened. And thus it came 
 to pass that the very sins and idolatries of the 
 heathen were fuel to the flame of his mission- 
 ary impulse. He could not bear that men 
 should " change the glory of the incorruptible 
 God for the likeness of an image of corrupt- 
 ible man, and of birds, and fourfooted 
 beasts, and creeping things," and that they 
 should " worship and serve the creature 
 more than the Creator who is blessed for- 
 ever'' (Rom. i. 23, 25). His spirit was 
 provoked within him at Athens when he be- 
 held the city full of idols, and realized anew 
 that men could "think that the Godhead 
 was like to gold, or silver, or stone, graven 
 by art and device of man " (Acts xvii. 16, 
 
 29). 
 
 And lastly the apostles, Paul in particular, 
 
 43 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 were moved to missionary effort by compas- 
 sion for a world perishing in sin. To their 
 eyes the world was lost, and the only hope 
 lay in the gospel. Jew and Gentile alike had 
 sinned and alike were without excuse (Rom. 
 iii. 9). The one had sinned against the law 
 and would be judged by ' it ; the other had 
 sinned without the law, and would perish 
 without it (Rom. ii. 12). They saw men 
 dead in trespasses and sins, alienated from 
 God, without God and without hope (Eph. ii. 
 2, 12). The Gentiles particularly were liv- 
 ing in the lusts of the flesh, were obedient to 
 Satan, were steeped in foul vices and idola- 
 tries. And against all such ungodliness and 
 unrighteousness of men the wrath of God 
 was denounced — tribulation and wrath, in- 
 dignation and anguish upon every soul that 
 did evil (Rom. ii. 9). Jews and Gentiles 
 alike were by nature children of wrath (Eph. 
 ii. 3). And from this divine wrath there was 
 but one way of escape, and that through 
 missions. Only if they should call on the 
 name of the Lord could they be saved ; but 
 how could they call on Him of whom they had 
 not heard ? or how hear without a preacher ? 
 or how preach, except they were sent 
 
 44 
 
The Principles of Apostolic Missions 
 
 (Rom. x. 13ff.) ? Beside that figure which 
 ever stood before their thought, the figure of 
 their Master with outstretched hand that 
 said, " Go, preach ! " they ever saw another, 
 with hand outstretched not in command but 
 in appeal, — the figure that Paul saw across 
 the narrow strait ; they heard the voice that 
 cried "Come, help!"; and moved by divine 
 compassion they hastened forth to answer 
 that appeal. 
 
 45 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PEINCIPLES OF MODERN MISSIONS 
 
 1. The Aim of Modern Missions, 
 
 When we turn to modern missions and 
 ask what their principles have been, we 
 need not be surprised if we find that these 
 have not always been clear, definite, and 
 consistent. The apostles enjoyed a special 
 degree and kind of illumination with re- 
 gard to the questions involved in the 
 founding of the church which has not 
 been granted since their day. The modern 
 answer to the query, What is the aim of 
 missions? has been attained very much as 
 individual Christians of to-day have attained 
 their answer to the question, What is the 
 aim of human life? False scents have been 
 followed ; partial answers have been accepted 
 as full and final ; subordinate aims have 
 sometimes obscured the principal aim. As 
 in every other department of life, the im- 
 pulse to action, the action itself, has come 
 first; reflection as to the exact end to be 
 
 46 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 served by action has been a later develop- 
 ment. The church in modern times has 
 rather felt her way to her conception of the 
 aim of missions than realized it distinctly 
 from the start. And if this seems to be a 
 reversal of the order of rational procedure, 
 the answer to the criticism is that missions, 
 for evangelical Christianity, are not so much 
 a rational process as an instinctive and vital 
 one. So far then as the earlier attempts of 
 modern missions are concerned, we must de- 
 duce the aim of those who made them, not 
 merely from what they may have said about 
 it, but rather from what we see them to have 
 done on heathen soil. But the question of 
 aim has been emerging more and more 
 clearly. Since Carey's time missions have 
 been carried on by organized societies, and 
 men do not organize without some more or 
 less definite conception of the end for which 
 they are to act together. 
 
 Now it may help us to understand what 
 has been the real, even though it has been 
 sometimes the only partially comprehended 
 aim of the modern mission movement, if we 
 look first at some recent statements of the 
 true and proper end of missionary effort. 
 
 47 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 One of these is embodied in the motto of 
 that latest development of missionary en- 
 thusiasm, the Student Volunteer Move- 
 ment. That motto is " The evangelization 
 of the world in this generation." Some 
 time since there appeared in the New York 
 Independent an article under this caption, in 
 which it was urged that if the thousand mil- 
 lion people outside of Europe, the United 
 States, Canada and Australia, who know little 
 or nothing of the gospel, should be grouped 
 into companies of about 200,000 each, and a 
 mission manned by half a dozen missionaries 
 planted in the centre of each group, " such a 
 force as this, assisted by native Christians, 
 could, without doubt, in the course of thirty- 
 three years, tell again and again to every one 
 in each group of 200,000 the facts and mean- 
 ing of the life, death, and resurrection of the 
 Son of God." The article goes on to show 
 that such a plan is practicable ; that the men 
 needed would be supplied by drafting for 
 missionary service one in thirteen hundred 
 of the membership of evangelical churches, 
 and the means, by a levy of a quarter of a 
 cent per day on each member ; and that the 
 administrative problem of dividing the field 
 
 48 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 and distributing the force should not be too 
 great in this day of vast commercial, military 
 and political enterprises. The writer of this 
 article does not explicitly claim that the suc- 
 cessful prosecution of such a scheme as he 
 proposes would be the accomplishment of 
 the missionary work; but he suggests as 
 much when he says in closing that the diffi- 
 culties to be overcome, while the} r are stupen- 
 dous, are not so serious as the sin of con- 
 tinued disobedience to the last command of 
 Jesus. 
 
 What he merely suggests has, however, 
 been deliberately avowed and strongly urged 
 by some earnest friends of missions, as being, if 
 not the ultimate, at least the immediate aim, 
 which should take precedence of every other. 
 Thus the accomplished editor-in-chief of the 
 Missionary Review of the World defines the 
 purpose of missions to be the evangelization 
 of the world {Divine Enterprise of Missions, 
 p. 64ff.). " The result of missions," he says, 
 "is the outgathering from the world of an 
 elect church. But this result, while it is, 
 of course, part of God's aim, is not therefore 
 to be a part of ours. It may constitute our 
 hope and expectation, but the aim of mis- 
 
 49 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 sions, so far as the church is concerned, is 
 the world's evangelization." " No unbiased 
 reader can examine the body of instructions 
 given to the early church by the Lord Him- 
 self without observing that, first of all, He 
 meant that there should be a simple herald- 
 ing of good tidings, accompanied by a per- 
 sonal witness to their truth and power, and 
 a consequent making of disciples ; and then 
 that these converts should be gathered into 
 churches, baptized and further trained in 
 fuller knowledge of divine truth and prepara- 
 tion for service. To confound preaching and 
 teaching, evangelization and indoctrination, 
 is a mistake that is fundamental and initial. 
 The didactic process is secondary and subor- 
 dinate. Nor are we anywhere taught to wait 
 
 for results We are both to look and 
 
 pray for results, but we are not to gauge our 
 fidelity or our success, or our Master's ap- 
 proval, by the number of converts; nor is the 
 herald to wait in any one field until conver- 
 sion has done its work before he goes to the 
 regions beyond. Without an hour's delay, for 
 any cause, on any pretext, save only to re- 
 ceive power from above, should we who be- 
 lieve urge on this holy crusade for God till 
 
 50 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 every living soul has heard of Christ. This 
 gospel of the kingdom must first be preached 
 among all nations as a witness, and then shall 
 the end come. Whether these words refer 
 to the end of the Jewish age in the destruc- 
 tion of Jerusalem, or to the end of the gos- 
 pel age in the second advent of the Son of 
 Man, or to both, there is here indicated a 
 vital relation which the general proclamation 
 of the gospel bears to the consummation of 
 God's plan. He is working toward an end, 
 and that end is conditioned on world-wide 
 evangelism. The announcement of the 
 gospel to every creature is the Zoar to which 
 the church of God must come before those 
 grand events move to consummation which 
 at once bring judgment to sinners and salva- 
 tion to saints." 
 
 There are many things to be said in criti- 
 cism of such a conception of the aim of 
 missions. The late Dr. E. A. Lawrence, in 
 his book entitled Modern Missions in the East 
 (pp. 35, 36), summarizes them as follows: 
 (1) It ignores the time, labor, and skill re- 
 quired to present the Gospel to the heathen 
 as a mass in such a way that they may even 
 begin to understand it; (2) It ignores or 
 
 51 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 decries that measure of responsibility which 
 we certainly share with God for fruits of our 
 labor in conversion ; (3) It ignores the aim 
 of Christianizing the world as well as evange- 
 lizing it, and the fact that this will be best 
 and quickest accomplished through Christian 
 institutions and a native ministry in each 
 land ; (4) It stands in the service of certain 
 premillennial ideas with which it is consist- 
 ent, while with other views it is not consistent. 
 To these objections I would add : 
 1. The view in question is not consistent 
 with the Great Commission as given by 
 Matthew. In order to make it appear so, it 
 is necessary to empty the expression "make 
 disciples" (/xa^reuw) of its meaning, reducing 
 it to a mere synonym of "preach the Gospel" 
 (eua^eAc'Cw), thus explaining the larger term 
 by the smaller, instead of the smaller by the 
 larger. It is necessary, too, to tear from 
 their real purpose, as explicative of the 
 words "make disciples of all the nations," 
 the two participial clauses which follow — 
 " baptizing them into the name of the Father 
 and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," and 
 " teaching them to observe all things what- 
 soever I have commanded you;" and to 
 
 52 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 make these refer to another and later pro- 
 cess, which is not to be so much as begun 
 until the Gospel has literally been proclaimed 
 to every creature. 
 
 -2. As this view is inconsistent with the 
 Great Commission, it is equally at variance 
 with the example of the apostles. The 
 writer quoted above does indeed maintain 
 that the primitive church not only deliber- 
 ately " undertook to reach every nation and 
 every creature with the proclamation of the 
 gospel," but that she succeeded in the at- 
 tempt, so that " within thirty-five years after 
 our Lord ascended, the gospel had been 
 carried throughout the known world " {Mis- 
 nonary Review of the World, 1889, pp. 482, 
 485). As to the first of these propositions, 
 we have only to recall what has already 
 come under our notice, that both Peter and 
 Paul made it their business not merely to 
 proclaim the gospel, but to baptize, organ- 
 ize, instruct, and edify their converts, to 
 ordain elders, to order the administration of 
 the Lord's Supper, to exercise discipline, to 
 rebuke error, and in general to establish 
 stable, aggressive churches. As to the sec- 
 ond, while we may well acknowledge the zeal 
 
 53 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 of the primitive Christians in making known 
 the gospel, and feel rebuked for our own slug- 
 gishness, we have only to ask, Where is the 
 evidence that when Paul suffered martyrdom 
 the name of Jesus had ever been uttered in 
 Britain or in Germany, not to say in India 
 or in China ? 
 
 3. This conception of the aim of foreign 
 missions is not that which has inspired mod- 
 ern missionary endeavor and been embod- 
 ied in it. Whether we think of Eliot and 
 Brainerd among the Indians, of Ziegenbalg 
 and Schwartz in Tranquebar, of Carey and 
 his associates at Serampore, of Judson in 
 Burmah, or of Morrison in China, it is mani- 
 fest at once that not one of these pioneers 
 was actuated by the purpose merely to make 
 the widest possible announcement of the 
 Gospel. Every one of these godly men 
 shows that he felt himself called to a work 
 very different, a work of foundation -laying. 
 
 Eliot, for example, not only preached to 
 the Indians about Boston and made con- 
 verts, but he organized these into churches. 
 He went further. He established them in a 
 settlement of their own at Natick, drafted 
 for them a constitution based on the laws of 
 
 54 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 Moses, and directed them in their building 
 and farming operations. With almost infi- 
 nite toil he translated into their tongue a 
 primer, catechisms, a metrical version of the 
 Psalms, several works on experimental re- 
 ligion, such as Baxter's Call to the Uncon- 
 verted, and, to crown all, the Bible itself. 
 He thought, too, that he was fulfilling his 
 vocation as a missionary by preparing a 
 grammar of the Indian tongue for the use 
 of those that should labor after him. He 
 lived to see eleven hundred "praying In- 
 dians," organized into six churches, presided 
 over by their own officers and served by 
 twenty-four native preachers. With these 
 facts put the conviction which he expresses 
 in a letter to Increase Mather, that " God is 
 wont ordinarily to convert nations and peo- 
 ples by some of their own countrymen," and 
 it becomes clear what was the conception of 
 missions which dominated John Eliot. 
 
 It was so also with Brainerd. No man, it is 
 true, ever burned with a more fervent evan- 
 gelistic zeal. His course was brief. It was 
 only three years from the time he began his 
 work for the Delawares on the site of the 
 city of Easton till he died in the house of 
 
 55 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 Jonathan Edwards in Northampton. And 
 yet he gave part of that time to establish- 
 ing a colony of Indians at Crosswicks in 
 New Jersey. Here he stimulated them to 
 begin agriculture, employed a schoolmaster 
 for them, and twice a week drilled the chil- 
 dren in the Assembly's Catechism. 
 
 Ziegenbalg and Pliitschau, the pioneers of 
 the Danish-Halle mission to Tranquebar, 
 while they were zealous evangelists, were also 
 from the beginning far more. They opened 
 schools, set up a printing-press — the first 
 mission press in India — and translated into 
 Tamil the whole of the New Testament and 
 part of the Old. The work was completed 
 by Schwartz, who in his turn translated the 
 Scriptures into Telugu also. Schwartz was 
 above all things a preacher. He believed 
 that preaching should be the chief work of a 
 missionary; and yet he thought it needful 
 to give much time to the establishment and 
 maintenance of schools and to catechising. 
 
 But as has been already intimated, it is from 
 the time of Carey that the modern mission en- 
 terprise begins to be, so to speak, conscious 
 of itself and of its own aims and motives. 
 This was plainly providential, for only so 
 
 56 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 could organized missionary effort become pos- 
 sible. We see now why God allowed the 
 indifference and unbelief of Carey's associ- 
 ates to keep him back for six years from go- 
 ing forth in person as a missionary to the 
 heathen. In those years of prayer and study 
 his conceptions of the work to be done at 
 home and abroad were clarified and settled, I 
 and the success that crowned his efforts at 
 last was the success that so often comes to an 
 earnest man who has thought through a diffi- 
 cult problem. The resolution taken by the 
 Baptist Ministers' Meeting at Kettering was 
 taken " agreeably to what is recommended in 
 Brother Carey's late publication " on the sub- 
 ject of the propagation of the gospel among 
 the heathen. " Brother Carey's late publica- 
 tion " was his famous Enquiry into the Obli- 
 gations of Christians to use Means for the 
 Conversion of the Heathens. In that treatise 
 Carey thus outlines his conception of the 
 work missionaries are called to do : " They 
 must take every opportunity of doing them 
 [t. e.j the heathen] good, and laboring and 
 traveling night and day, they must instruct, 
 exhort, and rebuke with all long-suffering and 
 anxious desire for them, and above all must 
 
 57 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 be instant in prayer for the effusion of the 
 Holy Spirit upon the people of their charge. 
 It might likewise be of importance, if God 
 should bless their labors, for them to encour- 
 age any appearances of gifts amongst the 
 people of their charge ; if such should be 
 raised up, many advantages would be derived 
 from their knowledge of the language and 
 customs of their countrymen; and their 
 change of conduct would give great weight 
 to their ministrations " (Smith's Life of Wil- 
 liam Carey, pp. 39, 40). 
 
 In the " Form of Agreement" entered into 
 by the missionaries at Serampore in 1805, 
 when Carey had been eleven years in India 
 and had for five years been associated with 
 Marshman and Ward, the aims which these 
 devoted men had in view are more fully set 
 forth. After binding themselves to strive 
 after a right estimate of the value of the soul 
 and a due sense of the needs of the heathen 
 around them ; to use all diligence, on the one 
 hand, in acquainting themselves with the 
 religious views of the natives, and, on the 
 other, in avoiding every ground of needless 
 offense ; to improve every opportunity of 
 
 presenting the truth, and to make Christ 
 
 58 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 crucified the great theme of their preaching, 
 they add: "Another important part of our 
 work is to build up, and watch over, the 
 souls that may be gathered, to press the great 
 principles of the gospel upon the minds of 
 the converts until they be thoroughly settled 
 and grounded in the foundation of their hope 
 toward God. We must be willing to spend 
 some time with them daily, if possible, in 
 this work. We must have much patience 
 with them, though they may grow very 
 slowly in the divine knowledge An- 
 other part of our work is the forming of the 
 native brethren to usefulness, fostering every 
 kind of genius and cherishing every gift and 
 grace in them. In this respect we can 
 scarcely be too lavish of our attention to 
 their improvement. It is only by means of 
 native preachers that we can hope for the 
 universal spread of the gospel throughout 
 this immense continent. It is absolute duty 
 to cherish native gifts and send forth as 
 
 many native preachers as possible Still 
 
 further to strengthen the cause of Christ in 
 this country, and, as far as in our power, to 
 give it permanent establishment, even when 
 
 the efforts of Europeans may fail, we think 
 
 59 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 it our duty, as soon as possible, to advise the 
 native brethren who may be formed into 
 separate churches, to choose their pastors 
 and deacons from among their own country- 
 men, that the word may be statedly preached 
 and the ordinances administered in every 
 church by the native minister, as much as 
 possible, without the interference of the 
 missionary of the district, who will con- 
 stantly superintend their affairs, give them 
 advice in cases of order and discipline, and 
 correct any errors into which they may fall, 
 and who, joying and beholding their order 
 and the steadfastness of their faith, may 
 direct his efforts continually to the planting 
 of new churches in other places, and to the 
 spread of the gospel throughout his district 
 
 as much as is in his power Under the 
 
 divine blessing, if, in the course of a few 
 years, a number of native churches be thus 
 established, from them the word of God may 
 sound out even to the extremities of India, 
 and numbers of preachers being raised up, 
 may form a body of native missionaries 
 inured to the climate, acquainted with the 
 customs, language, modes of speech, and 
 
 reasoning of the inhabitants ; able to become 
 
 60 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 perfectly familiar with them, to enter their 
 houses, to live upon their food, to sleep with 
 them or under a tree ; and who may travel 
 from one end of the country to the other al- 
 most without any expense. These churches 
 will be in no danger of falling into errors or 
 disorders because the whole of their affairs 
 will be constantly superintended by a Euro- 
 pean missionary. The advantages of this 
 plan are so evident that to carry it into com- 
 plete effect ought to be our continued con- 
 cern. That we may discharge the important 
 duty of watching over these infant churches 
 when formed, and of urging them to main- 
 tain a steady discipline, to hold forth the 
 clear and cheering light of evangelical truth 
 in this region and shadow of death, and to 
 walk in all respects as those who have been 
 called out of darkness into marvelous light, 
 we should continually go to the Source of all 
 grace and strength ; for if to become the 
 shepherd of a single church be a most solemm 
 and weighty charge, what must it be to watch 
 over a number of churches just raised from 
 heathenism and placed at a distance from 
 each other? " (Smith's Life, p. 444ff.). 
 
 Such were the conceptions of the Seram- 
 
 61 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 pore brotherhood as to the aim to be pursued. 
 That they kept this aim steadily in view is 
 witnessed by the whole of their wonderful 
 work of organization. They planted stations 
 northward to Assam and Bhootan, eastward 
 to Burmah, Java, and the Celebes, up the 
 Ganges valley to Delhi, and across the pen- 
 insula to Surat on the west coast. They 
 created schools which in 1818 numbered one 
 hundred and twenty-six, and contained ten 
 thousand boys ; they made a beginning also 
 in the education of Hindu women ; and they 
 crowned their educational system with a 
 Christian college. They translated and 
 printed the Bible, in whole or in part, in 
 thirty-six languages and dialects of India. 
 
 Now it may fairly be said that the view of 
 Carey and his associates as outlined above 
 has dominated modern Protestant missions. 
 Judson, for example, in his first years in 
 Burmah, said he would die content if he 
 could see the Bible translated into Burmese 
 and a church of a hundred members gathered. 
 The American Board in 1856 declared that 
 " if we resolve the end of missions into its 
 simplest elements, we shall find that it em- 
 braces (1) the conversion of lost men ; (2) 
 
 62 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 organizing them into churches; (3) giving 
 these churches a competent native ministry ; 
 and (4) conducting them to the stage of in- 
 dependence and (in most cases) self-propaga- 
 tion " {Missionary Tracts, No. 15, Outline of 
 Missionary Policy, p. 5). Six years later 
 the Board proved its convictions by with- 
 drawing its missionaries from the Sandwich 
 Islands. In 1877 the Church Missionary So- 
 ciety in a Brief View of Principles (quoted 
 by Dr. Theodor Christlieb in his Protestant 
 Foreign Missions, p. 63) said : " All evange- 
 listic efforts are to aim, first at the conversion 
 of individual souls, and, secondly, though 
 contemporaneously, at the organization of the 
 permanent native church, self-supporting, 
 self-governing, self-extending." In 1880 Dr. 
 Christlieb himself wrote (Protestant Foreign 
 Missions, p. 63) : " The important question 
 whether the object of a mission should be 
 simply the conversion of individuals or the 
 Christianization of whole nations, will be, 
 nay is already, decided from the practice and 
 experience of all the present societies, as 
 well as in the history of missions during the 
 first century. It is not a question here as to 
 
 this or that, but as to one after the other. 
 
 63 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 According to the apostolic example, the 
 whole spirit and character of a people 
 brought under Christian influence must be 
 cleansed, renewed, and fructified, through 
 the conversion of one individual after an- 
 other, if the leavening power of the gospel 
 is to permeate public and social life. But 
 for this process, the only sure and solid basis 
 lies in the formation of individual churches 
 of believers, as centres of new light and life 
 from God, ' well-rooms ' of regenerating 
 power for the whole people." In January, 
 1893, the first " Interdenominational Confer- 
 ence of Foreign Missionary Boards and So- 
 cieties in the United States and Canada " 
 was held in New York city, a conference at 
 which were present sixty-eight missionaries 
 and officers of mission boards, representing 
 twenty-three societies. At this conference 
 one of the secretaries of the American Board 
 concluded a paper on " The Relative Impor- 
 tance of Evangelistic Work in Relation to 
 other Forms of Effort " with the following 
 statement, which, so far from being chal- 
 lenged, was rather confirmed by each of 
 seven speakers who took part in the ensuing 
 discussion : " The first, the deepest, the 
 
 64 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 most enduring purpose of all missionary 
 work is to bring the gospel home to human 
 hearts and lives and to develop self-support- 
 ing and self-directing churches who will ex- 
 tend this blessing until all nations are full of 
 the knowledge and faith of Jesus Christ. All 
 forms of labor are subservient to this end, 
 and when it is reached the work is done " 
 (Report of 'First Inter denominationa I Conference^ 
 etc., p. 36). 
 
 #. The Motives of Modern Missions. 
 
 Coming now to the question of motive, it 
 will need but little argument to make it plain 
 that those considerations, which, as we saw 
 in the preceding chapter, inspired the 
 apostles — regard for the command of Christ, 
 love to Christ and zeal for His honor and 
 for the glory of God in Christ, and com- 
 passion for perishing souls — have also been, 
 and are to-day, the great springs of the mod- 
 ern missionary enterprise. However the 
 pioneers of that enterprise were misunder- 
 stood and misinterpreted by their fellows — 
 and there have never been lacking successors 
 of those who accused John Eliot of being 
 actuated by personal ambition, or looked on 
 
 65 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 Carey as Festus did on Paul, as beside him- 
 self — yet they themselves had the testimony 
 of a good conscience as to their motives. 
 Let them answer for themselves : " God," 
 said Eliot, " first put into my heart a com- 
 passion for the poor souls of these Indians 
 and a desire to teach them to know Christ 
 and to bring them into His kingdom." "Be 
 thou mine, Lord Jesus, and I will be thine," 
 was the prayer and vow of Zinzendorf as a 
 child. " I have but one passion ; it is He, 
 He alone," was the motto of his manhood. 
 11 Is not the command given to the apostles 
 to teach all nations obligatory on all succeed- 
 ing generations of ministers, seeing that the 
 accompanying promise is of equal extent ? " 
 — this was the question which Carey pro- 
 posed for discussion by the Baptist Minis- 
 ters' Meeting at Northampton in 1786, and 
 which brought upon him the rebuke of the 
 chairman, that he was " a miserable enthusi- 
 ast for asking such a question." 
 
 " The importance of spending our time for 
 God alone," so Carey wrote to his father, 
 when announcing his resolve to go to India, 
 "is the principal theme of the Gospel. To 
 
 be devoted like a sacrifice to holy uses is the 
 
 66 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 great business of a Christian. I consider 
 myself as devoted to the service of God 
 alone, and now I am to realize my profes- 
 sions " (Smith's Life of William Carey, p. 61). 
 
 " In order to be prepared for our great and 
 solemn work," so ran the first article of the 
 famous Serampore Agreement, " it is abso- 
 lutely necessary that we set an infinite value 
 upon immortal souls ; that we often endeavor 
 to affect our minds with the dreadful loss 
 sustained by an unconverted soul launched 
 into eternity. It becomes us to fix in our 
 minds the awful doctrine of eternal punish- 
 ment, and to realize frequently the incon- 
 ceivably awful condition of this vast country, 
 
 lying in the arms of the wicked one 
 
 We are apt to relax our exertions in a warm 
 climate, but we shall do well to fix it always 
 in our minds that all around us are perishing, 
 and that we incur a dreadful woe if we pro- 
 claim not the glad tidings of salvation'* 
 {Ibid, p. 442). 
 
 " Some one asked me not long ago," said 
 Judson, in an address delivered in this coun- 
 try, "whether faith or love influenced me 
 most in going to the heathen. I thought of 
 it awhile, and at length concluded that there 
 
 67 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 was in me but little of either. But in think- 
 ing of what did influence me, I remembered 
 a time, out in the woods back of Andover 
 Seminary, when I was almost disheartened. 
 Everything looked dark. No one had gone 
 out from this country. The way was not 
 open. The field was far distant, and in an 
 unhealthy climate. I knew not what to do. 
 All at once that "last command" seemed to 
 come to my heart directly from heaven. I 
 could doubt no longer, but determined on 
 the spot to obey it at all hazards for the sake 
 of pleasing the Lord Jesus Christ " {Life of 
 Adoniram Judson y by his son Edward Jud- 
 son, p. 474). " May God forgive all those 
 who forsake us in our extremity," wrote the 
 same great missionary, at the close of an ap- 
 peal for new men for Burmah. " May He 
 save them all. But surely, if any sin will 
 lie with crushing weight on the trembling, 
 shrinking soul, when grim death draws near; 
 if any sin will clothe the brow of the final 
 Judge with an angry frown, withering up 
 the last hope of the condemned in irremedi- 
 able, everlasting despair, it is the sin of turn- 
 ing a deaf ear to the plaintive cry of ten mil- 
 lions of immortal beings, who by their dark- 
 
 68 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 ness and misery, cry day and night, 'Come to 
 our rescue, ye bright sons and daughters of 
 America; come and save us, for we are sink- 
 ing into hell!"' {Ibid., p. 310). 
 
 " It is something to be a missionary," says 
 Livingstone in his Missionary Sacrifices, "it 
 is something to be a follower, however feeble, 
 in the wake of the Great Teacher and only 
 Model Missionary that has ever appeared 
 among men ; and now that He is Head over 
 all things, King of kings and Lord of lords, 
 what commission is equal to that which the 
 missionary holds from Him ? . . . . The mis- 
 sionary is a harbinger of the good time com- 
 ing. When he preaches the gospel to a 
 tribe which has long sat in darkness, the 
 signs of the coming of the Son of Man are 
 displayed. The glorious Sun of Righteous- 
 ness is near the horizon. He is the herald 
 of the dawn, for come He will whose right it 
 is to reign, and what a prospect appears 
 when we think of the golden age which has 
 not been, but yet must come ! Messiah has 
 sat on the Hill of Zion for eighteen hundred 
 years. He has long been expecting that His 
 enemies shall be made His footstool; and 
 may not we expect, too, and lift up our 
 
 69 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 heads, seeing the redemption of the world 
 draweth nigh?" (Blaikie's Personal Life of 
 David Livingstone, p. 478). 
 
 Whom else would you hear strike the full 
 chord of missionary motive ? Would it be 
 Duff in impassioned eloquence before the 
 Scottish General Assembly ? Would it be 
 Mackay from the shores of Lake Nyassa, or 
 Gilmour from the dust-swept plains of Mon- 
 golia ? Would it be Paton, as many Chris- 
 tians of America and England heard him, four 
 years ago, turning aside from the most thrill- 
 ing story of perils or triumphs to utter with 
 melting tenderness the name of Jesus ? Call 
 whom you will, and still you will find the 
 bond that binds him to his work a threefold 
 cord — obedience to Christ, love to Christ, 
 and love to men. And these three find their 
 unity in Christ Himself. "My intercourse 
 with missionaries of all kinds in all coun- 
 tries," wrote Dr. Lawrence {Modern Missions 
 in the East, p. 41ff.), on his return from a 
 tour of twenty months through mission 
 lands, " has convinced me of the great diver- 
 sity of their motives. They vary according 
 to temperament, training, theology, environ- 
 ment. Men come to Christ from different 
 
 70 
 
The Principles of Modern Missions 
 
 motives ; they go out on His work with dif- 
 ferent motives ; there are motives that look 
 Godward and motives that look manward. 
 But all are but varied manifestations of the 
 one supreme motive, which is the common 
 source of all. That source, the motive of all 
 motives, is the great theanthropic impulse 
 that is born of contact with Christ. The 
 main source of missions is not, strictly 
 speaking, in any motive at all, but in a 
 motor, in Christ Himself as author, operator, 
 and energizer of all divine vitalities and 
 activities. Christ is the one motive power. 
 Not the command of Christ, not the love of 
 Christ, not the glory of God, not the peril, 
 or guilt, or possibilities of souls, no one of 
 these alone is the great constraining force, 
 but Christ Himself." 
 
 I 
 
 71 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF APOSTOLIC MISSIONS 
 
 In the two previous chapters of this book 
 comparison was instituted between apostolic 
 and modern missions with respect to the 
 principles involved. It is now proposed to 
 make a similar comparison with reference to 
 the problem presented. The problem, be it 
 noted, rather than the problems. For by the 
 phrase " the problems of missions" is usually 
 meant the vexed questions of missionary ad- 
 ministration at home and abroad. It is not 
 problems in this sense with which we are 
 here concerned, but the problem, what we 
 might call the situation with respect to mis- 
 sions, the totality of facts and forces which 
 underlay the missionary enterprise and con- 
 ditioned its success or failure. 
 
 The importance of the subject thus defined 
 is obvious. If the conditions under which 
 nineteenth-century missions are being prose- 
 cuted are essentially those which prevailed 
 in the first century there is the best ground 
 
 72 
 
The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 for cheer. Where the apostles and the early 
 church succeeded we need not fail, and 
 everything that is recorded as to their at- 
 tempt becomes at once useful to us by way 
 either of encouragement or of warning. 
 But if the mission problem of to-day is 
 radically unlike that which confronted the 
 apostles, then we are cut off from one of our 
 main sources of confidence. If we are 
 treading an unknown path, are engaged in 
 an untried experiment, then the strain upon 
 our faith and courage must be far greater 
 than it would be were we assured that our 
 endeavor is practically the same with that 
 recorded in the latter half of the New Testa- 
 ment. 
 
 When we examine the problem of apostolic 
 missions it resolves itself into two problems, 
 which we may call the external and the in- 
 ternal. Apostolic missions was the effort of 
 the church as it existed in Jerusalem on the 
 day of Pentecost to propagate itself through- 
 out the world, and specially, as has been 
 shown, to plant self-supporting, self-govern- 
 ing, self-extending churches in all the great 
 centres of influence of the Roman world. 
 The conditions making for success or failure 
 
 73 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 in this attempt lay in part without the 
 church and in part within it. Let us look 
 first at that which has attracted most atten- 
 tion, viz., the external obstacles to success. 
 These it would be hard to overstate. Had 
 the Pentecostal church been a hundred or a 
 thousand times more numerous than it was, 
 had its members been in any conceivable de- 
 gree wealthier and more influential, the diffi- 
 culties of the primitive mission enterprise 
 would still have been enormous. These dif- 
 ficulties were first physical ; they inhered in 
 the geographical structure and extent of the 
 world even as known to the men of the first 
 century. If only the Roman empire were 
 considered, this stretched from the Euphrates 
 to the Pillars of Hercules, from the Danube 
 to the cataracts of the Nile; while beyond 
 these boundaries lay dimly known regions — 
 India, China, the northern lands where the 
 fierce German tribes had their home. For 
 traversing these vast spaces no means were 
 at hand for the ordinary traveler but to go 
 on foot by land or to creep cautiously from 
 headland to headland, from island to island, 
 in the ships of the time. Then there were 
 intellectual difficulties of the most stagger- 
 
 74 
 
The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 ing sort. How should all the mingled peo- 
 ples, with their discordant tongues, their 
 diverse customs, their different stages of cul- 
 ture, be made even to comprehend the gospel 
 message? And how was Christianity to 
 force its way against the dominant philoso- 
 phies of the time ? 
 
 But, above all, there were moral and spir- 
 itual difficulties to be overcome by the first 
 missionaries. It was not a clean and vacant 
 soil into which they were bidden to cast the 
 gospel seed, but one preoccupied with rank 
 growths which would dispute every inch of 
 the ground. Heathenism was in full posses- 
 sion of the ancient world. While God had 
 been training the chosen people in the true 
 religion, He had suffered all other nations to 
 walk in their own ways (Acts xiv. 16), and 
 they had used their liberty to erect a vast 
 and varied structure of idolatry and supersti- 
 tion which threw its shadow over every rela- 
 tion and interest of life. How pervasive the 
 influence of these false faiths was we may 
 learn from the New Testament itself. We 
 read, for example, that when Paul and Barna- 
 bas had healed a cripple in Lystra, the popu- 
 lace concluded that Jupiter and Mercury had 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 appeared among them in human form (Acta 
 xiv. 8-13). The imprisonment of Paul and 
 Silas at Philippi was due to a miracle of heal- 
 ing wrought on a girl believed to be under 
 the special influence of Apollo (Acts xvi. 
 16), and the readiness of their jailer to com- 
 mit suicide when he supposed that his pris- 
 oners had escaped (ver. 27) was no doubt a 
 fruit of Stoic teaching. "When Paul arrived 
 in Athens he found the city full of idols, and 
 in the market-place philosophers of the Stoic 
 and Epicurean schools encountered him (Acts 
 xvii. 16, 18). When he had made converts 
 in Corinth, he saw that they could not attend 
 a feast, buy meat in the market, or carry a 
 cause before a magistrate without perilous 
 contact with heathen usage (1 Cor. vi. Iff., x. 
 23n°.). In Ephesus his life was put in peril 
 through the fanatical regard of the populace 
 for the image and temple of Diana (Acts xix. 
 23fT.) ; in Colossse the truth he had preached 
 was perverted by the admixture of heathen 
 error (Col. ii. 8ff.). When he was wrecked 
 on Malta, the islanders interpreted the attack 
 of the viper as a proof that he was pursued 
 by the goddess Nemesis (Acts xxviii. 4), and 
 when he departed on his way to Rome it was 
 
 76 
 
The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 in a ship which was under the tutelary care 
 of Castor and Pollux (ver. 11). 
 
 We know from other sources that these 
 and similar allusions in the New Testament 
 to heathen belief and practice are only inci- 
 dental revelations of that which was uni- 
 versal and all-pervasive throughout the Ro- 
 man world. Go where one might — in 
 crowded city or quiet country, in the shad- 
 ows of the forest, where the spray rose from 
 the waterfall, on the mountain top, by the 
 seashore, in Rome, in Athens, or in the camp 
 of the most remote legion on the frontier — 
 the eye fell on temples, altars, shrines, votive 
 tablets, images of gods and goddesses. And 
 not only were such visible signs of heathen- 
 ism everywhere discoverable, but heathenism 
 made its influence felt in every sphere of 
 human activity. The state was saturated 
 with it. From the emperor down to the most 
 unknown legionary not a man could hold an 
 office, sit as a magistrate, testify as a witness, 
 cast a vote, command a legion or a century, 
 or even draw his pay, without participation 
 in some heathen rite. Social life was no less 
 under the power of religion. "Each period 
 of life, every important event," says Uhl- 
 
 77 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 horn, " was celebrated with religious services. 
 . . . . There was the goddess Lucina who 
 watched over the birth of a child ; Candeli- 
 fera in whose honor at such times candles 
 were lighted ; Ruraina who attended to its 
 nursing; Nundina who was invoked on the 
 ninth clay when the name was given ; Potina 
 and Educa who accustomed it to food and 
 drink. The day when the child first stepped 
 upon the ground was consecrated to Statina; 
 Abeona taught it to walk ; Farinus, to lisp ; 
 Locutinus, to talk; Cunina averted from it 
 evil enchantments while lying in the cradle. 
 There was a god of the door (Forculus), a 
 god of the threshold (Limentinus), a goddess 
 of the hinges (Cardea). There was a god for 
 the blind (Cseculus), a goddess for the child- 
 less (Orbana). 'Even the brothels/ ex- 
 claims Tertullian, ' and cook-shops and pris- 
 ons have their gods.' Every household festi- 
 val was at the same time a divine service ; 
 each class had its gods whom it invoked, and 
 from whom it expected help and protection 
 in its work. From the niche of a rafter 
 Epona, the goddess of horses, looked down 
 on the stable ; on the ship stood the image of 
 Neptune; merchants prayed to Mercury for 
 
 78 
 
The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 successful bargains. All tillage of the soil 
 began with prayer. Before harvest a pig 
 was sacrificed to Ceres, and the labor of fell- 
 ing a forest was not begun until pardon had 
 been supplicated from the unknown gods 
 who might inhabit it." {The Conflict of Chris- 
 tianity with Heathenism, p. 31ff ). 
 
 We need to remind ourselves, also, that 
 this complicated fabric of heathen usage did 
 not sustain itself simply by the force of cus- 
 tom and the attraction which mysterious or 
 splendid rites have always had for supersti- 
 tious minds. Behind the temples, altars, 
 sacrifices, ceremonies, we must see a great 
 army of those who were in one way or an- 
 other interested in maintaining heathen faith 
 and worship. These appear also on the pages 
 of the Acts of the Apostles, in Elymas the 
 sorcerer, himself a Jew, but representative 
 of a host of heathen of like occupation; in 
 the magicians and silversmiths of Ephesus; 
 in the priests of Jupiter at Lystra; in the 
 owners of the Pythoness of Philippi. Types 
 these are of the multitude of priests and 
 priestesses, soothsayers, diviners, necroman- 
 cers, augurs, flamens, vestals, haruspices, 
 fortune-tellers, quacks, artificers, merchants, . 
 
 79 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 who at once shared, fostered and fattened on 
 the superstition of the age; each of whom 
 was ready, so soon as he perceived the an- 
 tagonism of the new religion both to his 
 faith and his livelihood, to resist its propa- 
 gation with all his power. 
 
 And besides all these private enemies of 
 the gospel there was one great public enemy. 
 It was the empire itself. Even in the Acts 
 we see the first flashes of that storm of per- 
 secution of the church at the hands of the 
 state which was not to cease, was indeed 
 scarcely to lull, for two hundred and fifty 
 years. These are to be found, not in the 
 execution of James, and the intended execu- 
 tion of Peter by Herod Agrippa (Acts xb'- 
 1-3) — for this persecution proceeded from 
 Jewish, not from Roman sources — but in 
 the charges brought against Paul and Silas 
 first in Philippi and then in Thessalonica. 
 " These men, being Jews, do exceedingly 
 trouble our city, and set forth customs which 
 it is not lawful for us to receive, or to ob- 
 serve, being Romans " — this was the accusa- 
 tion by which the owners of the demoniac 
 girl of Philippi sought to give effect to their 
 resentment against those who, by casting out 
 
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The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 the demon, had taken away their hope of 
 gain (Acts xvi. 20). " These that have 
 turned the world upside down are come 
 hither also ; whom Jason hath received ; and 
 these all act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, 
 saying that there is another king, one Jesus " 
 — this was the cry which the envious Jews 
 of Thessalonica put into the mouths of the 
 mob they had raised against the missionaries 
 (Acts xvii. 6, 7). Two indictments are here 
 laid. One is that these Jewish strangers 
 were introducing new religious observances; 
 the other, that they were guilty of offense 
 against the supreme dignity of the emperor 
 by proclaiming Jesus as a king. These two 
 charges found their point of unity in that 
 deification of the emperor in which the 
 Roman idea that it is the supreme duty of 
 the citizen to live for the state came at last 
 to be embodied. In the Roman view piety 
 and patriotism became almost synonymous. 
 To introduce a religion not sanctioned by the 
 state, to refuse to honor the gods acknowl- 
 edged by the state, and especially to refuse 
 to worship the numen of the emperor, this 
 was impiety and treason in one. It was be- 
 cause in this, as well as in the whole founda- 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 tion upon which it rested, the state was in- 
 separably bound up with heathenism, that 
 the conflict which actually arose was, as 
 Uhlhorn has shown, inevitable, and, when 
 once joined, possible to be terminated only 
 by the complete triumph of the one party or 
 the other. 
 
 Side by side with this opposition on the 
 part of heathenism there was another which 
 was offered by Judaism. This was in the 
 beginning the more dangerous of the two, 
 because more intelligent and more bitter, 
 and because the Roman law did not at first 
 distinguish Christians from Jews. The tem- 
 per, motives and methods of this antagonism 
 we may learn equally well from what Saul 
 of Tarsus did from Jerusalem to Damascus, 
 and what Paul the servant of Jesus Christ 
 suffered from Damascus to Rome. 
 
 But the battle which the new religion had 
 to fight was not merely the battle of truth 
 against error strongly intrenched in custom, 
 vested interests, the very structure of the 
 Roman state, and the zeal of the Jews for 
 a religion which they knew to have been 
 divine in its origin. It was also the battle 
 of righteousness against wickedness, of holi- 
 
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The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 ness against sin. When we study the Gos- 
 pels we find that the Jewish nation at the 
 time of the Advent was morally corrupt. 
 Along with scrupulous attention to external 
 religion, there was pride, hypocrisy, untruth, 
 extortion, impurity. But if Jewish morality 
 was fitly described by our Lord's terrible 
 figure of the whited sepulchre, heathen mo- 
 rality was an unburied carcass. In the Gen- 
 tile world iniquity no longer took pains to 
 clothe itself in the garb of outward decency, 
 but stalked forth naked and unashamed. 
 Extravagance, luxury, frivolity among the 
 rich; cringing dependence on the part of 
 the throng of clients and hangers-on that 
 crowded their doors and clamored for "bread 
 and games " ; abject submission, which yet 
 often masked a very volcano of hate, on the 
 part of the myriads of slaves that were every- 
 where to be seen; labor despised, counted 
 unworthy of the dignity of a freeman ; the 
 self-respecting middle class swept away; 
 utter disregard of human life, showing it- 
 self in the terrible punishments inflicted on 
 slaves for the slightest offenses, and in the 
 unconcern with which even vestal virgins 
 looked on while human blood was shed in the 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 amphitheatre ; marriage dishonored ; purity 
 set at naught to a degree which cannot be 
 uttered to modern ears ; children made away 
 with by strangling or exposure, or, if allowed 
 to live, turned over to the care of slaves; 
 venality and intrigue rife among all the offi- 
 cial classes (unless exception be made in 
 favor of the army, in which outdoor life, 
 constant campaigning, and military devotion 
 to duty served to maintain a higher stand- 
 ard) — to say that these things were charac- 
 teristic features of the life of heathenism in 
 that age is only to repeat from the pages of 
 heathen writers themselves the terrible in- 
 dictment which Paul, with full knowledge 
 whereof he affirmed, brings in the closing 
 verses of the first chapter of the Epistle to 
 the Romans. 
 
 And while there were these elements of 
 difficulty in the external situation, there 
 were also serious obstacles within the church. 
 Not only were the Christians at first few in 
 number, poor, of humble social station, des- 
 titute of culture, members of a despised and 
 hated race, and themselves objects of con- 
 tempt and hatred to the rest of their nation 
 but they had very imperfect conceptions of 
 
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The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 the work given them to do. They did not 
 understand either the simplicity or the uni- 
 versality of the gospel. Many thousand 
 converts had been made, and the glad 
 tidings had been carried to Samaria, to 
 Antioch, yes, as far as Cyprus, before even 
 the apostles realized that repentance unto 
 life was possible to Gentiles as Gentiles. 
 Indeed Peter came to this realization only 
 through the coincidence of a vision from 
 heaven and the providential arrival of mes- 
 sengers from Cornelius the Roman, and the 
 subsequent unmistakable descent of the 
 Holy Ghost upon the centurion and his 
 friends ; and his course of action was imme- 
 diately challenged by a party within the 
 church, which till the end of the apostolic 
 age continued to oppose the admission of the 
 Gentiles except through their first becoming 
 Jews. So influential was this party, and so 
 strong were the Jewish prepossessions of the 
 first Christians generally, that there is reason 
 to doubt whether the Gospel would have 
 been freely proclaimed to the Gentiles in the 
 first century had not God raised up a special 
 apostle for this very work. 
 
 Having glanced at the conditions adverse 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 to the missionary undertaking, as these were 
 found without and within the church, let us 
 now look at some factors that made for mis- 
 sionary success. Paul wrote to the churches 
 of Galatia that Christ came in " the fullness 
 of the times" (Gal. iv. 4). The phrase has 
 always attracted the attention of students of 
 the New Testament. It has often been 
 shown how, with reference to all that was to 
 precede the Advent, that event took place in 
 the fullness of the times: how, that is to say, 
 every condition named in the prophets had 
 been realized ; how every note of time, from 
 dying Jacob's prediction that "the sceptre 
 should not depart from Judah till Shiloh 
 come " to Daniel's prophecy of the seventy 
 weeks found its precise fulfillment in the 
 reigns of Augustus and Tiberius ; how all 
 the blind gropings of heathenism had ended 
 in failure and thus made the world ready for 
 the appearing of the true Saviour ; how 
 Judaism had accomplished, even through un- 
 belief and apostasy, its God-given destiny, 
 and was at the point to fall as the blossom 
 falls to make way for the fruit. 
 
 But this "fullness of the times" was as 
 strikingly manifest with reference to what 
 
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The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 was to follow the Advent as it was with re- 
 spect to what should precede it. If the times 
 were fulfilled for the appearance of the 
 Saviour, no less were they fulfilled for 
 world-wide proclamation of His gospel and 
 the world-wide establishment of His king- 
 dom among men. For one thing, the world 
 was physically accessible as it had never been 
 before. The time predicted by Isaiah, when 
 every valley should be exalted, and every 
 mountain and hill should be brought low, 
 and the crooked should be made straight, 
 and the rough places plain, seemed now to 
 have come. The Roman legions had acted 
 like the mighty battering-rams which they 
 were wont to drag up to the gates of 
 beleagured cities, in breaking down the bar- 
 riers which in earlier times had separated na- 
 tion from nation. If Rome had not been 
 able literally to level the mountains, her 
 victories had compelled her to construct the 
 great roads that radiated like spokes from 
 the golden milestone in the forum. Where 
 Roman arms had triumphed, Roman law was 
 established, and under its protection life, 
 property, labor, commerce, travel became 
 secure. As Rome grew in power and wealth, 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 intercourse between the various parts of the 
 empire was greatly stimulated. Everywhere 
 there was coming and going, of soldiers, am- 
 bassadors, prsetors, pro-consuls, merchants, 
 pilgrims, students, teachers. The mere 
 physical necessities of Rome herself and 
 the other great cities that in that time of 
 peace everywhere sprang up, as well as the 
 demands of luxury, fostered a commerce by 
 land and sea such as had not been approached 
 or even thought of before. And this free 
 intercourse of nation with nation wrought 
 together with the subjection of all to com- 
 mon forms of law to bring men into a meas- 
 ure of intellectual and religious tolerance, 
 not to say sympathy. The old state of 
 things, in which each nation looked with 
 suspicion on every other, and clung tena- 
 ciously to whatever in social custom, civil in- 
 stitution, intellectual and religious habitude, 
 made for separation — an attitude once uni- 
 versal, which the Jews and the Chinese have 
 brought with them out of that ancient time 
 — this old state of things began to give way. 
 As the nations came to know each other bet- 
 ter, they became more tolerant, and at last 
 even assimilative, of each other's peculiarities 
 
 88 
 
The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 of custom, institution, faith. Races began 
 to be fused ; religions became less exclusive, 
 more eclectic and comprehensive. As men, 
 once accustomed to remain at home and to 
 worship local deities, began to move abroad, 
 they were compelled either to accept new 
 divinities or to conclude that the gods whom 
 they found in new lands were the same they 
 had been wont to honor, only under new 
 names. Jupiter was discovered to be one 
 with Zeus, Juno with Here ; nay, Isis and 
 Anubis and Osiris and Baal and Astarte 
 were found, or at least believed, to be only 
 local names for familiar inhabitants of Olym- 
 pus. 
 
 The same end — the bringing in of the full- 
 ness of the times for missions — was being 
 served in another way by the prevalence of 
 Greek culture, carrying with it the knowl- 
 edge and use of the Greek tongue. Rome 
 had not made political conquest of the world 
 until Greece had first established her intel- 
 lectual supremacy. Greek modes of thought, 
 Greek models of style, Greek habits of life 
 were being everywhere adopted. To have 
 studied in Greece, or at least under Greek 
 masters, to have read the Greek classics, to 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 be able to compose, or argue, or declaim, in 
 the Greek style, to be an adherent of one or 
 other of the schools of Greek philosophy, 
 these were the marks of culture. And the 
 •result of all this, and particularly of the wide 
 acceptance of the Greek philosophies, had 
 been to undermine polytheism. Multitudes 
 of the educated had already lost faith in the 
 gods, even though for policy's sake they 
 maintained outward deference with respect 
 to them. 
 
 And while Rome and Greece were thus 
 making each her special contribution to the 
 preparation of the world for the reception of 
 the gospel, Judaism was also making hers. 
 Once uprooted from the Holy Land by the 
 hand of Nebuchadnezzar, the Jews had be- 
 come in a certain sense cosmopolitans. Led 
 by their genius for trade, they had estab- 
 lished themselves in every quarter of the 
 civilized world. Yet they had never become 
 fused with the nations among whom they 
 had made their homes. Cut off from Jeru- 
 salem and the temple, they made the syna- 
 gogues their centres of unity, and thus every- 
 where bore witness to the great truths of 
 Old Testament religion, which were at the 
 
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The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 • 
 
 same time so large an element in the gospel. 
 Particularly they testified to the unity and 
 spirituality of God, to the hope of a coming 
 deliverer, and to the fact of a divine revela- 
 tion. This last they did especially in the 
 creation and wide distribution of the Septu- 
 agint. And their witness was not unavail- 
 ing. Amid all the intellectual doubt of the 
 time, the acceptance of new gods and new 
 rites, the weariness and fear and sometimes 
 loathing that was begotten by the moral 
 corruptions that were rife, there were not a 
 few men and women, many of them repre- 
 sentative of the best that was left in heathen- 
 ism, who were attracted by the simple, spirit- 
 ual worship, the purer morality, the assured 
 faith of their Jewish neighbors. These were 
 some of the things that justify the applica- 
 tion of Paul's phrase "the fullness of the 
 times " to the providential preparedness of 
 the world for the diffusion of Christianity. 
 These were some of the ways whereby the 
 wires were being strung, by which the gospel 
 message was to be flashed, as it were, in a 
 generation, to every part of the empire ; or, 
 ought we not rather to say, by which in every 
 part of the vast realm of moral and spiritual 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 darkness there should begin to be the glow 
 of gospel light ? 
 
 When we take up the Acts and the Epis- 
 tles we find on every page illustrations of 
 this marvelous external preparation for apos- 
 tolic missions. As we accompany Paul on 
 his journeys, we become aware that he is 
 everywhere following those great military 
 roads which Roman political foresight had 
 established, or those lines of commercial in- 
 tercourse which the necessities of the empire 
 had created. Thus, for example, Prof. Ram- 
 say of Aberdeen has shown that the vessel 
 in which Paul was wrecked was a corn-ship 
 in the imperial service ; and it has often been 
 pointed out that the last stage of that mem- 
 orable journey was over the famous Via 
 Appia, along which so many lesser conquer- 
 ors had marched in triumph. But even had 
 these highways by land and sea existed, Paul 
 could hardly have used them as he did except 
 that he everywhere found a measure of pro- 
 tection at the hands of the Roman power. 
 His journeys were never easy ; hunger, thirst, 
 cold, nakedness, were their frequent accom- 
 paniments. They were not always safe ; there 
 were perils of rivers, perils of the deep, perils 
 
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The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 of robbers, perils of mob violence at the hands 
 of his own countrymen, of treachery on the 
 part of false brethren (2 Cor. xi. 25-27) ; but 
 hard and perilous as they were, they were 
 possible at all only by the help that Rome 
 afforded. If he was beaten and imprisoned 
 by Roman magistrates at Philippi, it was the 
 protection of the Roman power that gave 
 him liberty to carry on his work in Corinth 
 (Acts xviii. 12-17), and that saved him from 
 death at Ephesus (Acts xix. 30-41) and 
 Jerusalem (Acts xxiii.) ; and it was only by 
 standing on his rights as a Roman citizen 
 that he was able at last to carry out his long- 
 cherished purpose to preach the gospel to 
 those that were in Rome (Acts xxv. 12 ; cf. 
 Rom. i. 13). 
 
 It seems likely also that it was from Greek 
 masters in his native Tarsus, as well as at 
 the feet of Gamaliel in Jerusalem, that he 
 received his intellectual training. At least, 
 the evidences of Greek culture appear, not 
 merely in the fact that at Mars Hill he quotes 
 a line from a heathen poet (Acts xvii. 28), 
 but in the very form into which he cast his 
 epistles. In every city that he entered, the 
 synagogue furnished him a pulpit from which 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 to sound a first proclamation of the gospel, 
 the Greek language a medium through which 
 he could make himself understood by both 
 Jew and Gentile, the Septuagint a recognized 
 Scripture to which he could appeal, and the 
 proselytes a prepared soil for the good seed. 
 The synagogue in Antioch (Acts xiii. 14), 
 the "proseuche by the riverside at Philippi 
 (xvi. 13), the rock-hewn Areopagus at Ath- 
 ens (xvii. 19), the house of Titus Justus in 
 Corinth (xviii. 7), the school of Tyrannus in 
 Ephesus (xix. 9), the steps of the castle 
 Antonia in Jerusalem (xxi. 40), the audience- 
 hall of Festus in Csesarea (xxv. 23), the hired 
 house at Rome (xxviii. 30) — these are but 
 symbols of the way in which it had been made 
 possible for Paul, for the early Christians 
 generally, to subsidize the civilization of their 
 time for the proclamation of the truth and 
 the establishment of the church. 
 
 And while the world was thus made ready 
 for the missionary work of the church, the 
 church also was being prepared for her mis- 
 sionary work for the world. The relation of 
 Pentecost, not merely in a general way to the 
 life and power of the church, but specifically 
 to her missionary activity, cannot be mis- 
 
 94 
 
The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 taken and should never be forgotten. This 
 specific bearing appears at once in the form 
 of that final promise of the Saviour of which 
 Pentecost was the fulfillment, " Ye shall re- 
 ceive power when the Holy Ghost is come 
 upon you, and ye shall be my witnesses both 
 in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and Samaria, 
 and unto the uttermost parts of the earth " 
 (Acts i. 8) ; in the fact that the audience 
 which assembled contained representatives 
 of every portion of the civilized world ; and 
 in the nature of the miraculous endowment 
 which accompanied the descent of the Spirit, 
 namely, the power to proclaim in foreign 
 tongues the wonderful works of God (Acts 
 ii. 9-11). As soon as the resurrection had 
 chased away doubt, and Pentecost had brought 
 enlightenment, zeal, and spiritual power, per- 
 secution scattered the disciples abroad through 
 Judaea and Samaria (Acts viii. 1). Then 
 Philip was made instrumental in bringing 
 half-heathen Samaritans and the eunuch from 
 far distant Ethiopia to faith in Christ (viii. 6, 
 38). Then, while Peter was meditating on 
 the vision that made it plain that old-estab- 
 lished distinctions were now to be ignored, 
 
 the messengers of Cornelius the Roman came 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 knocking at the gate, and, under the Spirit's 
 guidance, Peter went unto men uncircumcised, 
 ate with them, preached to them, baptized 
 them, saw them endued with the Holy Ghost, 
 and was thus prepared to champion the right 
 of Gentiles to be admitted to the church 
 without circumcision (x. 1-xi. 18). Then, 
 under the influence of these events, some of 
 those who had been scattered abroad, them- 
 selves residents of Cyprus and Cyrene, and 
 therefore men accustomed to contact with 
 Gentiles, and less bitterly prejudiced against 
 them, when they came to Antioch, ventured 
 to preach the gospel to the Greeks. God 
 honored their faith, and a great multitude of 
 the Greeks believed. When this was reported 
 at Jerusalem, the church there sent forth 
 Barnabas, also from Cyprus, who organized 
 these Gentile converts into a church (xi. 
 19-26). 
 
 And while in these ways the primitive 
 church, under the guidance of the eleven, 
 and of Peter in particular, was being led along 
 the path of missionary endeavor, God was 
 preparing for himself an agent who was to 
 be emphatically the missionary apostle. We 
 have the highest reason to believe that the 
 
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The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 original members of the apostolic company 
 were men of unusual native ability and 
 strength of character. With respect to Peter 
 and John especially, we have, in the early 
 chapters of Acts, in their epistles, and in the 
 fourth Gospel, the evidences that they were 
 princes among men. In the contrast about 
 to be drawn between them and Paul there is 
 no intention to show that he was superior to 
 them, either in intellectual ability or in no- 
 bility of character. The contrast bears upon 
 a different question, namely, the special qual- 
 ifications of the two earlier apostles and of 
 Paul respectively for the work of missions. 
 With regard to these Paul's preeminence 
 can scarcely be denied. Peter and John 
 were Jews of Palestine, Galileans, fishermen. 
 There is no reason to think that, when Jesus 
 ascended, they had ever been farther from 
 home than a visit to Jerusalem would take 
 them. Their culture was that of Jewish 
 peasants. Whatever association with their 
 Master may have done for their intellectual, 
 and especially their moral and spiritual de- 
 velopment — and who can estimate what the 
 effect of that association must have been? — 
 they were still on the day of Pentecost, as 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 on the day when they had been called away 
 from their nets, Galilean peasants, unfamiliar 
 with the great Roman world of which Pales- 
 tine was so small a part, intensely Jewish in 
 thought and feeling. With them contrast 
 Paul, also a Jew, but a Jew of the Diaspora, 
 a native of Tarsus, capital city of the Roman 
 province of Cilicia, a Greek city taking rank 
 for culture with Athens and Alexandria. 
 Here, as the free-born son of a Roman citizen, 
 Saul, who in accordance with Roman custom 
 bore also the name of Paul, spent his youth. 
 How much he must have seen and heard, and 
 even participated in, of what went to make 
 up the characteristic life of the time will be 
 best understood by reference to the case of 
 those who as the sons of missionaries have 
 spent their childhood in China or India, let 
 us say. Do what missionaries may to shield 
 their children from contamination by hea- 
 thenism, they cannot keep them from contact 
 with it. Children of missionaries learn the 
 language of the country often before they 
 learn English ; they become familiar with its 
 customs as perhaps their parents are never 
 able to do ; the outward aspects of its life, 
 industrial, political, religious are everyday 
 
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The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 matters to them ; and if God leads them, as 
 He has so often done, to take up the mission- 
 ary calling themselves, they find that they 
 enjoy in their work almost incalculable ad- 
 vantage over those, no matter how able and 
 earnest, who come upon the field for the first 
 time as grown men or women. 
 
 But Saul did not remain always in Tarsus. 
 When he had mastered the trade of tent- 
 making — and we may ask whether he could 
 so well have supported himself in Corinth v 
 or Ephesus had he been a fisherman — he 
 was sent to Jerusalem, to receive his Jewish 
 education under the most noted rabbi of the 
 time. Here he made so great a name for 
 ability, piety, and zeal, that he became a 
 member of the Sanhedrin, and, when the 
 Christians began to make headway, was hon- 
 ored with a special commission to put down 
 this heresy. How this Pharisee became a 
 Christian ; how this persecutor became a 
 preacher and an apostle ; how this brilliant 
 young rabbi was led to use the training he 
 had received from Gamaliel in proving that 
 Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ of prophecy ; 
 how this traveled Jew from Tarsus came to 
 be able to say that from Jerusalem round 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 about to Illyricum he had fully preached the 
 gospel of God; how this Cilician tent-maker 
 found it possible to live a year and a half in 
 Corinth and three years in Ephesus, and at 
 the same time make the gospel he preached 
 without cost to those that heard, thus put- 
 ting himself in striking and favorable con- 
 trast to the self-seeking Judaizing teachers 
 who opposed him ; how this favorite pupil 
 of a great teacher was able to gather about 
 him a band of devoted disciples, whom he 
 trained to take up and carry on his work ; 
 how this Roman citizen saved himself from 
 being scourged unlawfully by Claudius Lysias, 
 and secured a change of venue from Porcius 
 Festus to the emperor himself ; how this son 
 of cultured Tarsus was able to dispute with 
 Stoic and Epicurean philosophers at Athens, 
 and to clinch his arguments with a line from 
 the hymn of Clean thes the Stoic — all this is 
 familiar, and in all this is to be seen the 
 special training of Paul as a missionary. 
 
 And not only did God train Paul for this 
 work, but He gave him unmistakable evi- 
 dences of His providential control over both 
 him and his work. As it was Jesus Himself 
 who appeared to Paul in the way, and laid 
 
 loo 
 
The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 on him the Great Commission, so it was the 
 Holy Ghost who, in some mysterious bnt in- 
 dubitable way, said to the church at An- 
 tioch, " Separate me Barnabas and Saul for 
 the work to which I have called them " 
 (Acts xiii. 2). It was the Lord Himself who, 
 when the apostle went up to Jerusalem for 
 the first time after his conversion, said to 
 him, " Depart — this is not your sphere of 
 labor — I will send thee far hence unto the 
 Gentiles " (xxii. 17-21) ; who by His Spirit 
 hedged up the way when Paul would have 
 entered Bithynia, and forbade him to tarry 
 in Asia, but led him down to Troas, to find 
 the explanation of this mysterious guidance 
 in the vision that summoned him to carry 
 the gospel into Europe (xvi. 6-10) ; who, in 
 Corinth, when the Jews opposed themselves 
 and blasphemed, addressed him in a vision, 
 11 Be not afraid, but speak, and hold not thy 
 peace : for I am with thee, and no man shall 
 set on thee to hurt thee : for I have much 
 people in this city " (xviii. 9, 10) ; whose 
 angel stood by him on the foundering ship, 
 to assure him that as he had testified for 
 Him in Jerusalem, so should he do also at 
 Rome (xxvii. 23, 24) ; who, when all others 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 had forsaken him, as he made his defense be- 
 fore Caesar, stood by him and strength- 
 ened him, and delivered him out of the 
 mouth of the lion (2 Tim. iv. 16, 17). 
 
 Such was the problem of missions in the 
 apostolic age. A world given over to Pagan- 
 ism, and unspeakably corrupt in its morals ; 
 a world in which false philosophies, Roman 
 political policy, Jewish rancor, the power of 
 long-established religious and social customs, 
 and the self-interest of all those who made 
 gain, whether of money or of influence, out 
 of heathenism, stood ready to make com- 
 mon cause against the gospel ; and yet a 
 world wonderfully made ready, physically, 
 politically, intellectually, religiously, for the 
 introduction of a new faith : a church feeble, 
 despised, divided within itself on questions 
 vital to missionary success, and always con- 
 taining an element hostile to missionary 
 effort; and yet a church prepared by the 
 hand of God, wonderfully led to true con- 
 ceptions of missionary duty, furnished with 
 a leader who was as obviously prepared for 
 the place he was to fill as was Moses for the 
 leadership of the people at the Exodus, or 
 David to sit upon the throne of Israel, and 
 
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The Problem of Apostolic Missions 
 
 — what was more than all — a church to 
 which was being manifestly fulfilled the 
 promise that was spoken in the same breath 
 with the bidding to make disciples of all the 
 nations, "Lo, I am with you alway, even 
 unto the end of the world." 
 
 103 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF MODERN MISSIONS 
 
 When we transfer ourselves in thought 
 from apostolic to modern times, and ask 
 what is the problem of missions, it seems at 
 first sight that all the conditions have 
 changed. For one thing, the world is vastly 
 larger. Its map has been redrawn. In place 
 of the orbis ter varum of the ancients we have 
 a mighty globe, one-half of which was all un- 
 known in the days of Paul. Nor is the 
 world any longer under the control of one 
 political power. Christendom and heathen- 
 dom alike are divided into many nations, 
 each with its strongly marked nationality and 
 well-compacted political structure. And 
 what is still more strikingly in contrast to 
 the condition of things in the first century, 
 the civilization, the culture, the political sa- 
 gacity, the military strength, is now arrayed, 
 not on the side of heathenism, but on that of 
 Christianity. 
 
 And as the modern world seems utterly 
 
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The Problem of Modern Missions 
 
 different from the ancient, so the modern 
 church presents an entirely different aspect. 
 The church is now the dominant power in 
 the civilized world; numbers, learning, 
 wealth, political influence, all are hers. It 
 would seem, therefore, that there could be no 
 real analogy between the apostolic and the 
 modern problems of missions. And yet 
 there is such an analogy, and it is not of a 
 superficial sort. The opposition which, a 
 century ago, was offered by heathenism to the 
 gospel was of the same sort, and sprang 
 from the same sources, as that which was en- 
 countered by the primitive Christians. Great 
 as the church of the eighteenth century was 
 in numbers and power, she had for the most 
 part lost the missionary impulse, and it had 
 to be renewed within her by a providential 
 and spiritual discipline very like that which 
 we have traced in the Acts of the Apostles. 
 For modern missions, as well as for apostolic, 
 God brought in a " fullness of the times,'* 
 and when once the work had been entered 
 upon there were given evidences as convinc- 
 ing, almost as striking, as those given to 
 Peter and Paul, that they who obey the com- 
 mand, " Go, disciple the nations," have also 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 the fulfillment of the promise, " Lo, I am 
 with you alway." 
 
 Glance first at the difficulties in the way 
 of modern missions. There is no need to 
 draw in detail on these pages the dark pic- 
 ture of present-age heathenism. In its great 
 outlines, in many of its minutiae, it is more 
 or less familiar to us all. Its false faiths, 
 Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Mo- 
 hammedanism, Shamanism, Fetichism, in 
 their protean shapes ; the false philosophies 
 with which these are inseparably intertwined ; 
 the multitude of its gods ; its idolatries ; its 
 hold upon the intellectual, social, political 
 life of the peoples ; its shameless untruth 
 and dishonesty ; its foul impurities ; its hor- 
 rid cruelties, many of them practiced under 
 the sanctions of religion ; its hopeless miser- 
 ies ; its pride ; its entire absorption in the 
 present and the seen — the story of all this, 
 in whole or in part, has been told often. 
 The point of present interest is that the ob- 
 stacles to the entrance and progress of the 
 kingdom of Christ presented by this heath- 
 enism of to-day are substantially the same as 
 those which the heathenism of the Roman 
 empire offered to the efforts of the apostles. 
 
 106 
 
The Problem of Modern Missions 
 
 There is the same preoccupation of the soil 
 against the truth. The minds and hearts of 
 the heathen are not tabulse rasse for the re- 
 ception of the gospel. Thought, feeling, 
 belief, habit, character, are already shaped by 
 the power of false religion. And these re- 
 ligions of the heathen world have held un- 
 broken sway for centuries. They have influ- 
 enced scores of successive generations. The 
 influences of heredity and environment have 
 wrought along the lines of religion until it 
 is scarcely too much to say that a Chinaman 
 is a Confucianist, or a Hindu an idolater, not 
 merely by practice, but by nature. The one 
 worships at the ancestral tablet, the other 
 falls before the image of Vishnu or Kali, not 
 simply from conviction or training, but as it 
 were by a law of his being. 
 
 And while heathenism is thus interwoven 
 with the very fibre of the man, it is also 
 making constant appeal to him from without. 
 Its outward signs — its temples and shrines, 
 its charms, its priests, its pageants, its cere- 
 monies — are ever before his eyes. Did he 
 wish to do so, he could never put himself 
 beyond the sound of its prayers, its incanta- 
 tions, its tinkling bells, its booming gongs, 
 
 107 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 the piercing cries of its victims. Every rela- 
 tion he sustains in life — as a son, a brother, a 
 husband, a father — is under its spell. Every 
 event of his history — his birth, the giving of 
 the name he bears, the first cutting of his 
 hair, his education, his passage from boyhood 
 to manhood, his betrothal, his marriage, the 
 beginnings of his journeys, the sowing of his 
 seed, the harvesting of his crops, his social 
 pleasures, his business undertakings, his dis- 
 asters, his successes, his domestic joys and 
 sorrows, his sicknesses, his bereavements — is 
 associated with some recognition of the faith 
 he acknowledges. 
 
 But heathenism to-day, like heathenism of 
 old, has not only its fortress, deep-founded, 
 high-walled, moat-encompassed ; it has also 
 its army of defenders. It has not merely 
 philosophies, but philosophers ; not merely 
 religions, but religionists. The opposition 
 which John Eliot encountered from Indian 
 powwows, which led him on one occasion to 
 say in reply to their threats, " I am about the 
 work of the great God, and my God is with 
 me, so that I neither fear you nor all the 
 sachems in the country," is but a type of 
 that which the priests and sacred men of 
 
 108 
 
The Problem of Modern Missions 
 
 heathenism have ever} T where and always of- 
 fered to the missionary. Thus, for example, 
 Duff wrote from India of the tumult of op- 
 position raised by the first conversions among 
 the Brahmans : " The whole strength of 
 Hinduism in the metropolis of India has been 
 mustered against Christianity and its mis- 
 sionaries. Rajas and Zemindars, Baboos and 
 Brahmans have all combined, counseled, and 
 plotted together. An eyewitness at one of 
 the great Sabbath meetings, at which not less 
 than two thousand were present, assured me 
 that several hundreds consisted of Brahmans, 
 who, at times, literally wept and sobbed, and 
 audibly cried out, saying, 'that the religion 
 of Brahma was threatened with destruction, 
 and that unless energetic measures were 
 taken, their vocation would soon be at an 
 end.' " (Smith's Life of Alexander Duff^ ii, 
 62). Who can fail to note the analogy with 
 the scene in the theatre at Ephesus, and 
 the exact coincidence of the double solici- 
 tude of the Brahmans with that expressed by 
 Demetrius, "And not only is there danger 
 that this our trade come into disrepute, but 
 also that the temple of the great goddess 
 Diana be made of no account, and that she 
 
 109 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 should even be deposed from her magnifi- 
 cence, whom all Asia and the world worship- 
 ped " (Acts xix. 28fT.) ? And as if to make 
 the parallel complete, we read further (Life 
 of Duff, ii, 68ff.) that, as Paul's friends 
 among the asiarchs begged him not to adven- 
 ture himself into the theatre, so a young 
 civilian, Mr. Seton-Karr, wrote to Dr. Duff 
 informing him that there was a conspiracy- 
 am ong the wealthy Baboos to hire ruffians to 
 maltreat him, and begging him not to go out 
 at night, nor, when he did go out, to return 
 by the same way. 
 
 Let us recall too, how, more recently, the 
 sacred men of Tanna plotted to secure the 
 assassination of Dr. John G. Paton, and be- 
 ing thwarted in this, proposed to kill him by 
 Nahak, or sorcery ; how, when Mackay of 
 Uganda read the Bible to King Mtesa and 
 his court, Arab moollahs, Koran in hand, were 
 present to withstand him, as Elymas with- 
 stood Paul in the court of Sergius Paulus ; 
 how, in Japan, the forces of Buddhism have 
 been rallied to oppose the progress of Chris- 
 tianity ; how, in India, the Brahmo Somaj 
 and the Arya Somaj have refurbished Hin- 
 duism, purged it of some of its absurdities 
 
 110 
 
The Problem of Modern Missions 
 
 and excesses, adopted the very methods of 
 the missionaries, issuing tracts, writing 
 hymns, employing itinerating agents, even 
 holding prayer meetings : and it will be evi- 
 dent that to-day, no less than in the first 
 century, heathen religionists have been quick 
 to scent the danger with which the new faith 
 threatens the old, and to stir themselves to 
 maintain their hold upon their votaries. 
 
 Then there has been mighty resistance to 
 modern missions on secular and commercial 
 grounds. This has often been offered by 
 heathen, quite as often as by nominal Chris- 
 tians who have desired to make gain of them; 
 but whether offered by the one or the other, 
 the motive is the same as that of the owners 
 of the demoniac girl of Philippi, and De- 
 metrius and his fellow-craftsmen at Ephesus 
 —they see that "the hope of their gains is 
 gone," that "their craft is in danger, whereby 
 they get their wealth." It was on this princi- 
 ple that the East India Company shut Carey 
 out of Calcutta and drove Judson to Burmah, 
 and, in spite of pressure of growing public 
 sentiment in England and repeated changes 
 in its charter, maintained a hostile attitude 
 toward missions until the close of its history. 
 
 ill 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 On like grounds, the officers of the Danish 
 East India Company at Tranquebar derided 
 the labors of Ziegenbalg, and at last threw 
 him into prison, where he remained four 
 months "in confinement so close that no 
 outsider could gain access to him," and "dur- 
 ing the first month was denied even the use 
 of pen and ink." (Thompson, Protestant 
 Mission, p. 165.) In like manner, English 
 Baptist missionaries to the West Indies were, 
 in 1831, arrested and tried on the charge of 
 inciting the slaves to insurrection. So David 
 Livingstone found his plans thwarted and his 
 way blocked, both on the east coast of Africa 
 and on the west, by the Portuguese, who saw 
 that he was determined to break up their 
 lucrative traffic in slaves. So still, the Arab 
 slave-traders and the German and American 
 rum-traders are the virulent enemies of mis- 
 sions to the Dark Continent. 
 
 And not only commercial interest, but gov- 
 ernment policy has raised opposition to the 
 missionary. It is not for the true religion 
 only that kings have been nursing fathers and 
 queens nursing mothers. What David proph- 
 esied in the second Psalm has been often ful- 
 filled in the history of modern missions. It 
 
 112 
 
The Problem of Modern Missions 
 
 was by imperial decree that China was so 
 long kept closed to the entrance of the gos- 
 pel, and that sentence of death was pro- 
 claimed against any follower of Jesus who 
 should venture to set foot in Japan. It was 
 a heathen queen who summoned and, for 
 twenty-five years, directed, with almost Sa- 
 tanic energy, all the forces of heathenism for 
 the extirpation of the Christian church in 
 Madagascar. It is the espousal of the Mo- 
 hammedan cause by the Turkish government 
 that, from the day that Pliny Fisk and Levi 
 Parsons began their work until now, has 
 been the chief obstacle to the progress of the 
 gospel in that empire ; and recent terrible 
 events have only made it evident with what 
 special knowledge Dr. James S. Dennis was 
 speaking when, four years ago, he said, " Tho 
 policy of the Turkish government has been 
 increasingly inimical and aggressive in its at- 
 tacks upon mission work. It has endeavored 
 to close schools, to suppress literature, to 
 deal a staggering blow to the rising ascend- 
 ency of the awakening Christian element of 
 
 the empire The story of Moslem and 
 
 Christian has a pathetic past, and it has also 
 its stirring present. An acute and startling 
 
 113 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 phase of this conflict is hastening on. The 
 Christian has the providence of God, the 
 power of education, the inspiration of a re- 
 ligious reformation, the impulse and stir of 
 modern thought, the public sentiment of the 
 age, and the sympathies of Christendom on 
 his side. He has a haughty and long-domi- 
 nant foe to deal with, and the immemorial 
 ascendency of the Moslem will never yield 
 without a desperate struggle.'* (Foreign 
 Missions After a Century, p. 122.) 
 
 Nor should we forget, in forming our con- 
 ception of the modern problem of missions, 
 that, in face of such difficulties, the Protes- 
 tant church, from Luther to Carey, was not 
 ready for missionary effort. The church as 
 a whole was great and powerful, but that 
 portion of it which, at first, had any thought 
 of missionary duty or privilege was feeble 
 and despised. We may explain the fact as 
 we will, but we cannot deny it, that neither 
 Luther nor Calvin had any thought of con- 
 verting the heathen. Perhaps it was be- 
 cause they and their associates were too 
 deeply involved in the controversies that 
 had arisen within the church itself and the 
 momentous questions of doctrine and policy 
 
 114 
 
The Problem of Modern Missions 
 
 that were pressing for adjustment. It has 
 been suggested also that, so far as Luther 
 is concerned, a mistaken eschatology, which 
 led him to look for the speedy end of the 
 world, may have operated to prevent him 
 from thinking of missions. Unquestionably 
 the fact that, at that time, exploration and 
 commerce were in the hands of Romish 
 nations, Portugal and Spain particularly, 
 and that therefore the stimulus to missions 
 which actual contact with heathen peoples 
 gives, was denied to Protestantism, had much 
 to do with this apathy. But the fact of this 
 apathy remains. The sixteenth century 
 passed away, and except the abortive effort 
 of Admiral de Coligny to plant a Christian 
 colony in Brazil, and the equally unfruitful 
 attempt of Gustavus Vasa for the enlighten- 
 ment of the Laplanders, the Protestant 
 Church did nothing in obedience to the 
 Great Command. 
 
 But God was in His church. In 1632 
 Peter Heyling of Lubeck was stirred up to 
 go forth to Abyssinia. In 166-i Ernest Von 
 Welz published his call for the formation of 
 " a special society by which, with divine help, 
 our evangelical religion may be diffused. " 
 
 115 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 The missionary character of this publication 
 may be seen from the three questions which 
 in it Von Welz proposed to the German 
 church. " Is it right for us Christians to 
 monopolize the gospel? Is it right that 
 when we have so many students of theology 
 among us we do not urge them to labor in 
 other parts of the vineyard ? Is it right that 
 we spend so much money on luxuries and 
 have no thought of spending any for the 
 diffusion of the gospel ? " (Thompson's 
 Protestant Missions, p. 21.) But Von Welz 
 was only vox clamantis in deserto. It was 
 not until the Puritans were driven to New 
 England, and contact with the Indians awoke 
 missionary impulses in the hearts of John 
 Eliot and the Mayhews, and the story of 
 their labors and successes was sent back, 
 that the church in the older lands showed 
 any effective missionary zeal. Eliot for many 
 years received a salary, first of <£20, after- 
 ward of <£50, from the Society for the Prop- 
 agation of the Gospel, which was created by 
 Cromwell and the Long Parliament. 
 
 And as, in apostolic times, God not only 
 made use of persecution to scatter the dis- 
 ciples over unevangelized regions, but also 
 
 116 
 
The Problem of Modern Missions 
 
 subsidized to the spread of the gospel the 
 commerce which the needs of Rome had cre- 
 ated, so, in the seventeenth century, He made 
 the commercial and colonizing enterprises of 
 the day minister to the cause of missions. 
 Alongside the English efforts on behalf of 
 the Indians in America must be placed 
 Dutch missions in the East. The Dutch 
 East India Company was chartered in 1594. 
 In 1622 Anthony Walaeus, professor in the 
 University of Leyden, at the request of the 
 directors of the company, drew up the plan 
 of a missionary training-school which should 
 furnish chaplains and missionaries. Walseus 
 himself became principal of the new institu- 
 tion, which, however, lasted but ten years 
 and graduated only twelve alumni. In 1627 
 Grotius wrote his celebrated work, Be Vert- 
 tate Religionis Christianse, to serve as a hand- 
 book for the Dutch missionaries in their con- 
 troversies with the heathen. Under the fos- 
 tering care of the company, missionary oper- 
 ations were carried on, with much outward 
 success, but by lamentably mistaken methods, 
 and therefore with small permanent result, 
 in Formosa, southern India, Ceylon, the Mo- 
 luccas, and other parts of the East. 
 
 117 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 The eighteenth century in England and 
 Germany was a time of widespread spiritual 
 declension. Deism and rationalism were ex- 
 erting their poisonous influence. Yet the 
 divine hand was leading the church forward 
 along the path of missions. Through the 
 Pietists and Moravians on the Continent, 
 and by means of the Wesleyan revival in 
 England, God was fostering the mission spirit 
 and raising up men for the work. When, in 
 1705, Liitke, court chaplain of Frederick IV 
 of Denmark, was bidden by his royal master 
 to look out missionaries for the Danish colony 
 in Tranquebar, former association of Liitke 
 with Spener in Berlin led him to apply to 
 the latter's successor in the leadership of the 
 Pietist movement, Fran eke of Halle. It was 
 at the very time when Bartholomew Ziegen- 
 balg, son of a pious mother, had been im- 
 pelled by Francke's instructions to reflect 
 deeply on the question of his personal duty 
 to go forth to the heathen. The call of 
 Liitke for missionaries came to his awakened 
 heart as did the knock of the messengers of 
 Cornelius to the soul of Peter meditating on 
 the vision of the great sheet. It was the 
 
 voice of God, and Ziegenbalg and his friend 
 
 118 
 
The Problem of Modern Missions 
 
 Pliitschau at once offered themselves for the 
 new enterprise. And as at first, so after- 
 ward ; the Tranquebar mission, while carried 
 on under the auspices of the Danish king 
 and supported mainly by contributions from 
 Denmark, drew its missionaries chiefly from 
 the Pietist seminary at Halle, and is there- 
 fore known as the Danish-Halle mission. 
 
 Pietism was destined also to render an- 
 other memorable contribution to the growth 
 of missionary movement within the Protes- 
 tant church. Count Zinzendorf, trained in 
 childhood by his grandmother and his aunt, 
 the former a friend of Spener, and both ardent 
 Pietists; receiving the beginnings of his edu- 
 tion at Francke's school in Halle — Count 
 Zinzendorf, as the head of the community at 
 Herrnhut, and later bishop of the revived 
 Church of the United Brethren, inaugurated 
 the first purely missionary enterprise to be 
 undertaken by a Protestant church as such. 
 In 1722 the Bohemian refugees settled at 
 Herrnhut. In 1731 Zinzendorf visited Co- 
 penhagen, and there saw and heard two 
 Eskimo youths whom Hans Egede had sent 
 home from Greenland. There he saw also 
 Anthony, a Negro from the West Indies, who 
 
 119 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 belonged to the household of a Swedish 
 nobleman. This black man informed some 
 of the brethren from Herrnhut who had ac- 
 companied Zinzendorf, and among them 
 David Nitschmann, that while yet in the 
 West Indies he had earnestly desired to 
 know the way of salvation. In Copenhagen 
 he had found the knowledge which he longed 
 for, and had been baptized, and now he poured 
 out to these new-found friends his anxious 
 desire that God would send some one to in- 
 struct his countrymen, the Negro slaves of 
 St. Thomas, and particularly his own sister, 
 who had been like himself a seeker after 
 God. Zinzendorf was deeply impressed, and 
 the missionary impulses he had received at 
 Halle were greatly quickened. On his return 
 to Herrnhut he rehearsed the Negro's story 
 to the assembled brethren, and shortly after, 
 by the Count's invitation, Anthony himself 
 came to Herrnhut and told his tale. This 
 was on July 29, 1731. A year later — August 
 21, 1732 — David Nitschmann and Leonard 
 Dober set out from Herrnhut for St. Thomas. 
 So in God's providence the Eskimo and the 
 Negro became the men of Macedon to call 
 the Moravian Church to its grand work of 
 
 120 
 
The Problem of Modern Missions 
 
 missions. Dober and Nitschmann were the 
 advance-guard of that noble army which, 
 from the same centre, was to go out to Green- 
 land and Labrador and Alaska, to many 
 tribes of our own Indians, to Central and 
 South America, and to several districts of 
 the Dark Continent. By the Moravians also, 
 by Christian David especially, John Wesley 
 was deeply influenced, and out of the Meth- 
 odist revival, through John Newton and 
 Thomas Scott, came at last William Carey, 
 Andrew Fuller, John Ryland, and the dawn 
 of " the century of missions." 
 
 And now we must use the space left to us 
 to see how the world no less truly than the 
 church was made ready for missions. The 
 story is as old as Carey ; we may do well to 
 let him tell it, prefacing only that it was 
 Captain Cook's journals of his voyages to 
 the South Seas, published in 1777, that first 
 drew Carey's attention to the heathen world, 
 and led him at a later time to select Tahiti 
 as the intended scene of his missionary 
 efforts. Having in his Inquiry proved that 
 the Great Commission was still binding, and 
 having surveyed the state of the heathen 
 world, Carey addresses himself to what he 
 
 121 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 knew would seem to many the insuperable 
 difficulties in the way of carrying the gospel 
 to the heathen. "And first," he says, "as 
 to their distance from us, whatever objections 
 might have been made on that ground before 
 the invention of the mariner's compass, noth- 
 ing can be alleged for it with any color of 
 plausibility in the present age. Men can 
 now sail with as much certainty through the 
 great South Sea as they can through the Med- 
 iterranean or any lesser sea. Yea, and Prov- 
 idence seems in a manner to invite us to the 
 trial, for there are, to our knowledge, trading 
 companies whose commerce lies in many 
 places where these barbarians dwell. At 
 one time or other ships are sent to visit places 
 of more recent discovery, and to explore 
 parts the most unknown ; and every fresh 
 account of their ignorance or cruelty should 
 call forth our pity and excite us to concur 
 with Providence in seeking their eternal 
 good. Scripture likewise seems to point out 
 this method. * Surely the isles shall wait for 
 me ; the ships of Tarshish first, to bring my 
 sons from far, their silver and their gold with 
 them, unto the name of the Lord thy God ' 
 (Isa. lx. 9). This seems to imply that in the 
 
 122 
 
The Problem of Modern Missions 
 
 time of the glorious increase of the church, 
 in the latter days (of which the whole chapter 
 is undoubtedly a prophecy), commerce shall 
 subserve the spread of the gospel. The 
 ships of Tarshish were trading vessels, which 
 made voyages for traffic to various parts; 
 thus much therefore must be meant by it, 
 that navigation, especially that which is com- 
 mercial, shall be one great means of carrying 
 on the work of God." (Smith's Life of 
 William Carey, p. 35). The mariner's com- 
 pass, geographical discoveries, the great trad- 
 ing companies and colonizing movements of 
 his time — these seemed to William Carey to 
 invite the church to the enterprise upon 
 which his heart was set. 
 
 Thinking so, he was only thinking God's 
 thoughts after Him. Nothing can now be 
 more certain than that in just such ways 
 God was making it not only possible, but 
 as it were inevitable, that the Protestant 
 church should undertake the evangelization 
 of the world. Attention has already been 
 directed to the fact that one great reason 
 why the Reformation did not immediately 
 issue in Protestant missions was that, at that 
 time, exploration, commerce, the mastery of 
 
 123 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 the seas, belonged to Catholic Portugal and 
 Spain. But these nations none the less had 
 their function to perform in preparing the 
 way for Protestant missions. It was theirs 
 to discover and map out the field. During 
 the half century that preceded and the half 
 century that followed 1517, Portugal occu- 
 pied a position of influence in the affairs of 
 Europe and the world such as she had never 
 held before, nor was to hold again. A bril- 
 liant company of navigators was carrying 
 her banner to every part of the world. In 
 1486 Bartholomew Diaz doubled the Cape of 
 Good Hope. In 1497 Vasco Da Gama dis- 
 covered that by this same cape lay the way 
 to India. In 1505 the first Portuguese vice- 
 roy was sent to India. In 1500 Cabral dis- 
 covered and took possession of Brazil. The 
 sixteenth century was also the period of 
 greatest power and glory for Spain, the most 
 intensely Catholic of the nations of Europe. 
 Following the great achievement of Colum- 
 bus, Spain made ever-increasing conquests in 
 the New World, until she numbered Mexico, 
 Central America, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, 
 Cuba, and San Domingo among her depend- 
 encies. And as this was the era of the 
 
 124 
 
The Problem of Modern Missions 
 
 dominance of Portugal and Spain, so it was 
 the era of Roman Catholic missions. The 
 Society of Jesus was founded in 1534 ; in 
 1542 Francis Xavier landed at Goa in India ; 
 in 1552 he died on an island off the coast of 
 China. 
 
 But with the close of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury the hegemony of the seas began to pass 
 from Catholic to Protestant hands. During 
 the reign of Elizabeth the great English 
 navigators — Frobisher, Drake, Hawkins — 
 made their appearance. In 1576 Frobisher 
 sailed in search of a northwest passage to 
 India. Three years later Drake circumnavi- 
 gated the globe. In the same year Thomas 
 Stevens visited Goa, and sent home to Eng- 
 land a narrative of his travels which at- 
 tracted wide attention. In 1588 the destruc- 
 tion of the Armada gave token that England 
 was henceforth to supersede Spain as the 
 mistress of the seas. And along with 
 England another Protestant country, the 
 Netherlands, came rapidly forward as a 
 commercial and naval power. As a part of 
 Spain the Dutch people had enjoyed their 
 full share of the wealth which flowed in 
 from the Spanish possessions in India and 
 
 125 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 America. When the attempt of Philip II. 
 to force the Catholic faith upon them led 
 them to assert their independence, they 
 revenged themselves by ousting Spanish and 
 Portuguese traders in the East and West 
 Indies. The English East India Company 
 had been chartered in the year 1600. The 
 Dutch East India Company was organized in 
 1602. In 1616, the Danes, another Protestant 
 people, acquired possessions in Tranquebar 
 and Serampore, the former of which places 
 was to become the field of the Danish-Halle 
 mission, and the latter to furnish to William 
 Carey, denied by his own countrymen 
 entrance to Calcutta, a foothold for the 
 prosecution of his great work. And as in 
 the East, so in the West. Jamestown, 1608; 
 Plymouth, 1620 ; New Amsterdam, 1614 ; 
 Surinam, 1622 — these are the proofs that, in 
 the New World, also Protestant England and 
 Protestant Holland were beginning to con- 
 test supremacy with Catholic Portugal and 
 most Catholic Spain. And out of the con- 
 tact with heathenism which was the result of 
 these commercial and colonizing enterprises 
 on the part of Protestant peoples arose, as 
 
 we have seen, the earliest Protestant mis- 
 
 126 
 
The Problem of Modern Missions 
 
 sions. The mariner's compass, geographical 
 discovery, the great trading companies and 
 colonizing movements of his time — these, as 
 has already been remarked, seemed to 
 William Carey to be the great providential 
 indications that the hour for missions to the 
 heathen had struck. And now it is plain 
 that he was right. For if we should add to 
 the mariner's compass that great invention 
 of which he and his associates at Serampore 
 were to make such mighty use, the printing- 
 press, and that other which under the hands 
 of James Watt the Englishman and Robert 
 Fulton the American was to make the earth 
 so small, we should have from the pen of the 
 father of nineteenth-century missions a brief 
 but comprehensive statement of that which, 
 so far, at least, as the physical difficulties in 
 the way of missions are concerned, made the 
 latter day " fullness of the times." 
 
 127 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE METHODS OF APOSTOLIC MISSIONS 
 
 By the term " missionary methods," we of 
 the present day are apt to mean simply the 
 modes of operation adopted by missionaries 
 on the field. We speak of preaching as a 
 missionary method, or of printing and dis- 
 tributing the Scriptures as a missionary 
 method ; but we would not, perhaps, think 
 of including under that term the means em- 
 ployed at home for raising the funds needed 
 to send out missionaries, or the principles 
 upon which a mission board should decide 
 whether or not it should enter a new field. 
 Yet the latter are missionary methods no less 
 than the former, and in speaking of apostolic 
 missions we must use the term " methods" 
 in this more comprehensive sense. For in 
 the apostolic church there was not, and in 
 the nature of the case there could not be, 
 that sharp distinction between the church and 
 its missionaries which obtains to-day. As was 
 suggested in an earlier chapter, the whole 
 membership of the Pentecostal church was 
 
 128 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 engaged in the proclamation of the gospel. 
 Nor was there any distinction of home field 
 from foreign field. Every place, even Jeru- 
 salem, was at first foreign field to the disci- 
 ples of Jesus. It is well, perhaps, that we 
 are compelled to remind ourselves that in 
 the beginning the whole work of missions, 
 the devising and use of means for meeting 
 all the varied necessities of the work, lay 
 upon the whole church. We are apt to think 
 that the work of missions belongs chiefly to 
 missionaries specifically so called, and em- 
 braces little beyond what such missionaries 
 can accomplish. No more valuable fruit 
 could be gathered from a fresh study of ap- 
 ostolic missions than a renewal of the con- 
 viction that missions is the work, not of a 
 part of the church, but of the church, and 
 that for the accomplishment of the whole 
 work of missions no agency short of the 
 whole church is sufficient. 
 
 Using the term missionary methods in the 
 larger sense which has been suggested, the 
 first topic to which we invite attention is the 
 geographical plan of apostolic missions. Our 
 Lord's command was to make disciples of all 
 the nations, to preach the gospel to the 
 
 129 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 whole creation. A work so vast could never 
 be accomplished, or even rightly begun, by- 
 haphazard methods. Some sort of plan was 
 essential to success. And the Saviour sup- 
 plied some directions as to the geographical 
 plan to be followed. He commanded that 
 " repentance and remission of sins should be 
 preached in his name among all nations, be- 
 ginning at Jerusalem " (Luke xxiv. 47), and 
 that the disciples should be " witnesses to 
 him in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and 
 Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the 
 earth " (Acts i. 8). 
 
 The first specification, then, in the divinely 
 ordered geographical plan of missions was that 
 the apostles should begin at Jerusalem. If 
 we seek reasons for this injunction, a main 
 one no doubt is that in this way the vital re- 
 lation between Christianity and Judaism 
 would be emphasized. But aside from this, 
 the disciples were bidden to tarry at Jerusa- 
 lem, and begin their work there because oth- 
 erwise they might have separated to their 
 homes before the day of Pentecost, and thus 
 have missed the opportunity for the wide 
 diffusion of the gospel which the presence at 
 the feast of so many foreign Jews afforded. 
 
 130 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Besides bidding the apostles to begin at 
 Jerusalem, the Lord's command indicates 
 "all Judaea and Samaria" as the next sphere 
 of their missionary labors, and after that 
 " the uttermost parts of the earth," that is 
 to say, all regions, even the most remote. 
 And the early chapters of the Acts of the 
 Apostles inform us that this was the actual 
 order in which the extension of the church 
 took place. This result was brought about, 
 not so much by deliberate design on the part 
 of the apostles, as by God's providence, which 
 used the persecution which began with the 
 stoning of Stephen to scatter the believers 
 abroad over the very regions which the Sa- 
 viour had indicated (Acts viii. 1). 
 
 Among the laborers thus thrust forth into 
 the harvest by the Lord of the harvest Him- 
 self was Philip, who entered the city of Sa- 
 maria and taught, and with such success that 
 a large body of converts was quickly gained. 
 When report of this fact was brought to the 
 apostles, who, in spite of persecution, had re- 
 mained at Jerusalem — no doubt for mutual 
 consultation, and that a visible unity of the 
 church might thus be maintained — they sent 
 forth Peter and John to take up and com- 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 plete the work which Philip had begun. 
 And they, on their return journey to Jerusa- 
 lem, preached the gospel in many villages of 
 the Samaritans (viii. 1-25). 
 
 Meanwhile God had appointed Philip to a 
 new field of labor. When he had met and 
 instructed and baptized the eunuch of Queen 
 Candace, we find him next at Azotus, in 
 the Mediterranean coast-plain, and, passing 
 thence northward, he preaches the gospel to 
 all the cities till he comes to Cassarea (viii. 
 40). Thus, in spite of persecution, even by 
 means of it, there comes to be what is called 
 (ix. 31) " the church throughout all Judaea 
 and Galilee and Samaria." 
 
 Then follows notice of a tour of Peter 
 through these same regions, visiting, among 
 other places, Lydda, where he healed ^Eneas, 
 and Joppa, where he raised Dorcas to life, 
 and by the aid of the impression made by 
 these miracles gained many converts (ix. 
 32-43). From Joppa he was summoned to 
 make his memorable journey to Caesarea, in 
 order that for the first time Gentiles, in the 
 person of Cornelius and his household, should 
 be admitted directly to the church without 
 submitting to circumcision. This new de- 
 
 132 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 velopment of the work, also, came under the 
 cognizance of the church at Jerusalem. 
 When Peter returned, he was sharply at- 
 tacked for having entered into fellowship 
 with Gentiles. But he was able to give so 
 clear an account of divine leading in the 
 whole matter that criticism was silenced, nay, 
 even gave place to rejoicing because to the 
 Gentiles also God had granted repentance 
 unto life (x. 1-xi. 18). 
 
 We see, then, the way in which the 
 apostles carried out the first part of their 
 Master's geographical plan of missions. 
 They began at Jerusalem. From Jerusalem 
 as a centre, they went forth, personally or 
 through the medium of the disciples, to all 
 Judaea and Samaria ; to Jerusalem report was 
 made of the gathering of converts, first from 
 among the Jews, and then from among the 
 Gentiles; from Jerusalem the apostles di- 
 rected, confirmed, and extended the work 
 thus begun. Let us now inquire how attack 
 was made upon the remaining region indi- 
 cated in the Lord's command, the uttermost 
 parts of the earth. 
 
 The initiative in this great task was taken 
 by some of those who were scattered abroad 
 
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 by the same persecution that sent Philip to 
 Samaria. These, we are told, passed beyond 
 the limits of the Holy Land to Phoenicia, 
 Cyprus, and Antioch. Though at first they 
 preached to Jews only, yet in Antioch cer- 
 tain of them, themselves men of Cyprus and 
 Cyrene, broke over the boundaries of Jewish 
 exclusiveness, and spoke to the Greeks also 
 the word of the Lord. The result was that 
 a great multitude believed. Tidings of this, 
 also, came to Jerusalem, and the church there 
 sent Barnabas to Antioch to direct the work. 
 He associated with himself that Saul of 
 Tarsus for the reality of whose conversion 
 he had recently stood sponsor in Jerusalem. 
 Under their joint leadership the church in 
 Antioch grew outwardly and inwardly, until 
 even the heathen perceived that these disci- 
 ples of Jesus could no longer be identified 
 with the Jews ; therefore they coined a new 
 name for them, and called them Christians 
 (xi. 19-26). 
 
 Here, as the very structure of the Book of 
 Acts makes evident, we reach a great turn- 
 ing-point in the history of apostolic missions. 
 In Antioch the voice of the Holy Ghost was 
 heard saying, " Separate me Barnabas and 
 
 134 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Saul for the work whereunto I have called 
 them " (xiii. 2). From Antioch, sent forth 
 thus by the Holy Ghost, the two divinely 
 designated missionaries went forth to Sal- 
 amis and Paphos, to Perga and Lystra and 
 Iconium, and to the other Antioch. To the 
 Syrian capital they returned and made report 
 of all that God had accomplished by them 
 in opening a door of faith unto the Gentiles 
 (chaps, xiii, xiv). Thence they were about 
 to set forth again to visit and confirm the 
 churches previously founded, when difference 
 of opinion as to the expediency of taking 
 Mark with them led to the separation of the 
 two co-laborers. Barnabas took Mark and 
 sailed for Cyprus ; Paul, choosing Silas as 
 his companion, departed to go through Syria 
 and Cilicia. 
 
 There can be little doubt that, had Paul 
 been left to the exercise of his own discre- 
 tion, he would have confined this tour to Asia 
 Minor, and, when he had founded churches 
 in Mysia and Bithynia and Proconsular Asia, 
 would have returned once more to Antioch. 
 But the Head of the church, the great Mas- 
 ter Missionary, who had outlined the cam- 
 paign of the eleven, was also directing the 
 
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 movements of the apostle to the Gentiles. 
 By the vision at Troas Paul was led to 
 Europe, and immediately to Philippi. The 
 importance of this city is especially brought 
 to notice in the inspired record by the state- 
 ment (xvi. 12) that it was the chief city of 
 the district and a colony, that is, a colony in 
 the strict technical sense of the word, a little 
 Rome, as it were, in its political arrangements 
 and the privileges enjoyed by its citizens. 
 Here a home was provided for the apostle and 
 his company in the house of Lydia. Now if 
 we compare the statement (xvi. 18) that it 
 was "for many days" that the demoniac girl 
 bore her wild testimony to the divine mis- 
 sion of Paul and his companions with the 
 account of the conversion of the jailer (xvi. 
 27ff), conveying, as it does, so strong an im- 
 pression that it was not first on the night of 
 the earthquake that this man heard the 
 teaching of the apostle, but that the truth 
 had already been working for some time upon 
 his conscience, and that to be caught and 
 held, so to speak, as he was tottering on the 
 verge of the precipice of suicide, but fastened 
 in an instant a conviction of sin and ruin 
 which had gradually been gathering strength; 
 
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The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 and if we add the fact that in the epistle to 
 the Philippians seems to point to a somewhat 
 long intercourse between them and the 
 apostle : we shall conclude that the stay of 
 Paul in Philippi was much more extended 
 than a casual reading of Luke's narrative 
 might lead us to suppose. 
 
 Leaving Philippi, Paul goes forward to 
 Thessalonica, Beroea, Athens and finally Cor- 
 inth. And it is noteworthy that while, by the 
 outbreak of persecutions, putting their lives 
 in peril, in the two first-named cities, and the 
 unreceptive temper of the sensation-loving 
 Athenians, the missionaries had providential 
 intimation that they were not to prolong their 
 stay (xvii. 10, 14, 33), a different purpose 
 was manifested as to their sojourn in Corinth. 
 Persecution broke out here also, it is true ; 
 but the refusal of Gallio to be a judge in 
 what he contemptuously regarded as a mere 
 dispute between Jews about words and 
 names prevented it from accomplishing its 
 purpose of driving out the apostle. By a 
 vision, also, the Lord commanded Paul to re- 
 main in Corinth and to labor without fear, 
 for He " had much people in that city." In 
 obedience to this heavenly vision, Paul re- 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 mained for eighteen months, perhaps even 
 longer. He found a home for himself in the 
 household of Aquila, and for the church in 
 the house of Titus Justus. Many of the 
 Corinthians who heard his preaching believed 
 and were baptized, among others the chief 
 ruler of the synagogue and the treasurer of 
 the city (xviii. 1-17). 
 
 The term of Paul's work in Corinth was 
 set by the approach of a feast which he was 
 anxious to keep in Jerusalem, perhaps in 
 connection with the termination of a vow 
 which he is said to have taken. On his way 
 to Jerusalem he visited Ephesus, refusing to 
 tarry, but promising to return should it be 
 God's will. When the feast was past, he 
 went again to Antioch, and when he had 
 spent some time in that city, where he had 
 previously labored a whole year, he set out 
 once more, and after visiting the churches in 
 Galatia and Phrygia, he fulfilled his promise 
 to return to Ephesus (xviii. 18-23, xix. 1). 
 Here he remained for three years (xx. 31), 
 disputing first for three months in the syna- 
 gogue, and then separating the disciples and 
 reasoning daily in the school of Tyrannus; 
 and, by means of his teaching and of special 
 
 133 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 miracles which God wrought hy his hands, 
 bringing it about that " all they that dwelt 
 in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both 
 Jews and Greeks" (xix. 10). Driven from 
 Ephesus at last by the tumult aroused by 
 Demetrius and his fellow-craftsmen, Paul 
 spent three months in Greece, passed through 
 Macedonia, and went by way of Troas, Assos, 
 and Miletus to Jerusalem (chaps, xx., xxi.). 
 Enabled at last, though in a way no doubt 
 very different from what he had anticipated, 
 to carry out his long-cherished purpose to 
 see Rome and to preach the Gospel to those 
 that were in Rome also (xix. 21 ; cf. Rom. i. 
 13), he abode in the imperial city " two whole 
 years in his own hired dwelling, and received 
 all that went in unto him, preaching the 
 kingdom of God, and teaching the things 
 concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all 
 boldness, none forbidding him " (Acts xxviii. 
 30, 31). And with this statement the direct 
 account of his labors comes to a close. 
 
 But why, the reader may inquire, review 
 at such length so familiar a history ? The 
 reply is that by such a review we have made 
 plain to us the geographical plan of mis- 
 sionary operation which Paul, under the 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 guidance at once of providential indications 
 and of special revelations at critical junc- 
 tures, was led to adopt. As Jerusalem was 
 for the eleven the centre from which Pales- 
 tine was evangelized and the church there 
 organized, so Antioch, the capital of Syria, 
 Philippi, the chief city of Macedonia, Cor- 
 inth, the capital of Achaia, Ephesus, the 
 capital of Proconsular Asia, and Rome, the 
 capital of the Empire, became for Paul the 
 divinely indicated centres from which he 
 carried on his work, and from which he made 
 the word of God to sound out in every 
 place. 
 
 Our second, and indeed our main question 
 with respect to apostolic methods in missions 
 has reference to the agencies employed in 
 proclaiming the gospel and establishing the 
 church. We have seen that the apostles 
 received the great outlines, both of the aim 
 of missions, and of the geographical plan to 
 be followed, in what the Duke of Wellington 
 called their " marching orders," in the Great 
 Commission itself. Did they also receive 
 from the Lord instructions as to the agencies 
 to be employed? 
 
 As students and promoters of missions we 
 
 140 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 cannot ascribe too great importance to the 
 last command. Let us have no hesitation, 
 therefore, in bringing it once more before 
 us. " Go ye, therefore, and make disciples 
 of all the nations, baptizing them into the 
 name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
 the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe 
 all things whatsoever I have commanded 
 you : — " so Matthew. " Go ye into all the 
 world, and preach the gospel to the whole 
 creation: — " so Mark. "Repentance and 
 remission of sins shall be preached in my 
 name unto all nations Ye are wit- 
 nesses of these things: — " so Luke. Of 
 these three forms of the Saviour's parting in- 
 junction the first is the fullest, and we have 
 already expressed the conviction that it sub- 
 stantially embodies the aim of missions ; that 
 the participial clauses, "baptizing them," etc., 
 and " teaching them," etc., are explicative of 
 the direct command "make disciples," and 
 that the whole may therefore be paraphrased 
 somewhat as follows : " Go, make all nations 
 adherents of the religion which I have taught 
 you, by baptizing them into the name of the 
 Trinity and teaching them to observe all my 
 commands." "But how?" the disciples might 
 
 141 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 well ask ; " how are we to do all this ? " 
 Mark and Luke supply the answer to the un- 
 spoken question. " Go, preach the Gospel." 
 14 Repentance and remission of sins shall be 
 preached in my name." 
 
 Our Lord seems, then, to point out preach- 
 ing as the great, if not the only, missionary 
 agency. If now, as in our study of the aim 
 of missions, we throw on the language of 
 the Great Commission the light of apostolic 
 example, we see that both in the Acts and 
 in the Epistles the greatest stress is laid upon 
 preaching as a missionary method. Indeed, 
 the very form of the Pentecostal gift fore- 
 tokened the part that preaching was to play 
 in the extension of the church, and the day of 
 its bestowal had not closed before an ingath- 
 ering of three thousand souls had witnessed 
 to the efficiency of this divinely appointed 
 means. And as the apostles began, so they 
 continued. " Every day in the temple and at 
 home they ceased not to teach and to preach 
 Jesus as the Christ" (Acts v. 42). After the 
 stoning of Stephen, "they that were scattered 
 abroad went about preaching the word." 
 Philip, for example, " went down to the city 
 of Samaria and proclaimed unto them the 
 
 142 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Christ." Joining himself to the eunuch, he 
 took his text from the very passage which 
 the traveler was reading, " and preached 
 unto him Jesus." When the eunuch had 
 gone on his way rejoicing, Philip began at - 
 Azotus, " and preached the gospel unto all 
 the cities until he came to Csesarea" (viii. 
 4, 5, 35, 40). 
 
 Nor did Paul prove an innovator in this 
 respect. The first glimpse we have of the 
 missionary apostle, after he and Barnabas 
 were sent forth by the Holy Ghost from 
 Antioch, is at Salamis in Cyprus, where, we 
 are told, " they proclaimed the word of God 
 in the synagogues of the Jews " (xiii. 5) ; 
 and the last verses of the Acts show him in 
 his hired house at Rome, receiving all that 
 went in unto him, " preaching the kingdom 
 of God, and teaching the things of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ with all boldness" (xxviii. 31). 
 And Paul's own epistles confirm the picture 
 which Luke draws. Twice in the Epistles 
 to Timothy (1 Tim. ii. 7, 2 Tim. i. 11), he 
 speaks of himself as having been appointed a 
 preacher. He tells the Corinthians (1 Cor. 
 i. 17) that Christ sent him not to baptize, 
 but to preach the gospel, and that the word 
 
 143 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 of the cross, however much it might be de- 
 spised by Jews and Greeks, was the divinely 
 ordained means of man's salvation. 
 
 But while it is plain that the eleven and 
 Paul were of one mind in considering preach- 
 ing a chief missionary agency, it is plain also 
 that they had a broad conception of what 
 preaching is. Not only formal utterance of 
 religious truth in a public assembly, but any 
 oral communication of such truth was 
 preaching, in the apostolic view. He who 
 uttered the truth might be an official person, 
 apostle, as was Paul, deacon, as was Philip, or 
 an unofficial person, as were most of those 
 who are said to have gone about preaching 
 the word. The time for preaching was not 
 the Sabbath merely, but every day, and even 
 any hour of the day or night. The apostles 
 delivered from prison by an angel entered 
 into the temple about daybreak and taught 
 (Acts v. 21) ; and at midnight Paul and Silas 
 spoke the word of the Lord to the jailer and 
 his household (xvi. 32). The place of preach- 
 ing might be the temple, as so often in the 
 days that followed Pentecost; or the syna- 
 gogue, Paul's favorite point of vantage for 
 addressing his countrymen; but it might 
 
 144 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 also be a private house, the market-place, the 
 amphitheatre, the proseuche by the river, the 
 court of a prison, or the audience-hall of a 
 Roman governor. The audience might be a 
 reverent assembly of Jews, or a group of 
 pious women, or a knot of half-contemptuous 
 philosophers, or a single household, or a 
 single person, traveler, soldier, or slave. The 
 style of address might rise to the highest 
 level of eloquence, as when Paul spoke on 
 Mars Hill, or be that of simple conversation, 
 as when Philip sat beside the eunuch in the 
 chariot. In short, the Acts of the Apostles 
 is the best commentary on that injunction of 
 Paul to Timothy (2 Tim. iv. 2) which has 
 been so often misunderstood, "Preach the 
 word; be instant in season, out of season." 
 
 As to the matter of apostolic preaching, it 
 varied with the character of the audience 
 addressed and the immediate object intended 
 to be served. The Saviour had bidden His 
 followers to be witnesses unto Him, to an- 
 nounce the good tidings, to proclaim repent- 
 ance and remission of sins in His name ; but 
 He had also enjoined them to teach the ob- 
 servance of all His commands. Accord- 
 ingly, part of the preaching of the apostles 
 
 145 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 was directed to making disciples, and part to 
 instructing and upbuilding those who were 
 already disciples. And if we compare Peter's 
 sermon on the day of Pentecost (Acts ii. 
 14-36) with his address in the house of Cor- 
 nelius (x. 34-43), or Paul in the synagogue 
 of Pisidian Antioch (xiii. 16-41) with Paul 
 to the idolaters of Lystra (xiv. 15fT.), or 
 Paul to the philosophers of Athens (xvii. 
 22-31), we shall see how well these first mis- 
 sionaries were able to fit the truth they ut- 
 tered to the needs of those whom they ad- 
 dressed. And if it be asked how this variety 
 in the matter of Paul's preaching squares 
 with his affirmation (1 Cor. ii. 2), that he 
 determined to know nothing among the Co- 
 rinthians save Jesus Christ and Him cruci- 
 fied, the answer is that we must distinguish 
 between the course which the apostle adopted 
 in first presenting the gospel to the inhabit- 
 ants of Corinth and that which he took after 
 a numerous church had been gathered. He 
 himself, in his letters to that church, makes 
 reference to instructions which he had given 
 as to public worship, the observance of the 
 Lord's Supper, and the fact and meaning of 
 the resurrection. The truth is that what 
 
 146 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Paul was accustomed to call his gospel was a 
 whole body of Christian truth and precept. 
 The heart of this body was indeed Christ 
 aud Him crucified, but the warm blood from 
 this heart pulsated in the farthest extremi- 
 ties. No one understood this better than 
 Paul. As the law of Moses enforced even 
 the prohibition to reap the corners of a field 
 by the solemn refrain, "I am Jehovah your 
 God," so Paul knew how to root the humblest 
 duties of the' Christian life in the mightiest 
 facts of the gospel, in God's eternal purpose, 
 in the death or resurrection or exaltation of 
 God's Son. 
 
 But if preaching, in the comprehensive 
 sense of the term which has been suggested, 
 was the principal missionary method em- 
 ployed by the apostles, was it the only one? 
 We may boldly answer that it was not. We 
 have just noted that in apostolic preaching 
 distinction must be made between that which 
 was intended to lead non-believers, whether 
 Jews or Gentiles, to faith, and that which 
 was addressed to believers and was meant for 
 their edification. Now the same distinction 
 runs through the whole activity of the apos- 
 tles as missionaries. While one great part of 
 
 147 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 their work was to preach the gospel with a 
 view to the conversion of individuals, another 
 great part of it was to instruct the converts 
 thus made, to organize them into churches, 
 and to conduct these churches to the point of 
 independent and aggressive life. And for 
 this latter purpose the apostles made use of 
 what for lack of a better name we must call 
 the supervisory method. It has already been 
 suggested that it was partly in order that 
 they might exercise this function of super- 
 vision that the apostles, when all other Chris- 
 tians had been driven by persecution from 
 Jerusalem, remained bravely at their post. 
 We have noted also that among Paul's re- 
 sponsibilities none weighed more heavily 
 upon him than the daily care of all the 
 churches (2 Cor. xi. 28). The details of this 
 supervisory method of missionary operation 
 as it was practiced by the apostles will readily 
 suggest themselves. 
 
 First, for example, they made use of per- 
 sonal visitation. The apostles did not remain 
 in one place, but were constantly moving 
 about, as the necessities of the expanding 
 church demanded. It was in order that they 
 might be able to do this that they adopted, 
 
 148 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 under divine guidance, the geographical plan 
 of missions which has been outlined. When 
 Philip had preached with success in Samaria, 
 Peter and John went thither to direct the 
 work. When the same evangelist had made 
 a tour through the cities of the Judsean coast- 
 plain, Peter presently followed him over the 
 same ground. And this plan of personal 
 visitation was a favorite one, also, with Paul. 
 On his first tour, he and Barnabas returned, 
 at the risk of their lives, over their own 
 course, revisiting Lystra, Iconium, and Anti- 
 och of Pisidia, confirming the souls of the 
 disciples, exhorting them to continue in the 
 faith, forewarning them of persecution, and 
 completing their organization into churches 
 by appointing elders (Acts xiv. 21-23). His 
 second journey was undertaken for the ex- 
 press purpose of visiting the churches 
 founded on the first. " Let us return now," 
 this was his proposal to Barnabas, " and visit 
 the brethren in every city wherein we pro- 
 claimed the word of the Lord, and see how 
 they fare " (xv. 36). And this plan he car- 
 ried out ; he " went through Syria and Cilicia, 
 confirming the churches " (xv. 41). He be- 
 gan his third tour, also, by going through the 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 region of " Galatia and Phrygia in order, 
 stablislring all the disciples " (xviii. 23). At 
 the close of his stay in Ephesus, he departed 
 to go into Macedonia, and when he had gone 
 through those parts, and had given them 
 much exhortation, he came into Greece. 
 Here he spent three months, no doubt in the 
 same work of personal visitation. Then he 
 set out for Jerusalem, but took opportunity 
 to go back once more through Macedonia, 
 and to revisit Troas, where he prolonged his 
 affectionate counsels to the church through 
 the whole night. Though he could not spare 
 time to go to Ephesus, he summoned the 
 elders of the church in that city to meet him 
 at Miletus, and there gave them a solemn 
 parting charge (chap. xx.). 
 
 A second way in which the apostles ex- 
 ercised this function of oversight was by the 
 employment of assistants. There was more 
 to be done than they could do in their own 
 persons. In the beginning they had found 
 it necessary to oversee even the distribution 
 of food to the poor. It was in order that 
 they might be set free from such demands 
 upon their time and strength that the order 
 of deacons was instituted (vi. 1-6). But 
 
 150 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 for the direction of the spiritual no less than 
 of the temporal interests of the growing 
 church they soon found that they needed 
 helpers. The deacons themselves, Stephen 
 and Philip in particular, were active evangel- 
 ists. When report was brought that con- 
 verts had been gained in Antioch, Barnabas 
 was delegated to go thither to direct and 
 confirm the work (xi. 22). When dispute 
 arose as to whether Gentile converts must be 
 circumcised, Judas and Silas were sent to 
 bear the decision of the apostles in the mat- 
 ter to the church in Antioch (xv. 22). And 
 as in so many other respects, so also in this 
 ability to make use of helpers, Paul was the 
 missionary par excellence of the primitive 
 church. Few things contributed more di- 
 rectly to his success than this faculty for 
 utilizing others in the work of the gospel, 
 this power to attract and bind to himself, to 
 train and direct, a great company of co- 
 laborers, through whom he multiplied him- 
 self a hundredfold. From the day on which 
 he sets forth with Barnabas and Mark from 
 Antioch we see him alone but once, in 
 Athens, and even there he has sent for Silas 
 and Timothy, left behind in Bercea, to come 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 to him with all speed (xvii. 15). Silas he 
 had associated with himself in Antioch be- 
 fore setting out on this journey (xv. 40). 
 Timothy he had found in Lystra (xvi. 3). 
 Already, as it seems, the apostle's child in the 
 faith (1 Tim. i. 2), the young Lystran now be- 
 comes his work-fellow in the Gospel (Rom. xvi. 
 21), destined to remain to the last his trusted 
 helper and friend. In Derbe, whether on 
 this journey or at some later time we do not 
 know, he laid hold on Gaius, who was with 
 him when he went to Jerusalem for the last 
 time (Acts xx. 4). At Troas he adds to his 
 company Luke, the beloved physician, of 
 whom he could write from under the very 
 shadow of martyrdom, " Only Luke is with 
 me " (2 Tim. iv. 11). And indeed there is 
 scarce a city visited by Paul which did not 
 yield him one or more such helpers. From 
 Thessalonica, for example, came Secundus 
 and Aristarchus (Acts xx. 4), the latter of 
 whom was afterward his companion in im- 
 prisonment (Col. iv. 10). In Beroea he 
 found Sopater (Acts xx. 4); in Corinth, 
 Erastus (Rom. xvi. 23), and Aquila and 
 Priscilla, until the end his fellow-workers in 
 Christ Jesus, who on some occasion unknown 
 
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The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 to us risked their lives to save his (Rom. 
 xvi. 3, 4). From Ephesus he drew Troph- 
 imus (Acts xxi. 29), and perhaps also Tychi- 
 cus, who was certainly of Asia (Acts xx. 4). 
 In Rome he laid hold on Onesimus, the run- 
 away slave, to send him forth in due time 
 with Tychicus to Colossse, as the faithful 
 and beloved brother (Col. iv. 9). From 
 Colossee came Epaphraditus or Epaphras 
 (Col. iv. 12), whom Paul calls his brother 
 and fellow-worker and fellow-soldier, who 
 for the work of Christ came nigh to death, 
 and hazarded his life to supply the apostle's 
 need (Phil. ii. 25, 30). And time would fail 
 us to tell of others his fellow-laborers whose 
 names are in the book of life, whom his lov- 
 ing salutations have preserved to us : of 
 Titus, whom he honored with an epistle, and 
 who next to Luke and Timothy was dear 
 and useful to him ; of Urbanus, his fellow- 
 worker, and Quartus, the brother ; of Clem- 
 ent and Rufus and Onesiphorus and Crescens 
 and Artemas; of Zenas the lawyer; of 
 Apollos the eloquent ; of those women also 
 who labored with him in the gospel, Euodia, 
 Syntyche, Phoebe, Mary, Persis the beloved, 
 Tryphaena and Tryphosa, who labored much 
 
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Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 in the Lord; of some, alas, who proved 
 unworthy of his confidence, Demas, Hyme- 
 nseus, Philetus, Alexander the coppersmith, 
 Phygellus and Hermogenes, who concerning 
 the faith made shipwreck. 
 
 And what varied uses did Paul make of 
 these lieutenants ! Sometimes he sends 
 them before him, as he did Timothy and 
 Erastus when he was intending to go into 
 Macedonia (Acts xix. 22). At other times 
 he left them behind him, as he seems to have 
 left Luke in Philippi (cf. Acts xvi. 16, xx. 6), 
 and as he certainly left Silas and Timothy in 
 Bercea (Acts xvii. 14), and Aquila and Pris- 
 cilla, and afterward Timothy, at Ephesus 
 (Acts xviii. 19, 1 Tim. i. 3). Often he 
 charged them with special duties. Thus he 
 committed to Titus the matter of the collec- 
 tion to be made among the churches of Mace- 
 donia for the poor saints in Jerusalem (2 
 Cor. viii. 6), and left him in Crete to set in 
 order the things that were wanting and ap- 
 point elders in every city (Tit. i. 5). Thus 
 he sent Timothy to Corinth to put the church 
 there in remembrance of his ways in Christ 
 (1 Cor. iv. 17), and left him in Ephesus to 
 withstand false teachers (1 Tim. i. 3, 4). 
 
 154 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Often he makes them the bearers of his let- 
 ters, as Phoebe was of that to the Romans 
 (Rom. xvi. 1), as Tychicus was of those to 
 the Colossians (Col. iv. 7) and the Ephesians 
 (Eph. vi. 21), as Epaphras was of that to the 
 beloved Philippians (Phil. ii. 25ff.), and 
 Onesimus of the short but precious one to 
 his master Philemon (Philem. 12). And as 
 he entrusts these messengers with his letters, 
 he charges them to bring him word again of 
 his converts, whether they stand fast in the 
 faith. 
 
 It is instructive, also, to note how Paul 
 kept himself in quick spiritual touch with 
 these helpers; how he encourages, advises, 
 cautions, reproves them, bidding Timothy to 
 suffer hardship as a good soldier of Jesus 
 Christ (2 Tim. ii. 3), and Titus to let no man 
 despise him (Ti. ii. 15), and Archippus to 
 take heed to fulfill his ministry (Col. iv. 17), 
 and Euodia and Syntyche to be of the same 
 mind in the Lord (Phil. iv. 2); how he leans 
 on their help and sympathy ; how, above, all 
 he loves them and prays for them with a love 
 that makes us think of the love of Jesus for 
 the twelve. And, indeed, there is no other 
 comparison which will so fitly embody this 
 
 155 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 noble cooperation between Paul and bis mis- 
 sionary associates. He was like a general in tbe 
 midst of his aides, making even his dungeon 
 at Rome headquarters of the army in the 
 field ; but it was not the power of military 
 discipline that secured obedience to his com- 
 mands. He was like the head of a great 
 commercial house, having his factors in every 
 important city; but it was not for pay that 
 his agents went and came and served. Had 
 the Saviour remained on earth in person to 
 direct His disciples in the work of missions, 
 would not His relation to them have been 
 something like this which Paul sustained to 
 this company of loving work-fellows? Nay, 
 was it not just because the Saviour was ful- 
 filling His promise to be with His disciples 
 always that this fellowship in the gospel was 
 what it was ? 
 
 One other means the apostles had of mak- 
 ing effective this method of oversight. It 
 has been already suggested in connection 
 with the names of Phoebe, Tychicus, Onesi- 
 mus. It was by the use of the pen. One 
 of the arguments that we hear employed 
 in support of missions is that to missions 
 we owe our own religious privileges. The 
 
 156 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Christian civilization which the Pilgrims 
 brought with them in the Mayflower was it- 
 self, we are reminded, the fruit of missions. 
 The plea is a sound one ; but is it not far 
 more important for us to remember that it is 
 to missions that we are indebted for the New 
 Testament itself? There is scarcely one of 
 its twenty-seven books that does not bear 
 the missionary impress. The Acts of the 
 Apostles is the history of primitive missions. 
 Every other book, except those briefest ones, 
 Philemon, Jude, 2d and 3d John, and the 
 last of all, the Apocalypse, was written in 
 response to the missionary exigencies of the 
 growing church. As to the epistles of Paul 
 this is obvious, and no less so as to those of 
 Peter and James and the first of John. All 
 these were penned because their missionary 
 authors felt themselves to be overseers of the 
 churches, responsible for their faith, polity, 
 conduct, life. And did not the Gospels 
 spring out of the same sense of responsi- 
 bility? Two of them were written by mis- 
 i sionary lieutenants of Paul, and the special 
 adaptation, so often pointed out, of Matthew 
 to the Jews, of Mark to the Romans, of Luke 
 to the Greeks, and of John to the Christians, 
 
 157 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 confirms the suggestion of their missionary 
 purpose. It was not the mere impulse of 
 authorship which prompted the evangelists ; 
 it was not simple love for the Saviour whose 
 earthly history they record ; it was, as the 
 prologue to the third Gospel (Luke i. 1-4) 
 and the last verses of the central portion of 
 the fourth (John xx. 30, 31) make evident, 
 the practical purpose to put into the hands 
 of the disciples, already won and yet to be 
 won as the fruits of apostolic missions, a rec- 
 ord of the great facts upon which their faith 
 was founded. 
 
 We have seen that the first missionaries 
 were preachers, and that they were over- 
 seers, superintending in person, by deputies, 
 and by letter the affairs of the multiplying 
 churches. Let us glance at one other agency 
 which they employed, the agency of miracles. 
 If Mark xvi. 9-20 be canonical, the Saviour 
 indicated this also as a missionary method. 
 For there we read (ver. 15n\), " And he said 
 unto them, Go ye into all the world, and 
 preach the gospel to the whole creation. He 
 that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved; 
 but he that disbelieveth shall be condemned. 
 And these signs shall follow them that be- 
 
 158 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 lieve : in my name shall they cast out devils ; 
 they shall speak with new tongues; they 
 shall take up serpents, and if they drink any 
 deadly thing, it shall in no wise hurt them ; 
 they shall lay hands on the sick, and they 
 shall recover." Now irrespective of any 
 opinion one may hold as to the genuineness 
 of these verses, or as to the specific meaning 
 of the words, " These signs shall follow them 
 that believe," it is manifest that both the 
 eleven and Paul did possess such miraculous 
 powers as are here described, and did make 
 use of them in connection with their work as 
 missionaries. In illustration we need only 
 cite the phenomena of the day of Pentecost 
 (Acts ii. 4) ; the miracles of mercy wrought 
 by Peter on the lame man at the Beautiful 
 Gate (iii. 1-10), on iEneas at Lydda, and on 
 Dorcas at Joppa (ix. 32-43), and by Paul on 
 the cripple of Lystra (xiv. 8ff.), and, by 
 means of handkerchiefs or aprons that had 
 come in contact with his person, on a multi- 
 tude of sick folk at Ephesus (xix. 11, 12) ; 
 and the miracles of judgment worked by 
 Peter on Ananias and Sapphira (v. 1-11), 
 and by Paul on Elymas (xiii. 11, 12). Nor 
 should it be overlooked that in several of 
 
 159 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 these instances Luke makes note of the effect 
 of the miracle in attracting attention to the 
 gospel and furthering the extension of the 
 church. Thus the narrative of the healing 
 of -^Eneas closes with the statement that 
 " All that dwelt in Lydcla and Sharon saw 
 him, and they turned to the Lord," and that 
 of the raising of Dorcas with these words, 
 u And it became known throughout all Joppa, 
 and many believed on the Lord ' (ix. 35, 42). 
 The effect of the judgment upon Ely mas was 
 that "the pro-consul, when he saw what was 
 done, believed, being astonished at the teach- 
 ing of the Lord" (xiii. 12). The result of the 
 special miracles wrought by Paul at Ephesus, 
 and of the discomfiture of the sons of Sceva, 
 who attempted to "do in like manner with 
 their enchantments," was that "fear fell 
 upon all the Jews and Greeks that dwelt at 
 Ephesus, and the name of the Lord Jesus 
 was magnified .... and not a few of those 
 who practiced magical arts brought their 
 books together and burned them in the sight 
 
 of all So mightily grew the word of 
 
 the Lord and prevailed" (xix. 17-20). 
 
 And this power of miracle was not a thing 
 exercised on rare occasions only, or by but a 
 
 160 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 few persons. It seems rather to have been a 
 characteristic feature of primitive missions. 
 Paul wrote to the Romans that it was by word 
 and deed, in the power of signs and wonders, 
 that from Jerusalem to Illvricum he had 
 preached the gospel of Christ (Rom. xv. 18- 
 20); and he reminds the Corinthians that the 
 signs of an apostle were wrought by him 
 among them in signs and wonders and mighty 
 works (2 Cor. xii. 12). Nor was it otherwise 
 with the eleven. The first of those general 
 statements as to the condition of the church, 
 with which Luke periodically breaks the 
 thread of his narrative in the Acts, includes 
 the particular that "many wonders and signs 
 were done by the apostles " (ii. 43) ; and in 
 the prayer recorded in chap. iv. 23fT., the 
 petition that the Lord would grant to His 
 servants to speak the word with all bold- 
 ness is immediately followed by the request 
 that He would stretch forth His hand to 
 heal, and that signs and wonders might be 
 done through the name of Jesus, as though 
 preaching and miracles were usually con- 
 joined in apostolic practice. But it was not 
 the apostles exclusively who enjoyed and 
 used supernatural endowments. Of Stephen 
 
 161 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 also, and of Philip, it is written that they 
 wrought miracles (vi. 8, viii. 6, 7) ; and from 
 several allusions in the Acts to the power of 
 speaking with tongues (x. 46, xix. 6), and 
 from the closing portion of the first letter to 
 the Corinthians, chaps, xii.-xiv. in particular, 
 we learn that there was a wide diffusion of 
 miraculous gifts in the primitive church. 
 
 Into the vexed question of the exact nature 
 of these charismata it is not necessary here 
 to enter. The two powers which are of 
 special interest from the point of view of 
 missions are the gift of healing and the gift 
 of tongues. We may be certain that these, 
 as well as other endowments, were intended 
 for practical use, not for mere show. Indeed, 
 Paul estimates their relative value on the 
 scale of their relative usefulness, particularly 
 for the edification of believers (1 Cor. xiv.). 
 Yet what he says (vers. 23-25) as to the con- 
 victing power of prophesying upon the un- 
 believer who should happen to be present 
 in a Christian assembly shows that these 
 powers had relation to the extension of the 
 church as well as to its edification. 
 
 Nor is there any sufficient reason to doubt 
 that the charismata of the Epistles are the 
 
 162 
 
The Methods of Apostolic Missions 
 
 same with the miraculous powers descrihed 
 in the Acts. If so, their missionary function 
 has already been made evident. And if ob- 
 jection be made, with reference to the gift of 
 tongues, that, after the day of Pentecost, we 
 have no evidence that it was used to make the 
 gospel message more intelligible, and that the 
 wide diffusion of the Greek language made 
 such a use needless, may it not be that it is 
 just this prevalence of Greek as the lingua 
 franca of the Roman world that, at the same 
 time, suggests the practical purpose of the 
 gift itself, and explains the silence of the 
 record, after Acts ii., as to its actual use in 
 the extension of the church? That which 
 impressed the foreign Jews on the day of 
 Pentecost was not that they understood the 
 apostles, for this they would still have done 
 had the preachers all spoken in Greek. It 
 was that they " heard each man in his own 
 tongue wherein he was born. ,, This fact 
 gave the apostles' words a power which they 
 could not otherwise have had. May it not 
 be that the first missionaries often availed 
 themselves of the gift of tongues to secure 
 the same added power for their message, and 
 
 yet that no prominence is given in the narra- 
 
 153 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 tive to the use of the gift which secured it, 
 because this increment of power, while im- 
 portant in itself, was so unimportant in com- 
 parison with the fact that the Greek tongue 
 made the Gospel, whether spoken or written, 
 universally intelligible. 
 
 164 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE METHODS OF MODEEN MISSIONS 
 
 If we begin our study of modern methods 
 in missions by seeking to understand their 
 geographical plan, it deserves notice, in the 
 first place, that in our age, no less than in that 
 of the apostles, the guiding hand was God's. 
 Allusion was made in a preceding chapter to 
 the providential circumstances which led to 
 the location of the Danish-Halle mission in 
 Tranquebar, and of the earliest Moravian mis- 
 sions in Greenland and the West Indies. The 
 history of modern missions furnishes many 
 other striking instances of the same sort. 
 Carey's purpose, formed under the influence 
 of the narrative of Cook's voyages, was to 
 go to Otaheite ; but just when the newly 
 formed Baptist Missionary Society, at its 
 third meeting, had decided that among other 
 articles " to be examined and discussed in 
 the most diligent and impartial manner was 
 the question, 'In what part of the heathen 
 world do there seem to be the most promis- 
 
 165 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 ing openings?'," the appeal of Dr. John 
 Thomas, a surgeon in the employ of the 
 East India Company, decided the matter. 
 At the next meeting of the society, Thomas 
 was present, and made his plea for Bengal 
 in person. Then it was that these pioneers 
 of modern missions " saw," to quote the 
 words of Andrew Fuller, " that there was a 
 gold mine in India, but it was deep as the 
 centre of the earth," and that Carey offered 
 to go down into it, if only his friends would 
 "hold the ropes." 
 
 Judson meant to labor in India, and ac- 
 tually arrived in Calcutta. But the East 
 India Company refused him permission to 
 settle in their dominions, and were about to 
 deport him to England. In answer to his 
 earnest entreaties he was permitted to sail 
 for Mauritius. After spending four months 
 on this island, he decided to open a mission 
 in Penang, in the Straits of Malacca. With 
 this in view he took ship to Madras. His 
 presence in India was at once reported to the 
 governor-general, and he was again in immi- 
 nent peril of being sent to England. Mean- 
 while, the only vessel in Madras harbor that 
 was bound in the direction of Penang was 
 
 166 
 
The Methods of Modern Missions 
 
 the Georgianna, for Rangoon. Judson con- 
 fessed in later life that Burmah was "the 
 one country of the East of which he had a 
 horror." But it was Burmah or England, 
 and he chose Burmah ! 
 
 In 1786, Dr. Thomas Coke, of the Wes- 
 leyan Methodist Church, set sail for Nova 
 Scotia; but the vessel was compelled, by 
 stress of weather, to put in to Antigua in 
 the West Indies. Here the spiritual destitu- 
 tion of the Negro slaves so moved Dr. Coke 
 that he decided to remain, and thus began a 
 work which was not only fruitful of good to 
 the West Indies, but was also one of the 
 means used of God to fire the missionary 
 zeal of William Carey. 
 
 Livingstone's first thought of missions as a 
 personal duty was roused by reading Dr. Karl 
 GutzlafT's appeal on behalf of China, and it 
 was to China that the great Scotchman pro- 
 posed to devote his life ; but the directors of 
 the London Missionary Society, having been 
 deterred from appointing him to the West 
 Indies only by the consideration that the 
 two years he had spent in the study of medi- 
 cine would, in that field, be largely thrown 
 away, and being of opinion that his gifts did 
 
 167 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 not fit him for India, determined to send 
 him to Africa. By these instances, among 
 many of a like sort, is it not made plain that 
 the geographical plan of modern missions 
 has been drawn by the Lord Himself? 
 
 And, second, it is to be noted that, under 
 this divine guidance, the church of our age 
 has established her mission work in the great 
 centres of political, commercial, intellectual, 
 and religious influence in the heathen world. 
 It is true that Carey was prevented from 
 establishing himself in Calcutta, and had to 
 take refuge, with Marshman and Ward un- 
 der the protection of the Danish flag at 
 Serampore, sixteen miles distant. But two 
 things are worthy of remark : Serampore, 
 while politically and commercially unim- 
 portant, was the very centre of the hor- 
 rid Juggernaut cult; and the foothold in 
 Calcutta which the East India Company at 
 first refused to Carey, it soon unwittingly 
 gave him by appointing him professor of 
 Bengali and Sanskrit in Fort William Col- 
 lege. This position, we may add, he contin- 
 ued to hold for thirty years, and from it de- 
 rived a salary first of <£700, and then of £1800 
 per annum, all of which he turned into the 
 
 168 
 
The Methods of Modern Missions 
 
 common fund of the Serampore Brotherhood. 
 Nor does it require any special acquaintance 
 with India and the East to enable one to un- 
 derstand that the very names of the cities 
 where he and his associates caused stations 
 to be opened — Nagpore, Surat, Allahabad, 
 Cawnpore, Delhi, Benares, Rangoon, Penang 
 — indicate how closely, in his geographical 
 plan of missions, this modern missionary gen- 
 eral followed the example of Paul. 
 
 Not that Carey made no mistakes in this 
 matter. He made grave mistakes, no doubt, 
 and many have been made since. But in spite 
 of all mistakes, the man who should have ac- 
 companied Dr. Bainbridge in 1880, or Dr. 
 Lawrence in 1886, on their round-the-world 
 tours of missionary investigation, could with- 
 out fear boast that he had been in every 
 great city of the heathen world. If there is 
 any ground for criticism, it is not that the 
 great centres of influence have not been 
 seized, but rather, as the last-named traveler 
 kindly but earnestly urges, that there has 
 not been a sufficient measure of cooperation 
 and comity in apportioning these strategic 
 centres, and the districts of which they are 
 the mighty hearts, among the great churches 
 
 169 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 and societies. Important as Tokio and Shang- 
 hai are, it may be questioned whether there 
 is room for fourteen societies to work from 
 the one, and eleven from the other. But 
 until we have learned to exercise more wis- 
 dom and grace in this very matter in our 
 work at home, we may well hesitate to cast 
 a stone at those who, under vastly greater 
 difficulties, are directing the mission work 
 abroad. 
 
 Passing now from the geographical plan of 
 modern missions to a survey of modern mis- 
 sionary methods, in the strict sense of the 
 term, our first impression is that these are 
 far more numerous than those made use of 
 by the apostles. Five great agencies are us- 
 ually enumerated : the evangelistic, the edu- 
 cational, the literary, the medical, and the 
 industrial. Besides, there are, as Dr. Law- 
 rence suggests (Modern Missions in the East, 
 chap, vii.), several other activities demanding 
 much time and labor on the part of the mis- 
 sionary : such as teaching converts to sing ; 
 superintending the erection of mission build- 
 ings, — schoolhouses, chapels, dispensaries; 
 keeping accounts ; purchasing and forward- 
 ing supplies ; advising the native Christians 
 
 170 
 
The Methods of Modern Missions 
 
 in a great variety of matters ; and advocating 
 and furthering various social and political re- 
 forms. In defense of these apparently more 
 varied activities, it might be pleaded, first, 
 that the apostles themselves were inclined to 
 be tolerant in the matter of methods. Ready 
 to condemn unsparingly any who adulterated 
 the gospel, they were ready, also, to admit 
 a large variety in the methods of applying 
 the gospel to the needs of men. To this at- 
 titude they were led by the very profusion 
 of the charismata. They could not but recog- 
 nize wide diversities of operation as thor- 
 oughly consistent with the indwelling of one 
 Spirit, and as all tending to the one end of 
 extending and building up the church, the 
 body of Christ, The apostles believed, too, 
 as we have seen, in the adaptation of their 
 methods to meet the special circumstances in 
 which they might find themselves ; and while 
 we abate nothing of what was said in a for- 
 mer chapter as to the essential similarity of 
 the mission problem in modern times to that 
 which presented itself to the apostles, we 
 may at the same time admit that there are 
 differences in the details of the two situations 
 which may well justify some differences of 
 
 171 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 method. This remark applies particularly 
 to those minor activities, hardly deserving 
 the name of missionary methods, referred to 
 by Dr. Lawrence. Notwithstanding such 
 differences, we believe that it can be shown 
 that the main outlines of missionary method 
 to-day are the same as in the first age of the 
 church. 
 
 In proof of this contention, it is a joy to 
 be able to say, and that without fear of suc- 
 cessful contradiction, that in modern as in 
 apostolic missionary practice, the method 
 most emphasized is the preaching of the Gos- 
 pel. To this method more time and strength 
 are given than to any other, if, indeed, we 
 may not say, than to all others combined. 
 It is true that this fact is not always apparent 
 to the casual observer. The apparatus em- 
 ployed in preaching may be, often is, less no- 
 ticeable than that required for education, 
 or literary work, or medical missions. Ed- 
 ucation means school buildings, sometimes 
 of an imposing sort ; medical work requires 
 hospitals and dispensaries ; literary work in- 
 volves press-rooms, it may be, or Bible 
 houses. Preaching may or may not presup- 
 pose chapels. If it does, these will often not 
 
 172 
 
The Methods of Modern Missions 
 
 be distinguishable from the structures that 
 surround them, whether shops in the city or 
 cottages in the country. The only real es- 
 sentials for preaching are a preacher and an 
 audience. In the valuable article on " Meth- 
 ods of Mission Work" in the Encyclopaedia 
 of Missions, we are told of a Christian gen- 
 tleman on a visit to Constantinople, who, 
 after having seen Robert College, the Amer- 
 ican College for Girls, the Bible House, and 
 the school and dispensary of the Free Church 
 Mission, said that he was glad to find so 
 much good work being done, but sorry to see 
 so little preaching. " Come with me on Sun- 
 day," said his missionary guide. Then he 
 led him from one end of the city to the other, 
 and in Stamboul, Galata, Scutari, Hasskeuey, 
 showed him gathering after gathering, where 
 preaching to audiences ranging from seventy- 
 five to three hundred was going on, in Turk- 
 ish, Armenian, Greek, Spanish, and English. 
 The same thing might have happened to a 
 traveler in Peking or Shanghai or Canton, in 
 Calcutta or Bombay, in any great centre of 
 missionary work in the heathen world. 
 
 But let no one suppose that the preaching 
 of missionaries is confined to the Sabbath and 
 
 173 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 to stated places. Of them, as truly as of the 
 first Christians, may it be said that they "go 
 everywhere preaching the word," and that 
 they claim all times and places for delivering 
 their message. " You will be near the mark," 
 writes a Chinese missionary, "if you imagine 
 the gospel messenger in a straw hat and a 
 pea jacket, sitting on a broken wall — there is 
 always a broken wall handy in a village — or 
 on a door-step, or on a form at the front of 
 an eating-house, conversing freely with a 
 score of Chinamen, all of whom, perhaps, 
 bear some mark of their occupation, while a 
 number of boys in very scant clothing thrust 
 themselves to the front, and a few women 
 linger at a distance, just beyond the range of 
 hearing." Mutatis mutandis the picture 
 would be equally true of missionary preach- 
 ing in any of the great mission lands. The 
 present writer has heard the gospel pro- 
 claimed in native chapels, in heathen tem- 
 ples, in the homes of the common people, on 
 the veranda of the missionary's house, in the 
 ward of the mission hospital, in the market- 
 place, at the boat-landing, by the camp-fire in 
 the jungle, in the hovel of the outcast, in the 
 
 halls of princes, and the palace of a king. 
 
 174 
 
The Methods of Modern Missions 
 
 And how many are the means of locomo- 
 tion which missionaries adopt as they thus 
 go forth to sow beside all waters ! By train 
 or steamboat, where they can, as sometimes 
 in India and China and Japan ; by jinriksha, , 
 by ox -cart, by mule litter, by wheelbarrow, 
 by sedan chair, by bicycle ; slung in a ham- 
 mock on a pole as Hannington was in 
 Africa; mounted on horses, or mules, or ele- 
 phants, or camels, or astride an ox, as Living- 
 stone made his first journeys ; by boats, pro- 
 pelled sometimes by steam, more often by 
 sails, or oars, or poles, or tracked by ropes by 
 power of man or beast; by canoe and clog- 
 sledge and snowshoe, as Young in the icy 
 North ; oftenest of all on foot, trudging with 
 Gilmour across the dreary plains of Mongo- 
 lia, floundering with Livingstone through the 
 hopeless swamps, threading with Paton the 
 jungle paths of New Hebrides, clambering 
 with Mackay over the mountain tracks of 
 Formosa, toiling with McGilvary up the beds 
 of the brooks that come down from the 
 haunts of the shy Moo Surs — so the heralds 
 of the cross go forth to tell their story. 
 
 And how many forms that story takes! 
 
 Sometimes the formal sermon; far more often 
 
 175 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 the informal address, where questions are 
 freely allowed and skillful objections must, 
 perhaps, be answered; and quite as often the 
 quiet talk with a single inquirer, as Jesus 
 talked with the woman at the well, or Philip 
 with the eunuch in the chariot. And as the 
 missionary despises no place, no audience, no 
 form of address, so he thinks no device too 
 trivial that will serve to get him a hearing. 
 The power of music, whether of baby-organ, 
 or flute, or guitar, or violin, or even hand- 
 organ ; the open medicine chest ; the book- 
 stall ; the vivid picture on the lantern-screen; 
 the telescope focused on a distant hill ; his 
 watch, his pocket-compass, the buttons on 
 his coat ; the rubber rattle of his infant child, 
 if need be — any of these will serve these 
 modern fishers of men as lure for their hook. 
 And not only do they claim all times, all 
 places, all devices for attracting attention, 
 but they claim, as well, all classes as their 
 auditors. Carey and Duff and many others 
 after them took special measures to bring the 
 gospel to the attention of the highest castes 
 of India. The Rev. Gilbert Reid is devot- 
 ing himself to-day to work among the official 
 classes in China. Mackay of Uganda used 
 
 176 
 
The Methods of Modern Missions 
 
 to read the Bible to King Mtesa and his 
 court. But no class has escaped the atten- 
 tion of the missionary. The blind of China 
 have had the Scriptures made accessible to 
 them. The lepers of India have found those 
 who lay upon their souls the healing touch 
 of gospel love and truth. The lattices and 
 curtains of harems and zenanas have not 
 shut out the missionary lady. In the late 
 war between China and Japan, the troops 
 of the Sunrise Kingdom were supplied with 
 pocket copies of the Gospel of John, and a 
 missionary and four native pastors pressed 
 forward with them to the front. Let us 
 not be misled. However inconspicuous this 
 evangelism may be in the eyes of globe-trot- 
 ting visitors to the great cities of heathen- 
 ism, or even on the pages of the reports that 
 are published at home, it is the chief work of 
 modern missions, the joy, the hope, the de- 
 light, of the great majority of missionaries. 
 
 And not only is preaching pushed in its 
 own proper form, but it utilizes, in many 
 cases it has created, other forms of mission- 
 ary effort. Medical missions, for example, is 
 not first of all a philanthropic, but an evan- 
 gelistic agency. The physician is a preacher; 
 
 177 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 the dispensary and the surgical ward are also 
 chapels. In a recently published letter, the 
 physician in charge of the hospital at Tung 
 Cho, China, says that he has sometimes 
 thought that the lack of clocks among the 
 Chinese will be the indirect cause of salva- 
 tion to many souls ; for, having no means of 
 telling time accurately, his patients come to 
 the hospital long in advance of the ap- 
 pointed hour, and as there is always a Bible 
 woman on hand to talk to them, they receive 
 much instruction in Christian truth. Educa- 
 tion, too, is pressed into the service of evan- 
 gelism, nay is often chiefly a means to it. In 
 Mohammedan lands, the school platform is 
 the only pulpit from which the glad tidings 
 can be made to fall on Moslem ears. One 
 chief motive of Dr. Duff's great work as an 
 educator in India was that, by means of the 
 school, he might bring the gospel to bear upon 
 Brahman youths not eas}^ to be reached in 
 any other way. And the constant reports of 
 conversions among the pupils of mission 
 schools show that everywhere missionaries 
 are alive to their opportunity to preach the 
 gospel through the school, and that God is 
 honoring their fidelity. This subservience of 
 
 178 
 
The Methods of Modern Missions 
 
 other methods to the evangelistic finds illus- 
 tration also from the literary work of mis- 
 sions. Much of this, especially that which is 
 directed to the translation of the Scriptures 
 and the production and diffusion of simple 
 and striking gospel tracts, is prompted by 
 evangelistic motives. Missionaries have 
 learned that the printed page, while it cannot 
 take the place of the living preacher, may be 
 a John the Baptist to prepare his way, a 
 Timothy or a Titus to remain behind and re- 
 peat his message. 
 
 A second illustration of the statement that 
 the methods of present-day missions are sub- 
 stantially the same as those employed in the 
 New Testament time, is to be found in the 
 large use now as then of what we have called 
 the method of supervision. Missionaries of 
 to-day lay strong stress upon preaching, but 
 they are not, and, in the face of the needs of 
 heathenism and of the churches in heathen 
 lands, they cannot be, content to be preach- 
 ers simply. With the first successes gained 
 by the truth the}^ find themselves called to be 
 more than preachers — apostles, bishops, su- 
 perintendents, having oversight of a plurality 
 of churches and an expanding work. In a 
 
 179 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 few instances, it is true, missionaries are the 
 nominal pastors of native churches, but even 
 in these instances they do not devote them- 
 selves exclusively to the care of their charges 
 as pastors do at home. The}' feel themselves 
 called to a larger work, the work of caring for 
 and developing, not a church, but churches, 
 the church. Attention was called in Chapter 
 II. to that wonderful passage in the Articles 
 of Agreement of the Serampore Brotherhood, 
 in which Carey's mind and Ward's pen unite 
 to set forth the relation which, in the judg- 
 ment of those pioneers of organized missions, 
 the missionary should sustain to the native 
 brethren, the native churches, the native 
 church. The eighth of those articles, after 
 enlarging upon the importance of setting 
 native pastors over the churches, wherever 
 practicable, adds, " These churches will be in 
 no immediate danger of falling into errors or 
 disorders, because the whole of their affairs 
 will be constantly superintended by a Euro- 
 pean missionary. The advantages of this 
 plan are so evident that to carry it into com- 
 plete effect ought to be our continued con- 
 cern. That we may discharge the important 
 obligations of watching over these infant 
 
 180 
 
The Methods of Modern Missions 
 
 churches when formed .... we should con- 
 tinually go to the Source of all grace and 
 strength ; for if to become the shepherd of 
 one church be a most solemn and weighty 
 charge, what must it be to watch over a num- 
 ber of churches just raised from a state of 
 heathenism and placed at a distance from 
 each other ? " 
 
 There can be no question that in this view 
 of missionary duty the father of modern mis- 
 sions voiced the feeling of the great majority 
 of his successors. They have known that the 
 word of God is seed, and have counted it a 
 blessed thing to drop a grain of that seed into 
 a heathen heart ; but they have known also 
 that " the good seed are the children of the 
 kingdom," and have believed that it is a no 
 less blessed, and may be a far more fruitful 
 work, to plant and nurture and protect those 
 patches of living seed-corn from which at 
 last shall come the universal harvest. They 
 have known that truth is light, and have felt 
 it good to shed that light upon a single dark- 
 ened heart; but they have known, too, that 
 Christians are lights, and churches are light- 
 houses, blazing with it may be a hundred, or 
 a thousand, or a million candle-power, and 
 
 181 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 they have deemed it a better and a greater 
 thing to see that everywhere throughout 
 some wide region of darkness these lesser and 
 greater lights are kept steadily shining. We 
 have found this out at home, and wherever, 
 in East or West, there are conditions even 
 remotely resembling those obtaining on the 
 mission field, wherever, that is to say, the 
 churches are feeble and scattered, we choose 
 a man of large experience, sound judgment, 
 ready tact, and high power of leadership — 
 call him secretary, synodical missionary, pas- 
 tor-at-large, or missionary bishop — and invest 
 him with the power of supervision. 
 
 And what a few men are at home, almost 
 every missionary is, or comes at last to be, on 
 heathen soil. " The missionary," says Rev. 
 C. H. Wheeler, " is confined to no one city 
 or village, is the occupant of no one pulpit, 
 is not a local preacher, but an apostolic ex- 
 plorer, to range and map out the country, 
 and direct others, whom he shall select and 
 train for the work, where to do the labor of 
 local preaching " {Ten Years on the Euphrates, 
 p. 65). " In the early part of his life," writes 
 Dr. Blaikie, with regard to Livingstone, " he 
 deemed it his joy and honor to aim at the 
 
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The Methods of Modern Missions 
 
 conversion of individual souls, and earnestly 
 did he labor and pray for that, though his 
 visible success was but small. But as he 
 gets better acquainted with Africa, and 
 reaches a more commanding point of view, 
 he sees the necessity for other work. The 
 continent must be surveyed, healthy locations 
 for mission-stations must be found, the temp- 
 tations to the accursed traffic in human flesh 
 must be removed, the products of the country 
 must be turned to account, its whole social 
 economy must be changed. The accom- 
 plishment of such objects, even in a limited 
 degree, would be an immense service to the 
 missionaiy ; it would be such a preparing of 
 his way that a hundred years hence the 
 spiritual results would be far greater than if 
 all the effort were now concentrated on 
 single souls. To many persons it appeared 
 as if dealing with individual souls were the 
 only proper work of a missionary, and as if 
 one who had been doing such work would 
 be lowering himself if he accepted any other. 
 Livingstone never stopped to reason as to 
 which was the higher or more desirable 
 work ; he felt that Providence was calling 
 him to be less of a missionary journeyman 
 
 183 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 and more of a missionary statesman ; but the 
 great end was ever the same. * The end of 
 the geographical feat was only the beginning 
 of the enterprise ' " (Personal Life of David 
 Livingstone, p. 189). Dr. Blaikie is right. 
 He who was found dead on his knees in the 
 hut beside Bangweolo was not Livingstone 
 the explorer, but Livingstone the missionary, 
 missionary statesman, missionary general. 
 And while it may be readily admitted that 
 Livingstone had a special calling, it is still 
 true that there is scarcely a great name in 
 missionary annals who did not come to see 
 that he, too, was called to be no longer a 
 mere missionary journeyman, but a mission- 
 ary statesman and general. What Heber 
 and Selwyn and Pattison and Hannington 
 were b} r ecclesiastical appointment, Carey 
 and Duff and Judson, Inglis and Paton, 
 Nevius and Clough and Mackay, have been 
 by assignment of God's providence, mission- 
 ary bishops in charge of wide realms and a 
 fast-extending church. 
 
 And it scarcely needs to be said that, in 
 carrying out this work of supervision, the 
 modern missionary follows much the same 
 lines as his apostolic prototype. Often he 
 
 184 
 
The Methods of Modern Missions 
 
 goes in person among the churches and sta- 
 tions, ordaining elders, administering the sac- 
 raments, counseling the officers and leaders, 
 deciding difficult questions, correcting errors, 
 reforming abuses, stimulating Christian ac- 
 tivity, catechising, instructing. And he does 
 not usually go alone, but, like Paul, has with 
 him one or more native brethren, who minis- 
 ter to his wants and assist him in his work. 
 These are not only hands to serve him, but 
 eyes to see, ears to hear, tongues to speak 
 for him. Their more perfect acquaintance 
 with heathen character and custom, their 
 better knowledge of the language, their more 
 ready access to the people, enable him to ac- 
 complish by their help what he could never 
 accomplish without it. And not only does he 
 take them with him, but often he sends them 
 before him to spy out the land, or leaves them 
 behind him to deepen and extend the impres- 
 sions he may have made ; or charges them 
 with special errands of instruction, or stimu- 
 lus, or discipline; or uses them as evangelists, 
 colporteurs, school-teachers. Meanwhile he 
 employs every means to deepen and broaden 
 their Christian characters, and develop their 
 gifts, and increase their zeal in the service of 
 
 185 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 Christ. In a few instances this end is sought 
 by means of a regularly organized theologi- 
 cal seminary, having a permanent faculty 
 and a well-wrought curriculum. More often 
 resort is had to the less formal training class, 
 held at seasons of the year when agricultural 
 operations are at a standstill, taught, it may 
 be, by a single missionary, or by a missionary 
 and his wife, and using a course of study 
 that runs the gamut from reading and sing- 
 ing to theology and the making of sermons. 
 Oftenest of all, dependence must be placed 
 upon casual and informal instructions given 
 by the missionary at odd moments, at home, 
 on the road, or by the camp-fire, and upon 
 association with him in the practical work 
 of the gospel. 
 
 Are there any miracles in modern missions? 
 It would seem not, unless it be considered 
 that the late Dr. J. L. Nevius in his book, 
 Demon Possession and Allied Themes, has 
 shown that Chinese Christians of to-day ex- 
 orcise demons by prayer and the use of the 
 name of Jesus. But if there have been no 
 miracles in the sense that there were miracles 
 in the apostolic age, there have been miracles 
 of grace not less striking. If there has been 
 
 186 
 
The Methods of Modern Missions 
 
 no gift of tongues, there have heen wonders 
 of patience, erudition, linguistic skill, tri- 
 umph over innumerable difficulties, so that 
 at last the heathen of every nation hear and 
 read the wonderful works of God in their 
 own tongue wherein they were born. If 
 there have been no miracles of healing, med- 
 ical missions have been hardly less effective, 
 not indeed in proving divine vocation, but in 
 exhibiting divine compassion, in attracting 
 attention, in dispelling prejudice, in opening 
 the way for Him who can say to the sick of 
 the palsy not merely, " Take up thy bed and 
 walk," but " Man, thy sins be forgiven thee." 
 The inter-relation between literary work in 
 missions and both the evangelistic and super- 
 visory activities of the missionary and the 
 help that medical missions render in the 
 direct proclamation of the gospel have al- 
 ready been sufficiently indicated. Let us 
 take a moment in conclusion to consider the 
 other great method of modern missions, edu- 
 cation. The evangelistic element in this also 
 has already been pointed out, and should 
 never be lost sight of. The man who finds 
 no fault with Paul because he availed him- 
 self of the love of the Athenians for philo- 
 
 187 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 sophical discussion in order to preach the 
 gospel to them, and even devotes a large 
 part of his address to dwelling on truths of 
 natural religion before he says a word of 
 Christ, may well hesitate to attack Dr. Duff, 
 when he, in his turn, takes advantage of the 
 desire of the Brahman youth of Calcutta for 
 an English education to instill gospel truth 
 into their minds, and judges that this truth 
 will be all the more effective when accom- 
 panied by truth of a scientific or even a 
 philosophical kind. Then it is to be remem- 
 bered that education, quite as much as liter- 
 ary work, stands in vital relation to that 
 other great method in missions which we 
 have called the supervisory, and which has 
 reference to the development and training of 
 the native church. If a missionary is to be 
 a general, he must have his trained subordi- 
 nates ; if he is to be a bishop, he must have 
 his inferior clergy : and it is one great func- 
 tion of evangelistic education in missions to 
 raise up and equip these in all grades — school- 
 teachers, elders, Bible readers, evangelists, 
 pastors, leaders of religious thought and life, 
 the Luthers, Calvins, Wesleys of heathen 
 lands, the successors of the missionary him- 
 
 188 
 
The Methods of Modern Missions 
 
 self. Let us admit that the apostles did not 
 establish schools nor teach them — though the 
 late Dr. A. P. Happer maintained that in the 
 school of Tyrannus, in which Paul reasoned 
 daily with the disciples of Ephesus (Acts 
 xix. 9), we have explicit New Testament 
 sanction for the mission-school — but let us 
 remember that the apostles labored, not 
 among barbarous peoples, but among the 
 most highly civilized peoples of their day. 
 Let us remember that much of what the 
 modern missionary strives to give by means 
 of the mission-school — the ability to read the 
 Scriptures, the quickening of dulled minds, 
 the development of useful gifts — had in great 
 measure been given to the people of the 
 Roman empire through the diffusion of Greek 
 culture and the Greek tongue, on the one 
 hand, and the influence of the sj^nagogue 
 and the existence of the Septuagint, on the 
 other. Let us remember that in many hea- 
 then lands, in India and Japan especially, 
 , the question is whether the missionaries shall 
 give the youth of the native church, and some 
 at least of the heathen, an education that is 
 Christian, or allow the government to furnish 
 an education wholly secular, it may be even 
 
 189 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 infidel. Let us remember that the same forces 
 which pat early education in America under 
 the care of the church and the ministry, and 
 led to the establishment of schools and col- 
 leges by all the great religious bodies, and 
 even to-day justifies these in maintaining 
 boards of aid for colleges and academies, op- 
 erate no less, but in some cases far more, in 
 heathen lands, and vindicate the missionary in 
 providing Christian schools for Christian and 
 heathen youth. The apostles were not school- 
 teachers, but had they lived in the nineteenth 
 century instead of the first, had they begun 
 at Calcutta instead of at Jerusalem, had their 
 field been the Indian or the Chinese empires 
 instead of the Roman, is it not more than 
 possible that they would have seized on the 
 school, as they did in fact upon the syna- 
 gogue, as a great agency for the diffusion of 
 the gospel, and is it not likely that foremost 
 among them in this as in all else would have 
 stood that matchless missionary, at once the 
 Carey and the Duff of the infant church, 
 who counted himself debtor both to Greek 
 and barbarian, to wise and unwise, and who 
 was ready to use any means if only he might 
 save some ? 
 
 190 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE RESULTS OF APOSTOLIC MISSIONS 
 
 When Paul, on his second missionary 1 
 journey, came with his companions, Silas and 
 Timothy, to Thessalonica, he labored for 
 three weeks among the Jews, who were very 
 numerous in that city, reasoning with them 
 out of the Scriptures, opening and alleging 
 that it behooved the Christ to suffer and to 
 rise again from the dead, and that Jesus was 
 indeed the Christ. The result was that 
 some Jews were persuaded, and also of the 
 devout Greeks a great multitude and of the 
 chief women not a few. But the unbeliev- 
 ing Jews, moved with jealousy, took unto 
 them certain vile fellows of the rabble, and, 
 gathering a crowd, set the city in an uproar ; I 
 and assaulting the house of Jason, sought to 
 bring forth the missionaries to the people. 
 But when they found them not, they dragged 
 Jason and certain other brethren before the 
 rulers of the city, crying, " These that have 
 turned the world upside down are come 
 hither also " (Acts xvii. 1-9). 
 
 191 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 " These that have turned the world up- 
 side down " — it was the cry of a mob, of 
 which it could no doubt have been said, as 
 afterward of a similar mob in Ephesus, that 
 " the more part kuew not wherefore they 
 were come together." Nor was it the spon- 
 taneous cry even of such a mob. It had 
 been put into their mouths by the leaders of 
 the Jewish community, even as the fierce 
 demand, " Crucify Him ! " had been put by 
 the chief priests on the tongues of the 
 multitude at Jerusalem. It was not, there- 
 fore, the language of calm consideration; it 
 was that of jealous hate, of fear, of frenzy, 
 and it bears the marks of that distortion and 
 exaggeration with which these passions ever 
 make their victims speak. And yet con- 
 cealed beneath distortion and exaggeration 
 there lay a kernel of truth. At least the 
 charge thus made against the missionaries 
 may assure us that Christianity was not first 
 heard of in Thessalonica on the first of those 
 three Sabbath days when Paul stood up in 
 the synagogue to prove from the Scriptures 
 that Jesus was the Christ. The news of the 
 successes won by this new teaching in other 
 cities had already reached the ears of the 
 
 192 
 
The Results of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Jewish leaders in Thessalonica ; and what 
 they had heard was sufficient to give at least 
 a color of truth to the cry which they taught 
 the loafers of the market place to utter, 
 " These that have turned the world upside 
 down have come hither also." 
 
 Christianity was indeed destined to turn 
 the world — the otxoupivT), the Roman world — 
 upside down. In three centuries, it may 
 fairly be said, it had justified the charge, 
 though not just in the way which those 
 meant it who first gave voice to it. And it 
 is our first business in this chapter to inquire 
 to how great an extent this mighty change 
 was accomplished in the apostolic age. 
 What were the results of apostolic missions ? 
 Or perhaps it would be better to ask, What 
 were the apostolic results of missions ? For 
 it must not be forgotten that we are to con- 
 fine our view, in the first instance, to the 
 apostolic age, that is, to the period up to the 
 death of the apostle John. It is true there 
 has been wide difference of opinion as to the 
 date of that event ; but we cannot be far 
 wrong if we consider that the apostolic age 
 came to an end with the first century. This 
 limitation of time is important, for it has 
 
 193 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 sometimes happened that results that were 
 not accomplished until the age of Con- 
 stantine have been spoken of as though they 
 had already been attained within the lifetime 
 of the apostles. 
 
 The first particular in which we may seek 
 to appraise apostolic results of missionary 
 effort is with regard to that which some, as we 
 have seen, regard as the end of missions, but 
 which we believe to be only the beginning 
 — the diffusion of the knowledge of the 
 gospel. How widely, we may ask, was re- 
 pentance and remission of sins preached in 
 Jesus' name in the first century ? The first . 
 factor of our answer to this query we may 
 well find in the catalogue, given in the 
 second chapter of the Acts, of the regions 
 from which the foreign Jews who witnessed 
 the scenes of Pentecost had come. In the 
 crowd who listened to Peter on that occasion 
 were Parthian s, Medes, and Elamites — that 
 is, natives of the countries lying between 
 the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, be- 
 yond the western boundary of the Roman 
 empire ; dwellers in Mesopotamia, the region 
 of which Babylon was the centre ; inhabit- 
 ants of Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, 
 
 194 
 
The Results of Apostolic Missions 
 
 Pamphylia— that is, of all the provinces of 
 Asia Minor ; men of Egypt, and of the parts 
 of Libya about Cyrene — of the eastern and 
 western districts of the Mediterranean coast 
 of Africa under Roman rule ; strangers from 
 Rome, others from the important island of 
 Crete, and still others from that wide region, 
 extending from Damascus to the Indian 
 Ocean, which bore the name of Arabia. 
 The impression given by the narrative is 
 that not only were Jews and proselytes from 
 all these widely separated regions present in 
 the audience that listened to the apostles, 
 but also that representatives from all or 
 nearly all of them were included in the three 
 thousand who were led by what they heard 
 to open confession of Jesus as the Christ. 
 If this be the case, we have as the result of 
 the very first preaching of the gospel by the 
 apostles a diffusion of at least some knowl- 
 edge of it over a wide portion of the empire. 
 Nor can this be said to be mere conjecture. 
 We know that the church, at a very early 
 stage of its history, did include men of 
 Cyprus, as Barnabas (Acts iv. 36) ; men of 
 Antioch, as Nicholas, one of the original 
 company of deacons (vi. 5) ; men of Da- 
 
 195 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 mascus, as Ananias and the others whom 
 Saul of Tarsus was intending to carry away 
 bound to Jerusalem (ix. 10) ; and men of 
 Cyrene, as those who, with others from 
 Cyprus, broke over the bounds of Jewish 
 exclusiveness and preached to the Greeks of 
 Antioch (xi. 20). When Paul was in 
 Corinth there had been for many years 
 Christians in Rome (Rom. i. 9-13, xv. 23). 
 The epistle to Titus seems to suggest that 
 there were disciples in Crete before Paul and 
 Titus visited that island (Tit. i. 5). These 
 facts make it probable that what is written 
 (Acts viii. 26ff.) of the eunuch of Ethiopia, 
 — that, having received the gospel while on 
 a visit to Palestine, he returned to his own 
 country, thus diffusing the knowledge of it, 
 — was only a single illustration of what took 
 place on a much larger scale. 
 
 But if it be objected that this spread of 
 the glad tidings was the result of God's prov- 
 idence rather than of deliberate missionary 
 effort, we may remind ourselves how wide 
 was the region over which we know the gos- 
 pel to have been proclaimed of set purpose. 
 Samaria, both the city and many villages of 
 the district (Acts viii. 14, 25); Azotus and 
 
 IDG 
 
The Results of Apostolic Missions 
 
 all the cities north of it as far as Csesarea 
 (viii. 40), including among others Lydda, 
 Sharon and Joppa (ix. 35, 42); Phoenicia, 
 Cyprus, and Antioch (xi. 19); Damascus (ix. 
 20) — all these cities and regions had cer- 
 tainly been the scenes of missionary endeavor 
 before the Holy Ghost said to the prophets 
 and teachers at Antioch, " Separate me Bar- 
 nabas and Saul to the work whereunto I have 
 called them." On his first tour Paul went 
 through the whole island of Cyprus from 
 Salamis to Paphos (xiii. 5, 6). Crossing to 
 the mainland, he preached also in Perga, in 
 Pamphylia, and in Antioch of Pisidia, where 
 he remained three weeks, and where at last 
 "almost the whole city was gathered to- 
 gether to hear the word of God," and 
 whence " the word of the Lord was spread 
 abroad throughout all the region " (xiii. 44, 
 49). Then we find him in Iconium, then in 
 Lystra and Derbe and the parts of Lycaonia 
 in the neighborhood of these cities (xiv. 6). 
 On his second journey he went again over 
 the regions visited in his first (xv. 36), and then 
 crossed into Europe, preaching in Philippi, 
 where he founded a church which from the 
 first day entered into fellowship with him in 
 
 197 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 furtherance of the gospel (Phil. i. 5) ; in 
 Thessalonica, where he established another 
 church, from which the word of God sounded 
 forth not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but 
 in every place (1 Thess. i. 8); in Bercea; in 
 Corinth, where he stayed two years and 
 achieved notable success; and in Ephesus. 
 On his third journey he came to Ephesus, 
 where he labored for three years with the 
 result that " all that dwelt in Asia heard the 
 word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks " 
 (Acts xix. 10). Then he went a second time 
 through Macedonia to Greece, where he spent 
 three months, returned through Macedonia, 
 and went by Troas and Miletus to Jerusalem 
 (xx. 1-16). Thus he could say (Rom. xv. 
 19) that " from Jerusalem round about unto 
 Illyricum — on the eastern shore of the 
 Adriatic — he had fully preached the gospel 
 of God." Besides, we know that he was at 
 some time in Crete with Titus (Tit. i. 5), 
 and that for two years he preached to all 
 that came to him in his own hired house at 
 Rome (Acts xxviii. 30, 31). It is entirely 
 possible, also, that between his first and 
 second imprisonments, if we suppose that 
 there were two imprisonments, he carried 
 
 198 
 
The Results of Apostolic Missions 
 
 out his purpose to visit Spain (Rom. xv. 24, 
 28). So much Paul seems to have accom- 
 plished for the spread of the knowledge of 
 the gospel in his own person and by word of 
 mouth, to say nothing of what he brought 
 about by letters or through the agency of his 
 lieutenants. Our information as to the mis- 
 sionary travels of the other apostles is not so 
 full. We know that Peter was at some time 
 in Babylon (1 Pet. v. 13), and though we al- 
 low no weight to the tradition which sends 
 Thomas to India, Bartholomew to Parthia, 
 Andrew to Russia, Philip to Scythia, and 
 Matthew to Ethiopia, we may be sure that 
 these were busy somewhere in preaching the 
 glad tidings. These are the facts by which 
 we must interpret the strong expression of 
 Paul in his letters to the Colossians (i. 23), 
 " Be not moved away from the hope of the 
 gospel, which ye heard, which was preached 
 in all creation under heaven. " 
 
 And what were the results of this wide- 
 spread evangelism ? How many converts 
 were made ? How many churches were 
 founded? At least partial answers can be 
 given to these questions. At the close of 
 the day of Pentecost three thousand be- 
 
 199 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 lieved (Acts ii. 41). This number increased 
 daily (ii. 47,) and after Peter had healed 
 the lame man the number of the men alone 
 grew to be five thousand (iv. 4). In conse- 
 quence of the judgment upon Ananias and 
 Sapphira, believers, we are told, "were the 
 more added to the Lord, multitudes both of 
 men and women " (v. 14). After the ap- 
 pointment of the deacons, " the word of the 
 Lord increased and the number of the dis- 
 ciples multiplied in Jerusalem exceedingly " 
 (vi. 7). We are not surprised, therefore, 
 that on the occasion of Paul's last visit to 
 Jerusalem, James and the elders should say 
 to him, " Thou seest, brother, how many 
 myriads there are among the Jews which 
 have believed " (xxi. 20). And as at Jeru- 
 salem, so elsewhere ; as among the Jews, so 
 also among the Gentiles. The account given 
 of Philip's labors in Samaria is that multi- 
 tudes both of men and women believed and 
 were baptized (viii. 6, 12). As the result of 
 his later efforts in the cities of the Judaean 
 coast-plain, and of the teaching and miracles 
 of Peter who followed him, all that dwelt in 
 the city of Lydda and the district of Sharon 
 and many inhabitants of Joppa are said to 
 
 200 
 
The Results of Apostolic Missions 
 
 have believed and turned to the Lord (ix. 
 35, 42). The original converts at Antioch 
 are spoken of as a great number (xi. 21). 
 The visit of Barnabas resulted in large addi- 
 tions to the church, and the joint labors of 
 Barnabas and Saul in still further expansion, 
 until not only these two, but Symeon, 
 Lucius, and Manaen found employment in 
 the Lord's work (xi. 24, 26, xiii. 1). In 
 Pisidian Antioch " many of the Jews and of 
 the devout proselytes followed Paul and 
 Barnabas " (xiii. 43) ; in Iconium " a great 
 multitude both of Jews and of Greeks be- 
 lieved " (xiv. 1) ; in Derbe the apostles 
 "made many disciples " (xiv. 21). The 
 effect of the labors of Paul and Silas in 
 Thessalonica was, as already noted, that 
 " some Jews were persuaded, and of the de- 
 vout Greeks a great multitude, and of the 
 chief women not a few " (xvii. 4), and 
 almost the same statement is made (xvii. 12) 
 with regard to their success in Beroea. We 
 are told that many of the people of Corinth, 
 when they heard Paul's preaching, believed 
 and were baptized (xviii. 8 ); and in his 
 second epistle to the Corinthians (i. 1) the 
 apostle greets not only the church in Cor- 
 
 201 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 inth, but also " all the saints that are in the 
 whole of Achaia." In Ephesus " many came 
 and confessed, and shewed their deeds " 
 (Acts xix. 18). The salutations with which 
 Paul closes his letter to the Romans (chap, 
 xvi.) are addressed not only to individual 
 disciples, as Epsenetns, Andronicus, and 
 Junia, but to " Aquila and Priscilla and the 
 church that is in their house," to "Asyn- 
 critus, Phegon, Hermes, Patrobas, and the 
 brethren that are with them," to "Philologus 
 and Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olym- 
 pas and all the saints that are with them." 
 
 And as there were many disciples, so there 
 were many churches. Attention has more 
 than once in these pages been called to the 
 fact that it was Paul's constant practice to 
 organize his converts into churches, with eld- 
 ers taken from their own number. Even on 
 his first tour he left such churches behind 
 him. And the eleven pursued the same pol- 
 icy. There was not only a church in Jeru- 
 salem (Acts viii. 1), but churches throughout 
 all Judaea and Galilee and Samaria (ix. 31). 
 There were churches in Syria and Cilicia (xv. 
 41), in Lycaonia (xvi. 5), in Phrygia and 
 Galatia (xviii. 23, 1 Cor. xvi. 1). Beside the 
 
 202 
 
The Results of Apostolic Missions 
 
 seven churches in Asia to whom John con- 
 veys messages in the Apocalypse, there were 
 churches in Troas (Acts xx. 7), in Colossse 
 (Col. i. 1), and probably in Hierapolis (Col. 
 iv. 13). There was not only a church in 
 \ Philippi (Phil. i. 1), and another in Thes- 
 salonica (1 Thess. i. 1), but there were 
 churches in Macedonia (2 Cor. viii. 1). And 
 so in Achaia ; there were churches in Corinth 
 (1 Cor. i. 2) and in Cenchrea (Rom. xvi. 1), 
 but Paul in the epistle to the Romans, writ- 
 ten from Corinth, sends greetings from " all 
 the churches of Christ" (Rom. xvi. 16). 
 The epistle to Titus (i. 5) makes it plain 
 that there were a number of churches in 
 Crete. Peter in his first epistle (v. 13) 
 sends greeting from the church in Babylon, 
 and while he inscribes his letter only to 
 "the elect who are sojourners of the Dis- 
 persion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia 
 and Bithynia " (i. 1), yet the tenor of his in- 
 structions to his fellow-elders (v. Iff.) shows 
 that the Jewish Christians in these regions 
 were organized into churches. The same 
 remark applies to the epistle of James (cf. i. 
 1, v. 14). 
 All these churches had been founded be- 
 
 203 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 fore the death of Paul. If that occurred in 
 A. D. 68, we may easily concur in the opin- 
 ion expressed by the writer of the article on 
 11 The Historical Geography of Missions " in 
 the Cyclopedia of Missions. " Of this we 
 can be sure," he says, " Christianity found a 
 lodgment in the first century from Spain to 
 Babylon (3,000 miles) and from Alexandria 
 to Rome. It had taken the whole Mediter- 
 ranean as its field of work. In 30 A. D. 
 there were 500 Christians ; in 100 A. D. 
 there were probably 500,000. A map of the 
 Christian world at this date containing only 
 certainties would not give a true impression 
 of the geographical extent of Christianity. 
 From the unexampled spread a little later we 
 must allow a large growth in these early 
 times before the great persecutions. The 
 map should show the routes Paul took on 
 his missionary journeys and on his way to 
 Rome. The cities of iElia Capitolina (Jeru- 
 salem after 70 A. D.), Samaria, Joppa, 
 Cassarea, Ptolemais (Acre), Tyre, Sidon, 
 Damascus, Salamis, Antioch, Tarsus, Derbe, 
 Lystra, Iconium, Antiochia, Hierapolis, Co- 
 lossse, Philadelphia, Sardis, Thyatira, Per- 
 gamum, Ephesus, Smyrna, Philippi, Thessalo- 
 
 204 
 
The Results of Apostolic Missions 
 
 nica, Beroea, Corinth, Cenchrea, and Rome 
 should be plainly marked. The following 
 cities and countries should be put down as 
 probable : Babylon, Edessa, Arabia Petrsea, 
 Alexandria, Cyrene, Ancyra (in Galatia), 
 Perga, Troas, Athens, Rhodes, Crete, Mileta, 
 Puteoli, Carthage, and Southern Spain. It 
 is possible that Dalmatia, Britain, and the 
 Rhone valley should be included." 
 
 But let us not misunderstand what is 
 meant. It is not meant that these cities and 
 countries were by 100 A. D. wholly Chris- 
 tian, but only that Christianity had gained a 
 foothold, churches had been founded in 
 them. A student in one of our theological 
 seminaries recently published a missionary 
 map of the world in which the regions domi- 
 nated by Protestant Christianity are indi- 
 cated in white, while the unevangelized 
 portions of the world are black. Should we 
 prepare in the same manner a map of the 
 Roman empire at the close of the first cen- 
 tury, there would not be a single patch of 
 white, but only a few points of light scattered 
 over the black field as the stars are scattered 
 on the face of the sky. 
 
 But our estimate of the results of first 
 
 205 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 century missions must not be merely quanti- 
 tative. Souls and churches weigh as well as 
 count ; and we have need to ask not only, 
 How many ? but also, Of what sort ? As to 
 outward condition, the converts of apostolic 
 missions were mostly of the lower and 
 middle classes in society. Though here and 
 there in the church were to be found those 
 who had rank or official station, like Manaen, 
 foster-brother of Herod the tetrarch, at An- 
 tioch (Acts xiii. 1), Erastus, the treasurer of 
 Corinth (Rom. xvi. 23), Sergius Paulus, pro- 
 consul of Cyprus (Acts xiii. 12), and Pudens 
 and Claudia at Rome (2 Tim. iv. 21), the 
 former perhaps the son of a senator, the 
 latter the daughter of a British king, (Cf. 
 Conybeare and Howson. Life and Epistles 
 of St. Paul h\, pp. 484, 485), yet for the most 
 part it was the poor of this world who were 
 found to be chosen of God to be rich in faith 
 and heirs of His promised kingdom. Paul 
 says (2 Cor. viii. 2) that the Christians of 
 Macedonia gave out of deep poverty, and the 
 very occasion of their liberality was the ne- 
 cessity of their yet poorer brethren in Judaea. 
 So also in Corinth. Not many wise or mighty 
 or noble were called, but the foolish, the 
 
 206 
 
The Results of Apostolic Missions 
 
 weak, the base, and the despised did God 
 choose for the purposes of His grace (1 Cor. 
 i. 26, 27). 
 
 But it is the inward rather than the out- 
 ward condition of the apostolic churches that 
 most concerns. And as to this point we have 
 much fuller information than as to their 
 number or size. The first chapters of the 
 Acts present us with a fairly detailed picture 
 of the church in Jerusalem ; the epistles of 
 Paul draw with a loving but impartial hand 
 the portraits of several of the churches 
 which he founded. The impression we get 
 from these sources of these churches, the 
 first fruits of apostolic missions, is, in many 
 respects a pleasing one. The spirit of unity 
 and mutual love that prevailed among the 
 members of the mother church in Jerusa- 
 lem, and that expressed itself in the volun- 
 tary surrender of private property for the 
 relief of those that were in need ; the joyous- 
 ness that uttered itself in daily praises ; the 
 ready submission to the teaching and guid- 
 ance of the apostles (Acts ii. 42-47) ; the 
 simple faith in Christ that was content to 
 answer the persecuting rage of the Jewish 
 authorities with humble prayer that God 
 
 207 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 would fulfill His promises and honor His Son 
 Jesus (iv. 23-31) ; the aggressive zeal that 
 led to the daily increase of their number and 
 the winning of a great company even of the 
 priests to the obedience of faith (vi. 7), and 
 made the outbreak of persecution, not a 
 reason for keeping silence, but an occasion 
 for the wider diffusion of the glad tidings 
 (viii. 4) ; the spiritual power that showed 
 itself, not only in the apostles, but in Stephen 
 and Philip and Barnabas and Judas and 
 Silas, and that not merely in the possession 
 of miraculous gifts, but in deep insight into 
 the Old Testament Scriptures, and power to 
 use them in convincing and convicting un- 
 believers and in instructing and edifying be- 
 lievers — in all this we may find abundant 
 evidence that the Saviour was honoring his 
 promise to be with his disciples in the work 
 he had laid upon them. 
 
 Or turn from Luke's narrative to Paul's 
 letters, those to the Corinthians, for example. 
 Let us remember what the Roman world was, 
 morally and spiritually, in that day, and that 
 of all this Corinth was, as it were, a perfect 
 epitome. Seat of government of the im- 
 portant province of Achaia; made by her 
 
 208 
 
The Results of Apostolic Missions 
 
 very situation between two seas a great com- 
 mercial entrepot ; patroness of the Isthmian 
 games, which once in three years drew to her 
 a vast assemblage from every part of the em- 
 pire ; chief centre of the voluptuous worship 
 of Yenus, goddess of love and pleasure; 
 rich, powerful, gay, corrupt — Corinth was 
 the Paris of the Roman world. And here 
 Paul had gathered a church. Its members 
 were not rich or educated or noble ; and not 
 only did they come from the lower ranks of 
 society, but from the deepest depths of 
 heathen corruption had some of them been 
 drawn. Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, 
 effeminate abusers of themselves with men, 
 thieves, coveters, drunkards, revilers, extor- 
 tioners — " such," says Paul, " were some of 
 you " (1 Cor. vi. 9-11). But now they were 
 washed, sanctified, justified, called to be 
 saints. Paul could give thanks for the grace 
 of God that had been given them in Christ, 
 for their rich endowment in every grace, in 
 utterance, in knowledge, in patient waiting 
 for the revelation of the Lord Jesus (i. 4-7). 
 He could praise them that they remembered 
 him in all things, and held fast the tradi- 
 tions, even as he had delivered them to them 
 
 209 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 (xi. 1). He rejoiced in the variety of mirac- 
 ulous gifts which they possessed. He could 
 boast of their liberality in contributing to 
 the relief of the poor Christians of Judaea 
 (2 Cor. ix. 2). They had shown their love to 
 him by praying for him continually (2 Cor. 
 i. 11). But the picture has its shadows. 
 These Corinthian Christians were, after all, 
 more carnal than spiritual, mere babes in 
 Christ (1 Cor. iii. 1). The church had been 
 split into factions (i. 10ff.). It had listened 
 to false teachers (2 Cor. xi. Iff.). Many of 
 its members were like Christian when he 
 emerged from the Slough of Despond; the 
 idolatries and immoralities of their heathen 
 life still clung to them (1 Cor. v. 1, vi. 18, x. 
 14rT.). Disorders had appeared in their wor- 
 ship. The charismata were made to minister 
 to personal vanity instead of to the edifica- 
 tion of the church (chap, xiv.); the Lord's 
 Table became a scene of gluttony and drunk- 
 enness (xi. 21). There were errors in doc- 
 trine ; some even denied that there had been 
 or could be any resurrection of the dead (xv. 
 12). 
 
 And what was true of Corinth was more 
 or less true of all the churches of which we 
 
 210 
 
The Results of Apostolic Missions 
 
 have any account in the pages of the New 
 Testament. Open whichever of Paul's let- 
 ters one may, there appears substantially the 
 same picture, of churches made up for the 
 most part of truly converted men and women, 
 exhibiting many of the graces of the Spirit, 
 strong in faith, abounding in love, full of 
 earnestness and zeal, and yet exposed to 
 grave perils through tolerance of false teach- 
 ers and acceptance of false doctrines, and 
 still more through conformity to the evil 
 world by which they were environed. Simi- 
 lar deductions must be made from the ac- 
 count of the state of the Jewish churches. 
 The epistle to the Hebrews shows us how 
 Judaism, with its ancient traditions and splen- 
 did ritual, still retained its attraction for the 
 Jewish Christians. The epistle of James 
 rebukes them for a dead orthodoxy, unchris- 
 tian regard for the rich and neglect of the 
 poor, grievous sins of the tongue, unseemly 
 strife, and the worldly mind. Peter, too, 
 while he praises the Jewish Christians of 
 Asia Minor for their faith, their love to a 
 Saviour they had never seen, and their affec- 
 tion for each other, thinks it necessary to 
 warn them again and again that they must 
 
 211 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 not fashion themselves according to their 
 former lusts in the days of their ignorance, 
 but that the time past of their lives must 
 suffice them to have wrought the desire of 
 the Gentiles, to have walked in lascivious- 
 ness, lusts, wine-bibbings, revelings, carous- 
 ings and abominable idolatries (1 Pet. i. 14, 
 ii. 1, 11, iv. 3). So that of Jewish and Gen- 
 tile converts alike we may say with Dr. Rufus 
 Anderson, so long secretary of the American 
 Board, " While the primitive converts were 
 remarkable as a class for the high tone of 
 their religious feelings and the simplicity and 
 strength of their faith, they were deficient in 
 a clear, practical apprehension of the ethical 
 code of the gospel" [Foreign Missions, p. 59). 
 But we should fail to do justice to the re- 
 sults of apostolic missions if we did not re- 
 gard the fruit borne in individual Christians 
 as well as in churches. That would be no 
 just estimate of the results attained in Jeru- 
 salem which should take no account of Bar- 
 nabas, that good man and full of the Holy 
 Ghost and of faith, who sold his land to bring 
 the price and lay it at the apostles' feet, who 
 was large-minded enough to believe that Saul 
 of Tarsus, so lately a persecutor, was now a 
 
 212 
 
The Results of Apostolic Missions 
 
 disciple (Acts xi. 24, iv. 36, ix. 27) ; and of 
 Stephen, full of faith and power, disputing 
 in the synagogues with a wisdom and dem- 
 onstration of the Spirit which his adversaries 
 could not withstand, burning with a holy zeal 
 that made his face like the shining face of an 
 angel but was yet yoked with so much of 
 His Master's temper that he could pray, as 
 he fell under the stones of the mob, " Lord, 
 lay not this sin to their charge ! " (vi. 8, vii. 
 54fT.) That would be a very inadequate 
 statement of Paul's success as a missionary 
 that should have nothing to say of Timothy, 
 who served with him in the gospel as a child 
 serveth a father (Phil. ii. 22) ; and of Epa- 
 phras, who for the work of Christ came nigh 
 unto death, hazarding his life to supply the 
 apostle's need (Phil. ii. 30); and of Titus, 
 whose earnest care for the welfare of the 
 church at Corinth Paul declares to have been 
 equal to his own (2 Cor. viii. 16); and of 
 Aquila and Priscilla, the tutors in Christ of 
 eloquent Apollos, the hosts of the apostle in 
 Corinth, who, wherever they lived — in Cor- 
 inth, Ephesus, Rome — had a church in their 
 house, who made not only Paul but all the 
 churches of the Gentiles their debtors by 
 
 213 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 saving his life at the peril of their own (Acts 
 xviii. 3, 26 ; 1 Cor. xvi. 9 ; Rom. xvi. 3-5). 
 
 And the mention of Priscilla, and the fact 
 that her name three times precedes that of 
 her husband, as it follows it three times, may 
 remind us of some new forces that began to 
 stir in heathen society as the results of apos- 
 tolic missions. Among these was a new esti- 
 mate of the dignity of woman, of the honor 
 to be paid her as joint heir with her husband 
 of the grace of life ; a new view of the 
 sacredness of marriage ; a new tenderness 
 for children ; a new care for the slave ; a 
 new sense of the nobility of labor. These 
 new views, feelings, practices appear in the 
 pages of the New Testament in part indeed 
 only as injunctions of the apostles to their 
 converts, but in part also, as the names of 
 Priscilla and Phoebe and Onesimus will sug- 
 gest, as results already beginning to be at- 
 tained within the limits of the church. 
 Their first effect upon the heathen world was 
 to excite wonder ; but in the end they were 
 to work so mightily as in themselves to jus- 
 tify the charge against the first missionaries 
 which serves in some sort as the text of this 
 chapter, " These that have turned the world 
 upside down have come hither also." 
 
 214 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE EESULTS OF MODEKN MISSIONS 
 
 When we undertake to make compari- 
 son between the results of apostolic mis- 
 sions, as outlined in the preceding chapter, 
 and those of modern missions, our first 
 thought is that such comparison is barred, 
 in view of the far longer time through which 
 modern missions have been prosecuted. It 
 was at the most seventy-five years between 
 Pentecost and the death of the Apostle John: 
 but two hundred and fifty years have passed 
 since Eliot began to preach to the Indians 
 about Boston ; it will soon be two hundred 
 years since Ziegenbalg and Plutschau set sail 
 for Tranquebar ; it is a hundred years and 
 more since Carey landed in Calcutta. Two 
 counter-suggestions, however, will immedi- 
 ately occur to us. One is that, as already 
 suggested, results that can be measured 
 quantitatively are neither the only nor the 
 chief things to be considered. If it can be 
 
 shown that modern missions have been effect- 
 
 215 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 ing the same kinds of results as those 
 achieved by apostolic missions, it will be a 
 question of far less moment whether they 
 have effected them in the same or a less or a 
 greater degree. The other suggestion is that 
 there are important differences in the condi- 
 tions under which the results of missions 
 were brought about in apostolic and in mod- 
 ern times respectively. To say this is not to 
 contradict what was said in an earlier chapter 
 with regard to the substantial similarity of 
 the conditions confronting the church of the 
 first century and that of our own time in 
 undertaking the work of missions. These 
 differences are not such as affect the kind of 
 the results attained, but only their degree. 
 For one thing, therefore, we may remember 
 that, in an important sense, the Roman world 
 was a unity, under one government, using 
 one language, dominated by one spirit. Such 
 was the intercourse between the various por- 
 tions of the empire, and, especially, such was 
 the relation of Jerusalem to the communities 
 of Jews to be found in every considerable 
 city, that a new religious movement intro- 
 duced at any point, but most of all at the 
 Jewish capital, would find its way with the 
 
 216 
 
The Results of Modem Missions 
 
 greatest facility to the farthest corners. Of 
 this fact the catalogue of districts repre- 
 sented in Peter's audience on the day of Pen- 
 tecost is a sufficient illustration. The world 
 as it was at the dawn of modern missions 
 had no such unity. So far as any effect upon 
 India was concerned, Eliot might almost as 
 well have been laboring on some other 
 planet ; the same might be said of the rela- 
 tion of the work of Carey and his associates 
 to the evangelization of Africa. Differences 
 of race, language, government, customs, as 
 well as vast distances, stormy oceans, and 
 mountain walls separated the great sections 
 of heathenism from each other ; and while 
 some of these barriers have since been re- 
 moved, others, as for example, that presented 
 by differences of language, remain to this 
 day. Nor must we forget how small was the 
 Roman empire in comparison with the field 
 of modern missions. It lay in a circle around 
 the Mediterranean, which furnished an easy 
 highway to every part of it. Its extreme 
 length from east to west was three thousand 
 miles, from north to south fifteen hundred. 
 Its total area was less than two million 
 square miles. Its population may have been 
 
 217 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 a hundred millions. On the other hand, it 
 is fifteen hundred miles from Peking to the 
 southern point of Hainan. The Chinese 
 empire alone contains five million square 
 miles, and has a population of three hundred 
 millions. It is further from the vale of 
 Kashmir to Cape Comorin than from the 
 cataracts of the Nile to the Danube. Hin- 
 dustan is larger by a third than the Roman 
 empire at its largest, and has a population 
 two and a half times as great. If we take 
 the map of the world and compare Asia 
 Minor or Achaia, the principal scenes of 
 Paul's missionary labors, with either of these 
 great mission-lands, not to say with Africa, 
 we find them to be in comparison about as a 
 postage stamp is to the envelope on which it 
 may be placed. 
 
 It may be said, too, that the disproportion 
 between primitive and modern missions with 
 regard to the time in which their results 
 were accomplished is apparent rather than 
 real.7 inasmuch as present-day results have 
 practically all been realized since Carey. 
 This is not to say that earlier laborers had 
 no success, but only that their successes were 
 not of a permanent sort. Nothing now re- 
 
 218 
 
The Results of Modern Missions 
 
 mains of what was won by Eliot and 
 Brainerd among the Indians, because the 
 Indians themselves were long since swept 
 away. There was the same lack of perma- 
 nence in the work of Ziegenbalg and 
 Schwartz and their successors in Tran- 
 quebar. Dr. Thompson, in his lectures on 
 early Protestant missions, tells us that while 
 in a hundred years there were, on that field, 
 perhaps fifty thousand baptisms, yet that the 
 delegation sent by the London Missionary 
 Society in 1821-9 reported that neither in 
 Tanjore nor Tranquebar was any vital religion 
 to be found {Protestant Missions, p. 206). 
 We are not far wrong, therefore, if we say 
 that whatever results modern missions pre- 
 sent to-day in the world-wide field have been 
 achieved within a hundred years. What has 
 been accomplished in China has been accom- 
 plished in half that time. Indeed it is less 
 than forty years since missionaries were per- 
 mitted to live or work outside the five 
 original treaty ports. So in Japan ; what 
 has been achieved is the fruit of but a single 
 generation of missionary effort. 
 
 Bearing these limitations in mind, let us 
 consider what have been the results of 
 
 219 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 modern missions, first, in securing the diffu- 
 sion of the Gospel. With how much less of 
 hyperbole than that of which Paul makes 
 use (Rom. x. 18) can we say to-day of the glad 
 tidings of salvation what David could say 
 only of the proclamation of God's glory in 
 the heavens, " Their line is gone out through 
 all the earth, and their words to the end of 
 the world " ! Thibet is the one land of the 
 earth, unless we add some of the interior dis- 
 tricts of Africa, that has not been, we will 
 not say entered, but permanently occupied in 
 the name of Christ ; and before the closed 
 gates of Thibet, even, the Moravian mission- 
 aries have been encamped for thirty years, 
 during ten of which they have been able to 
 throw the Thibetan New Testament over the 
 ramparts. A cordon of mission stations was 
 long since drawn around the Dark Continent, 
 and from the south, east, north and west the 
 witnesses of Christ have been pressing in 
 upon its mighty heart. When the "century 
 of missions " closed there were in Africa 
 1,350 stations and outstations, places in 
 which either a missionary resided or the 
 gospel was regularly preached under mis- 
 sionary supervision. 
 
 220 
 
The Results of Modern Missions 
 
 In China, Dr. Lawrence found that "for 
 about 2,000 miles along the coast, from the 
 Chinese wall to Hong Kong, runs a continu- 
 ous line of mission stations and outstations, 
 and from Shanghai, at right angles to this 
 coast line, and from the middle of it, for 1,500 
 miles up the Yang-tze river — the Mississippi 
 of China — runs another line with very few 
 breaks. From these two base-lines mission- 
 ary laborers move ever farther onward and 
 inward, into Shansi and Shensi, into Honan 
 and Hupeh and Hunan and Szechuan and 
 the other provinces " (Modern Missio?is in the 
 East, pp. 65, 66*). Already in sixteen out of 
 the eighteen provinces of the empire, and 
 from more than a thousand centres, the 
 sound of Gospel falls on Chinese ears. 
 
 In India in 1891 there were 4,200 stations 
 and outstations, in addition to which fifteen 
 out of forty societies at work in that land 
 reported 2,500 preaching places, where the 
 gospel was occasionally, though not regularly 
 ' proclaimed. There were in all heathen lands 
 in the same year 12,000 stations and outsta- 
 tions, and the careful writer of the article 
 on " Methods of Mission Work" in the 
 Cyclopedia of Missions tells us that the gos- 
 
 221 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 pel was regularly preached in at least 13,200 
 places. Add to these facts the spread of the 
 knowledge of Christian truth by means that 
 cannot be tabulated, by the informal preach- 
 ing that is everywhere and always going on, 
 for example, and by the printed page, and 
 we shall get some faint impression of the ex- 
 tent of the diffusion of the gospel through 
 modern missions. 
 
 Or we may gain this impression in another 
 way if we estimate the number of those who 
 are engaged in making the gospel known. 
 In a former chapter it was shown how evan- 
 gelism permeates and utilizes every other de- 
 partment of missionary activity. No apology 
 need be made, therefore, for including in the 
 number of those who make proclamation of 
 the gospel all missionary workers, and all 
 native assistants except teachers, though 
 many of these last also might rightly be ac- 
 counted preachers in the wide sense in which 
 we use that term. Estimating in this way, 
 we find that the heralding of the glad tidings 
 is one chief business of 6,000 men and women 
 in Africa, 11,000 in India, 3,000 in China, 
 1,000 in Japan. It may be admitted, indeed, 
 that this showing is far from what it should 
 
 223 
 
The Results of Modern Missions 
 
 be if the population of heathen lands is to 
 be overtaken with the gospel in this genera- 
 tion, or even in several generations, but it 
 may well be asked whether the diffusion of 
 saving truth in the Roman empire in the first 
 century was so great in proportion to the 
 population as that which has thus been 
 brought about, in some instances in a much 
 briefer period, in the great mission lands of 
 to-day. 
 
 Let us now inquire what has been the out- 
 come of modern missions in converts and 
 churches. The most striking difference be- 
 tween the apostolic and the modern mission- 
 ary enterprises in this regard is that while the 
 preaching of the apostles was at once effect- 
 ive for the conversion of souls, both among 
 Jews and among Gentiles, modern mission- 
 aries have won converts usually only after 
 long periods of waiting. Carey, for example, 
 had been seven years in India before he 
 baptized Krishna Pal, his first convert. Jud- 
 son lacked but a fortnight of six years of 
 missionary labor when he welcomed Moung 
 Nau, the first Burman to wear the yoke of 
 Christ. Morrison landed in Canton in Sep- 
 tember, 1807 ; it was in 1814 that he bap- 
 
 223 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 tizecl Tsai-A-Ko at the little spring near the 
 city of Macao. Samuel Marsden and his as- 
 sociates labored seventeen years in New 
 Zealand before they made a convert. The 
 Telugu mission of the American Baptists 
 was maintained for thirty years with so little 
 success that the Missionary Union again and 
 again debated the propriety of abandoning 
 it. These are to a certain extent typical in- 
 stances of the long patience with which the 
 modern missionary husbandman has had to 
 await the sprouting of the seed. This fact 
 is to some minds very disheartening. Some 
 earnest friends of missions do not hesitate to 
 avow the conviction that there must be some- 
 thing radically wrong in missionary methods 
 where progress in conversions is so slow. If 
 this phenomenon had been confined to a few 
 fields we might be tempted to concur in this 
 opinion ; but, as already said, it has been 
 rather the rule than the exception in modern 
 missionary experience. No doubt mistakes 
 of method have been made, Marsden in 
 New Zealand, for instance, confessed that he 
 had at first shared the error held by Hans 
 Egede when he went to Greenland, that civ- 
 ilization must precede Christianization. 
 
 224 
 
The Results of Modern Missions 
 
 But whatever mistakes may have been 
 made in individual instances, the true expla- 
 nation, we feel sure, is to be found in those dif- 
 ferences which have already been alluded to 
 between the Roman empire in New Testament 
 times and the great heathen lands of to-day. 
 The original apostles addressed their own 
 countrymen, speaking the same tongue, hold- 
 ing the same traditions, wearing the same 
 garb, presenting the same type of culture 
 with themselves. Paul, while he was a Jew 
 in race and religious training, was also a Ro- 
 man citizen, in many respects indistinguish- 
 able from the great mass of the men among 
 whom he labored, in Asia Minor, Macedonia, 
 and Achaia. The Greek tongue was a 
 vehicle for the spoken and written procla- 
 mation of the truth which has never been 
 surpassed in the history of human speech. 
 Modern missionaries, on the other hand, 
 have gone to nations utterly unlike them- 
 selves in race, customs, culture, religion. 
 They have been compelled to give weary 
 years to the study of strange tongues and to 
 the breaking down of the suspicions with 
 which the heathen have regarded them. 
 When they have acquired the language of 
 
 225 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 the people, they have in many instances 
 found it so crude, so debased in its forms of 
 thought, that only with the greatest pains, 
 and very imperfectly even then, could the 
 thoughts of God be expressed in it. Often, 
 too, the minds of the people have been im- 
 bued with bitter prejudice against the mis- 
 sionaries by the crimes of dishonesty, vio- 
 lence, and lust that have been committed by 
 men nominally representatives of the Chris- 
 tian religion. Modern missionaries have not 
 had either the gift of tongues or the power 
 of miracle to attract attention and attest the 
 truth of their message. We may remind 
 ourselves, too, that the apostles were not 
 everywhere equally successful. Paul had 
 small fruit of his labor among the Jews of 
 Pisidian Antioch or among the Gentiles of 
 Athens. And what is more than all in this 
 connection, " the times and seasons " now as 
 of old are kept in the Father's authority. 
 The same sovereign Lord who kept the hun- 
 dred and twenty waiting ten days before he 
 endued them with power, may choose to keep 
 His servants of the present age waiting as 
 many years and then at last to send the Pen- 
 tecost. 
 
 226 
 
The Results of Modern Missions 
 
 This has been, in fact, the history of many 
 a field. Missionaries have believed that it 
 would be so, and so it has been. When Jud- 
 son had been three years in Rangoon, he wrote 
 to Luther Rice, " If any ask what success I 
 meet with among the natives, tell them to 
 look at Otaheite, where the missionaries la- 
 bored for twenty years, and, not meeting 
 with the slightest success, began to be neg- 
 lected by the heathen world, and the very 
 name of Otaheite began to be a shame to 
 Christian missions; and now the blessing 
 begins to come. Tell them to look at Ben- 
 gal, also, where Dr. Thomas had been labor- 
 ing seventeen years (that is, from 1783 to 
 1800) before the first convert, Krishna, was 
 baptized. When a few converts are once 
 made, things will move on ; but it requires a 
 much longer time than I have been here to 
 make a first impression on a heathen people. 
 If they ask again, What prospect of ultimate 
 success is there? tell them, As much as there 
 is an almighty and faithful God who will 
 perform His promises, and no more. If this 
 does not satisfy them, beg them to let me 
 stay here and try it, and to let you come, 
 and to give us our bread ; or if they are un- 
 
 227 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 willing to risk their bread on such a forlorn 
 hope as has nothing but the word of God to 
 sustain it, beg of them, at least, not to pre- 
 vent others from giving us bread ; and, if we 
 live some twenty or thirty years, they may 
 hear from us again " {Life of Adoniram Jud- 
 son, pp. 92, 93). Such was the voice of good 
 cheer that came like the voice of Daniel from 
 the bottom of the den of lions. May it not 
 rebuke some who in sunlight and safety are 
 half-heartedly " holding the ropes " ? 
 
 And how was Judson's faith justified? 
 When he died, says his biographer, the Bur- 
 mese Christians numbered over seven thou- 
 sand, besides hundreds who had died rejoic- 
 ing in Jesus. He had finished the transla- 
 tion of the Bible. There were sixty-three 
 churches established among the Burmans 
 and Karens. These churches were under 
 the care of 163 missionaries, native pastors, 
 and assistants. The foundations of Chris- 
 tianity had been laid deep down in the Bur- 
 man heart where they could never be washed 
 away. Judson died in 1850. The latest re- 
 port (1897) of the Baptist Missionary Union 
 shows in Burmah twenty-five stations, 600 
 outstations, 187 native preachers, 500 other 
 
 228 
 
The Results of Modern Missions 
 
 native laborers, 640 native churches, more 
 than two-thirds of them self-supporting, and 
 36,054 church members, of whom 2,469 had 
 been baptized in a single year, and who out 
 of deep poverty were giving nearly $50,000 
 annually to the cause of Christ. What em- 
 phasis these figures give to the language of 
 the report from which they are taken : " We 
 are nearing the close of the third generation 
 of missionary occupation of this land. The 
 results speak for themselves. . . Christianity 
 has taken root here, and we believe that there 
 are districts where it would continue to flour- 
 ish and expand independent of foreign direc- 
 tion " ! 
 
 And as Judson pleaded to be allowed to 
 remain in Burmah, so did Mr. and Mrs. 
 Jewett plead for the maintenance of the 
 " Lone Star " mission to the Telugus of 
 India. This mission was founded, says Dr. 
 A. T. Pierson (Divine Enterprise of Missions, 
 p. 302fY.), in 1835. Mr. Jewett joined it in 
 1848. In 1853 Dr. Samuel F. Smith's poem, 
 "Shine on, lone star," gave it its name, and 
 secured for it a new lease of life. In 1865 it 
 was reinforced by Rev. J. E. Clough. In 
 1867 two converts had been baptized. But 
 
 229 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 in 1868 the two had become three-score and 
 ten. In 1870 the church had 709 members; 
 in 1871, 1,200; in 1872, 1,650; in 1875, 
 2,600; in 1876, 4,000. In one day in 1877 — 
 a veritable nineteenth-century day of Pente- 
 cost — 2,222 were baptized; in three weeks 
 of the same year, 5,400; in seven weeks, 
 8,600. At the end of this year the church 
 numbered 12,000. There are now in this 
 field about 55,000 adult Christians, organized 
 into 108 churches, nearly a third of which 
 are self-supporting, and ministered to by 267 
 native pastors and evangelists. 
 
 The Methodist Episcopal mission in India 
 having Bareilly as its centre was founded in 
 1856. In 1864 Dr. Butler reported that 161 
 converts had been gathered, and organized 
 into ten churches, with four native preachers. 
 In 1891, Dr. Scott of the same mission wrote 
 home, " We are baptizing, old and young, a 
 thousand a month." In 1893 there were 
 18,000 additions to the church, and in the 
 five years then closing, 45,000. The latest 
 printed report from this field (that for 1896) 
 shows, in the two conferences into which it 
 is now divided, a total adult membership of 
 66,500. The baptisms for the year were 
 
 230 
 
The Results of Modern Missions 
 
 more than 15,000, of whom nearly 10,000 
 were adults. The children gathered in sab- 
 bath-schools numbered 65,000, and the con- 
 tributions of the Christians to religious pur- 
 poses, in a year of great scarcity and im- 
 pending famine, amounted to 54,373 rupees 
 (115,000). And to say in a word what can 
 be put in the form of statistics, there were in 
 all heathendom when the century of missions 
 began less than 200 missionaries and 50,000 
 converts ; when it closed, there were 6,000 
 missionaries, 30,000 native evangelists, one- 
 sixth of whom were ordained, 5,700 churches, 
 and 750,000 living church-members, forming 
 the nucleus of a Christian community of not 
 less than 3,000,000. 
 
 Let us turn, however, to results that can- 
 not be expressed in figures. Acknowledge 
 as we must, that the converts and churches 
 of to-day are not perfect any more than were 
 those of New Testament times, they yet bear 
 favorable comparison with them. Liable, as 
 were their prototypes in Corinth and Ephesus, 
 to be drawn into sinful contact with the mire 
 of the pit from which they have been digged, 
 paining the hearts and disappointing the 
 hopes of their fathers in Christ by relapses 
 
 231 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 into their former lusts in the days of their 
 ignorance, how like they are to those who 
 come before us in the pages of the Acts and 
 the Epistles as the God-given seals of the 
 ministry of the apostles ! What warm love 
 do they show to those who have begotten 
 them in Christ Jesus through the gospel ! 
 How many have risked their lives for the 
 missionary, as Mebalwe did his to pluck 
 Livingstone out of the mouth of the lion ! 
 How many a shore has witnessed the tears 
 and heard the sobs of those who bade fare- 
 well to beloved fathers in Christ, tears not 
 less sincere than those that fell upon the 
 beach of Miletus ! How many a modern 
 Lydia has shown her gratitude to those who 
 have taught her the way of salvation by con- 
 straining them to make their home under 
 her roof ! How many a latter-day Paul has 
 had his band of loving followers, who have 
 ministered to his comfort, as Luke and Titus 
 and Timothy and Priscilla did to that of the 
 apostle to the Gentiles ! How many a self- 
 denying eloquent minister of Christ has come 
 forward to be to the missionary a fellow-la- 
 borer in the gospel, as Tschoop was to Zeis- 
 berger, as Prosad was to Carey, as Kothabyu 
 
 232 
 
The Results of Modern Missions 
 
 was to Juclson, as Sanquala was to Board- 
 man, and Gopee Nath Nundi to Duff and 
 his successor ! 
 
 Nor should we forget how, out of the 
 abundance of their joy and their deep pov- 
 erty, these native Christians have abounded 
 in the riches of their liberality; how they 
 have not shrunk back from martyrdom, but 
 in Madagascar, in Laos land, in Uganda, in 
 blood-stained Armenia, have faced the dun- 
 geon, the sword, the spear, the cord, the 
 stake, with prayers and praises on their lips, 
 as Stephen kneeled in sight of Saul of Tarsus, 
 as thousands in early days braved the lions ; 
 how to them, to their changed characters, 
 their pure lives, their simple testimony, their 
 missionary zeal, is due, as missionaries de- 
 light to testify, the largest part of what has 
 been won in heathen lands ; how long ago in 
 the Pacific islands, and more recently in Ja- 
 pan and China, they have begun to see be- 
 yond the limits of their own land and race 
 and tongue, and to feel the obligation to take 
 up and carry forward to other nations the 
 banner of the cross ; how more and more 
 they are proving themselves worthy of the 
 trust that missionaries are more and more 
 
 233 • 
 
Apostolic and Modern Missions 
 
 learning to repose in them, and showing that 
 the grace of God in them is a living power 
 that will grapple and solve the problems of 
 individual and corporate Christian life. 
 These are things which can only be hinted 
 at here, but which fill those who mark them 
 with holy joy, for in them lies the proof now 
 and for us, no less than when Pentecost was 
 still in the air and Peter and Paul led the 
 missionary church, that Christ is with His 
 people. 
 
 Nor is there need to speak at length of in- 
 direct results, of a new life beginning to 
 throb under ribs of death, of horrid customs 
 abandoned, of demoniac nations made to sit 
 clothed and in their right mind, of enormi- 
 ties of sin driven to hide themselves under 
 cover of darkness, of caste shattered, of 
 woman emancipated. The story of all this 
 is old, and it has just been told anew in full- 
 est detail in Dr. James S. Dennis' book, 
 Christian Missions and Social Progress. Nor 
 may we delay to tell what triumphs of divine 
 grace — of wisdom, love, zeal, self-denial, hu- 
 mility, patience, faith, courage — have been 
 wrought in missionary character, giving us 
 out of every church and every Christian land 
 
 234 
 
The Results of Modern Missions 
 
 a noble company who, like the elder Saul, 
 show head and shoulders above the people, 
 and, like the younger Saul, stand forth as rep- 
 resentative of the best that sanctified human 
 nature can be and do. Enough has been 
 said, we hope, to make it plain that modern 
 missions in their results, no less than in the 
 principles upon which they are based, the 
 problem which they have to solve, and the 
 methods which they employ, are a fair coun- 
 terpart of the missions of which the New 
 Testament gives account. It is good to be 
 assured that the modern missionary enterprise 
 is no longer an experiment, that a hundred 
 years of organized effort have proved its per- 
 manence, laid bare its principles, and tested 
 and approved its methods. But it is more to 
 know that it is a child of that which was 
 conceived on Olivet, which was brought to 
 birth at Pentecost, and which reached ma- 
 turity in the work of Peter and Paul and 
 John ; that it is heir to every encouragement 
 upon which the early church could lean ; and 
 that its prospects are in sober truth "as 
 bright as the promises of God." 
 
 235 
 
Selections from 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company's 
 
 Missionary Lists 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago : 63 Washington Strett 
 Toronto : 154 Yonge Street 
 
{MISSIONS, GENERAL 
 
 Christian Missions and Social Progress. 
 
 A Sociological Study of Foreign Missions. By Rev. James 
 S. Dennis, D.D. Students' Lecturer on Missions, Prince- 
 ton, 1893 and 1896. With over 100 Illustrations from 
 Photographs. 2 vols., 8vo, cloth, gilt top, each, $2.50. 
 " A new and notable book on foreign missions. Their influence 
 is studied from the view-point of the sociologist, and results of 
 fresh interest are brought forward. The Evangelistic aim is duly- 
 honored as paramount ; but special attention is devoted to the 
 social significance of mission work as introducing stimulating and 
 corrective ideals, giving promise of beneficent and far-reaching 
 changes in the status of non-Christian peoples. The author has 
 takea great pains to inform himself as to the social conditions of 
 heathenism. 
 
 Foreign Missions After a Century. 
 
 By Rev. James S. Dennis, D. D. Fourth edition. 8vo, 
 cloth, $1.50. 
 
 11 A broad, philosophical, and systematic view of the missionary 
 work in its relation to the living Church." — The Independent. 
 
 A Concise History of Missions. 
 
 By Rev. Edward Munsell Bliss, D.D. i6mo, cloth, 75c. 
 
 Strategic Points in the World's Conquest. 
 
 The Universities and Colleges as related to the Progress 
 of Christianity. By John R. Mott. With a Map. Fourth 
 thousand. i2mo, cloth, $1.00. 
 
 A New Programme of Missions. 
 
 A Movement to make the Colleges of all Lands Centers of 
 Evangelization. By Luther D. Wishard. Introduction by 
 Rev. R. S. Storrs, D.D. i6mo, paper, 25c; cloth ; 50c. 
 
 The Missionary Pastor. ! 
 
 Helps for Developing the Missionary Life of his Church, 
 By Rev. J. E. Adams. With Charts by R. J. Kellogg. 
 i2mo, cloth, 75c. 
 
 The Student Missionary Enterprise. 
 
 Proceedings of the Convention of the Student Volunteer 
 Movement, Detroit, 1894. 8vo, cloth, $1.50. 
 
 "Make Jesus King;." 
 
 The Report of the International Students' Missionary Con- 
 ference, Liverpool, 1896. 8vo, cloth, net, $1.50. 
 
(MISSIONS, GENERAL 
 
 The World's Missionary Conference Re- 
 ports. 
 
 Being the Report of the Centenary Conference on the Pre t- 
 estant Missions of the World, London 1888. Edited 1/ 
 Rev. James Johnston, F.S.S., Secretary of the Conference. 
 Two large 8vo vols., over 1,200 pages, cloth, net, $2.00. 
 
 The Holy Spirit in Missions. 
 
 By Rev. A. J. Gordon, D.D. Graves' Lectures, 1892. 
 i2mo, paper, net, 50c; cloth, gilt top, $1.25. 
 
 Medical Missions. 
 
 Their Place and Power. By Rev. John Lowe, Secretary 
 of the Edinburgh Medical Mission Society. Fourth edition, 
 i2mo, cloth, $1.50. 
 
 A Primer of Medical Missions. 
 
 By Rev. John Lowe. Outline Missionary Series. i6mo, 
 paper, 20c. 
 
 A Manual of Modern Missions. 
 
 Historical and Statistical Accounts of the Principal Prot- 
 °,stant Missionary Societies in America. Great Britain, and 
 the Continent of Europe. Illustrated. By Rev, J. T. 
 Gracy, D.D. i2mo, cloth, $1,25. 
 
 Open Doors. 
 
 Hints about Opportunities for Christian Work in all parts 
 of the World. i6mo, paper, 15c. 
 
 The Greatest Work in the World. 
 
 The Evangelization of all Peoples in the Present Century. 
 By Rev. A. T. Pierson, D.D. i2mo, paper. 15c. 
 
 The Evangelization of the World. 
 
 A Record of Consecration, and an Appeal. By B. Broom- 
 hall, Secretary of C. I. M. Illustrated. 4to, net, $1.00. 
 
 Modern British Missions. 
 
 With References to American Missions. By Rev. E. P. 
 Rice, Rev. J. P. Hobson, and others. Edited by Rev. 
 R. Lovett, M.A. Present Day Primer Series. i8mo, 
 flexible cloth, net, 40c. 
 
 "Do Not Say;" 
 
 Or, The Church's Excuses for Neglecting the Heathen. 
 By J. H. Horsburgh, M.A. i2mo, paper, net, 10c. 
 
MISSIONS, MISCELLANEOUS. 
 
 Korea and Her Neighbors. 
 
 By Isabella Bird Bishop, F.R.G.S. Illustrated. 8vo, 
 
 cloth, $2.00. 
 A record of travel and residence in Manchuria, Eastern Siberia 
 and Korea. Mrs. Bishop reached the last-named country just after 
 its invasion by the Japanese, and remained in or near it for nearly 
 two years. 
 
 Among the Tibetans. 
 
 By Isabella Bird Bishop, F.R.G.S. Abundantly Illus- 
 trated. Second edition, i2mo, paper, 35c; cloth, 
 
 $1.00. 
 "This volume is as fresh and striking as was Miss Isabella 
 Bird's first notable venture, the much appreciated ' Unbeaten 
 Tracks in Japan. "' — The N. Y. Times, 
 
 Lady Missionaries 
 
 In Foreign Lands. By Mrs. E. R. Pitman. Missionary 
 Biography Series. Illustrated. Fifteenth thousand. 
 i2mo, cloth, 75c. 
 
 Missionary Heroines 
 
 In Eastern Lands. By Mrs. E. R. Pitman. Missionary 
 Biography Series. Illustrated. 121110, cloth, 75c. 
 
 Letters from Armenia, 
 
 By Dr. J. Rendel Harris and Helen B. Harris. With 8 
 Illustrations from Photographs, and a Map. Prefatory let- 
 ter from Mr. Gladstone. i2ino, cloth, $1.25. 
 *' In many respects the most illuminating account of the state 
 of affairs in Armenia that has been given to the public since the 
 fearful massacres of the past two years." — The Review of Re- 
 views. 
 
 An Intense Life. 
 
 A Sketch of the Life and Work of Rev. Andrew T. Pratt, 
 M.D., Missionary of the A. B. C. F. M. in Turkey, 1852- 
 1872. By Rev. George F. Herrick. i6mo, cloth, 50c. 
 
 In the Path of Light Around the World. 
 
 A Missionary Tour. By Rev. Thomas H. Stacy. Pro- 
 fusely Illustrated. Small 4to, cloth, $2.00. 
 
 Robert Whitaker McAll, 
 
 Founder of the McAll Mission in Paris. A Fragment by 
 Himself, a Souvenir by his Wife. With Portraits and 
 other Illustrations. 8vo, cloth, $1.50. 
 
Princeton 
 
 heologica 
 
 Seminary Libraries 
 
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