■- ; ' ■ God’s grant to the gentiles ANNUAL SERMON BEFORE THE American Board of Commissioners FOR Foreign Missions DELIVERED AT MADISON, WISCONSIN, OCTOBER 10, 1894 BY THE REV. T. EATON CLAPP, D .D. Pastor of the First Congregational Church. Manchester, N. H. PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD I SOMERSET STREET BOSTON GOD’S GRANT TO THE GENTILES ANNUAL SERMON American BEFORE THE Board of Commissioners FOR Foreign Missions MADISON, DELIVERED AT WISCONSIN, OCTOBER 10, 1894 BY THE REV. T. EATON CLAPP, D.D. Pastor of the First Congregational Church. Manchester. N. H. PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD 1 SOMERSET STREET BOSTON BEACON PRESS : THOMAS TODD, PRINTER, 7-A BEACON ST., BOSTON. GOD’S GRANT TO THE GENTILES. “And when they heard these things, they held their peace, AND GLORIFIED GOD, SAYING, THEN TO THE GeNTILES ALSO HATH GOD GRANTED REPENTANCE UNTO LIFE.” — Ac/S xi : l8. Christian Brethren : The pulpit of our beloved American Board is sacred for its associations. The occupant is compassed about by a cloud of venerated and glorified witnesses, who hold him in full survey. For more than eighty years one and another has prayed to be sent to you with a message moved by the Holy Ghost, and so profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in the righteousness of missions. We are, so we believe, commissioners of the very heart of the work of the Lord — work which angels would love to perform. “If Christianity is heroic life, the missionary work is heroic Christianity.” No men ever more needed wisdom or more felt their insufficiency to fit foreign timber into the building of God. No men ever craved more to be without shame when the awful fire test shall be submitted. May the infinite Maker and Builder speak to us on this latest anniversary occasion, so that as men of God we may be thoroughly furnished for the work of our hands in this new time ! May all the mighty motives that inspired and constrained the select master builders of sacred story — “the recompense of re- ward,” “the unseen and eternal,” “Him who is invisible,” “the Son of man standing at the right hand of God,” “the love of Christ” — salute our uplifted eyes as we gird up our loins for another missionary tour around the world! 4 GOD S GRANT TO THE GENTILES. Nor do we forget our representative character. Loyal to the fathers of this venerable Board, we eschew, as Job eschewed evil, the most ragged remnant of aught save an obedient trusteeship for the brotherhood of churches, whose plant the Board is and evermore shall be. Churches, not boards, are collectively the body, the bride, of Christ. U2^on her the Holy Ghost fell in the radiant Christian beginning ; in her he abides ; and forth from her must flow the potency of missionary life. Boards are but methods, not entities. The churches are our Antioch ; corporate members. Prudential Commit- tee, missionaries, are their Paul and Barnabas. Upon us the churches lay directed hands, to whom also we return with report. We are the river bed, the channel, through which flows the crystal river of their beneficence. We are, to use Paul’s striking figure, the earthern casket to carry their intrusted gospel treasures to the Gentile sons and daughters of God. Christ keep us from becoming lords of the heritage ; keep us flexible, ojDen channels, willing and loyal servants of transportation ! Perish all methods that suggest as- sumptions or aught faithless to the sentiment dear to every Congregational heart, “The American Board, the servant of the churches, for Jesus’ sake!” In such mood we reverently handle this word of his Spirit. It is a conclusion of our ai^ostolic fathers — a con- clusion most revolutionary in its effect uj^on their Christian minds. It is a conclusion accepted reverently, candidly, joyously. “They held their peace, and glorified God, say- ing, Then to the Gentiles also hath God granted repent- ance unto life.” Hostile reluctance before it fled away like morning mist, and at a single stroke they saw with welcome that the privileges of the new kingdom, like the command of God, were “wide as the world.” This exjiansion of vision was the more possible be- cause their previous reluctance was not of the will and heart, but of the head. Theirs was not the hesitation of god’s grant to the gentiles. 5 a narrow and ungenerous indifference, but of ignorance of the divine purpose. Hard-headedness is always more hopeful than hard-heartedness, but no man ever so Chris- tian-hearted became a good neighbor until he had located his neighbor with the theodolite of the Good Samaritan. Whether or not our Lord while on earth restricted the ‘‘kindness of God toward man” to the lost sheep of the house of Israel for the same reason that Moses loosened the marriage bond — “even the hardness of their hearts” — certainly he did so restrict, and to that extent the infant Church could not understand his speech when, at the moment of his coronation, he commissioned them to compass sea and land with his gospel. Both apostles and brethren thought they were doing God’s service by discipling within the Jewish radius. Cornelius of Csesarea was the pioneer, the Columbus, to discover for the Gentile world the new continent of grace and truth ; or, to vary the figure, Cornelius made the test case. Believing that a dying and risen Saviour gave the repenting and believing Gentile also a right to the tree of life and entrance through the gates of the city, he appealed to the supreme court for a ruling to that effect and won his suit. The middle wall of parti- tion was thrown down, and to the consciousness of the infant Church — lo ! the field was the world. Let us of Gentile ancestry cherish the name of Cornelius in ever- lasting remembrance ! Little did Peter know the use he was soon to make of the keys of the kingdom nor the resplendent ministry he put in peril on that cold morning of his profane denial in the high priest’s court. It only remained for a stroke of lightning from the third heaven outside of Damascus, a little later on, to complete what the prayer of the dying Stephen began, and Paul, the immortal agent for this larger hope, was ready to commence the foreign mission- ary era of the Christian Church — a commencement whose radiance still enlightens the world. 6 god’s grant to the gentiles. Sad addition to sacred history is it to write that even then Jerusalem should so far remain under the old blight as again “ not to know her day,” and Antioch, rather than she, became the mother missionary church. Must this chapter of history, this chapter of reluctance in the life of the first church, like so many others, re- peat itself ? Does only the timid and despondent spirit see in disturbed vision a church alike reluctant before the present Gentile missionary problem, a disposition to lock the door against the non-Christian portion of our race 1 Dr. Dennis, in his lecture on the “ Present Day Conflicts of the Foreign Mission Field,” heads the list of “conflicts inevitable in aggressive efforts at reform” with “a self-centered Christianity in the Church at home.” Will not a concensus of American pastors reveal the existence of a formidable and growing minority in our churches avowing with hesitant and sullen speech, “ We do not believe in foreign missions } ” The pastor’s prayer- ful appeal is met by a cold counter-congregational wave, and the church, like its Master, cannot do many mighty works “because of their unbelief.” These pastors sadly wonder “whereunto this thing will grow.” Blessed be the Lord, these reluctant brethren — for whom He died — are in a minority to whom the majority cannot give place. No, not for an hour! But in the presence of the sublimest wish and loftiest command of Him whose wish and command are like Himself “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” the majority cry out, not for victory only, but for unity. In the presence of incredible pagan necessity and misery Christ’s followers must be of one mind and one heart. They must all hang together or all hang separately when the Son of man shall come in his glory. Nor may these pastors fondly hope that this upas tree of reluctance stretches its roots no farther than the mushroom village of Doctrinal Dispute. It exists in congregations where that wound is healed, and where over its scar has grown the flesh of a god’s grant to the gentiles. 7 little child. Congregations contain it which paid as little regard to our recent theological fisticuffing as the waves to the royal mandate of Canute. Men and brethren, what shall we do ? O, for a fresh message from the Lord ! a tidal w^ave of revelation to sweep away this unbelief and cause the unified brother- hood of the Church to hold their peace and glorify God before the flaming conviction of our fathers, “To the Gentiles a/si? hath God granted repentance unto life!” Perhaps we do not need a new revelation. What holy men of old wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost may be “ profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness ” and able thoroughly to furnish today’s men of God for missions. Was not the very Scripture before us written for example upon whom the end of this missionary age has come ? and, re- stated in faith, may it not repeat the first miracle of con- viction ? In the hope of this consummation, so devoutly to be wished, let us open the casket and take out its apple of gold. First, it contains a declaration of their own precious faith, “God hath granted repentance unto life.” To the Gentiles also, no less, no more, than to their own grateful and joyous selves, hath God granted repentance unto life. “ Hath God granted.” O, not merely humanitarian in origin was this new gospel movement across the face of time and which had caught them in its radiant train ! Our apostolic fathers were too near the divinity that originated their Christianity to imagine its divorcement from God, its author. The recipients of this revelation were the men whose eyes had seen and whose hands had touched the Word of life. What they had worth living for, dying for, and hoping for for their children was a fresh grant from God. Every statement of it began with the Divine name. “God so loved the world.” Their redemp- tion called for a narrative in terms no less august than their creation. They felt themselves to be the honored 8 god’s grant to the gentiles. creatures of a divine undertaking ; they were workers together with God. “He, the High and Holy One,” had come among them bearing in his white hands an affluent extension of privilege, a heavenly grant, far in., advance of what had glorified their creation. Made a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor, they were now the redeemed sons and daughters of God. Their traditions contained Alexander’s conquests, the splendor and irresistible awfulness of which filled the world and bore all before and under — a miracle of time. The majestic, iron Roman movement then held them in its world-wide grip. These men, eyewitnesses of colossal human things, were now sharers in an undertaking of God — the God of Alexander and Caesar as well as of Abraham, Moses, and David. They were the grateful and adoring beneficiaries of a divine grant. Like Jacob they awoke to find God in that place, with designs of unfathomable grace upon them. This new bush also was aflame with God. Nor were the conte7its of the grant out of keeping with its adorable Author. “ Repentance unto life.” The first word recalls that pathetic bit of biography about Esau. He sold his birthright for a profanely paltry price and could find no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears. Under this lifted curtain we see the elder brother repenting at leisure. He walks blinded by scalding tears all about the unhappy transaction of that fatal day, seeking a loophole in the compact through which to recall his fool’s play ; but he found no place of repentance. But these fathers were born on a kindlier day — a day of the Son of God, wherein the Esaus, traders in infinitely worthier birthrights, were granted repentance, privilege to recall bad bargains, and to resume their for- feited heirship of their Father. “ Repentance unto life." The last word carried them to the “beginning,” to the most coveted tree in the gar- den, outside of whose closed and guarded gates the race god’s grant to the gentiles. 9 wandered, Esau-like, in tears. A^oto the race is greeted with the glorious gospel of the blessed God. The only begotten Son hath secured their right to enter in through the gates into the garden — -the garden now grown to be a populous city in virtue of the mighty multitude of re- pentant and believing Esaus admitted, whose tears are all wiped away — and to the tree of life, of which if a man eat he shall live forever in the paradise of God. But these early Christian fathers belonged to the class who with hope of Christ on/y in this life were of all men most miserable. In this life only, after visions of the un- seen and eternal They could no more be satisfied with the best of the seen and temporal ; as well ask Columbus to be contented with the Mediterranean, with its shore range always in sight, after sailing the broad Atlantic in company only with the sun and stars. This was the kingdom of Israel revised by Jesus Christ — the inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and un- fading in the heavens — a living hope of which the resur- rection of our Lord had begotten in their own precious faith. And now the scales have fallen from their eyes ; the mists have rolled away; and lo! every Gentile — alien and stranger to the commonwealth of Israel — is by God’s grant a possible fellow citizen and member of the house- hold of God, joint heir to a like precious faith. Erom that day forward these fathers were wide-eyed men. The kingdom was as a cloudless June night sky viewed through a telescope. They know now why their blind hearts burned within them as their Lord talked to them on Olivet about preaching the gospel in all the world. You reluctant brethren of the modern Church of Christ, who daily bless the God and Father for your liv- ing hope, come upon this mount of divine vision! Be- hold the transfiguring glory of your estate in Christ Jesus — this inexpressible grant. Let the burning light of the conviction that smote the fathers to the earth fall upon you. Make your admission in like silence and glorifica- lO god’s grant to the gentiles. tion. “Then hath God granted” to the American pagan, the live Indian, the narcotized Chinaman, the licentious Japanese, the “unspeakable Turk,” the insufferable Brah- man, the creeping Pariah, the man-eating Islander, the fetich-groveling African — to man, thy flesh and blood brother, anywhere, everywhere, steeped and foul in the incredible darkness of a Christless night — hath God granted repentance unto life, granted the unspeakable privilege with yourselves of entering into the kingdom of his dear Son. Compel your narrow lips to say it once, and be redeemed from your unneighborly unbelief. “ God hath granted ” it. He doth not plead with his Church to grant it. Far up and back in heaven, among the ineffable eternities, before the mountains were brought forth or ever He had formed the earth and the world, when we all lay unformed in the loins of the formless void, the council was held, the foreordination took place. Infinite love fashioned the solitary decree. It rested in divine patience and confidence for its justification upon Calvary. There on the mount, outside the city’s gates, it received its everlasting vindication. If God hath made the grant, what then } Given the heavenly vision, what is the task ? On the housetop at Joppa, Peter has his dream. Di- vine Wisdom selects his method of revelation and suc- ceeds. The four-footed beasts and the fowls were a parable understood by the dreamer. When Peter was before Cornelius and his company in Caesarea he said, “Unto me hath God showed that I should not call aujy 7nan common or unclean.” We read that while he pon- dered on the vision “ behold, the men of Cornelius stood before the gate.” The vision and the men were in con- junction. Peter must go with the men. No enterprise was ever more carefully conducted by its head. Before Cornelius, St. Peter sees but one duty — “to preach Christ.” He performs his duty, and soon the infal- lible sign of divine adoption is made. The Spirit falls god’s grant to the gentiles. II on the Gentile company as on the fathers in the be- ginning. It were withstanding God to withhold bap- tism. Given the vision of the divine right of the Gentiles to the privileges of the kingdom, the task of disciple-making among them followed as the day follows the night. Who shall abrogate this relationship of visions and tasks ? Because we are the Church of Christ we may not draw the easy inference that the door of his kingdom is merely to be left hospitably open, or to write over it “ Welcome ; ” or, as a sufficient measure of hospitality, to send into Gentile winter St. Bernard dogs, with food and drink tied about their necks. It is no mark of heavenly grace that we abstain from playing the flaming angel before the gate. By confession we are followers of him who from a child was about his “Father’s business.” We are sheep to be housed from the wolves, but more than sheep. We are like the kissed and feted younger son, who found enforced at home the abiding law of the homestead — the law that during all the years of his prodigality required service of the elder brother without so much as the bonus of a kid. The incarnation was not an exceptional event, in kind to remain sui generis throughout the Christian centuries, but one to be in measure reproduced in every follower. We are not even diminutive Christs. Let that spirit be in us that does not look upon equality with Christ a prize to be striven for. “ God hath highly exalted ” us and given us the name disciple, above every other name but His; reproduced for the same sacred purpose, namely, to do the Father’s will and work on earth. “My Father worketh hitherto and I work,” is the motto of every true son of God. Imagine an idle Lord before you justify an idle disciple. It ought to be the Christian’s meat, as it was Christ’s, to do the will of Him that sent him and finish his work. We are workers together with God. Our works are they that will follow us, and from our 12 god’s grant to the gentiles. labors we are to rest. Science seems to confirm this doc- trine of Christian responsibility. “Whenever the scheme was planned it must have been foreseen that the time would come when the direct- ing part of the course of evolution would pass into the hands of man. A spectator of the drama for ages, too ignorant to see that it was a drama and too impotent to do more than play his little part, the discovery must sooner or later break upon him that Nature meant him to become a partner in her task and share the responsi- bility of the closing acts. It is not given him as yet to bind the sweet influences of Pleiades or to unloose the bands of Orion. In part only can he make the winds or waves obey him or control the falling rain, but in larger part he holds the dominion of the world of lower life. He exterminates what he pleases ; he creates and he de- stroys ; he changes ; he evolves ; his selection replaces natural selection; he replenishes the earth with plants and animals according to his will. But in far grander sphere and in infinitely profounder sense has the sover- eignty passed to him, for by the^ same decree he finds himself the guardian and the arbiter of his personal des- tiny and that of his fellow men. The molding of his life and of his children’s children in measure lies with him. Through institutions of his creation, through parlia- ments, churches, societies, schools, he shapes the path of progress for his country and his time. The evils of the world are combated by his remedies; its passions are stayed, its wrongs redressed, its energies for good or evil directed by his hand. P'or unnumbered millions he opens or shuts the gates of happiness and paves the way for misery or social health. Never before was it known and felt with the same solemn certainty that man, within bounds which none can pass, must be his own maker and the maker of the world. For the first time in history not individuals only, but multitudes of the wisest and noblest in every land, take home to themselves and un- god’s grant to the gentiles. 13 ceasingly concern themselves with the problem of the evolution of mankind. Multitudes more — philanthropists, statesmen, missionaries, humble men and patient women — devote themselves daily to its practical solution, and everywhere some, in a Godlike culmination of altruism, give their very lives for their fellow men.” Here is an illustration of Christian responsibility. Said A. M. Mackay, that noble missionary, in his diary while in Berlin in May, 1874, “This day last year Liv- ingstone died — a Scotchman and a Christian, loving God and his neighbor, in the heart of Africa. ‘ Go thou and do likewise.’ ” And in December of the next year, in a letter to the Church Missionary Society, “My heart burns for the deliverance of Africa, and if you can send me to any of those regions which Livingstone and Stanley have found groaning under the curse of the slave-hunter I shall be very glad.” Pardon this abiding in the alphabet of our Christian convictions, but the white light is pouring down upon the foundations. Nothing is allowed to be merely because it has long been, or been enshrined in the reverence of man. The Church is not merely a city set on a hill, but is herself bathed in the blaze of a flaming scrutiny. Her- self and her methods are under the glare of the search light. Never has the world been so exacting of the Church ! never such large things awaited her doing ! Never before has the Church so needed to return to her original and study her primary lessons! Let us ourselves be most critical. The colossal task of the Redeemer grows clearer. His is not a flight through the ages drawing the fleeing households into his train, impelled thither by rumors of fast-following evil. An aggressive campaign is the Lord’s. He never sounds the retreat. He is the prophet-king who contemplates his enemies under his feet. His Church shall yet see, not a vast solitude of peace — a graveyard, within the trenches of which lie buried the armies of hell 14 god’s grant to the gentiles. — but the city of God, the New Jerusalem, come down out of heaven ; the tabernacle of God among men ; all the splendid conditions of heaven fulfilled on earth ; a race, individual and social, animated by eternal life — a celestial civilization. The Redeemer must reign until he has done this. His headquarters are for the time in the sky ; the earth is the scene of the enterprise. His Church is his agent, so far as we know. At Pentecost the Spirit sat only on the infant Church. It was to do greater works than its founder. We know of no crop of heavenly things growing in any field other than that plowed, sowed, and watered by Christian husbandmen. When Peter flinched, the Lord had no substitute. “ On the eve of his martyrdom, as it is said, the friends of the apostle obtained the means for his escape. They pleaded the desolation of the Church. He may have remembered his deliverance by the angel from Herod’s prison. And so he yielded to their prayers. The city was now left and he was hastening along the Appian way, when the Lord met him. ‘ Lord, whither goest thou ? ’ was his one eager question ; and the reply fol- lowed, ‘I go to Rome to be crucified again for thee.’ “Next morning the prisoner was found by the keep- ers in his cell ; and St. Peter gained the fulfillment of the Lord’s words and followed Him even to the cross. “The tradition may be only a thought clothed in an outward dress, but it gathers up with singular power and beauty the sum of what has been said. If that Divine Figure rises up before us in the crisis of our trial, service will be transfigured by the glory of Him who came not to be ministered unto but to minister. So looking to Christ, we shall come to understand little by little the meaning of His command, sufficient alone to move, to guide, to support, ‘ Follow me ! ’ ” The Christian waits to know what God has for him to do; the Christian does what God has for him to do. Like Luther he can do no other, God help him ! It is not safe for him to violate his conscience. god’s grant to the gentiles. 15 VVe are confused by the clash of many methods, the calls of many pressing righteousnesses. Having set our faces toward social Christianity, the manifold relations of men pressing for reconstruction stagger our faith in Christ’s old way of converting men for the sake of con- verting society — the way after which we have fashioned our missionary enterprises. Yet, before the Lord, we are making all things after “the pattern shown on the mount ; ” and we trust by this primitive gospel outfit to see paganism go under the King’s feet, with all its moral and social miseries, through the personal conversion of its children and by supplying her converted children with the affluences of a Christian civilization. Nor may we forget in the meantime to eradicate the long-lingering heathenisms tolerated in that so-called Christian civiliza- tion. If the time for great social reconstruction at home has come, please God we can accomplish both, Christ strengthening us. The men of God are thoroughly fur- nished unto every good work. We must obey God rather than men. So we take our place on the frontiers of today’s Gentiles, in line with the whole dear brotherhood of Christ’s Church, shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace and the sword of the Spirit in hand. Let us go forward singing the Battle Hymn, “ He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” We dare hold no other relation to our heavenly vision without being disobedient. “ God hath granted to the Gentiles also repentance unto life.” After the man from Macedonia had preferred his midnight plea St. Luke writes, “And when he had seen the vision straightway we sought to go forth, concluding that God hath called us to preach the gospel unto them.” Is not this the conclusion of the whole matter.-' What special indebted- ness had Paul to Greek and barbarian that we have not ? Let tis straightway seek to go, also ; but, going, depend 1 6 god’s grant to the gentiles, not on mere humanitarian impulses, on the gaping wounds of the half-dead foreign neighbor, not even on our confi- dence in Christ’s missionary methods. We read that the Lord at the end of the supper said, “That the world may know that I love the Father , . . Arise, let us be going.” In the supreme moment, not his love for men, but for the Father, was his inner- most resource. Even so this “grant of God” to the Gentile must be supreme missionary motive. Our brother man has a divine right to the tree of life, to enter in through the gates of the city. The most un- clean heathen hidden in the black heart of Uganda is like the Waldensian girl of blood-stained tradition. On her way to the hidden chapel the dragoon challenges, “ Whither away, my lass ? ” She answers : “ I am going to my Father’s house. His Son is dead. The will is to be read today and I am in it.” And, brethren beloved, we must let him know that he is in it. We must per- suade him, even as our fathers persuaded us, to accept his patrimony.