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THE 
 
 MISSIONARY CHARACTER 
 
 AND 
 
 OBLIGATION OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 By Key. John K. Allen. 
 
 I have been asked to speak for a limited time upon 
 the Missionary Character and Obligations of the 
 Church. I do not need to show you how large the 
 theme is to which I am to direct your attention for a 
 few minutes, and it will be plain to all that I cannot 
 say all nor even a large part of what belongs to such 
 a subject as this. 
 
 Let me direct your thoughts to two or three points 
 which most naturally present themselves when we 
 consider this theme. 
 
 And in the first place the Missionary Character and 
 Obligation of the Church is indicated in its very 
 charter. We must always start here. On the even- 
 ing of the first Lord’s Day, Jesus stood in the midst 
 of the disciples, and having given them his saluta- 
 tion, said: “As the Father hath sent Me, even so 
 send I you.” This was not addressed to all the apos- 
 tles nor to the apostles alone. One of the eleven was 
 absent, and others were there besides the apostles. 
 The commission was given to the Christian society 
 and not to any special order of men. 
 
 Later, and near the time of the ascension, He meets 
 the disciples by appointment, from the other side the 
 cross and the grave, upon a mountain in Galilee. 
 
2 
 
 MISSIONARY CHARACTER AST) 
 
 There are not only the twelve, but five hundred 
 brethren present at once. To them He declares the 
 extent, method and duration of His sovereignty, and 
 gives the command which has never been recalled: 
 “ Go ye, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.” 
 It is the fulness of the times. All things are now 
 ready, and the seed which has been ripening in the 
 little garden spot of Israel is now to be scattered 
 throughout the world. He claims all peoples and 
 all time for His own. Now here are the orders which 
 Christ has laid upon His Church. His command is 
 to go — to go to all nations — and to keep on going un- 
 til the end of the world. A church which is not a 
 missionary is a disloyal church, and is false to its 
 charter. A charter includes two things — privileges, 
 and duties as a consequent. The privileges of the 
 Church are the presence of Christ with His power in 
 it. “ All authority has been given Me in heaven and 
 on earth.” Its duties spring from that. “ Go ye, 
 therefore , and disciple, for I am with you all the 
 days.” If a church will not obey these commands, 
 there will be lacking the tokens of Christ’s presence 
 with it. A church without the missionary spirit 
 must be a declining one. Even history shows that 
 the missionary church is the strong, living and grow- 
 ing one. 
 
 The early disciples did not attempt to gainsay this 
 command of their Lord. They made no effort to 
 show Him the dismal and hopeless outlook. Loyalty 
 would demand that they should attempt the impossi- 
 ble. Loyalty demands it of us to-day. The outlook 
 is not so entirely discouraging as it was when those 
 few men were set down in the centre of a moral Sa- 
 hara and told to make it blossom as the rose. In our 
 day there are lines of light along the edges of the 
 darkest continents, like that intolerable radiance 
 which you have seen burnishing the edges of a great, 
 
OBLIGATION' OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 gloomy continent of cloud hanging in mid-heaven. 
 But still to-day it is only the minority which has 
 heard of Christ. Two out of every three of the in- 
 habitants of the earth have never seen a B ble. But 
 here are written in the charter of the Church the un- 
 changing words of Jesus: “Go, and make disciples of 
 all nations.” Whether we go to succeed or fail, loy- 
 alty demands that we go. President Mark Hopkins, 
 at the recent meeting of the American Board, spoke 
 of the answer of some Russian soldiers when told they 
 were marching to certain death: “ That’s none of our 
 business.” It is the answer of the Church when men 
 speak of obstacles. 
 
 Opportunities and advantages for fulfilling this 
 command are afforded us to-day such as the world 
 has never before had. It need not be said that our 
 boasted inventions cannot of themselves usher in the 
 kingdom of God. The electric light cannot dissipate 
 any moral darkness. The telegraph can in the twin- 
 kling of an eye bring to a man the news of the loss of 
 what is dearest to him in life. But when he interro- 
 gates it for help and sympathy he finds it dumb and 
 dead. We girdle the earth with railroads and steam- 
 ship lines, but neither the fleetest ship nor the swift- 
 est train can carry a man away from himself — from 
 his own bad heart — nor across the border into the 
 kingdom of God. Yet in all these things there is 
 something of which we may take advantage. The 
 world is made one neighborhood, and men are made 
 a brotherhood. They make distinct the appeal of 
 heathendom for help, because our nearness thrusts 
 its want in our faces. They make it easier to carry 
 to the nations the bread of life. They are the wings 
 on which the mighty Gospel may fly abroad. Peo- 
 ples to whom the apostles could only have gone with 
 strenuous efforts, spurred on by invincible zeal, are 
 easy of access to the Church of tnis century. If the 
 
4 
 
 MISSIONARY CHARACTER AND 
 
 men of the past could plead some excuse for the dif- 
 ficulties in the way, much less have we. In no age 
 of the Church has this command of Jesus to go aud 
 preach the Gospel to every creature been more im- 
 perative and absolute than it is at this hour. 
 
 Our time compels us to leave this ground of the 
 Church’s missionary obligations and look at another. 
 The truth which Jesus entrusts to the messengers so 
 sent forth deepens their responsibility. It is uDlike 
 any other which men can possibly carry. Its aim is 
 nothing less than the complete and eternal salvation 
 of those to whom it comes. That work it professes 
 to be able to do. 
 
 If the Church really believes it has anything as im- 
 portant as that to say, its sense of obligation ought 
 to be awful and overwhelming. It was this belief 
 which gave stimulus and an unquenchable zeal to the 
 early disciples. They had tarried in company with 
 the Master and knew all His story. When the Spirit 
 descended there were no new facts to be added to the 
 stock they possessed. But how it all became trans- 
 figured at Pentecost. Their story had run up the 
 scale and had become a gospel. The tale they could 
 tell would bring salvation. The hundred striking in- 
 cidents they could narrate were not merely interest- 
 ing, but no man could hear them without being chal- 
 lenged to make an awful decision whose consequences 
 would reach into eternity. What they had to say 
 distanced in importance any possible message which 
 could be entrusted to men. Up to this hour, with 
 their story of a perfect life, they had been like men 
 who see a star in the sky and do not know it is a 
 world. There it is, a beautiful bright point in the 
 heavens winking recognition down to the earth, giv- 
 ing glory to the night. Bat now a man comes with 
 his telescope and spectroscope. And then they find 
 that that thing whose light pierces the darkness is a 
 
OBLIGATION OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 5 
 
 great world, vastly larger than this ball of earth on 
 which they stand ; they find out concerning its atmo- 
 sphere and composition, and never again as they look 
 up at it can they think of it as only a needle of light 
 piercing its way through the gloom. So marvellous 
 a change came over the disciples when Pentecost 
 came, and their sweet, beautiful story unfolded its 
 real great meanings to them. It was not now a mere 
 narrative, it was gospel. And the question was not 
 now how to get courage enough to say it — the ques- 
 tion was how to keep still, even though the cost of 
 speaking might be imprisonment and death. O, it 
 must be said — it pressed up to their lips to be said, 
 and they cried: “ We cannot but speak of the things 
 which we have seen and heard..” They must say it 
 or die — must say it if they died. If the Church is 
 possessed with this truth, that it has the Gospel, the 
 message of salvation to carry to the world, its sense 
 of obligation will never let it sleep. Such men will 
 have their feet shod with the readiness of the Gospel 
 of peace. Were not the feet of the missionary Paul 
 shod in that way? With what restless, eager, tireless 
 feet does he go over the world ! He goes to city after 
 city and province after province. Now he is climb- 
 ing the mountain passes, and again sailing upon the 
 deep. He presses north among the half-barbarous 
 people of Lystra, and again encounters the philoso- 
 phers on the Acropolis. He no sooner starts a church 
 in one place than his eager, yearning heart summons 
 him away. He visits one island, and gets wrecked 
 upon another. He is in Antioch and Ephesus, in 
 Philippi and Corinth, in Athens and Rome. This 
 readiness of the Gospel is the shoes he wears. They 
 are shoes which wax not old; the feet which wear 
 them are restless and fleet and grow not weary, and 
 they are beautiful upon the mountains. As the mes- 
 senger of the gods was said to have winged feet, so 
 
6 
 
 MISSIONARY CHARACTER AND 
 
 does this messenger of God seem to go with incredible 
 swiftness from land to land and people to people. If 
 you asked him the reason of it all, he would tell you 
 he had the Gospel which would save these men ; they 
 were dyiDg in ignorance and darkness and a heavy 
 responsibility rested upon him of conveying the truth. 
 He looked out at the world with covetous eyes; he 
 wanted it for his Master — he wanted to save these 
 souls. That same spirit burns in every true mission- 
 ary heart, and every Christian heart ought to be that. 
 This missionary fire made John Williams cry: ‘‘I 
 cannot stay in a single island; human souls are 
 perishing all around. I must have a ship to send a 
 messenger to other islands to glide the heathen to 
 heaven.” This deep conviction in the heart of the 
 Church that it has the only Gospel ever delivered to 
 the world, that it has what the rest of the world does 
 not have, and which it must have or die, of necessity 
 throws upon it the heaviest obligations. 
 
 And this sense of responsibility is deepened when 
 we remember that if we do not give the Gospel to 
 them they never will get it. This duty and privilege 
 has been devolved upon men — there is no missionary 
 but man. The Lord Jesus never preached His Gospel 
 to any man. For forty days after His resurrection 
 He seemed to hover on the borders of two worlds, 
 seeming to be claimed by each, now in sight and now 
 out of it. Put there is no evidence that in those 
 days before the ascension, when perhaps He revisited 
 unseen some of the scenes of His labors and sorrows, 
 He preached His truth to any soul ; not at the house 
 of the widow in Nain, or the house of Ihe woman 
 who loved much in Magdala; not at the house of the 
 publican in Jericho, or at the home of the demoniac 
 in Gadara. Even after His ascension, when He is 
 going to claim Saul of Tarsus for Himself, from out 
 that supernal glory which smites the persecutor to 
 
OBLIGATION OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 7 
 
 the earth on the outskirts of Damascus, the Gospel is 
 not preached by the heavenly voice. Let him go into 
 the city and a man shall tell him what he must do. 
 
 - And although His heart broods with unutterable love 
 over the world He died to save, when has He broken 
 the heavens and come to preach to any dying soul in 
 any land in any time? 
 
 And this mission is given to no angel. Once they 
 bent on quivering wing over the hills of Bethlehem 
 and broke the midnight silence with their song, while 
 their spokesman cried: “I bring you good tidings of 
 great joy, which shall be to all the people.” Once 
 they cried from out the amazing emptiness of the 
 sepulchre: “He is not here, He is risen;” but when 
 since then has an angel preached of the advent or 
 the resurrection of Jesus? They may brood over the 
 beggar lying full of sores at the rich man’s gate, and 
 when the spirit has been freed from the rotting robe 
 of the flesh, a convoy of them may bear it to Abra- 
 ham’s bosom ; but they cannot tell him, lying there 
 in that torturing garment of the body, the message of 
 salvation. There is joy in their presence; the light 
 from the face of God is reflected in their faces, when one 
 poor, penitent soul drops its first tear, lifts it broken 
 cry for forgiveness. But though their interest is so 
 deep they may not carry the word of forgiveness. 
 The Son of Han can say to His angels go, and to 
 others come, and they will obey ; but to them He has 
 not said: “ Go into all the world and preach the Gos- 
 pel to every creature.” Men and brethren, let us be 
 sure of this, if we do not carry the Gospel to the hea- 
 then they will never get, it. We are put in trust of 
 the Gospel. How shall they hear without a preacher? 
 Jesus breaks the bread, and gives it to His disciples, 
 and the disciples give it to the multitude. 
 
 Does not the sense of our obligation deepen as we 
 think of these things? An awakened Christian con- 
 
8 
 
 MISSIONARY CHARACTER AND 
 
 sciousness will be oppressed with the need of the whole 
 world. Macaulay says concerning the keen sense of 
 wrong which characterized Edmund Burke, that “op- 
 pression in Bengal was to him the same thing as oppres- 
 sion in the streets of London. ” It was a rare soul 
 which could feel that wrong was as really and awfully 
 wrong so far away as at his own doorstep. In the 
 new life which Christianity brings to men, in the 
 lofty outlook it gives them, it strives to make them 
 feel that a soul is as really a soul, that it is as really 
 worth saving, and that its sins are as awful if it live 
 in China or India or Japan, as if it lived in Philadel- 
 phia or New York. Carey made his rude map of the 
 world, and as he pointed his customers to one land 
 after another and said: “That is pagan,” and “That 
 is pagan, ” the tears would steal down his cheeks. The 
 heart which is alive will feel the truth of the hymn, 
 and hear hoarse voices coming from where the winds 
 blow over the icy mountains of Greenland, and weak 
 voices coming from the enervating atmosphere of 
 India, and its dreams by night will be haunted by 
 visions of men who cry: “ Come over and help us.” 
 There are other things which I might say if time 
 allowed, as, for instance, that we owe everything to 
 missionary enterprise. We are sinners of the Gen- 
 tiles. Our ancestors, but a few centuries ago, were 
 sunken in all the degradation we now find in the 
 heathen world. The ancient Britons were wild men 
 who wore the skins of wild beasts. The ancient Scots 
 were cannibals. The ancient Saxons delighted in 
 human sacrifices, and the Gauls used the skulls of 
 their enemies as drinking cups in their feasts. That 
 is the hole of the pit whence we were digged. What 
 we are we owe to missionary enterprise. Is there not 
 a new obligation in this fact? Shall we keep what we 
 have and share it with none? 
 
OBLIGATION OFjTHE CHURCH. 
 
 9 
 
 “ Shall we whose souls are lighted 
 With wisdom from on high, 
 
 Shall we to men benighted. 
 
 The lamp of life deny ?” 
 
 How wonderful was the vision which swept before 
 the mind of Jesus, as on that mountain He gave 
 command to disciple all the nations. Never did the 
 grandest dream of any conqueror picture anything so 
 tremendous and sublime. Once more now at the 
 end, as at the beginning, He saw all the kingdoms of 
 the earth and the glory of them, and again a voice, 
 not this time a false one, said: “All these will I give 
 thee.” He would give him the heathen for his in- 
 heritance, and the uttermost part of the earth for his 
 possession. Jesus is sending His followers out to 
 make a universal conquest which shall never be re- 
 versed. How weak He seems, this man so recently 
 crucified as a malefactor, with scars still upon Him ! 
 And what a picture of helplessless that little crowd 
 of poor, ignorant, unarmed disciples is ! This, the 
 power which is to revolutionize the world I We can 
 as easily imagine those men turning their face to the 
 North, and with their united breath blowing back 
 the bitter winds which sweep down upon them from 
 over the snows of Lebanon. We could as easily im- 
 agine that the spring breaking out from the rock at 
 the feet of Jesus should be copious enough to assuage 
 the thirst of the world. As we picture the scene 
 there is no stopping place in our judgment between 
 the widest extremes — this is the wildest lunacy or ab- 
 solute divinity. Jesus stands upon this mountain in 
 Galilee in apparent helplessness, and sends out His 
 undisciplined followers to take captive the world. 
 And the magnificence of the conception is being 
 equalled by the grandeur of the fulfillment. Having 
 been lifted up, He is drawing all men to Him. and in 
 Richter’s words He is the one who “ being the holiest 
 among the mighty, the mightiest among the holy, 
 
10 
 
 MISSIONARY CHARACTER. 
 
 lifted with His pierced hand empires off their hinges, 
 and turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, 
 and still governs the ages.” With the success of 
 centuries behind us, we hear His word anew to-day 
 to go and disciple the nations. Every time we pray 
 the prayer He taught us and say “thy kingdom 
 come; thy will be done in earth as in heaven,” we 
 hold up before us the idea of a glorious consumma- 
 tion, and the truth of our own obligation. He has 
 fulfilled His word and shall fulfill it — “Lot I am with 
 you all the days, even unto the end of the world.” 
 Soon, when our part of discipiing the nations is 
 done, we may hope to stand with a multitude of 
 those redeemed from every land and hear great 
 voices in heaven, which shall say, “The kingdom of 
 the world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of 
 His Christ; and He shall reign forever and ever.”