SERM. 
 
 FOREIGN MISSIONS. 
 
 SERMON 
 
 DKMVKKKI) AT THE OPEN I NCI 
 OF THE 
 
 PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 
 
 IN THE 
 
 TJ nited States of .A. m e r i c a. 
 
 SARATOGA, 
 
 MAY 1 5th, 1884, 
 
 BY 
 
 Rev. HENRY HARRIS JESSUP, D.D. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY FRIEND'S OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 
 
The Assembly having been constituted with prayer, Rev. 
 \V. H. Roberts, D. T)., stepped to t lie front of the platform and 
 announced that when the last General Assembly adjourned it 
 was with the expectation that this one would be opened with 
 a sermon by Rev. Edwin F. Hatfield, D.D., the moderator of 
 that body. As the Assembly knew, however, that venerable 
 servant of the Divine Master had been summoned to the 
 “General Assembly and Church of the first born, whose names 
 are written in Heaven.” “ Blessed are they who die in the 
 Lord. They rest from their labors, and their works do follow 
 them.” He stated that under the rule, the present General 
 Assembly would be opened with a sermon by Rev. Henry H. 
 Jessup, D.D. of the Presbytery of Lackawanna, Moderator of 
 the General Assembly of 1879, the last moderator present, being 
 a commissioner. After appropriate devotional services, Dr. 
 Jessup delivered the following discourse : 
 
 Fear not, for I am with thee ; I will bring thy seed from the east, and 
 gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, give up; and to the south, 
 keep n't back; bring my sons from lar, and my daughters from the ends of the 
 earth.” 
 
 Isa . , 43:5, 6. 
 
 “ Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, and, lo, I am with you alway, 
 even unto the end of the world.” 
 
 Matt. 28:19, 20. 
 
 Fathers and Brethren : 
 
 The Messianic prophet and the Christ of all the prophets here unite their 
 voices in calling the whole church to the rescue of the whole world. The four 
 quarters of the globe are summoned. The Lord’s sons and daughters are to 
 be gathered from the ends of the earth. This is the high, the supreme mission 
 
4 
 
 of the church of Christ. This will remain its supreme mission until “every 
 knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the 
 glory of God the Father.” 
 
 I. The solemn circumstances in which we assemble this day, as repre- 
 sentatives of one branch of the Christian church, with two offices of this body left 
 vacant, for the Brst time in its history, by the death of one who was both its 
 Moderator and Stated Clerk, are a solemn reminder of the uncertainty of life, and 
 the imminence of that hour, when we must render an account of our 
 stewardship. 
 
 And while we bow reverently to the wise and loving decree of the great 
 Head of the Church, we would renewedly dedicate ourselves to his service, ask- 
 ing only for new opportunities for work, and power from on high that we may 
 do it for his glory. 
 
 The great work committed to the church is the rescue of the race. Christ- 
 ianity is pure unselfishness. Christ cime to earth on a mission of unselfish 
 love, to those who might reject Him, and could never appreciate or repay Him. 
 His children, by the power of His spirit and example, love all men for His 
 sake. They subordinate self, deny self, forget self and go out of self. The 
 church, in the missionary enterprise, simply goes out of herself for the rescue 
 of the lost. 
 
 She would spurn to do it for reward, for glory, or for sectarian prejudice 
 and party zeal. She engages in it from love, pure, devoted, disinterested, un- 
 alloyed love. In serving Christ her King, her love is loyally; in heeding His 
 last command it is obedience, but first and last, her spirit is the subjection of 
 self and the enthronement of love. 
 
 II. On this semi-centennial of our foreign missionary labors as a church, 
 after a fifty years’ campaign, it is fitting that we review the principles and the 
 scope of our work, the objects and motives of our action. It is well at times 
 to examine the foundation of our foreign work. With what aim and purpose 
 have we wrought in the past? With what aim and hope are we to work in 
 the future ? 
 
 No church can grow by taking itself as a model. Our past history and 
 achievements are not enough to furnish a standard for the future. The life of 
 Christ, His words and His work, with the deeds and words of His Apostles are 
 our only safe model. We should rise higher than our own plane, ever press- 
 ing and reaching toward that of Christ H.mself. What we have done in fifty- 
 years ought to make us grateful to Him who has accepted our unworthy ser- 
 vices, but should be no criterion for the future. 
 
5 
 
 How little comparatively have we accomplished, at home and abroad, and 
 how much remains to be doDe! 
 
 The whole church as a church needs a higher consecration, a consecration 
 all along the line, of person and property, of life and service, of ourselves and 
 our children, to Him who has bought us with His own blood. Water will not 
 rise higher than its fountain head. A church will not rise higher than the con- 
 secration of its individual members. 
 
 Our ecclesiastical order and organization are well adapted to missionary 
 activity and progress. The individual, the church, the session, the Presbytery, 
 the Synod, the General Assembly, furnish a gradation of forces, for securing 
 personal liberty, concerted action, widely diffused information, sympathetic 
 co-operation, and that consciousness of strength and efficiency which result 
 from union, which ought to make us a power for good at home and abroad. 
 
 But this splendid machinery, whose gearing extends by shafts and wheels 
 over a continent, needs the fire of spiritual life, of personal holiness, of indi- 
 vidual consecration through the entire membership of the church, to set it in 
 motion, aud make it effective for the salvation of a world. 
 
 We need to go out of ourselves, to look upon our church machinery as 
 only a means to an end, and that end the glory of Christ in saving men every- 
 where. 
 
 Our church convocations should bring us into nearer and more inspiring 
 communion with Christ and with one another. 
 
 The modern movement toward alliances aud reunions in the various 
 branches of our own church, needs the vitalizing of the missionary spirit to 
 prevent its becoming a means of mere self-glorification, or leading to a more 
 intense denominationalism, a display of our ecclesiastical armory, or the 
 widening of a mere theological arena. 
 
 A living orthodoxy is a chain binding the church to the living Christ, and 
 insuring growth and progress. A dead orthodoxy is a splendid seal set upon 
 a sepulchre. 
 
 The reunion of 1870 has been blessed as a Missionary Reunion, an en- 
 largement of evangelistic work, an increase of benevolent giving and of spirit- 
 ual power. 
 
 In fifty years our branch of the Presbyterian church has founded 29 
 missions in ten different countries, and now supports 447 American mission- 
 aries, men and women, of whom 160 are ordained; with 805 native preachers, 
 helpers and teachers, a total of 1,252 laborers with 20,000 communicants, 
 and 22,000 children aud youth are under instruction, and tens of millions of 
 pages of Scriptures and other books are annually printed at our mission 
 presses. 
 
6 
 
 Our expenditure in foreign lands is about one-twentieth of our home 
 expenditure in all the departments of church work. The number of ordained 
 missionaries sent abroad is about one thirty-second, of the ministerial force of 
 the church, or one ordained foreign missionary to every thirty-six churches 
 connected with the General Assembly. 
 
 Our corps of laborers is planted in some of the most difficult outposts of 
 the heathen and Mohammedan world; among some of the least impressible 
 and least mobile elements of the earth’s population. Yet the success thus far 
 achieved is not inconsiderable. 
 
 There is great cause for gratitude, but little for self gratulation in the 
 work of the past. We have only begun to work. 
 
 The foundations already laid, the territories explored, the languages 
 mastered, the books translated, the national traits understood, the false 
 religions unveiled, the churches planted, the schools, colleges and seminaries 
 founded, the youth instructed and the confidence gained among kings and 
 their subjects ; all these are but a preparation for the great work of evangeli- 
 zation lying before us in the immediate future. 
 
 I IT. Are we right then in theory, and are we faithful in practice, in the 
 foreign missionary work? 
 
 We believe that the world is to be brought to Christ through the out- 
 pouring of' the spirit upon men who have heard the gospel tidings. Faith 
 cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. The gospel must be 
 preached, and preachers must be sent. A living church is a preaching 
 church. We are commanded to “go and teach the nations.” We are to 
 preach, to found churches, to train and ordain a native ministry, to encourage 
 native self-support, to translate and print the Scriptures to promote education 
 and social elevation. 
 
 When we have done our duty in teaching the nations, Christ Himself has 
 promised to do the rest. In one country one form of teaching may be the 
 best — in another country another. In one place a mighty influence will be 
 exerted through the press and the college, in another by the introduction of 
 the simplest agricultural and mechanical arts. In one the common school, in 
 another the extended tour through hundreds of cities and villages. In one 
 place medical missions, in another the work of Christian women. In one the 
 simplest tract, in another the most elaborate Christian literature. In one, 
 the ordaining of peasants familiar with only the rudiments of knowledge, to 
 be the pastors of unlearned peasants; in another, the most careful theological 
 training to lit men to preach to the cultivated, to manage the affairs of metro- 
 politan churches. 
 
 There are “ diversities of gifts, differences of administrations and di- 
 versities of operations,” but the same spirit, the same God which worketh 
 all in all. 
 
That missionary theory is correct which knows but the one foundation, 
 Jesus Christ, but is willing to utilize all the “ gold, silver and precious stones” 
 which our modern Christian civilization can supply in building on that foun- 
 dation. We may rightly use at home and abroad, in furthering the knowl- 
 edge of Christ, all the facilities and appliances for printing, teaching and dil- 
 lusing truth, which the inventive intellect of the nineteenth century has laid at 
 the feet of the church. We no longer send missionaries to China in sailing 
 ships on a 120 days’ voyage ; nor do we print Bibles lor millions of people on 
 a hand press; nor raise up only an illiterate native ministry ; norsend abroad 
 us missionaries men who are incapable of success at home. 
 
 The modes of preaching the gospel are various; but the gospel to be 
 preached is one. If missionaries open schools and teach, the Bible and the 
 Christian faith must be the foundation of all their teaching. Dana, Dawson, 
 and Guyot are illustrations of teaching the profoundest and the purest 
 science in the reverent spirit of Christian faith. Teaching medicine or science 
 simply for the sake of medicine and science, is not the work of the mission- 
 ary; but he may teach both in a Christian spirit, and with thorough instruction 
 in the Bible, and thus train Christian physicians and scholars who will be 
 pillars of the church of their native land. 
 
 Typecasting and book making .are mechanic arts, but when done to give 
 the Bible to a nation, as was done by Eli Smith, Van Dyck, Graham, Carey, 
 Marshman, Morrison and Dyer, in giving the Bible to the Arabs, toe Hindus 
 and the Chinese, they become a noble form and mode of preaching the gos- 
 pel. Livingston was teaching when traversing Africa with his Makololo com- 
 panions; Eli Smith was teaching when he spent weary months in the type 
 founderies of Germany with Hallock, making the metallic punches and matri- 
 ces for the new, so-called American font of Arabic type in which the Bible 
 was to be printed lor sixt} r millions of Arabic-speaking people; Hamlin was 
 teaching when training the persecuted Armenians to bake bread for the Brit- 
 ish Crimean arm} r ; Dr. Peter Parker, when surrounded by thousands of pa- 
 tients in Canton ; Dr. Pratt, when traveling in the Taurus mountains; Dr. 
 Azariah Smith, when organizing the Christians of Aiutab into a self supporting 
 community; the Constantinople missionaries, Hamlin and Trowbridge, when 
 caring for hundreds ot cholera patients; Dr. Grant, when journeying from 
 village to village among the robber Koords ; Whiting in sacrificing his life to 
 save the famine stricken Chinese ; Calhoun confided in and trusted by both 
 Druzes and Maronites in the midst of their fierce civil war, when both 
 parties alternately brought their gold and jewels to bis unprotected house for 
 safe keeping; the Syria missionaries during the massacres of 1860, when for 
 months they fed and clothed the twenty thousand refugees from Damascus 
 and the Lebanon ; Dr. Van Dyck, in translating the Bible and treating thous- 
 ands of sufferers from the virulent eastern ophthalmia; Dr. Post, in perform- 
 
8 
 
 ing marvelous surgical operations, and in the intervals o ( leisure making a 
 concordance of the Arabic Bible which cost him and his assistants 15 000 
 hours of labor ; Dr. West, who disarmed the hitter hostility of Armenian 
 ecclesiastics and Turkish Pashas, and won them to friendship by the patient 
 and skillful use of his high medical knowledge; Dr. Osgood, in delivering 
 hundreds of despairing victims from the opium curse in China; Miss Dr. 
 Howard, in successfully treating the wife of Li Hung Chang; Bishop Patte- 
 son and his colleagues, in teaching the South Sea Islanders the simplest arts of 
 decency in clothing, and of comfort in building their houses; these and mul 
 titudes of others in Asia, Africa, Europe, America and the far of!' isles, have 
 truly obeyed the Saviour’s last command, in teachingthe gospel, by living the 
 gospel and exhibiting its blissed fruits amid famine and pestilence, want and 
 nakedness, cannibalism and savage ferocity, wars and massacres, relieving 
 suffering, healing disease, instructing ignorance and guiding lost men to a 
 Saviour. 
 
 The world needs the gospel and the gospel needs laborers of every 
 kind ; and the gospel needed, is 
 
 IV. The gospel in its purity and entirety ; the pure word of God with 
 its converting and sanctifying power ; not a gospel diluted and attenuated to 
 suit an enfeebled sentiment, nor a mutilated gospel, but the gospel of salvation 
 by faith in an atoning Saviour. 
 
 An emasculated gospel, robbed of the sanctions of the moral government 
 of God; which denies to the Judge of all the earth, the attributes which it re- 
 quires in the simplest human magistrate; whose excessive tenderness rejects 
 from the Bible the records of the Noachiati deluge, the destruction of Sodom, 
 the overthrow of Pharaoh and his host, and the extermination of the Canaan ites, 
 as inconsistent with the character of its effeminate deity ; which bends reve- 
 lation to the reason, though it break in the process, instead of bowing its 
 reason reverently to the revelation of God; which is sure of nothing but the 
 assumption that every man’s Bible is just so much of the Scripture, and no 
 more, as suits his own individual reason ; which exalts a fallible individual 
 consciousness above the infallible word of the infallible God; we say such a 
 gospel or religion or faith as this, will never believe in missionary work as a 
 rescue of the perishing, at home or abroad. 
 
 And we may further insist, that sucli a gospel is not the gospel to pro- 
 claim to the sorrowing, suffering, bond-children of Satan in heathen and 
 Mohammedan lands. It is not the gospel which the world wants. 
 
 The world is groaning under the burden of sin. It is full of colossal 
 systems of creature worship, of propitiatory sacrifices, of self torture, of 
 pilgrimages, of bloody rites, of burnt offerings of human victims, which men, 
 in the dark groping of their unrest, have invented, or amid the wreck of an- 
 
9 
 
 cient traditions have clutched at with t ho grip of despair, to satisfy the sense 
 of deserved retribution for sin. It is an insult to the moral yearnings of 
 man’s nature to offer him such a stone, when he is dying of hunger fur bread. 
 Of what use is it to tell the Pagan and the Mohammedan, the “ Barbarian 
 and the Scythian,” that we have crossed seas and continents burning with 
 zeal to preach to them the glorious gospol of uncertainty : to enlist recruits 
 in the army of mighty doubters; to assure them that there is nothing sure; 
 to tell them to cultivate their consciousness, if, perchance, they may evolve 
 from it a system of faith which will stand the test of the microscope and the 
 crucible. 
 
 When human hearts are aching and bleeding over sorrow and sickness, 
 over the bereavements, the broken hopes and racking anxieties of life, and 
 struggling with sin and evil, not knowing whence they came or whither they 
 are going, what mockery to raise their hopes of relief and comfort, and then 
 drive them to a deeper misery, by offering such a diet of despair! 
 
 Such revelations as glimmer in the dawn of the “new theologies,’’ have 
 little in common with that “true light which lighteth every man that cometh 
 into the world,” that ‘ light from heaven above the brightness of the sun,” 
 which burned the image of the glorified Son of God into the soul of Saul of 
 Tarsus, and sent him forth through Asia and Europe, “ to open the eyes of 
 the Gentiles, to turn them from darkness to light and from the power of .Satan 
 unto God, that they might receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among 
 them which are sanctified by faith in Jesus Christ.” ( Acts 26:17). 
 
 The world is weary with its burden of sin. Hinduism is weary of its 
 funeral pyres and Juggernauts, its shriveled arms, its child widows and 
 ferocious cruelties. Islam is weary of its relentless ritual, its meaningless 
 lasts, its vain repetitions, its decimating pilgrimages to Mecca, its millions of 
 women staggering broken hearted down to a hopeless grave. 
 
 Buddhism is weary of its dreary philosoph}* iu which is no inspiration of 
 hope, and whose highest aspiration is the wretched negation of non-existence. 
 And no wonder, when its sacred books teach such doctrines as these, that 
 “ all vice and virtue are a dream.” “ True knowledge is attained by doing 
 nothing.” “ Let the mi.:d do nothing, observe nothing, aim at nothing, hold 
 fast to nothing, that is Buddha.” A clod after countless ages may become a 
 God, and then become a clod again. “ Avoid both vice and virtue. He that 
 can do this is a religious man.” 
 
 Japan is weary of vain prostrations, of calling for ages on deaf and dumb 
 images, without a response or a hope of relief. The millions of Africa are 
 weary of centuries of internecine war, of cannibalism and living burials, of 
 the horrible fears of dark superstition, of the sickening atrocities of slavery 
 and the slave trade, of debasing sensuality, cruelty and crime. 
 
 The whole world is weary, and clamors and pleads for rest, for pardon 
 
10 
 
 of sin, for peace of conscience, for a pathway of light out of this prison of 
 darkness. 
 
 And what shall we preach to them? What can we preach to them but 
 the glad tidings of salvation through faith in the crucified Son of God? 
 
 With what gladness, with what confidence we can teach them the inspir- 
 ing words, “Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will 
 give you rest.’’ “ T am the light of the world.” If any man thirst let him 
 come unto Me and drink.” “ The blood of Jesus Christ His son cleanseth 
 us from all sin.” “ Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation, through 
 faith in His blood, to declare His right eousness for the remission of sins that 
 are past — that He might be just and the justifier of him which believeth in 
 Jesus.” 
 
 On what solid rock do we stand, when preaching such a gospel? 
 
 V. Christianity comes to the world as a universal religion. Christ comes 
 as the universal Christ — the Christ of all men — the desire of all the nations. 
 
 The Brahmo Somaj call for an Oriental Christ; one fitted especially for 
 India and the Hindus. But in the narrow sense in which the claim is made 
 there is no Oriental Christ. There can be no local, limited, national, tribal 
 Christ. The Christ of God is the Christ of the wdiole race. 
 
 Mohammed came to a tribe, founded a ritual system based on Oriental 
 ideas and Arab national peculiarities. In his character were combined, as 
 has been said, “ Oriental dreaminess, Oriental frenzy, Oriental endurance and 
 fortitude, Oriental sensuality, Oriental despotism, with Arab enterprise, Arab 
 vindictiveness and Arab subtlety.” His system is Arab and Ishmaelitic. 
 And the best comment on Islam is the moral, intellectual, social and spiritual 
 condition of the Mohammedan world to-day. Gautama Buddha came to a 
 tribe and founded a local tribal system, and the best comment on the so-called 
 Light of Asia, is the moral, social and spiritual darkness of the Asia of to- 
 day. 
 
 But in the religion of Christ is no mark of nationality. As Goldwiti 
 Smith has so well said, “ It was constructed at the confluence of three races, 
 the Jewish, the Roman, and the Greek, each of which had strong national 
 peculiarities of itr, own. A single touch, a single taint of any one of those 
 peculiarities, and the character would have been national, not universal, tran- 
 sient, not eternal. It might have been the highest character in history, but 
 it would have been disqualified from being the ideal. Supposing it to have 
 been human, the chances v ere infinite against its escaping any tincture of the 
 fanaticism, formalism and exclusiveness of the Jew, of the political pride of 
 the Roman, of the intellectual pride of the Greek. Yet it has entirely 
 escaped them all.” There may be danger, in our modern modes of thought 
 and expression, and our modern system af organized effort, that we present 
 
11 
 
 the Christ to others too much as a foreign Christ, as a part of our civilization, 
 our national manners and customs, as an American, or an English or a Euro 
 pean Christ, In founding churches and schools, in translating books, in teach- 
 ing the young, in forming a literature, we should aim to divest our theology, 
 our thoughts and words, of whatever is purely local and national, and present 
 the gospel to the nations in all its original simplicity, purity and catholicity. 
 
 Give India the gospel which is meant for all men. Give China the same 
 gospel, and Africa, Japan and Western Asia, the same gospel, drawn from 
 the very words of the New Testament, with as little of our local coloring and 
 tiibal terminology, as is consistent with a clear and accurate expression of 
 the doctrines of Christ. 
 
 And are the Reformed churches to carry their minute differences for- 
 ever into the heathen and Mohammedan world? Are there to be half a dozen 
 or a dozen kinds of Presbyterian Presbyteries gathered in every distant prov- 
 ince and empire ? Is it not a grievous offence for us to attempt to force upon 
 Asiatics and Africans the hair splitting distinctions wrought out and fought 
 out years ago in Great Britain and America? 
 
 Is not one Reformed church enough for India, China, Japan and 
 A tnerica ? 
 
 It is time for comity and co-operation in the missionary work to begin 
 in earnest, at least among the millions of the Presbyterian faith. 
 
 A rational solution of the question maybe found in leaving the whole 
 matter to the missionaries on the ground. Let each branch of the church en- 
 courage co-operation and communion on the part of its missionaries with 
 those of all branches of the Reformed church abroad, and allow all Presby r - 
 terian Missions, at least, to unite in foreign lands in a common organization, 
 so as to present to the unevangelized world only their points of agreement, 
 the common “ standards,” and above all their common standing on the Gospel 
 of a common Saviour. 
 
 How it lowers the exalted Son of God to have him understood among the 
 heathen as a Presbyterian Christ, a Methodist, a Baptist, a Congregational or 
 an Episcopal Christ ! Let not our Prophet Priest and King be veiled or 
 masked by our peculiar distinctions aud names. 
 
 Christianity as the divine plan for human redemption has already proved 
 its adaptedness to all men in all lands. It offers free deliverance from sin 
 and death through Christ the Son of God. Unaided by arms and armies, it 
 conquered Greece and Rome, Carthage and Gaul, Britain and Scandinavia. 
 It transformed alike the cultivated Roman and the savage cannibals of Scot- 
 land and England. It met the wants and tastes of the Semitic Jews and 
 Arabs, the Japhetic Teutons and the Hamitic Egyptians. It proved itself 
 adapted to East and West, North and South alike. To the Oriental, it met 
 Oriental wants, because Orientals are sinners and need a Saviour. To the 
 
12 
 
 Occidental, it met Occidental wants, because Occidentals are sinners and need 
 a Saviour. There is no greater difference between Hindu and Briton or 
 American to-day, than there were was between Syrian and Briton in the first 
 century. Christ is Oriental as the sun is Oriental. He rose in the Orient, 
 but shines all round the world and shines for all and forever. 
 
 If the Syrian ana the Hindu claim to-day, that because Cnrist was an 
 Asiatic, they can understand his language and his human life better than we 
 of the West, let us rejoice with them, and pray that they may not be satis- 
 fied with the mere external setting of the celestial jewel. 
 
 But when a Mozoomdar, whose words touch our very souls by their elo- 
 quent pathos and tender longing after Christ, can write a book on the Christ, 
 without one word of “ the blood of Jesus, which cleanseth us from all sin;’’ 
 without one intimation that ‘ Christ once bore our sins in his own body on the 
 tree,” or that we are “ accepted in the Beloved in whom we have redemption 
 through His blood,” we can but long that he may find peace to his troubled, 
 spirit in that pardon through the blood of Christ which a Sheshadri, and a 
 hundred thousand others of his own countrymen have found. 
 
 VI. Again, we find the missionary spirit a necessity to the vitality and 
 purity of the church. 
 
 The Reformation of the sixteenth century lost a great part of its power 
 in the world, by centering its thoughts and efforts upon itself. The mighty 
 intellectual energy awakened to new life and power by the open Bible, soon 
 turned and employed itself in domestic controversy. It spent itsell upon 
 itself. The church was torn by dissensions, and the mind of its leaders was 
 spun out into attenuated webs of philosophical hair splitting instead of con- 
 centrating itself upon a world’s salvation. The result was formalism, Iruitless 
 speculation and spiritual death. 
 
 On the other hand, the pilgrims of the Mayflower, who turned their faces 
 westward to the heathen continent of America, instead of seeking simply 
 their own ease or even freedom from persecution, laid it down as a fundamen- 
 tal principle that “ the first great object of their migration to America was the 
 evangelizing of the American savages. ” Mr. Morton, brother-in-law of Gov- 
 ernor Bradford, says in a preface to the letter of John Robinson, that “the 
 desire of carrying the Gospel of Christ into those foreign parts among those 
 people that as yet have had no knowledge nor test of God,” was more import- 
 ant in their minds than “ procuring a quiet and comfortable habitation.” 
 Robert Cushman, in pleading for reinforcements to the Plymouth colony, 
 stirs up the English people with eloquent missionary appeals, lie says: 
 
 “ A man must not expect only to live and do good to himself, but he 
 should see where he can live to do most good unto others ; for as one saith, 
 
 ‘ he whose living is but for himself, it is time he were dead.’ I know many 
 
who sit here still, with their talent in ;i napkin, having notable endowments 
 both of body and mind, and might do great good if they were in some places, 
 which here do none, nor can do none, and yet, through fleshly fear, niceness 
 and straitness ol heart, sit still and look on, and will not hazard a dram ol 
 health, noi a day of pleasure, nor an hour of rest, to further the knowledge 
 and salvation of the sous of Adam in that new world, where a drop ol the 
 knowledge of Christ is most precious, which is here not set by. Now what 
 shall we say to such a profession of Christ, to which is joined no more denial 
 of a man’s self : ' 
 
 “ And seeing we daily pray for the conversion of the heathens, we must 
 consider whether there be not some ordinary means and course for us to take 
 to convert them, or whether prayer lor them be only referred to God’s extra 
 ordinary work from heaven. Now it seemeth unto me we ought also to en- 
 deavour to use the means to convert them and the means cannot he used, un- 
 less we go to them or they come to us. To us they cannot come, our land is 
 lull ; to them we may go, their land is empty ; as the enterprise is weighty 
 and difficult, so the honor is more worthy — chiefly to display the efficacy and 
 power of the Gospel in zealous preaching, professing and wise walking under 
 it. before the faces of these poor blind infidels. 
 
 As to such as object to the todiousness of the voyage thither, the danger 
 of pirates’ robbery, and of the savages’ treachery, these are but lions in the 
 way, and it were well tor such men if they were in heaven, for who can show 
 them a place in this world where iniquity shall not compass them at the heels; 
 and where they shall have a day without grief or a lease of life for a moment, 
 and who can tell but God what dangers may lie at our doors even in our native 
 country, or when God will cause our sun to go down at noonday, — and in the 
 midst, of our peace and security la)' upon its some lasting scourge for our so 
 long neglect of his most glorious Gospel. 
 
 *• l speak nothing about the bitter contention that hath been about relig- 
 ion, by writing, disputing and inveighing earnestly one against another, the 
 beat of which zeal, if it were turned against the rude barbarism of the heathens, 
 might do more good in a day than it hath done here in many years. Neither 
 need I speak of the little love to the Gospel and the little profit which is made 
 by the preachers in most places, which might easily drive the zealous to the 
 heathens who, no doubt, if they had but a drop of that knowledge which here 
 flieth about the streets, would be filled with exceeding joy and gladness.” 
 
 This is the missionary spirit of the Pilgrim fathers, and we do not wonder 
 at their success in rearing a moral and spiritual fabric on this continent which 
 has received such manifest tokens of the Divine favor. 
 
 Would that the voice of the earnest preacher might have been heard in 
 the councils of the post reformation fathers, that they might have turned the 
 heat of their zeal against the rude barbarism of the heathen.” instead of in- 
 veighing against one another. 
 
14 
 
 The missionary spirit of that age found expression also in the renewal of 
 the missionary charter granted by Cromwell “ for promoting and propagating 
 the Gospel in New England,” through the influence of Richard Baxter and 
 Lord Chancellor Hyde. The most eminent of their missionaries was John 
 Eliot, who, aided by Hon. Robert Boyle, published the Bible in the Indian 
 language in I 664, stating as the secret of his success, “prayers and pains, 
 through faith in Jesus Christ will do anything.” The Colonial seai of Massa- 
 chusetts in 1 628 had the device of an Indian upon it, with a motto in his 
 mouth, “ Come over and help us.” This is a spirit which is worthy of imita- 
 tion in all ages. Alas that it has been so feebly imitated in the treatment of 
 the American Aborigines by the descendants of the Pilgrims, and that the 
 Eliots and Brainerds, the Wrights and Ivingsburys have been so conspicuously 
 few in number! 
 
 Never was it more important to bear it in mind than now that life is es- 
 sential to purity. The chief hope of the Church of Christ in America, in all 
 its branches, lies in its fidelity to a perishing world. As has been well said, 
 “ the question now is, not whether the heathen can be saved without the gos- 
 pel, but whether we can be saved if we do not give them the gospel.” 
 
 The best remedy for the bitter and aimless controversies which so often 
 rend the church, is personal consecration t-o the salvation of a lost world. 
 
 The church would have been saved the wear and weariness of many an 
 invasion of heresy, were all its ministers laboring in earnest for souls. 
 
 Is it not true that the majority of the inventors of new theologies, the as- 
 sailants of God’s word, the troublers of Israel, are men who have no sympa- 
 thy with the world’s evangelization, the progress of Christ’s kingdom, and the 
 fulfilment of his last command? 
 
 A question like this is always a practical one to the church. The mis- 
 sionary spirit is a necessity to our churches, our colleges, our Theological 
 seminaries, our Ecclesiastical Convocations. The stream, to be kept pure, 
 must be kept flowing. Life and motion are the conditions of purity. Obedi- 
 ence to the will of Christ is essentia! to doctrinal orthodoxy. Out of the 
 stagnant marshes of selfish indolence arise the poisonous exhalations which 
 stifle the life of the church. “ If any man will do His will, he shall know of 
 the doctrine whether it be of God.” 
 
 VII. And were we disposed to excuse ourselves, we cannot honestly 
 plead the spent excuses of a past age. Shall we offer the plea of impotence , 
 that we cannot send the gospel, that we cannot spare our sons and daughters 
 or raise the means to sustain so vast an undertaking? 
 
 The church of Antioch might with some show of reason have pleaded im- 
 potence, when amidst its persecutions and feeble numbers, the Holy Ghost 
 bade it “Separate me Barnabas and Saul.” 
 
 But how can we plead it, when there are thousands of individuals in our 
 
15 
 
 churches who have greater financial resources than the entire Christian church 
 of that age, and not a lew who might lay a track of Bibles all the way Ironi 
 San Francisco to Jerusalem and then not exhaust hall their fortune; when the 
 intellectual, spiritual and physical agencies ready to our hand are well nigh 
 illimitable? Shall «e as a Christian nation, plead impotence, when we can 
 span n continent with quadruple bands ot steel, adorn our cities with palaces, 
 and attain a scale of social expenditure never equalled; when our fertile 
 fields and orchards, our iron furnaces, our veins of gold and silver, our cotton 
 mills and railways, our banks and commercial establishments are pouring 
 their wealth into the lap ot the church, as well as the world ? 
 
 Nor can we plead that the heathen ii<> not neeii the gospel. I his plea 
 might have been urged, before the true condition and character ol the heathen 
 were known, or by men who deny the gospel as a means ol salvation, or who 
 claim that all religions are equally good and equally bad. or that all men 
 will be saved whether in Christ or out nf Christ. 
 
 But we who believe the gospel, who believe that all men are under con- 
 demnation for sin, that “ Christ came to seek and save that which was lost,’ 
 that conscience is a law by which the heathen will be judged and by which 
 they will perish without the gospel; and that the Christ the son of God, has 
 bidden us go teach the nations, because without this gospel teaching there i> 
 no hope for the nations; that they need the gospel and have a right to the 
 gospel: surely, we. as Christians and obedient children of the great Redeemer, 
 can never excuse our own neglect by the plea that they do not reed what wc 
 confess that we need, amid all our light and knowledge! We do need it. our 
 children need it, our country needs it. ai d what then shall we say of 1,000, 
 000,000 who have none of our light or our means of salvation. 
 
 Nor can we enter the plea of geographical ignorance. The apostles with 
 their limited knowledge ol geography might have begged to be excused from 
 entering the vast terra incognita outside the Roman Rmpire, or even from 
 essaying to reach the limits ol the Empire itself, so vast, so varied, so well 
 nigh unintelligible to the Jews of Palestine. Bui no. Athens and Rome, 
 Egypt and Syria. Macedonia and India, Arabia and the Black Sea provinces 
 were visited in turn by those whose teet were beautiful alike on the moun- 
 tains and the plains in bearing the glad tidings of peace. 
 
 And even in later ages, ignorance might have been urged by those who 
 had never heard of the remote parts of Asia and Africa, the Isles of the Sea 
 and the Western Continent. But on this question our mouths are stopped. 
 All continents are now known and largely explored. We know too much lor 
 our own peace of couscience. Our morning journals epitomize the news ol 
 ihe world, and publish for a nation of readers, maps, charts and statistics, 
 more accurate and extensive than anything known to the scientific world a 
 hundred years ago. 
 
 Our school children will describe the languages, religious customs and 
 
16 
 
 populations of countries in a manner to astonish a Copernicus or a Kepler. 
 
 We know where the heathen and Mohammedans live, what they believe, 
 their numbers, their deep degradation and their spiritual needs. We know 
 that they are numerous enough to give every church a vast field of labor, and 
 degraded enough, to awaken our sympathies and our zeal. 
 
 We cannot plead preoccupation. The infant churches of Syria and Asia 
 Minor might have pleaded it, with the fires of persecution burning around 
 them and the hungry lions ready to tear them in pieces in the amphitheatres 
 of a hundred cities. 
 
 The Reformers of the 16th century might have urged it, hemmed in be- 
 tween the fanatical hatred of an unscrupulous hierarchy, and the well- trained 
 armies of princes and emperois. But the apostolic churches testified in the 
 midst of the flames and preached the Gospel of peace to its persecutors, 
 bursting the barriers by an unquenchable zeal, and overflowing the whole 
 Roman Empire. Whatever may be said in extenuation of the neglect by 
 the Reformers, of a missionary zeal for the “ dark places of the earth,” they 
 had far more to preoccupy them than has any church in this 19th century. 
 But the plea of preoccupation is exhausted. Its day is spent. The com- 
 mand *• Go and teach all natious,” never came to a people better equipped 
 for work, with a larger available Christian army, of greater mobility and 
 facility of action, or with ampler resources, than the American church of to- 
 day. It, is free to act, untiammeled by any alliance with the political states, 
 unfettered by hierarchical dictation, unrestrained by the barriers of internal 
 dissension, or the pressure of a great work at home undone and with no one 
 to do it. 
 
 Our own tribe in Israel, “by their generations, after their families, by the 
 house of their fathers, according to the number of the names, all that are able 
 to go forth to war ” in the service of ( 'hrist our King, are six hundred thousand 
 church members, and a constituency of millions. And out of this mighty 
 host, we have sent abroad 160 ordained missionaries and 287 lay missionaries 
 male and female. Can it be said that we are so preoccupied with ourselves, in 
 caring for our children, our neighbors, our countrymen, that these 4-47 are all our 
 church can spare to labor for 1,000,000,000 of our race who are sitting in 
 darkness? 
 
 Bet tii e time past suffice lor us and our fathers to have wrought out such 
 excuses as this. Nebemiah was doing a great work among the ruins of Jeru- 
 salem, and “ could not come down.” We are doing a greater work than Ne- 
 hemiah in our own Zion, but we can come down, or rather come up to the 
 dignity and honor and privilege of this great work committed to us by the 
 Prince of the House ol David. We cannot afford to be preoccupied, to the 
 exclusion of the first great duty of the church. “The time ol waiting in Jeru- 
 salem has passed. The church has already been endued with power from on 
 
17 
 
 liiyrli. It is now the time to go and do the blessed work of saving a world. 
 
 Preoccupied, when Christ the Lord is calling I Preoccupied, when earth’s 
 millions are calling ! Is there more pressing business than the business of 
 the King? And are we to hope for salvation to ourselves, or our churches, 
 or our nation, it we neglect the last command of the ascending King of 
 Kings ? 
 
 VIII. Missions are the church’s unpai I debt to the heathen world. The 
 great apostle declared himself a debtor both to the Greeks and to the Bar- 
 barians. They had done nothing for him, but Christ’s work for him made 
 him a debtor to all. And this debt was to be paid. No claims of the Israe- 
 litish nation, no ties of blood relationship, no charms of the society and glory 
 ot the holy city Jerusalem, no associations ol the sacred spot where the 
 Lord ol glory was crucified, and ascended to Heaven, could free tin* great 
 apostle from that debt of love and service which he owed to the heathen 
 world. Paul felt and knew, and acted as il he felt and knew, that this debt 
 must be paid, that he owed it to Christ, and to men for Christ’s sake. He did his 
 part. He spent and was spent He preached in Asia and opened the gates ol 
 Europe. But what was Paul’s debt, was the debt of the whole church and is the 
 debt ol the whole church to-day. It is your debt. It is mine. It is the debt of 
 every Christian believer in every land, in every town and city, every hamlet 
 and farm house, whether old or young, strong or weak, rich or poor. We 
 owe it to Him who bought us with His own blood and hath made us heirs of 
 an heavenly inheritence, that we pay our debt of love and gratitude, by giv- 
 ing the gospel news to all the children of Adam. 
 
 No claims of our own favored and exalted nation, no anxiety about our 
 country’s future, no love for our noble Republican institutions, no attachment 
 to the land of our heroic fathers, no desire for ease or pleasure, or the repose 
 of civilized life and society, and no amount of labor and expense and self- 
 denial bestowed upon home evangelizatio.i in its manifold forms can absolve 
 11s from the solemn and awful and ever-accumulating debt we owe to those 
 who are sitting in the region and shadow of death. 
 
 IX. It is sometimes asked in a spirit of human calculation, does it pay? 
 Has it paid the church to embark in the great work of Christian Missions ; to 
 send its sons and daughters away from home and country, to live and (lie in 
 heathen and Mohammedan empires? To fall victims to deadly climates, to he 
 massacred by Chinese pirates and Moslem fanatics, to struggle with difficult 
 languages, to spend their lives in laying, in obscurity, the foundations of the 
 Church and a Christian civilization among the barbarians of Africa, and the 
 haughty and hardened populations of Asia ? Has it paid our church to set 
 aside so great a sum of money annually to be sent out of the country, and 
 
18 
 
 to consume so much of' our time and energies upon an object so remote, 
 for the sake of people whom we have never seen, and from whom we 
 may never in this world receive one word of thanks or one message of 
 approbation? There may be those who would bid us ask ourselves to-day 
 whether, in the process of our higher spiritual arithmetic, we are satisfied that 
 this laborious, expensive and ever-growing and ever-exacting enterprise has 
 turned our, to our advantage; and whether, on the whole, we might not bet- 
 ter abandon the work and apply ourselves to labors more near at hand, more 
 cheaply performed, requiring less sacrifice, and giving more visible and tan- 
 gibly profitable results. 
 
 Fathers and bretheren, the mere mention of such a question, the meas- 
 ing of such a celestial work by such a low and terrestial scale, seems a profan- 
 ation. 
 
 The work of saving a lost world is a work of unselfish Christian love. It 
 repudiate s the process of cold calculation. It gives with no thought of receiv 
 ing. it is a necessity of the Christian life. It must be and cannot help being. 
 It, is the irrepressible firh in the soul of the Christian disciple. It will work 
 and suffer, and find delight in labor, and joy in its sufferings. It is born of 
 communion with Christ, and has caught his self-giving, world-loving Spirit. 
 
 Enter the room of a loving mother, as she bears in her arms her sick- 
 child, afflicted, it may be, with loathsome disease; note her tender patient care 
 through midnight hours, as worn and weary, she watches on, hopes on and 
 suffers on with her suffering child ; and would von dare to ask her coolly, 
 mother, does it pay? 
 
 Would you ask the shepherd, seeking his lost sheep, does it pay? 
 
 Would you ask the apostle, shipwrecked, scourged, stoned, persecuted, 
 hated, robbed, imprisoned and betrayed for Christ sake — does it pay? 
 
 Love is its own reward. Our estimate of this work is that of Christ our 
 Lord. He came to seek and to save, to rescue the lost, and the work of the 
 rescue is to continue as long as there are lost ones to be rescued. All we 
 need to know of heathen lands is, “are there men there?” 
 
 Veins of gold and silver and deposits of diamonds will draw men in 
 thousands, to endure exposure and hardship, encamp in the wilderness amid 
 snow and ice, and with marvelous patience and perseverence build up cities 
 and states. Gold will draw men anywhere and always. But in the history 
 of the church, men draw the gold from willing givers. A newly opened door 
 to men on the Congo opens the coffers of the church, and draws not only 
 the gifts Imt the givers of self and life, to the rescue of Africa’s newly discov- 
 ered millions. 
 
 The world says, I will go, there are millions of money iu it. The ciiureti 
 says, 1 will go, lor there are milions o i men to be saved. The one is moved 
 by cold calculation ; the other by uncalculating resistless love. 
 
19 
 
 X The church should send the gospel to the heathen world because it 
 believes in the future triumph of the gospel. 
 
 The church of Christ is not leading a forlorn hope. It moves forward, 
 full of the inspiration of a buoyant, joyous faith in the inherent power of ihc 
 gospel to conquer the world. It holds no pessimist philosophy, no depressing 
 conviction that we are in a hopeless struggle against overwhelming odds. 
 
 Holding in its hand the imperial commission to disciple all nations, with 
 the promise of the omnipotent, transforming power of the Holy Spirit lo change 
 the hearts of men, with the Word of God, which is quick and powerful to 
 penetrate the darkest minds; with the assurance of the King of kings Him- 
 self that in going to evangelize the nations He will be with us always unto 
 the end of the world ; with the past history of Christian missions to stimulate 
 its zeal, with the knowledge that the present age is the brightest since the 
 days of the apostles, in respect to the prevalence of pure religion, in the faith- 
 ful study of the Word of God, in the distribution of 250, 000,000 copies of 
 the scriptures in 250 languages; in personal consecration, in increasing liber- 
 ality, in self-sacrifice for Christ, in enlarged plans and labors for nesv missionary 
 enterprises in the new enlistment of the consecrated womanhood of the 
 church, giving a new meaning to the 68th Psalm vs. 11: “The Lord giveth 
 
 the word, and the women that publish the glad tiding are a great host,” until 
 25 women’s boards of missions have became a mighty power in the world ; in 
 the rapidly increasing facilities of intercourse between the nations and tribe; 
 of the earth ; in The growing power and influence of Christian nations, and the 
 waning power o! Paganism and Mohammedanism, in the steady crumbling of 
 the walls and the gates which had barred the entrance of Christian missions 
 lor ages and in the full equipment of all the great evangelical Christian churches 
 of all continents for a general aggressive movement upon the whole unevan- 
 gelized world, the Church of Christ, which “ He hath purchased with his own 
 blood,” moves forward, “ fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as 
 an army with banners.” 
 
 We will not, we cannot believe, that the* dispensation of the Holy Spirit 
 has been, or is, or is to be a failure. The work of the Spirit is to reprove 
 the world, to guide men into all truth, to show men things to come, to lake 
 of what is Christ’s and show it unto men, and testify of Christ to men. He 
 began to reveal his mighty regenerating and transforming power at the Pen- 
 tecost, displayed it more and more in the Apostolic age, showing that the 
 words of the prophet Joel were beginning to be fulfilled: “I will pour out 
 
 my spirit upon all flesh.” Men were born of the spirit and sanctified by the 
 spirit, and at times through all the ages, the work of the spirit has been mani- 
 fest in reformations, revivals, spiritual awakenings and marvelous spiritual 
 transformations. 
 
 Is anything too hard for the Lord? Are there human hearts harder or 
 
20 
 
 viler or fiercer or more seemingly hopeless than thousands of those already 
 transformed by his wondrous grace ? Are there nations more debased than 
 those already brought by the Spirit’s work from the most revolting and savage 
 barbarism to the peace and light of Christian life and character, than the 
 Fiji Islanders so recently blood-thirsty cannibals, now rejoicing in 900 
 Christian churches? 
 
 Is the command to disciple the nations limited to a more minority of the 
 race? Or does the command to preach the gospel mean simply the formal 
 utterance of set gospel phrases for a brief period by a transient herald, as if 
 the preaching “ for a testimony” meant simply to shout in the ears of a few 
 individuals in each tribe or people the tidings ol their inevitable doom ? 
 
 Not such was the testimony of Paul who ir? one city, for the space of 
 three years, ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears. 
 
 The great commission extends from the ascension of our Lord to the end 
 of the world. It is positive, honest and obligatory. It is positive as enjoy- 
 ing distinct, clearly defined duties. It is to preach the gospel to every crea- 
 ture. It leaves no discretion to the church, as to what is to be done. The 
 gospel is to be preached, and to all. It is an honest commission. It means 
 what it says. The gospel is to be preached thoroughly, clearly, patiently, in 
 faith that it is meant to be the power of God unto salvation. It is not a sham 
 gospel, nor is it to be preached in a halfhearted despairing way. Our Lord 
 gave His command in awful earnest, and intended that His gospel should be 
 preached as a living, real witness of salvation through faith in Him. It was 
 not given to a close corporation, nor meant I'cra close corporation, but given 
 to the world. It is to be honestly preached, as if meant for human salvation, 
 and not simply as the knell of a condemned world. “ God sent not His son 
 into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might 
 be saved.” 
 
 It is an honest proclamation to be honestly carried to mankind. It is to 
 be repeated and repeated and impressed upon the world, and renewed gener- 
 ation after generation. 
 
 It is an obligatory commission — not to be evaded or shirked. It is backed 
 by Supreme authority. It allows of no excuses. It must be obeyed and 
 obeyed by all the church of Christ. We must do it or be found unfaithful. 
 
 The question is not, shall it be done? but how can we do our part in the 
 work ? 
 
 The Gospel is still the *• power of God unto salvation.” It has not be- 
 come weakness, nor is it dependent upon the weakness of man. 
 
 Its power rests not upon any temporary enactment or transient system 
 or feeble human agency. It is founded on Infinite Power, and as such it is 
 irresistible. 
 
 Christ Himself is working through the gospel in the midst of His church. 
 
21 
 
 As the God of Providence lie guides the affairs of nations, of men in masses ; 
 as the God of Grace, He transforms the hearts and lives of individuals. 
 
 We cannot conceive of any new element to be hereafter introduced into 
 the Christian economy which is to add to that power already infinite, which 
 is armed and engaged in behalf of human salvation. 
 
 New appliances and means on our part may be devised and put into 
 operation, in the elucidation and application of the existing truth of the gospel. 
 But let it be understood that these are only means to an end. We may de- 
 vise no new gospel. We may add nothing to the gospel and take nothing 
 from it. It was adapted to Asia. Africa and Euiope in the Apostolic age, and 
 is adapted to these and all other lands to day. 'I he gospel which transformed 
 the Roman empire can transform the empires ol India, C hina and Japan. 
 
 And we mav reverently and confidently say that there is no evidence to 
 prove that, even the personal presence of our Divine Lord Himself in the 
 flesh on earth again, would add anything to that tremendous vitalizing spiritual 
 energy with which in the work of the Omnipotent Spirit, He has clothed the 
 gospel of a crucified and risen Redeemer. 
 
 It was expedient for the church and the world that He should go away, to 
 send the mighty enlightener, the Spirit ol truth. And that Spirit has wrought 
 mightily, is still working mightily and will still work mightily in the future 
 salvation of the world. 
 
 The weakness, the halting, the loss of power and efficiency, are all in the 
 human i: struments. in the slackness ol the church, in unbelief, in indifference, 
 in narrowness of vision. The triumphal chariot of His Kingly Majesty will 
 move omvard, whether we ride upon it or be crushed beneath it, or be left far 
 behind. And even were it supposed that our Lord might return and dwell on 
 earth again in human form, what does the supposition involve ? Nothing less 
 than a second humiliation. His humiliation preceded His exaltation, and the 
 exaltation necessarily followed in the law of the Divine economy, the humilia- 
 tion. For the kingdom of God is a growth, an advance, a progress from lower 
 to higher, from foundation to topstone, from seed to fruit, from type to anti- 
 type, from promise aud prophecy to glorious fulfilment. It is not a 
 retrogression, a return to beggarly elements and scaffoldings after the 
 glorious temple is once completed with triumphal shouts of “ grace, grace 
 unto it.” 
 
 There will be no second humiliation of our Lord. And what conceivable 
 condition in which He could reign on earth in bodily visible form in this pres- 
 ent world, with all that such reigning involves, could be other than a humilia- 
 tion as compared with the transcendent glory ir. which He now reigns on high 
 as King of kings and Lord of lords? To appear on earth in His glory would 
 smite with blindness every human beholder, and to reign in any circumstances 
 on an earthly localized material throne, would involve the very conditions of 
 
limitation as to space and time, from which the mission of the Holy Spirit was 
 intended to free His church and the world forever. 
 
 It has been gravely urged, and that by Christian writers, that we are not 
 to expect the conversion of the world from any increase of our present means 
 of evangelizing the nations, nor by any working of the Divine Spirit, but “ by 
 a stupendous display of Divine wrath upon all the apostate and ungodly.” 
 The universal church is to be established, not by gradual conversion more or 
 less rapid, under this dispensation, but by the personal advent of our Lord 
 Himself ; not by an extension of the gospel, the labors of ministers, or any' 
 gracious instrumentality now at work, but by the angels of God.” Again, 
 “ the world is not growing better, but worse, under all human efforts.” “The 
 power of Christ in a new moral system, is to complete what His grace has 
 failed to accomplish in this.” These quotations would indicate that the work 
 of evangelizing the world is a hopeless task : that in attempting to fulfill 
 Christ’s command we are “ feeding the church upon unauthorized speculations,” 
 and that the only true course for the church is to fold its arms in fatalistic 
 melancholy, and await those awful scenes of desolation which are to sweep 
 away the pagan nations, and by unparalleled judgments, purge the earth for 
 the abode of God’s elect. 
 
 It is urged that prophecy abounds in predictions % of dire events and 
 judgments which are to precede and accompany the final triumph of the 
 church. 
 
 But is the destruction of the unbelieving nations the only possible service 
 to be rendered by Divine judgments in the history of the church and the 
 world? Have not the revolutions and convulsions the wars and upturnings 
 of the past 2,000 years proved mighty auxiliaries to the advancing kingdom 
 of our God? Were those who preached the gospel to Europe, and to our 
 pagan ancestors in the British Isles, and by whose labors whole nations were 
 Christianized, utterly mistaken in their principles and modes of operation? If 
 it was right to Christianize one nation, why not all nations, especially' when 
 the Lord has bidden us disciple them all. Have not the judgments of God 
 proved to be the ploughshare by which the soil has been upturned to receive 
 the good seed of the Word 1 
 
 God, even our God, is on the throne. He will overturn and overturn in 
 the future as He did in the past, when He prepared the way for the coming of 
 the Messiah to the world, and opened the way for Jews and Gentiles to 
 receive the gospel. 
 
 Have we not seen in our own lifetime the workings of God’s mighty 
 hand, in great political and social overturnings in China and India, in Japan 
 and Madagascar, in Africa and continental Europe, in European and Asiatic 
 Turkey, which for the time being have seemed to threaten the very existence 
 of the church in those lands, and yet have turned out to its actual growth and 
 
advancement? Without alluding in detail to the Tae Ping revolt, which in 
 twenty years is estimated to have caused the death of 200 millions of human 
 beings, the Sepoy rebellion, which shed so much of innocent blood, the Japan- 
 ese political revolution, the upheaving in Madagascar, the American civil 
 war, the European wars terminating in Solferitto, Sadowa and Sedan, all of 
 which broke the power of hoary systems of wrong or complicity with wrong, 
 and the most of which gave a now impulse to human liberty; let us glance 
 briefly at the lour convulsions which have shaken the Ottoman Empire within 
 thirty years, as an illustration of the fact that the cause of truth and of right- 
 eousness in the world gains some of its noblest victories through the agency 
 of blood and terror, of massacre and revolution. 
 
 The Crimean War, which for a season convulsed the whole Turkish Em- 
 pire, exciting latent Mohammedan fanaticism and threatening to roll backward 
 the rising tide of light and liberty, resulted in guaranteeing protection and a 
 civil autonomy to the evangelical communities in Turkey. The Sultan gov- 
 erns his Empire through the various religious hierarchies. The Patriarchs 
 and bishops are responsible to the government for the payment of the taxes 
 of the Christian sects, and the heads of other religious sects for theirs. When 
 evangelical Christianity suddenly appeared in all parts of the Empire its ad- 
 herents had no political status or recognition. They were outlawed by all 
 and preyed upon by all. False tax levies and forged claims were followed 
 by persecution and imprisonment, and there was no relief. 
 
 The Crimean war gave Christian England the right to insist upon pro- 
 tection to the evangelical communities. They were organized under wakeels 
 corresponding to the religious heads of the older sects, and thus the gospel 
 for the first time had a fair chance to grow and extend under the protection 
 of the Sultan himself. And twenty years later, a prominent Mohammedan 
 gentleman of Constantinople wrote to an American friend as follows : “ These 
 educational and missionary enterprises of your countrymen have convinced 
 me, (1) that Christian philanthropy is something we Moslems neither know 
 nor practice. (2) That the religion which produces such fruit is adapted to 
 the wants of man. (3) That your countrymen are the best friends of Turkey, 
 if friendship is measured by what it does. (4) That their work in this country 
 is already too strong to be destroyed by any human power, and (5) is as 
 sure to advance as a tree is to grow. It has vitality in it. (6) That they 
 work on a principle exactly opposite to that of our government. Our theory 
 is that the people exist for the government and the country for the capital. 
 But your countrymen believe in work for the people. They are opening up 
 oases all over our desert. When the day shall come that our people shall be 
 educated in your schools, when our intellectual and moral life shall be molded 
 by your teachings and actual religious freedom makes it possible for us to seek 
 for all the elements of power in the institutions your country has given ours, 
 then indeed will there be occasion for universal rejoicing/’ 
 
24 
 
 The Syrian massacres of 1860 illustrate the same subordination of the 
 wildest outbreaks of human passion to the Divine plan for the advancement 
 of Christ’s kingdom in the world. Previous to 1860 ignorance and fanaticism, 
 with hostility to education and evangelical Christianity, prevailed throughout 
 Syria. The masses looked on the Bible as a forbidden book, and the mission- 
 aries as enemies of the human race. The city of Damascus was the citadel 
 of Mohammedan bigotry. As one of the sacred cities with Mecca and Jeru- 
 salem it was exempt from taxation and military conscription. The code of 
 the Khalif Omar for the humiliation of the Christian Zimmehs was still in 
 force. Christians could dress only in black and were forbidden to ride on 
 horseback in the streets. In every way they were treated with contempt and 
 kept in subjection, and haughty Damascus looked down on the Christian world 
 as infidels and outcasts. 
 
 On the 9ih of July, 1860, the Moslem populace, aided bj T Druzes, Tur- 
 kish regulars, Kurds and Bedouin Arabs, began the work of pillage, massacre 
 and burning. Already thousands of Christians had been massacred in Deirel- 
 komer, Hasbeiya and Jezzin. Scores of towns and villages were in ashes 
 mingled with the blood of the slain. 
 
 The whole Christian quarter of Damascus was plundered and burned, 
 6,000 Christians massacred, and women and girls were carried off to Moham- 
 medan harems. But for the noble interposition of Abdul-Kadir, the Algerine 
 prince, not a Christian would have escaped. He rescued 12,000 men, women 
 and children and guarded them in the fortress until relief came from 
 Beirut. 
 
 All Syria was in terror and tears. The missionary work seemed at an 
 end. Churches and schools were destroyed and Christians massacred or left 
 widows or orphans. The labor of years seemed lost, and darkness settled 
 over the land. But out of that darkness came light. 
 
 Forced by Christian Europe. Fuad Pasha hastened from Constantinople 
 with an army. French troops held Beirut, and a British fleet of 25 line of 
 battle ships anchored in the harbor. Fuad Pasha, by forced marches, reached 
 Damascus. The guilt}” Pasha who had presided at the massacre with the 
 Ulema, the Mufti, Kadi, and leading civil and military officers came out to 
 meet him. They were thrown into irons and imprisoned. Within a few 
 hours 120 officers and men, including the Pasha, were shot, and fifty-six of 
 the leading citizens, men of rank, learning and wealth, were hung. The best 
 Moslem house was turned into a Greek church. The wretched refugees w'ere 
 lodged temporarily in Moslem houses, and then sent to Beirut and fed at gov- 
 ernment expense. 
 
 The Christian quarter was rebuilt at Moslem expense and heavy taxes 
 laid on all Mohammedans. Every young man between the ages of IS and 
 40 was drafted into the Turkish army, and sent, with his hands in wooden 
 
25 
 
 storks, to Beirut, and thence transported to some remote part of the empire. 
 
 Haughty Damascus had made a holocaust of Christian victims, but was 
 itself humbled in the dust. Taxes and the conscription serve as a perpetual 
 reminder of its departed glory. The Mount Lebanon province was reorgan- 
 ized under a Christian Pasha, and from that time to this has enjoyed the best 
 system of government in the whole Turkish Empire. 
 
 The 20,000 refugees in Beirut, fed and clothed for four months by the 
 charity of Protestant England, America and Germany, at the hands o( mis- 
 sionaries, learned to respect and esteem them as their best friends. 
 
 The Arabic Testament just completed was ready to he carried by them 
 all over the land. Schools were in demand. All the leading literary and 
 religious institutions ol Syria date back to that era ol upheaval and change. 
 Then began in fact the new life of modern Syria. The hand of God was 
 breaking up the old and preparing for the new. Seminaries, colleges, hospi- 
 tals, printing presses and journals began to appear in the reconstructed towns 
 and cities of that year of massacre and ruin, and the popular mind was 
 awakened from the sleep of ages. 
 
 In the Bulgarian A r ar of 18 77, when fiendish atrocities of every kind had 
 revealed again the frenzy of Mohammedan fanaticism, the Turkish power was 
 once more humbled. Mohammedan political prestige greatly lessened, and 
 millions of Christian subjects treed from the Moslem yoke forever. New 
 guarantees for liberty of conscience were exacted from the Porte, and reforms 
 promised, whose execution will be insisted upon by Christian Europe, even 
 though temporarily delayed. 
 
 In 1882, the wild spirit of Mohammedan bigotry broke out once more, 
 and the streets of Alexandria ran with Christian blood. The revolt of 
 Arabi Pasha threatened the lives ol the Christian population and the destruc- 
 tion of religious liberty in Egypt, with a return to the cruelties ol the bastinado 
 and the worst features of Egyptian rule. 
 
 The interposition of Eneland, the defeat of Arabi, the check upon rising 
 Moslem Irenzy, and the shattering of the Pau Islamic league which had be- 
 come a menace tc progress and civilization in the East, all revealed again the 
 working of that hand which makes no mistakes, and that wise and glorious 
 Providence of God, which overrules all things for His own glory. 
 
 Truly, though the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing. 
 ‘•He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.” “ When the judgments of God 
 are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.” Isa. 
 26. “ Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made 
 
 in the earth ; he breaketh the bow and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth 
 the chariot in the fire. Be still and know that 1 am God. I will be exalted 
 among the heathen ; I will be exalted in the earth.” Ps. 46. 
 
 We are not then shut up to interpret the prophecies of divine judgments 
 
26 
 
 as necessarily involving the destruction of the heathen nations, and the failure 
 of the Christian dispensation to meet the wants of the world. The wrath of 
 man will praise the Lord. Every revolution leads sooner or later to recon- 
 struction. Every upturning of the soil uproots old evils and fits the earth for 
 the blessed seed sowing of the truth. 
 
 The Gospel is fitted for men and all men. The Lord’s sons are coming 
 from far; and his daughters from the ends of the earth. 
 
 The Holy Spirit has wrought and is still working and will j r et work more 
 and more potently for the regeneration of the world. 
 
 The world is not growing worse. The Church is gaining on the world. 
 In this land, it grows almost two and a-half times faster than the population. 
 The history of modern missions is a history of growing, shining and ever 
 increasing light. 
 
 When Carey proposed as a topic of discussion 100 years ago the conver- 
 sion of the heathen, Dr. Ryland, the presiding officer, said “ Young man sit 
 down. When God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your 
 aid or mine.” 
 
 And when, in 1796, two overtures in behalf of foreign missions were laid 
 before the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the scheme was de- 
 nounced as “highly dangerous to the good order of society,” and rejected on 
 the ground “that it was improper and absurd to propagate the gospel abroad 
 while there remained a single individual at home without the means of relig- 
 ious knowledge.” 
 
 In the light and missionary conviction of this generation, we can hardly 
 credit the existence of such ignorance and selfishness. Thank God, the 
 church has swept on in its course out of that dark moral eclipse. 
 
 Thank God that no officer of any respectable religious assembly, in our day 
 would venture to suppress advocacy of the missionary work. 
 
 The church is outstripping the world in its onward movement. The 
 foundations of the past have not been laid in vain. With millions of youths 
 studying the word of God, history will not repeat itself in another Romish 
 apostacy. 
 
 We need not the ministry of angels, the gift of miracles. Miracles alone 
 never converted men. Let us not question or doubt the power of ihe gospel, 
 attended by the power of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 We need consecrated lives, devout hearts, working hands, united effort, 
 a recognition of our stewardship of the Lord’s property. 
 
 Let us be patient while we toil on and pray on, “Thy kingdom come.” 
 Let us not be betrayed into the impatient demand, “Let Him hasten His work 
 that we may see it, and let the counsel of the Holy One draw nigh that we may 
 know it.” (Isa. 5:19.) 
 
 ’The work goes on in spite of low views and superficial know 3ge of the 
 
work among Christians; pessimist theories of the church; secular misrepresen- 
 tations of missionary work; the feebleness and mistakes o( the instruments 
 used; neglect of missions in so many Sabbath schools; the appetite for exag- 
 gerated statistics; the evil influence of ungodly foreigners in heathen lands; 
 the inadequate manning of so many fields already occupied; the difficulty of 
 carrying on work in a foreign language; the skepticism of some as to men's 
 need of the gospel; the dreadful licentiousness in heathen lands; the power of 
 resistance of hoary systems of error, and the sleepless vigilance of the devil 
 and his angels. 
 
 The cause of missions cannot fail, will not fail, must not fail. Let us as 
 individuals and as a church, here in this great assembly, in view of the prom- 
 ises and the past mercies ol God, conscious of our own short-comings and in- 
 firmities. and yet strong through Christ who strengtheneth us, renewed])' con- 
 secrate ourselves this day to Christ our King and Lord, and resolve that, so 
 far as our personal efforts or sufferings, our toils and prayers and sacrifices 
 can avail, the cause of missions shall never fail. 
 
 We are committed to it for life. However severe or protracted the con- 
 flict, we are enlisted for the war. We will not countour property as our own 
 nor our lives dear unto us, nor withhold our children from this blessed service. 
 Nothing that we can do shall be left undone. And the work will go on with 
 ever accumulating depth and power. It will cross new seas, penetrate new 
 continents, gladden new hearts, and bring new trophies to Christour King and 
 Saviour. 
 
 Wondrous vision, when Christ himself shall see of the travail of his soul 
 and be satisfied! Not vet is the Lord Christ satisfied. Not yet 
 has the world received all His fulness. Not yet are His commands 
 obeyed, His promises fulfilled. His desires accomplished. He died for 
 all He is waiting for the “lulness of the Gentiles” to come in. 
 Who can describe that glorious spectacle, when all shall be Christ’s — East, 
 West, North, South — when all the sons and daughters are brought in He 
 will then be satisfied. His church will have fought and won. Peace and joy, 
 holiness and love will prevail, until at length shall be heard great voices in 
 Heaven saying: ‘‘The kiugdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of 
 our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign lor ever and ever.’’ 
 
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