That Old Established House “£T/>e M issionary u nion 99 WILLIAM ASHMORE, D. D. Sk American Baptist Missionary Union ^ >? f Boston V_ _ J Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Columbia University Libraries https://archive.org/details/thatoldestablishOOashm William Ashmore, D.D. That Old Established House Missionary Union’* WILLIAM ASHMORE, D. D. * Business houses like to speak of their antiquity. That means that they are long known and well known, and can be depended upon. In Boston, at the foot of School Street, is an old bookstore with an old-fashioned cut-away roof, with old- fashioned figures, 1732 A.D., upon the wall. They are proud of it. We come to speak of an old established busi¬ ness house called “ The Missionary Union/’ and have several things to say about it. THE FOUNDERS OF THIS HOUSE The house originated in 1814. It was founded by a corporation of Baptist gentlemen who were leaders in the denomination at the time. They were soon joined by many others of equal celeb¬ rity. They numbered among them such persons as Francis Wayland, Daniel Sharp, Dr. Baldwin, Dr. Stillman, Baron Stow, Dr. Famum, Dr. Welch, William R. Williams, Spencer H. Cone, Morgan I. Rhees, Solomon Peeto, Edward Bright, Heman Lincoln, and many others like them, as brave and brainy a lot of men as ever put their heads together to accomplish a purpose. These men were moved to organize this house, partly as a result of contagion, partly by some special provi¬ dences occurring at the time, but chiefly by a di¬ vine impulse typified by an angel in mid-heaven having the everlasting gospel to preach to them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation and kindred and tongue and people. The contagion came from the English Baptists under Fuller, Carey, Dr. Staughton and others who had started in business of this kind. The providential occur¬ rence was the conversion to Baptist views of Ado- niram Judson ; and the impulse, as we all believe, came from the Holy Spirit of God. They got started all right, but for a while it was slow work. Multitudes of the Baptists had to be educated up to a belief in missions. Then, too, the openings for their business abroad were meager at first. Only minor races were accessible. It was found that a general meeting once in three years would be quite often enough. Even then forty and fifty dele¬ gates at a time would be considered a good repre¬ sentation. But the countries continued to open before them, the opportunities multiplied, and money came in more freely. Then the triennial meeting had to be given up for a yearly meeting, and now, today, at the annual session of the shareholders great churches are packed, and there is not half time enough to go through the business that has to be attended to. THE KIND OF BUSINESS THE OLD HOUSE IS ENGAGED IN It was organized to do a foreign business; that is, business in foreign lands, — a heavy export business. In one respect it is like any great for¬ eign business concern; it sends out the products of the home land and distributes them to the ends of the earth, and then buys things to bring back. It is always interesting to go into a great shipping establishment in New York. Today they are sending off a shipload of something to South America; tomorrow a shipload will go to Europe, and next day one will go to Africa; and so it goes, everywhere under the sun, to big nations and to small tribes, one invoice after another of some¬ thing to supply people’s needs. So, in a measure with the old Union. It does business in France, in Germany, in Russia, in Denmark, in Sweden, in the heart of Africa, in India, in Burma, in Assam, in Siam, in China, in Japan, even in that out-of-the-way place, the Liuchiu Islands, and the Philippine Islands. There is a difference, though, in the kind of products dealt in. Our ordinary commercial houses send out all sorts of manufactured goods, from a locomotive down to a tin whistle. Our foundries, our looms and our factories often run extra time to supply the demand. Our chambers of commerce are busy finding markets, and our diplomats get great salaries to support them while fostering “trade.” Our breadstuffs, our oil that we get out of the ground, our drugs for the heal¬ ing of human maladies, and forty other things *• too tedious to mention ” all come in the category of our exports. The Union deals in not a single one of these things; yet it does deal in counter¬ parts of many of them, of a much higher grade of goods. It deals in breadstuffs, — in the bread of life; in the meat which endureth to everlasting life. It deals in healing medicines, — in the balm of Gilead, in the leaves of the tree of life which are for the healing of the nations, — in eye-salve to anoint the eyes of the blind and make them see; in fruits of the garden of God, long preserved, yet fresh as when pulled from the tree. It deals in clothing, too, of a wonderful cut and fashion, gar¬ ments of glory and beauty; in robes of righteous¬ ness; in crowns withal; in precious stones and pearls of great price. Then, too, it is doing another kind of work out in these countries to which it is sending its heav¬ enly wares. It is opening highways in the desert; it is passing through the valleys and making them a well; it is planting the rose of Sharon in every¬ body’s dooryard that will receive it; it is making the solitary place to be glad, and the desert to re- joice and blossom like the rose; it is breaking open prison doors and setting captives free; it is opening great hospitals, erecting great printing- establishments, founding great colleges, starting great churches, and everywhere is preparing the way for a “good time coming,” and is proclaim¬ ing the acceptable year of the Lord just at hand in the valley below and on mountain ridge above, when all flesh shall see the glory of God together. HOME WORK OF THIS HOUSE At the same time this foreign mission house is doing a great home work. It is acting as a great “ elevator ” which receives the grain from a hun¬ dred quarters and distributes it into a hundred other quarters, — a great receiving house —a great clearing house — a great investment house, through which its patrons may invest their small and large sums in the best-paying securities on the face of the earth. It is like one of those great watersheds of our land which collect all the raindrops and all the showers and all the downpours of water into one great reservoir, 8 that it may be piped off thirty and forty and fifty miles to supply the needs of a million of people. The rainshed of the old Union beats the rainshed of the Mississippi all out. It ex¬ tends from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to the states of the South, where they have another watershed and distributing reservoir of their own; and it furnishes an outlet for the missionary funds of nine hundred thousand people. We have not the best system of collecting the rains that might be, and we must improve it. Still, there is always a bit of show somewhere. We have the fine rain and the great rain of our financial strength; we have our nickels and our dimes and our dollars and half eagles and whole eagles and double eagles and hundred-dollar notes and thousand-dollar checks. So you see it is a great business house, this. SPECIFIC OPERATIONS OF THE BUSINESS HOUSE “ Operations ” is the word they use under such circumstances. The house commenced operations in Burma. After a while some tribes called the Karens began to come in. A noted man sprang up, called Ko Tha Byu. He had been a robber, \)ut the gospel got hold of him and he became an apostle and went through and through the land as the fiery cross used to go through Scotland among the clans. The Karens came in by thousands. All their tribes are now being pried up out of the mud, and are developing an excellent type of Christianity among themselves. The Burmans are following, and the Shans and the Kachins and various other tribes. In Assam, among the wild tribes, the gospel has taken hold wonderfully, and now thousands of them are coming in and are setting up for themselves. Among the Telugus the word has operated so powerfully that at one great baptism which they had, twenty-two hun¬ dred and twenty-two were baptised in one day , and now there are over fifty thousand of them there, as there are about forty thousand in Burma. So in China and in Japan and in Africa they are beginning to come like doves to their windows. The same is true in European countries. In 10 European and Asiatic countries the converts have been coming- in at the rate of about twelve thou¬ sand a year of late. Soon there will be more than that, for the field is widening; the breaking of fallow ground, as people call it, is proceeding with unwonted rapidity and the opportunities are un¬ precedented. As the miners say, “new lodes” are being discovered as rich as anybody could desire, while old ones are yielding more than ever. Up in Alaska they have their Klondike; down in Africa they have their diamond mines; way off in Burma they have their ruby mines; but we Baptists have in Asia and in Africa our gold mines and our diamond mines and our ruby mines, which beat the whole of them. OTHER HOUSES IN THE SAME BUSINESS We must not fail to speak of these; our zeal and our success have provoked very many. The formation of the original Baptist house in London to export the gospel was soon followed by others, and now there are hundreds of them all working together without rivalry, all having on their hands more than they can do, all of them having paying dividends, all of them anxious to enlarge their operations, and all of them praying for each other’s success. The like of it is never known among secular business houses. Among these latter they compete with each other and try to get ahead of each other and “ do ” each other, as they call it, and get business out of each other’s hands, and keep secret all their movements without letting the other know them. Not so with these gospel houses, — the more a neighbor’s house succeeds, the better the rest like it. They tell all that is going on, and stir each other by stories of their own success. There is no place of importance on earth today where business houses of this kind have not something going on in their particular line of trade. “ There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.” You find branch houses in Europe and Asia and Africa, and in the great cities, of course ; but if you go to Greenland you will find them there ; if you go to Patagonia you 12 will find them there ; if you go to the islands of, the sea you will find them there. In fact their mission stations are belting the globe, north and south, east and west. England has so much terri¬ tory that it is said the sun never sets upon all at once. Still more true is it of us. Already the sun never sets upon our mission stations. Be¬ fore it is done shining on one place it has begun shining on another, and no matter what time it is in the twenty-four hours, there are plenty of sta¬ tions which at that very moment have the sun directly overhead. We are sure of an everlasting noonday, take it all in all. INCREASE IN OUR BUSINESS To give you a little idea of how the missionary business has increased since that first Baptist so¬ ciety was started in England, and indeed since our own was started eighty-eight years ago, we may say that the one station started by Carey has now multiplied to five thousand large, central stations, together with at least twenty-five thousand smaller ones. Where there were three men, Carey, Marshman and Ward, there are now fifteen thou¬ sand men and women in the work ; where there was no church at all, there are now eleven thou¬ sand, and where there was one convert, Krishna Pal, there are now more than a million and a half of Baptist converts and more than twice as many more of what they call adherents; that is, persons who, though they have not come out openly, have quit worshipping idols and are regularly listening to Christian truth. The religious future of Asia and Africa belongs to this great gospel-promul¬ gating house. Hinduism is going down before it, and so is Confucianism, and so is Buddhism. It ought to do us Baptists good to consider the very honorable place we have in this list of great business houses. We are among the first of them. We do not collect and disburse so much money as some of them, but it is a fact that we have more converts to show for what we have done than any of them. This is not boasting, but is said by way of increasing our confidence and stimulating us to greater effort. We should be stupid and culpable if we did not appreciate the 14 magnificent position we occupy among the great church forces of the Kingdom of God, working together for the regeneration of the kingdoms of the earth. OUR SHARE IN THE GREAT CONCERN We ourselves have an interest in the business. It came to us as an inheritance. Our old fathers and mothers who were in it in the beginning have gone the way of all the earth. They may have left us various things of value, possibly houses and lands and stocks of one kind and another, but not even the rich ones among them have left us any¬ thing of more priceless worth than their share in this paying concern of God Almighty. They have gone, these good people; they sit today, so to speak, on the parapets of heaven, and look down on what they left behind to their children. There is the unfinished work of their day and generation —the great enterprise of the world’s redemption. Could they but come back to us from the other world with a message in relation to property affairs, we are certain they would say: “ Oh, chil- dren, prize like your very life your share in the mission enterprise; the houses we gave you will go to pieces, the lands we gave you will become impoverished, the stocks we left you will depreci¬ ate, but these missionary shares are advancing all the time. There is nothing that stands so high even here. The angels care nothing about your great mines and your great warehouses and your great syndicates; there is not one of them that cares to invest in the best of them. But when it comes to the shares in Christ’s wonderful enter¬ prise they are full of admiration; they gladly give their service, and with joy go forth to minister to them who are heirs of salvation, and heirs of this great trust along with it all. All the time the angels desire to look into it all.” OUR RESPONSIBILITY IN THE BUSINESS How ought we to demean ourselves under such a legacy ? It includes all the unredeemed prom¬ ises of the living God which are handed down to us as part of the heavenly portion, — promises of the blessings of the heaven above, blessings of the 16 deep that lieth under; above the blessing's of our progenitors unto the utmost bound of the ever¬ lasting hills. It includes the legacy of our fathers' and mothers’ unanswered prayers for the good of Zion. We are the heirs-at-law of the whole. It is a way that God has of making good to the children the promises made to the father; the father may die before the time comes to send an answer, but God, who administers probate, passes it on to the children if the children only possess the spirit of the father. So the apostle spoke of the promises made to the fathers which, said he, God hath fulfilled toward us, their children. Good for many of us that we are taking up the work the fathers had to lay down at death. There is no better specimen of loyalty and fidelity to a great trust seen on earth than when sons and daughters step into the vacant place, and continue to pray as their fathers prayed, and give as their fathers gave. That is filial piety in real earnest, — that is indeed continuing the succession of the family line. You are entitled to a coat-of-arms, on which shall be some such motto as this : “ We 17 receive and we give ” When anybody asks you about your crest, you can say : “ My grandfather gave, and my father gave, and now I give; and I will teach my son to give, and we will keep it up till the kingdom comes; the Missionary Union shall never lack a liberal and cheerful giver in our family so long as God keeps us going as a fam¬ ily.” May our fidelity be such that God will say of us as he said of Abraham: “ For I know him that he will command his children and his house¬ hold after him.” Lord, so let it be! Let us never be short when a missionary collection is to be taken; let us never grow stingy; let our purses never have the lockjaw nor the strings thereof dangle loose when the Lord asks for an offering. Let our pocketbooks, somehow or other, act as the iron gates did before Peter, and open of their own accord. THE HOUSE ROBBED But now, alas, for many others of us who never do anything! About one third of all the churches of our land never give one red cent. 18 Many members in giving churches never give one red cent . They leave the others to do the whole of it, and yet they are under obligations just as much as people who give every Sunday. A man who accepts the gospel must accept it with all its attendant conditions and obligations. One of those obligations is to give what you have re¬ ceived, to pass it to the next man and the next woman. You may say you will eat and drink, but you will not share with anybody. Now, have you the mind of Christ ? Be honest with your¬ self, and ask yourself if you are acting like a Christian. It may be your very salvation de¬ pends on an honest answer, — not that the giving of money will save you, but the withholding of what is due to your Master and to your needy missionary societies and to your dying fellow-men may prove that you have not the love of God in you. The apostle John teaches that very doc¬ trine : “ If a man have this world’s goods, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion ” —you know the rest of it. John either knew or he did not know; if he 19 did not know, then you cannot trust him in other things; if he did know, where will you stand ? You say your father was a good man, yet he never gave anything; your grandfather was a good man, yet he never gave anything ; you are the third generation, and you never give anything. So much the worse for you. You ought to be all the more anxious to make up for this defect. Your family line ought, in you, to make a new start. Will a man rob God ? was asked of old. Your answer would have to be : “Yes, Lord, my grandfather robbed thee and my father robbed thee and now I rob thee — three generations of us who have never given a red cent to save a single lost heathen soul.” Oh, my withholding brother, turn a new leaf at once! A MAGNIFICENT CRISIS TO BE MET The old Union never had such an opportunity as it has just now. “ White for the harvest! White for the harvest! ” is the cry everywhere. White for the harvest upon the mountains of Assam; white for the harvest on the plains of 20 India; white for the harvest on the rivers of Burma; white for the harvest in the valleys of China; white for the harvest in the islands of Japan and the Philippines, and lo, too, white for the harvest in the wilds of Africa. Our old business house has openings by the score ; and there are the men, and the women, too, all ready; but the means, the means wherewith to send them out! It is sorely pressed for means. The massacre in China has not scared them. For every one that falls, two rise up and say, “ Here, Lord, am I, send me.” “Here, Baptist men and women of the Missionary Union, here am I, send me to China.” On the way up the Mount, Isaac asked his father, “ Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for an offering? ” Nowadays we say, Be¬ hold the lamb for an offering, in China, if need be, — yes, a “burnt offering” as some of the others have been, if God should so will it, but where are the means for getting there to preach the everlasting gospel for a few years before we die? The answer to that question must come from 21 you to whom appeal is now made to come for¬ ward and stand by the honored missionary house of your sainted fathers and mothers. LITERATURE DEPARTMENT AMERICAN BAPTIST MISSIONARY UNION TREMONT TEMPLE, B 08 T 0 N, MASS. 3D ED. 5-02. 5M. Headquarters of “The Missionary Union,’' Tremont Temple, Boston, Mass. SAMUEL USHER. BOSTON