Missions or Mammon?

The Congo Mission bequeathed to the A. B. M. U.— Dr. Gordon's fight against its abandonment— " The cooking-stove apostasy"—Address at Evangelical Alliance, " The Responsibility Growing out of our Perils and Opportunities "

IN the fall of '84 the Livingstone Inland Mission, founded

by Mr. and Mrs. Grattan Guinness of London, was handed over to the American Baptist Missionary Union. This mission was organized immediately after Stanley emerged from the gloom of interior Africa in '77, By this time its stations were planted all up and down the Lower Congo. Twenty-five men and women were in the field, acclimatized and instructed in the vernacular. Translations of a large part of the Scriptures had been made into many Congoese dialects. Schools were in running operation. A steamer for itinerating purposes plied from station to station. All the preliminary expenses, all the discouragements of frequent sicknesses and early deaths, which accompany missionary pioneering, had been borne by the founders. The mission with all its equipment was bequeathed without conditions to the American Baptists, who had been contemplating opening work in Africa, as to "those who believe in maintaining every word and ordinance of God."

The gift was accepted at the Detroit meeting of the denomination in '84. A reaction of timid conservatism, however, followed soon after. The value of the gift did not seem

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to be fully appreciated. The difficulties ahead loomed large

against the black sky of boundless African heathenism. A

cry for " concentration of interests " went abroad, and pressure was brought to bear from many quarters looking to the return of the missionaries and the abandonment of the field.

It was at this juncture that Dr. Gordon set himself to stem the tide. Earnestly did he appeal to his own church and to local conferences to resist the retrenchment. With his pen he addressed the denomination at large. A pointed tract, " The Ship Jesus," emphasizing the American debt to Africa, was written, and became widely influential. Finally he took the field with Dr. Sims, who had worked many years in this mission, and went from city to city over all the country east of the Mississippi, pleading for the evangelization of the Congo Valley. With statesman-like prevision he showed the strategic opportunities of the mission. With burning words he denounced the proposed desertion of those who were holding the outposts. He aptly recalled the history of the great and flourishing Telugu Mission and the demands for its abandonment which had been made in its days of weakness. He denied the " lack of interest " which many were urging as a reason for withdrawal. " When the doctor would feel the pulse of a patient," said he, "he lays his finger on the wrist, where the walls of flesh are the thinnest. Who will say that we may not detect the missionary pulse and learn something of the moving of the Spirit by noting the expressions of Christ's poor saints who have sent up their little gifts— in some instances the widow's all—because the burden for Africa is on their hearts? I have rarely read anything more touching than some letters of this sort which have been received and there have been hundreds of these small donations. How can the Union, having opened its treasury and invited contributions to the Congo Mission, and in response having received gifts from hundreds of donors, many of them, as I

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know, the fruit of the most conscientious self-sacrifice, fail now to fulfil the trust which the acceptance of such gifts involves?

" No! let us, pastors and editors, laymen and workmen for Christ, shut our ears to this talk about ' giving up,' and raise the cry, ' Give.' Let us emphasize the cry by entering upon a course of self-denial which we have not known before, in economizing in our living and cutting off our luxuries, that we may have more to give. The American Baptists need the Congo almost as much as the Congo needs them. They need the tremendous appeal of its misery, its darkness, and its ruin to rouse them to their old-time heroism and self-denial. Ethiopia is at last stretching out her hands to God; she is also stretching out her hands to us. How can we answer at the bar of God if, with all our yet unused resources, we turn away from the call, and withdraw our hands from Ethiopia? "

The response to these appeals was such as to place the Congo Mission beyond even the suggestion of abandonment. Gordon was able to write from Asbury Park, where the question came up for final settlement at the annual meetings of the denomination, the following triumphant words

" Praise the Lord! The Congo Mission has gone up with a shout— gone up, that is to say, with the strong and unanimous voice of all the people to possess the land. I wish you could have seen and heard the enthusiasm of the meeting yesterday. The Lord hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad."

" Dr. Gordon's best monument," wrote after his death one who knows more of this crisis than any other, " is the Congo Mission. He saved it!"

The increasing tendency in Protestant churches to adopt unworthy methods for raising money, and the growth of church amusements and " vestry junketings " to the detriment of the spiritual life, was severely rebuked in an address which

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Dr. Gordon delivered about this time. " Machinery," he said, "is taking the place of life in our churches. If money is needed for carrying on the Lord's work, the first resort is not to fasting and prayer, but to festivals and fairs. Now eating strawberries and cream in the interest of foreign missions stands in immeasurable contrast with foregoing butter and sugar, as the poor Salvationist does, in order to save thereby to help the gospel." He aptly characterized the series of noisome enterprises for filching dollars from unwilling pockets —the rainbow teas, the chocolate drills, the operettas, the bazaars, the clam-bakes, the minstrel shows, the broom drills, the kermesses, the oyster suppers, and so on to the end of the whole wretched category— as a new heresy, a heresy of conduct, "the cooking-stove apostasy." The new methods of " compelling them to come in " were branded as a compulsion of the senses rather than of the heart. The extravagant billboards, advertising church services in the language of the opera-bouflfe poster, he felt to be a dishonor and a reproach to the Lord Christ. Of the " entertainments " which they hawked, he said in his last message to the church

" Certain insects conceal their presence by assuming the color of the tree or leaf on which they prey. Church amusements are simply parasites hiding under a religious exterior, while they eat out the Hfe of Christianity."

His opposition to these things dated back to the earliest years of his ministry. His own church, never much tainted with the canker, had silently and gradually, with the development of a new and higher religious consciousness, cast aside all such devices.

This address awakened, together with a wide favorable response, much adverse criticism, as is always the case when extensive and popular abuses are attacked. In reply to these criticisms a counter-reply, printed in part below, was sent forth

" To invent a new phrase may give one renown, but it may be as perilous as to invent a new explosive unless one is prepared to be blown up by his own compound. They were thrown off in the heat of fervid utterance— this expression, ' the cooking-stove apostasy,' and that other, ' the amusement heresy '— and now they are coming back without having cooled at all in the course of their travels. One suggests that the author must have relapsed into incorrigible Puritanism, and wonders if he has never heard of the love-feast of the early church, in which a simple meal was sanctified to the salutary use of Christians, and made a means of nourishing their social joys. To which we reply that we have so heard, and that we remember how quickly this feast degenerated, and brought in such abuses that it called out the stern rebuke of the apostle, ' What! have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? or despise ye the church of God? ' Thus it is that innocent things are so easily spoiled by our misuse unless we are very watchful. This is exactly our" point. Another critic brings the accusation of pessimism. As though that were more dangerous than the shallow optimism which glides over the surfaces of things and complacently refuses to believe

that therj may be perilous depths below! We desire to be

neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but a truthist; and such we humbly believe we are, in giving the note of warning suggested by these phrases....

"An excellent and sober Christian of fifty years' standing in one of our churches meets us and says, 'You are right, brother, in your note of warning. I am done with church sociables. I have never objected to such gatherings accompanied by a simple meal, nor do I now object. But when I found at the beginning of the year that our church had engaged a colored man to furnish the supper, and when I saw him there, with his white vest and white gloves and professional cookery, I said, " No more of this." ' By which he

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meant to say, we judge, that there may be danger of getting a ministry of three orders in our churches— pastor, deacons, and caterer, the last in white vestments manipulating the ritual of pies and cakes. And we think his alarm is well grounded. Usage sanctifies the most incredible innovations in the course of time. It is far easier to start a thing than to stop it, and we commend the wisdom of this man who stepped out when the caterer stepped in, saying, ' We have no such custom, neither the churches of God.'...

" To denounce theater-going from that pulpit in which the theater has actually been set up is, we take it, a very ineffective proceeding. There is no question in our mind as to which is the more objectionable for Christians, to go to the playhouse, or to bring the playhouse into the church....

" To one who asks why the work of Christian women in preparing delicacies to be sold at a church festival, or in making goods at a church fair, is not just as acceptable to the Lord as money, especially when they have not the latter to give, we reply, the work is acceptable; but the principle of raising money in this way for the cause of Christ is what we object to. To get an equivalent in food or goods for the money put into the Lord's treasury robs the offering of its richest element— that of sacrifice. The very savor and sweetness of a gift in the sight of God are contained in this, as abundant Scriptures show. In God's reckoning the value of an offering depends as much on what it costs the giver as on what it nets the receiver. Therefore the treasury of the Lord is vastly more enriched by the widow's mite than by the widow's muffins....

" ' But what can poor churches in the country do, where money is scarce? ' asks another. Let them do a little in the right way, rather than much in the wrong way. ' For the honor of Christ I pray that the heathen may never learn how the American Christians raise money for missions,' writes a

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returned missionary in a recent article. And what advantage financially would it be for them to learn? The Bassein Baptist Christians out of their poverty give more per head for missions than the Baptist Christians of Massachusetts with all their wealth; that is, they give more without these modern methods than we do with them. As for attracting people to the sanctuary, which is the principal aim of church suppers and entertainments, what is gained in that direction compared with the immense spiritual loss incurred? In a certain body of Christians in New England one hundred and fifty-one churches report not a single accession by conversion during the last year. We know something of the ecclesiastical machinery by which these churches are carried on, and how almost universally the devices which we are considering enter into their established order. Is not the record sad enough, and does it not seem to call out the pathetic question of the Lord, ' Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labor for that which satisfieth not?' And by way of contrast, my poor brother, a pastor from Russia, is sitting by me while I write. He never heard of a church entertainment or church supper till he came to this country, and has not a single wheel of our church machinery in his system. Constantly persecuted, seven times imprisoned, once sent into exile, and with no place to gather his flock except his own private house, yet without any of our modern appliances, he has baptized in the region about his home four hundred converts during the last two years. Does not this suggest how much more the Lord can do without our modern improvements than with them?...

" On the whole, it may be a question whether we have not laid undue stress of late on the mere question of drawing the masses. Christianity has repulsions as well as attractions, and these two are so perfectly adjusted as to hold off those who care only for the loaves and fishes, while drawing in such as

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are ordained to eternal life. The same voice which says, ' Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden,' also says, ' If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.' The operation of this twofold constraint of tenderness and severity is very strikingly told in two sentences from the Acts of the Apostles: ' And believers were the more added to the Lord; ' ' And of the rest durst no man join himself to them.' To enervate our own spiritual life in our effort to draw the masses will be a very great price to pay for our success, if we gain it. Satan takes all ways to destroy the church. Heaven help us if, having resisted the encroachments of Arianism, we should now be seduced by this folly of vegetarianism. To deny the cross in our creed is a fearful thing; to deny it in hfe may be even worse. ' For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enonies of the cross of Christ: whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.'

In December, 1887, Dr. Gordon addressed the meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in Washington on "The Responsibility Growing out of our Perils and Opportunities." He spoke in part as follows

" We are accustomed to say that responsibility is measured by opportunity. That is certainly one of its measures. But there are two factors necessary to constitute an opportunity the ability and the occasion. There may be the ability without the occasion, or there may be the occasion without the ability. In either case we have but half an opportunity, and this cannot evoke any very great responsibility. But where both are present in large degree— ability and occasion— the upper and nether millstones of accountability have come together, and woe be to the Christian who gets between them. For if new corn is not ground into bread for a suiTering world,

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the owner of the corn will be ground. If he does not give his substance he will be in danger of losing his soul. It is estimated that eight billions of dollars are to-day treasured up in the hands of Protestant Christians in the United States — a sum so great that it staggers our arithmetic to compute it. That is one element of our ability. Into our doors the untaught and unregenerate populations of the Old World are pouring by the hundreds of thousands every year, while through our doors we can look out upon every nation of the globe as a field ripe for missionary harvest. Here is our occasion. It is enough to startle one into alarm to think of the stupendous obligation created by the conjunction of these two elements....

" If we look at the great laboring-class we hear from some of its representatives the impatient miirmurings of communism. I know of no answer to such at once so subduing and so potent as the divine communism which is presented in the New Testament. I open the first chapter of the church's history and read this remarkable statement concerning the primitive Christians: ' And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.... Neither said any of them that aught of the things which he possessed was his own.' At once I hear the current comment on this text that it represents only a provisional and temporary condition of things, and was not intended for a permanent model. Yes, that is the way we are apt to look upon ideals which are too high for our faith or too hard for our selfishness. It is the exegesis of covetousness and selfinterest that has largely fixed this interpretation upon the text. As a matter of fact there is not the slightest intimation anywhere that this feature of the primitive church was intended to be transitory. I for one am profoundly grateful for this lofty and divinely appointed example of Christian commu-

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nism. Of course in translating this example into practical experience we must take into account all the modifying texts ' If any will not work, neither shall he eat,' which excommunicates from our community all the shiftless and idle; and ' If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel,' which enjoins upon us the duty of making decent provision for the family. What we find as a resultant is this: that the church, according to its primitive ideal, is the one institution in which every man's wealth is under mortgage to every man's want, every man's success to every man's service. No laborer in any part of the field should lack the means for prosecuting his work so long as any fellow-disciple elsewhere has ability to supply his lack. This, I believe, was the divine communism on which the church was founded, and by which it was intended to be perpetuated. And if we could present to the discontented working-classes to-day this fresh, unsullied ideal in active operation it would be the most powerful answer possible to their bitter complaint of the selfishness and unsympathy of men....

" Two centuries ago quaint Thomas Fuller said, ' If any suppose that society can be peaceful while one half is prospered and the other half pinched, let him try whether he can laugh with one side of his face while he weeps with the other.' We are not concerned, however, with those outside the church, but those within. As surely as darkness follows sunset will the alienation of the masses follow sanctimonious selfishness in the church..., The church millionaire stamls at exact antipodes to the church millennial, and in proportion as the former flourishes the latter will be hopelessly deferred. It is not an orthodox creed that repels the masses, but an orthodox greed. Let a Christian in any community stand forth conspicuously as honest as the law of Moses, yet building up an immense fortune by grinding the faces of the poor,

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compelling them all the while to turn the grindstone, and

he will wean a whole generation from the gospel.... We

have no power to prevent men of the world from heaping up colossal fortunes. But our gospel plainly forbids Christians to do it. ' Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,' said Jesus to his disciples for all time. It requires no very skilful exegesis to explain the text; but it would require a very ingenious exegesis to explain it away.

" Dr. McGlynn told the exact truth when he recently declared the corruption of the church traceable to two things— Roman gold and Roman purple. As fast as the church became a coffer for hoarding coveted wealth she became a coffin for enshrining a dead Christianity. And to-day the scandal of Christendom is exhibited to our gaze in a pope claiming to be the true and only Vicar of Christ, living in a palace with six hundred attendants, and enjoying a personal income of a million and a half dollars annually. Oh, if, according to the dream of devout Catholics of the middle ages, some papa angelicus were to arise, an angel-pope who would fling out this vast and prodigal church wealth among his penniless subjects, while he himself once more took up the primitive commission and went forth without purse or scrip, what an ^* antipoverty ' argument would that be for men and angels to witness! I say all this not to cast gratuitous contempt on Rome, but to bring a solemn warning to America. That eight billions of hoarded money constitutes a tremendous danger. I cannot see how the church can keep hold of it and be able at the same time to take hold of the million hands of poverty and illiteracy and spiritual destitution which are stretched out for help....

" In this world, as well as in the world to come, there is an impassable gulf between Dives and Lazarus. If the church deliberately chooses the company of Dives, putting on purple and fine Hnen and faring sumptuously every day, she cannot

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keep with Lazarus. The attempt may be made to effect conciliation by tossing biscuits across the gulf. But this will not do. It is not money that is wanted, to bring the disaffected masses into sympathy with the church, so much as fellowship. The word koinoiiia, ' community,' or ' having in common,' is a great characteristic word of the New Testament. The church is a heavenly commonwealth, in which there is a community of life with the Head and a community of goods with the members and a community of sympathy with the world. If only the church could once more stand forth transfigured in its primitive ideal, it would be certain to repeat its primitive conquests. Let the ministers of our great metropolitan churches who enjoy munificent salaries begin the reform by becoming like the chief apostle— poor, that they may make many rich; and let the millionaire pewholders follow their lead by parting their goods to such as have need. Then see if the growing spirit of communism will not be speedily arrested, not by the counter-irritant of ridicule, but by the emollient of Christ-like example....

"If we look to the upper and best-educated classes of society we are confronted with a wide-spread and growing agnosticism. And what is agnosticism? It is culture ending in ignorance, as the highest mountain-peaks are lost in clouds. I would not deride or pour contempt on this tendency lest I be guilty of what an old writer has called ' beating a cripple over the head with his own crutches.' A loud-mouthed and boastful infidelity may awaken our contempt, but a lame faith, stretching out its hands toward the great mysteries of life and eternity, deserves to be pitied rather than pelted. And so I have delighted to quote to men of this school the words of Scripture concerning our great High Priest, 'who can have compassion on the ignorant [the agnooushi, the agnostics], and on them that are out of the way.'

" But how shall the church meet this growing sentiment outside the church? I may surprise you when I answer, With a humble Christian agnosticism.

" Christianity is not a system of philosophy, but a revelation to faith. The attempt to survey and map out its doctrines according to our logic charts has always proved injurious. If theologians insist upon being wise above what is written, neologians, by a natural reaction, will be ignorant below what is written. I am a most decided believer in a positive gospel, and concerning everything that has been revealed I think we may be just as sure as concerning the conclusions of mathematics. But not everything which we desire to know has been revealed. The gospel exhibits a divine reserve as well as a divine revelation, and the same voice of the great Teacher which declares concerning one realm of truth, ' To you it is given to know,' declares concerning another realm, ' It is not for you to know.'

" Now while upon such questions as, for example, the resurrection of the body at Christ's second coming there is a flood of light from Scripture, upon the state and employments of the soul between death and resurrection hardly a ray of light has been thrown. And while the most positive information has been vouchsafed as to what God will do for the heathen who hear and believe the gospel, he has nowhere informed us exactly what will be the ground and method of his dealings with those heathen who have never heard it. Yet such minute surveys of the terra incognita of the intermediate state have been attempted, and such learned conclusions concerning this mystery of the heathen's accountability have been put forth, that great religious bodies have been set in battle array, and vast missionary interests have been imperiled. If the most learned man in the whole fraternity of theologians had long ago faced these questions with a positive and dogmatic ^* I don't know,' he would have been worthy to be counted ' a prophet, and more than a prophet.'

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" It has been the misfortune of Christian philosophers from the beginning that they have made theology ' dark with excess of light.' The heresies which have afflicted the church have, almost without exception, been invented by learned scholars; and the speculations which have blighted the faith of beUevers have generally been hatched and brooded in the theological schools. The great mass of plain and practical Christians have, as a rule, kept the faith in its purity; for they have been content to believe more than they know, and to accept more than they can understand. Reason and faith are like the two compartments of an hour-glass: when one is full the other is empty. Those who have determined to know all things, revealed and unrevealed, have often thereby reduced their faith to the minimum, and in so doing have contracted the very faculty by which we are to apprehend God.

" Now what I am urging is this, that as sumptuous wealth in the hands of the church has always proved a curse, so a sumptuous learning in the schools of theology has proved too frequently a blight upon the faith and piety of Christians. Agnosticism is the spiritual pauperism which stands over against the theological and philosophical wealth with which men attempt to endow the gospel. Paul declares that in giving the gospel God 'destroyed the wisdom of the wise.' If this wisdom of the wise gets installed in our theological chairs and presides there, it will in turn destroy the gospel. It is written that ' when the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.' If the wisdom of this world attempts to reverse this order, and to please men by the learnedness of preaching, it will darken and bewilder those that would believe.

" Here, I solemnly conceive, is one of the most serious perils to which our Protestant ministry is exposed to-day, viz., that it shall be impoverished by excess of learning, that it shall attach the first importance to German learning and to Greek philosophy, instead of going forth with the humble equipment of the Word of God. I am perpetually chagrined to see how much better many of the unschooled lay preachers of our time can handle the Scriptures than many clergymen who have passed through the theological curriculum. I do not undervalue the seminary in saying this, but beg that we should consider the point at which it is most conspicuously failing. I wish, for one, that no more chairs might be endowed in our theological institutions for teaching the relations of Christianity to science; that those courses in polemics, which stuff men's heads full of the history of all the heresies which have afflicted the church from the beginning, might be shortened more and more, and that the time thus saved might be given to studying the Bible and practising with the 'sword of the Spirit.'

" Magnificent and far surpassing all that has gone before is the electr c light; but the shadow which it casts is the darkest and den est that ever yet fell upon earth. And I believe that in New England, where the light of philosophic Christianity has been the most brilliant and the intellectual lenses and reflectors for its diffusion the most clear and polished, the shadows of agnosticism and atheism fall most darkly.

" Would that our teachers of theology were content to know less that they might know more, that they were less endued with the spirit of modern thought and more deeply baptized by that Spirit that has been sent to us ' that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.'