"Christ for the World"

The significance of the modern missionary movement— Misapprehensions concerning it— Dr. Gordon's work for this cause—The International Conference of Missions in London—The Scotch campaign— Chairman of the Executive Committee, A. B. M. U.— Personal relations with missionaries

" TTISTORY," says Schaffle, "moves on the axis of religion,"

1. J- This truth is rarely recognized while history is making, but is always apparent when the record is completed and filed away in libraries. Most men to-day agree that the present century is one of preeminence. Yet its claim to distinction lies, according to their thinking, in its career of political, institutional, and scientific development. The men of to-morrow, however, we venture to predict, will consider as its most noteworthy feature its religious unfoldings. For the first time in the history of man religion appears to be losing its local, national, and ethnic character, and to be entering upon a universal phase. The faiths of the ancient world were for the family and for the state. Outsiders who had no share in the sacred fire were barbarians, without claims and beyond the pale of sympathy and fellowship. Judaism itself was as exclusive as the religions of the hearth. But when the apostles announced the breaking down of the middle wall of partition, and proclaimed the unity of Greek and Scythian, of bond and free, a new era opened. Nevertheless, far from being a pro-

" CHRIST FOR THE WORLD''' 223

duct of the age, the new evangel was centuries in advance of the age's comprehension, as is clearly seen by the lapse from it which followed, and which has made of ecclesiastical history a vast parenthesis of error, a terrible deflection from the intent, teaching, and commands of Jesus and of Paul. This hiatus— inscrutably permitted of God— endured from the days of the apostles to the period of modem Protestant missions, which began with the disembarkation of Carey at Calcutta in 1793- If, as the author of " Ecce Homo " tells us, the missionary impulse is the test of a standing or falling church, the church of fifteen centuries was essentially decadent. For during this whole dark interim her responsibility toward the remote and pagan peoples of the earth seems to have been almost completely forgotten or ignored. The work of Anskar and Boniface and Ulfilas and Columba and John Ehot and Lullius is indeed memorable; yet it was not in the least characteristic of the age. Evangelism was discovuaged on the ground of the unworthiness of the heathen. Turk and Saracen and Moor were enemies to destroy, not possible converts and brethren in the commonwealth of faith. Whenever proselytism was entered upon it was the proselytism of the sword, as when Charlemagne drove the followers of Wittekind into the cold baptismal waters of the Elbe, or when the Jews were compelled to church-going on Holy Cross days at Rome.

We might naturally have looked for some general evangelistic impulse at the Reformation did we not remember that the Calvinists along the dikes of Holland and inside the fortifications of La Rochelle, as also the Puritans watching for the galleons of the Armada off the misty channel headlands, were engaged in a struggle for existence which gave little time for considering the needs of the dark peoples without in the world's penumbra. Even Luther, with all his light, held to the curiously inverted theory that, for the bringing back of Christ, evangelical religion must cease from off the earth,* while his successors, as soon as they were released in some measure from fear of the Romish wolf, plunged into interminable quarrels over polity and the metaphysics of theology questions which proved as fatal to the missionary motive as problems of criticism are in some quarters to-day. Xavier and Ricci and Ruggieri, the missionaries of the counterreformation in the East, compounded with heathenism to such an extent as to nullify most of the essentials of Christian teaching, and finally indulged in fatal political intrigue, which resulted in their expulsion. Their brethren in Canada, Jogues and Brebeuf, likewise carried on what was, after all, rather an heroic propaganda of Romanism than a preaching of Christianity.

With the stirrings in the nonconformist churches of England in the last years of the eighteenth century a new epoch opened. Since the days of Carey, of Marty n, of Judson, of Giitzlaff, of Heber, the missionary movement has swept on, decade by decade, gaining in scope and tidal propulsion, until it has, in our day, reached the most remote parts of the earth. After eighteen centuries of confined and limited existence, Christianity is becoming cosmopolitan. It is destroying and superseding all other forms of religious belief. It is the last type of faith which is to appear upon this earth. We have indeed reached a stupendous crisis in the world's religious life, the issue of which must be either the glorification of Christianity or the final death of religion. Successors there can be none. This gives to our time a religious significance far exceeding that of either apostolic or Reformation era.

^* " Another hundred years and all will be over. The gospel is despised. Asia and Africa have no gospel. In Europe, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Hungarians, French, English, and Poles have none, either. The small electorate of Saxony will not hinder the end." (Quoted in Froude's " Luther," p. 54.)

'' CHRIST FOR THE WORLD'' 225

The world-wide spread of Christianity imph'es, of course, the enunciation and popularization of an unapproached and unassailable moral ideal and system. It means, further, the unification of the race through the agency of a common faith and a common hope. It means the establishment of one moral type among Anglo-Saxons, Sikhs, Slavs, Hunanese, and Basutos. The establishment of such a type will constitute a final argument for the truth of Christianity beside which the apologicB of book-writers and creed-makers, as well as the efforts of those who seek to commend Christianity by paring away its supernaturalism and by assimilating it to "progressive " opinion, will seem the veriest trifling.

The modern missionary movement is, then, an undertaking admirable and important beyond all, even in our age of multitudinous activities. It is without question unprecedented as an example of elaborate, persevering, and extensive voluntary effort. It offers, too, illustrations of faith and of obedience equal to any. What a suicidal plunge is that into the vast yellow ocean of eastern Asia! What an apparently impossible undertaking this of evangelizing four hundred millions of the most materialized people on earth! What misgivings must the brave, determined march into the night and gloom of the Dark Continent not awake! And to all the seemingly insurmountable difficulties abroad are added the continuous, persistent ridicule and misrepresentation of a secularized Christendom. The wisdom of God is still the foolishness of men. Christianity in its phase of world-wide expansion is as completely misunderstood as it was in the days of its inception. Many have dwelt upon the blindness of the world at large to the extent and importance of religious phenomena in the first centuries of this era. One of the most brilliant of living historians has said

" That the greatest religious change in the history of mankind should have taken place under the eyes of a brilliant galaxy of philosophers and historians who were profoundly conscious of the decomposition around them; that all these writers should have utterly failed to predict the issue of the movement they were observing; and that during the space of three centuries they should have treated as simply contemptible an agency which all men must now admit to have been, for good or evil, the most powerful moral lever that has ever been applied to the affairs of men, are facts well worthy of meditation in every period of religious transition." ^*

And yet they are facts which have a very close counterpart to-day. The contempt with which Tacitus spoke of "auctor nominis ejus," in the famous passage in the " Annals," is brother to the scorn which breathes through every utterance of the London "Times" and of the New York "Post" when missions are under consideration, and is not unsuggestive of the spirit which many Christians, as, for example, Charles Kingsley in certain scurrilous pages of " Alton Locke," have at times indulged. If this is true of Kingsley, what shall we say of ihe vilification which club-men, Gymkhana idlers, globetrotters, and correspondents turn ceaselessly upon the representatives of Jesus among the heathen? The carnal mind is indeed enmity against God. Nay, more, it is stupidly bat-like in its vision of spiritual things and in its interpretation of history. While minimizing or ignoring the patent results of missionary labor in India, in Uganda, in Japan, in Polynesia, and elsewhere— the schools, the hospitals, the opium refuges, the leper asylums, the zenana enterprises, the rescue work, the prison-gate efforts, the great native Christian conferences, the innumerable self-supporting native Christian churches— it remembers to forget the almost geologic deliberateness with which fundamental religious changes occur. It forgets the dim eons which have shaped and moulded and bound the followers of Vishnu and Siva; it forgets, too, the nine centuries ^* W. E. H. Lecky, " European Morals," vol. i., p. 359.

'• CHRIST FOR THE WORLD" 227

which it took to subdue Japan to Buddhism, and demands from the hands of a few awakened Christians cataclysmal results in mere decades.

Yet, if neither the subUmity of project involved in the movement for a universal Christendom nor a knowledge of accomplished result nor a sense of historic proportion were present, one would think that the remarkable concurrence of events which marks the present era would provoke attention and lead to a conviction of the import of the situation. For not only has the return to Bible study, so characteristic of our time, led to an emphatic reassertion of Christ's missionary injunctions, not only has the reawakened Hfe of the churches prepared the way for missionary enterprise, and not only has the increment of wealth for the prosecution of such work fallen to Protestant hands; our century has also witnessed those great political changes which were the condition precedent to a world evangelization. It has seen an enlargement of the moenia mutidi by the exploration of all remote and hitherto unknown parts of the earth. It has seen those regions brought to our doors by the extensive use of steam as a mode of motion. It has seen the opening to commerce and to missionary operations of countries isolated, dormant, and closed against foreigners. It has witnessed the uninterrupted passage of control over dark-skinned races from the hands of the Latin nations and from the influence of intolerant clericalism. It has witnessed the decay of papalism and of persecution in Catholic countries. It has witnessed the founding and growth to titanic power of new Protestant states in America and Australasia. It has, beyond all, witnessed the advance, decade by decade, of the British raj throughout the earth— the growth of a new Rovia imperialis with proconsuls and pretors able to protect the representatives of Protestant Christendom in their work. The great God who hangs out nightly the stars in heaven does so not merely because they serve as lamps for us. Neither is he shaping contemporary history solely with reference to British pride and " British interests." The " weary Titan, with deaf ears and labor-dimmed eyes," as Matthew Arnold called this great cosmopolitan power,

" Bearing on shoulders immense,
Atlantean, the load
Of the too vast orb of his fate,"

is, all unknown to himself, the serf of God preparing for and protecting his sons in their work.

Those, therefore, who see in these almost cosmic movements no unity of divine purpose, but merely a multiplication of the complications of international politics, have indeed seen a great light, but have not heard the voice. To Lucian Jesus was but a "crucified sophist," and his followers outcast fanatics. To the world at large modern missions are estimated in much the same fashion. It is not to be expected that those who are so oblivious to this convergence of the currents of history should regard with either interest or patience the testimony of Scripture as to the importance of evangelistic developments. That these constitute, according to Jesus' own words,* the condition of his return to earth in power, is something of which, doubtless, they do not know, or know only to mock. If this is really so, the final estimate of those engaged in this witnessing will be very different from that now current.

It is from this point of view that the task of writing Dr. Gordon's Hfe has been undertaken. Were it not for the fact that he was one of the very foremost figures of his day in America in the agitation for a world-wide propaganda of Christianity, his career would not, perhaps, be of such distinc- ^* " And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations; and then shall the end come." (Matt. xxiv. 14.)

" CHRIST FOR THE WORLD" 229

tion as to require particular record. He would be remembered as a useful pastor, a gifted preacher, a friend of the poor, and a man of exalted saintliness. His labors, however, in behalf of missions were, during the last decade of his life, incessant they constituted his absorbing interest, his inspiring enthusiasm. In journeyings often, in labors of missionary tours, in labors of conventions, in labors of committees, as coeditor of the leading American missionary review, as author of missionary literature, as pastor of a church unsurpassed in missionary efforts, as the executive head of the denominational missionary organization, as founder of a training-school for missionaries, he toiled to the full measure of his strength. Even after his death— suggestive, indeed, of faithfulness to the end! — there was found in his ulster pocket an appeal in behalf of the little blind girls of Canton who live in the slavery of enforced immorality

The year 1888 was marked by greater activity in this line than any previous. The London conference gave a new impulse, the campaign in Scotland new opportunities, and his election to the position of chairman of the Executive Committee of the American Baptist Missionary Union new responsibilities. In the seven years of life which remained to him his best work for this cause was accomplished.

The great Centenary Conference on Foreign Missions, convened in London, June, 1888, holds, even in these days of memorable conventions, a place of preeminent interest. It was a gathering in the best sense ecumenical. Every Protestant missionary society in the world gave to it its adherence. Every evangelical church having any agency for the extension of the Redeemer's kingdom was represented. Distinguished missionaries from abroad— Hudson Taylor, Bishop Crowther, John Wilkinson, Dr. Post, Murray Mitchell— gave to the gatherings the results of years of observation and experience. There were laymen, too, friends of missions, whose names

230 ADONIRAM JUDSON CORDON

command attention in the East as well as in the West— Sir William Muir, Sir Monier Williams, Sir Richard Temple, Sir AV. W. Hunter, General Phayre, Sir Robert Cust, and Lord Northbrooke, the ex-viceroy of India. There were promoters of missions present like Messrs. Stock, Broomhall, and Guinness. The Vatican Council of '70 was the last and complete expression of Romanism. The Chicago Parliament of Religions of '93— that strange gathering of religious and irreligious miscellanea— embodied, directly or by implication, the essentials of "liberalism." The London International Missionary Conference of '88 exhibited to the world Christianity in its purest, best, and most useful phase. The spirit of the gathering was beyond criticism. From beginning to end there was no friction, notwithstanding the variety of denominational interests represented. The divisions of Protestantism, so much dwelt upon, seemed to have disappeared. Dr. Gordon, who, though speaking only occasionally, was listened to with marked interest, said very pertinently, after contrasting this spirit of comity with the spurious " unity " so often demanded:

" We have a Bible that is one, but that has been translated into at least three hundred languages. Now remember that the old church, that shed rivers of blood to prevent one church of Christ Jesus being translated into various sects, also shed rivers of blood to prevent the Word of God being translated into various languages. That church is just as opposed to a polyform Christianity as it is to a polyglot Bible. But we have both.

"Are we not, then, to look for a reunion of the church? I cannot dwell on this point long, but will simply say, Yes; I 'beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together unto him.^ That will be a reunion of Christendom, a reunion in which there will be included nothing ' that defileth, or worketh abomination, or maketh a lie.'

'' CHRIST FOR THE WORLD'' 231

The problems discussed were of great variety and delicacy. As an executive in the management of extended missionary interests, Dr. Gordon listened with absorbed attention; the reports from the fields filled him with delighted enthusiasm. He could think only of the great review which closed our Civil War as veteran after veteran came to the front and related his struggles and victories in Africa, in Asia, or in the islands of the Pacific. He was introduced to a Moravian brother, "a man of humble bearing and broken English." The remembrances of Herrnhut welled up into his eyes and rolled out on his cheeks as he grasped his hand. In the auxiliary meetings following the conference— at Mr. Guinness's East London Institute, at Association Hall, and at Mildmay— he was listened to by great throngs. He preached, too, in the streets and parks of London without interference. At the Mildmay Conference he enjoyed the fellowship of the choicest spirits of British Christianity. With brimming eyes did he listen to the wonderful expositions of Hebrews by Adolph Saphir. With brimming eyes was his own beautiful address on " Union with Christ " received.

The conferences being over, he went to Paris to look into the work of the McAU Mission. His addresses at the various halls had, according to the testimony of an eye-witness, a powerfully moving effect on the audiences of French men and women. While speaking in Paris, an urgent message reached him from representatives of the Scotch churches, who had heard him in London, begging him to address a series of meetings which had been arranged in Edinburgh for July 14- 17 th. These dates were chosen in order to reach the university students before their dispersion for the vacation. At the cost of complete alteration of plan, he left for Scotland with Dr. Pierson. The meetings in Edinburgh were of great power. The large Synod Hall was filled to its utmost capacity. As the meetings progressed it was clear that the tide was rising.

Before the conference was over an appeal was drawn up importuning Dr. Gordon and Dr. Pierson to make a tour of the principal cities and towns of Scotland in behalf of the missionary interests of Scotch churches. This was adopted with fervor, two thousand people rising en masse to express their approbation as soon as the letter had been read. Then followed a laborious but fruitful missionary campaign. Largely attended meetings were held in Edinburgh, Oban, Nairn, Elgin, Inverness, Aberdeen, Strathpeffer, Dundee, and elsewhere. Everywhere the American ministers were received with enthusiasm; everywhere their words made a deep impression. Gordon's allusion to his Scotch name and ancestry excited warm response. " We are getting much enjoyment, too, along with this unexpected service into which we have been drawn by the importunity of our Scotch friends," he wrote. On a lovely day he visited lona, the center from which wide-reaching missionary impulses radiated in medieval times. The day at this shrine he counted one of the most inspiring of his hfe, and ever after St. Columba shared with Brainerd and Carey in his heart's affection.

On his return to America he was elected to the honorable and onerous position of chairman of the Executive Committee of the American Baptist Missionary Union. He had already served as a member of this committee for more than seventeen years. In his new capacity he was to guide its deliberations for six years more. A minute passed by his associates at his death, after adverting upon " the advantages which the prestige of his honored and growing name brought to the Union," remarked

" But the value of his incumbency was enhanced by the unvarying courtesy of his demeanor, the combined dignity and affabihty of his bearing toward his associates, the clear knowledge and sound judgment which he brought to the elucidation of the questions involved in our work— questions

'' CHRIST FOR THE WORLD'' 233

always grave and often intricate and perplexing— the patience, the faith, the mingled moderation and energy, and the untiring industry of his service."

This work was the most taxing in which he engaged; nevertheless none was nearer his heart, p-or he was no perfunctory official who dismissed from his thought the whole business of the committee as soon as the meetings adjourned. No one on the foreign field but could at any time appeal to him for the most intelligent sympathy in his labors. "The best prayer-book is a map of the world," he said once. The denominational mission stations in Burmah, in Africa, in China, were collects in this prayer-book to which he often turned. " Instead of praying for the Lord's blessing upon our mission fields and upon our missionary brethren in general, let us get a hst of their names and take some one of them before the throne of God each day. Let us make ourselves so far acquainted with their circumstances of trial or success that we shall have definite petitions or thanksgivings to make for them. Let the missionaries be reminded to send home specific requests for prayer, and let them be taken up for definite remembrance at our monthly meetings. For ourselves, we have found great blessing and profit in going through the missionary list day after day. The heartfelt solicitude of the apostle to the Gentiles nowhere comes out more manifesdy than in the frequent recurrence of that saying, 'Without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers.' "

He was, furthermore, constantly writing letters of encouragement to lonely and isolated missionaries. One of these remarks, " In intellectual appreciation and heart experience of the profoundest truths of the gospel, I owe to A. J. Gordon a debt next to that I owe the aposdes. I deem him the beloved apostle, the John of our generation." He then goes on to say, " His fatherly interest touched my hfe in many ways and when I most needed a touch divine. When alone

234 ADONIRAM JUDSON CORDOM

with my wife in the mountains of Assam, I received from him ' In Christ ' and ' The Twofold Life,' with the autograph and the love of the author on the fly-leaf of each. Words can never tell what these two books were to us in that mountain fastness." Another writes, " 1 feel the Congo Mission has met a great loss in his death. Oh, that some one might be raised up to enter into the sympathies and hold the confi dence of the missionaries as he did! I remember writing, at the suggestion of Brother Hoste, for a chapel at Lukunga, though we had little faith in asking. The promise of help which the following letter gives was redeemed to the full " ' My dear Brother: Your letter is just received, and I am rejoiced to hear that you are well and hopeful. Dear, devoted Brother Hoste, of whom all speak with such admiration and affection, certainly ought to have a chapel. I will talk it up and see what can be done. Our prayers are much toward you and your great, dark field, where the open sore of the world is awaiting the healing of the great Physician. Your position is an enviable one considering the rewards which belong to it from the Master, but I do not forget also the hardshps and trials which belong to it. These may the Lord give you grace to bear... .'"

At another time an iron chapel was needed at Banza Manteke. He took the matter up, raised the money in his own church, and cabled the order for its immediate construction. When the Congo Mission was first assumed by his society, complications arose which interrupted the channels of supply to those in Africa. In this crisis he himself guaranteed a shipment of provisions on order at Bywaters in London. No wonder that, as another wrote from another quarter of the world, " we looked to him as to an elder brother, one to whom we could go for advice in critical junctures, upon whose confidence and prayer we could rely.... For a whole night I have been weeping his departure."