Old Time Student Volunteers: My Memories of Missionaries

These missionaries in the foreign field, of whom sketches and memories are here given, are not selected from God’s great army-roll as those pre-eminently worthy of note. Perhaps it is all the better that this is so. They are in this record simply as those among the earlier missionaries whom the writer was privileged to meet and to know. They are from various missionary fields, and were sent out from different missionary societies, at different times. Therefore they may be considered as more fairly representative of foreign missionaries as a class, and as a whole.

In order to limit the scope and field of his recorded memories, as distinguished from those with whom young “student volunteers” and other friends of missions to-day are personally acquainted, the writer has thought best to give no sketch of any missionary who was not in the mission field at least as early as fifty years ago. In this way his personal memories in the eventide of life may prove of interest and service to those whose recollections do not run back of these better, brighter days in God’s providence.

Yet the writer regrets that the limitations which he has deemed best to apply to this record forbid his telling particularly of grand and efficient missionaries whom he has known and honored in these later days. He would be glad to bear his witness to the noble and S

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inspiring presence and words of such men of Gk)d, whose power he has felt, as the veteran John G. Paton of the New Hebrides; John L. Nevius and Erastus Wentworth of China; Bishop William Taylor of Africa; J. Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission; Bishop J. P. Thoburn, W. B. Capron, and Edward Chester, of India; President George Washburn of Constantinople; and that noble missionary maiden, Miss Mary L.’ Whateley of Cairo and “among the huts” of Egypt. But time would fail him to tell of these good missionaries and many like them, and of their self-denying and devoted doings for Christ and for souls.

That these records may incite some to examine further, and thus come to learn and realize what a work is going on in this line for the welfare of those in Christian lands, and of those in lands less privileged, by those who serve and honor Christ at His command, and at the call of those in need, is the sincere hope of

The Author.

Philadelphia, June 8, igoz.

It is customary to speak of the early days of the foreign missionary movement in America not only as days of a small beginning, but as days of comparatively small expectations. The ends of the earth were far apart and little understood in the opening years of the nineteenth century; and the few student volunteers in America who were ready at that time to attempt work among the heathen myriads of the world at large, are supposed to have been incapable of the faith-filled daring to which those of the present day have come in their growing expectations. The very motto of the Student Volunteers of to-day in their enthusiastic gatherings of thousands, “The Evangelization of the World in this Generation,” is supposed to illustrate and emphasize the progress that has been made since the time when no annual meeting of the friends of foreign missions in America had yet been large enough to fill more than a private parlor.

But the men of that day were men of sublime faith and love and hope; and we have more to learn from them than from the progress that is making in our day. Only a few years after the first meeting of the American Board was held in the house of Dr. Noah Porter u in Farmington, Connecticut, the annual meeting of the Board was held in the house of Henry Hudson in Hartford, Connecticut. At that meeting in 1816 it was suggested by the Rev. Dr. Samuel Worcester, the first corresponding secretary of the American Board, that “the energies of Christendom wisely directed, and. attended by the blessing of the Spirit, might send the gospel over the world in a quarter of a century.” After consideration, the suggestion was formally recommended by the Prudential Committee. And then it was formally adopted by the members of the American Board as the conviction and aim of the representatives of the foreign missionary movement in this country. “Twenty-five years” are even less than a generation. Did not the aim and purpose of the foreign missionary workers of that day of small beginnings compare favorably with even the motto of the great body of Student Volunteers in these later days of Christian progress, when the aim is phrased as “The Evangelization of the World in this Generation”?

When the twenty-five years from the time of the adoption of that declared aim had expired, the annual meeting of the American Board was held in 1841 at the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. The gathering was much larger than any that had been held in the early days of the foreign missionary beginnings in America. But the full work proposed had by no means been realized. This fact was most impressively brought out at this later meeting by the Rev. Dr. Yale, who stated that of the members present when it was adopted only three still remained on earth, and only one of those, the Rev. Dr. Calvin Chapin, was there present.

And as he said “the work is not done,” he added: “I feel a pang of regret that, since that declaration was made, six hundred millions of pagans have gone down to the grave.” The effect of this expressive reminder was such that for a time none seemed ready to break the silence that ensued. Yet a result that followed was that that meeting in Philadelphia marks a new beginning in American missionary zeal. All were aroused to new zeal and fresh work. The incubus of a heavy debt was lifted, and all took hold in a renewed spirit. More than twice twenty-five years have passed since that new beginning, and eleven years more are added to that; and the proposed work is not done. The memory of the repeated purposing of that good work, even with its repeated delays and postponings, ought to be an added incitement and inspiration to its doing. “How long, O Lord? how long?”

A reminder of the fact that American foreign missions is, comparatively, a thing of but recent date, and that foreign missions was from the beginning a Student Volunteer movement, is pressed upon me anew when I am able to say that of the five young men who first volunteered and were ordained for that great work, I met and well remember two. Those five were from four colleges, — Brown, Union, Williams, and Harvard. The two whom I met were Adoniram Judson, Jr., and Samuel Nott, Jr. Moreover, I knew well the venerable Rev. Dr. Noah Porter, of Farmington, Connecticut, who was sixty years pastor of the church into which he was born, and in whose parsonage home was held the first meeting of the “American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,” which was formed primarily to sustain those young men and others who might follow them. A single room in a country house was large enough for the annual meeting of the friends of foreign missions then. At the first meeting five persons were present; at the second annual meeting there were seven; now no church or hall in the country can hold all who seek to attend. How that little vine has grown and prospered will be appreciated by those who attend or read of the great International Student Volunteer Missionary Conventions held on this continent in modern times.

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