Plans for World-Conquest in Napoleon's Time: Samuel Nott, Jr.
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.
“Thou preparedst room before it, And it took deep root, and filled the land. The mountains were covered with the shadow of it. And the boughs thereof were like cedars of God.”
Samuel Nott, Jr., was born near my birthplace in Connecticut. His father was Samuel Nott, for many years pastor of the Congregational Church in Franklin, Connecticut. I heard him preach, in the pulpit of my Stonington home church, when he was about ninety years old, yet still vigorous and hearty, while venerable. A son of the missionary, born in India, Samuel Nott, 3d, with whom I was associated in railroad engineering and management, gave me many facts in the life of the early missionaries to the East.
Samuel Nott, Jr., was a student in Union College, where his uncle, Eliphalet Nott, was president for more than sixty years. President Nott, also, I saw and heard in the pulpit when he was about ninety. Nott was from Union College j Judson was from Providence College, now Brown University; Gordon Hall and Luther Rice (together with Samuel J. Mills, pioneer of them all as a volunteer, but younger, and who was ordained in 1815) were from Williams College; Samuel Newell was from Harvard. No single agency reached them all alike, but the same God was over all and in it all. Nott said, years afterwards, as to the motive that impelled him at the outset, that he felt that God told him to go and preach the gospel to those who were afar, therefore he must go. What the result was to be he could not say, but as to his evident duty he was clear. Therefore he determined to go.
These first student volunteer missionaries to the foreign field were ordained at Salem, Massachusetts, in February, 18 12. Judson and Nott, with their wives, sailed for the field in the East in diiferent vessels, and for different ports, but actuated by the same spirit, and in a common work. The one sailed from Salem for Calcutta, and the other from Philadelphia for Bombay. The field which they sought to enter was little known in America; the work which they were to engage in was little understood; and the ends of the earth were at that time very far apart, with modes of communication few and infrequent.
Now, while what is going on in China, or India, or South Africa, can be known in Boston, or Philadelphia, or New Orleans, in a few brief hours, it is well to look back and see how it was in those days. When Samuel Nott, junior, was compelled by his failing health to return from his mission field to America, the vessel on which he was sailing touched at St. Helena. His son tells of that incident. The latest news that had reached them in Bombay from Europe was of Napoleon’s escape from Elba, his arrival in Paris, and the new army gathering to his standard. After that all was a blank in their minds as to the busy world.
As they were nearing St. Helena a ship was seen in the distance. Wrote the returning missionary: “The reader may imagine with what interest we saw, on the verge of the horizon, a ship approaching now, not merely to break the solitude, in which for weeks we had traversed the ocean, but to inform us of the fate of men at one of the most remarkable crises of human history.” Sixty years after this, the good missionary wife and mother, when over ninety years of age, wrote of that glad hour, “Glorious news! Great news for old England! A great battle at Waterloo! Napoleon a prisoner on the Northumberland on his way to St. Helena, in the keeping of Sir George Cockburn. Peace in all the world.” The son adds: “Our missionaries had the experience of being among the earliest of those who touched at the island after Napoleon arrived, and being as near his prison house as the anchorage of St. Helena would bring them.”
The “big war-ship” Northumberland was in the Potomac when, in the war with England in 1812-14, Washington was destroyed by the British. One of the party with the missionaries, who visited the vessel at St. Helena, found on board a token of that event. “In the cabin of that ship they saw [President] Madison’s pillow, — a keepsake picked up by the admiral on his unwelcome visit at Washington during that war.”
In the world’s thought, the landing of Napoleon at St. Helena was an event of great importance, but the world took little heed of the American missionaries who touched there in going or in coming. Napoleon’s plans were for personal conquest and rule. The work of the missionaries looked to the bringing of all mankind under the sway of the Prince of Peace. Their work was greater, and of more importance in its effect on mankind and the world’s history, than all that was accomplished by Napoleon and the armies that he led or opposed. And we may well believe that God was as much interested in the missionaries’ work as in Napoleon’s, although God was ruling over both.
The Notts brought with them a native African girl, who desired to be with her loved benefactors. She was an earnest Christian, and wanted to go back as a missionary among her people. She, however, closed her earthly work in New York City in 1822, after living a brief but useful life in God’s service. One of her benefactors said of that life: “It is an evidence that the missionaries and the Christian public have not labored in vain for the Bombay mission. I confess that in this one event I have enjoyed a rich reward for my own portion of labor and trial in it.” This waif of the mission field often said to a son of her benefactor, who told me of it, that when he grew to be a man he must go as a missionary to her country, adding that she would go with him to take care of him.
That missionary son would have gone to the ends of the earth if God had so directed him. He had a missionary spirit, and he was ever doing a missionary work. He was busy about his Master’s work until, after more than fourscore and five years of earthly work, he entered into rest not long before I wrote these lines. It is a privilege to have lived near that devoted missionary and his equally devoted missionary wife in the later years of their consecrated lives, in the home of their godly and devoted son and daughter; and I trust that I was more imbued with their missionary spirit from my valued intercourse with them.