From the Orient to the Orient: Henry J. Van Lennep

We in America congratulate ourselves that we have done so much by our missionaries to bring the clear light of Bible truth to shine on needy souls in the Orient; but as I have already asked, do we realize how much American missionaries in the Orient have done to cause clearer light to shine on the Bible for the benefit of Americans? When we consider that the Bible was written by Orientals for Orientals, it is obvious that it is as important to have Oriental figures of speech and forms of expression translated for the benefit of Occidentals as it is to have the language of the original Hebrew and Chaldaic and Greek in which the Bible was first written translated into English, before we can get the full benefit of its all-important teachings. As it has been said about such a matter, even though the water of life is to be had “without money and without price” it inevitably costs something to secure a clear glass or even a tin cup to drink it from. Not even a free gospel can be had without paying the price of some study and knowledge to ascertain the meaning of its words. Missionaries have spent precious years in translating the Bible into the language of the Algonquins and the Arabs, the Choctaws and the Chinese, and into scores of other languages, and the people thus benefited are profoundly grateful. Missionaries have also devoted themselves to self-denying labors for the purpose of throwing light on the many Orientalisms of the Bible in order that needy Occidentals can learn what God would have them to know and which they ought to be glad to understand. Should not American Christians be as grateful for God’s truth as Asiatic Pagans? But are they so? Mention has already been made of Dr. William M. Thomson, and the service he rendered to us all in his priceless volume “The Land and the Book.” And there are others to whom we are indebted.

Among the American missionaries whose work in this line has been most widely helpful stands Dr. Henry J. Van Lennep of Smyrna, author of “Bible Lands: Their Modern Customs and Manners Illustrative of Scripture,” and other works in the field of biblical explanation and illustration. This good missionary of Christ and his fellow-workers have done much by their words and their works for people of the Turkish Empire and of the United States, for Christians and for unbelievers; and it behooves us all to be grateful to them accordingly. I count it a high privilege to have known personally this true man of God and to have been stimulated and helped in the line of his special information and endeavors.

Henry J. Van Lennep had the advantage in this line of being born in the Orient, and so of being familiar with Oriental figures of speech and forms of expression as a boy and from his boyhood. He was of an eminent Dutch family of scholars and writers, to whom Americans owe so much. His ancestors had a part in the Thirty Years’ War for liberty. Later they engaged in business in the East. He was born in Smyrna in Asia Minor, in 1815. When fifteen years old he was sent to America to be educated. Two years later the reading of the “Memoir of Levi Parsons” the missionary in Palestine, and a letter from his godly mother, fired him with a desire and a determination to be a missionary for Christ. He was graduated at Amherst College and Andover Theological Seminary. In 1839 he set out as a missionary of the American Board in Turkey. His first missionary station was Smjnrna, his native place. And it was thus that he became a missionary from the Orient to the Orient — a position of peculiar privilege and power. After a while he was stationed at Constantinople with Dr. Goodell. Again he was a pioneer missionary at Tokat. In every field he had exceptional success. He seemed rarely qualified for his work. He was a fine linguist. He became familiar with ten Oriental languages, in five of which he could preach fluently. He was proficient in music, drawing, and painting, which were his favorite recreations. As an instructor of youth, especially Oriental youth, he excelled. An American gentleman who had been his pupil said of Dr. Van Lennep: “One of his best qualifications as a missionary was that he understood the people among whom he worked, and loved them. In the Bebek Seminary where he taught for a while the students looked to him not merely as a teacher and respected him, but also as their companion and friend, and loved him accordingly.”

It is hardly possible to overestimate the advantage which the understanding of the peculiarities and prejudices and preferences of a people must give to a missionary who would gain their respect and confidence in order that he can lead or uplift them to a better standard of life and being. Many a missionary through ignorance must raise an added barrier between himself and the people to whom he is sent, by his unnecessary and unaonscious trampling on things that they hold dear, or by his unwise differences in dress and habits and customs, so as to seem to the people he would win an inferior and a barbarian, instead of a superior of a higher order of civilization. In this particular Dr. Van Lennep had a notable advantage over missionaries who were otherwise his equals. In consequence “numbers of the most successful professional men among the evangelical Armenians and Greeks of Constantinople and Asia Minor — ministers, physicians, and instructors of youth — were his pupils.”

Long before I had met Dr. Van Lennep I had heard much about him and had learned to respect and admire him. On a visit to America he had married the only daughter of good Dr. Joel Hawes, pastor of the Centre Church in Hartford with which I first united. She had gone back with her husband to his field, where afterwards she diedj but her name and his were ever in high praise on the lips of pastor and people in my early Christian life.

In 1869 Dr. Van Lennep so far lost his eyesight by cataract that he was compelled to give up his mission field and return to America. He then became Professor of Natural Science and Modern Languages in Ingham University, Le Roy, New York. After retiring from his mission field he still kept up his work by securing to some twenty-five Asiatics facilities for education in America, so that the natives in the Eastern Continent might have the best that could be obtained in the Western Continent. It was while he was at Le Roy that I first made his personal acquaintance., Later he was at the head of a boarding-school for boys in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where I knew him more intimately. He had married a daughter of the Rev. Isaac Bird, long a missionary in Palestine; and Mr. James Bird, a son of the missionary, and who had married a daughter of Dr. William Goodell, a missionary in Palestine and Constantinople, also taught in the school at Great Barrington. Thus there were three missionary families represented at Great Barrington, and there was a delightful missionary atmosphere in that home which I was accustomed to visit and enjoy.

Dr. Van Lennep wrote for The Sunday School Times a series of articles throwing Oriental light on the pages of the Bible. These articles were continued for several years, and I was only one of many who through them came to prize highly and to be very grateful for his translations and illumination of many Bible passages and figures of speech which had been poorly understood before.