Joshua the Colonist
Whether descending from the snowy Alps, where flowers bloom on its margin, to melt away before the summer heat, and pour from its icy tavern a turbid, roaring torrent, or descending through the drear desolation of Arctic regions to topple over the sea-cliff, and form the icebergs, the dread of mariners, that come floating like glittering castles and cathedrals, into southern seas, the glacier is a river of ice — not of fluid but of solid water. Tossed into waves of many a fantastic form, and cracked with fissures that gape to swallow up the unwary traveller and bury him in their profound blue depths, this remarkable object, as may be seen in the Mer de Glace, possesses a wonderfully firm texture. Its ice rings toa blow; yet it climbs up slopes, turns the edge of opposing rocks, forces its way through narrow gorges, and, accommodating itself to the curves ot the valley, advances with a slow but regular rate of progress. How this vast, continuous mass of ice, many miles in length and hundrecs of feet in thickness, is displaced, and thrust forward ana downward into the plains, was long, but is no longer, a mystery. It happens thus. Each succeeding winter covers the mountain-tops with fresh accumulations ofsnow. ihese, with their enormous weight pressing from above and behind on the partially plastic glacier which the frost forms out of their snow, force it from its birth-place to seek room elsewhere. It descends; it melts; and, changed into flowing streams, carries beauty to smiling valleys, and fertility to far distant plains.
By an analogous process, men, who naturally cling to their birth-place, and often, like trees that spread their roots on a naked rock, cling to it the closer the poorer it is, are constrained to obey the original command of God, and even against their will, “replenish the earth.” Those Alpine valleys which have furnished us with a figure, furnish a remarkable example of that fact. Walled in by stupendous mountains, whose heads are crowned with eternal snows, and whose precipitous sides afford little else than footing for pines and food for wild goats, it is a very limited number of families they are able to support. Supplying to their stated inhabitants but the bare necessaries of life, they afford no room for increase of population. In consequence of this, as the birth exceeds the death rate, and numbers hereby accumulate, their pressure, like that of the snows on the glacier, forces the population outwards; compelling them, though with bleeding hearts and tender memories of their dear mountain-home, to seek relief in emigration — room and bread elsewhere. Hence, whether born in Swiss or Italian valleys, natives of the Alps are met with over the whole continent. The ignorant and indolent of Roman Catholic cantons go forth to recruit the armies of despots and of the Pope; while on the other hand, those from Protestant territories are found pursuing in wee 5) - Pca
hereditary trades the arts of industry in the chief cities of Europe, and even on the distant shores of the Atlantic.
The pressure of population on the ordinary means of subsistence is as much felt in a small country hemmed in by the sea, as in one hemmed in by mountains. Unlike trees whose bark expands with their growth, the people cooped up in such a country are like a man sheathed in unelastic, iron armor. Destitute of energy, they remain at home, almost always on the borders, and frequently suffering the horrors, of famine. Educated and enterprising, they seek an outlet. They go abroad; and encountering alike the dangers of the sea and the hardships of the emigrant, they may
be found in huts scattered on foreign and savage
shores laying the foundations of future commonwealths.
The latter is the part which seems to be specially assigned in the providence of God to our country and our countrymen. Carrying with us the love of liberty, literature, and science, the useful and also ornamental arts, and above all that Word of God which bringeth salvation, one of the brightest prospects in the future of our world is that Britons, forced by the increase of population and the narrow limits of their island-home to seek new settlements on other shores, shall be more than any other the chosen race to fulfil the command of Eden, and multiplying, “replenish the earth.” With the energy of the old Scandinavians in our blood, with a resolution that delights to encounter difficulties, with a courage that is inflamed, not quenched, by dangers, with our ships ploughing every sea and our commerce connecting us with every shore, to us more than to any other Christian nation, God seems to commit the interests of humanity and the Kingdom of his Son; saying, as to Israel of old, Go ye in and possess the land; saying, as to the first disciples, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature! A noble destiny this ! — the chief purpose, perhaps, for which, though occupying a small, remote, and stormy isle, we have grown into a mighty people, and fill a place in the world vastly greater than that which our island fills on its map. Great colonists as we are, and greater as, with the growth of our wealth and therefore of our population, we are likely to be, it may prove instructive and also interesting to look at Joshua in the character of a colonist — the leader of the largest band that ever left their old in search of a new home. The emigration which he succeeded Moses in conducting to a happy issue was divinely directed, as well as divinely appointed; and from it our country may gather lessons of the greatest importance, if not ‘indeed essential to the right fulfilment of its splendid and holy destiny.
I remark, then, that the colonization of Canaan under Joshua was conducted in an orderly manner, on a large scale, and in a way eminently favorable to the happiness of the emigrants and the interests of virtue and religion.
We cannot say the same of ours. Certainly not. Our system of emigration rends asunder the dearest ties of nature, removing from the side of aged parents those who should tend and support them. It carries away the very flower of our youth; the enterprising; the stout-hearted, and the strong-handed; and so leaves the old country burdened with an undue prcportion of such as are feeble and infirm. Our manner of emigration is attended with still worse, because most immoral effects. The largest proportion of such as seek a home in other lands being young men, there are too many women at home, and too many men abroad. The equality of the sexes is disturbed. God’s virtuous order is thrown into confusion; and the consequences, both to the old country and its colonies, are immoral, eminently pernicious.
It was after another fashion that God managed the emigration of the Hebrews under Moses and Joshua. It presents us with a model we would do well to copy. The children of Israel entered Canaan to be settled within allotted borders; by families and by tribes. In their case emigration was thus less a change of persons than a change, and a happy change of place. No broad seas rolled between the severed members of the same family; there were no bitter partings of parents and the children they feared never more to see; nor did the emigrants, with sad faces and swimming eyes, stand crowded on the ship’s stern to watch the blue mountains of their dear native land as they sank beneath the wave. Now, were our emigrations conducted somewhat after this divine model, the trees, the birds, the flowers, the skier might differ from those of the old country, but with the same loved faces before them, the same loved voices in their ear, the same loved forms moving about the house, the same neighbors to associate and intermarry with, to rally round them in danger, to sit at their festive board, and at length carry their coffin to the grave, our emigrants would feel their new quarters to be home, and remember almost without a pang, since they had brought away with them those who most endeared it, the glen or valley, the city or village of their birth. See many of our colonists separated by broad seas from all they loved; strangers to one another; dwelling far apart; scattered on the lonely prairie or buried in the depths of gloomy forests; doomed to rough work and learning rougher manners; sighing for their old homes, the amenities of civilized and the sweet pleasures of domestic life! How enviable compared to theirs the circumstances of the Hebrews on the other side of Jordan, amid the swelling hills and green valleys of their adopted land! Every homestead presents a picture of virtuous, domestic life. The aged parents, regarded with reverence and supported with cheerfulness, sit shadowed by vine and fig-tree; while the father, leaving his plough in the furrow or leading his flock homeward at the close of day, is met by a merry band of children to conduct him to a home where a bright wife stands at the door with smiles of welcome on her face, one infant in her arms and another at her knee.
A still more important lesson than that taught by the orderly, just, humane, and happy arrangements of this Hebrew colony, is taught us by the care Joshua took of its religious interests. These, the greatest, yet considered appsrently the least, of all interests, are sadly neglected in many of our foreign stations; and I have often wondered to see with what little reluctance Christian parents could send their children away to lands where more lost their religion than made their fortune. Alas! for many of our emigrants — not scapegraces, but youths of fair and lovely promise — with none to care for their souls! The world engrosses all their care. No holy Sabbath renews each week impressions that were fading away. Seldom visited by any minister of the Gospel, far remote from the sound of the church-going bell, they grow indifferent to the claims of religion; apathy steals over them like a creeping palsy; and disgracing the very name of Christian, many addict themselves to vices which make even the heathen blush. Condemn the Canaanities for offering their children up to Moloch ! — equally cruel and costly, and far more guilty, are the sacrifices some parents make of theirs to Mammon. Talk of the Old Testament being out of date ! — it were well for our countrymen, and the world overso many of whose shores our colonies are planted, if we copied the lessons of that divine old book. Whatever we do with our religion, the Hebrews did not leave the ark of God behind them. Regarding it as at once their glory and defence, they followed it into the bed of Jordan, and, passing the flood on foot, bore it with them into the adopted land. Wherever they pitched their tents, they set up the altar and tabernacle of their God. Priests and teachers formed part of the train; and making ample provision for the regular ministration of word and ordinance, they laid in holy and pious institutions the foundations of their future Commonwealth. Here is an example to us. Our surplus population must of necessity emigrate. We are furnished in God’s good providence with remarkable facilities for carrying the blessings of civilization and a pure gospel to the ends of the earth; I know no grander scheme for our country and its Christian patriots than a colonization formed to the utmost possible extent, in all its orderly arrangements, and family relationships, and religious provisions, on the model of that which Israel followed in the land of Canaan. We have attempted it in the New Zealand settlements of Canterbury and Otago on a small and imperfect scale. But it were as much to our own interest as to the good of mankind, that we tried it on a scale corresponding to our means, and the world’s clamant necessities. Such colonies would relieve the old country, and bless the new; and these, unlike the melancholy ruins of ancient kingdoms, depopulated regions, and the graves of extinct and exterminated tribes, were worthy footmarks for us to leave on the sands of time and the soil of heathen shores.
Such are some of the points in which Joshua is to be admired, and imitated, as a model colonist. Alas! while neglecting his example in things worthy of imitation, we have followed it but too closely in the one thing where it affords us no precedent to follow. I refer to the fire and sword he carried into the land of Canaan, and his extermination of its original inhabitants. We have too faithfully followed him in this — with no warrant, human or divine, to do so. Let me explain the matter.
The day of Jericho’s doom has come. To the amazement first, and afterwards, no doubt, to the
YOSHUA THE COLONIST. 14!
amusement of its inhabitants, the host of Israel, followed by the ark of God and priests with sounding horns, have walked on six successive days the round of its walls. Its inhabitants crowd- ing the ramparts have probably made merry with the Hebrews — asking, as they passed, if they expected to throw down stone walls with rams’- horns instead of battering rams? and whether they had not had walking enough in the wilderness these past forty years, that they were taking this daily and very harmless turn round their city? With such gibes and mockery the six days passed on; but now the seventh, the Sabbath of the Lord, had come — and with it an end of their mirth, and of Jericho itself. Smitten, when the people shouted and the trumpets blew, as by the blast of a mine or the shock of an earthquake, its walls were to fall flat to the ground, and lay it open to the assault. And in view of that event, these were Joshua’s instructions: ‘The city shall be accursed, it and all therein, to the Lord; only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house.” And committing no mistake as to the full and bloody import of this order, the people, it is said, ‘‘ utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old. Nor was the slaughter at the sack of Ai, conducted also under Joshua’s orders, less indiscriminating and wholesale. There was not, we are told, a man or woman but was smitten with the edge of the sword, the king only excepted; and him — -the last survivor of these stout heathens and of a miserable crowd of women and children — whom the people had taken alive and brought captive to Joshua,
Joshua carried to the smoking ruins of his home, and hanged on a tree. These are specimens of the policy which the Hebrews pursued in Canaan, killing all, without dist!nction of rank, or sex, or age. They went to the slaughter of ‘the Canaanites as we should to the destruction of our sins — their eye did not pity and their hand did not spare.
We naturally recoil from such scenes; and taking advantage of that horror of bloodshed and of the sufferings of innocents which God has implanted in every breast, Tom Paine, and other ribald sceptics, have made this terrible extermination a ground for attacking the character of Joshua, and denying the divine authority of the Bible itself. The faith of some has staggered at this terrible wholesale slaughter. It has disturbed the minds of others; and it may be well to take this opportunity of showing that, severe as the judgment was, it affords no ground whatever either for traducing the character of Joshua or doubting the divinity of Scripture.
There have been monsters who delighted in cruelty, and found music in the groans of sufferers — popish inquisitors and persecutors, a sort of fiends wearing ecclesiastical habits and the human form, who gloated their eyes with tender maidens writhing on the rack, — ruthless conquerors, who put all, without distinction, to the sword, as deaf to the cries of mothers and the wails of infants as the steel they buried in their bowels. Joshua did exterminate the Canaanites; but he is not to be ranked with these. The kindly terms which he uses to Achan, as, bending with pity over the guilty man, he calls him “my son” — the high honor he displayed in keeping faith with the - Gibeonites, who had so cleverly entrapped him — the dauntless courage which he carried into battle, with which he faced the Israelites when, maddened on one occasion to fury, they sought his life, and with which also when alone, by the walls of Jericho, on seeing the Lord of Hosts, in form of a man standing across his path with a sword drawn in his hand, he went up to Him with the brave challenge, ‘“Art thou for us or for our adversaries?’ — the piety which raises man above all low and brutal passions, and ever softens the heart it sanctifies; these noble features in Joshua’s character are incompatible with a temper that could find pleasure in the infliction of suffering, or delight in scenes of blood. It is not the pious, but the impious — not honorable men, but knaves — not the brave, but cowards, that are cruel. The judge is not cruel who condemns a criminal; and, placed in similar circumstances, no doubt Joshua, brave, gentle, and generous, was often agitated by the emotions of him who, seated on yonder bench of justice, with swimming eyes, and voice his rising feelings choke, pronounces on some pale, trembling wretch the dreadful doom of death.
In his bloodiest work Joshua was acting under commission. His orders were clear, however terrible they read. These are his instructions, as given by God to Moses : — ‘‘ When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seve nations greater and mightier than thou; and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them, thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them: neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son” — a terrible sentence clenched with this weighty reason, “for they will turn away thy sons from following me, that they may serve other gods: sc wili the anger of the Lord be kindlec against you, and destroy thee suddenly.” There, God undertakes the whole responsibility. And be it observed that the children of Israel were blamed not because they did, but because they did not, exterminate the Canaanites, — slaying them with the sword, or driving them out of the land. The duty was painful and stern; but they lived to find, as God had warned them would happen to them, and as happens to us when we spare the sins of which these heathen were the type, that mercy to the Canaanites was cruelty to themselves.
But, admitting that the responsibility is shifted from Joshua to God, how, it may be asked, are the sufferings of the Canaanites, their expulsion and bloody extermination from the land, to be reconciled with the character of God, as just, and good, and righteous? This is like many other of his acts. On attempting to scrutinize them, mystery meets us on the threshold. No wonder ! — when we feel constrained to exclaim even over a flake of snow, the spore of a fern, the leaf of a tree, the change of a base grub into a winged and painted butterfly, ‘‘Who can by searching find out God!
who can find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is higher than heaven, what can we do? deeper than hell, what can we know? the measure thereof is longer than the earth and broader than the sea.” Dark as the judgment on Canaan seems, a little consideration will show that it is no greater, nor so great, a mystery as many others in the providence of God.
The land of Canaan was his — ‘the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” And I ask in turn, is the Sovereign Proprietor of all to he denied the right that ordinary proprietors claim — the right to remove one set of tenants, and replace them by another? Besides, the inhabitants of Canaan were not only, so to speak, ‘tenants at will,” but tenants of the worst description. They practised the grossest immoralities; even their religious rites were obscene. Cruel, sensual, devilish, they were sinners beyond other men; a curse to the world which they corrupted with their vices, and burdened with a load of guilt. And, therefore, unless we refuse to God the right we grant to inferior proprietors — that of doing what they will with their own, and the right also we grant to inferior governors — that of inflicting punishment on crime, God possessed an absolute and perfect authority, not only to remove, but to exterminate these idolaters out of the land, saying, “Thou shalt smite and utterly destroy them.” Let it ke remarked also, that the Canaanites not only deserved, but chose their fate. The fame of what God had done for the tribes of Israel had preceded their arrival in the land of Canaan. Thus, its guilty tenants were early warned; got iy 146 STUDIES OF CHARACTER.
“notice to quit;” might be considered as summoned out. They refused to go. They chose the chances of resistance rather than quiet removal; and so, — for be it observed that the Israelites in the first instance were only ordered to cast them out, — they brought destruction on themselves, with their own hands pulling down the house that buried them and their children in its ruins.
But the children? the unoffending infants? There is a mystery, I admit, an awful mystery in their destruction; but no new or greater mystery here than meets us everywhere else. The mystery of offspring who suffer through their parents’ sins is repeated daily in our own streets. Look at that poor child, shivering in the winter cold, rags on its back and cruel hunger in its hollow cheek, reared in deepest ignorance and driven into crime, doomed to a life of infamy and of misery, — it suffers, the hapless victim ofa father’s drunkenness. Look at this wasted, withered, sallow infant, that is pining away to death and the mercy of the grave, with its little head wearily laid on the foul shoulders of one who has lost, with the heart, almost the features, of her sex, — it suffers through a mother’s sins. Sanitary reformers tell us, and tell us truly, that thousands of children die year by year in consequence of the foul habits and foul habitations of improvident and careless parents; and history tells us that not thousands but millions who did not know their right hand from their left, have fallen victims to wars and conflagrations, to earthquakes and famines, to plagues and pestilences. It does not alter the case one whit to say that children who die of disease, for instance, die
JOSHUA fHE COLONIST. 147
by the laws of Nature, while those in Canaan were put to death by the command of God. This is a distinction without a difference; for what are the laws of Nature but the ordinances and will of God? If it is consistent with his righteous government to deprive an infant of life by the hand of disease, it is equally so to do it by the edge of the sword. And thus, while the death of a thousand children is not more mysterious than that of one, there is no more mystery in all the slaughtered babes of Canaan, than lies shrouded and shut up in the little coffin any sad father lays in an untimely grave. Nor is the cloud which here surrounds God’s throne, dark as it seems, without a silver lining. There is mercy in the death of all infants — the Canaanites not excepted. I feel here as I have often felt when gazing on the form of a dead child in some foul haunt of wretchedness and vice. To die is to go to heaven. To have lived had been to inherit the misery and repeat .the crimes of parents. The sword of the Hebrew opens to the babes of Canaan a happy escape from misery and sin — a sharp but short passage to a better and purer world.
Thus, and otherwise, we can justify the sternest deeds of which Joshua has been accused. He held a commission from God to enter Canaan, and cast out its guilty inhabitants, and, like a woodman who enters the forest axe in hand, to cut them down if they clung like trees to its soil. His conduct admits of the fullest vindication; and though it did not, we should be the last to accuse him. Ours are not the hands to cast a stone at Joshua. A most painful and shameful history than the history of some at least of our colonies was never written. Talk of the extermination of the Canaanites! Where are the Indian tribes our settlers found roaming, in plumed and painted freedom, the forests of the New World? Excepting a few scattered, degraded savages, all have disappeared from the face of the earth. We found Tasmania with a native population; and lately the only survivors were a single woman and some dozen men. Unless where our emigrants are settled on its shores, or lonely shepherds tend their flocks, or the gold digger toils for the treasures in its bowels, the Australian continent is becoming a solitude; its aborigines disappearing before us with the strange animals that inhabit their forests and form their scanty food. Equally with the timid Bushmen and crouching Hottentot, the brave savages of New Zealand are vanishing before our vices, diseases, and fire-arms. Not more fatal to the Canaanites the irruption of the Hebrews than our arrival in almost every colony to its native population! We have seized their lands; and ina way less honorable, and even merciful, than the swords of Israel, have given them in return nothing but a grave. They have perished before our vices and diseases. Our presence has been their extermination; nor is it possible for a man with a heart to read many pages of our colonial history without feelings of deepest pity and burning indignation. They remind us of the sad but true words of Fowell Buxton. The darkest day, said that Christian philanthropist, for many a heathen tribe was that which first saw the white man step upon theirshores Instead of a blessing, we have carried a blight with us. Professed followers of Him who came not to destroy but to save the world, we have entered the territories of the heathen with fire and sword; and adding murder to robbery, have spoiled the unoffending natives of their lives as well as of their lands.
Had we any commission to exterminate? Divine as Joshua’s, our commission was as opposite to his as opposing poles to each other. These are its blessed terms, ‘‘Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Can our country and its churches read that without a blush of shame and a sense of guilt? Let us repent the errors of the past. Not so much to aggrandize our island, as to Christianize the world by our colonies, is the noble enterprise to which Providence calls us. Onr sailors touch at every port; the keels of our ships plough every sea; our manufactures are borne to every shore; our settlements are scattered far and wide over the whole face of the globe; and year by year this busy hive throws off its swarms to take wing in search of new settlements and wider homes. With its literature and language, with its hereditary love of adventure and indomitable vigor, with its devotion to liberty, civil and sacred, with the truth preached from its pulpits, and Bibles issued by millions from its printing presses, our country seems called of Heaven to marshal the forces of the Cross on the borders of heathendom, and ‘“‘go in to possess the land.”
‘Go ye in to possess the land,” — these, if I may say so, were the marching orders under which Joshua and Israel entered Canaan; and however unable they appeared, in point of numbers and ordinary resources, to cope with those who held the soil and were prepared to fight like men that had their homes and hearths, their wives and children to defend, yet then, as still, the measure of man’s ability is God’s command. While he denied them straw, Pharaoh required the Israelites to make bricks; and other masters may impose on their servants orders equally unreasonable. But whatever God requires of us, God will give ability to do. Is it to repent and be converted? is it to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved? is it to crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts? is it to abstain from evil and do good? is it to cast sin and depravity out of our hearts, like Canaanites out of the land? — the fact that God has commanded us to do a thing proves that we can do it. So there is no Christian but may adopt the bold words of Paul, and say, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”
Since it is so, what a noble career and rapid conquest were before the children of Israel? Sweeping over Canaan like a resistless flood, they might have carried all before them. What difficulties could prove too great for those who had God to aid them? What need had they of bridge, or boats, before whose feet the waters of Jordan fled? of engines of war, whose shout, borne on the air, smote the ramparts of Jericho to the ground with an earthquake’s reeling shock? of allies, who had heaven on their side, to hurl down death from the skies on their panic- stricken e emies? How could they lose the fruits of victory over the retreat of whose foes night refused to throw her mantle, while the sun held the sky, nor sunk in darkness, till their bloody work was done? What were natural difficulties, or disparity of numbers, to those who entered Canaan with the promise, “If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commands, and do them, your threshing shall reach unto the viutage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowig time, and ye shall eat your bread unto the full, ‘nd dwell in your land safely; and ye shall chase your enemies; and they shall fall before you by the sword; and five of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight!”
With these promises Israel crossed the flood on foot; yet after many years, and ample time allowed to exterminate all the Canaanites, we find God saying to Joshua, ‘‘ Thou art old and stricken in years, and there remaineth yet very much land to be possessed.” How true, and, alas! how sad, that these reproachful words admit of a wider than their orginal application; one involving on the part of Christ’s Church deeper sin and greater shame! It is a long time ago, more than eighteen hundred years, since aur Lord brought his Church into the world, and conducting her to the borders of heathenism, said, “Go ye in to possess the land; gc ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature; go, and I will be with you; go, and I will never leave nor forsake you.” His Church measures its existence not by years, but centuries. It has seen hundreds of generations swept into the tomb. Save the changeless sea and perpetual hills,
it has seen all things changed beneath the sun; the religions of Egypt, and Greece, and Rome sink into the tide of time; and every kingdom that flourished at its birth pass away from the face of the world. Venerable for its age, not less than for its truth, the Church of Christ has had time enough to plant the cross on every shore, and push its bloodless conquests into every land; yet how may Jesus, pointing to a world by much the larger portion of which remains under the dominion of darkness and of the devil, address her, saying, “Thou art old and stricken in years, and yet there is much land to be possessed.”
So gigantic is the missionary work which lies
before the Church that the old words are still -
appropriate, “The field is the world.” With exceptions hardly deserving notice, the whole continent of Asia, the whole continent of Africa, and, speaking of its original inhabitants, the whole continent of the New World, in other words, much the largest portion of the globe, is ‘‘land yet to be possessed.” Eighteen centuries ago Christ charged his people to carry the tidings of salvation to the ends of the earth; but thousands of millions have died, and hundreds of millions are living, who never heard his name. Was ever master so ill-served, or hard battle and noble victory, if I may say so, so defrauded of their fruits?
Again, much of the world, though nominally Christian, is “land yet to be possessed.”
By the use of different colors an ordinary map of the globe is made to present a view of the different kingdoms into which its surface is divided,
The same device has been applied to illustrate its religious as well as its political condition; and when the map is spread out with all those countries - which are not Christian shaded with the sombre colors that symbolize their moral and spiritual darkness, it 1s a black picture — one to make the Church of Christ hang her head with shame. Yet all outside these darkest spaces is not enjoying the light of a pure gospel. Outside them, there is much to do; ‘‘ much land to be possessed.” The largest portion, indeed, of what is nominally Christian is under the dominion of one form or other of Antichrist. In the oid land of Canaan, the places from which Jebusites, and Hittites, and others, were expelled, came to be occupied, in part at least, by the Samaritan race. These, though holding a portion of his creed, hated the Jew; and often opposed him with an animosity more bitter than rankled in heathen breasts. And how has that condition of things found a counterpart in the so-called Christian world? A corresponding mixture of truth and error characterizes the Greek and Roman Churches. Their animosity to the true faith has been seldom, if ever, exceeded by heathen rancor: nor has Pagan Rome persecuted the truth more bitterly than Popish Rome has done. And thus in many nominally Christian countries,
where grovelling superstitions have usurped the place of piety, or infidelity, eating out the vitals of religion, has left nothing but an empty shell, the Church of Christ has a great work to do- — very much land yet to be possessed.
Again, it is true even of our own native country that ‘there is much land yet to be possessed.”
The eyes of a fool, says Solomon, are in the ends
of the earth; and however much we commend the zeal which has sent missionaries to the plains of India, the sands of Africa, and Greenland’s icy shores, perhaps we lie somewhat open to that remark. In seeking to convert the heathen abroad, nave we not too much overlooked the claims of those at home; and, like unwise generals, pushed on our conquests, while leaving a formidable enemy in our rear? In those vast, almost unbroken masses, ignorance and intemperance, whose rags and vices, whose neglect of religious ordinances and moral degradation, disgrace our country and Christian name, how much land is there yet to possess? If we reckon how fast the non-church-going population of our large towns, and of many mining and manufacturing districts also, is increasing; how many are sinking year by year into the godless mass that has abandoned the house of God, and cast off all profession of religion; and how that rising flood of irreligion threatens at no distant period to engulf throne, and altar, and all to which our country owes its goodness and its greatness, what need is there to push on the work of Home as well as of Foreign Missions, and ‘enter in to possess the land!”
In addressing ourselves to this task, we might take a lesson from the manner in which the twelve
tribes took possession of the land of Canaan. God
divided it for them into twelve different sections. Giving to each tribe a part, He said, as it were, ‘This is your portion, fight for it; while you help your brother, and your brother helps you, be this your sphere for work and warfare.” Thus all jealousy, envy, and discord were prevented; the only rivalry between one tribe and another being who should be foremost in the work — the first to cast the heathen out of their borders, and possess the land. Had no such plan been adopted, what had happened ? — the tribes had fallen into quarrels; and those who fought with the Canaanites had probably fought with each other. And, I have thought, it were well did the Churches of Jesus Christ apportion out the heathen world; and well also if our different denominations, laying aside all haughty exclusiveness and mutual jealousies, were to divide the waste field at home. Then “Judah would no longer vex Ephraim, nor Ephraim envy Judah;” and the Church, acting in harmony, marching in concert throughout all its sections, would go forth to the conquest of the world, to use the grand words of the old prophet, “‘clear as the sun, fair as the moon, and terrible as an army with banners.” Then, animated with one spirit, and aiming at one object, we might expect such success as blest her earliest days. What noble progress did she make when the dews of youth were on her? For one heathen converted now, hundreds were converted then. By her arms Rome subdued kingdoms, but the Church by the preaching of the Gospel subdued Rome herself. Nor oppression, nor exile, nor bloody scaffolds, nor fiery stakes, nor persecution in its most appalling forms, could arrest her triumphant career. She entered the temples of idolatry, smiting down their gods as with an iron mace; she forced her way through the guards of imperial palaces; she faced all danger; she overcame all opposition; and almost before the last of the Apostles was called to his rest, she had made the name of Christ greater than Czsar’s — proclaiming the faith, and planting the cross in every region of the then known world. Wherever Roman commerce sailed, she followed in its wake; wherever the Roman eagles flew, she was there, like a dove, bearing the olive branch of peace. A century or two more of such progress, such holy energy, such self-denying zeal, and, the Spirit of God continuing to bless the preaching of the Word, the whole land had been possessed — the earth had been the Lord’s, and all the kingdoms of this world had become the kingdom of our Christ. Though it tarries now, that vision shall come; and to Him whose hand is not shortened that it cannot save, nor his ear heavy that it cannot hear, be the prayer offered till the answer come, “‘ Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, and in the days of old.”