The Heroism of Foreign Missions

“As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.” — ACTS xiii. 2, 3.

THE work was foreign missions. The disciples in Judea were sending out two of their number to preach the gospel in other parts of Asia and, by and by, in Europe. And therefore these words belong to us to-day, upon this one Sunday in the year when we give our especial thoughts to the foreign missionary work. This Sunday always comes back to us with the same feeling and color. It enters in among our common Sundays with a larger power than belongs to them. It seems as if the arms of Christ were stretched out a little more widely. As sometimes when our Lord was preaching in the temple, those who stood nearest to Him and caught His words the freshest from His lips, those to whom His words had been long familiar, must have seen Him lift up His eyes and look across their heads to the multitude beyond who stood upon the outskirts of the crowd; and as, while they watched Him finding out and speaking to those strangers, their own thoughts of Him must have enlarged; as, perhaps at first surprised and jealous, they must have come to understand Him more and love Him better for this new sight of

His love for all men, — so it is with us to-day. Indeed there is no feeling which the Jew had when he found that what had been his religion was going to become the possession of the world, which doe? not repeat itself now in men’s minds when they hear their gospel demanding of them to send it to the heathen. It must have been a surprise and bewilderment at first to find that they were not the final objects of God’s care, but only the medium through which the light was to shine that it might reach other men. I can conceive that Joseph and Mary may have wondered why those Gen tiles should have come out of the East to worship their Messiah. But very soon the enlargement of their faith to be the world’s heritage proved its power by making their faith a far holier thing for them than it could have been if it had remained wholly their own. Christ was more thoroughly theirs when through them He had been manifested to the Gentiles. And so always the enlargement of the faith brings the endearment of the faith, and to give the Savior to others makes Him more thoroughly our own.

With this thought let me speak to you to-day. Let me plead for the foreign missionary idea as the necessary completion of the Christian life. It is the apex to which all the lines of the pyramid lead up. The Christian life without it is a mangled and imperfect thing. The glory and the heroism of Christianity lies in its missionary life. This is the subject of which I wish to speak to you this morning.

The event which is recorded in the text, the departure of the disciples on their first missionary journey, was a distinct epoch in the history of Christianity. There had, been some anticipations of it. The gospel had been preached to the Samaritans. Philip had baptized the Ethiopian. Peter had carried his message to the Roman centurion. But now for the first time a distinct, deliberate, irrevocable step was taken, and two disciples turned their back upon the home of Judaism, which had been thus far the home of Christianity, and went forth with the world before them. They went indeed in the first place to the Jews who lived in foreign lands; but when they went away from Judea they started on a work from which there was no turning back and which could not be limited. Before they had been many weeks upon their journey, it had become distinctly a mission to the Gentiles. And now, from the time when Paul and Barnabas went out upon this mission, the body of the disciples divides itself into two parts. There are the disciples who stay at home and manage affairs in Jerusalem, and there are the disciples who go abroad to tell the story of the cross. Peter and James are in Jerusalem. Paul and Barnabas and Luke go wandering to Ephesus and Athens and Corinth. And, as we read our Bibles, gradually the history detaches itself from the Holy City. The interest of Christianity does not linger with the wise and faithful souls who stay at home. Peter and James pass out of our thought. It is Paul, with his fiery zeal and eager tongue, restless to find some new ears into which to pour the story of his Mas ter; it is he in whom the interest of Christianity is concentrated. He evidently represents its spirit. Its glory and its heroism are in him. The other disciples seem to feel this. They recognize that it is coming. They are almost like John the Baptist when he beheld

Jesus. As they come down to the ship to see their companions embark, as they fast and pray and lay their hands on them and send them away, there is a solemnity about it all which is like the giving up of the most precious privilege of their work, its flower and crown, to these its missionaries; and they turn back to their administrative work at home as to a humbler and less heroic task.

The relation of the disciples who stayed at home to the disciples who went abroad to preach is the perpetual relation of the home pastor to the foreign missionary. The work of the two is not essentially different. It is essentially the same. Both have the same gospel to proclaim. But the color of their lives is different. Paul is heroic. James is unheroic, or is far less heroic. I think as we go on we shall see that those words have very clear meanings. They are not vague. But even before we have defined them carefully they express a feeling with which the missionary and the pastor impress us. Heroism is in the very thought of missions. Patient devotedness, but nothing heroic, is associated with the ministry of him who works for the building up of Christian lives where Christianity already is the established faith.

I am sure that I speak for a very great many of my brethren in the home ministry when I say that we feel this continually. “Sent to tell men of Christ,” — that is our commission. And men certainly need to be told of Christ over and over again. Those who have known Him longest need to hear His name again and again in their temptations, their troubles, their joys. We need to tell men of Him all their lives, until we whisper His familiar name into their ears just growing dull in death. I rejoice to tell you of Him always, those of you who have heard of Him most and longest; but you can imagine, I am sure, how, standing here in your presence, and letting my thought wander off to a foreign land where some missionary is standing face to face with people who never heard of Christ before, I feel that that man is “telling men of Christ” in a realler, directer way than I am. He is coming nearer to the heart, the true idea and meaning of the work we both are doing, than I am. We are like soldiers holding the fortress. He is the soldier who makes the sally and really does the fighting. I know the answer. I know what some of you are saying in your hearts whenever we talk together about foreign missions. “There are heathen here in Boston,” you declare; “heathen enough here in America. Let us convert them first, before we go to China.” That plea we all know, and I think it sounds more cheap and more shameful every year. What can be more shameful than to make the imperfection of our Christianity at home an excuse for not doing our work abroad? It is as shameless as it is shameful. It pleads for exemption and indulgence on the ground of its own neglect and sin. It is like a murderer of his father asking the judge to have pity on his orphanhood. Even the men who make such a plea feel, I think, how unheroic it is. The minister who does what they bid him do feels his task of preaching to such men perhaps all the more necessary but certainly all the less heroic, as he sees how utterly they have failed to feel the very nature of the gospel which he preaches to them.

But I must come closer to our subject. “The heroism of Christianity lies in its missionary life.” And let us start with this. Every great interest and work of men has its higher and its lower, its heroic and its unheroic phases. Take public life for instance. Two servants of the people work together in the same office, and both alike are faithful, both are honest. Both try to do their duty. But one thinks of the state and of that interest of the state for which he labors, as serving him. The other thinks of himself as serving the state. There is the difference. To one the currents of life flow inward towards the centre, which is his person. To the other the currents of life flow outward towards the interests for which he lives. So it is with every man’s profession. Of two men who are practising law, one dwells upon the idea of the law and gives himself to its development. The other dwells upon the idea of himself and considers that the law is given to him for his support. Of two doctors, one makes medicine his servant to build up his fame or fortune; the other makes himself the servant of medicine, to give what strength there is in him to her development and application. In every one of your professions there are both kinds of workers. There are the men who are given to their work, and the men who consider that their work is given to them. Their methods may be just alike. They may study in the same school, read the same books, work in the same office; but anybody who comes near them feels the difference. There is the heroic element in one, and the heroic element is absent in the other.

And what is true about a special occupation is true about life as a whole. The fundamental difference lies between the men who think that life is for them, that this great world of living things is the reservoir out of which they are to draw pleasure and good; and the other men who think that they are for life, that in this universe of living things there is a divine idea and purpose to which they, coming in their appointed time in the long ages, are to minister with what power of service they possess. Everywhere there runs this difference. It appears in men’s thought about God. To one man God is a vast means, working for his comfort. To an other man God is a vast end, to which his powers strive to make their contribution. Everywhere there runs this difference. And it is just this larger conception of life everywhere to which the name heroic properly belongs. This largeness involves unselfishness. The heroic public man or lawyer or doctor or liver of human life is he who gives himself to his interest instead of asking his interest to give itself to him. The heroic moments in all of our most unheroic lives have been those in which we have been able to give ourselves to our art or occupation, counting our lives contributions to its idea, instead of demanding that it should give itself to us and contribute to our wealth or welfare.

It is clear then, first of all, that heroism is not merely a thing of circumstances. There are two ideas which men are apt vulgarly to associate with their idea of a hero. One of them is prominence, and the other is suffering. The ordinary notion of a hero is either of a prominent and famous man, or of a man who has borne suffering manfully. Now it may be that an unselfish and devoted life in such a world as this in which we live has such a tendency to bring a man into hard conflict with the hard things about him, that pain will come to be a very frequent accompaniment of heroism. But evidently, if what I have said is true, there is no necessary company between them. There may be pain without heroism, pain inspired by selfishness, and making the man who suffers all the smaller and more self-involved. On the other hand there may be heroism without pain, self-devotion with all the circumstances of happiness. And so with regard to prominence. The essence of heroic life is the apprehension by any man of the idea of a cause, and the abandonment of his life to that idea. Such an abandonment, such a filling of his life with such an idea, will make him naturally the type-man of his cause, will set him in its fore-front and will bring him into conflict with all men who oppose his cause; but these are accidents. In obscurity and luxury it may be that a man still is a hero. Even there he may fasten upon the idea of a cause and give himself up to it and effectively live for it, and if he does that he is a hero. In heaven all life will be heroic. Every being there will live for the divine ideas of things. No man will think that the golden streets and the hosts that fill them, and the unspeakable Majesty which sits in the centre of all upon the throne, are for him. Every soul will delight to count its eternity a contribution to them. But there will be no unhappiness, no pain in heaven. The accidents will have been changed, and will show that they were never more than accidents, but the essence of heroism will be the same forever.

I put then as the first element of heroism this quality of Ideality; the power, that is, of getting hold of the idea of any cause or occupation or of life in general, so that the cause, the occupation, or life becomes a living thing to which a man may give himself with all his powers.

That quality of ideality is the essential thing in heroism. There can be no hero without that. It is just what makes the difference between the “dumb, driven cattle” and the “heroes in the strife.” Look through the ranks of your profession. Are there not both cattle and heroes there? Are there not times in your work when you are of the cattle sort, when the idea fades out of what you are doing, and nothing but the clatter of its machinery remains? Alas for you if such times are in the preponderance, if they are not lost in the general presence of the idea of your labor, making it an inspiration and making you heroic in your dedication to it.

Along with this primary quality of all heroism there go two others, closely related to it. They are Magnanimity and Bravery. The true hero is generous and brave. Whence comes his generosity? Is it not of the very essence of his ideality. Let me be a scholar, for instance. The first question will be whether I have got hold of the idea of scholarship and have given myself to it. Am I studying for my own sake, to make myself famous or accomplished; or am I studying for scholar ship’s sake, to make my branch of study more complete, to glorify and multiply the cause of knowledge in the world? If the first, I have no real ground of sympathy with other scholars. I do not take a cordial interest in their success. I am not tempted to help them. I am tempted again and again to hinder them. I am open to all kinds of jealousy and spite and little-mindedness. If the latter, I am anxious for every other worker’s success, as well as for my own. I am as glad of another man’s discovery as if I had made it. I cannot be jealous of the light which some new hand flings on that subject which it is the object of my life to glorify. I will help every brother student as eagerly as I will help myself. Here is magnanimity. You see how closely it is bound up with ideality. The magnanimous public man is he who so lives for the ideas of his country that he is not jealous but glad when he sees other men doing more for the development of these ideas than he can do. The magnanimous churchman is he who cares so much for the church that he will help any other man’s work for her as devotedly as if it were his own. The magnanimous man is he who has so conceived the idea of manhood, to whom humanity is so sublime a thing, that he will help another man to complete himself, to be as good and as great as he can be, with as much earnestness as he will expend in his own culture. Here is generosity. You see that it is not mere good-nature. It is most intelligent and has its reasons. And this is the second element of heroism.

And the third element is Bravery. We can see how heroic bravery too belongs with the quality which discovers and fastens upon ideas. There are two kinds of bravery; one which comes from the recollection of self, the other which comes from the forgetfulness of self. An Indian is brave when out of sheer pride he lets men drive their burning fagots into his flesh arid utters no cry. A fireman is brave when for his duty he rushes into a burning house and, all scorched and bleeding, brings out the ransomed child. The first is brave by self-recollection. The second is brave by self-forgetfulness. The first has gathered up all his self-possession and said, “Now I will not flinch or fear because it is unworthy of me.” The second has cast all recollection of himself aside and said, “That child will die if I stay here.” We need not ask which of these two braveries is heroic. There is a courage that comes of fear. A man learns that on the whole it is safer in the world not to dodge and shirk, and so he goes on and meets life as it comes. There is nothing heroic about that. A man wants to run away, but because his fear of disgrace is greater than his fear of bullets he stays in the ranks and shuts his eyes and marches on. There is nothing heroic about that. A man is afraid as he sits alone and thinks about a task, but when he gets among his fellow-men, a mere contagious feeling takes possession of him and he is ready to fight and die because other men are fighting or dying, like a dog in a pack of dogs. That is “the courage corporate that drags the coward to heroic death.” There is nothing heroic about that. Only when a man seizes the idea and meaning of some cause, and in the love and inspiration of that is able to forget himself and go to danger fearlessly because of his great desire and enthusiasm, only then is bravery heroic.

Ideality, magnanimity, and bravery then; these are what make the heroes. These are what glorify certain lives that stand through history as the lights and beacons of mankind. The materialist, the sceptic, the coward, he cannot be a hero. We talk sometimes about the unheroic character of modern life. We say that there can be no heroes nowadays. We point to our luxurious living for the reason. But oh, my friends, it is not in your silks and satins, not in your costly houses and your sumptuous tables, that your unheroic lives consist. It is in the absence of great inspiring ideas, of generous enthusiasms, and of the courage of self-forgetfulness. It may be that you must throw away your comfortable living to get these things; but your lack of heroism is not in your comfortable living, but in the absence of these things. Do not blame a mere accident for that which lies so much deeper. There are moments when you bear your sorrows, when you watch by your dying, when you bury your dead, when you are anxiously teaching your children, when you resist a great temptation, when your faith or your country is in danger; there are such moments with you all when you seize the idea of human living and are made generous and brave because of it. Then, for all your modern dress, for all your modern parlor where you stand, you are heroic like David, like Paul, like any of God’s knights in any of the ages which are most remote and picturesque. Then you catch some glimpse of a region into which you might enter, and where, with no blast of trumpets or waving of banners, you might be heroic all the time.

And now we may turn to that which has been our purpose in all we have been saying. What we have had in our mind is the great work of foreign missions, and we have been led to speak of heroism in its three fold quality of ideality and magnanimity and bravery. Now no cause ever really takes possession of the world unless it puts on the heroic aspect, unless it shows itself capable of inspiring heroism. Christianity is subject to this law like every other cause. It, too, must show itself heroic or it fails to seize and hold mankind; and it is in the desire for universal extension, the desire to make its Master known to all men, the desire for foreign missions, that Christianity asserts her heroism.

It is true indeed that Christianity is itself heroic life. All that there is in human living becomes magnified and glorified to its best when it is put under the leadership of Christ. The deepest idea of life is brought out and proclaimed; the true generosity of life is uttered; its selfishness is broken up; and love, which is the power of the Christian life, casts out fear and makes the ser vant of the Savior brave. The Christian is the heroic man. Ah! as I say that, does there float across your mind the memory of many and many a time in history, or in the life that you have watched, or in your own life which you have lived, my Christian friends, when the Christian has not been the hero; when, even in the name of Christ, the Christianity which called Him its Master has seemed to forsake ideas and to give itself over to machineries, seemed to make life dwindle into a little system of economies for securing to privileged souls freedom from pain and a share in luxuries here and hereafter, seemed to make men cowardly instead of brave? I know it! I know it! Such things have been; such things have been and they still are, in the name of Christ. But such things are not Christianity. Look at Christ! The idealist, the generous, the brave! Anything that is mechanical, that is selfish, that is cowardly, coming into His religion, comes as an intruder and an enemy. Christianity in its essence is, Christianity in its long and general influence always has been, heroic; the power of ideality and magnanimity and bravery among men.

But if Christianity is heroic life, the missionary work is heroic Christianity. By this time I am sure that I have made it clear that if that is true at all it is true not from any mere circumstances of personal privation which attach to the missionary life, but because the missionary life has most closely seized and most tenaciously holds and lives by the essential central life-idea of Christianity. What is that idea? Out of all the complicated mass of Christian thought and faith, is there any one conception which we can select and say, “That is the idea of Christianity “? Certainly there is. What is it? That man is the child of God. That, beyond all doubt, is the idea of Christianity. Everything issues from, everything returns to, that. Man’s first happiness, man’s fallen life, man’s endless struggle, man’s quenchless hope, — they are all bound up and find their explanation in the truth that man was, and has never ceased to be, and is, the child of God. Therein lies the secret of the incarnation, all the appeal of the Savior’s life, all the power of the Savior’s death. It is the Son of God bringing back the children to their Father. Now we believe that, we love it, we live by it, all of us in all our Christian life. But when a man gathers up his life and goes out simply to spend it all in telling the chil dren of God who never heard it from any other lips than his that their Father is their Father; when all that he has known of Christ is simply turned into so much force by which the tidings of their sonship is to be driven home to hearts that do not easily receive so vast a truth; to that man certainly the idea has become a master and a king, as it has not to us. Belief is power. By the quantity of power I may know the quantity of belief. He is the true idealist, not who possesses ideas, but whom ideas possess; not the man whose life wears its ideas as ornamental jewels, but the man whose ideas shape his life like plastic clay. And so the true Christian idealist is he whose conception of man as the redeemed child of God has taken all his life and moulded it in new shapes, planted it in new places, so filled and inspired it that, like the Spirit of God in Elijah, it has taken it up and carried it where it never would have chosen to go of its own lower will.

Here lies, I think, the real truth about the relation which the missionary life has to the surrenders and privations and hardships which it has to undergo. The missionary does give up his home and all the circumstances of cultivated comfortable life, and goes out across the seas, among the savages to tell them of the great Christian truth, to carry them the gospel. I am sure that often a great deal too much has been made of the missionary’s surrenders, as if they were something almost inconceivable, as if they in themselves constituted some vague sort of claim upon the respect and even the support of other men. But we are constantly reminded that that is not so. The missionaries themselves, from St. Paul down, have never claimed mere pity for their sacrifices. It is other people, it is the speakers in missionary meetings, who have claimed it for them. The sacrifices of the missionary every year are growing less and less. As civilization and quick communication press the globe ever smaller, and make life on the banks of the Ganges much the same that it is on the banks of the Charles, the sacrifices of the missionary life grow more and more slight. And always there is the fact, which people are always ready to point out, that other men do every day for gain or pleasure just what the missionary does for the gospel, and nobody wonders.

The merchant leaves his home and goes and lives in China to make money. The young man dares the sea and explores the depths of Africa or the jungles of the islands for scientific discovery or for pure adventure. What is the missionary more than these? What do you say to me about his sacrifices? Only this, I think, that the fact that he is ready to do the same things — not greater, if you please, but the same things — for the Christian idea, which other men will do for money or for discovery or for adventure, is a great proof of the power of that idea. It takes at once what some people call a vague sentiment, and co-ordinates it as a working force with the mightiest powers the world knows; for there are none stronger than these, money, discovery, and adventure. And since men are to be judged not merely by the way in which they submit themselves to forces but by the quality of the forces to which they submit, not merely by their obediences but by their inasters, not merely by their enthusiasms but by the subjects about which they are enthusiastic; it certainly is a different sort of claim to our respect when a man dares any kind of sacrifice for Christ and His gospel of man’s divine sonship, from that which comes when a man dares just the same sacrifices for himself, or for his family which is but his extended self. Here is the true value to give to the often told and ever touching story of the missionary’s sufferings. I resent it as an insult to him if I am asked to pity him because, going to preach the gospel of the Savior, he very often has to sleep out-doors and walk till he is footsore, and stand where men jeer at him and taunt him. But I rejoice in that story of suffering because I can see through it the clear strong power of his faith in that gospel for which he undertook it all. The suffering is valueless save for the motive which shines through it. The world is right when, seeing Paul and a whole shipload of other people wrecked upon the coast of Malta, it has wholly forgotten or never cared who the other people were, but has seized the shipwrecked Paul and set him among the heroes. It was not the shipwreck but the idea that shone through the shipwreck, that made his heroism. He was a martyr, a witness. The roar of the breakers and the crash of the ship were but the emphasis. The essential force and meaning was in the great apostle’s faith. The poor wretches who suffered with him were on their own selfish errands, and the shipwreck could give no real dignity or beauty to what was not in itself dignified or beautiful.

It seems as if I need not take the time to show that with the supreme ideal character of the missionary’s life there must go a supreme magnanimity and bravery.

Look at the point of magnanimity. No man can be magnanimous who does not live by ideas. But the higher and the more enthusiastic the ideas, the more complete will be the magnanimity they bring. Now the missionary idea that man is God’s child gives birth to two enthusiasms; one for the Father, one for the child; one for God, one for man. The two blend together without any interference, and both together drown the missionary’s self-remembrance, with all its littleness and jealousy. Who can tell, as the missionary stands there preaching the salvation to his dusky congregation, which fire burns the warmest in his heart?

Is it the love for God or for his brethren? Is it the Master who died for him, or these men for whom also He died, from whom his strongest inspiration comes? No one can tell. He cannot tell himself. The Lord Himself in His own parable foretold the noble, sweet, inextricable confusion. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these ye have done it unto Me.” But surely in the blended power of the two enthusiasms there is the strongest power of magnanimity. All that the mystic feels of personal love of God, all that the philanthropist knows of love for man, these two, each purifying and deepening and heightening the other, unite in the soul of him who goes to tell the men whom he loves as his brethren, about God whom he loves as his Father.

Of the courage of the missionary life I have already spoken. Its singularity and supremacy are not in the way in which the missionary dares physical danger; other men do that. It is not in his cheerful bearing of men’s dislike and scorn. That we all know is too easy for us to wonder at it when a man is really possessed by a great idea. The real courage of the missionary is in the mixture of mental and moral daring with which he faces his great idea itself. A man dares to believe, in spite of all discouragement, in spite of all the brutishness and hateful life of men, in spite of retarded civilization and continual outbreaks of the power of evil, that man is still the child of God, and that the way is wide open for every man to come to his Father, and that the Christ who has redeemed us to the Father must ultimately claim the whole world for His own. That is the bravest thing a reasonable man can do, to thoroughly believe that and to take one’s whole life and consecrate it to that truth. A man may no doubt do it heedlessly and thoughtlessly, just as a man may walk up to a cannon’s mouth singing light songs, but when a man does it with patient, calm, earnest though tfulness, it is the bravest thing a man can do. To face a great idea and, owning its mastery, to put our hands into its hands, saying, “Lead where you will and I will go with you;” that is always a more courageous thing than it is to fight with giants or to bear pain.

I have pleaded with you this morning for the heroism of the missionary life. Not because of the pains it suffers but because of the essential character it bears it is heroic. Pain is the aureole but not the sainthood. So they have marched of old, the missionaries of all the ages of the religion of the Incarnation and the Cross, idealists, believers, magnanimous and brave, the heroes of our faith. They were all this because they were missionaries. They could not have been missionaries and not have been all this. You cannot picture mere machines or disbelievers or selfish men or cowards doing what they have done. They have lived in the midst of infinite thoughts and yet not grown vague. They have worked with the tools of human life, but not grown petty. In one word, they have been heroes because of their faith, because their souls supremely believed in and their lives were supremely given to Christ.

If, as I believe with all my heart, the world’s fullest faith in Christ is yet to come; if, as I think, we are just coming now to a simpler and deeper Christianity than the world has ever known, who shall not dare to hope that the missionary life, the heroism of Christianity, the heroism of the heroism of human life is not dead, but is just upon the point of opening its true glory and living with a power that it has never shown before?

Let us have some such faith to-day. It is a little heroic even to believe in foreign missions. If we may not be among the heroes, let us, like the church of old, hear the Holy Ghost and go with Paul and Barnabas down to their ship and lay our hands on them and send them away with all our sympathy and blessing. So, perhaps, we can catch something of their heroism. So, in our quiet and home-keeping Christian lives, the idea of Christianity may become more clear, Christ our Lord more dear, and we ourselves be made more faithful, more generous, and more brave.