The New Lessons
We must not leave this department of our great theme without looking back and asking what new lessons God would have us learn. And, first of all, this history of modern missions has been writing in large letters the lesson of the power of pious parentage.
Rev. J. Murray Mitchell, LL.D., has told how he once ascended to a high summit in India in search of the source of the Godivari River: how at last a spot was reached where so few were the drops that trickled from the rocks that they could for some seconds be held in the hollow of his hand; and at that point one could in a few moments scoop out a new channel and turn the whole stream in a new direction. From such an insignificant rill sprang one of India’s noblest rivers. The little stream he saw, flowing down the slope and gradually broadening: then running eastward toward the Bay of Bengal, growing wider and deeper, gathering volume and momentum, until it became the secret of fertility to thousands of acres otherwise dry and desert.
That river is a parable of human life. “The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord, and he turneth it whithersoever He will.” He who learns the secret of the Lord, like Him, gets at the point in the stream, near the heart, where life’s issues begin to flow outward, and where character, conduct, history and destiny wait for a shaping hand. Thackeray reminds us how we sow a thought and reap an act; sow an act, and reap a habit; sow a habit, and reap a character; sow a character, and reap destiny. So then he who begins back where thought is forming, moulds the seed of that last, eternal harvest.
No lesson learned from these lives of the new apostles is more awfully solemn than this: They prove to us the power of spiritual ancestry — the faith which, first dwelling in a godly mother or grandmother, has given many a Timothy to the field of missions. The Samuels are to be accounted for by the Hannahs, and the pioneers of our Lord have been nurtured by some Zacharias and Elisabeth. There may be no inheritance of godliness, but there is certainly a heritage of grace; aptitudes are transmitted, if character is not. Let every father remember how from his loins may come a future Judson or Marsden, a Williams or Wilson, a Patteson or Hannington. Let every mother think how the child she bears and rears may be one of God’s destined kings or queens, and that it is her hand that helps to give shape to the plastic clay for one of God’s chosen vessels. We have only to remember Ziegenbalg and Zinzendorf, Schwartz and Livingstone, Paton and Mills, Gulick and Scudder, Judson and Jessup, Duff and Hudson Taylor, to learn how much hangs on the holiness and heroism of the parents, if the children are to become holy and heroic.
Another lesson taught is that of unrecognized greatness. The new apostles, like the old, have not ahvays been recognized, and have sometimes been rejected, by their own generation; and this lack of appreciation of God’s anointed men and women by their contemporaries is one of the significant lessons of the New Acts of the Apostles. Carey bore the sneers of unhallowed wit; Stoddard was charged with throwing away his fine culture amid Persian wilds, as Livingstone was, with wasting great powers amid African forests. Williams falling at Erromanga, Hannington shot on the borders of Uganda, Mackay dying yet in youth among the cruel savages of Mwanga’s realm, Riggs retiring into scholarly seclusion at the Golden Horn, and three peerless women following Judson to Burma — to many all this is sheer waste; but history reverses many of our verdiets, and the judgment-seat of Christ will reverse many more.
It was not in vain that Morrison wore the queue and burned the midnight lamp at Canton, that Wilder ‘’ buried himself” for thirty years in India, that Carey left Leicester for Serampore, that Hunt exiled himself at the Fiji group, that Patteson fell at Nackapu, that McAll spent his last twenty years in tireless labours amid the commune, in Paris.
Again, we are taught obedience to the will of God. The plan of God is the only ultimately successful scheme; and to find out that plan and fall into our place in it, is to come into our true orbit round the Sun of the universe — to enter into, to become part of, a system of harmony in which all things work together for good. There, all things are ours, even death as well as life, things present as well as things to come — for we are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. Life’s length is not measured by its years, but its yearnings, its prayers, its measure of unity with God and conformity to His purpose. All life is long if it reaches the goal God means for it.
The new apostles have been men and women who have sought to hear God’s voice and heed divine visions, and move along the lines laid down in the word of God — who have waited God’s time and wrought in God’s way. The founder of the China Inland Mission heard a voice plainly saying to him,” I am going to open central and inland China to the gospel, and will use you if you are ready to come into My plan;” and from that day he has known no will but that will. God cares not for the many, but He uses the few who are wholly His — who in that calling wherein they are found abide with God; whose eyes are unto His, glad to be guided by His eye, and needing not bit and bridle and rein and whip to compel them to obey His will, like the dumb horse or stubborn mule. He who is content to be drained of selfishness, to lose himself in God, as content to die as to live, if death means life to others; ready, like Ignatius, to be ground between teeth of lions to make bread for God’s people — he is the man upon whom the Spirit comes, and with whom, as was written of Gideon, He “clothes Himself,” as a warrior with his coat of armour.
Yes, the inner secret of service is the sharing of God’s Spirit, and so of His power. Herbert Spencer was right, for * ’ by no political alchemy can we get golden conduct out of leaden instincts.” Influence will not be grandly noble when character is basely ignoble, and all efforts to make up in culture for what the soul lacks in renewed nature, will be worse than waste. The builder should not construct ornament, but ornament construction; and he who wants beauty of character needs only to see that there is something solidly built and firmly based, on which to have beauty appear. Otherwise the best appearances are like frost-work on the window-pane that melts away before the sunbeam.
Again, what a lesson may be learned from the diversity of spJieres that have furnished God’s workmen. Coleridge at Christ’s hospital felt ambitious to be a shoemaker’s apprentice, because from this, more than any other handicraft, eminent men have gone forth to serve the world. Jesus Christ was a carpenter at Nazareth, and His life as a mechanic was a prophecy of the host of those who from the workshop of the common tradesman would go forth into fields of wide usefulness and heroic service. Any place may furnish training and any tool may become, like Moses’ rod, God’s means to work His signs. The heart needs only to be God’s — then ‘■’■ what is that in thine hand?” A shepherd’s crook, a carpenter’s hammer, a mason’s trowel, a shoemaker’s awl, or the needle of Dorcas, — these God can use as well as the tongue of the orator or the pen of the ready writer, to glorify Him.