New Opportunities and Preparations

Clear signs of a supernatural Providence are seen in the new opportunities of modern history. The hidden hand of God has manifestly touched the affairs of men in the unlocking and opening of long shut doors.

The poet Dryden crowned the year 1666 as ‘’Annus Mirabilis,” because made forever memorable by such events as the great fire in London, and the naval war with the Dutch and their allies. The Marquis of Worcester entitled the sixteenth century the “century of invention.” And a wonderful hundred years they were that saw the globe circumnavigated by the ships of Magellan, that covered the era of Charles the Fifth and Elizabeth, of Henry the Eighth, and Leo Tenth, of Luther and the Reformation, of the wars of France and the rise of the Dutch Republic, of the Diets of Worms and of Spires and of Augsburg, of the Council of Trent, and the final triumph of the Protestant cause, and the birth of religious liberty.

But, in every respect, even as the century of invention, the nineteenth century has far outshone the sixteenth; and as to the “annus mirabilis,” that one year, 1858, is probably the most wonderful year in the annals of history, for the rapidity with which on every side new doors opened for access commercially, politically and religiously, to the whole world. During that year, Japan, after two centuries of sealed ports, made treaty with Great Britain; China enlarged vastly the rights conceded sixteen years before; India became part of Britain’s world-wide empire, and zenanas were penetrated by Christian women; Italy laid the basis of her new era of freedom; Mexico threw open her doors to the Protestant missionary — all this and much more within a twelvemonth!

In that one ‘^ annus mirabilis,” two-thirds of the entire population of the globe were suddenly brought within the reach of the missionary who preaches a full gospel and carries an open Bible. It was that same year that the “week of prayer” began, upon recommendation of the missionaries in Lahore, and how quickly came the answer! From that year, missions entered upon an entirely new career. On the walls of history a divine Finger wrote, as in flaming capitals, certain words which should be the motto of all future enterprise for God:

“Behold I have set before thee an open door.”
“The fulness of time is now come.”
“The King’s business requireth haste.”
“The field is the world,”
“Occupy till I come.”

One must read the story of missions with veiled eyes who sees no miracles of providential preparation.

When the Tliaddcus in 1820, furled sail in the harbour of Oahu with that pioneer band of eighteen, who went to begin the long, and, as some thought, hopeless fight with a degraded and brutal paganism, what was their astonishment to find that, before they landed, not only had God opened to them a door of access, but He had moved a pagan priest and a pagan king to strike the first blow at Hawaiian idols! Obookiah, the native lad, who in his impatience to get ashore had gone off in a small boat, had brought back to them, while yet on board, the news: ‘’Oahu’s idols are no more!” And they could only make the vault of heaven ring with their praise: Sing, O heavens! for the Lord hath done it!

Was there no meaning in this opening history of the work of the American Board in those Pacific waters? Who was it that, before these missionaries had set foot on these islands, and not only without their agency but without their knowledge, had demolished the barriers of a thousand years and left before them a wide and effectual door? They came to Jericho, and before they had even marched around it, the walls are found fallen flat, and the stronghold awaiting easy occupation. When it is remembered that this mission was undertaken by that great missionary society as a sort of test-work, in which the will of God might be seen as to future and similar enterprises, the whole of this unparalleled beginning reminds us of Joshua’s interview with the Captain of the Lord’s host, who assured him in advance that He was there to lead them on to victory.

Japan, almost at the other limit of the half century thus begun, may be cited as an example of providential preparation. If ever a divine plan and purpose were to be seen, surely it is here. Was it an accident or mere incident that, after two centuries of exclusion and proscription, Christianity should find entrance to the Land of the Rising Sun, at the very time when a great social and political upheaval had unsettled the old foundations, and offered opportunity to establish a new order! In no previous time of Japanese history — certainly not since the year 1600 — had such an hour of crisis come. And hence the progress of this Island Empire toward national transformation and evangelization has been more rapid than anything known since the accession of Constantine.

The preparation which Robert W. McAll found in France for his simple evangelistic work, can be compared to nothing but a sudden subsidence of barriers, such as we sometimes see when some seismic convulsion sinks the land below sea level and lets the waters rush in upon the submerged territory.

When McAll went to the French capital in 1872, the war with Germany had left desolation behind it.

Anarchy and violence had brought a new experience of the revolution of eighty years before, with its cruelties, bloodshed, lawlessness and godlessness. Even atheistic France revolted from the terrors of a society without God. It was a period of transition. The land of La Fayette was breaking her long allegiance with Papal Rome; Gambetta had thundered out his anathema against ‘’ clericalism “as ‘’ the foe of France;” and the nation, weary of a religion which was a wedlock of formalism and superstition, and whose offspring was hollow ceremonial and utter recklessness, was drifting toward utter denial of God and of all godliness.

Just at this time McAll came to Paris and met that ‘’man of Macedonia” opposite the wine-shop in Belleville, who, in unmistakable words, said: ‘’Come over and help us!” That whole mission work is one of the miracles of modern Providence, raising up and thrusting into the field the right man, at the right hour, in the right place! The round peg dropped into the round hole, and the man and his work fitted each other perfectly. Just when it was needed and prepared for, France got, for the workingmen and the priest-ridden masses, a simple gospel, unencumbered with churchly methods, without priestly forms and without price.

Instances such as these are sufficient to convince even unbelievers that God’s Hand is in missionary history. And, even if any one of the many examples of such providential preparation were insufficient to sustain the argument for such divine Providence, their tmited testimony is overwhelming; they are like the threads which, separately unable to bear a heavy strain, may, when wound into one strand, defy any power to break them.