New Judgments of God
We recognize wonders of Providential interposition in the defence of His servants and the defeat and destruction of their foes.
From the times that the stars in heaven fought against Sisera, God has not ceased to do battle for His own elect. And in not a few instances His *’ little flock, “few and feeble amid their foes, like lambs among wolves, have had only to stand still and see His salvation. Sometimes the Angel of Death has gone forth at His bidding and smitten the enemies of His people with a destruction as sudden as that which smote Herod in the midst of his fawning courtiers. Kings have conspired to cast away His cords from them, and rulers have counselled together to break asunder His bands; but His sceptre has dashed them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.
In Siam, in 185 1, and in Turkey twelve years before, at the very crisis of missions, when absolute expulsion of all Christ’s witnesses was impending and final disaster threatened their work, sudden death came to the hostile monarchs who had flung themselves upon the bosses of Jehovah’s buckler. These two cases may stand as sufficient to represent the class of interpositions we refer to now. In both cases the respective rulers were at the time proposing and preparing to drive out all Christian missionaries and bring their work to wreck and ruin. In both cases, all resistance was so hopeless that prayer to God was the one and only resort. And, in both cases, the death of the stubborn and malignant monarch, at the exact time when the plan was ripe for accomplishment, and the crisis of missions had fully come, was felt even by the foes of God themselves to be an interposition of God, and turned the scale.
When Sultan Mahmiid thus suddenly died in Turkey, the edict of expulsion found no executive to carry it into operation. On the other hand, Abdul Medjid who succeeded him, on the 3d of November following, in presence of an august assemblage of the nobles of the empire, not only the Mussulmans, but the deputies of the Greeks, Armenians and Jews, together with foreign am.bassadors, ordered his Grand Vizier to read the Haiti Shcrif of Gtd Hane, or first formal Bill of Rights, the Magna Charta of Turkey, and himself led the way in taking the oath of fidelity to this new Charter of Liberty, which prepared the way for the famous Haiti Huinayoun in 1856! Thus, for more than fifty years missions have been acquiring more and more influence within the dominions of the Sultan of Turkey.
As to that other Land of the White Elephant, the turn of tide is one of the most striking in all history. Maha-Mong-Kut, who then came to the throne, was the one man in the empire who had been prepared by God to be the friend and patron of Christian missions. He had been taught in science and language by a missionary, and in this frequent and familiar contact had become his friend and the friend of his fellow missionaries. He had imbibed from such intercourse a liberality of mind, a catholicity of sentiment, which both fitted and disposed him to favour and further the work of the missionary. He was not, however, a Christian disciple, and had retired to the cell of the Buddhist monastery. But, on the sudden demise of the reigning and reckless sovereign, Maha-Mong-Kut was called from his seclusion to mount the throne of the “Sacred Prabahts,” and, for seventeen years, wielded a sceptre so benignant that he has been known as the most enlightened and catholic ruler of all Asia. Before he died he had decreed liberty of conscience throughout all the land, and his son and successor, Chulalangkorn, has followed in his steps. More than forty years not only of toleration, but of co-operation toward missions, have been the fruit of one unmistakable act of divine interposition in 185 1. Could unwritten history find a record, there are many such interpositions both in behalf of individuals, and of the work of missions as such, which equally reveal the presence and power of Him whose last promise was, “Lo, I am with you alway.”
There is something awful in the majesty of divine judgments. God’s “great army” has not been disbanded, though the prophet’s pen no longer outlines their march and describes their regiments. Caterpillar and cankerworm, locust and palmerworm still obey His behests.
What a desert of devastation, for instance, the locust leaves in his track! Think of an army of these invaders, reaching fifty miles in every direction, and half a mile thick, with one hundred and fifty locusts to the cubic foot, and moving from twelve to twenty miles an hour! It would require seven million vessels, each of six thousand tons burden, to transport such a host; and yet this is but one small detachment of God’s ‘* great army!”
God calls for the famine and it does His bidding, and often strangely prepares His way. In India it introduced, in 1877, the greatest ingathering of converts ever known. In China, in the days of Morrison, eight times it did the work of an evangelist and made full proof of its ministry by giving God’s servants the opportunity to show the unselfishness of the Christian spirit. A heathen people, dying of drought or flood, pestilence or starvation, see their fellows of the same nation and religion, stand aloof in utter indifference, while ‘’foreign devils,” inspired by a hated faith, labour night and day, daring all privations and exposures to feed the starving, heal the sick, and comfort the dying; and this goes further to correct false prejudices and win men to Christ than any argument or word of witness. Famine has been so often the precursor of ‘’revivals” that missionaries have learned to think of it as an angel in dark disguise.
In connection with that Pentecost at Hilo and Puna, there was a miracle of judgment that will never be forgotten. In a secluded valley of Puna was one small village which was a moral cesspool. Awful as was the heathenism about it, here it was worse, and the labours of Mr. Coan, so rapidly fruitful elsewhere, here, for years were vain and even worse than vain, for the people hardened themselves against God, and even sought to starve out his messengers. At one time Mr. Coan, with a little band of native Kanakas, went there to hold a meeting, and were refused even a half-potato; and at night lay down unable to sleep for hunger. While the villagers thought them asleep, they were seen eating the food which they had denied that they were able to supply for the Lord’s servants. In the morning, the missionary left them, literally shaking off the dust of his feet for a testimony against them, saying, “Never again will I come to you until you call for me.” Not long after, this village, though forty miles from port where the infection was usually caught, was so visited by a scourge of small-pox, that, save three or four survivors, every inhabitant died; and in 1840, a lava flood swept over the site of the previous visitation of God, and left only a black field of death and desolation behind it. It is to this day a reminder of the destruction that overtook Sodom! The people saw in it God’s strange work of judgment and retribution.