Miracles of Grace
The remark of Prof. Theodore Christlieb is often repeated, that ‘Mn the history of modern missions we find many wonderful occurrences which unmistakably remind us of the Apostolic age.” And in view of the fact that, now as then, such hindrances to the gospel exist in the heathen world that the sense of divine things is dulled and blunted, he thought that supernatural exhibitions of power are needed to confirm the message and compel attention. With such a basis of conviction that God’s intervention is to be expected, the wonders recorded in the experience of Hans Egede, Spangenberg and Zeisberger, Kleinschmidt, and the little flock in the Vaudois valleys, will not appear incredible. And, inasmuch as there is no hint in the New Testament that the signs promised as proofs of Christ’s presence and confirmations of faith were ever to cease, why are we incredulous as to the reality of the wonders recorded?
The New Acts of the Apostles have recorded similar triumphs of grace. In countless cases the moral miracle wrought at Ephesus has been repeated. Leaders of the people, who have made merchandise of superstition and imposture, have sacrificed both their profits and their prominence, their means of livelihood and sometimes life itself, rather than longer sin against God, or betray even by silence their former victims of ignorance and delusion. Who can count the cost to a Brahman like Sheshadri in India, or a Maronite priest like Asaad Shidiak in Syria, of renouncing a false faith and a lying life, henceforth to teach the hated gospel and bear the shameful cross! Hudson Taylor tells of one such conversion in inland China, where a former leader in atrocious crimes turned the haunts of unbridled lust into the place of prayer, and himself became the witness to those whom he had led astray.
In the Acts of the Apostles, they are the wonders of grace that overawe us, and not those of simple power. When the magians, already referred to, that clustered about Diana’s great temple, were so wrought upon by the Spirit of God that their pride and greed, their lust of power and their lust of gain, were at once renounced, and the flames devoured the costly text-books of their occult arts, there is something in such sacrifices that is sublimer than any mere display of force, though it were sufficient to shake the earth itself. We all know that selfish greed and social rank grapple men as with hooks of steel; and we stand in awe of such proofs of divine working as were seen when all sources of pecuniary gain and superstitious prestige were thus voluntarily abandoned.
Is it no sign of God’s power when moral and social changes which the wisest men reckon among impossibilities are not only actually wrought but with a rapidity that seems fabulous?
For example, when Dr. Duff began work in Calcutta, he found that a cow had more rights and higher rank than a woman, and he said that to try to educate women in India was as vain as to attempt to “scale a wall five hundred yards high.” To-day in the province of Bengal alone a hundred thousand women and girls are under instruction, and India’s most gifted daughters are laying hold of the treasures of the higher education. Zenana doors have been unlocked by the gentle hand of Christian womanhood, and a transformation is already accomplished which centuries of merely human wisdom and power could not even have begun.
Those sagacious men who are God’s seers look on this great change as the hope of this Oriental Empire. Woman was taken out of man, yet even in India as in Eden, woman leads man, and through her heart lies the road to his head. Whatever system of truth or faith captivates woman, in the end captures man. Even those who see, can scarce believe what they see — a moral movement to-day in progress, by which the conditions of a half century ago are being reversed. What then was a wall of hopeless exclusion, the despair of the missionary, is now become a highway of access and the hope of final conquest, as before the victorious Macedonian the walls of Tyre were turned into the mole that joined the island to the mainland.
Henry Martyn calmly said that the conversion of Krishna Chundra Pal, India’s first Protestant convert, was as stupendous a miracle as raising the dead. What would he say if he saw the native Christians in that empire of Brahma, increasing eighty per cent, in one decade of years?
When that first convert was baptized, in 1800, the islands of the South Seas thronged with hordes of heartlessly cruel savages. Cannibalism, their shame, was yet their glory; human skins furnished them with water-bags and human skulls with drinking-cups; men’s bones were their ornaments, and men’s blood moistened their war-paint. How has it come to pass that to-day scarce a trace of these brutal barbarities exists through the vast Pacific Archipelago?
From the commencement of the BecJiuaiia mission by Hamilton Read, in 18 16, for over ten years no ray of light shot athwart the gloom. The Batlaping had open ears only to what promised temporal gains, and were deaf to all spiritual invitation or warning. When the sorely-tried faith of the missionaries almost gave way, there was a holy woman in the mission who never faltered in her faith. She believed in the promise of an unchanging God, and she said: * ‘We may not live to see it, but, as surely as to-morrow’s sun will rise, the awakening will come.” When her friends at home would have counselled her to give up her forlorn hope and go to a promising field, and when Mrs. Greaves, of Sheffield, wrote, asking what could be sent her that would be of use — the sublime answer of Mary Moffat was: ‘’Send us a communion service; it will be wanted.”
At that time there was not the first glimmer of day — it was the forecast of faith; and it took many months for the letter to find its way to England and for the request to find fulfilment. And, meanwhile, the darkness seemed to deepen, and doubts grew graver as to the expediency of carrying on the Bechuana mission; but her faith knew no change: it had its grip on the promises. In 1827, the gray light of dawn faintly appeared, and by 1829, a marvellous quickening began even among these stolidly indifferent natives, and without any human or visible cause. There was “a wave of tumultuous and simultaneous enthusiasm,” which could not be due to the “sober-minded and hard-headed Scotchmen,” who have a wholesome dread of sensationalism and emotionalism. But in a few months the whole aspect of matters was changed. The meeting-house thronged in advance of the hour of service — songs and prayers instead of pagan chants and dances — all at once eternal realities had come to the front and compelled attention. The dirt and filth and nudity of the natives were exchanged for cleanly habits and decent attire, and such a spirit of inquiry was aroused that the little Kuruman meeting-house resounded with sobs and cries that made it hard to go on with the usual forms of worship. And the first time the table of the Lord was spread in the Bechuana mission, the same number sat down as at the original celebration in Jerusalem! and the very day previous to that appointed for this ordinance, there arrived a box, long on the way, which being opened was found to hold the communion vessels Mary Moffat had asked for nearly three years before — prophesying” we shall want them — send them
William Duncan took seven years — 1856-1863 — to establish his model state among the wild Red men of North America. When he first went among them he found nine hostile tribes gathered together, and when after six months he undertook to preach his first sermon, he dared not bring them into one assembly, but delivered it nine times the same day to as many different groups; and when Lord Dufferin, Governor-General of Canada, went to see Duncan’s Metlakahtla, he could find no terms in the various languages of which he was master, fitty to describe what he saw, but could only exclaim, ‘’What wonders hath God wrought!”
William Duncan went to Fort Simpson in 1856, where he found some twenty houses of fur-traders, and nearly three hundred in a long straight line on the Pacific coast, where wild Indians lived.
Not long after his arrival he found a crowd of these savages on the beach actually tearing in pieces, and then eating, a human body. With the aid of an Indian, named Clah, who could speak English, he undertook to learn the languages of these wild men, and get acquainted with their habits. He found two distinct parties — “man-eaters,” and ‘’ dog-eaters” — but more numerous tribal divisions. He began to visit them at their houses, and after working over eight months, wrote out that first plain sermon which nine times he read to audiences that numbered from fifty to two hundred. He opened his first school in the house of a chief, Legiac. At first he had such conflicts with their unholy rites and pagan superstitions, that even his life was in danger; but he persevered, teaching and preaching and visiting the sick, and the influence of the gospel became apparent. Feathers and paint gave place to decent attire. Even the chiefs were found at school; church-goers were numbered by hundreds. And in
1863, he withdrew with fifty Indians to a retired bay twenty miles off, that he might build there a model state, free from the drunkenness and other vices that were constantly undoing his work at Fort Simpson. Six weeks later, he was joined by three hundred more who entered into the covenant to abandon pagan practices and vicious habits. And so the foundations of MctlakaJitla were laid. A Christian village grew with surprising rapidity. It was laid out with regularity, but its outward order was but a faint reflection of its moral order.
Chief Legiac was transformed from a fierce and revengeful savage to a quiet carpenter, and became Mr. Duncan’s chief helper. The Tsimean Indians developed not only into industrious tradesmen, but into artistic carvers in wood, stone and ivory, and jewellers. The natives bought their own vessel and set on foot their own commerce. Whiskey and immorality were excluded, and Metlakahtla became a proverb for all the most beneficent fruits of Christianity, and put to vShame the oldest and best governed communities of Christian lands, by its beautful example of the Power of the Gospel.
Individual conversions weigh heavily in the scale when we are seeking proofs that God is supernaturally working; but when to these is added the weight of testimony found in these changes that affect the whole domestic and social life, what doubt remains? We must take the whole range of human experience, of the sins and sorrows, curses and crimes of society, when we estimate either human degradation or elevation. Gesta Diaboli must be known if Gesta Christi are understood.
What lever is that which after thousands of years of worse than slavery is now lifting womanhood to a lofty level? In Asia woman has long found no welcome at birth, no instruction in girlhood, no love in wifehood, no care in motherhood, no protection in old age, no regret in death. In Africa, sold for so many head of cattle, she has often been more brutally treated; and in Persia, loaded like a donkey, she could not easily be distinguished from a beast of burden. Tabooed by caste, denied either freedom or society, counted as soulless, and both incapable of culture and unworthy of respect, she has been shut up in a domestic prison, and treated as a slave for service and a victim for vice.
Where woman is thus dishonoured, we shall not be surprised to find the whole basis of society rotten, and can believe that the road leading to Juggernath’s shrine is for fifty miles paved with men’s bones, and that the altars of that monster are stained with blood and smeared with obscenity. We shall not find it hard to credit the awful sacrifices which slavery has offered on the altar of human cruelty, though it has bound and slain such a host of victims that their bodies, laid side by side, would thrice girdle the globe at the equator!
Sin has made the earth the habitation of cruelty. When the old king of Eboe died, by tlieJ2i-J2i rites forty victims were sacrificed. Nine of his youngest wives, their ankles and wrists broken, and in excruciating pain, were put at the bottom of the open grave pit, with the dead body, to await death by slow starvation, guards being stationed about the grave with clubs to beat back any of them if they moved from their place. Other human beings were bored through the feet and hung from high trees heads downward to die in digony. And these are but specimen-pages from that bloody book of human history which records deeds of which it is a shame even to speak.
The missionary who has witnessed the power of God unto salvation is not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. He sees it lifting the individual to his true level and putting him in his normal place. Nakedness is decently clad; the hut or hovel, where beasts made their stalls side by side with human beings, gives place to neat and comely houses, where modesty is no longer put to shame, and order reigns. Children are nourished and cherished with loving tenderness, and breathe the atmosphere of a pious, prayerful home. Woman is dignified and honoured, wedlock sanctified, and family life glorified. Honest toil is respected and rewarded; the serf and the slave are made free and independent; ignorance and idleness, the handmaids of vice, are exchanged for virtue’s habitual attendants — industry and intelligence.
Isaac Taylor once attempted a catalogue of the great social evils: polygamy, legalized prostitution and capricious divorce, bloody and brutal games, rapacious and offensive wars, death and punishment by torture, infanticide, caste and slavery. From all lands where the cross has been set up and the gospel faithfully preached, these nine gigantic forms of wrong are either retreating or are no more found. A new standard of manhood is also erected, and new lessons in living, taught. So surely as Christ becomes Master, so surely do these owls of the midnight flee before the new dawn.
Instead of polygamy, once more, as at the beginning, one man and one woman become “one flesh.” The law, instead of shielding vice by legalizing it, becomes the avenging sword to punish unbridled lust; and easy divorce is condemned as the apology and refuge of ‘’free love.” Infanticide is branded as both cruelty and crime, fatal both to natural affection and a good conscience. Aggressive warfare becomes highway robbery and organized slaughter. Bloody and brutal games are considered as lowering man to the level of the brute, if not the demon; and needless torture even of the worst criminal, inflicts a pang upon the community scarcely less keen than the anguish of the victim. Caste is seen to be an insult to God, because a dishonour to His image in man; and slavery becomes, to an enlightened Christian society, the breach of all duty and love both to God and our neighbour — the violation of the whole decalogue at once — a conspiracy of man to rob and ruin, debauch and defraud, degrade and dishonour his fellow-man — to make impossible a true life for the individual, the family, or the state; to set a premium on lies and lusts, covetousness and cruelty; to cage God’s nightingale — the human soul — and put out its eyes, that it may become content behind bars and sing when it can no longer soar!
There are those who dispute the unique claims of the Son of God, and talk of Christianity as one of the great religions, all of which have their right to a seat in the world’s parliament. But the difference between the gospel of Christ and any other religion is one not of degree only, but of kind. Let these claimants to the honour of equal rank bring forth their witnesses. Greece boasted her religion of beauty and art, wisdom and knovdedge; Rome, her manly virtue and martial valour, model laws and ideal state. Did the refinement and culture of Athens, even in the age of Pericles, or the noble statesmanship and heroic courage of Rome in the days of Augustus, actually uplift society from moral degradation and depravity? Did these “religions” banish gladiatorial games and the cruelties of the arena, and aggressive wars of conquest? Did they prevent worn-out slaves and even aged parents from being turned out to die; or, the modesty of maidens from being sacrificed at temple altars in the name of religion? Did Athens or Rome build hospitals or asylums for the deaf and dumb and blind and crippled and incurably diseased? Let Buddha, “Light of Asia,” and Brahma, India’s saviour, tell us whether they made impossible the murder of the innocents, the funeral pyre and the torture fire, the car of Juggernath, the hook-swing, the bed of spikes, the caste walls, the child marriage, the worship of the cow and the trampling of woman?
Now let the Christian missionary testify! Whereever Christ has found a throne, the arena is in ruins. Warfare yields to peaceful arbitration, when it is not needful as a check upon despots or lawless rioters and anarchists. The mercenary spirit gives place to the merciful, and poverty finds pity, and suffering- is soothed by compassion. Christian lands build not only schools and colleges, but great homes where sickness and misfortune find refuge and loving ministries. Man’s inalienable rights find their Magna Charta, and even the animal creation profits by the compassion which Christ teaches. Christianity is the only faith that has ever been able to turn the world upside down, and restore the true and original order, so that where man had become the worshipper of beasts and the slave of his own lusts, he has once more asserted the supremacy of conscience and regained dominion.
The zvJiole Jiistory of modern missions abounds in the sublime. It is a panorama of wonders. Take one more example out of hundreds that might be cited. In Japan, without any injustice to the others who compose that noble band who have sought the true illumination of the Sunrise Kingdom, we may mention the name of John C. Hepburn, M.D., LL.D., SiS, facile priiiceps. He arrived at Kanagawa October 18, 1859; and, although not the first to enter those ports after the Townsend-H arris treaty of 1858, he has perhaps rendered to the Island Empire the most distinguished service yet permitted to any one man. In December, 1862, he located at Yokohama, doing daily dispensary and lexicographic work, and teaching on Sundays. For over thirty-three years he has been almost continuously a resident of the Island Empire, even his temporary absences being in the interests of Japanese civilization. During two winters he was in Shanghai printing his dictionary, and has more than once visited America. But over the entire empire for the period of a generation this man has been known as a medical missionary, an educator of the very first rank, whose services were sought in vain at high prices by the Japanese Government; as a Christian statesman and philanthropist tmtiring in his devotion to the well-being of the nation; but principally as the chief translator of the Holy Scriptures. And no more sublime hour has been reached in the history of this awakening people, than when, after nearly thirty years of patient toil, holding in his hands the two volumes of the completed Word of God, he formally presented the Japanese Bible to the nation.
When Rev. Dr. Inglis, of Aneityum, was asked to make a speech before the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, and was cautioned to be brief, he said:
Fathers and brethren, we are told that missionaries should content themselves with stating facts, and leave the Church to draw the inference. I wish to bring three facts to your notice.
“First I place on your table,” suiting the action to the word,” the Shorter Catechism translated into the language of Aneityum.
‘“‘’Second I place on your table also ‘Pilgrim’s Progress ’ translated into the language of Aneityum.”
Then, taking into his hands a large volume, while he looked longingly on the pages that had cost him years of toil, he laid it on the table, and said:
“Thirds I place on your table the Holy Scriptures, Old and New Testament, translated into the language of Aneityum, and now leave the Church to draw the inference,” and sat down amid a storm of applause.