Rapidity of Results

God shows His power both in the quality and quantity of His work; and perhaps no proofs of His energy are more convincing in the sphere of missions than those furnished in the astonishing rapidity with which results of great magnitude have been wrought.

This may be made to appear most clearly if we take a cursory glance over the entire century since Carey sailed for India, and, without tarrying at any point, sweep round the vast circle of the work accomplished, and get at least a comprehensive glimpse of the stupendous changes wrought within these hundred years.

Ninety-six years have swept by since mission history began in the South Seas. At least fourteen years of labour passed before there was the first convert in Tahiti. Then, and while the missionaries were absent from the island, Tuahine and another of the natives, who had been impressed with the truth while serving in a missionary’s family, were found praying to God for a new heart. Then Pomare II. gave up his idol-gods; and, before the missionaries had again set foot on Tahiti, a wonderful upheaval of society had begun. Since that day in 1811, the converts, living and dead, in Western Polynesia, have numbered over a million!

Let us now shorten the period of our survey to the eighty years since 18 13, when the American Baptist Missionary Union was formed. Then Judson and his wife were its only representatives and Burma its sole field. For ten years he wrought before he had been able to gather one little flock of eighteen converts into a church. Those ten years seemed comparatively fruitless. But when from across the sea the question was asked, “Judson, what are the prospects?” his faith, undiscouraged, saw only a future as bright as the promises of God! We now look back over this four-score years, and, not excluding the first decade of years of comparative famine, what a glorious harvest the Baptist Union has already reaped! Taking the whole eighty years into our reckoning, one new Baptist church has been organized on heathen soil for every three weeks of the entire time; one new convert has been baptized for every three hours, counting in day and night; and at least one in ten of such converts has become an active worker in the field, himself a seed of the kingdom!

Let us still narrow down the time to fifty years, and see what signs and wonders He has wTought who takes no note of man’s calendar of time.

In Turkey, more than twenty translations of the Word of God in the languages and dialects of living peoples have been supplied during the half century: an average of one new translation for every thirty months! By Dr. Cyrus H. Wheeler and his co-workers, the banks of the Euphrates have been dotted with self-sustaining churches; and a standard of giving, so exalted and apostolic, has been erected, that whereever ten disciples could be found, a church could be gathered which would support its own pastor. For each disciple gave a tenth of his income, and out of ten such tithes, a sum could be realized equal to the average income of the givers; and so the native pastor, willing to live on a level with his people, could have enough to keep him from want. Think of such model churches in territory newly occupied for Christ!

When, in 1878, the jubilee of the baptism of the first Karen convert was kept, the Kho-Thah-Byu Memorial Hall was joyfully dedicated, with its capacious audience-chamber and various accessories. But what a host of converts had those fifty years seen gathered to Christ! not less than sixty thousand, half of whom were living to take part in the celebration. Sir Charles Bernard reckons the present Christian community at 200,000, and it has five hundred self-sustaining churches.

In China, the era of missions properly began in 1842; fifty years later, there were fifty thousand converts, and the ratio of increase during the quarter century between 1863 and 1888 was eighteenfold!

The fifty years in the Fiji Islands from 1835 to 1885, saw changes so wonderful that they defy adequate description. When James Calvert went there his first duty was to gather up and bury the skulls, hands and feet, of eighty victims, sacrificed at a cannibal feast. He lived to see the very people who had taken part in that horrible meal seated about the Lord’s table to eat of the bread and drink of the cup that are the emblems of His Body and Blood. At the close of that fifty years thirteen hundred churches of Christ could be counted, some of them standing on the site of cannibal ovens, and out of a population of 110,000, 104,000 were habitual attendants at places of worship. And in no part of Scotland could there be found fewer homes where no family worship hallows household life.

Forty-three years were spent by Eliza Agnew at the girls’ seminary, in Oodooville, Ceylon. She was called the ‘’mother of a thousand daughters,” for she had taken part in the training of three successive generations of Ceylonese girls; teaching the daughters and even granddaughters of her original scholars. When she laid down her work, it was found that not a single girl who had gone through the full course under this saintly teacher had gone back unconverted to a heathen home; and upwards of six hundred whom she had taught were penetrating with the light of the gospel the darkness of Indian zenanas! It may be doubted whether a fuller cup of service has ever been offered to the Saviour of souls by any woman of the century.

Look at the contrasts of thirty years in Upper Burma, 1 860- 1 890. When Theebau was inaugurated as King of Upper Burma, at Mandalay, he was a monster of cruelty, and the event was celebrated by a massacre so horrible that several hundred of the nobility, and even members of the king’s own family, were among the victims. The sacrifice of human life was so common, that when the city of Mandalay was built, fifty-six young girls were slain, that the eight gates of the city might by their blood be secure from all invaders. To attempt missions in such a locality meant captivity, if not martyrdom, to whoever undertook the work.

Thirty years later, in that same city, the Baptist Missionary Conference was held, and during the conference the Judson Memorial Church was dedicated. Burmese Christians had given eight thousand rupees toward the cost; it was a native Karen choir that led the service of sacred song; and at the closing communion of the Lord’s Supper, Tamils and Telugus, Burmans and Karens, Shans and Tounghus, English and Eurasians, Americans and Chinamen, representatives of five hundred churches and 30,000 believers in Burma, sat down together to keep the sacred supper — bound in one bundle of life.

Let us still shorten the time to a quarter century. Johann Gerhard Oncken, born Varel, Oldenburg, about 1800, and in early life a domestic servant, in young manhood opened a book shop at Hamburg, joined the English Independents, and became agent of the Edinburgh Bible Society and Lower Saxony Tract Society. In April, 1834, about 34 years old, he asked Dr. Barnas Sears of Brown University, then in Hamburg, to baptize him and six others and form them into a Baptist Church, of which Oncken became pastor; and next year the American Baptists made him their missionary. Then began a career so remarkable that it can be scarcely believed. He visited all parts of Germany and Denmark, preaching, scattering Bibles and tracts and organizing churches. He faced persecution and was several times imprisoned; but, in 1842, during the great fire, he with his family and congregation so helped homeless sufferers, that the Senate publicly decreed to them the right of unhindered worship, and he gave himself anew to missionary work.

Twenty -five years passed, and sixty-five churches with seven hundred and fifty stations had been established, with nearly ten thousand members and one hundred and twenty ministers and Bible readers; Bibles and tracts had been scattered by the million pages, and fifty millions of people had heard the gospel. Give us two hundred and fifty churches like Oncken’s at Hamburg, and we can, in twenty-five years more, secure the preaching of the gospel to every human soul!

Dr. John Geddie was at Aneityum only tzventyfour years, from 1848 to 1872. On the tablet reared to his memory we read: ‘’When he landed in 1848, there were no Christians; when he left in 1872, there were no heathens.”

John Williams’s course reached over but twenty-two years, from 18 17 to 1839. Five years before he fell a martyr at Erromanga, the gospel had been carried over a circle of four thousand miles diameter, whose centre is Tahiti. There lies a vast Pacific archipelago, within whose circumference of twelve thousand miles are included the Raratongan, Friendly, Cook, Society, Navigators’, Marquesas, Union, Austral, Gambia, and Solomon groups of islands, and Low Archipelago, as well as many others. Yet, within seventeen years, not only had every group, but every considerable island in every group, been evangelized; the people had burned the maraes, and given up their abandoned idols as trophies to the missionaries. War spears had become pulpit rails for the gospel of peace, and the god of war himself had become a prop for the roofs of the homes where peace found dwelling-place!

Robert W. Mc All’s sixteen years in France, from 1872 to 1888, finds no parallel in any papal community. In 1872 he opened one little salle amid the lawless Communists of Belleville; sixteen years later, he had 112 salles; and in one year held 1 4, 000 religious meetings, whereby probably a million of hearers had been reached. And even the government held out to him every encouragement in his work, declaring that police force became unnecessary in proportion as McAll meetings prevailed. And all this amazing success was reached without any outward attraction of art. A free gospel for everybody, an open Bible, hearty singing, plain, simple talks, self-denying toil for souls — these were all the machinery.

It is but sixteen years since the great Pentecost in the Telugu country: and the progress of gospel triumph during those years can be compared only with the rapidity of the work in the South Seas. Souls were ingathered with such amazing speed and in such vast numbers, that it has been doubted whether even the first Pentecost in Jerusalem equalled it. The church at Ongole became the largest in the world, numbering with its branches over 30,000 members. And the peculiar feature of this history is that the blessing is perpetual. No one ingathering has perhaps ever been so astonishing from first to last. The revival has known no cessation since its beginning, and nearly ten thousand souls were added to the Church during the eighteen months last reported!

Harpoot — that leading station of the American Board in Eastern Turkey, the seat of the Euphrates College, and the centre of widespread evangelism among the Armenians — has been the scene of a quiet, but powerful work of God. One of its most venerated missionaries, Dr. H. N. Barnum, once gave an account of fourteen years of labour, in preaching, establishing stations, training a native ministry, and carrying on all the work of evangelization and education over a wide territory. The question was asked: ‘* At what cost was all this done?” And the answer was — for a sum less than the cost of the church building in which he was then speaking — an edifice worth probably 150,000 dollars! Fourteen years of such wide-reaching work at an average cost per year of somewhat over 10,000 dollars!

When Mackay, at Formosa, kept his twelfth anniversary, he sought to gather all his living converts at the Lord’s table — and twelve hundred kept the solemn feast. Many had died during those twelve years, and much time had been spent at the outset in acquiring a strange tongue; yet, notwithstanding all this, there was this rich living harvest of twelve years’ sowing.

Seven years were allotted to Johnson in Sierra Leone — among the chaotic mass of human beings, the refuse from the holds of slave ships, who could hold no converse with one another except through a bastard English dialect; who lived a life of unbridled lust, habitual lying, thieving and quarrelling; who had no honest trades to occupy their time or earn their living, but were fed like paupers and criminals on government rations. Yet, out of such worthless material, by God’s help, he organized a Christian community, as out of the filth of earth the divine forces of nature crystallize gems, turning the miry clay into sapphires, the sand into opals, and even the soot into diamonds.

A like period of seven years sufficed to establish among the wild men of North America William Duncan’s model State, or Metlakahtla, a community whose industry, intelligence, virtue and piety were incredible to all who were not eye-witnesses of the marvels of God’s grace.

Six years on the Hawaiian Islands saw almost a complete revolution. Seventeen missionaries had landed March 31, 1820, among a people where infant-murder, even by the hands of mothers, was common; where modesty was unknown and traffic in female virtue became a trade, and every foreign vessel a floating Sodom; where no marriage law was known, and the nation was rapidly coming to extinction by its own vices. Yet, even here, in 1826, 10,000 natives met at Kawaihae to hear the gospel; at Hilo and Kailua places of worship were built holding 5,000; and at the dedication of the church at the latter place, the rulers of the nation pledged it to the Christians’ God. In every district of the islands, Christian schools were found, with a total of 400 teachers and 25,000 pupils.

Four years, as we have seen already, sufficed at Hilo and Puna to work a transformation that finds no adequate symbol but the volcanic upheavals with which the Kanakas are familiar. The eleven thousand converts, gathered from 1835 to 1839, represent only one evidence of God’s miraculous work. The whole reconstruction of the community, from its very base, was a grander result and a clearer proof of a supernatural power. Transient movements of sympathy and sensibility may account for revivals that sweep like sudden tidal waves over a wide territory; but the permanent creation of an orderly, decorous, peaceful Christian State must be traced back to Him who alone can mould lasting spiritual results.

Three and a half years of John G. Paton on Aniwa saw a gigantic upheaval of the whole conditions of society. That story is as thrilling as any written in the new chapters of the Acts, and no narrative of missionary toils and triumphs is either more readable or more romantic, more graphic or pathetic, or more abundant in proofs of supernatural power. A religion that in so short a time can transform a cannibal island into a civilized community, with Christian home life, Sabbath sanctities and unselfish ministries; that can develop ignorant, heartless, brutal savages into intelligent, affectionate, devoted Christians, must be more than human. One of the first missionaries to this island, twenty-six years before, had been killed. In 1866 Dr. Paton went there to reside, and there are now 1,300 professed disciples on the islands of the New Hebrides group.

Two years on Nanumaga wrought results not less marvellous. When Thomas Powell left a native evangelist on the island, the natives kept him waiting for hours on the beach while they sought to avert the wrath of the gods, for permitting him to land. He found literally an idol-god in every house, and began to labour, with no apparent hope of success or hold upon the people. Yet, in two years not an idol could be found; the whole population gathered in a place of worship built for Jehovah, and He was inhabiting the praises of those who had just before been abject slaves of the lowest idolatry. All the native children old enough to be taught were in attendance on school, and it is no exaggeration to say that the entire complexion, and even constitution, of Nanumagan society was changed.

We may shorten the period of survey to a single year and we yet find signs and wonders. Not only does Ongole furnish us an example of 10,000 converts baptized in the one year, 1878, but during that same year, in Tinnevelly and various other places in Southern India, so great was the harvest gathered, that it has been computed that 50,000 turned from idols in that single twelvemonth.

And what shall we say when one day proves with God as a thousand years? When Titus Coan, on one Sabbath in July, 1838, baptized over 1,700, it was thought scarcely credible that such oversight and scrutiny could have been exercised as to keep out unworthy candidates. But, forty years later, Jewett and Clough baptized in one day over Jive hundred more than Coan had; and that only after the most rigid examination, lest unworthy persons should find their way into the waters of baptism.

Surely the triumphs of grace already recorded in these pages belong to signs and wonders inexplicable by human power. Idolatry, the most degraded in type and the most prolific in fruit, confronted, conquered, uprooted, destroyed! Jeremiah reproached Judah with having gods as many as cities;* but in Nanumaga every hovel had an idol, and in India more deities are worshipped than the worshippers themselves number. Obstacles have been confronted which towered high as mountains and defied either removing or surmounting. Yet see a feeble few seize the very centres and hold the very fortresses of the devil! as earlier disciples dared to go to Ephesus, centre of Diana worship — to Paphos, where Venus kept her shameless feasts — to Babylon and Rome, where vast pagan empires held their capital and carnival! Follow unarmed men and sensitive women as they tread over paths lined with human bones, and walk through valleys of death, to assault the image of a modern Moloch and overturn the shrine of Juggerriath! Whether it be to face the despotic Sultan and the ruthless Turk at the Golden Horn, or the cruel ruler of Uganda, or the savage cannibals of the Pacific, or the half idiotic Patagonians, — the same invincible faith and holy heroism!

The horrors of heathenism defy any description. Language is not black enough — hell itself is not equal to the needs of such a portraiture. Take infanticide as an example. Mrs. Williams had, at Raiatea, a female servant who, after conversion, gave her an awful glimpse of the customs that swayed all Polynesia. A mother would suffocate a new-born babe with a wet cloth, or with her own hands strangle it, or

* Jeremiah xl. 12.

bury it alive — and feel no pang of compunction; or, yet more like a demon than a brute, break joint after joint of the fingers and toes and then of the arms and legs, and if such torture did not kill, finish the deed by choking it to death. One woman confessed to thus having killed five, another seven, another nine, and yet another, her whole family of seventeen! At a school anniversary an aged chief, before whom six hundred children passed in review, arose under the force of deep feeling, and said: ‘’I must speak! O that I had known that such good was in store for us! my own children might have been among this happy group! But I have destroyed them all — nineteen — and have not one left! “Then turning to the king, his relative, he said, with streaming eyes: ‘’You, my brother, saw me kill them one after another! Why did you not stay this murderous hand 1 and say, God is about to bless us! Salvation is coming to these shores!”

The island of Raiatea, the centre for Williams’s tours, was the seat of both the political power and idolatry of the group; there was the Temple of the Mars, and the Moloch of the vSouth Seas. Idleness and iniquity, cruelty and crime, held high carnival. The mind was blunted by ignorance, and the conscience seared into insensibility. ‘And yet even among such a people he was not ashamed to preach the gospel, and believed it would prove the power of God. It seemed as though association with such brutes would drag him down, but he brought them up to his level, instead of sinking to theirs. He taught them religion, and religion brought civilization, until every house seemed a house of prayer, and naked savages clothed and in their right minds sat down at Jesus’ feet. No more a wilderness of wretched hovels, but three miles of comely cottages; useful trades and mechanic arts, and a thrifty commerce. Within a year seven thousand idolaters have flung their gods to the fires and built a great house

for God. And so in Samoa five-sixths of the whole population of sixty thousand are shortly flocking to him to be taught. And all this with no aid from the civil power!

And still God’s signs and wonders convince not the unbelieving, for some would not be persuaded though one rose from the dead. ‘’ Critics of missions” still survive who can look at God’s great work, and yet call missions either an *’ organized hypocrisy, or a disastrous failure! “Such a judgment recalls Dr. Johnson’s verdict upon Milton’s ‘’Lycidas,” that it is ‘no poem at all;” with Matthew Arnold’s quiet rejoinder that “such a sentence is terrible — for the critic/” Some guns kick so badly that, as Dr. Beecher used to say, ‘^ it were better to be before than behind them.”

We have not written to convince sceptics or silence critics, but to encourage believing and praying saints who find new food for faith and prayer in every new fact that proves a present and a living God. To such, God’s signs and wonders are a daily inspiration; and all missionary history becomes one continuous miracle. These signs have not been wrought ‘’ in a corner;” they are found everywhere, and attested by witnesses who are beyond impeachment, whether for competency or integrity, and who are too many in number for honest doubt to remain.

A brilliant but erratic American once replied to an opponent in debate, — who sought to discredit his statements of fact, by saying that ‘^ of such facts he himself had no knowledge” — ‘’My knowledge, however limited, cannot be set aside on account of another’s ignorance, however extensive!” The masterly retort is but too applicable to some who with a superficial denial would sweep away the testimony of that noble band of witnesses who, from Carey to Mackay, and over a field that reaches from Japan to Liberia, and from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, attest gospel conquests.