New Lessons from Experience
The modern age of missions furnishes new incentives in the exhibition of the relations of Christian missions to Christian life, which could be understood only when experience had both proved and illustrated those relations.
Long since, Solomon wrote: “There is that scat-, tereth and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet but it tendeth to poverty.” That is one of the great truths of the wisdom from above, but to the worldly man it is folly. No paradox Christ uttered is more inexplicable to the natural and carnal heart than this: “He that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for My sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.” To increase by scattering, and grow poor by withholding; to save by losing and lose by saving — is the climax of absurdity, yet it is the first principle of divine philosophy. Selfishness withholds and gets poorer by the attempt to grow richer. Benevolence scatters, and in imparting increases — in giving, gets.
Missions sustain Christian life — a relation both of sustenance and satisfaction — they supply the one most complete avenue for service and for satisfying joy. There are returns, though they are not carnal nor material — the channel which conveys our gifts outward, conveys joy inward — like the mutual action of arteries and veins. Worldly pleasures are sweet for a season, but they lose relish and give place to bitter dregs at the bottom of the chalice. The worldly mind is a mirror turned downward, reflecting only what is earthly, sensual and sensuous, material and temporal. The spiritual mind is the mirror turned upward, reflecting heaven with its stars. Worldly pleasures lose charm; so shallow that you can look through them and see the mire at the bottom of the stream from which you drink; so hollow that, as you grasp them, you have a sense of their unsubstantial, unsatisfying character. Adolph Monod, dying at fifty-four years of age, in 1891, left in a brief, dying sentence, the sum of his legacy to his survivors: ‘’All in Christ, by the Holy Spirit, for the glory of God! All else is nothing.”
The Church has found missions needful for its own full arousing to activity, for such work is the preservative of life. Nearly one-third of our existence is passed in that sleep which for all active purposes of life is a blank, but which helps to replenish waste and supply energy to exhausted brain and brawn. But while in the physical sphere there is no antagonism between sleep and life, in spiritual things sleep is death. All activities of the vital spirit cannot cease without cessation of life itself, for motionless members become atrophized; as Dr. Solander said of travellers amid the snows of a Norwegian winter: ‘’Whoever sits down there will sleep, and whoever sleeps will wake no more.” The sleep of the soul arrests spiritual circulation and respiration. Piety cannot survive absolute inaction.
When missionary activities cease, ritualism and formalism intone their monotonous chant, and by their mechanical uniformity induce hopeless sluggishness and spiritual death. There is but one source of safety, even to disciples. Apathy brings apostasy, lethargy palsies and kills. To have a healthy, alive Church, all must be at work for souls; each, like Arnold of Rugby, studious to learn the evils and needs of his own generation and serve the whole race.
Missions are thus inseparable from the salvation of the Church. The Hawaiian Islands undertook the mission to Micronesia to arrest decline and decay among native converts. The sagacious pioneers in Tahiti and the Fiji group encouraged the newlyorganized churches to send labourers at once to other clusters about them as a means of their own development. And it has always been so. Not one of the ancient Churches survives in purity that was not a missionary Church; all the rest are to-day dead. And if, at this time, the forty millions of Protestants should give up all missions and concentrate all effort on denominational extension and self-preservation, it would be the surest, quickest way to promote decay. Ruin would result, perhaps so rapid, that in a century we should have relapsed again into the Dark Ages.
Daniel Webster, some years before his death, made an extensive tour to the extreme west of the United States, and on his return, expressed in four words his impression of the country’s peril: “Abundance, Luxury, Decline, Desolation.” A sagacious seer and prophet was this, our American Burke. He saw that this boasted abundance and luxury were the summit of a hill beyond which the descent was awfully rapid and dangerous. Numerical strength may be weakness, and wealth, impoverishment. What saved the Church of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century from the apostasy that threatened, was the birth-Jioiir of missions which gave the Church a new remedy for its ills. And the only thing that can save the Church of the nineteenth century from another apostasy, will be a new consecration to the work of a world’s evangelization, proportioned to our new measure of knowledge and opportunity. For be it remembered that fidelity has no fixed standard; it varies because light has its degrees of clearness, and ability has its varying measure. What would have been faithfulness in Carey’s day is neglect now; what would have been zeal then is indifference now. As the world opens to us; as our numbers and resources multiply; as our knowledge of human need increases; as our facilities are indefinitely enlarged, so our readiness, promptness, fulness of devotion, must keep pace; otherwise we are unfaithful. If, when I have wealth, I give no larger a proportion than when poor, I really keep a far larger proportion for my indulgence; if, when I have far more incentives to duty, I am no more active, I am the more unimpressible and irresponsive. So, of this age to which so much more is given, God will require the more.
Frenchmen have accomplished the feat of actually plating a dead child with a metallic shell. The corpse is prepared by a bath of nitrate of silver and the vapour of phosphorus, and then electricity is employed to lay on the thin shell of copper, aluminium or gold. The tendency of our day is to a plated Church — to leave the corruption of this world, and the coldness and lifelessness of a secular selfishness, within, and gild over with fashionable formalism and polite culture. To leave this tendency unchanged is to have, in the end, a corpse with a gold shell!
There certainly is a crisis in Church life just now which gives to watchful saints no little alarm. It is an age not only of doubt, but of declared doubt; an age of scholarly inquiry, but audacious rationalism and impudent irreverence; an age of unrest, insatiate avarice and reckless ambition; an age of fashionable indulgence and unrestrained selfishness; an age of formality in religion and prayerlessness; an age of religious extension, rather than of holy intensity; an age of secular churches and wide-spread neglect of the real sanctities of holy living.
Reference has been made already to John Owen’s ‘* Pneumatologia,” and to what he says of every age, ‘’that it has its own test of fidelity or infidelity.” Before Christ’s advent, the great testing truth was the oneness of God’s nature and His monarchy over all. At His advent, whether a Church was orthodox hung on this — whether it would receive or reject the Son of God as divine, incarnate, sacrificed, glorified according to prophecy and promise. But, now that the Church has been outgathered, the test is, ‘’^how the Church receives the Holy Spirit;’’ so that a body of disciples who hold tenaciously to the unity of God and the trinity of the persons of the Godhead, and accept Jesus Christ as Son of God, Saviour and Lord, may yet in God’s eyes be apostate, because practically rejecting the Holy Spirit in His divine offices!
The remark is alarmingly true, and there is no sign of such apostasy more convincing than the absence of that missionary spirit which is the practical evidence and expression of the abiding of the Spirit of Christ. If at once the whole Church of God should enter upon the work of a world’s evangelization with a zeal proportioned to the present claims of duty and opportunity, there would be a sudden cessation of the widespread doubt, due to the leaven of German rationalism, under polite names of Biblical criticism; we should find it once more true, as Shaftesbury said, that the antidote to all this scepticism and uncertainty is to be constantly and wholly absorbed in work for soul-saving. All minor questions are forgotten when major issues come to the front; as two animals that have been fighting will suddenly come into friendly terms, and stand side by side when forced to face and fight a lion. Even the Church is coming to embrace a great multitude who ‘’vigorously believing nothing, practice vigorously what they believe;” and it will be worse unless we redouble our fidelity to missions.
One of the highest incentives is found in the fact that missions thus develop the life that makes them possible. There never was a true mission born unless there was vitality enough to give it birth; but it is equally true that such child-bearing saves the very mother herself. The sacrifice is salvation. That word. Salvation, has a grander, fuller meaning than we often think. Justification may come to him who believes with the heart; but there is a full salvation only to him who confesses with the mouth, and witnesses to the world. To escape the penalty of sin is but the first step in salvation; to escape the power of sin, and the dominion of evil is the next step, sanctification. But he who advances not further and learns that service which delivers from the more subtle dominion of self, knows not the fullest meaning of salvation.
It ought to be motive enough that the Church’s mission is to save the lost, and not simply to care for the saved. Solomon says, God hath set the world in man’s heart — but the Hebrew term is olam — indefinite duration. There is a latent instinct of eternity in the human soul. Man knows that duration was before him and will be after him; and the believer is one in whose heart this latent instinct has been aroused to activity: his mission is to go forth and awaken that instinct in others and that is soul-saving!