The New Outlook
There is a promise and prophecy which all history is actually fulfilling. Watch the panorama of the ages as it unrolls; see each new scene in vivid colours fill out that shadowy outline pencilled by prophecy. Ever since Pentecost flamed with its tongues of fire, God has been visiting nation after nation, to take out of them a people for His name. At first the door of faith was opened to the Jew, and the proselytes, gathered from all nations, went back, like the Ethiopian eunuch, to witness to the peoples among whom they dwelt. Then the door was opened to the Samaritans, Syrians, people of Asia Minor and Greece; then to those of Italy, Gaul, Britain, Germany; till in our day God successively flings wide the portals of India and Burmah, Syria and Turkey, Siam and China, Africa, Japan, Corea and the Isles of the Sea; yes, even the papal strongholds, France, Italy and Spain.
And now Thibet, the shrine and throne of the Grand Lama, Buddhism’s capital, seems compelled to open her two-leaved gates. God is doing with all these natives just as He said, and in some on a grand scale — “taking out of them a people for His name.” Witness the Hawaiian Islands, now a Christian nation; the half million native converts in India; the scores of self-supporting churches along the Tigris and Euphrates; the Kho-thah-byu Memorial Hall, rallying and radiating centre for thirty thousand Christian Karens; the two thousand churches of Polynesia; New Japan, with its giant strides toward Christian civilization; McAll’s hundred gospel salles and thousands of converts in atheistic France; Madagascar becoming to Africa what England is to
Europe; and China turning converts into evangelists.
Starting from Jerusalem, over eighteen and a half centuries since, and moving westward, the flag of the cross has been unfurled successively in Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, and Constantinople; borne from the shores of Britain to a New World across the Atlantic; across that New World to the Pacific and the isles of the sea; over the Pacific to Japan and Corea and the various lands from the Chinese Sea to the Arabian Gulf and the Golden Horn; and thus, completing the circuit of the globe, we once more set up the standard in Jerusalem, the original place of the cross!
Meanwhile, this girdle of missions is widening into a zone, spreading northward toward the icebergs of Greenland and the snow castles of Siberia, and southward toward the Cape of Good Hope and the Land of Fire. We have only to lengthen our cords and strengthen our stakes, and every creature may yet be reached with the good tidings and hope may reap the fruition of Scripture promise. Then, when from gentile nations, the last convert shall have been gathered and incorporated into Christ’s mystical body; when the Ecclesia — the “out-called” ones — shall be complete, and the Bride hath made herself ready, the Bridegroom shall return to claim His own. The fulness of the gentiles being come in, the blindness of Israel shall be removed; through eyes no longer veiled, and dimmed only by penitential tears, they shall look on Him whom they pierced and wounded in the house of His friends, and so all Israel shall be saved and the fallen and ruined Tabernacle of David be rebuilt. Then shall the residue of men and all the gentiles seek after the Lord, and see the salvation of God.
All these motives and incentives, old and new, unite to sweep over us a deep conviction and persuasion, like a mighty tidal wave beneath whose majestic movement all minor issues are buried. If we discern the signs of the times, there is a redness in the evening sky which hints the dawn of a glorious day. The present crisis of missions should compel us to forget all lesser interests and issues, and hasten to bear the good news unto earth’s very ends. Labourers should be multiplied, gifts increased, and, with a new energy born in us of the Holy Spirit, this greatest enterprise of the ages should be undertaken.
This gospel of the kingdom must first be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.
There is a legitimate way of hastening toward, if not of hastening, that end: promptly to occupy every open door, and amply to sow every open field. While we pray, ‘’Thy kingdom come,” how far may we answer our own prayer! The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together, waiting for an apathetic Church to do its duty. Within our generation a thousand millions of human beings will go down to the grave without faith or hope, life or even light; one hundred thousand die daily, while forty millions of Protestant believers, idle and unmoved, see this wholesale descent into the darkness beyond! And yet there are four hundred professed disciples in Protestant communions for every one of that hundred thousand that each day pass into the great unknown. How far-reaching and all-powerful might be the evangelism of these Protestant disciples, if once organized, economized and vitalized by the spirit of missions and the Spirit of God!
Since Jesus of Nazareth, through the rent veil of His flesh and the rent door of His tomb, opened to every believer the path of life, nearly nineteen centuries have fled, during which a vast number of souls, equal to twenty times the present population of the globe, have gone down to the grave, ignorant of Christ. And during all these centuries, He who is of purer eyes than to behold evil, has confronted the woe and want and wickedness of heathenism! Through all this time God has been preparing His Church to enter these new open doors, and the Messiah, who was cut off without generation, has been waiting to see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied, waiting for his bride to make herself ready and put on her beautiful attire.
During the last hundred years, since Carey led the way, a series of providential interpositions and gracious manifestations that deserve to rank with miracles, have set upon mission work the sanction and seal of God. Colossal obstacles have been removed and huge barriers subsided, long locked gates been burst, and grand triumphs won. Why do we hesitate! Let the hosts of the Lord rally to the onset. The great Leader of the host even now sounds His imperial clarion along the whole line of battle. Let us obey the signal, boldly pierce the very centre of the enemy’s forces, turn their staggering wings, and in the confidence of faith, move forward, a united army, in one overwhelming charge!
Late one summer afternoon, now thirty years ago, a sudden rainpour fell in Virginia, Nevada. It was very unexpected, for those rainless summer skies seldom yield even a shower. After the rain ceased, a dense darkness drew its pall over the whole sky; and Mount Davidson’s vast eastern slope that overlooks the city, was so enveloped in darkness that the mountain could scarcely be distinguished from the cloud masses that surrounded it.
A remarkable phenomenon drew all eyes toward the mountain peak. Upon the lofty summit a little tongue of golden flame moved strangely to and fro, like some supernatural signal. It was very small but bright, and the more conspicuous against the dense, dark background of storm cloud. Most strange of all, this fire neither waxed nor waned, but simply burned on.
It was at first a mystery; but, in fact, it was the nation’s flag, planted on the mountain’s peak, and waving in the wind. Through a narrow rift of cloud the rays of the setting sun had found their way; and that flag of the Republic lay just in the line of their direction, and so they touched it alone, resting upon it, glorifying, transfiguring it. For an hour that burning banner held the fixed, fascinated gaze of the multitude. And it afterwards proved that the setting sun, which thus gilded and glorified the star-spangled banner, had that same day looked down on the fall of Vicksburg and the victory at Gettysburg, which were the decisive turning points of the war for the Union.
Darkness overspreads the earth and gross darkness the people. But God’s glory arises, and is seen in the work of missions. We have but to lift our eyes and look, and we may see that, on the very summits of heathendom and in the midst of the death-shade, the heroic soldiers of the Lord Jesus have planted the banner of the cross, and there it still waves, a trophy of coming triumphs. The glory of God rests upon all faithful testimony to His name, and makes it still a tongue of fire. While we set up the cross on the high places of the earth, and seem but solitary, God’s great plan of battle comprehends both the world and the age, and takes in all fields of conflict and all faithful witnesses. We may not see it or know it, but elsewhere decisive battles are taking place, and strongholds of evil are giving way before the onset of God’s hosts. In His eyes, which command the whole field and period of conflict, while we see only discouragement and defeat, the tide of battle may be turning!
The task on which we entered in the discussion of the great theme is now in a sense completed. No one could be more sensible than the writer of these pages, how little justice has been done to the marvels of this missionary century. But our eyes must be turned forward, rather thaPx backward. What God has wrought, with a Church just waking from the sleep of fifteen hundred years, is but a prophetic hint of what He will do, if, thoroughly roused to holy action. His people meet the duty of the hour with the faith, the prayer, the sacrifice, the consecration, which the crisis demands.
The New Acts of the Apostles is, like the old, an unfinished book. Other chapters wait to be written. What shall they record! God grant that the unwritten history of the years before us may embrace far greater marvels than have ever been witnessed! New Pentecosts with floods of blessing, until, as Malachi says, there be ‘’none left to pour out!” New Apostles, until God’s chosen heralds leave no Regions Beyond unpenetrated, and no creature unreached! New visions and voices, until every divine lesson is learned, and the whole Church is in living accord with the Master! New converts and martyrs, until the Saviour’s soul has found its full satisfaction for its travail! New signs and wonders, until even unbelievers confess the work to be of God! New hopes and incentives, if indeed, any be needful to inspire to ever-increasing fidelity, or possible to enhance the grandeur of existing motives!
But all this depends on the manifested Presence of the Redeemer, in the power of that Holy Spirit, whose holy ministries made luminous with glory the Acts of the Apostles!