The New Open Doors
That word Opportunity is a pictorial word. It suggests a ship, before the port, just sailing into harbour after the fight with wind and wave. True opportunity is always God-given: Behold I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it.” But doors unentered do not remain open, and if God once shuts no man can open, and we may knock in vain. Unused opportunity never returns: it is forfeited forever. One fact is plain: open doors now challenge us to enter every land. Before us stands the opportunity of the ages. The rapid and sudden multiplication and accumulation of these openings compel us to wonder and adore, for He who only doeth wondrous things is at work, and so the iron gates open of their own accord before His messengers and heralds.
A few familiar facts, which are leaders of a vast host, show that God is on the march, and summoning His Church to follow. Brevity compels classification: we must look at facts only in groups. And this age of wonders is but one century beyond that of Carey; yet within one hundred years what was local and exceptional has become cosmopolitan and universal. With the swift touch of God, He has opened the world, over which the Cobbler of Hackleton sighed, to the Gospel which he loved, and given to the Church the chance to occupy it for Christ.
Keeping in mind that our theme is missions, we select seven of the remarkable features of our own age, all of which are gigantic in character and cosmopolitan in extent, and which constitute in our day the seven wonders of the world.
I. World-wide Exploration.
If we are to preach the Gospel to every creature we must first go into all the world, and this has not been possible to any previous age as it is to ours, for all the world has not hitherto been accessible or even known. At last the trackless pathways of the ocean have been crossed and the penetraha of all the continents reached. Land and sea yield up the secrets of six thousand years. Navigation and exploration have been so thorough that we feel sure that no continent is unveiled, nor even one island undiscovered. The frozen poles have been forced to unbar the gates of their ice castles and the flag of the triumphant explorer is unfurled on their crystal battlements. For the first time since the world began man knows his own habitation and domain.
All this is full of meaning. When God set Canaan before His people. His word was: “Everyplace that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you.” That law is general. Every land of promise waits for possession, and possession hangs on appropriation. The first condition of a world’s evangelization is its exploration; and, because the prows of our ships, ploughing furrows in every sea, have made the vast oceans harvest-fields of commerce; because the dauntless explorer has pierced Asiatic jungles and African forests, traced the rivers to their source, and scaled the mountains to their brow; because the exclusion and seclusion of hermit nations has been invaded and the veil rent in twain before their closely-guarded fanes and shrines; because the public sentiment of mankind forbids locked gates and sealed ports, the way is open as never before for the Gospel chariot.
2. World-wide Comiminication.
This naturally follows, but not of necessity, for doors, wrested or wrenched open by sheer force, are closed almost as soon as opened. In this case, however, the iron bars of resistance have been broken down, and the two-leaved gates have yielded to the gentler touch of diplomacy as well as to the harsher hand of war, — to the still small voice of commerce as well as the louder threat of compulsion. Bonds of union have been braided out of mutual treaties, and barriers that stood firm for ages have been razed to the ground, or fallen like Jericho’s walls without a blow.
Facilities for mutual contact and communication are so multiplied and marvellous that we scarcely recognize our own world. Within the century steamships have diminished distance, by shortening time to less than one-tenth of the period required for ocean voyages. Steam carriages cross the continents so swiftly that the limited express needs but a continuous track to run round the globe in three weeks; and the black-horse not only climbs the steep mountain side but bores his way through its rocky heart, bridges river chasms, tramps down thickest forests, and dares alike Sahara sands and Siberian snows. The postal union bears letters and papers from the great centres to the remotest outskirts of the earth in six weeks; and the telegraph wire and ocean cable yoke God’s lightning to human thought, flash news to the ends of the globe; and, threading the vast body politic with its mysterious system of sensor and motor nerves, electricity makes the whole world thrill with instantaneous intelligence.
Now, at last, there are no distant lands, no foreign peoples; the whole world is one neighborhood; those who were afar off are brought nigh. Once, to love one’s neighbour meant to love him who lived next door: but now everybody lives next door — and by that law we must love the race of man. Communication such as this, making possible a contact so constant, so sympathetic, so universal, never entered into the wildest dreams of the ancients, and to our grandfathers would have seemed incredible. Had Carey foreseen and foretold what one century has made real, his prediction would have ranked him among madmen. The tales of the Arabian Nights are outdone in extravagance by actual facts. God has, through modern science, given to man the magic wand, the magic lamp. The genius of nature, with all his mighty forces waits to do our bidding, helping us to carry out the last command of our Lord.
3. World-wide Civilization.
This comprehensive term includes all that builds mankind into a compact state or civil society, — intelligence and industry, enterprise and education, manners and morals.
Barbarism is the burglar of history; its deeds of wrong, robbery, violence, are of the night, and cannot abide the day which dawns when civilization sheds its light. In the flush of the morning, blushing for shame, it seeks the cover of darkness. Such crimes against God and man as infanticide and cannibalism, such orgies of lust and blood as the rites of Juggernath and the Meriah groves; such cruelties as those of the torture rack and suttee pyre, are things of the past.
Education is a revolutionist, overturning intellectual errors and superstitious faith. Cuvier knew too much to fear the ghost with horns and hoofs that came to his bed and growled out, ‘’ I will eat you! “He coolly surveyed the sheeted form, and said to himself, “Horns and hoofs! Humph! Graminivorous, not carnivorous! that beast feeds on grass and grain, and won’t eat me.” And so the comparative anatomist went to sleep. Knowledge is power. It destroys even where it does not construct. The Hindu cannot study astronomy and geology without seeing his absurd cosmogony fall in ruins; yet that cosmogony is so built into his religious system that the two fall together, and he loses faith in the Vedas. The Chinese study geography and history, and learn that the Middle Kingdom must reconstruct its map of the world and its notions of the race of man; for the Celestial Empire is but one among many great nations, and Confucius but one among many great teachers. The Siamese cannot look into medical science without the uprooting of hoary superstitions; nor the degraded Hottentot learn common facts about earth, air and water, without finding that the witches he fears are not human beings nor demons, but miasma and malaria, to be exorcised by scientific drainage and sanitary conditions.
Civilization is in our day the forerunner of missions, not only in casting up a highway and gathering out the stones, but in putting into the hands of Christian and Protestant peoples the balance of power. That those nations where the most enlightened form of Protestant Christianity prevails hold the sceptre that sways the world, there is no doubt. Their sovereignty is a conceded fact. The pillars of the world’s throne are wrought not of brute force but of brain force; the granite columns of character and culture, intelligence and integrity. Great Britain and the United States, the giant empire of the east and the great republic of the west, joined by Prussia, the Protestant kingdom of the continent of Europe, wield jointly an influence which Papal, Pagan and Moslem powers, combined, could not resist. Such a fact bears the stamp and seal of God’s design, and its bearing on world-wide missions cannot be measured.
4. World-wide Assiviilation,
Communication promotes actual contact and communion. The intercourse of travel and the interchange of trade have begotten new relations and suggest a new science which Lieber calls Catallactics — the exchange of thoughts. There has come to be a new trade in ideas, a commerce of sentiments. Hermit nations emerge from their cell and shell. From the sunrise kingdom young Japanese pour into western channels to absorb the secrets of occidental progress, and in their reflow, bear back the new ideas they have acquired. China sends her younger statesmen to study at the centres of Christendom the problems of human progress, and bring back their solution. The gods of the Celestial Empire actually ask questions of the foreign devils! Confucius, the Chinese Pope, no longer wears the tiara of infallibility. He who shook his own hand now shakes ours, respects the head that wears no queue, and the feet that are shod with elastic hide instead of unbending wood.
The barriers between peoples are down. Barriers of language once more impassable than mountains or oceans are silently crumbling. In Yokohama and Hong Kong, Cairo and Capetown, Calcutta and Constantinople, English is spoken: it is becoming the court-language of the world. Thousands in India and Japan flock to hear men like Julius Seelye and Joseph Cook, who use only their own mother tongue, and in some of the capitals of the Orient a translator or interpreter is becoming so far unnecessary.
Barriers of mutual misunderstanding and suspicion are falling. Acquaintance dissipates false impressions. The “foreign devils” are found to be brothers; there is no evil fascination in their eye, no curse in their speech, no fatality in their touch. Trust takes the place of distrust, and love the place of hate.
The era of universal peace seems to be at hand. Men are learning the divine lesson that war is based not only on a bad principle, but a bad policy, and that O ‘Council was not far wrong in stoutly maintaining that “no social revolution is worth one drop of human blood.” Generous forbearance, mutual concession, fraternal conference and impartial arbitration, may settle any controversy without striking a blow. War is a serpent, with a crush in its coils, a fang in its jaws, and a sting in its tail. Its venom heats the blood for generations. France has never forgotten nor forgiven Waterloo, and the memory of conflicts more remote than the Crimean War, the Battle of Plassey, or even the fall of Constantinople, rankles still; for though men die, nations survive. Waste of treasure and of life are bad, but waste of good feeling and kindly relations is worse.
God sits at His loom. With many shuttles He weaves into one fabric the threads of national life; and in the woof and warp the blood-red threads are getting scarce. Peaceful compacts guard the rights and promote the concord of men. Trade and travel bring men together, and they come to know each other, and to feel that war must be no more. In 1884, in Berlin, fourteen nations sent representatives to the conference that gave a constitution to the Congo Free State. That conference marks perhaps the first parliament of man and forecasts the federation of the world; for Protestant, Catholic, Greek and even Mohammedan communities had delegates there. The various congresses and conferences connected with the Columbian Exposition would have been impossible half a century ago; so marked was their testimony to the assimilation going on among men, that there seems risk of losing sight even of some vital distinctions.
5. World-wide Emancipation,
This is another marvel of this age. From the fall of man until now, human slavery has been the fatal foe of the best good of the race; equally bad for master and slave. The nightingale will not sing in a cage until its eyes are put out. The light of man’s intelligence must be quenched, the eyes of his intellect be blinded, before he will submissively wear his bonds. Hence the castle of human bondage has been built upon the base-blocks of ignorance and degradation, and buttressed with oppression and compulsion.
But, even when blinded, Samson was a safe victim of tyranny only while his hair was kept shorn; and so, close in the steps of human knowledge and enlightenment, has followed the uprising of man in behalf of his fellow-man: if the slave or serf did not burst his own bonds, civilization has broken them for him.
Great Britain could not further share this crime of the age without relapsing- toward barbarism, and so British intelligence and integrity soimded the tocsin that on that memorable first day of August, 1838, pealed out liberty in Jamaica. It was not Clarkson and Wilberforce, but the ‘’Magna Charta,” and the Bible, that original charter of human rights, that put beneath the walls where human beings were imprisoned, a lever mightier than that of Archimedes. Even despotic Russia had to grant at least a nominal release to her serfs; and the late four years’ conflict in America could not end while upon one slave there was left an unbroken fetter: those four millions of bondmen were God’s “contraband of war.”
Who but He has brought it about that not one enlightened nation dares openly to espouse slave trathc or maintain slave labour? The market for human bodies and souls has long been transferred from London and New York to Cairo and Constantinople. The voice of mankind is heard saying, “Away with fetters!” and appealing for a parliament of man in which there shall be no commons, but all shall sit as peers!
Emancipation means more than bodily freedom; it brings individualism. Knock from the body its shackles and the mind begins to be free. Men begin to learn and think, to reflect and reason. Speech bursts its bonds and the dumb tongue is loosed. Instead of a mass in which individuals are lost, each man learns that he is himself a born sovereign rather than subject, having a little empire of his own. He begins to assert himself and his inalienable right of self-rule. He learns the dignity and majesty of mind, and that no chain ever forged is strong enough to bind a thinker. He learns the grandeur of reason, and that truth is resistless like the waves of the sea, mighty enough to vlrreck the strongest bark of falsehood and grind to powder the age-long rocks of error.
And SO to-day we see intelligence, that great agitator, striding over the vast steppes of Asia and river highways of Africa, scattering the seeds of social revolution; and a bloodless warfare of ideas is going on, before which strongholds of error and injustice are falling.
When man begins to be free in body and mind he learns also the divinity of conscience. God has decreed that no human device of tyranny or torture shall suffice to kill or curb man’s moral sense; and the cell, the rack, the axe, the stake, have proved powerless to change that decree. Though blinded and made the sport of foes, conscience is still a giant, that has but to get hold of the pillars of Dagon’s temple, to lift them from their foundations and bring down to the dust the fabric of organized oppression and regal wrong. Dr. Francis W. Upham says; “The conscience is the servant only of God, and is not subject to the will of men. Through His words, this truth, which reaches to social as well as religious institutions, has an indestructible life. If it be crucified it will rise again. If buried in the sepulchre the stone will be rolled away, and the keepers become as dead men.” *
Never before has liberty, both civil and religious, reigned among men so widely and wisely. The consequences are most significant touching the work of missions. For example: In most lands, persecution for religious opinion is already done away, or if it still survives it is a relic of a barbarous age, hiding in the darkness and resorting to the secret weapons of the assassin. Enlightened civilization which shut the gates of the arena also put out the fires of the stake. Years since in China, the last of the missionary martyrs who died by government decree, was beheaded. Where in Spain the dungeons of the Inquisition stood, harvests for God are growing out of the ashes of saints. India may
* St. Matthew’s Gospel, by F. W. Upham.
ostracise, but dare not execute, converts. All this forecasts that wider emancipation of the soul of man, when such self-conscious sovereign shall learn to be the willing subject of the Lord of all, and find his highest freedom in the service of a Higher Master. That will be the world’s year of jubilee!