The New Era
Two of these seven wonders yet remain to be considered, and they serve to inaugurate a new era; for one of them puts multiphed facilities, implements, instruments or weapons into our hands, and the other organizes and mobilizes the forces available for the work and war of the ages.
The first of these is World-wide Preparation.
In one sense, all that has been said of other wonders implies preparation. But there is one aspect of the present condition of the world which implies a preparation in itself so peculiar that it needs extended reference; namely, the obvious and providential furnishing of facilities exactly adapted for, and preparatory to, a world-wide work of evangelization. These of themselves serve to introduce a new era.
There is a divine meaning in the fact that this century, most prolific of missions, has been also most fertile in invention, of all ages; the one great epoch of discovery, not only in political and social developments, but in general progress in art and science, leaving behind all other centuries. The leading statesman of Britain is credited with saying, that social advance has moved on such flying feet that in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century all previous history was outrun; that even this was surpassed by the next twenty-five, and this again by the rate of progress of the next ten. If Mr. Gladstone’s estimate be correct, one decade of years from 1875 to 1885 witnessed a forward stride of the race more gigantic than all the previous ages of history!
This is doubtless no exaggeration. Certainly since the world began no such epoch of improvement has been known. We have seen huge strides, leaps forward which make all past advance seem like a snail’space. During the years of this century the movement onward and upward seems, even to those who are borne on and up by it, incredible. Since Rome was founded the rate of progress has increased at least a thousandfold.
To appreciate this fact, we need to stop long enough to study comparative history. This is the world’s golden age so far as invention and discovery, intelligence and material progress, can bring it. Measured by achievement each year is a century. This is the age of railway and steamship, photograph and phonograph, telescope and microscope, spectroscope and spectrum analysis; audiphone and microphone, petroleum and aniline dyes; steam printing press and machine typesetter; typewriter and sewing machine; of the discovery of forty new metals, and the revolution of chemical science; of the ocean cable and the signal service; of anaesthetics, and a score of new sciences and arts, of cheap postage and the universal postal union; of newspapers, magazines and popular literature; of machine work instead of handwork; of free schools and universities for the people; of giant explosives and gigantic enterprises. Most wonderful of all, this is the age of electricity, which already serves man as motor, messenger and illuminator, is to be applied to forging as well as plating metals, and no one knows to how many other uses.
In Robert Mackenzie’s graphic sketch of “The Nineteenth Century,” he calls this feature of our times “the great outbreak of human inventiveness which left no province of human affairs unvisited.” With strange and startling suddenness men’s eyes opened to see how rude and crude were previous methods and appliances, and at the same time those eyes became endowed with a scientific insight and foresight almost superhuman. Man became not only scientist but seer; before ^^“^ limitless paths of possible progress stretched toward a goal so advanced, yet so entrancing, that the enchanting vision quickened the pace of the whole race, as though men had on the mythical “seven-league boots,” or the winged sandals of Mercury.
Wherever a high civilization has shone, mankind has felt the thrill of a new passion for investigation and improvement. See the human form become practically transparent, as the speculum, stethoscope, laryngoscope, opthalmoscope, microscope, and electric lamp guide the physician and surgeon in searching the darkest hiding places sdi disease. Lithotomy gives place to lithotrity. Limbs, once amputated, are now straightened and strengthened. Since 1 8 1 5, the treatment of the insane has undergone a revolution as radical and significant as the new era of conservative surgery. Machinery now works cotton and wool, metal and wood, and new motors do our planing and carving, hammering and rolling, sowing, mowing, ploughing, reaping, threshing and binding.
We do not appreciate all this glory of achievement, because the wonders of the age dazzle our eyes and dull our vision.
Let us glance once more at the electric telegraph. As the earth’s rotation on its axis takes a full day, points on its surface at antipodes to each other are twelve hours apart, reckoning by the sun. But telegraphic signals flash instantaneously, and so far outrun the sun’s apparent motion that an afternoon message, cabled from London, is read in San Francisco on the morning of the same day, and there are points further westward where we might have the paradox of publishing news of an event twenty-four hours before it takes place! This prompts Mackenzie to rank the telegraph as the first human invention which is obviously final. In the race of human improvement, steam may give place to some yet mightier power, as gas is already superseded by a better method of lighting; but, “■ no agency for conveying intelligence can ever excel that which is instantaneous. Here for the first time the human mind has reached the utmost limit of its progress.”*
This unparalleled progress belongs mostly to the half century now nearing its close. During fifty years the more prominent achievements of the age have been reduced to practical form. Almost the entire system of railway is the product of this brief period. The first sun-picture dates back but sixty years, just before the death of Daguerre, from whom it took its name, and already we have a score of new applications of this principle. These inventions alone link the ages together, ushering in a new era of art and letters, making the sun himself the artist and sculptor of the coming era. Already the sun’s ray has wedded the delicate lens, and given birth to microscopic photography; so that during the siege of Paris pages of the London Times photographed upon a square inch of surface, were borne by carrier pigeons to the French capital, there to be magnified and reproduced. And it would seem that the sunbeam, already used for a pencil and chisel, is about to surpass the pigments of the painter, using sensitized paper in place of canvas and giving us colour as well as form.
The phonograph, at first a scientific toy, has become an automatic clerk, recording and repeating a message, and has begun to be used for that difficult art, the analysis and reproduction of animal sounds and utterances; and it makes possible for future generations to hear the words and voices of dead orators and statesmen, poets, and preachers. It is within this half century that the spectroscope has brought other orbs near enough to analyze their light and learn the substances burning in their photospheres; and the invaluable service of the spectroscope in refining and working metals, shows its possible utility in manufacture.
* The Nineteenth Century, 197.
Anaesthetics, which renders medical and surgical treatment comparatively painless and so reduces human suffering to a minimum, is so recent a discovery that many yet living remember its well-nigh tragic beginning in Edinburgh in 1847. The giant explosives — nitroglycerine, dynamite, giant powder, etc., have already displaced older and tedious methods of clearing the earth’s surface of stumps and debris, and opening its veins of metal and mineral. Delicate photometers and micrometers, every form of monster machinery or delicate mechanism, belong to this age; while science teaches us drainage and irrigation, analysis and enrichment of the soil and secrets of fertility, turns deserts into gardens, and makes every spot available for building a habitation and earning a livelihood.
If such be the progress of this half century, nothing which men may imagine to do seems impossible in the new era just opening, when science promises to navigate air as well as sea and build ships to master winds as well as waves. Forms of force hitherto unknown are now undergoing experiment. Secrets, hidden even from this century, are yielding to human investigation, and a decade of years may witness a revolution greater than that which even in our day has turned the world upside down.
We have laid stress upon this march of human improvement, not so much because of the lightning pace of this advance, as because of its obvious connection with God’s providential purpose. It is one great sign of the times. It marks this as the golden age of opportunity. A world’s evangelization is not only possible but practicable, with a rapidity proportionate to progress in other directions. On the pages of history in large letters it is written that the periods of most marked progress exactly synchronize with the eras of most active missionary effort. Clear as the weather signals in the sky, is this glowing sign of God’s plan in this generation. His mind is the vital spring of man’s intellectual life. He is the fountain of life, and in His light do we see light. It was He who kept a continent veiled for five thousand years, rending the veil only when a reformed Church with an unchained Bible was ready to enter it and make it the theatre of new gospel triumphs. It was He who locked nature’s secrets within her dark chambers, until a missionary Church was aroused to yoke to His chariot the new forces and appliances. God is surely speaking. To the reverent ear the still small voice is more impressive than peals of thunder. ‘’Behold I have set before thee an open door.” An open door to the nations — the world before us; an open door into Nature’s Arcana, with all her machinery and forces to do our bidding. Opportunities are matched by facilities equally great. Never such a work to be done, never such tools to work with. What responsibility, if such opportunity be lost and such facilities lie unused!
The last of these seven modern wonders is
world-wide Organization.
Organization is the watchword of the Age. Never before was there such a period of practical union among men for all the ends of material, intellectual and social improvement. Organization is rapidly extending and far-reaching; its triumphs are so multiplied and magnificent that they constitute the peril of the age, threatening to erect a despotism whose iron sceptre shall be resistless and remorseless. Already the Giant is on the throne; he lifts his finger, and great railway systems are locked in inaction; factory wheels stop, ships lie in the docks, buildings wait for workmen, mines remain unworked; labor’s hundred hands are chained, and action is exchanged for petrifaction. Man has created a Frankenstein, and knows not how to manage the monster.
While we cannot deny the risks attending organization in reckless hands, we must confess both its widespread influence, and its great utility when under rational control. What master organizations the Church already commands as helpers! The Young Men’s Christian Association is an example, the creation of the last half century, yet a huge banyan, whose original root was in British soil, but throwing out branches on all sides, across continents and oceans into new countries, bending down to take root in papal, pagan, moslem and heathen communities, until there remains scarce a land in any clime where this gigantic and beneficent growth has not reached.
The Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavour is a yet younger giant, fourteen years old, yet in rapidity of growth, daring enterprise, boundless influence and burning enthusiasm, leaving already behind it any other organization ever known on this planet.
Let these illustrate the genius of the age when everybody organizes. Barristers and judges, physicians and surgeons, artists and artisans, underwriters and undertakers, cabmen and cartmen, shoeblacks and newsboys — every learned profession and every form of work resorts to organization. Were there some new trade to-day with only two engaged in it, they would begin by drawing up articles of association and forming a co-operative union.
The reason is plain. Men will dare attempt, and can together accomplish, what no one would try to do, or could do, alone; and so they resort to associated effort. Great and manifold advantages spring from co-operation. When hand joins hand, the weak and timid get strength and courage, and momentum is imparted to a movement in which individual forces are combined and concentrated. Great enterprises are possible only to an epoch of organization, and so we find business schemes pushing triumphantly to the very borders of civilization.
Compare present history with past records. Before the time of Christ, isolation was the law. Nations had little touch with each other. Universal empires were the aggregates of separate states, held together by those iron bands which conquest imposes and despotism rivets. The unity was that of frost, not of fire and fusion. To gather strange peoples under one sceptre, or conglomerate empires into one huge monarchy, insures no unity. Barriers are not broken down, and there is no sympathetic bond or brotherhood any more than between Jews and Samaritans.
How changed the whole aspect of affairs! We stand in the blazing focal centre of world-wide enterprise. Discovery sends its heralds to trumpet its triumph from rising to setting sun. Invention yokes to its car steam and lightning, and flies as on the wings of the morning to the uttermost parts of the earth and sea. Many run to and fro; and knowledge is increased. Material advance has its million messengers who haste to do its bidding. This is the world’s Messiah, which bids disciples go into all the world and proclaim to every creature the good tidings of human improvement; and forthwith go the myriad missionaries of invention and discovery, needing no second summons. The swiftest ships and carriages are not fleet enough conveyances for the new apostles of science and art. They dare the sea with its tempest and tornado; defy forest and jungle, river and mountain, plague and famine, hot sands and frozen bergs. And all for what? To tell men of the oil-lamp and the sewing-machine, the timepiece and the parlor organ; to sell ribbons and calicoes, fire-arms and rum-jugs, soap and flour, at the earth’s ends. Trade and traffic, agriculture and manufacture, push their conquests by organizing and co-operating; and so, in quarters most remote, in inland hamlets as well as populous cities, and on islands a half century ago unknown, you may find to-day all the appliances of enlightened society.
The theme loudly enforces its own lesson and appeal. To world-wide missions, organization and co-operation are essential. Shall the Church be slow to learn the lesson of the age? and her Master wait for willing feet to run on His errand of grace, His mission of mercy and salvation?
It is true the children of light have already resorted to organized effort in missions. William Carey was the pioneer, not of missions so much as of organization; and since his day, this has become so distinctive a feature of Church activity that the marked success attained since 1792 is traceable to associated work. By organization it has already come to pass that, although we have not absolutely reached every nation, still less every creature, our network of missions stretches round the globe and covers the earth.
And yet, in many quarters, how large are the meshes and how far apart the cords of that network. We have more than one hundred and seventy missionary boards and societies, and over one hundred and ten missionary organizations controlled by women; and these all, nearly three hundred, are the outcome of this century past, and most of them of the last fifty years. Yet what are even these among so many! We have but begun as yet our work of a world’s evangelization.
The old command of Christ echoes down the long aisles of the ages. Evangelize! And the new voice of the Providence that speaks through events in this missionary era, peals out. Organize! Lengthen thy cords and strengthen thy stakes. A love that is like God’s, must multiply and extend a thousandfold its lines of holy effort, and drive ten thousand times as many stakes deep down into the intelligent conviction and unselfish affection of Christ’s disciples.
God leaves His Church without excuse or even pretext, if missions be not prosecuted as a world-wide enterprise. In a sense never thought of when that promise was spoken, the Lord is with us — with us.
unlocking the gates of hermit nations, battering down the wall of China, unsealing the ports of Japan and Corea, cleaving a path to the heart of Africa — with us to unchain the human mind and reveal the secrets of nature. We may now go into all the world, and to every man in his own tongue give the word of God.
There was never such a work for the time, nor such a time for the work. The opportunities and facilities offered to us make even such a task easy and such a load light, turning weights into wings and burdens into pinions, to the willing soul. Knowing God’s season, the fulness and fitness of His appointed time, it is also man’s opportune hour, high time to awake out of sleep, and the world’s critical hour of need and want. Dull and dead, indeed, must he be who sees not the signs of the times, hears not the voices that call and the signals that sound, and heeds not the approaching end of the age! The Captain of our Salvation is blowing a blast on His bugle — everything echoes His command, Forward! Why do we delay?