The New Pioneers

RaimundusLullius — Pioneer to the Mohammedans. 1236-1315.

To find the pioneer missionary to the Moslem field, we must go back more than six and a half centuries before Keith Falconer fell at Aden, to that young noble of Majorca, born in Palma in 1236. He was trained as a soldier, and thirty years of his life were wasted, not in frivolity only but in sensuality, in scandalous excesses. Even his scholarly culture and philosophical mind, like those of Augustine before him, were only like polished bow and arrow without practical purpose or unselfish love to give them serviceableness.

But God had for this prodigal son a grander career. While writing a song for the siren of lust, he had a vision of the Crucified, which left upon his soul not only its impress but its image. The Captain of the Lord’s Host laid hold of the trumpet that hung idle and useless on the walls of society, blew a blast upon it, waked it to music and turned it to a warrior’s bugle. The grace that changed the poet of passion into a saint, made the saint a servant of Christ and a witness to a lost world. Born in 1236, he had from his cradle heard the story of the crusades. He conceived the noble purpose of beginning a new crusade against Saracen infidels, not by force of arms to rescue the Saviour’s sepulchre from profane hands, but by prevailing prayer and preaching of good tidings to lead the followers of the false prophet to bow before Christ’s cross and worship at His empty tomb.

He suddenly renounced the world and its pleasures, divided his estate among kinsmen and friends, took the Franciscan garb, and went into solitude to prepare for his sacred mission. He studied philosophy, theology and the ancient tongues. Learning Arabic from a slave, he made himself familiar with the works of Averroes — the Moorish Aristotle of Cordova — and other Moorish writers, and so derived the germ of that system of dialectics unfolded in his ‘’’’Ars Magna,’’ whereby he hoped to reform science and make converts to Christianity.

The rest of his life was one long and toilsome pilgrimage after the moving pillar. Old habits of sin, like Pharaoh’s hosts in pursuit of Israel, would have drawn him back into bondage, but he dared a Red Sea of blood for the sake of following the ‘* vision.” Like the young Count at Halle, he had covenanted with God: “To thee, O Lord God, I offer myself, my wife, my children, and all that I possess;” and being free from all worldly hindrances he gave himself unreservedly to missionary service. Part of his plan for bringing unbelievers to accept the truth of Christianity was to establish missionary training colleges, where young men might be taught Arabic and other tongues; for his was no petty ambition; he aspired to nothing less than to surround and subjugate the whole Moslem territory in Christ’s name. There is something sublime in this solitary man, moving the King of Aragon to establish at Palma a monastery to educate monks as missionaries, and spending years in fruitless but tireless endeavour to kindle in successive popes and kings an enthusiasm like unto his own. Then, nothing daunted, crowning all else by going himself into Moslem territory to preach Christ — he was the first of the missionary martyrs to die for the sake of the Dark Continent.

Those who doubt the romance of missions should read the story, more fascinating than any fiction, of this, the first and greatest of missionaries to the Mohammedans, and deservedly wearing the title of the “greatest missionary orator of history,” whose work, on “Divine Contemplation,” ranks with the Confessions of Augustine, the Meditations of Thomas a Kempis, or Bunyan’s “Grace Abounding.” Follow this Spaniard, pleading with kings to found training schools for Franciscan missionaries, and with the “Vicars of Christ” to decree missionary institutes and lead on the new crusade. Then see him in 1292, just five centuries before that famous meeting at Kettering when the first Baptist missionary society led the way, himself landing in Tunis, daring to go defenceless and alone to win converts where proselytism was a crime, and conversion was apostasy, and both punishable with death.

Scarcely had he broached his design, when he was cast into prison and then driven out of the country. He returned to Europe for aid, and again unsuccessful, went back to Africa in 1307, though threatened with stoning, and, at Bougiah, employed his” great art “in an argument with a learned Mohammedan under cover of an inquiry into the truth of Islamism. His real design was detected, and he escaped death only through his antagonist’s intercession. Again in prison, he wrote there a defence of Christianity, and compelled even his foes to respect the fanatical philosopher who risked life itself for the sake of his faith and his mission.

He was a second time deported, and at seventy years of age we find him on a tour of the chief cities of Europe, like another Peter, the Hermit, preaching his crusade and declaring, “God wills it!” Once more unsuccessful, with a zeal that no discouragement could quench or even dampen, in 13 14, at seventy-eight years of age, this grand old hero once more crossed the Mediterranean to Bougiah, and there, in his eightieth year, met death, like the first martyr, by stoning.

Whatever his faults or fanaticism, he had an iron resolution and chivalric ardor seldom equalled, and on the scroll of missionary history the name of this noble of Palma has a grand record. Dr. George Smith says of him; “No church, papal or reformed, has produced a missionary so original in plan, so ardent and persevering in execution, so varied in gifts, so inspired by the love of Christ, as this saint of seventy-nine, whom Mohammedans stoned to death on the 30th of June, 131 5. In an age of violence and faithlessness, he was the apostle of heavenly love.” Let this motto from his own great book be adopted by all his true successors:

“He who loves not, lives not;
He vfho lives by the Life, cannot die.”

Francis Xavier — Romish Apostle to the Indies. 1506-1552.

Five centuries stretch between Lull and Carey, and few are the missionary names that history meanwhile records, but sufficient to preserve the succession unbroken and show that God always has true children to become the seed of the Kingdom.

The Reformation period was not one of missionary activity: from the days of the Bohemian martyr to those of the Florentine, the reformers did little more than purge the Church of false doctrine; but the Reformation moved the Romish Church to aggressive measures, and one of the most conspicuous fruits of mediaeval missions was Francis Xavier, the apostle to the Indies.

This remarkable and unique man, born in 1506, was in youth tainted by association with Protestant ‘’heretics” but was, by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, saved from these ‘’deplorable dangers.” At forty-six he died on the Island of Sancian, or St. John, off the coast of China, in 1552. But what an all-consuming flame burned in his bosom during those last ten years and set the Orient aglow!

He was misguided, no doubt; but no other life, since Paul’s, has shown such ardour and fervour, such absorbing zeal for the greater glory of God, such self -forgetting, self-denying passion for the souls of men, as that of the young Saint of Navarre, whose withered relics are still adored in the Church of Bom Jesus at Goa.

It was not until 1542, ten years before his death, that the Jesuit missionary landed in Portuguese India. Yet what labors abundant crowded that decade! For three years he toiled in Southern India; for nearly three more, in the Chinese Archipelago; and the last four were given to India and Japan.

To the doctrine of free grace, unconsciously imbibed in boyhood, he owed his genuine experience of faith in Christ, his strong hold upon Him, and the inspiration of an unselfish purpose. To his Papal and Jesuit training we trace that admixture of confidence in outward rites and good works which alloyed and vitiated his otherwise superb service. To sprinkle holy water in baptism, to recite the creed and a few prayers, limited his methods and measured his success. His preaching practically knew nothing of the purging away of sin by intelligent faith in the atoning blood. He said, feci cliristiaiios’’ — “I make christians”; and it is not strange if the disciples he made often shocked their “maker” by glaring vices and flagrant sins.

He mastered no oriental language, and was often without an interpreter; sometimes, as among the pearl fishers of Tuticorin, he was, as he himself felt, but an adept in a dumb show, an actor in a pantomime. His was the gospel of sacraments and ceremonies, preached in mute action, but with what lofty enthusiasm! To baptize a new-born babe would save a soul; to mumble a few prayers would deliver from purgatory; and so he went on with wild passion for numbers, carrying the counting of converts to the last extreme of error and absurdity. It was the lasting warning against that mechanical theory which gauges the success of missions by numerical results.

In one month, in Travancore, he baptized ten thousand natives, and at the close of his ten years’ work reckoned his converts by the million. In fact, with an ambition that knew no bounds, he planned the conversion of the whole Empire of the Rising Sun, and wanted only time enough to Christianize the Orient.

Yet, notwithstanding all these drawbacks, this Jesuit fanatic puts to shame all who read the story of his life, by the utter self-abnegation he exhibited. The man who on ship-board could night and day devote himself to watching over and nursing a crew sick with the scurvy, himself bathing their disgusting bodies and washing their filthy clothes; who could suffer the pangs of hunger, famishing himself to feed the starving; who could, unresting, make journeys over thousands of miles without care or thought as to personal comfort; who could cheerfully forsake the paths of indulgence and scholarship for one perpetual pilgrimage amid the sickening sights and stifling air of oriental heathenism; who could, on God’s altar lay himself, with his brilliant mind and prospects of preferment, with youth, wealth, worldly ambition, all tempting him to self-seeking — and know only the glory of God — such a man cannot be simply set aside as a fool or a fanatic. If his mistaken zeal for Papal supremacy caused Japan to seal her sea-gates to all foreign approach for two and a half centuries, on the other hand his consecrated earnestness has lit a flame of devotion to Christ in hundreds who have wept over the story of his heroism.

Xavier might have chosen any career however illustrious, and success would have had his crown ready. When at twenty-four, he was graduated at the college of St. Barbara in Paris as master of philosophy, and licensed to lecture upon Aristotle; when he taught with applause at the College of Beauvais, and in the Sorbonne gained the title of “doctor,” he was like a new star rising on the firmament of European civilization, and men asked whereunto his fame might not reach. But on August 15, 1534, he with five others, led by Loyola, took their vows in the chapel of Montmartre, and from that time he never swerved nor looked back. After his ordination as priest, he went to Bologna, and there in his preaching and visits to hospitals and prisons, evinced such apostolic zeal and love, that he seemed a combination of Peter and Paul and John in one; and, when missionaries were in demand for Portuguese settlements in the Indies, he was one of the first two selected. Bell in hand, he went through the streets of Goa calling upon Christian inhabitants to send children and slaves to be taught the true faith; went to the coast of Cormorin and the island of Ceylon, and many other parts of the East, reviving the dead faith of nominal Christians, and gathering flourishing congregations which he left in the care of his disciples, himself pressing onward to the regions beyond. Intrepidly he met the intrigues and violence of Japanese priests, publicly disputed with the bonzes, and won many from the cultured classes; so that, on returning to Goa in 155 1, he left three great princes of the empire as converts and vast numbers of baptized disciples from the humbler ranks. He meant to pierce the Chinese wall of exclusion; and when the fatal fever laid hold upon him he could only look toward the Walled — Kingdom, and cry, “O rock! rock! when wilt thou open to my Master?” During these ten years this Romish ‘’apostle” had planted the cross ‘’in fifty-two different kingdoms, had preached through nine thousand miles of territory, and baptized over one million persons.” In visions of the night when he saw the world conquered for Christ, he would spring

Up shouting, ‘■’■ Yet more, O my God, yet more!” and his whole life was a commentary on his own motto:

‘’Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.”

John Eliot — Apostle to the North American Indians. 1604-1690.

Like Ziegenbalg and Zinzendorf, properly belonging to the century before Carey, Eliot was one of those who formed the mould in which modern missions took shape. He was a pioneer of pioneers, and history has yet to give him his true niche in her Westminster. His period nearly spans the seventeenth century, and three features are conspicuous in his personality: first, a pious parentage with its rich legacy of character; secondly, his connection with the Puritan exile, Thomas Hooker, whom he followed to the New World; and thirdly, his absorbing passion for the souls of the red men. For sixty years he filled his sole pastorate at Roxbury, from this centre radiating influence over a wider sphere of effort.

A forecast of his work was seen in his early aptitude for language. At nineteen, graduated from Cambridge, he had already mastered the original languages of the Bible, and shown unusual skill as a grammarian and philologist. At thirty-five, the colonial leaders chose him to aid in the new version of the Psalter, and his “Bay Psalm Book” was the first book printed in America.

He had barely taken up his pastoral staff at Roxbury when his unselfish love was drawn out toward the Indians. Through a young Pequot, he got hold of their strange tongue, and in 1646, in Chief Waban’s wigwam preached the first sermon in their language ever known on American soil. This memorable service in camp, near Brighton, lasted three hours. A new camp-fire was kindled, and the spirit of religious inquiry began to burn. Two weeks later, a second visit found an old warrior weeping lest it should be too late to find God; and a fortnight after, Waban himself was found talking to his followers of the strange story of the cross, in face of fierce opposition from the Indian priests.

What, two hundred years after him, William Duncan did in his “Metlakahtla,” Eliot did in his ‘’Nonantum,” five miles west of Boston — building a model state for his “praying Indians,” who as such became known in history, like Cromwell’s ‘’ Ironsides.” The Roxbury pastor, aflame with holy passion to civilize and Christianize these wild men of the forest, organized his converts into a commonwealth, with civil courts, social and industrial improvements and religious institutions.

No circle of ten miles diameter could fence in such a man. Neponset, Concord, Brookfield, Pawntucket, felt his power, and from all quarters came clamorous appeals for new law-codes, Bible institutions and Christian teachers. Chiefs and their sons became converts, and then leaders; and, when Eliot’s visits involved risk to him, the sachem and his brave warriors became his escort; while fearless, if not heedless of danger, alone on horseback, he dared perils and bore privations for Christ’s sake.

Not only were snares of death laid for him by hostile and treacherous chiefs, but his own countrymen, not content to withhold aid, pitilessly pelted him with the hail of ridicule, or hurled at him the mudclods of aspersion; they made him the butt of jest as a trader in fables, or charged him with selfish greed. But God “stepped in and helped.” Before the century had reached its noon, his work had won a double victory; for it had both conquered the Indian and compelled recognition from Britain. Devout souls, across the sea, heard the fame of his deeds and felt the flame of his zeal; and so it came to pass that, more than half a century before the ‘’ Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,” a similar organization was formed to propagate the gospel in New England, and sent fifty pounds a year to the Nonconformist exile at Roxbury.

Like Livingstone, Eliot was a missionary general and statesman. In 1650, he gathered most of his converted Indians into “Natick,” a tract of six thousand acres on the Charles River, where each family had a house-lot, where large buildings were erected for church and school, and where distinguished visitors heard Eliot’s praying Indians teach and preach. The evangelist and statesman now became also theological professor, training a native ministry — that secret of the perpetuity of all mission work. He who had toiled for thirty-eight years to gather about thirty-six hundred converted Indians into fourteen settlements in 167 1, left twenty-four native preachers behind him when he died in 1690.

This versatile man was not only preacher and pastor, general and statesman, founder of model settlements and trainer of native evangelists; he was also a translator. In 1661 the New Testament, and two years later the Old Testament, were published in the native tongue; and so that famous Indian Bible, which has now no! one living reader, was the first Bible printed west of the Atlantic. As Bayard Taylor said of Humboldt — it is “not a ruin but a pyramid,” no mere lonely relic of the past for the curious antiquary, but a grand structure from whose lofty apex the red man got a glimpse of the City of God; and it is still a pillar of witness, testifying to one of God’s kings who, against such odds, builded this monument to the glory of God! Both as a memorial of holy zeal and as a testimony to fine scholarship, it merits what Edward Everett said of it, that ’ the history of the Christian Church contains no example of resolute, untiring labour superior to it.” Eliot likewise created for his beloved children of the forest a new Christian literature, translating such practical guides as ‘’ Baxter’s Call,” and preparing catechism and psalter to follow grammar and primer. When age and weakness kept him at home, and he could not go to his Indians, he besought families to send to him their negro servants that he might teach them saving truth.

Southey pronounced John Eliot ‘’one of the most extraordinary men of any country;” and Richard Baxter said there was ‘’ no other man whom he honoured above him.” We claim for him a certain priority of pedigree in this apostolic succession. In a peculiar sense he was, on this side the sea, father and founder of modern missions; for it was his life and work that moved and moulded David Brainerd, James Brainerd Taylor, Jonathan Edwards, Adoniram Judson, as also William Carey and others who followed him. Yet this stream of holy influence which watered so many trees of life, Eliot himself traces to its spring in the home of Hooker. ‘’When I came into this blessed family,” said he, “I saw as never before the power of godliness in its lively vigour and efficiency.” What a lesson in living! Eliot held for a time the position of usher in Hooker’s grammar school, and the family piety he saw exhibited there led to his conversion and consecration. Thus do the streams whose fountains are beneath the Temple of God flow softly through their hidden channels, and come up to the surface, from time to time, in some Siloam basin or Bethesda pool. Hooker reappears in Eliot, Eliot in Edwards, Edwards in Carey, Carey in Judson, and so on without end.

The last words on John Eliot’s lips were “Welcome, joy!” and were probably the response of the departing soul to the vision of bliss which glorified his dying moments. But there is a brief sentence written at the end of his Indian grammar which is the key to the lock of his life, furnishing at once the interpretation of the man and the revelation of his secret. As

I stood, in 1893, by the simple slab of stone that in a Boston burial-ground bears his name, that sentence seemed a fit motto for all true missions:

‘’ PRAYER AND PAINS
THROUGH FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST
WILL DO ANYTHING.”

Baron Justinian Ernst Von Welz — Pioneer to Dutch Guiana.

The roots of modern missions reach back to the Reformation, and the plant that hangs with such abundant fruit is at least four centuries old. But much of this growth was below the surface; and a distinct and definite line marks the last hundred years as the period of organized missionary effort.

Luther, and his fellow reformers, revived primitive apostolic faith, which must be the precursor and prepare the way if apostolic life and work are to follow. The Church must always be evangelical before it is evangelistic. Soon after the reformed faith had laid hold upon the convictions of God’s people, the debt of duty to a lost race began loudly to demand payment, and the Reformed Church felt the movings of a new impulse to spread the good tidings far and wide. But, after a thousand years of inaction, of spiritual sloth and sleep, apathy and lethargy loose their hold slowly, as the ice-bonds of an arctic winter yield to the summer sun. Here and there one man was reached and roused, his eyes opening to the fact that millions were dying without the gospel; his ears opening to the cry of want and woe which, like the moan and sob of waves on the sea-shore, tells of storm and wreck. Now and then a man went forth, while as yet the Church as a whole seemed locked in icy indifference and insensibility.

Von Welz, who belongs before Spener, Francke and Zinzendorf, is one of the precursors of the commg era of missions. About 1664 he issued his invitation for a society of Jesus, to promote Christianity and the conversion of heathendom; and the same year, another manifesto of Uke purport which, like Carey’s Inquiry into the Obligations of Christians, a hundred years later, turned a powerful search-light upon the superficial piety of his day and laid bare its hollo wness and shallowness.

There is something grand in this solitary man, blowing upon God’s silver trumpet a solemn alarm to set in motion the camps. No such voice had before been heard in the Reformed Church, but it awakened no sympathetic responsive echo. Those ‘Might words,” which are the “Devil’s keenest swords,” pierced him again and again. Unsparing ridicule and contemptuous opposition swept over him, but only to fix deeper the roots of his holy purpose, as storms fasten the cedars to the rock-sides of Lebanon. Another manifesto still more searching succeeded: an appeal to court preachers and learned professors to establish a college for training missionaries. Von Welz joined to the capacity of a statesman and organizer, the enthusiasm of a zealot, the persistency of a born leader, and the courage of a warrior. Because he would not keep silence but kept blowing his bugle blast in men’s ears, summoning the sleeping Church to propagate the faith among unbelieving peoples, he was laughed at as a dreamer and fanatic, and denounced as a hypocrite, heretic and blasphemer. Dr. Ursinus, severer in rebuke than Ryland was with Carey, prayed, concerning the proposed Jesus- Association, “protect us from it, dear Lord God,” as though the proposed missionary society and training college were to be classed with those malicious and seditious schemes from which the litany implores, “Good Lord, deliver us.” The famous doctor of Ratisbon regarded the heathen as dogs to whom we are not to give that which is holy, or swine that will wallow in the mire and trample under foot the pearls of the gospel, and he would have pfiven them over to work all uncleanness with greediness.

When the proposal to send out artisans and laymen to evangelize the heathen met, like other appeals, only rebuif and ridicule, that heroic soul that could not move others to action found relief in self-offering. Ordained an apostle to the gentiles by Breckling, a poor priest in Holland, Von Welz, like Zinzendorf after him, left behind his baronetcy and his baronial estate, and himself became the humble messenger to Dutch Guiana, where he laid down his life. Like other seers of God and prophets of humanity, he saw farther than his contemporaries; and, had the bold originality of his missionary schemes found earnest co-operation, organized missions might have found in the soil of Protestant Germany their germination at least a hundred years before Carey and his humble twelve sat down in widow Wallis’ parlor at Kettering.

Von Welz was another of the examples of which history is full, of great and extraordinary minds endowed with a consciousness of strength, impelled by a Divine impulse which is their truest and best adviser. There is a “perspicacity of eye “which is the direct effect of that mystic anointing with God’s own eye salve; and God’s born prophets must not be disobedient to the heavenly vision, though others see not the form and hear not the voice. Baron Von Welz could say of his manifestos what Thucydides said of his histories, * ‘I give these to the public as an everlasting possession, and not as a contentious instrument of temporary applause.”

Such men are God’s agitators, sent to marshal the conscience of the Church, to mould the law of its life and the methods of its work in conformity with His word and will. They are educators of the race, but too often they find dull pupils, that, ever learning, are never able to come to the full knowledge of the truth. To us it now seems incredible that the Austrian baron, who would found a new Jesus society — not a Jesuit order — to rally to itself those whom the love of Jesus constrained to bear His gospel to the lost, and who offered the capital of 30,000 thalers as a fund whose interest should support the missionaries in training, — should be met not only by the sneers of the worldly, but by the unsparing condemnation of leading Churchmen; that John Heinrich Ursinus, superintendent of Ratisbon, otherwise an excellent man, could so violently oppose a scheme which took all its inspiration from the New Testament! Yet, in so doing, he represented the general attitude of the Lutheran Church of his day.

The zeal of this first missionary martyr within the Lutheran Church, who found a grave at Surinam, may have flamed with excess of enthusiasm, but we cannot, with Plitt, dismiss him as a” missionary fanatic.” His motives were too unselfish, his purpose too lofty, his self-sacrifice too sublime, his appeals too scriptural and too spiritual, to be thus classed with the outcome of a half-disordered brain. How true it is that the madness of one generation is the wisdom of the next, and the fanaticism of one decade becomes the heroism of the next! The men that are martyrs to the hatred nd violence of one age, are the saints that a succeeding age canonizes. Would that we might not slay God’s prophets, leaving a wiser generation to pay its too tardy tribute at their sepulchres!

Bartholomew Ziegenbalg — Pioneer to India. 1683-1719.

If we seek the pioneer in the East Indies, we must go back beyond Duff and Carey to those devoted pietist missionaries, Bartholomew Ziegenbalg and Henry Pliitschau, who, in 1706, just one hundred years before Alexander Duff was born, landed at Tranquebar.

Ziegenbalg, born in Pulsnitz, Upper Lusatia, in 1683, and dying in India, of cholera, at thirty-six, crowded into twelve years of missionary life such abundant service as few of the most devoted men have ever offered to the Master on the altar of missions. Trained at Halle in theology and biblical literature, and ordained at Copenhagen in 1705, he arrived at Tranquebar after eight months at sea, only to be imprisoned by the Danish authorities. Unknown to him and his fellow-student, by the same vessel on which they sailed, secret instructions were despatched by the Danish East India Company, authorizing the governor at Tranquebar to block their way by every means and crush their mission in the bud. And the governor did his best to obey instructions.

These first Protestant missionaries that ever trod the soil of India, had gone over the wide seas to win a new empire for Christ, and as they stood, on the night after they landed, with no shelter but the sky and no companions but the stars, left by the governor to shift for themselves, a pathetic interest invests their loneliness. What a task before them, and what a welcome to their new field! One of the governor’s suite took pity upon them and they found for the first few days a place of sojourn; then they were allowed to occupy a house upon the wall, close by the heathen quarters; and, all undaunted by difficulties, Ziegenbalg, six days after his landing, was busy at Tamil, though he had neither dictionary, grammar nor alphabet. He sat down with native children, writing with fingers on the sand to learn the strange language in which were locked up the secrets of access to the people and their religion.

By almost unparalleled industry and application, he could in eight months talk in Tamil. All day long “busied with reading and writing, translating and reciting, he managed not only to master the intricate construction of the language, but to catch the inflection and tone in pronunciation, so that in 1709, Tamil was to him as his native German. He had now, however, made only a start, and applied himself to the making of a grammar and two lexicons, which together contained nearly 60,000 words. Before he had been in India two years, the translation of the New Testament was in progress, and within a third year completed. Then, when serious illness hindered other work, he began the Old Testament.

Here was a young missionary of twenty-six, preaching in Tamil, and giving the people the New Testament in their own tongue. On the ship sailing from Copenhagen he had learned the broken Portuguese dialect that all along the coast was used by the half-breeds, and he turned this to good use, opening a school and preaching service for such as could be reached by this language; and the first fruits of his labour were five converted slaves of Danish masters within the first year after his arrival, and, four months later, nine adult Hindus.

Against the persistent opposition of the governor, and the failure of funds to carry on the mission, in 1708, Ziegenbalg made his pioneer preaching tour into the kingdom of Tanjore, and at Negapalam began his friendly conferences with the Brahmans. He not only first gave India a Tamil New Testament and vernacular dictionaries, but he set up the first press.

Left alone by Pliitschau’s return, he was himself driven home by sickness. In 17 15 he suddenly appeared in Denmark; then hurried into Germany to Francke and Halle, preaching to crowds that no church could hold; then Tvith his newly wedded wife, hurrying through Holland to London, he went back to Tranquebar, where he found the governor who had tyrannically fought him displaced by a warm friend of missions.

For two years more, as though he felt that death was approaching, with almost reckless enthusiasm he sped toward his goal — the winning of India for Christ. At Christmastide, 1 718, he preached, but a week later his voice was so feeble that he could scarce be heard, and he never again spoke in public. On the last Sunday his bed was his pulpit, and from his pillow he exhorted his native converts to hold fast the faith. Soon after morning prayer, February 23, 17 19, the chill of death was upon him.

Two scenes, one at the beginning, the other at the end of this singularly devoted life, should be placed side by side for the lessons they teach. When his mother died she left to her children as her last legacy, “a great treasure,” which she bade them seek in the Bible. ^’ There,” said she, “you will find it; there is not a page that I have not wet with my tears.”

Ziegenbalg was very young at the time, but he never forgot the impression of those words; and when he went to India, his mother’s legacy to him was the treasure he sought to bequeath to his converts. And when about himself to depart, so intense was the glory that smote him, that he suddenly put his hands to his eyes, exclaiming, “How is it so bright, as if the sun shone full in my face!” Soon after, he asked that his favourite hymn might be sung, “Jesus, meine zuversicht” (my confidence), and on the wings of sacred song he took his flight, leaving behind over three hundred and fifty converts, catechumens and pupils, a missionary seminary and a Tamil lexicon, but best of all the Tamil Bible.

When, a hundred and thirty-four years later, Alexander Duff stood in the pulpit where Ziegenbalg, as well as Grundler and Schwartz, so often told of Jesus, his heart swelled with emotion. To him the Danish missionary was, among all that had gone to India, not only great, but “first, inferior to none, scarcely second to any that followed him.” On the sides of a plain altar lay the dust of Ziegenbalg and Grundler, those two men of such ‘’brief but brilliant and immortal careers in the mighty work of Indian evangelization,” whose ‘’ lofty and indomitable spirit breathed the most fervid piety.”*

As truly as Ignatius or Huss, Ziegenbalg was a martyr of Christ. But, as Shelley’s heart was found unconsumed in the ashes of his pyre on Italy’s shore, the heart of such a pioneer is still the inspiration of all later heroism. Whatever property Ziegenbalg had in himself was made over to God, unencumbered with mortgages; to him self-denial was a joy, and sacrifice was amply compensated by service. Like the Maid of Orleans, he would ‘’rather have died than do anything which was known to be contrary to the will of God;” and, like Richard Knill, his contribution to missions was the offering of himself.

For courageous faith and patient faithfulness, for keen insight and practical wisdom, for untiring industry and deep devotion, few missionaries anywhere have equalled Bartholomew Ziegenbalg; and we cannot but see him repeated and reproduced in that most conspicuous figure in India during the eighteenth century, Christian Frederick Schwartz, who like him was a German, a student and translator in Tamil, ordained at Copenhagen, and who sailed to Tranquebar. These two men, though one life measured but half the other’s in years, wielded a power in India that can be measured only at the last day.

Hans Egede — The Apostle of Greenland.
1686-1758.

We turn now toward that repellant clime, the frozen pole, to find another example of one whom God called and thrust forth to unfurl the flag of the cross upon the ice-castles of the north.

It was early in the last century that a humble Dane who was the village pastor in Vaagen, off the Norway coast, in the Lifoden Isles, felt oppressed

* Smith’s Short History.

with the woe and want of the heathen a thousand miles away toward the pole; and, like Nehemiah at the court of Esther, his face betrayed his sorrow of heart, so that not only his wife but his parishioners sought a reason for his troubled looks. His was a secret that could not be kept. By a seeming accident Hans Egede had read of the discovery of Greenland by Norwegian sailors about the close of the tenth century; of the successful preaching of the gospel among the rude people of those climes; of the subsequent ice blockade, and the black pest which, in the fifteenth century, broke off communication, so that for nearly three centuries these poor heathen had been left to relapse into darkness without any man who cared for their souls.

Hans Egede could not say why he should feel such concern for those toward whom no one else seemed to be drawn; but he could rest neither day nor night for thinking of them; and he ventured at last to open his heart to his dear “Gertrude.” But, like many another, she found the home-work a sufficient apology for staying at Vaagen, and could neither sympathize with nor understand this yearning for souls three hundred leagues away. Wife and children and parish were to her field enough for apostolic labors and denials, and she begged Hans to dismiss his anxieties, her earnest pleading waxing at last into virtuous indignation at the mistaken zeal that would turn him from duties close at hand to go on a vague mission to the ends of earth.

God was dealing with her husband, and he could only answer that the Lord would have him do something for Greenland: of that he was sure. He was persuaded to wait, and four years passed away. Greenland seemed to find another ice blockade in Egede’s heart. Then came three signs from God; two bishops wrote letters, respectively from Drontheim and Bergen, both urging Egede to take up this mission; and a rich merchant made offer of transportation, and help in founding a colony. Egede felt that God was both thrusting him forth and opening the door; but his reluctant wife was now joined by a sorrowing church, and again Hans Egede consented to wait, but solemnly added: “Twice God has called me — if again He calls, I go.”

About a year after, the third call came; and this time it came through his wife, Gertrude. Thorns had been planted in the household nest, and she was restless and unhappy. Some hostile elements in the parish made her home-life bitter, and Vaagen lost its charm. God was stirring up the nestling and preparing his eaglet for a flight. Half a night was spent on her knees. Then she asked little Paul, her youngest child, whether she should go with his father to the poor heathen across the sea; and out of the mouth of a babe and suckling God spoke once more, for he said, * ‘Yes, let us go; and I will tell them of Jesus and teach them to say, * Our Father!’” And so, after six years of waiting and watching for God’s time to come, the wife, too, felt God thrusting her forth, and now her faith went beyond her husband’s.

Early in 1 7 2 1 the ship was ready to set sail: and when Hans Egede had his foot on the plank to go on board, some sailors warned him that death awaited him if he ventured to those inhospitable shores. They said they had come from Greenland and barely escaped being eaten by those cannibals who dwelt there and who had eaten some of their party. Was this God’s voice of warning? The Vaagen pastor took his four children by the hand and turned back. But Gertrude now led the way, crying, “O ye of little faith!” and boldly crossed the plank. To her this was no sign that they were to stay at home; it was a test, from God, of their worthiness to undertake for Him; and taking her seat in the boat she bade her family follow.

They set sail, and, while the husband and children wept, her face shone as if it were the face of an angel. They undertook as pioneers to preach the gospel in that foreign land, and with some forty settlers founded the Christian colony of which God-thaab, (Good Hope) is the capital.

The story of Egede is one of severe hardship, but it is so full of startling marvels that Christlieb has referred to it as one of the many instances which modern missions furnish of that supernatural working which seems to reproduce the apostolic age. Those stupid dwarfs, like the icebergs and snowfields about them, seemed frozen into insensibility; and, feeling that only some sure sign of Divine power could melt their stolid apathy, Egede boldy asked for the gift of healing, and was permitted in scores of cases to exercise it, while his wife received the gift of prophecy, predicting in the crisis of famine the very day and hour when a ship should come bearing supplies!

When Christian VI. discouraged the settlement on account of the severe hardships and bitter disappointment of the half famished colonists, the work of Egede seemed to have come to naught. But by a very marvellous leading of God, where the mission of Egede ended, Moravian missions began. For, in 1 731, at the coronation of Frederick’s successor to the throne, the young Count Zinzendorf represented the Saxon court; and meeting two Eskimo converts of Egede, learned that the mission work was to be abandoned. This was one of the main influences that, in the next year, moved the young count, and through him the Brotherhood, to send to the West Indies Dober and Nitschmann, and to organize a mission work that should know no limits but the wide world.

Count Von Zinzendorf — The Moravian Apostle. 1700-1760.

To Philip James Spener, head of this pietist school, and to Francke, his greater disciple, this Moravian bishop’s spiritual lineage must be traced. His grandfather, an Austrian noble, had for the Lord’s sake given up all his estates, and that heroic example of self-denial his grandmother and aunt had emphasized by such holy training, that the lad, at four years, formally covenanted with his “dear Saviour,” ‘’Be thou Mine and I will be Thine.” He so longed for communion with his unseen Lord, that in childish simplicity he was wont to write letters to Jesus, in which he laid bare his heart, and, confident that He would get and read them, tossed them from the castle window.

When but ten years old, the pupil of Francke at Halle, we find him forming prayer circles, and the Order of the Grain of Mustard-seed, whose members were to sow in other hearts the seed of the Kingdom. Though drawn to classic pursuits and tempted by rank and riches, his life-motto was that of Tholuck after him: ‘’I have one passion; it is He and He alone:” and it was this, that amid the gaieties of Paris and the snares of Dresden, held him fast to Christ. To this, even the new passion of love was at once brought into subjection; he would marry only in the Lord, and his unique covenant of wedlock involved a mutual renunciation of rank, a consecration of wealth, and a dedication of self to the Lord and His work. From this marriage-altar two pilgrims went forth, as from the paschal supper in Egypt, with loins girt and staff in hand, for a new Exodus.

On their wedding-tour, they found the Moravian exiles taking refuge at Berthelsdorf, and welcomed them to build there, Herrnhut; and the seal of the Unitas Fratriini became the count’s true coat of arms — a lamb on a crimson ground with the cross of resurrection, and a banner of triumph, with the motto: “Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur.” — “Our Lamb has won; let us follow Him.” Zinzendorf began with the resolve that wherever the Lord had need of him he would find his native land; and a little later could say that he would rather be hated for Christ’s sake than be loved for his own.

His history merges into that of the Moravian Brotherhood, which at the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its mission work, in 1882, had sent forth 2,170 missionaries, planted 113 stations, 211 schools, and 89 Sunday schools, with a total of 23,000 pupils, and expended 52,000 pounds yearly, at a cost of only three per cent, for administration.

The Unitas Fratrum is the pioneer church in missions. This brotherhood is in the direct line of descent from the Bohemian martyr, Huss, and his contemporary Chelczicky. In 1467, a few Bohemians formed themselves into an apostolic Church. Tradition traces the ordination of their first bishop to a Waldensian priest; and so the Moravians are linked to the martyrs both of Bohemia and of the Vaudois valleys. Their doctrine took form both in the mould of Luther and of Calvin, as became a Church that was to be known alike for its vigorous faith and its spirit of reform. Persecution wrought the red cross into the Moravian robe, and in 1722, Christian David, the carpenter, led a mere band of eleven exiles across the frontier into Saxony.

How God teaches us not to despise the day of small things! They remind us of the eleven Apostles at Jerusalem and of the twelve Baptists at Kettering. Five years after they settled on the site of Herrnhut, they were but three hundred strong, with Zinzendorf practically at their head; and August 13, 1727, is still kept as the spiritual birthday of the renewed Church. Ten years later the count became their bishop, and for twenty-three years, until his death in 1760, their “advocate.” To his leadership is due more than human annals record. Each morning gives a new text as a watchword; and certain members of the band keep up the hourly prayer, as vestals guarded the sacred fires and lamps. Death is a joyous home-going to be announced with song and trumpet.

The Brethren caught the spirit of their leader; the *’ seed corn “at Halle has grown into the “Diaspora” at Herrnhut, whose principle, as its name implies, is Dispersion. God has given to the Moravians to prove the power of the spirit of missions, and to make real what too many even yet treat as an impracticable ideal. The Diaspora is one hundred and sixty-seven years old, has over sixty central stations, numbers over seventy thousand members, and stands for the home mission. To contact with its working force the Wesleys and Whitefield owed their kindling of evangelistic zeal.

But it is the foreign missions of the Herrnhut band that furnish us our most pertinent example. When in 1732 the settlement was but ten years old and numbered but six hundred, Dober sailed for the West Indies; and, soon after, the United Brethren were planting the cross in Greenland and Lapland, the Americas and Africa. Less than one hundred and sixty years later, there were one hundred and thirty-three stations and filials; three hundred and forty-three missionaries and nearly fivefold as many native helpers; thirty thousand communicants, and nearly twice as many more baptized adults; and two hundred and thirty-two schools with twenty thousand pupils.

All Christendom may well stop to gaze at the unique spectacle of a Church, having in its missions almost three times as many communicants and baptized adults as in the home Church of its three provinces: British, German and American; a Church, which, while Protestant Churches at large send one member out of five thousand to the foreign field, sends one out of ninety-two! A like ratio throughout the Churches generally would put in the regions beyond three hundred and eighty thousand Protestant missionaries!

Let us fix in mind the leading features of this foremost missionary Church.

First, its Evangelistic Basis. It holds itself in debt to a lost world, and in trust with the gospel: as trustees to discharge the obligation of debtors. All are trained to service, to work for the common good of the Brotherhood and the redemption of the race; to have few wants, frugal habits and readiness for self-sacrifice. Missions are thus not the exception but the law. Prompt obedience to any clear leading of God is the base-block of daily life. Zinzendorf asked a brother if he would go to Greenland. ‘’ Certainly.” “When?” ‘^ To-morrow.” Any Church destitute of the spirit of missions is considered dead, and every disciple without service, an apostate.

Again, the law of preference. The worst and most hopeless fields have the first claim. Mary Lyon reflected their unselfishness when she advised her students at Holyoke to be ready to go where no one else would, or as a poor negro slave phrased it,” where dere is most debbil.” It was Moravian blood that impelled William Augustine Johnson to choose Sierra Leone, because it was the worst field known; and so Hans Egede became an exile in the land of eternal snow, Dober offered to sell himself into slavery to reach the slaves of St. Thomas, and later martyrs have scaled Thibet’s mountain walls to unfurl the flag of the cross above the shrine of the Grand Lama.

Again, zeal for Divine approval. Wordly ambition is ruled out of the Moravian life. Evangelism, not proselytism, is their principle. Increase of numbers is no object; and hence there is no counting of converts or overlooking of quality in quantity. Of denominational growth they are not jealous, and rather prefer not to extend their borders. To them alone belongs the rare distinction of a litany with this unique petition:

“From the unhappy desire of being great,

Good Lord, deliver us’-”

Holy living, ceaseless praying, cheerful giving.

constitute their conception of discipleship, and the open secret of that Brotherhood, which, fewest in numbers and poorest in resources, leads the van of missions.

Christian Friederich Schwartz — Founder of the Native Christian Church in India. 1726-1798.

Here was another of Germany’s contributions to the mission field. When at the University of Halle, he studied Tamil that he might superintend the issue of a Bible in that tongue; and, though this purpose was not carried into effect, he was unconsciously fitting for a singularly useful work at the centre of oriental missions. Francke, knowing that he had learned Tamil, urged him to undertake a mission to India; and in January, 1750, the meridian year of the eighteenth century, he set sail, unaccompanied even by a wife, that he might be the more single-eyed in his devotion to His Master’s work.

He was successively identified with Tranquebar, Trichinopoly and Tan j ore. But Schwartz left his track over all India, and he can be traced in footprints of light after one hundred and fifty years. Such was his influence as a man of God that both friends and foes alike looked upon him with an awe akin to worship. He was a day’s man betwixt contending parties, a whole court of arbitration in himself. He acted as embassy to treat with Hyder Ali and saved Tanjore. The cruel and vindictive despot gave orders: “Let the venerable Father Schwartz pass unmolested!” When, after nearly half a century of work in India, he was not for God took him, he was mourned by a whole nation. The prince of Tanjore wept over his bier and the Rajah himself built him a monument.

Bishop Heber described him as ‘’one of the most active, fearless and successful missionaries who have appeared since the Apostles,” and it is a curious exampie of apostolic succession in missions that William Carey had been five years in Serampore, when Schwartz was translated to a higher sphere.

‘’ Father Schwartz” wielded a sceptre in India more potent than even Zeigenbalg, who landed at Tranquebar twenty years before Schwartz was born. It may be worth while to notice the steps by which such a career was prepared. Born in 1726, he was left motherless while yet an infant. But, as his mother died, she gave her boy into the hands of her Lutheran pastor and weeping husband, with this solemn charge, which recalls the story of little Samuel:” For this child I prayed, and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of Him. Therefore, also, have I lent him to the Lord. So long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord. Take him, and foster in him any aptitude which he may show for the Christian ministry. This is my last legacy,”

The dying commission of this modern Hannah was fulfilled. His father trained young Schwartz to simple, self-denying habits; sent him at eight years of age to the grammar school at Sonnenberg, where he got a good start in Latin, Greek and Hebrew; then eight years later he transferred him to a higher school at Ciistrin. There unhappily, his youthful passions, not yet under the discipline of moral restraint, led him into dissipation, and it seemed as though his mother’s ‘’last legacy” would not prove also a prophecy.

But God remembered his covenant. The lad was kept back from presumptuous sins. He came under Francke’s influence, became interested in his orphan houses, and studied at the university where Francke taught. That marvellous man drew him with cords of love, led him to a true consecration, and introduced him to Schiiltze who had been twenty years in India, and was then at Halle to print the Tamil Bible. Under the contagious enthusiasm of this saintly missionary, the seed planted in the boy’s heart by his mother found its growth in the man’s life and character.

But its full ripeness was reserved for the oriental clime. On the voyage to India, his remarkable linguistic powers were again brought into play, for he so acquired the English tongue as to be able to preach in that language on his arrival at Tranquebar. Within four months, he preached with ease in the native dialect; then mastered Persian, and so had access to the greatest of Mohammedan princes; by his acquaintance with Hindustani, he became invaluable in the service of the British Government; and further acquired the Hindu- Portuguese, that he might reach the mixed race descended from this double ancestry.

His passion to save men made all labour and sacrifice seem little. He studied the habits, modes of thought and idioms of speech, and even the mazes of mythology, which are the paths to the hearts of the Hindus. But above all he set himself so to live in God as by his life to compel men to think of God. No hindrance was or is so serious to mission work as the utter and often shameless wickedness of those who in the eye of the native population stand for “Christians.” The Indians of the West said of their Spanish conquerors in Central America, “If they are to be in heaven, we prefer hell;” and the Indians of the East replied to those who preached to them purity, ‘’If only the pure in heart can see God, it is sure that your countrymen will not be found in heaven.”

But the character of Schwartz was a sermon that convinced the gainsayers. He spared not himself nor counted his own life dear. With an energy and unselfishness that have almost no parallel, as they had almost no limit, early and late he gave himself to work, and what his hands found to do he did with his might. His discourse before a small native congregation was prepared with as much care as if for courts and crowned heads of Europe. The country became dotted with native churches.

He was but forty years old when events occurred which stamped his career as unique, even in the history of mission enterprise. The Society for Promoting- Christian Knowledge chose Schwartz for its new mission at Trichinopoly. His whole allowance was fifty pounds a year. He lived in a small room and on a diet of rice and vegetables. A church was built to hold two thousand people, but he would not allow his work in an English garrison ‘to hinder his greater work among the natives. With the humblest of them he conferred and counselled, and the proud Brahmans were often won by his arguments, though they, like the Pharisees, feared to confess Christ, lest they should be put out of their “synagogues.” In 1769 he so charmed Rajah Taljajee by his thanks before meat, and his holy conversation, that when Schwartz left Tanjore, the Rajah persuaded him to return; and so great was his influence on the Rajah’s subjects that they declared that if their prince would set the example his followers would all become Christians; and the Rajah might perhaps have confessed Christ but for the violent opposition of his court.

Henceforth Schwartz went by the name of the “Padre,” and was free to go where he would, preaching and teaching. His life was a living epistle of Christ, a whole volume of Christian evidence and apologetics. One young nabob said, ‘’Until you came we thought of Europeans as godless men who did not know the use of prayers.” When chosen as the only man fit to treat with Hyder Ali, lest his hands should even seem defiled with presents he would take nothing beyond bare travelling expenses; and his candour and courtesy won even that tyrant, so that on a subsequent occasion he said, “Send to me none of your agents, for I trust neither their words nor pledges: send me the Christian missionary and I will receive him.” In the awful famine when Tanjore was laid waste, the Rajah said, ‘’ We have all lost our credit; let us try whether the people will trust Schwartz,” who was authorized to arrange as he could; and in two days a thousand oxen and eighty thousand measures of rice were ready for the starving garrison.

This one man, by the simple force of his piety, was not only preacher and pastor, but patriarch. He made laws and gave judgment. He ministered to living and dead. When punishment for slight offences became necessary, the culprits besought that he might himself inflict the penalty, and from his judgment there was no attempt or desire to appeal. When, in 1787, the Rajah died, his influence prevented the suttee at the funeral. All unsought by him, the magistracy of the country was in the hands of this saintly missionary. Freedom from deceitfulness and selfishness made him the organizer of cosmical order in the midst of social chaos.

After forty-eight years of consecrated service he died, his clear voice still ringing out his favourite hymn:

“Only to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ.”

The Rajah’s heir, Serjofee, could not be kept, even by Hindu custom, from taking his place as a chief mourner; and three years later, at his own cost, built him a superb marble monument, executed by Flaxman. The epitaph he himself wrote, the first English verse ever known to be written by a native Hindu:

“Firm wast Thou, humble and wise,
Honest and pure; free from disguise;
Father of orphans, the widow’s support;
Comfort in sorrow of every sort.
To the benighted dispenser of light,
Doing, and pointing to that which is right.
Blessing to princes, to people, to me,
May I, my Father, be worthy of Thee,
Wisheth and prayeth thy Sarabojee.”

William Carey — Pioneer in Organized Missions. 1761-1834.

To the Paulerspury ‘’ cobbler,” the famous missionary, Orientalist, translator, has long been conceded a front rank among pioneers of modern missions and the new apostles.

He was born the year after Zinzendorf died. At fourteen years of age a shoemaker’s apprentice, he was converted at about eighteen, and soon after reaching majority joined the Baptists; three years later he was ordained minister, serving churches first at Moulton and then at Leicester; then in 1793, going with Thomas, as the first missionary from Britain to India. When he died at seventy-three he had for half a century been the leading spirit in modern missions to the heathen.

Several significant stages of progress are noticeable in this leadership. First the kindling of the fires in his own soul and the feeding of them with the fuel of facts; then the carrying of the live coals to other fireless altars, fanning the embers until they burned and glowed, and guarding the feeble flame lest it be smothered by the ashes of apathy, dampened by the atmosphere of selfishness, scattered by the breath of ridicule, or quenched by the wet earth of open hostility. A very distinct stride forward was taken in organizing that parent society at Kettering, among whose original twelve we strangely miss Carey’s own name. Then, the next year he became its first representative, and actually arrived at Serampore to give forty years of service to the field in India.

Carey’s life is luminous with lessons. First of all, we learn the worth of hard work. He disclaimed genius, but claimed ‘’plodding,” as his secret. He dug down deep into God’s word to find His will. In the reading of Cook’s ‘’Voyages,” he went with him “round the world,” to learn man’s state and need, and so he yearned to bring God’s word and that world together, that human want might find its supply, and human woe its solace. From shoe-shop at Hackleton to pulpit and chair at Serampore, he was the same tireless plodder. Up to 1832 he had issued more than two hundred thousand Bibles, wholly or in part, and in forty dialects, beside other printed matter, including valuable grammars and dictionaries of Bengali, Mahratta, Sanskrit, etc. For twenty-nine years he was Oriental professor at Fort William College in Calcutta.

Carey’s force lay in character. What he wrought as a missionary pioneer must find its main explanation in what he was, as a man of men, a man of God. Not what one seems, but what one is, fixes the limit of power; the level beyond which the stream never rises is the character which is its source and its spring. ^’ To “or not to be, that is the question.” Reputation is at best but the reflection of character, and often very imperfect and unfaithful; the echo, faint, feeble, far off; but if the man be what he ought, others may filch from him his ‘’good name,” but he is not made poor.

Because of what Carey was, he bore without harm the brunt of a hard, long fight; even the keen blade of unsanctified wit, when used against him, only dulled its edge and blunted its point upon the shield of his manly aim and faith in God. To all accusers, traducers, ridiculers, his life gave the lie.

The energy of his will, every purposeful soul may emulate and imitate. Life that is aimless is both restless and forceless. On the walls of society how many a trumpet hangs, as we saw in the case of young Raimund Lull, useless, voiceless, rusty! it has no lustre and gives forth no music, and is losing the power to emit sound. What an hour of redemption, when some brave warrior lays hands on the long unused instrument, puts it to his lips and blows a bugle blast!

96 THE NEW ACTS Ol THE APOSTLES.

Young men — you whose life hangs idle, aimless, mute, while the right is battling with the wrong, would that some hero-spirit might set you quivering and resounding with the clarion-peal of a holy purpose to serve God and man! No work is so wearisome as doing nothing, no self-sacrifice so costly as self-indulgence. Could you wear the ^’ magic skin” which makes sure the gratification of every selfish whim, it would shrink with every new carnal pleasure and so at last crush out all true life.

From the cradle to the grave an indomitable will, yoked to a consecrated aim, bore Carey onward, tipward, like the black horse of the rail, over torrents, up mountains, drawing after him more passive and less positive and resolute souls. With little teaching he became learned; poor himself he made millions rich; by birth obscure he rose to unsought eminence; and seeking only to follow the Lord’s leading, himself led on the Lord’s host.

Carey had passion for souls, and, therefore, enthusiasm for missions: for human uplifting makes toil sweet, and loss, gain. Self-denial was his habit, and all the accumulations of his life in India were turned to the cause of God; when his income reached ^^1500 he reserved less than fifty for his personal expenses, devoting the rest to the purposes of the mission. This reminds us of Wesley, who kept his personal outlay down to twenty-eight pounds a year, though his income rose from fifty to five hundred.

Carey’s companions felt that God was behind him, and this constrained them no longer to resist what at first seemed the wild scheme of a fanatic, lest haply they should have been found fighting against God. Dr. Ryland confessed that God himself had infused into him that passionate solicitude for the salvation of the heathen which could be traced to no other sufficient source. He who, like Bunyan, had been given to dishonesty and profanity; whose untamed tongue had been too familiar with the serpent-slime of filth and lies, was from the hour of conversion a new man. His native aptitude for linguistic study early led him to search into Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and Dutch; and his deep sense of human need and gospel power, drew him toward painstaking investigation into the state of the heathen, and into the Bible as the secret of saving grace.

Holy zeal consumed him. For ten years, with increasing ardour and fervour, he urged in private and public prompt and united effort for a world’s evangelization. Whether mending a shoe, reading a book, or teaching a boy, he was ‘’ absent-minded,” for his ‘thoughts wandered to the ends of the earth; he saw a thousand millions of lost souls without Bible, or preacher, or knowledge of Christ. He read Cook’s “Voyages “till he knew as much as the writer, of the degradation and destitution he had seen; then he bought what other books he could, and borrowed what he could not buy; until he had picked up in fragments a mass of information so incredible that he became a living encyclopedia of missions, and even Scott was glad to stop at ‘^ Carey’s College” as he went from Olney to Northampton, and so the commentator sat at the cobbler’s feet to be taught.

Andrew Fuller found him at Moulton, a mapmaker. Out of such crude materials as a cobbler’s shop could furnish, with paper, paste and ink, he had outlined the countries of the world, representing to the eye the appalling facts about the race and the awful darkness and death-shade in the various lands of cruelty and idolatry and superstition. It was thus that he was prepared, when but thirty-one years old, to publish his powerful ‘’Inquiry into the Obligations of Christians,” and in the same year at Nottingham to preach that great sermon which has given a movement and a motto to missions for a century past, and which led to the great step at Kettering, the same year, which proved the turning point of missionary organization.

Behold the strange retributions and revohitions of history! Sydney Smith put Carey and his comrades in the pillory, and pelted them with pitiless mockery. To-day, not the Church only but the world honours with homage the name and memory of that “sanctified cobbler.” Let men ridicule! There is a Nemesis of Providence whose hand holds a scourge, not of small cords, but of scorpion stings. The ‘’ apostates of the anvil and the loom” have become God’s apostles of the new Acts, and their witty clerical reviler is now in the pillory!

Ah, ye humble working men, who, like those primitive disciples who forsook ship and tax bench to be Christ’s heralds, have left shoe-shop and shepherd’s fold, forge and anvil, plough and shuttle, for the sake of the Kingdom, what crowns of glory await you when the final day of awards rights the wrong of the ages I

Robert Morrison — The Apostle of China.
1782-1834.

This famous ‘’last-maker” of Morpeth always brings to mind one who was born twenty-one years in advance of him, the cobbler of Hackleton: for as Carey wrought on boots, so Morrison, wrought on boot-trees. Like Carey, he had but an elementary education, and yet had such burning passion for knowledge that he worked at his trade with book open beside him and gave to study the spare hours even of the night. At fifteen years of age he joined the Scotch Church, and at nineteen — again like Carey — was digging deep among the roots of Latin and Hebrew tongues, and the more intricate mysteries of theology.

While yet a student at Hoxton, Morrison chose the mission field, and in 1804 was accepted by the London Missionary Society and designated for China. Two years were given to special preparation, studying- that strange language under a native teacher. He who undertakes the mastery of the Chinese tongue will find his patience and perseverance tested. It has been said to demand ‘’ a head of iron, a chest of oak, nerves of steel, the patience of Job and the years of Methusaleh.” And yet we find Morrison plodding away undismayed at the task he had undertaken and laboriously copying Chinese manuscripts in the British Museum.

In 1807 he sailed for the Middle Kingdom as an ordained missionary at the age of twenty-five. But Chinese hostility to everything British compelled him to go by way of New York City, from which place he bore to the American Consul at Canton a letter from the United States Secretary of State, James Madison.

Reaching Canton in September, he took lodging in the humblest quarters, adopting for the time native habits both of dress and of diet. Forbidden to preach, he made closer search into the perplexities of the native language, and in 18 10, three years after landing, he actually put in print the first copy of any portion of the Scriptures ever issued by a Protestant missionary in the Chinese tongue. Four years later he had completed the translation of the whole New Testament, and with the aid of William Milne, who joined him in 18 13, in four years more he had ready the entire Old Testament also. It seems incredible, but it is true, that in 182 1, less than fourteen years after he set foot on Chinese soil, this one man gave to the Celestials the complete Word of God in their own vernacular. This was a herculean labor, and can be appreciated only by those who have undertaken a similar task amid circumstances equally discouraging, disheartening and difficult.

But this missionary Hercules hasother ‘’ labours,” as worthy to be reckoned among gigantic achievements. During the eleven years between 1807 and

1818, he had also prepared and published a Chinese grammar of three hundred pages, quarto; and a ‘* View of China,” for philological purposes. Verily, there have been giants, even in these modern days, who have confronted, undismayed, foes more formidable than the Anakim with their chariots of iron. To create a new version of the Scriptures — a first attempt, without either helpful precedents or adequate linguistic helps — was an undertaking from which any man but Morrison or Carey would have shrunk back dismayed.

These labours were literally colossal. The Old Testament alone formed twenty-one volumes duodecimo; but even such tasks were followed by a greater, for he compiled a Chinese dictionary, which he published in the same year with the completed Bible, and which cost the East India Company five thousand pounds sterling to issue!

When Morrison died in 1834, he had devoted twenty-seven years to China as a missionary teacher, translator of God’s Word, and distributor of a new and sacred literature. He had laid at Malacca in 18 18 the foundations of the Anglo-Chinese College, which was afterward removed to Hong-Kong; and himself gave toward the buildings and the support of the infant enterprise, twenty-two hundred pounds.

The University of Glasgow sought to pay a tribute to his great intellectual worth, when it conferred upon him, at the early age of thirty-five, the degree of doctor in divinity; and the nation honored him eight years later by making him a Fellow of the Royal Society; and George IV. granted him a special audience, on which occasion he presented the king with a copy of his translation of the Scriptures into the Chinese tongue.

But these honours pale beside the crown which God placed upon his head in permitting him to be the great pioneer in that most huge and hoary empire of Asia. What a conspicuous example is Morrison of that grand truth, so needful to be learned, that no man’s true work can be measured by man’s yardstick. Morrison was only a pioneer. He led the way, and that is all. The end of his work as a philologist and translator was but the beginning of the work of evangelization and education which others have done after him and are now doing. Morrison toiled hard but saw little fruit of his toil. He broke up the fallow soil, sowed the seed, but never saw the harvest and put in the sickle. The same year in which he gave the New Testament to the people, he baptized the first Chinese convert, and for four years Tsai-a-Ko adorned the doctrine, until he was called up into the true country of the Celestials. But Morrison’s reward was postponed for a future day. He ordained to the ministry Leang-Afa, after eight years, during which he had tested his fitness for the work. To pressnt a nation whose population represents one-fourth of the human race, with the entire Bible; to lay the foundations of a Christian college among them; to gather to Christ the first convert, and ordain the first native evangelist, is enough for one man. But, be it remembered, that as this work of missions is all ^’ God’s building,” he who lays the foundation-stones, down deep, out of sight, and whose work may be forgotten by man in the grandeur of more conspicuous and famous achievement, has in God’s eyes equal honour and shall have equal reward with him who lays the capstone upon a completed structure amid shouts of joy and triumph. The rough base-blocks lie beneath the surface, hidden from human gaze — but they hold up the whole building. But for them the stately column with its delicate tracery, the graceful arch, the sculptured frieze and cornice, the tapering spire or pinnacle, or the glorious dome, were impossible. And so, when China’s evangelization is complete, and the temple of God stands in perfect beauty, Robert Morrison’s work will receive both its full recognition and reward.

Samuel J. Mills — Founder of Missions, in America. 1783-1818.

Here is another example of spiritual heredity. This son of a Torring-ford minister was from birth the subject of pious instruction; but the influence that shaped his character antedated even his birth, for his mother declared that she had consecrated him, while yet unborn, to the service of God as a missionary. And from the hour of conversion, he felt an unconquerable desire, which might better be called a passion, for service in regions beyond. This passion instead of cooling with years rather burned more hotly, and during his college career at Williamstown, from 1806 to 1809, was a consuming flame. There he formed the little band whose professed purpose was to ‘* effect in the persons of its members a mission to the heathen”; and in 1810, at Andover, Hall, Newell, Judson and Nott joined him in that memorial to the General Association of Massachusetts which led to the formation of the American Board, the pioneer of all societies, on this side of the sea, for carrying the gospel to the world.

This man, little known as he is even to this day, was the moving spring behind much of the machinery of missions both at home and abroad. President Griffin of Williams College declared that, from the mind of Mills and from the little society he formed at college came not only the great Missionary Board, but the American Bible Society, United Foreign Missionary Society, and African School under care of the Synods of New York and New Jersey; and all the impulse given to Domestic Missions, to the Colonization Society, and to the general cause of benevolence in both hemispheres.

The name oi’ Samuel J. Mills thus stands high in rank, for he was in a sense the father and founder of missions in America. About the time when Carey was dreaming, over his cobbling, of the thousand millions without Christ, Mills was born, in 1783. Before birth a godly mother, as we have seen, consecrated him to missions; at fifteen the Spirit’s “demonstration,” with its swift logic of the lightning-flash revealed to him his lost state and his Saviour; and from the hour when he knew himself a miracle of grace, like Saul of Tarsus he had but one aim. Conversion was, with him, consecration, illumination, revelation, all at once. God had plainly set him apart to a missionary career, but none the less did he set himself apart. Active benevolence was the one law of his life, and wherever he was or went, he found a field for his activity.

His life was apparently 2^ failure to carry out his original design. What at first he willed to do he never lived to work out; it remained like the unfinished statue of the sculptor, where the chisel has just begun to show the beauty of the ideal form. And yet no man’s life was ever a truer success. In a way wholly unforeseen and unique, he fulfilled God’s purpose, and it proved larger in scope and grander in result than his own. From the age of sixteen he flamed with one passion: to bear the gospel to the heathen. If ever a man’s holy passion was a prophecy of a lif e-Vv’ork, his absorbing ambition was the promise of a mission in foreign lands, though he never actually entered on the work he had chosen. Yet the disappointment was ‘God’s appointment; for God meant that he should fulfil a far wider mission.

This was the work of Mills: to show that when the true spirit of missions burns, it can be pent up by no restraints, quenched by no ceeming failures. Mills was everywhere a missionary. Humble as he was, his motto was, not to “rest satisfied till he had made his influence felt in the remotest corner of this ruined world.” He waited for no new doors to open but went into the doors that were opened. No dreams of a field, more to his liking, kept him from tilling the field at his feet. In college he was planting trees of righteousness; and so the famous haystack at Williamstown was consecrated by his meetings with a few like-minded fellow-students, and in its shelter was formed the covenant that sent Newell and Judson to India and Burma, and became the origin of the American Board.

Mills died at thirty-five. Few lives at seventy-five can compare in work for God. Perhaps no man ever started moving more vast and varied schemes of Christian work, and so projected the lines of his influence to the ends of the earth and perpetuated it to the end of the age. His mind was overwhelmed with the deep night-shade of paganism. He made himself master of facts, and then used them as shot and shell to beat down the walls of carelessness and indifference. He yearned to enter at once the thousand gates to fields of holy work, to have every limb a tongue, and every tongue a trumpet to spread the sound of the gospel! He found in every new fact a new force to impel to new work. He met the poor heathen lad from Hawaii, and that led him to form the foreign mission school to train such as him for service. When not yet ready to go to foreign lands, he could not wait in idleness. He leaped into the saddle and for months explored the half-settled South and West of the United States. Hardships hindered him not. He swam streams swollen with rains and then stopped to dry his wet clothes and pushed on, making way through dense forests, wading through swamps, hungry and drenched, daring wild men and wild beasts, that he might learn the destitution of the people and supply them with the word of God, preaching and conversing as he went; and then coming back to the Eastern coast to organize Bible societies and home missionary effort. Like a warrior fresh from the battle-field, he went everywhere trumpeting in Christian ears the awful spiritual wants of the seventy-six thousand families he had found without even a Bible. His charity began at home, but it did not stay there. He felt that he must pass the limits even of those great states and territories. He felt himself ‘’ in a pinhole” even in the great Mississippi valley, while the broad earth lay beyond with its destitute millions. He waited not, like another Micawber, for opportunity to turn up; he made opportunity. Being for a little time in New York City he made explorations in the metropolis as thorough as in his Southern tours. When all eyes were turned to Africa, and the colonization scheme was formed, he threw his energies into tJiat, and himself sailed for the Dark Continent on a mission in its behalf, and on his return voyage died and was buried at sea.

For the young men of this generation I can find no finer example of a consecrated life. At thirty-five years his life-work on earth closed. Yet already he had lived a century, if life is measured by its aims and achievements. Most of us do not begin to live until we begin to die. Most men think of life as all before them at an age when his was all behind him. He packed the years with noble work for God and man, and made every day a week, and every week a month, and every month a year, in the reckoning of service. Like a comet whose brilliance increases so fast as it nears its perihelion, he moved nearer and nearer to his Lord, and his life grew brighter and more glorious, until its lustre was lost in the sun of righteousness into whose splendours it was merged.

AdONIRAM JUDSON APOSTLE OF BURMA. 1788-1850.

When God thrust Judson forth to serve Him in the field of missions. He knew His man, for He had trained and fitted him for His work. His genius was not inferior to that of Duff; his industry, to that of Carey; his piety, to that of Wayland; his spiritual instincts not less keen than those of Schwartz. His career embodies the romance of heroism, touched and tinged with the pathos of severe suffering.

God meant Judson to be a pioneer at Burma, and he combined the qualities needful in leaders of great enterprises, — self-reliance tempered with humility, energy restrained by prudence, activity anointed with unselfishness; and, withal, that patience and passionate love for souls which no man knows until he is devoted to a holy purpose and is absorbed in God.

Judson was one of the five now famous men whose offer of themselves for work abroad became the nucleus of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. On the way to India, the radical change of his views on the subject of baptism became the germ of a new movement, the organization of the American Baptist Missionary Union; so that providentially he led the way in the formation of two of the most efficient and successful among all the existing missionary societies.

Like many another of God’s heroes, disappointment met him at the outset. India was his chosen field, but he was driven further on to Burma, and so became there the first missionary of the new Baptist Board, thus doubly diverted from a Presbyterian mission and from India, that he might found a Baptist mission in Burma. It was another illustration of the Higher Power that is back of contrary winds. God drove him out of his course as he had planned it, to drive him into another course, as God had planned it. There was a barrier that suffered him not to go into Bithynia, that he might obey another call and enter an open door into Macedonia.

Four facts stand in the foremost rank in the furnishing of this Burmese apostle.

First, the fact of his conversion. Of this he had that clear assurance, for lack of which nothing else will compensate. Whether poets are” born “or * ’ made,” there is no doubt about a true missionary. He must be born from above. He can never be made by man. No native genius or acquired scholarship, no endowments of nature or attainments of culture, can supply the place of regeneration. Nay more, it is the men who are saved and knozv it, who by their experience give life and power to their testimony. The message needs the man to back it; the Bible needs the believer behind it. The righteousness of God is revealed from faith in the preacher, to faith in the hearer.

Secondly, the fact of his call. The work of a missionary was his vocation. The voice of conviction and of consciousness affirmed it. With Paul he could say, * ‘It pleased God who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the heathen.” From the very first he heard and heeded that voice, and went out not knowing whither he went. Because it was an example of the obedience of faith, he went on in the midst of disappointments; the retrospect might be dark and the aspect darker, but the ’ * prospect was as bright as the promises of God.”

•Thirdly, the fact that he had the word of God. To him the Bible was God’s own book; he believed in it throughout, and loved it. His devotion to it reminds us again of the famous Tuscan sculptor’s fondness for that relic of the Athenian Apollonius in the Vatican, for Judson studied the Bible from every point of view, as M. Angelo did the torso.

His reverent affection for God’s word made it a constant delight to study it. Compared with its infallible oracles, “the tradition of the elders” was nothing, and his aim was to construct his own character, and build in Burma an Apostolic Church, in all things according to the pattern showed him in the holy mount. That this word might mould the people, he became translator, and so joined the noble army to which belonged Waldo and Lefevre, Wyclif and Tyndale, Luther and Bedell, Carey and Eliot, Morrison and Hepburn.

Fourthly, the fact that he held a scriptural idea of missions. He had learned that to preach the gospel to unsaved souls is the one grand business of the Church. Too many seem to count this but as one of many forms of benevolent work, and they talk of missions as an organization of the Church. But Judson saw that the converse is true; that the Church is both the result and fruit of missions; and his life motto was: The Church is both constituted and commissioned to preach the gospel to the world. Of course, then, the chief work of the missionary is put beyond doubt. Though a man of the instincts and the culture of a scholar, finely fitted for a teacher, true to his principles, he made it his one great work to preach Christ, and all else held lower rank.

To estimate Judson aright wx must emphasize his scriptural idea of a Church. To him it was no worldly association or religious club of respectable moralists, or people whose claim to membership rested upon their baptism in infancy. It was no lawless democracy, or lordly monarchy, or titled aristocracy; no mutual benefit society or social community for religious and ethical culture. He believed the Church to be a divine institution, composed of converted souls; its threefold end, spiritual worship, holy living, and unselfish service. He sought, therefore, first of all to preach that gospel by which souls are saved; then out of converts to form New Testament Churches, and make them self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating; and to raise up a native ministry as the condition of their normal development.

He particularly interests the student of missions, as one who projected a biblical theory of missions and put his theory into effective practice. His plan was essentially Pauline, and it led to and fed an unselfish heroism. The mission field offered a tempting bait to ambition and avarice, as it became plain even to the Burmese powers what a high order of man this humble missionary was. But Judson lived and died poor. He illustrated the self-abnegation which is the cardinal law and primary condition of a missionary life. As Dr. Maclaren finely sa5^s, “The chord that vibrates most musically is itself unseen while it vibrates.”

The apostle of Burma believed every man’s life to be a plan of God, and that he should study to find out and fill out that plan. The result was, as it always is, an increase of power. His weak will was energized by the stronger will of God, and his sphere was constantly expanding as his capacity was enlarging; as God gave him more power to work, he gave him more room to work. Another result was a constant deepening of joy. Partnership with God made easy to him patient doing, bearing, and — what is hardest — waiting. And last of all came certain success, for God never fails, nor does he who sides with God.

Blessed is he who, like Judson, learns to call Jesus not only Saviour, but Lord. The clear eye to see, the prompt will to obey, the total self-surrender to serve, at whatever cost of sacrifice and suffering — these are the steps whereby we keep to God’s plan, and get that enduement of power which both brings and is, success. When the daughter of Pastor A. G. Brown, of London, was asked what led her to China, she said: “I had known Jesus as Saviour, Redeemer, Friend; but as soon as I knew Him as Lord and Master, He said to me, ‘Am I thy Lord and Master? then go to China.’”

When Judson died, hundreds of baptized Burmans and Karens were sleeping in Jesus, and over seven thousand survived, in sixty-three churches, under oversight of one hundred and sixty-three missionaries, native pastors, and helpers. Judson had finished his Bible translation, compiled a Burmese dictionary, and laid the basis of Christian character deep down in the Burman heart.

In the Baptist meeting-house at Maiden, Massachusetts, one may read upon a simple memorial tablet:

‘*1In /iftemorlam.

Rev. Adoniram Judson.

Born August 9, 1788,

Died April 12, 1850.

Maiden, his Birthplace,

The Ocean, his Sepulchre;

Converted Bunnans

The Burman Bible

His Monument.

His Record is on High.”

Captain Allen F. Gardiner — Pioneer of Tierra DEL FuEGo. 1794-1851.

It was a striking saying of the Hon. Ion Keith Falconer, the noble martyr of the mission at Aden, that we must not fear to be called “eccentric.” That word means “out of centre,” and if we are in the true centre as to God, in the orbit of obedience, we shall be out of centre as to the world.

Allen Gardiner was an enthusiast, a fanatic, but in the eyes of God he was fired with a divine passion. His enthusiasm was an ‘’ en-the-ism.” While an officer in the English navy, the death of his young wife left him free to give himself to missionary service, and he shrank not from pioneer work among the worst heathens. After a trial of other lands he turned to South America, but there was no open door, for priests of Papal Rome stood between him and the wild pagan tribes of the far South, until, at the Southern Cape itself, he found the island of Tierra del Fuego, so remote that Spanish Jesuits cared not to keep up their pursuit.

THE NE W PIONEERS. Ill

Dr. Flint says of the gospel, that its divine origin is seen in its universal adaptation. Here is the magic mirror in which the Eskimo and Maori, Fuegian and Fijian, Melanesian cannibals and Australian aborigines alike see reflected what they are and what they may be. The message of Christ crucified and risen has captivated alike the wisest sage and the simplest child; because meant for the universal man it finds a reception wherever it gets a hearing. Darwin himself, who found, in the natives of this ‘^ Land of Fire,” the missing link between man and the monkey, has left on record his testimony that ’ the lesson of the missionary is the wand of the enchanter.”

Against all conceivable obstacles Allen Gardiner persevered. Nature herself was inhospitable; the climate forbade his approach: winds and waves, summer rains and winter sleet, drove him back. Man gave him no welcome. The Patagonians had low foreheads, but lower minds and morals, wretched hovels and scant clothing; they seemed incapable of any high impulses or real improvement. At times they were like brute beasts; at others, treacherous robbers. At first he was compelled to retreat, and return to England. But, if he could not land on the shore, he could float on the sea; and so we have that unique illustration of a new method in missions, in Captain Gardiner’s two-decked boats at Banner Bay, where, with two catechists and two more pious sailors, he undertook to do pioneer work among the natives, from his floating home. Everyone of his party perished, never again seen alive by an Englishman. Starvation slowly slew them, and only their dead bodies and their diaries were found to tell the awful tale. One by one, and Gardiner last of all, they had succumbed to hunger.

Yet there had been no whining nor murmuring. The farewell message of the last survivor bore testimony:” Poor and weak as we are, our boat is a very

Bethel to our souls, for we feel and know that God is here. Asleep or awake,” wrote Captain Gardiner, “I am, beyond the power of expression, happy.” Instead of vain repining or lamenting-, he left behind only earnest entreating that the mission should not be abandoned, and left a brief plan outlining future operations.

Such was his passionate love for God that, even while starving, he could record nothing save marvels of mercy, and declared that after five days of fasting he felt neither hunger nor thirst. And over the place where he lay down to die he had inscribed, on the rock, from the Psalms, this precious motto:

“Wait, O my soul, upon God!
For all my expectation is from Him.”

He died, having seen no results of his work. He had sown in tears, but not a blade appeared. It was, however, no failure; for to-day among the heathen tribes of Paraguay there is springing up a plenteous harvest. Hope was deferred, but not lost; faith was tried but not tired, and triumphed.

It was a very strange way by which God led Allen Gardiner. His love for maritime adventure led him to a naval college, and into service in the navy. Little did he know that the curiosity which drew him to a heathen temple in China to witness the superstitions of idolaters, was to be the means of quickening the seed sown in his heart by pious parents. He saw what heathenism was, and he took his stand boldly for Christ and the Gospel. He began to seek the salvation of his shipmates, who were practically pagans; then as the ship touched at various ports he obtained leave of absence and explored the region near by, and so made himself familiar everywhere with the spiritual condition of the natives.

The passion for mission work became more intense. In 1834, he went to Zululand, but was driven thence three years later by the cruel war between

Chief Dingaan and the Dutch farmers. A whole year was spent in fruitless effort to get entrance for the gospel into New .Guinea; then for ten months he was on the Falkland Islands, and while there visited Patagonia, where he besought the Church Missionary Society to plant a mission; and in 1845, he himself with Robert Hunt, anchored in Gregory Bay; but Chief Wissale’s “petulance, cupidity, treachery, dishonesty and extortion” again compelled withdrawal, and even as they were conveying their few effects on board an English bark, this dastardly chief was plying his thieving arts.

In the same year, 1845, nothing daunted, Gardiner with Mr. Gonzalez went to Bolivia, daring the Atacama desert for the gospel’s sake. Again met by disheartening obstacles, in 1848, he headed a small pioneer party of five, whose destination was Tierra del Fuego, where the hopeless hostility of the natives, led on by Chief Jemmy Button, convinced him that ‘’ The missio7iary establisJiment must for the present be afloat! “Often perplexed, he was never in despair, and nothing could kill his imperishable faith and hope.” Being with him was like a heaven upon earth: he was such a man of prayer,” said Joseph Erwin, his boat carpenter.

Captain Smyley’s journal and Captain Morshead’s letters gave the public the awful facts about the experience of this starved party of missionaries — how from June 22 to Sept. 6, when Gardiner must have died, they had been out of provisions. Men who read or heard this pathetic tale, knew not which emotion was the mightier, horror at such a tale of suffering, or admiration at such dauntless heroism.

Secretary Despard published far and wide the decision of the Patagonian Society, that ‘With God’s help, the mission shall not be abandoned;” and the Allen Gardiner left Bristol in 1854, and in 1855 once more anchored in Spaniards’ Harbour. A few days later, at Earnest Cove, a new mission party had “the mournful satisfaction of standing on the spot where the remains of Gardiner were found,” and, with appropriate memorial services, of setting- up a tablet: “In memory of the lamented missionary martyrs.”

The period of trial was not yet past. In 1858, a suitable site was fixed upon for a mission, which was named Wy cliff e. But Capt. Fell and brother, and Mr. Phillips, the catechist, were brutally murdered, and the Allen Gardiner was found in Beagle Channel a perfect wreck, with one survivor, the cook.

Again the wrecked vessel being repaired, another beginning was made, and since 1872 the work has gone steadily forward. On Keppel Island, Fuegians are boarded and trained. El Carmen, on the coast, has been a medical mission for thirty years past. The Allen Gardijier still goes on its mission cruises, and it has been so demonstrated that brutal Patagonians and Fuegians may be evangelized, civilized, christianized, that Admiral Sulivan, at the annual meeting of the South American Missionary Society in 1 88 1, stated, after residing at the Falkland Islands, that he had informed Darwin of the great changes which had taken place in his human monkeys — of kindness shown to shipwrecked crews by the converted natives — how fowl-houses remained unlocked without even the theft of an Ggg and stated, that in reply Darwin had candidly confessed, ‘^I could not have believed that all the missionaries in the world could ever have made the Fuegians honest.”

So remarkable is the testimony of this great naturalist, who was, however, no ‘’ supernaturalist,” that with his oft-quoted testimony we close this brief sketch. He had said after his visit to Patagonia, ‘’Nothing can be done by means of mission work; all the pains bestowed on the natives will be thrown away; they never can be civilized.” This was Darwin’s opinion until proofs of the facts confronted him, and then he candidly admitted he was wrong, and added: ’ I had always thought that the civilization of the Japanese is the most wonderful thing in history; but I am now convinced that what the missionaries have done in Tierra del Fuego, in civilizing the natives, is at least as wonderful.” And from this time Darwin himself regularly subscribed to the society’s funds.

John Williams — The Apostle of the South Seas. 1796-1839.

How curious are the coincidences of history! It was only six weeks after Williams was born, when The i??/!^’ sailed for Tahiti, as though the ship that was to introduce the gospel to the Southern Seas waited until the coming apostle of those island groups was born, before it unfurled its sails!

The life we now outline covered only about forty-three years, from June 29, 1796, to Nov. 20, 1839. But it was crowded with the wonderful works of God. At twenty-one years of age, John Williams was sent to Eimeo, thence removing to Huahine and Raiatea. After five years of apostolic success, he visited the Hervey group, founding a mission at Raratonga, where he prepared books and in part a Bible translation. Then in a boat, built by himself, he explored most of the surrounding archipelago, establishing the Samoan mission. Four years were spent in England, from 1834 to 1838, publishing his story of the South Seas and his Raratongan New Testament, raising five thousand pounds for a new missionary ship, and planning for a high school at Tahiti, and a theological school at Raratonga for training native evangelists. With sixteen recruits he returned to his most loved work, visited Samoa, sailed for the New Hebrides to start a new mission, and, on the shores of Erromanga, fell a martyr. Twenty-two years — from the ironmonger’s forge in

London to the savage’s club at Dillon’s Bay! But what a unique mission, and what a lustrous record on high!

Williams, though generally and deservedly known as the Apostle of the South Seas, was not the pioneer in those waters. Captain Cook’s voyages had turned toward these island clusters many eyes besides those of William Carey and the Countess of Huntingdon. When, in 1795, the London Missionary Society was founded, such interest had been awakened in this archipelago, that as early as August 10, of the next year, The Duff set sail for Tahiti, under command of that devoted Christian, Captain James Wilson, and with thirty missionaries aboard. More than twenty years had gone by before John Williams followed, but his career was so exceptional, that without it the work in Polynesia would be a drama without its main actor.

The religious revolution wrought under his very eyes has, for rapidity and range of result, no parallel. The prophecy was literally fulfilled:

“The isles shall wait for His law: As soon as they hear of me they shall obey me. The strangers shall submit themselves to me.”

A year after Raratonga was discovered by Williams, idolatry was in ruins; a whole people called upon themselves the name of the Lord, and built a place of worship six hundred feet long, where Aitutakian chiefs were the main speakers. Greater wonder still, — all this, before one English missionary had yet taught on the island! God had used, to work this transformation, two plain, untaught natives! Here, ten years after Williams had sailed for Eimeo, he met the largest concourse of worshippers he had ever seen outside of his own country; and as they moved past him they laid at his feet fourteen huge idols as gospel trophies!

The Raratongans kept their Sabbaths as he had never seen the Day of Rest kept before. Prayer saluted the sunrise and the sunset, as though to punctuate holy time with worship, and the hours between were full of studies in the Word of God, for the people made notes of all the sermons they heard, that they might search, like the Bereans, into the truths they were taught. New codes of laws were built upon the corner-stone of this teaching; marriage was hallowed and polygamy proscribed. One island after another became a sanctuary, vocal with prayer and praise. Chiefs presided at holocausts of idols, stripping the gay trappings from their former gods, and feeding them as fuel to the fires. There were cases in which a few Jioiirs sufficed, to complete the destruction of all false gods and idol fanes, and to lay the foundations of chapels for Christian worship.

One scene it is well to delineate as an example of many. Tomatoa and his followers approach Opoa. A crowd is at the beach to seize the usual captives of war. But a herald shouts from the canoes,” We bring to you no slain victims; we are all praying people who worship the true God; these” — holding up the books prepared by missionaries — “these are our victims and trophies of war.”

When the war-god, Oro, was disrobed, and his temple burned by converts at Opoa, the heathen party built a huge cage of wicker-work in which to burn all the Christians alive. Unceasing prayer brought such plain help from above, that in the ensuing struggle even the enemies of the Lord felt that His hand was against them, and they threw down their weapons and fled, panic-stricken. They looked only for vengeance from their Christian conquerors, but found instead a sumptuous feast prepared for them, and for sheer astonishment could not eat. Then one of the vanquished heathen party rose and said: “Others may act as they will; but never again will I worship gods that could give no help in the hour of danger. We were four times as many as these praying people, and yet they have defeated us with the greatest ease. Their god must be the true God. Theirs is a religion of mercy. Had we won the victory they would now be burning in that cage; but instead of burning us, they feed us. I will go and join this people!” Such was the power of these words that every one of the heathen party bowed that night in prayer to the God of the Christians, and praised Him for giving to His own praying people the victory! And the next morning, after prayer, all united in destroying, in Tahua and Raiatea, every Marae, so that within three days not one vestige of idol worship was left!

John Williams’ career was one triumphal progress. At Savaii, for instance, tears of joy greeted him; and he met a people ready formally to renounce paganism. Malietoa, the chief, begged him with all speed to go to his native land and bring back teachers. How pathetic was his plea: “Come back as soon as you can; for before you return many of us will be dead.”

The Maruans, who were wont to trace every evil of any kind to bad spirits, turned to God, and proved the sincerity of their faith by ruined Maraes and broken idols. Spears that had once impaled children and borne them as trophies to the temples, were now turned into pulpit balustrades, and Oro and other grim idols of wood were used as props to common wood-sheds and cook-houses. Unchaste songs and gestures gave place to hymns of praise and bowed knees.

The changes which the apostle of the South Seas saw, defied description, and when described seem fables for the credulous. He himself was overawed by the proofs of the hand of God. At Tahiti, over fourteen years had gone by before one convert was made; and at New Zealand, twenty years, before there seemed to be one honest inquirer. Yet Williams witnessed changes nothing short of a radical revolution, within twenty, eighteen, twelve months, and sometimes within as many days. He went to islands where all were heathens; he visited them later to find chapels with thousands of worshippers; he found them without a written language, and left them reading in their own tongue the wonderful words of God!

Williams was of great service in furnishing elementary primers, translations of the gospels and epistles, and creating a Christian native literature. He trained converts into evangelists, who made tours among the surrounding islands until no heathen settlement remained unvisited. He taught converts the grace of giving, and when they had no money, they marked their pigs or other possessions, with the Lord’s sign, and sacredly put into His treasury whatever they brought in the market.

One comprehensive statement may serve to summarize this marvellous story of apostolic success. Five years before he fell, no group of islands, nor single island of importance, within two thousand miles of Tahiti, had been left unvisited.

This martyr’s death was doubtless due to a misapprehension. The natives of Erromanga had come to hate the sight of foreigners, because of recent wrongs at the hands of a crew, whose vessel touched at those shores. But history has her unique compensation as well as retribution. Fifty years after Williams fell, the son of his murderer was laying the corner-stone of the martyr’s memorial, while another son was preaching the gospel for which that martyr died!

Louis Harms — The Missionary Pastor.
1808-1865.

This man was another of God’s pioneers, but his personal field was the parish of Hermannsburgh. His divine vocation was found in furnishing an example of what one man and his congregation can do in the furtherance of the world-wide work.

When that disabled candidat came to that obscure parish in Hanover, and told his simple tale of the wants and woes of the heathen, little did he know that, though laid aside from the work himself, he was there lighting a fire which was never to be quenched, but to spread far and wide. When the heart of Pastor Harms was kindled with new zeal for missions, the people whom he led felt the fire burning within them also; and, though but a few and feeble folk, mostly occupied with farming and such like work, and too poor to give large sums of money, they responded to his appeal. He said first of all to himself and to them, ^’ Why should we not help missions?” This question soon prompted another, * ‘Why may we not plan missions of our own?” There were incredulous spirits that, like the Samarian lord, asked, “If the Lord- would open windows in Heaven, might this thing be!” But faith and prayer and self-sacrifice prevailed, and a moral miracle was wrought.

The simple Hermannsburghers began by offerings of money, but they soon found it easy also to offer themselves. One man gave his farm, and the farm-house became a training school, where missionary candidates, who willingly volunteered for service, began to be educated for the fields abroad. Then a sailor suggested the building and laimching of theix own ship, to bear their missionaries to other lands, and sail to and fro, as a medium of communication; and so the Candace — first of mission ships — was built and manned by themselves, and became a shuttle to weave threads of practical contact between the Church at home and its workers abroad, and carry mutual messages of love and sympathy.

This was not all. While sending forth scores of men and women to be its heralds and tell the old story of the cross, the Church scattered yet increased, until its membership reached ten thousand and it became the largest Church in Christendom. Not content with supplying workmen and caring for their wants, it set up its own printing-press, printed its own missionary magazine, and thus became in itself a whole board of missions, with its own training school, mission treasury, vessel and periodical, and ail the apparatus of a well-organized and thoroughly conducted missionary society; and although for nearly thirty years Louis Harms has been dead, the work remains to witness to the Church and to the world.

That one man, and he but forty years old, and with a simple rural parish, should start such a work, has been a problem to all who do not know the power which comes from the Spirit of God in answer to prayer. Though the undertaking was formally inaugurated in 1849, for years before, the foundations had been preparing in the heart of Harms. While in charge of his father’s private school, six years earlier, and as his assistant in parish work, he wielded a sceptre of influence over the people which showed him to be one of God’s anointed kings. Alike in private converse and public address, he swayed the hearts of those poor peasants. When, in 1844, he became his father’s assistant and was ordained, his hold on the people became stronger. His holy zeal, his passionate ardour and fervour, his intensely human sympathy, brought him into close contact with their hearts, and led to a great religious awakening, which was, as it always is, accompanied by a new missionary spirit. In fact, it is hard to say which was first in order of development; for Harms had so long felt the leverage there is in missions to raise spiritual life to a higher level, that he sought to arouse new interest in the heathen as one means of raising Church members to a higher plane. And when thus the parish had been made ready, it was only needful that the external circumstances should favour, in order for the work to be actually inaugurated.

While acting as his father’s assistant, Louis Harms felt under restraint, but at his father’s death, he was appointed pastor, and so the building whose base-blocks had long been laid began to rise toward completion.

To trace the history of the Hermannsburgh Society would be impracticable within these limits, and would not serve our present purpose. In 1890, there were some sixty stations, with a total of about three hundred missionaries and native helpers. But it does concern us to learn the lesson which God surely means to teach by this new chapter in the Acts of the Apostles. If a single Church, under the leadership o”f one man, and he broken in health, a chronic invalid, and his people for the most part only the Lord’s poory could work such wonders, who shall tell us what some other pastors and Churches might achieve for God, where large wealth and large numbers, intelligence and culture, social influence and every other help and encouragement exist to assure a wide work and a grand result!

Pastor Harms drank in the missionary spirit in the secret place where God dwells. Prayer brought him very close to that heavenly altar where God’s own fires’ eternally burn, and the angel at that altar touched with a live coal both his heart and his lips. The first impulse to his missionary heroism was found, not in the appeal of human need, but in the celestial spark which needed only a knowledge of facts to find ample fuel for a consuming flame. The man who knows not how to pray and how to lead his people to pray, may construct an organization, but he cannot put into it the motive power that moves its machinery and makes it mighty to effect results. Because Louis Harms prevailed with God, he also prevailed with men. He took the great facts about a world’s need, to the mercy-seat, and held them up in the light of the Divine Presence, until in the mystic Shekinah fire they burned and glowed.

Then he held them up before the eyes of men until he compelled others also to feel their awful force, and until indifference could no longer endure to confront them, but was melted into zeal.

Notwithstanding- the poverty of his peasant parish, Harms from the first would allow no canvassing for funds, and modern methods of appeal and of raising money have always been repudiated upon principle. And yet money has been provided by methods and in measure surprising to worldly minds. The enterprise that had such obscure and unpromising beginnings, was scorned by the wise and great of this world; it survived, however, not only the death of its founder, in 1865, but the schism in the Hanover Church thirteen years later, and the deposition of Theodore Harms in consequence of his loyalty to his conscience in refusing conformity to the customs of the State Church. He was followed by his people in his independent course, and thus was formed the nucleus of the Free Church of Hanover. These and many other causes combined, threatened to wreck the mission cause, but those simple Hermannsburghers have persisted in their devotion to the work of God, and the society is still sending forth its messengers to the region and shadow of death.

God thus writes upon His shining scroll another name unknown to fame, as men rank greatness; but, like Christ’s forerunner, great in the eyes of the Lord, and one to whom it was given to prepare His way among the people!

David Livingstone — Africa’s Pioneer. 1813-1873.

The hero of Blantyre furnishes another example of spiritual heredity, for his parents, however humble, were devout, and his father bequeathed to him both his thirst for knowledge and his spirit of enterprise. Though at ten working in the cotton factory, and there continuing for fourteen years, David was so eager to learn that he studied Latin by night, and in his daily labour gathered up the smallest fragments of time, often less than a minute — that nothing be lost. “Dick’s Philosophy of the Future State “kindled his missionary fervour, and then he got a medical training, intending to go to China. War with Britain closed that door, but ‘* Moffat’s Appeal for the Dark Continent” opened another, and so in 1840, he sailed for Kuruman, little suspecting what a unique career was before him.

Livingstone outranks all others as Africa’s apostle. His life spans but sixty years. Converted at twenty, he was in heart and aim thenceforth a missionary; perhaps no life since the Apostolic age has poured forth upon the feet of Jesus more of the costly ointment of consecrated service.

He was a man of such singular force that Sir Bartie Frere thought that” any five years of his life might have established for him in any other occupation, such a character, and raised for him such a fortune, as none but the most energetic can realize.” His last public utterance in Scotland gave in five short words the double secret of his life: ’ * Fear God and work hard.” That explains his thirty thousand miles of travel and the unrivalled series of discoveries: Five lakes, rivers, falls that outrank Niagara, high ridges that flank Africa’s central basin; that motto accounts for the perseverance that searched into the geology and hydrography, the fauna and flora of the continent, and that fought the two great foes of man and beast — fever and tsetse — with such persistency, that he declared that these two words would be found at death graven on his heart.

Energy weds industry, if it does not beget it. Though his native abilities were mediocre and his early opportunities meagre, like Carey, he could plod. Economy of time and resolute patience were the steeds he yoked to his life-car, and so he made such progress as even genius does not often secure. What carefulness in details is seen in that famous lined journal of eight hundred quarto pages, with its plain, neat writing. And what versatility is that, akin to genius, which makes it possible for one man in turn to master questions such as the desiccation of Africa, the utilization of her river highways, missionary organization and Bible translation! Book-making alone failed to arouse his enthusiasm; it was a mere task, partly from the long exile that forbade contact or converse with white men.

Livingstone’s services to the race are too great for immediate recognition. What he was as a scientist and explorer, traveller, geographer, zoologist, botanist, physician, the future must measure. In accuracy of detail few have ever equalled him. His astronomical observations, exact orientations, and manifold contributions to natural science in all its great departments, show a many-sided man. He could tell the Chamber of Commerce of a score of vegetable products entirely new to them; the geographical society decorated him with their gold medal, and three cities honoured him with their “freedom.”

As in all mighty men, the finest elements of his character crystallized about a strong will. If he failed, it meant new and more patient trial. “If I live,” he said in 1866, ‘* I must succeed in my undertaking; death alone will put a stop to my efforts.” When half starved, his medicine-chest stolen, at the mercy of foes like a warrior without weapons, and thrice in one day barely escaping death — not one man in a million would have pushed forward as he did in the heart of Africa. When in 1872, Stanley urged his return with him to England, though a strange presentiment weighed upon him that he was on his last journey and would never get to its goal, he flinched not in his resolve but pressed on, praying that before he fell he might work out his purpose.

He was a man whose great faith in God was the pole star of his life. He saw that great crises turn on trifles as great doors swing from small hinges, but that there was a Divine AVorkman who knew how much he could safely hang on such a hinge; and so he was wont to watch the seemingly trivial events that shape character and destiny. And on what apparent trifles Livingstone’s career turned! the chance reading of Dick, the appeal of Gutzlaff, the visit of Moffat, the friendly word of a director of the London Missionary Society. One text gave to his spiritual vision telescopic range and microscopic delicacy: “In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.” Under such guidance trial and trouble were God’s angels, calamity was His storm signal; and that nameless sorrow, which in his dear Mary’s death smote him, only drew out once more his ‘’Fiat, Domine, Voluntas Tua!”

He was at heart simply a humble missionary. On that altar of service his whole self was laid, and better to know and meet Africa’s wants, he entered that broader sphere that unconsciously made of the missionary a general and statesman. He saw that the true plan for Africa’s evangelization must be broad enough to take in the whole continent and its whole future. Hence he sought to explore and develop the resources of the country, devise facilities for travel and traffic, and abolish the awful curse of slavery. That he never lost sight of his original aim is plain from his own sage saying: ‘’the end of the geographical feat is the beginning of the true enterprise.”

To further this ultimate end he was willing to go anywhere, provided it be only forward, and to do anything provided it were preparing the whole field for the harvest. His gauge of missionary success was, not so many converts per pound sterling, but the wide diffusion of godly principles — results which no statistics can exhibit.

The hero of Blantyre was Conscience Incarnate. His watchword was duty. To keep his word and do his work faithfully was the double law of his life. But duty was softened by love, and lost all asperity. And it was one of God’s gifts to him that his sense of humour was so keen. He enjoyed immensely the superstitious fright of the natives when they watched the figures, shown on the screen by the magic-lantern, mysteriously appear and disappear; and the Soko was to him so hideously ugly, that he could conceive no use for him save to “sit for a portrait of Satan.”

Livingstone’s habitual indifference to worldly applause and advantage was the unique trait in his character; he was in some respects the counterpart of that Soudan hero, of whom Mrs. Charles says, “Not that he tried to renounce the poor prizes of this world; like Joan of Arc, he simply did not value them.” Money was to him no bait, and he hated to be lionized. He turned his back on the praise of men and would not even read what was written in his honour. The world’s gold was tinsel, its glory a fading laurel: he was after what was better, and he got it. He belonged to no conventional society: his citizenship was in Heaven. And when in that little grass hut at Ilala he died, alone with God, in prayer for Africa, as Schmidt had before him — that close to his life was poetically and pathetically fitting, more in accord with all that went before it than if he had died in a palace amid fawning courtiers. But, as a martyr’s grave drew Bishop Heber to Calcutta, that heart that is buried in Africa will yet be like a new Mecca to thousands of pilgrim saints.

Livingstone’s self-oblivion was sublime. The treasures and pleasures of Egypt were to him nothing if he might, like Moses, lead out God’s oppressed people from under the slave yoke. For Africa he could spend his last penny, and his last drop of blood. Such was the man whom an intimate acquaintance pronounced the best man he ever knew, and whom history already crowns as Africa’s best friend. His life was one grand sermon. The golden pen of action, held in the hand of resolve, wrote out its sentences in living letters on the eternal scroll, for all to read. Both by witness and suffering he ranks with the martyrs. His sacrifices were noble, though he declared he had never made any; yes, the man who had been soaked with drenching rains, had made his bed in damp grasses and his food out of roots, who had been forty times scorched in the furnace of fever, and buried his wife in Africa’s bosom; even when on a sick bed, without human helper and in a horror of great darkness, neither talked of self-denial nor halted in his work for Christ.

No wonder if his master passion was to abate and abolish all slavery and slave traffic. The horrors he saw defied description and made him feel that he was in hell. Everywhere he sought to rouse the dormant Christian conscience to the devilish atrocity of this crime; and, the memorial slab in the great Abbey, as is fitting, mutely repeats his memorable words:

“All I can add in my loneliness, is, may Heaven’s rich blessing come down on everyone — American, Englishman or Turk, — who will help to heal the open sore of the world!”

Alexander Duff — Pioneer of Education in India. 1806-1878.

The remarkable student of St. Andrew’s, from whom this Lectureship takes its name, combined in himself the courage of Knox, the force of Chalmers and the fire of Erskine. He was doubly a pioneer, for he was the first missionary of the Church of Scotland to India, and he led the way in higher education among the Brahmans. He was almost equally conspicuous as an orator, an organizer and an educator. Twice wrecked on his way to India, he saved his Bible from the sea — a fact regarded by him as significant and symbolic of his whole life-work.

He Struck out upon a new path. The corner-stone that he laid he himself cleft and shaped in a new quarry. His aim was to open up to the native Hindus, not only purely religious truth as such, but to introduce into the centre of the Orient the science and learning of the Occident. His plan was novel, and it signalized a new era in Indian missions.

A new idea finds slow entrance, especially in the religious sphere, for all new coins are handled with suspicion. Duff met with misrepresentation and opposition, but his school stood the storm like a cedar of Lebanon, and fierce winds strengthened its roots and toughened its boughs. A few years sufficed for his work to win golden opinions, even from scholars and princes. After five years, illness drove him home, but after five more, he came back to find seven hundred pupils instead of the few with which he started: and when, in the year of the disruption, his lot was cast with the Free Church, and his college passed into other hands, he began anew, and organized on a new and ampler scale his whole educational and missionary work.

Dr. Duff ranks with Carey and Livingstone as one of the great missionary triad of the new age. He was, on Indian affairs and Christian missions, an authority. His service to the Church at home was as great as to the vast Oriental Empire beside the Ganges. In 1834, and again in 1849, he was compelled to return to Scotland, and, in 1863, to abandon India altogether; but such a man was anywhere and everywhere a missionary. He was another Peter, the Hermit, sounding the signal of the new crusade, urging and leading God’s people onward toward a nobler missionary consecration. He twice filled the Moderator’s chair, but this was only a sign of his hold upon the Free Church, and no man since Paul has done more to fan and feed the fires of a holy enthusiasm for world-wide evangelism.

If Duff owed his pious aptitudes to his godly parents, it was the joint influence of Chalmers and IngHs that afterward shaped his mind for work in India. Thomas Chalmers, in 1812, before the Dundee Missionary Society, had held up the inspired Word and the living herald as God’s twin agency for spreading the gospel; and, two years later, before the Scottish Propagation Society, had given the testimony of experience to the utility of missions; these sermons left impressions on young Duff that could not be effaced — impressions deepened by personal contact with that greatest of Scotia’s sons, in the University. Then when, in 1825, Dr. Inglis made his fervent plea for workers abroad, Alexander Duff could no longer stay at home; and God, who in Carey had given to Schwartz an ‘’ apostolic heir,” gave in Duff an heir to Carey.

For the period of a whole generation he carried the assault against the citadel of oriental idolatry and superstition, instituting new educational methods for reaching the Brahmans, founding missions not only in India, but in Syria and the New Hebrides. But even this grand and complex achievement is perhaps surpassed in permanent value by his influence over the Church of Christ on both sides of the Atlantic. He made the very pulse of missions to beat quicker, shaping missionary effort and moving hundreds to go, as well as tens of thousands, to give.

Never will his mission tour in the United States in 1854 be forgotten, and when all those are dead who then heard him, his tracks will yet be left upon the history of American missions. His short career was like a prairie fire, sweeping hot and fast over the land. The enthusiasm he kindled was intense and glowing. At a time when material interests absorbed attention, when the development of a new territory and the growth of a young Republic engrossed thought, he widened the horizon of American disciples, and gave such impulse and impetus to work in other lands as no man since has ever equalled; the most ardent and fervent appeals for missions seem but as a faint echo of that clarion voice that shook the continent forty years ago!

Perhaps in the age to come, Scotia’s great pioneer in India will be most thought of, like Raimund Lull, as a great missionary advocate; and yet he had few of the studied arts and self-conscious graces of the ideal orator or finished declaimer. He would not have been set up as a model of rhetoric or oratory; if he had any code of rules, he broke the whole decalogue at once. His gestures, when he used any, were uncouth and grotesque. His muscles took rigidity from his mental tension. He twitched his forearm, hitched his shoulder, swung his long arm around, catching up and holding his coat-tails, while he left the other arm free to do the pounding necessary for emphasis.

But his unique attitudes and motions fitted his unique oratory. For hours he held audiences entranced. Words flowed in a tumbling torrent — a torrent of fire. Facts stood up at his command in ranks and regiments. His courageous fancy dared the loftiest flights, and his contagious enthusiasm set his whole audience aflame. The expense in vital force was immense, and left behind it exhaustion to the point of peril; and yet he did not roar or rant — it was not thunder, it was lightning.

He was a master of climax. His long sentences have been likened to an anger or corkscrew, boring into the minds of men, at* every turn and twist bearing down deeper, until at last, as when a cork is withdrawn, pent-up feeling finds vent in tears, in sighs, in shouts of applause. To take down such speeches was impossible. As well attempt to report a terrific storm at sea, with cyclone winds, mountain waves and waterspouts, varied with volcanic’ explosions, a glorious sunset, and concluding with an aurora borealis and shooting stars! The reporters gave it up, and with heads resting on their hands.

fixed eyes and mouth agape, resigned themselves to the charm of a speaker, who, instead of having to say something had something to say.

It might be invidious, among thousands of illustrious names, to assign to any one absolute pre-eminence. But in more respects than one, Alexander Duff shines in the firmament of missions as a star of the first magnitude. No missionary of modern times has laid on God’s altar a choicer offering of genius. His mind was at once like Brougham’s and like Canning’s; as a convex mirror it scattered light in every direction; as a concave mirror it gathered and concentrated all the rays into one burning focal point. With a memory, a store of information and a versatility, equally marvellous, his sagacity was equal to his capacity, which is still more uncommon; and it will take more than one-half century to dim the lustre of that name which has made so glorious the record of Scottish missions.

It was fitting that this apostle of Christian education in India, one of the originators of the Calcutta Revieiu, one of the founders, and for years the virtual governor, of the University of Calcutta, and the most eloquent missionary orator of this century, should leave as his last legacy to missions the cornerstone upon which this Lectureship is laid. May God make it ever a pillar of witness, in Duff’s native land, to the vital need of missions in directing and developing the life and power of the Church of Christ!