The Perennial Revival and World Evangelization
Some time ago a well-to-do Baptist contributed five hundred dollars to the Baptist Missionary Union, requesting that it be expended in distributing to the Baptist pastors of the North John R. Mott’s book, “The Evangelization of the World in this Generation.” The volumes sent out were attended with the request that the pastors read the work ancj give to their people the benefit thereof. This wise Christian man knew the relation of work abroad to a revival at home. He appreciated what Jacob Riis later expressed in the following language: “Every once in a while I hear some one growl against foreign missions because the money and the strength put into them are needed at home. I did myself when I did not know better; God forgive me! I know better now; and I will tell you how I found out. I became interested in a strong religious awakening in my old city of Copenhagen, and I set about investigating it. It was then that I learned what others had learned before me, and what was the fact there — that for every dollar you give away to con vert the heathen abroad, God gives you ten dollars’ worth of purpose to deal with your heathen at home.” Hence the gift of this volume of Mott’s. We commend its reading, and for the present content ourselves with culling out some general facts and figures for use in this chapter.
Ever since the Student Volunteer Movement adopted this statement, “The Evangelization of the World in this Generation,” as its watchword, we. have been mightily impressed with the wisdom and inspiration of their motto. It is always wise to set for the church of Jesus Christ a worthy goal; and there is a wonderful inspiration in a mere appeal to high, yet possible attainment. There could be no stronger argument in favor of the wisdom of this watchword than that found in the fact that while the optimism of youth first voiced this battle-cry, “The Evangelization of the World in this Generation,” in the Ecumenical Missionary Conference, held in New York City, the oldest missionaries in attendance, men who had been for forty years face to face with heathenism, expressed their convictions that the proposition involved was not only worthy of an endeavor, but easily within the power of the church as at present constituted. Admitting the possibility, the responsibihty for evangelizing the world in this generation is at once upon us. You will remember how, when John Williams, the apostle to the South Sea Islands, once proposed to return to his native country and urge his fellow Christians to furnish more missionaries for the South Seas, a chieftain replied: “Go with all speed, get all the missionaries you can, and come back as soon as you can, but many of us will be dead before you return.” Arthur T. Pierson says, “The whole pathos of missions was in that short entreaty.” And it cannot be denied that the whole proposition of evangelizing the world in this generation was suggested by the same appeal. The heathen now living must have the truth at the lips of the Christians now living, or never hear it at all, for by the time the sands of life have run out with us, their hundreds of millions will be sleeping beneath the sod. It is high time, then, that the church cease from the thought of committing the heathen to the next generation, and begin the march involved in Christ’s Great Commission. For that march there is inspiration in the saying of Jesus, as found in his solemn address in Matthew 24: “ For this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.”
“This Gospel of the Kingdom”
“This gospel’’ is God’s specific for sin. When Paul was writing his epistle to the Romans he said: “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.” And again: “Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace... So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Mark’s report of the Great Commission is: “Preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” There can be little question that one of the reasons, perhaps the most important one, for the slow progress of the church in recent years, and the present penury of our missionary treasuries, comes in consequence of calling this Scripture into question. Too many doctors of divinity, and professors of universities, have taken to prescribing other specifics for sin. Education is a good prescription for ignorance, and social settlements for filth and squalor, and institutional churches for the submerged; but for the sinful — high or low, rich or poor, educated or ignorant — the gospel of the Son of God is the only saving portion. Those who are stained must be brought to the foot of the cross where flows his cleansing blood; and those who are anguished in spirit and overburdened can be freed only by learning of “him vho bore our sins in his own body on the tree.” We believe with Henry Van Dyke, “Christianity has ceased to be the religion of the unshepherded multitude when it has ceased to proclaim redemption through Christ’s blood.” We also believe that in all the multitude of anguished, weary, living, dying souls, there is not a man or a woman so low that the cross cannot lift him, or so loathsome that the blood cannot make him clean.
One day as John Williams was walking along in one of the South Sea Islands he passed a row of six or eight stone seats, where the natives sat to chat with the passersby, and a cripple crawled from one of these seats crying to Williams: “Welcome, servant of God, who brought light into this dark island! To you we are indebted for the word of heaven.” Williams was greatly surprised, for he had never seen the man before, and on finding him well instructed in the Bible, he asked: “ Where did you get all this knowledge? The beggar answered: “As the people return from the service, I sit at the wayside and beg from them, as they pass by, a bit of the word. One gives one piece, and another another, and I gather them together in my heart, and thinking over what I thus obtain, and praying to God to make me know, I get to understand.” If the gospel could reach the heart of that heathen, and bring to him hope, where is the man whose sins are such this same truth cannot save him?
“The kingdom” is the keynote of this gospel.
Perhaps no man has ever given himself to a study of the gospel, as expressed by the four reporters, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, without being impressed by the continual recurrence of the phrase “The kingdom of God” or “The kingdom of heaven.” As John Watson has said: “Jesus is ever preaching the ’ kingdom of God ’ and explaining it in parables and images of exquisite simplicity. He exhorts men to make any sacrifice that they may enter the kingdom of God. He warns certain that they must not look back, lest they should not be fit for the kingdom of God. He declares that it is not possible for others to enter the kingdom of God. He encourages one because ’ he is not far from the kingdom of God.’ He gives to his chief apostle the keys of the kingdom of heaven. He rates the Pharisees because they shut up ’ the kingdom of heaven ’ against men. He comforts the poor because theirs is ’ the kingdom of heaven, and he invites the nations to sit down with Abraham in ’ the kingdom of heaven.’ The kingdom was in his thought the chiefest good of the soul and the hope of the world, ’ the one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.’”
It is not surprising, therefore, that those men who have seen, in all missionary endeavor at home and abroad, a work that looked directly to, and prepared absolutely for, the coming of the kingdom, should have been the great missionary spirits of the ages. As those who have believed in that full and perfect inspiration of God’s word have been the evangelists of times past, so those who have looked for the kingdom of God to be set up in this world and Christ himself to reign have been the missionary enthusiasts of the centuries. When we repeat the Lord’s Prayer our lips voice the cry of the centuries, “Thy kingdom come.” Why do we so pray? Is it not because we know that the kingdom is not come as yet; and also because we know it is going to come; and that the preaching of “this gospel” must usher it in? But when we pray that prayer do we think it possible that this generation might see the complete answer, that those of us who are now living might yet witness what the prophets of the past have longed to see? Again, when we pray that prayer, do we realize that whether we live to see its answer or no will depend solely upon how we conduct ourselves with reference to the great problem of world evangelization?
In order to deepen that thought we turn attention more fully to the great saying at which we have been looking, for it contains
The Saviour’s Sweeping Promise
“This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations.”
The promise insures the proclamation of truth.
“This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached.” When those words were uttered they were the most preposterous that ever passed the lips of man. They must have sounded strange tO’ even the ears of Christ’s followers and friends. The world, even as they knew it, was large. The speaker, Christ himself, was a humble man, with no money to make even a beginning of such missionary endeavor; with no position of power from which to proclaim his will in the matter; while his followers were few and feeble. And yet the possibility of having this proclamation perfected was apparent at the end of the first century, when the Roman world had not only heard this truth but, in great part, received it. And while the world of to-day is so much larger there never was a time when this promise seemed so near to realization as now. Less than thirty-five years ago, in New York City, A. B. Simpson, a plain man, and a faithful preacher, gave up his Presbyterian pastorate and inaugurated what has come to be known as the Christian and Missionary Alliance; and to-day the messengers of that Alliance are beneath every sun, being heard by almost every people, and out of the deepest poverty, the brethren and sisters of that movement are contributing more than half a million a year to missions.
The Moravian movement is perhaps even a better illustration of how a feeble folk can be made a multitude for God; and, from an apparently insignificant center, send their missionaries to the ends of the earth. When Mott’s book was published this little company of believers had three hundred and seventy-nine missionaries on foreign fields; while their membership at home was less than twenty-five thousand communicants, or about one for every forty Northern Baptists. Such has been their contribution of men and money to foreign fields that to-day their converts from heathenism are nearly three times as many as their church-membership at home. If other evangelical Protestants of Great Britain and America gave as much per capita as do- these Moravian brethren, we would have something more than sixty millions of dollars with which to send forth messengers of the truth; and, with that much at our command per annum, we could preach to every heathen in the world in less than ten years. Our ability in this matter is the measure of our responsibility; and whether or not any such increase will come to our missionary endeavor we have already seen enough to understand that Christ’s promise that “this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world” is going to have a literal fulfilment.
Not a people or place will he passed over.
The time was when members of Protestant churches seriously questioned whether God meant his gospel for all peoples. The opening up of new continents has brought to their attention whole races that were so low and loathsome that some said, “Nothing will ever save these nations.” But the falsity of that opinion is now put beyond dispute. Those who have been fortunate enough to hear Mr. Fred Haggard describe graphically how the gospel had changed a naked, filthy, sinful Assamese woman into a refined, sensitive, and sensible Christian, and how. in five short years, whole heathen villages in Assam had been so transformed by the power of God that one, turning back to visit them, was made to feel that he had been lifted out of heathenism and set down in a Christian land, will doubt no more.
The people of the Society Islands were not only savage, ferocious, and cannibalistic, but such was their immorality that Arthur Pierson says: “It would outrage all decency even to speak of the things which were done of them.” And yet young Williams had scarcely passed his boyhood when he was privileged to see their idols burned, their temples destroyed, all their customs changed, and chapels seating hundreds and in some instances thousands erected. They being saved themselves became zealous missionaries to the other benighted peoples of the earth, and it is written: “When Mr. Williams first visited Raratonga, in 1823, he found them all heathen. When he left in 1834, they were all Christians.”
Even Henry Martyn once wrote: “How shall it ever be possible to convince a Hindu or a Brahmin of anything?.. Truly, if ever I see a Hindu a real believer in Jesus I shall see something more nearly approaching the resurrection of a dead body than anything I have yet seen.” But Martyn lived to see even that, and to-day we count our Hindu converts by the hundreds.
Mott tells us that Manchuria is about eight hundred miles long and five hundred miles wide. It has a population something short of twenty-five million, mostly Chinese. Twenty-three years before his book was written there were three converts there, and eighteen years later only four thousand baptized members of the churches. But at the time of his writing there were twenty thousand members, and the Rev. William Hunter, a missionary, expressed the opinion that ten times twenty thousand had finished forever with their idol-worship, and that those who were definitely moving toward the acceptance of Christianity were even in excess of two hundred thousand.
Time fails one to speak of Murray’s work in southern Africa; of Baptist work on the Upper Congo; the salvation of the thousands of the wild men of Burma; the baptism of the thousands of the Telugus in the Lone Star Mission; of “the wonderful story of Madagascar”; of Methodist success in China; of the Presbyterians in Korea; and of other fields whose romances of missions have been scarcely less remarkable. But these suffice to show that there are no peoples so low but God can save them with the gospel of his Son; it is indeed his power to every one that believes.
That there are none who’ will be passed over is evident from the present progress of civilization. Mott reported 454,730 miles of railway. Thousands have been added since. That meant eighteen air-lines around the world, and one hundred and seventy thousand miles of submarine cables, not to speak of the thousands and thousands of miles of overland cables. Every nation is coming into instantaneous touch with its neighbor, and ere many days the remotest heathen will be within telephone distance of those who have received the light from heaven.
A long time now we have been singing:
Thou, whose almighty word
Chaos and darkness heard,
And took their flight,
Hear us, we humbly pray;
And where the gospel’s day
Sheds not its glorious ray,
Let there be light!
But it must occur to us that while we have addressed this appeal to God he turns it back to us, and if the people that now sit in darkness ever see the light, it will be only when we who are ministers of his
Move o’er the water’s face,
Bearing the lamp of grace.
It is time we ceased asking God to do our work. The purpose of this proclamation is here defined, “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a zvitness to all the nations.” When we speak of the evangelization of the world we do not necessarily mean the conversion of every man, woman, and child in it. If that were required, even in the light of our largest blessings, we might expect centuries, if not millenniums, to be expended on the effort. But to bear witness is an easier task, and one readily within the power of this generation. When we remember that there are one hundred and forty million Protestants in the world, and that all each of these needs to do is to tell ten of his fellows the story of the gospel, we realize how near the end may be. When we think on this we are brought into sympathy with Dr. G. W. Northrup’s arraignment of inactivity on the part of God’s people. Some years ago at Cincinnati, when his denomination was in its annual assembly, he preached that wonderful sermon on “The Evangelization of the World,” in which he said: “Why is it that the heresy of unbelief is regarded with such apprehension or alarm, while the heresy of inaction is viewed with comparative indifference? Is faith without works any better than works without faith? Are they not alike dead and displeasing to God, equally vain and perilous? To the heresy of inaction, far more than to the heresy of unbelief, is due the deplorable fact that the midnight darkness of heathenism still envelops nearly two-thirds of the population of the globe.” Again, we call your attention to The Climax of Christian Effort
“And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.”
That is the glorious consummation. It means, first of all, the end of this age. Who would not see it come? When one looks round about and remembers that this has been an age peculiarly marked by sin, an age in which that great trinity of iniquities — the saloon, the gamblinghouse, and the bagnio — have been daily growing in power, victimizing the multitudes; an age also in which ignorance and superstition and squalor have submerged the millions and brought untold sufferings to the innocent as well as to the guilty; an age now baptized in human blood, shed by the wildest butchery the world has ever known, he is ready to have it come to an end.
Henry T. Chapman, of Leeds, England, quotes the author of a book on India as saying: “One day I stood near one of the great temples (of India). With me was a friend. While we stood there, there came a native woman carrying a little child in her arms. She took no notice of us. But when she got to the foot of the temple steps she threw herself prone on the ground, holding up the baby in her arms. We looked and saw that the baby was ill-shapen, and had none of that beauty and loveliness which characterize infant life. Then she prayed this prayer: ‘Oh, grant that my child may grow fair as other children; grant that it may grow comely; grant that it may grow strong! Oh, hear the cry of a mother, and of a mother’s breaking heart! * And her prayer was finished; she arose, and was passing away, when the missionary said, ‘Friend, to whom have you prayed? ‘She answered: ‘I do not know; but surely somewhere there must be some one to hear the cry of a mother’s heart, and to keep a mother’s heart from breaking,”
When this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness to all nations, then the end of such ignorance shall come. Oh, that it might be in this generation!
It is evident also, that with that time Christ shall come.
A secretary of Foreign Missions, Dr. Henry C. Mabie, commenting on this passage of Scripture, said: “By ’ end ’ here I understand the consummation. After the testimony of Peter — Pentecost! After the testimony of Luther — Reformation! After the testimony of Moravians, the Careys, the Judsons, Livingstones, Morrisons, Duffs, and Patons, the consummation! Christ does not tell us just what kind of a consummation. There are a great many kinds to be climaxed at last by the great, greater, greatest of all consummations — the personal coming of the Lord.”
No man can look out upon the earth to-day and witness the conflicts between rulers and nations, the necessity for sword and slaughter, without longing in his heart for the time to come when men shall cease from the shedding of blood, when oppression shall be no more, because God has fulfilled to his Son the promise of making him “King of kings and Lord of lords,” and privileged him that universal dominion in which “all people, nations, and languages shall serve him,” and given to him that “everlasting kingdom” that Daniel declares “shall never be destroyed.”
There are few prayers written into verse that one should plead more earnestly than this:
Hasten, Lord, the glorious time.
When beneath Messiah’s sway,
Every nation, every clime,
Shall the gospel call obey.
Mightiest kings his power shall own.
Heathen tribes his name adore;
Satan and his host, o’erthrown,
Bound in chains, shall hurt no more.
Oh, we want to see it — the day of his coronation! Thank God for the privilege of doing anything that shall hasten it. Thank God for the privilege of giving anything that shall make it more glorious when once it shall come, for the privilege of sending one’s mite for the salvation of that multitude whose praises shall yet rock the earth and reach to heaven. We believe, by the grace of God, when that day is on, we shall meet our prayers again, and our money again, and all the sympathies we have ever felt, and all the sacrifices we have ever made, in the form of saved ones; and, as we listen to those from Asia, from Africa, from the isles of the sea, joining their voices with those from Europe and from our own land, shouting the praises of “him who sitteth upon the throne,” we shall only be sorry that we invested so little and prayed for them so seldom.
They tell us that the Princess Eugenia, of Sweden, moved by the sight of the sick-poor in the island of Gottland, finding that her funds, were exhausted, stripped her person of every jewel, and put the price thereof into a hospital. One day there came into the hospital a poor woman, ignorant and suffering and sinful. Eugenia prayed much for her. When the winter came on, and the princess had to depart for the city, she went to tell the woman good-bye, and found her much changed in character. As the princess approached her bed, the woman greeted her with these words: “I thank God that the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin,” and the tears of gratitude glistened in her eyes. As the princess passed out she said: “In those tears of penitence I have seen my diamonds again.”