Chapter 61.

THE TESTIMONY OF FOREIGN MISSIONS TO

THE SUPERINTENDING PROVIDENCE OF GOD

God is in creation; cosmos would still be chaos with God left out. He is also in events; the whole of mission history is a mystery until read as His story.

We are now to look at the proofs of a Superintending Providence of God in foreign missions. The word "providence" literally means fore vision, and hence, fore action — preparation for what is foreseen — expressing a divine, invisible rule of this world, including care, control, guidance, as exercised over both the animate and inanimate creation. In its largest scope it involves foreknowledge and foreordination, preservation and administration, exercised in all places and at all times.

For our present purpose the word "providence" may be limited to the divine activity in the entire control of persons and events. This sphere of action and administration, or superintendence, embraces three departments: first, the natural or material — creation; second, the spiritual or immaterial — new creation; and third, the intermediate history in which He adapts and adjusts the one to the other, so that even the marred and hostile elements, introduced by sin, are made tributary to the final triumph of redemption.

Man’s degeneration is corrected in regeneration; the natural made subservient to the supernatural, and even the wrath of man to the love and grace of God.

MANIFESTATIONS OF GOD

Thus, intermediate between the mystery of creation and the mystery of the new creation lies the mystery of history, linking the other two. We are now briefly to trace the working of the Creator and Ruler of both the matter worlds and time worlds, controlling the blind forces of nature and the intelligent forces of human nature, so as to make all events and agencies serve His ends as Redeemer.

In creation God specially manifests His eternity, power and wisdom; in history, His sovereignty and majesty, justice and righteousness; in redemption, His holiness and benevolence, and, most of all, grace or the voluntary exercise of His love. These positions being granted, we may expect to find, especially in mission history, proofs of God’s Superintending Providence, of His three-fold administration as Lawgiver, King, and Judge; in His legislative capacity, commanding and counseling; in His executive capacity, governing and directing; in His judicial capacity, rewarding and punishing. Space allows only a general glance as of a landscape from a mountaintop.

GOD’S ENTERPRISE

The work of missions is pre-eminently God’s enterprise — has on it the seal of His authority. He calls it His own "visiting of the nations to take out of them a people for His name." Thus the whole course of missions becomes God’s march through the ages. He has His vanguard, the forerunners that prepare His way, making ready for, and heralding, His approach. He has His bodyguard, the immediate attendants that signalize His actual advance, bear His banners, and execute His will; and He has His rearguard the resultant movements consequent upon, and complementary to, the rest.

In other words, God’s Superintending Providence in missions is seen from three points of view:

1. In the divine preparations for world-wide evangelization.

2. In the divine co-operation in missionary activity.

3. In the divine benediction upon all faithful service.

GOD’S PREPARATIONS

Each of these embraces many particulars which demand more than a rapid glance. God’s preparations reached through millenniums. But within the century just closed we see Him moving, opening doors and shaping events, causing the removal of obstacles and the subsidence of barriers, raising up and thrusting forth workers, and furnishing new facilities; and conspicuously in promoting Bible translation and diffusion.

GOD’S COOPERATION

His cooperation is seen in the unity and continuity of the work, in the marked fitness between the workers and the work, the new fields and the new facilities. Startling correspondences in mission history reveal His omnipresence and faithfulness, such as synchronisms and successions among His chosen servants, parallel and converging lines of labor, and connecting links of service. All these, and much more, show, behind the lives and deeds of the workmen, a Higher Power that wrought in them both to will and to work.

GOD’S BENEDICTION

Mission history shows also clear traces of the Judge. Hindrances and hinderers at times removed by sudden retributive judgments; nations that would not serve His ends declining and even perishing; and churches, cursed with spiritual apathy and lethargy, decaying. On the other hand, His approval has been as marked in compensations for self-denial and in rewards for service; in making martyr blood the seed of new churches, and in lifting to a higher level the individual and church life that has been most unselfishly jealous and zealous of His kingdom.

Pagan philosophers regarded the milky way as an old, disused path of the sun, upon which He had left some faint impression of His glorious presence in the golden stardust from His footsteps. To him who prayerfully watches mission history it is God’s Via Lactea; He has passed that way, and made the place of His feet glorious.

Brevity forbids more than the citation of instances sufficient to demonstrate and illustrate these positions. The evidence of divine co-working will of course be clearest where there is closest adherence to His declared methods of working.

DIVINE PREPARATION FOR MISSIONS

As to what events and what messengers have been His chosen forerunners? The first half of the eighteenth century seemed more likely to be the mother of iniquity and idolatry than to rock the cradle of world-wide missions.

Deism in the pulpit and practical atheism in the pew naturally begot apathy, if not antipathy, toward Gospel diffusion. A hundred and fifty years ago, in the body of the Church, disease was dominant and death seemed imminent. Infidelity and irreligion stalked about, God denying and God defying. In camp and court, at the bar and on the bench, in the home and in the Church, there was a plague of heresy and a moral leprosy.

THREE GREAT FORCES

How then came a century of modern missions! Three great forces God marshaled to cooperate: the obscure Moravians, the despised Methodists, and a little group of intercessors scattered over Britain and America. There had been a consecrated band in Saxony for about a hundred years, whose hearts’ altars had caught fire at Huss’s stake, and fed that fire from Spener’s pietism, and Zinzendorf’s zeal. Their great law was labor for souls, all at it and always at it. God had already made Herrnhut the cradle of missions and had there revived the apostolic church. Three principles underlay the whole life of the United Brethren: Each disciple is, first, to find his work in witness for God; second, his home where the widest door opens and the greatest need calls; and third, his cross in SELF-DENIAL for Christ. As Count Zinzendorf said: "The whole earth is the Lord’s; men’s souls are all His; I am debtor to all."

A SYMPHONY OF PRAISE

The Moravians providentially molded John Wesley; and the Holy Club of Lincoln College, Oxford, touched by this influence, took on a distinctively missionary character. Their motto had been, "Holiness to the Lord;" but holiness became wedded to service, and evangelism became the watchword of the Methodists. Just then, in America, and by a strange coincidence, Jonathan Edwards was unconsciously joining John Wesley in preparing the way for modern missions. In 1747, exactly 300 years after the United Brethren organized as followers of Huss, at Lititz in Bohemia, Edwards sent forth his bugle-blast from Northampton, New England, calling God’s people to a visible union of prayer for a speedy and worldwide effusion of the Spirit. That bugle-blast found echo in Northampton in old England, and William Carey resolved to organize mission effort — with what results we all know. And, just as the French Revolution let hell loose, a new missionary society in Britain was leading the awakened Church to assault hell at its very gates. Sound it out and let the whole earth hear: Modern missions came of a symphony of prayer; and at the most unlikely hour of modern history, God’s intercessors in England, Scotland, Saxony, and America repaired the broken altar of supplication, and called down the heavenly fire. That was God’s way of preparation.

The "monthly concert" made that prayer-spirit wide spreading and permanent. The humble Baptists, in widow Wallis’ parlor at Kettering, made their covenant of missions; and regiments began to form and take up the line of march, until, before the eighteenth century was a quarter through its course, the whole Church was joining the missionary army.

Sydney Smith sneered at the "consecrated cobblers" and tried to rout them from their nest; but the motto of a despised few became the rallying cry of the whole church of God.

DIVINE COOPERATION IN MISSIONS

We turn now to look at the history of the century as a missionary movement. Nothing is more remarkable than the rapid opening of doors in every quarter. At the beginning of the century the enterprise of missions seemed, to worldly wise and prudent men, hopeless and visionary. Cannibalism in the Islands of the Sea, fetishism in the Dark Continent, exclusivism in China and Japan, the rigid caste system in India, intolerance in papal lands, and ignorance, idolatry, superstition, depravity, everywhere, in most cases conspiring together, reared before the Church impassable walls, with gates of steel. Most countries shut out Christian missions by organized opposition, so that to attempt to bear the good tidings was to dare death for Christ’s sake. The only welcome awaiting God’s messengers was that of cannibal ovens, merciless prisons, or martyr graves.

OBSTACLES REMOVED

As the little band advanced, on every hand the walls of opposition fell, and the iron gates opened of their own accord. India, Siam, Burma, China, Japan, Turkey, Africa, Mexico, South America, the Papal States and Korea were successively and successfully entered. Within five years, from 1853 to 1858, new facilities were given to the entrance and occupation of seven different countries, together embracing half the world’s population! There was also a remarkable subsidence of obstacles, like to the sin king of the land below the sea level to let in its flood, as when the idols of Oahu were abolished just before the first band of missionaries landed at the Hawaiian shores, or as when war strangely prepared the way just as Robert W. McAll went to Paris to setup his first salle.

MISSIONARIES CALLED AND PLACED

At the same time God was raising up, in unprecedented numbers, men and women, so marvelously fitted for the exact work and fields as to show unmistakable foresight and purpose. The biographies of leading missionaries read like chapters where prophecy lights up history. Think of William Carey’s inborn adaptation as translator in India, of Livingstone’s career as missionary explorer and general in Africa, of Catherine Booth’s capacity as mother of the Salvation Army, of Jerry McAuley’s preparation for rescue work in New York City, of Alexander Duff’s fitness for educational work in India, of Adoniram Judson’s schooling for the building of an apostolic church in Burma, of John Williams’ unconscious training for evangelist in the South Seas. Then mark the unity and continuity of labor — one worker succeeding another at crises unforeseen by man, as when Gordon left for the Sudan on the day when Livingstone’s death was first known in London, or Pilkington arrived in Uganda the very year when Mackay’s death was to leave a great gap to be filled. Then study the theology of inventions and watch the furnishing of new facilities for the work as it advanced. He who kept back the four greatest inventions of reformation times — the mariner’s compass, steam engine, printing press and paper — until His Church put on her new garments, waited to unveil nature’s deeper secrets, which should make all men neighbors, until the reformed church was mobilized as an army of conquest!

DIVINE INTERFERENCE

At times this Superintending Providence of God has inspired awe by unmistakably judicial strokes of judgment, as when in Turkey in 1839, in the crisis of missions, Sultan Mahmud suddenly died, and his edict of expulsion had no executive to carry it out, and his successor Abdul Medjid signalized the succession by the issuing of a new charter of liberty; or, as when in Siam, twelve years later, at another such crisis, God by death dethroned Chaum Klow, the reckless and malicious foe of missions, and set on the vacant throne Maha-Mong-Kut, the one man in the empire taught by a missionary and prepared to be the friend and patron of missions, as also his son and successor, Chulalangkorn!

THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS

These are but parts of His ways. The pages of the century’s history are here and there written in blood, but even the blood has a golden luster. Martyrs there have been, like John Williams, and Coleridge Patteson, and James Hannington, Allen Gardiner, and Abraham Lincoln, and David Livingstone, the Gordons of Erromanga and the Gordon of Khartoum, the convert of Lebanon, and the court pages at Uganda; but every one of these deaths has been like seed which falls into the ground to die that it may bring forth fruit. The churches of Polynesia and Melanesia, of Syria and Africa, of India and China, stand rooted in these martyr graves as the oak stands in the grave of the acorn, or the wheat harvest in the farrows of the sown seed. It is part of God’s plan that thus the consecrated heralds of the cross shall fill up that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ in their flesh for His body’s sake which is the Church.

THE DIVINE BENEDICTION OF MISSIONS

The same Superintending Providence is seen in the results of missions. Two brief sentences fitly outline the whole situation as to the direct results in the foreign field: First, native churches have been raised up with the three features of a complete church life; self-support, self-government, and self-propagation; and second, the richest fruits of Christianity, both in the individual and in the community, have been found growing and ripening wherever there has been faithful Gospel effort. Then, as to the reflex action of missions on the church at home, two other brief sayings are similarly exhaustive: first, Thomas Chalmers’ remark that "foreign missions act on home missions, not by exhaustion, but by fermentation;" and second, Alexander Duff’s sage saying, that "the church that is no longer evangelistic, will cease to be evangelical"

The whole hundred years of missions is a historic commentary on these four comprehensive statements. God’s Word has never returned to Him void. Like the rain from heaven, it has come down, not to go back until it has made the earth to bring forth and bud, yielding not only bread for the eater, but seed for the sower, providing for salvation of souls and expansion of service. Everywhere God’s one everlasting sign has been wrought; instead of the thorn has come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier, the myrtle tree — the soil of society exhibiting a total change in its products, as in the Fiji group, where a thousand churches displace heathen fanes and cannibal ovens, or as among the Karens, where on opposing hills the Schway Mote Tou Pagoda confronts the Kho Thah Byu Memorial Hall, typical of the old and the new. Along the valley of the Euphrates churches have been planted by the score; with native pastors supported by self-denying tithes of their members. Everywhere the seed of the Word of God being sown, it has sprung up in a harvest of renewed souls which in turn have become themselves the good seed of the kingdom, to become also the germs of a new harvest.

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