God
is in creation; cosmos would still be chaos with God left out. He isalso
in events; the whole of mission history is a mystery until read as Hisstory.
We
are now to look at the proofs of a Superintending Providence of Godin
foreign missions. The word "providence" literally means fore vision,
andhence,
fore action — preparation for what
is foreseen — expressing adivine,
invisible rule of this world, including care, control, guidance, asexercised
over both the animate and inanimate creation. In its largest scopeit
involves foreknowledge and foreordination, preservation andadministration,
exercised in all places and at all times.
For
our present purpose the word "providence" may be limited to thedivine
activity in the entire control of persons and events. This sphere ofaction
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 andadjusts
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 madesubservient
to the supernatural, and even the wrath of man to the love andgrace
of God.
MANIFESTATIONS
OF GOD
Thus,
intermediate between the mystery of creation and the mystery of thenew
creation lies the mystery of history, linking the other two. We are nowbriefly
to trace the working of the Creator and Ruler of both the matterworlds
and time worlds, controlling the blind forces of nature and theintelligent
forces of human nature, so as to make all events and agenciesserve
His ends as Redeemer.
In
creation God specially manifests His eternity, power and wisdom; inhistory,
His sovereignty and majesty, justice and righteousness; inredemption,
His holiness and benevolence, and, most of all, grace or thevoluntary
exercise of His love. These positions being granted, we mayexpect
to find, especially in mission history, proofs of God’sSuperintending
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 alandscape
from a mountaintop.
GOD’S
ENTERPRISE
The
work of missions is pre-eminently God’s
enterprise — has on it theseal
of His authority. He calls it His own "visiting of the nations to take outof
them a people for His name." Thus the whole course of missionsbecomes
God’s march through the ages. He has His
vanguard, theforerunners
that prepare His way, making ready for, and heralding, Hisapproach.
He has His bodyguard, the immediate attendants that signalizeHis
actual advance, bear His banners, and execute His will; and He has Hisrearguard
the resultant movements consequent upon, and complementaryto,
the rest.
In
other words, God’s Superintending
Providence in missions is seen fromthree 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 rapidglance.
God’s preparations reached through
millenniums. But within thecentury just closed we see Him moving, opening
doors and shaping events,causing the removal of obstacles and the subsidence
of barriers, raising upand thrusting forth workers, and furnishing new
facilities; andconspicuously in promoting Bible translation and diffusion.
GOD’S
COOPERATION
His
cooperation is seen in the unity and continuity of the work, in themarked
fitness between the workers and the work, the new fields and thenew
facilities. Startling correspondences in mission history reveal Hisomnipresence
and faithfulness, such as synchronisms and successionsamong
His chosen servants, parallel and converging lines of labor, andconnecting
links of service. All these, and much more, show, behind thelives
and deeds of the workmen, a Higher Power that wrought in themboth
to will and to work.
GOD’S
BENEDICTION
Mission
history shows also clear traces of the Judge. Hindrances andhinderers
at times removed by sudden retributive judgments; nations thatwould
not serve His ends declining and even perishing; and churches,cursed
with spiritual apathy and lethargy, decaying. On the other hand, Hisapproval
has been as marked in compensations for self-denial and inrewards
for service; in making martyr blood the seed of new churches, andin
lifting to a higher level the individual and church life that has been mostunselfishly
jealous and zealous of His kingdom.
Pagan
philosophers regarded the milky way as an old, disused path of thesun,
upon which He had left some faint impression of His glorious presencein
the golden stardust from His footsteps. To him who prayerfully watchesmission
history it is God’s Via Lactea; He has
passed that way, and madethe place of His feet glorious.
Brevity
forbids more than the citation of instances sufficient to demonstrateand
illustrate these positions. The evidence of divine co-working will ofcourse
be clearest where there is closest adherence to His declaredmethods
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 motherof
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, inthe
body of the Church, disease was dominant and death seemed imminent.Infidelity
and irreligion stalked about, God denying and God defying. Incamp
and court, at the bar and on the bench, in the home and in theChurch,
there was a plague of heresy and a moral leprosy.
THREE
GREAT FORCES
How
then came a century of modern missions! Three great forces Godmarshaled
to cooperate: the obscure Moravians, the despised Methodists,and
a little group of intercessors scattered over Britain
and America.
Therehad
been a consecrated band in Saxony for about a
hundred years, whosehearts’
altars had caught fire at Huss’s stake, and fed that
fire fromSpener’s
pietism, and Zinzendorf’s zeal. Their great
law was labor forsouls, all at it and always at it. God had already made
Herrnhut the cradleof missions and had there revived the apostolic
church. Three principlesunderlay the whole life of the United Brethren:
Each disciple is, first, tofind his work in witness for God; second, his
home where the widest dooropens and the greatest need calls; and third,
his cross in SELF-DENIALfor 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 ofLincoln
College, Oxford,
touched by this influence, took on a distinctivelymissionary
character. Their motto had been, "Holiness to the Lord;" butholiness
became wedded to service, and evangelism became the watchwordof
the Methodists. Just then, in America,
and by a strange coincidence,Jonathan Edwards was unconsciously joining John
Wesley in preparing theway for modern missions. In 1747, exactly 300
years after the UnitedBrethren organized as followers of Huss, at
Lititz in Bohemia, Edwardssent
forth his bugle-blast from Northampton, New England, calling God’speople
to a visible union of prayer for a speedy and worldwide effusion ofthe
Spirit. That bugle-blast found echo in Northampton
in old England,
andWilliam
Carey resolved to organize mission effort —
with what results weall know. And, just as the French Revolution let
hell loose, a newmissionary society in Britain was leading the awakened
Church to assaulthell at its very gates. Sound it out and let the whole earth
hear: Modernmissions
came of a symphony of prayer; and at the most unlikely hour ofmodern
history, God’s intercessors in England, Scotland,
Saxony, andAmerica
repaired the broken altar of supplication, and called down theheavenly
fire. That was God’s way of preparation.
The
"monthly concert" made that prayer-spirit wide spreading andpermanent.
The humble Baptists, in widow Wallis’
parlor at Kettering,made their covenant of missions; and regiments
began to form and take upthe line of march, until, before the eighteenth
century was a quarterthrough its course, the whole Church was joining
the missionary army.
Sydney
Smith sneered at the "consecrated cobblers" and tried to rout themfrom
their nest; but the motto of a despised few became the rallying cry ofthe
whole church of God.
DIVINE
COOPERATION IN MISSIONS
We
turn now to look at the history of the century as a missionarymovement.
Nothing is more remarkable than the rapid opening of doors inevery
quarter. At the beginning of the century the enterprise of missionsseemed,
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,
intolerancein
papal lands, and ignorance, idolatry, superstition, depravity, everywhere,in
most cases conspiring together, reared before the Church impassablewalls,
with gates of steel. Most countries shut out Christian missions byorganized
opposition, so that to attempt to bear the good tidings was todare
death for Christ’s sake. The only
welcome awaiting God’s messengerswas
that of cannibal ovens, merciless prisons, or martyr graves.
OBSTACLES
REMOVED
As
the little band advanced, on every hand the walls of opposition fell, andthe
iron gates opened of their own accord. India,
Siam, Burma, China,Japan, Turkey, Africa, Mexico,
South America, the Papal States and Koreawere successively and
successfully entered. Within five years, from 1853 to1858,
new facilities were given to the entrance and occupation of sevendifferent
countries, together embracing half the world’s
population! Therewas also a remarkable subsidence of obstacles, like to the
sin king of theland below the sea level to let in its flood, as when the
idols of Oahu wereabolished just before the first band of missionaries landed
at the Hawaiianshores, 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 andwomen,
so marvelously fitted for the exact work and fields as to showunmistakable
foresight and purpose. The biographies of leadingmissionaries read like
chapters where prophecy lights up history. Think ofWilliam
Carey’s inborn adaptation as translator in
India, of Livingstone’scareer
as missionary explorer and general in Africa, of Catherine Booth’scapacity
as mother of the Salvation Army, of Jerry McAuley’s
preparationfor
rescue work in New York City, of Alexander Duff’s
fitness foreducational
work in India, of Adoniram Judson’s
schooling for the buildingof an apostolic church in Burma, of John
Williams’ unconscious trainingfor
evangelist in the South Seas. Then mark the unity and continuity oflabor
— one worker succeeding another at crises
unforeseen by man, aswhen Gordon left for the Sudan on the day when Livingstone’s
death wasfirst
known in London, or Pilkington arrived in Uganda the very
year whenMackay’s
death was to leave a great gap to be filled. Then study thetheology
of inventions and watch the furnishing of new facilities for thework
as it advanced. He who kept back the four greatest inventions ofreformation
times — the mariner’s
compass, steam engine, printing pressand paper —
until His Church put on her new garments, waited to unveilnature’s
deeper secrets, which should make all men neighbors, until thereformed
church was mobilized as an army of conquest!
DIVINE
INTERFERENCE
At
times this Superintending Providence of God has inspired awe byunmistakably
judicial strokes of judgment, as when in Turkey in 1839, inthe
crisis of missions, Sultan Mahmud suddenly died, and his edict ofexpulsion
had no executive to carry it out, and his successor Abdul Medjidsignalized
the succession by the issuing of a new charter of liberty; or, aswhen
in Siam, twelve years later, at another such crisis, God by deathdethroned
Chaum Klow, the reckless and malicious foe of missions, and seton
the vacant throne Maha-Mong-Kut, the one man in the empire taughtby
a missionary and prepared to be the friend and patron of missions, asalso
his son and successor, Chulalangkorn!
THE
BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS
These
are but parts of His ways. The pages of the century’s
history arehere
and there written in blood, but even the blood has a golden luster.Martyrs
there have been, like John Williams, and Coleridge Patteson, andJames
Hannington, Allen Gardiner, and Abraham Lincoln, and DavidLivingstone,
the Gordons of Erromanga and the Gordon of Khartoum, theconvert
of Lebanon, and the court pages at Uganda; but every one of thesedeaths
has been like seed which falls into the ground to die that it maybring
forth fruit. The churches of Polynesia and Melanesia, of Syria andAfrica, of India
and China,
stand rooted in these martyr graves as the oakstands in the grave of
the acorn, or the wheat harvest in the farrows of thesown
seed. It is part of God’s plan that thus the
consecrated heralds of thecross shall fill up that which is behind of the
sufferings of Christ in theirflesh 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 resultsin
the foreign field: First, native churches have been raised up with thethree
features of a complete church life; self-support, self-government, andself-propagation;
and second, the richest fruits of Christianity, both in theindividual
and in the community, have been found growing and ripeningwherever
there has been faithful Gospel effort. Then, as to the reflex actionof
missions on the church at home, two other brief sayings are similarlyexhaustive:
first, Thomas Chalmers’ remark that
"foreign missions act onhome missions, not by exhaustion, but by
fermentation;" and second,Alexander Duff’s
sage saying, that "the church that is no longerevangelistic,
will cease to be evangelical"
The
whole hundred years of missions is a historic commentary on thesefour
comprehensive statements. God’s Word has never
returned to Himvoid. Like the rain from heaven, it has come down, not to go
back until ithas
made the earth to bring forth and bud, yielding not only bread for theeater,
but seed for the sower, providing for salvation of souls andexpansion
of service. Everywhere God’s one everlasting sign
has beenwrought;
instead of the thorn has come up the fir tree, and instead of thebrier,
the myrtle tree — the soil of society
exhibiting a total change in itsproducts, as in the Fiji group, where a
thousand churches displace heathenfanes and cannibal ovens, or as among the
Karens, where on opposing hillsthe Schway Mote Tou Pagoda confronts the Kho
Thah Byu MemorialHall, typical of the old and the new. Along the valley of
the Euphrateschurches have been
planted by the score; with native pastors supported byself-denying
tithes of their members. Everywhere the seed of the Word ofGod
being sown, it has sprung up in a harvest of renewed souls which inturn
have become themselves the good seed of the kingdom, to becomealso
the germs of a new harvest.