Introduction to the study of foreign missions; being chapters I, II, VII, VIII, IX of Modern missions in the East

Introduction To The Study Of Foreign Missions

Being Chapters I, II, VII, VIII, IX of Modern Missions in the East

BY

EDWARD A. LAWRENCE, D.D.

NEW YORK

STUDENT VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT

FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS

Two Cor, to Received

CoPVRtfiHT ENTRY

CLASS OsKXc. No.

COPY B.

W

A*

Copyright, 1894, by HARPER BROTHERS Copyright, 1901, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY Copyright, 1901, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

The original and sole Master Missionary is our Lord Jesus Christ, and as Lord of his kingdom he has put his own divine commission upon his followers. It is " Come ! " " Go ! " two commands in one. " Come, learn of me ! " " Go, preach the gospel ! " His first command to his disciples was, " Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men " ; his last, " Go ye and make disciples of all the nations. ,, Discipleship and apostleship are one and inseparable. The instinct of true Christian life 'is everywhere the same. We learn but to teach ; we know of Jesus but to tell of Jesus. We commune with him but to communicate him. Even so are we sent as he has been sent. The commission is identical ; and it is in virtue of that final command and according to our fulfilment of it that we are to experience his fulfilment of the final promise, a promise made to a militant missionary church, not to one that is at ease in Zion. Just so far as his church accepts her responsibility for teaching all nations to observe all things whatsoever he has commanded her may she expect to hear the voice of him to whom all authority has been given in heaven and on earth, saying, " Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world."

Thus the church is a coin of divine minting. One side shows the likeness of its Lord, the other the map of the world. Both devices are so indelibly stamped into the metal that to mar either harms the coin, to efface either destroys it. The world is itself to be finally shaped into that divine likeness. Thus, Christ is at once Authority and Pattern, Inspirer and Organizer, Author and End of missions. Apart from him we can do nothing. Through him we can do, and teach all men to do, all things which he has commanded us.

Not only, then, is the Bible, in such a sublime sense as is just dawning upon us, the Mission Book of the World, the New Testament being the grammar of missions, but Christ has constituted every Christian a missionary, Christianity a mission religion, the church the great missionary institute. Such is the divine idea. What now has been the fact in realization of that idea?

We interrogate history, which is not merely, as has been well said, " an excellent cordial for drooping courage," but is also a rod for presumption and a staff for inquiry.

When we ask what place in the history of the church has Providence given to missions, we notice first the continuity of missions. We distinguish certain grand mission epochs, and are apt to infer that these comprise the whole of mission history. But missions are no modern discovery, or rediscovery of what was lost in the fourth or the ninth century. There have been flood and ebb of the tide, alternations of enthusiasm and lassitude, of zeal and apathy, of conquest and apparent defeat. There have been times of forgetfulness, stagnation, corruption. Many false methods have been employed for the enlargement of Christendom. The spirit of missions, which is the spirit of Christ, has been debased with the lust of power, or the lust of gold, or the lust of blood. The serpent's trail is seen all over the sacred path. The church, in its corporate capacity, has often done nothing or else has done all amiss. Yet the golden thread has not been broken, the prophecy has not failed. The sway which Christianity exercises in the world to-day is the result of over eighteen centuries of continuous effort and achievement. It may well be questioned whether there has ever been a time since that world-wide commission was first given when its appeal has ceased to ring in the ears and find response in the hearts of some of Christ's followers, when at least individual members of the church have not been planning or winning fresh conquests for him.

It is certainly true, in the words of Dr. Maclear, that " you can point to no critical epoch since the foundation of the church — whether it was the downfall of the Roman Empire, or the incoming of the new races, or their settlement in their new homes, or the bursting upon Europe of the sea-rovers from the north, or the moving of the Slavonic races to their present localities, or the discovery of the New World, or the present age, during which science has given to the political organism a new circulation, which is steam, and a new nervous system, which is electricity — when the spirit of missionary enthusiasm has not been rekindled just at the juncture when it was most needed." Precisely this was the anticipation of Jesus. " This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all the nations, and then shall come the end." He announces a continuity of efforts. So far from apprehending that the removal of his bodily presence will interrupt or impede the progress of his kingdom, he allows its universal aim to date from that event, and looking from Olivet around on all nations and down through all ages, " he claims with an absolute assurance the rise of a succession of heralds, who shall carry on a task hitherto unknown — the continuous proclamation of his gospel till the end of time."

The vision has been fulfilled. From that day to this, with whatever exceptional interruptions, with whatever grievous perversions, a continual succession of men has gone forth from the church into the world, intent on the propagation of the faith, and the spread of the kingdom of Christ. There can be no question that in every one of these nineteen Christian centuries mission work in some form or other has been going on. We cannot always trace it directly, but we can see its results. The second and third centuries are covered with dense darkness, so far as the records go, but none were more intensely missionary. From that time on to the present, every century, I think, without exception, shows conspicuous names engaged in this work. These are some of them :

Fourth century . . . Ulf ilas.

Fifth

' St. Patrick.

Sixth

' .... Columba.

Seventh

' .... Augustine.

Eighth

1 .... Boniface.

Ninth

■ .... Ansgar.

Tenth

' ... .Vladimir.

Eleventh

' .... St. Stephen of Hungary

Twelfth

' .... Bishop Otto of Bamberg

Thirteenth '

' .... Raymond Lull.

Fourteenth

Fifteenth

' .... Las Casas.

Sixteenth

' .... Francis Xavier.

Seventeenth

' ... .John Eliot.

Eighteenth

Nineteenth '

' ... .Judson.

But these are a few names out of hundreds known to us. And those are but a few out of tens of thousands known to the recording angel who in every century have braved peril and endured hardship that they might spread abroad the gospel.

" The evidential value of the continuity of the mission enterprise," as Dr. Maclear styles it, is something not to be lost sight of. If it is an enterprise which has never died out, lapsing with the decline only to rise with the recovery of the church, then this fact alone would not only define its inalienable place in the church, but would also declare its significance and glory.

Glance now at the various stages of periods in this continuous mission labor.

The usual division is into Primitive, Mediaeval, and Modern; Primitive missions including the Apostolic and post-Apostolic, and terminating with the conversion of the Roman Empire ; Mediaeval missions covering the next millennium; Modern missions starting from about the time of the Reformation. This division, however, is arbitrary, unwieldy, and inaccurate. The Encyclopaedia of Missions makes these divisions : The Pentecostal Church, the Apostolic Church, the ante-Nicene Church, the Imperial Church, the Feudal Church, the Crusading Church, the Colonizing Church, the Organized Church. These represent the state of the church rather than the stages of missions. There is another division by localities : Mediterranean, European, Universal.

The most natural and instructive division, however, seems to me that based on nationality. It is the method suggested by Jesus himself, " Go teach all nations," and outlining the plan of his kingdom's progress, " Ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria and unto the uttermost parts of the earth." First the sacred city; next the chosen people; then the mingling of Jews and Gentiles; finally the world with all its nations. Guided by this principle, from our later standpoint we see the first stages blended, the last divided. We might classify them as Imperial, Tribal, Universal. Or more fully: I. Romanic; 2. Teutonic; 3. Slavonic; 4. Universal. In the last class are to be included all extra European missions, whenever or wherever begun.

Providence in missions appears especially in the two factors which are to be found interacting wherever the church has done true service for Christ. These are, I. Opportunity; 2. Fidelity. The sphere of the former is external, of the latter internal. Both are God-given, both to be humanly appropriated. God provides the opportunity. He inspires the fidelity. The church must accept the one as the other. Both must concur, though either may precede; the opportunity, as has more frequently been the case, stimulating fidelity, or fidelity making a way where it does not find a way, thus creating its own opportunity. Nothing will better prepare one to take a part in the world-wide movement of to-day than to trace the working of Providence in the history of missions.

The preparation for the first great opportunity began long before the summons to work. Through all the patriarchal and prophetic ages Palestine was a great training-school for missions. All that while God was training his people by seclusion to that purity and tenacity of faith which must be the inheritance of a religion which would win the world by conquest rather than by compromise. At the same time, all along, scattered hints of the universal destiny of this religion were dropped as seeds in the heart of the people, which should ripen in the fulness of time. And centuries before this time came we can see God's hand making the Gentile world ready. The more we study those ages, the more shall we see the truth of the remark of the German historian Droysen, " Christianity is the point towards which the development of the old pagan world moves, from which its history must be comprehended."

In the ancient civilization, as is the case in lesser degree with some of those of Asia to-day, religion and life were closely identified. The state ruled over both, absorbing the individual, creating its own gods. All the relations of life were subject to the state, and each separate state was bound up with its own local deities. Such compact structures could be shaken down only by being shaken in all their parts. And how should these rigid systems be overthrown by a religion which approached them from a lower level of culture, and seemed, in fact, indifferent, if not even hostile, to culture; which appealed to the individual, in states where personality was swallowed up in patriotism, and claimed a universal and exclusive dominion among peoples crystallized into intense and hostile nationalities, and presided over by jealous tribal divinities?

God had his own way of rendering the triumph of such a religion possible. He made five casts of his hand. With each cast he broke down barriers. With each cast he threw out lines into all the earth, which, in his own time, he was to draw together into one great net that should hold in its meshes the fragments of disrupted kingdoms, the floating elements of dissolved nationalities, among which, in this new contact and oneness of life, the personal appeal and the universal claim could make their way. There were five great dispersions. The migrations of the Aryan race began the first or Aryan dispersion. From their primitive centre, whether in Asia or Northern Europe, they pushed themselves out into one after another of what were to become the great centres of civilization — into India, Persia, Greece, Italy, Gaul, and Russia. The affinities of the peoples that sprang up in each of these countries were such that it has ever been easy for one common life to possess them all. In India to-day one feels the latent bond of relationship between the citizen of the United States and the Brahman. One after another the various branches of this great race yield to the power of the Universal religion, which, originating in the Semitic race, has used the many scattered branches of the Aryan race as its vehicles and messengers in its triumphant progress around the world.

The second, or Greek dispersion, which had its beginnings in the nature of that people, was extended by the campaigns of Alexander, which were but the preludes to the journeys of St. Paul. The conqueror was God's hammer to beat down the walls with which the Persian Empire had hemmed in the restless, colonizing Greeks. Then God scattered these cosmopolitans broadcast. Under their predominating influence, Alexandria and Antioch became centres of trade and letters. Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, the whole section lying along the Mediterranean, was Hellenized. Their very downfall as a people and subsequent calamities dispersed them but the more, and thus broadened their influence. Says Dollinger, " The Greek schoolmaster everywhere followed the Roman legionary." A new set of relations was formed among the crumbling nationalities, whose members were brought into close mental contact through Greek commerce, literature, philosophy, and language. That wide-spread classic tongue was thus preparing to be the receptacle of

Revelation, first in the Septuagint translation, then in the original version of the Gospels and Epistles, the only books of any of the great religions that have been primarily recorded in any other than an Asiatic tongue.

A third time God flung out his lines afar in the Roman dispersion, or distribution. Then in the west, as before in the east, kingdoms were broken up, peoples denationalized, and both east and west men were brought into legal and political contact, while their roads by land and their ships by sea abolished distance and drew men into physical proximity. Two opposite processes were going on simultaneously — disorganization and reorganization. But while the old pattern had been provincial, the new was universal. Well has Niebuhr said, " The history of every ancient nation ends in Rome ; the history of every modern nation begins in Rome.' ,

It is easy to see how in the Greek and Roman dispersions God had set certain solvent agencies at work, which would disintegrate the old structures of pagan life. The power of each ancient state was broken, the prestige of the local gods was lost. Society was emancipated from the dominion of the patriarchal family. The very household was disintegrated to make way for personality, liberty, and private property. The great cities which succeeded to the ancient states were not grand enough nor exclusive enough to absorb the patriotism of their citizens. The vast Roman Empire was not compact enough to have much hold on the loyalty of its subjects. Local religion, first shocked by the defeat of its gods, was afterwards corroded by Greek philosophy.

Thus all around the Mediterranean the isolation and exclusion which had prevailed were changed to dispersion and concentration. Diversity and hostility were succeeded by uniformity and intercourse. But the former pride and glory had been followed by discontent. The old objects of love and worship, on which men's passions had been centred, were torn or melted away, and nothing had been found to take their place. Deep dissatisfaction prevailed. Men's lives were empty. They were sick at heart. Brought into close contact with one another, they were not united, but were at odds with both God and man. The unity of the Roman Empire was a mechanical unity, which could only hold the fragments of humanity in local and legal juxtaposition until the power appeared that should fuse them into one common life. What a marvellous mission field was thus offered to the gospel! And what a marvellous Providence had prepared it! It is God who tumbles down the pagan walls, it is he who melts away the icy barriers with the breath of his mouth. He makes the mission roads, and builds the mission bridges. And when he calls the mission army forth, lo! already he has entered the enemies' camp, to make them faint and fear. He worked so then, he works so now, in India as in the Roman Empire.

But there were two more dispersions. The fourth was that of the Jews. Not only their Babylonian captivity, but, later on, their own growing needs and tastes drew them into the movement of the times and scattered them, as the Jewish Diaspora, throughout the civilized world. In the ancient world also Judaism was an effective leaven of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition. Thus were they the condition, not only of the rise of Christianity, but of its incorporation into the heathen world. Their proselytes hung as a loose fringe to Judaism. Aroused but not fettered by its new truths, these Hellenists were just the favorable soil for the gospel seed. Preaching alio most always found its first audiences in the ubiquitous synagogues and houses of prayer. Every synagogue was a mission station of monotheism ; and it was those who had been lately kindled by the teaching of the prophets who most readily accepted the Messiah of whom these prophets spoke.

Finally, with a fifth cast of his hand, God flung the Christians out. They were not long permitted to cling to the sacred city, but were even driven forth, houses falling about their heads, to wander out into all the world, often unintentional and unconscious missionaries, witnesses to the truth of the gospel among all nations.

See how God's work is done ! Grain has been gathered from many distant scattered fields. By conquering hoofs it has been ground into meal, by governing hands it has been kneaded into one lump, the Roman Empire. Now shall the leaven be put into the lump, that so at last it may become like unto the kingdom of God. Into the shattered, uneasy, inorganic Roman world, there is inserted, by the labors of these few Christians, the life of one divine Lord, as the supply of all their needs, the centre of all their passions and affections, through the vitalizing power of which they may grow into one people and spread into one glorious kingdom.

I have dwelt at some length on the preparatory work of this era, not only because of its intrinsic importance, but also because, in the study of the mission work of our time, I find myself every day more and more referred to that early period, as the type and the key to very much that is happening now. And I am convinced that if any seek to. interpret the opportunity of to-day in the vast empires of Asia, they must carefully study the way in which God prepared the great apos-

ii tolic opportunity throughout the Roman Empire. Droysen says, " The highest achievement which antiquity in its own strength has been able to attain is the fall of heathenism." Yet we may add that it did not do even that. For antiquity had not the strength to shatter its own rejected idols. The final blow came from the pierced hand.

The apostolic fidelity needs not to be told. It stands recorded in the Acts and Epistles of the apostles. He who had created the opportunity and sent his Son, sent also the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Thereafter the persecuted church, for the first, last, sole time in its history, was the great missionary, needing no society for propaganda, for it was that itself. There is a mystery about the origin of many Christian communities, such as that of Damascus, Rome, Gaul, and Britain, which is explained only in this way. As is to-day alleged of the Mohammedans, every convert was a missionary. The merchantman, the servant, man or maid, the captive hostage or slave, the Christian wife, all were true to their opportunity; all carried their faith with them, and even through silence proclaimed it to the world about them. Yes, the absent and the dead did the same work, when the story of the one exiled and the other martyred for his faith proved to some inquirer the message of salvation. At the head of all these were the apostles and their companions, who waited for no compulsion to scatter them among the dispersed, but went forth like blazing torches to set the world on fire with Christian love. No sooner had these open doors been entered than the second great opportunity came with the irruption and distribution of the northern tribes. It was another of those great providential migrations of population, of which history is full.

It came neither too early nor too late. The work of Greece, of Rome, of Judea, had been finished; the work of Jesus was begun. For four centuries, along a frontier of two thousand miles, the Roman and Teuton faced one another. There was constant contact and interchange between Christian Rome and the rude, hardy, simple northern tribes. Missionaries like Ulfilas and Severinus wandered forth among them, to find their hearts strangely unfettered and unoccupied. Captives were taken on both sides. The pagan captives learned in Rome, and returned to tell their countrymen, what they found the Christian captives had already been teaching in the wild northern woods. Rome's hired legions, too, were constantly ministered to by holy men, who brought them, while they fought, the message of peace. It is touching to think of Bishop Ulfilas, with his Goths, refusing to translate for them the four books of Kings, because, forsooth, they needed the bit more than the spur. Thus the northern hearts were moved before they took Rome, till at last they came, they saw, and they were conquered, melting away into Christianity so quietly and so swiftly that hardly " a legend or a record remains to tell the tale." Here, among these primitive tribes, there were traits of personality, independence, and obedience, of manhood, and yet more of womanhood, which made good soil for the gospel seed.

Yet it was only an enduring fidelity that mastered this opportunity. It took all the fiery zeal of the Celtic Church, aided by the organizing power of Augustine and the Roman missionaries, on to the close of the seventh century to evangelize Britain. Winfred, called the father of Christian civilization in Germany, died a martyr on the shores of the Zuyder Zee. " Nor," says Dr. Maclear, " did his loving disciples and successors find the work less arduous, less liable to constant disappointment. The whole of the latter half of the eighth century is a record of alternate success and defeat. Now a fresh outpost is established, now it disappears before a desolating inroad of heathen Saxons. Now a church is built, now it is levelled with the ground by the same remorseless invaders ; nor was it till, with indomitable determination, Charlemagne had pushed his conquests from the Drimel to the Lippe, from the Weser to the Elbe, and thence to the shores of the Baltic, that the wild world of the eighth century could be lifted out of the slough of barbarism, and the civilization work of intrepid missionaries could proceed with any real effect."

There was yet another enlargement of opportunity when, after this long struggle with the Celtic, Teutonic, and Scandinavian tribes, the way was opened in the latter half of the ninth century to the Slavonian tribes. Here, too, it was only by the same bold, unflagging faithfulness that the gospel won the day. It passed quickly from Bulgaria to Moravia, and thence to Bohemia and Russia. But in Poland, Lithuania, Pomerania, the fight seemed almost hopeless, the opportunity not to exist. It is passing strange to read that in a.d. 1230 " human sacrifices were still being offered up in Prussia and Lithuania in honor of Potrimpos, the god of corn and fruits, and Picullus, the god of the nether world; while infanticide was so common that all the daughters in a family were frequently put to death; serpents and lizards were objects of worship, and male and female slaves were burned with the dead bodies of their master, together with his horses and hounds, hawks and armor." Or, again, how terribly confused are Christianity and bloody paganism in the account that " when the body of Rolf the Ganger, who had accepted Neustria and Christianity together for himself and his Norse followers, was to be buried, the gifts of the monasteries for the repose of his soul were accompanied by the sacrifice of one hundred human victims. "

Yet the work went on, though serpent worship was still prevalent in Lithuania in the fifteenth century, and though Lapland was not won until the sixteenth or even seventeenth century. It was only constancy, devotion unto death, and a continuous pressure of the gospel upon the world, that accomplished the evangelization of Europe, even with all the providential preparations, dispersions, and migrations.

Through it all, God showed that he could preserve as well as prepare. Speaking of the tenth century, Bishop Lightfoot says : " I can compare the condition of the church at this epoch to nothing else but the fate of the prisoner in the story, as he awakens to the fact that the walls of his iron den are closing in upon him, and shudders to think of the inevitable end. From all sides the heathen and the infidel were tightening their grip upon Christendom. On the north and west the pagan Scandinavians hanging about every coast, and pouring in at every inlet ; on the east the pagan Hungarians, swarming like locusts, and devastating Europe from the Baltic to the Alps; on the south and southeast the infidel Saracen, pressing on and on with their victorious hosts. It seemed as if every pore of life were choked, and Christendom must be stifled and smothered in the fatal embrace. But Christendom revived, flourished, spread."

The methods of these mediaeval missions were full of instruction, both for imitation and avoidance.

The missionaries were nearly all monks. They often went forth like Christ and his apostles, in companies of twelve, with a thirteenth as leader, and became pioneers of civilization as well as of Christianity, tilling the soil and subduing wild nature as well as wild hearts. Seven such companies of thirteen are named in the sixth and seventh centuries alone. Brotherhoods and sisterhoods had flourished among the Druids, and before them, and seemed congenial to the soil. The communities formed by them were not unlike the Christian villages of Southern India, or the South Seas, or the Moravian settlements in Greenland or South Africa. The monastery was not one great building, but a village of huts on a river or island, with a church, a common eating-hall, a mill, a hospice! and a surrounding wall of earth or stone. Thither men came and invited others who could not maintain the habits of their new life in heathen homes. Here they concentrated their strength. They ploughed and fished, felled trees and tended cattle, cared for the sick and poor, trained the children and the clergy, went out as evangelists, lingered as pastors, returned and copied the Scriptures, while they received and protected their new converts. Very unlike was this to the oriental or modern idea of monastic life. But Iona and Lindisfarne seem to have been the type of just what was needed for those times.

Throughout there was a striking absence of vernacular literature, and great anxiety to retain the Latin language for the Scripture and liturgy, though the mother tongue was never entirely banished from the Anglo-Saxon service. Miracle-plays also took a prominent part in their worship. Conversions were largely national instead of individual, and, as a result, frequently violent rather than peaceable, and sometimes of short duration. In answer to the often-pressed command, " Coge entrare " — compel them to enter in

— some milder spirits added, " verbis, non verberibus " — with words, not blows — but it availed little. When Clovis, Vladimir, and other savage chieftains were converted, there followed the wholesale baptism of their tribes. We read, for instance, how Russian peasants were driven into the Dnieper by Cossack whips, and baptized by force. Norway was converted in the tenth and eleventh centuries by the force and craft of its kings. It was only the Reformation that reached the heart of Norway. Charlemagne fought the savage Saxons into the kingdom of God, as well as into his own. It was always baptism or battle with him and many other Christian chiefs.

It is not strange, then, that while England was evangelized in less than a century through the combined efforts of the Culdee and Latin churches, yet in various Saxon kingdoms in the south of England there was for some time a pretty regular alternation of Christianity and heathendom. A heathen king, so the process is described, becomes Christian, and forthwith all his subjects are Christian. He returns to heathenism, or dies, and is succeeded by a heathen, and no Christians are found. Such is purely national conversion. Yet a Scotch writer says : "I doubt whether England now sends as many missionaries to all the world, as England at the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth centuries sent to Frisia alone. Certainly from Scotland not as many go out now as went from our shores at the beginning of the seventh century."