The Missionary Interpretation 
of History 

An article which appeared in the Methodist Review for 
July, I905, has grown to the present size, and is 
commended to all who enjoy its story of triumph. 


The Missionary Interpretation 
of History 

By 

RICHARD T. STEVENSON, PH. D. 

OHIO WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 


CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 



Contents 


PAGE 

L THE COMING OF THE MAN, 9 

II. HIs MIRACLES,
III. NEW PEOPLES,
IV. BROTHERHOOD,
V. PHILOSOPHY,
VI. ENTHUSIASM, 
--- 2I 
--- "33 
--- 66 
---- 83 

- 94 

I 

The Coming of the Man 

IT is not to be expected that this little 
book is an attempt to solve the riddles of 
history. It desires to present in its own 
way the man without whose work in the 
world we have not so far been able to get 
along. It would emphasize an explanation 
of progress after the fashion of one 
who believes profoundly in the leadership 
of Him who came to do the Father's will, 
and who gave commission to others to 
finish the work He had begun. 

"There is not only an economic interpretation 
of history, but an ethical, an 
aesthetic, a political, a jural, a linguistic, a 
religious, and a scientific interpretation of 
history." 

9 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

In such wise words Professor Seligman 
sets forth the fact of the complexity of history, 
and disposes of the exaggerations of 
the school of thought that endeavors to explain 
all movements of civilization from the 
point of view of economics, even affirming 
that Christianity was primarily an economic 
movement, and going so far as to 
apply the theory, not only to religion but 
also to philosophy. But the end of overemphasis 
is near at hand. The reaction 
has already set in, and the truth appears in 
the vigorous phrases of Sir Oliver Lodge, 
the eminent physicist, in the Contemporary 
Review of July, I905: 

"What we have to teach, throughout, is 
that in no sort of way is man to be the 
slave of his environment. .. . It is 
not himself which is to suit the environment, 
but he is to make the environment 
suit him. This is the one irrefragable doctrine 
that must be hammered into the ears 

10 



The Coming of the Man 

of this generation till they realize its truth 
and accept it." 
It is evident that we are come to a time 
when the moral and spiritual forces in 
human progress are getting truer recognition 
than a few years ago when undue emphasis 
upon economics minimized the 
power of the motives which could not be 
measured in bushel-baskets or weighed in 
scales. Not only is the ethical life not subordinated 
to the economic life, but, as the 
race improves, its finer elements are to grow 
supreme. 
As a mighty agent in the manifest destiny 
of the race let us study a peculiar 
sort of man, whose presence and spirit in 
history have to be reckoned with. Indeed, 
there is no getting on without him. The 
Christian Church is slowly coming to its 
right mind. For proof, we note how hostility 
has effervesced in suspicion, and suspicion 
has changed to indifference, and in


11 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

difference has become interest, and interest 
has leaped into loyalty, and, finally, loyalty 
has been transformed into a notable pride 
in the fruits of the toil of a singular type 
of man. We have known too little of him. 
We ought to know vastly more of him and 
his works; for to remain in any wise ignorant 
of him is not to know the trend of 
history since Calvary. We were once Gentiles, 
and now for some ages have been intrusted 
with the holy ark of God's Covenant 
of Peace with the world. We were 
found by Him in the gloom of our ancestral 
paganism. To make us inheritors of 
the benefits of the grace of God He swung 
open at great expense a mighty door, 
that Christ might enter our hearts and national 
life, and become through us the King 
of the kingdoms of the whole earth. This 
man is unique among men. He swings 
down the centuries with a free and powerful 
stride. His right to the path he has 

12 



The Coming of the Man 

not allowed any one long to dispute. He 
claims to have but one business, and to 
breathe but one consuming passion. He is a 
messenger of the King of kings, and has 
his eye on the uttermost shores of earth. 

At the foot of the tablet erected to the 
memory of John Howard in St. Paul's, 
London, are the words, "He trod an open 
but unfrequented path to immortality/' To 
none other is this shining tribute to the 
worth of the work of the Yorkshire sheriff, 
who gave his life to the amelioration of the 
harsh conditions of the prisoners in European 
jails, more appropriate than to the 
man who first started around the shores of 
the Mediterranean to preach out of their 
malign power the superstitions of a dark 
age. In the following manner Frederick 
Harrison, not the most sympathetic recorder 
of peculiarly spiritual victories, 
speaks of the first great missionary: "We 
know how the first fellowship of the breth


13 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

ren met; how they went forth with words 
of mercy, love, justice, and hope; we know 
their self-denial, humility, and zeal; their 
heroic lives and awful deaths; their loving 
natures and their noble purposes; how they 
gathered around them, wherever they came, 
the purest and the greatest; how across 
mountains, seas, and continents the communion 
of saints joined in affectionate 
trust; how from the deepest corruption of 
the heart there arose a yearning for a truer 
life; how the new faith, ennobling the instincts 
of human nature, raised up the 
slave, the poor, and the humble to the dignity 
of common manhood, and gave new 
meaning to the true nature of womanhood; 
how, by slow degrees, the Church, with its 
rule of right, of morality, and of communion, 
arose; how the first founders and 
apostles of this faith lived and died, and all 
their gifts were concentrated in one, of all 
the characters of certain history doubtless 

14 


The Coming of the Man 

the loftiest and purest�the unselfish, the 
great-hearted Paul." Surely in no ordinary 
pattern was this man cast, treading to immortality 
by a path open, but in his day 
too little frequented even by unselfish souls. 

Since that time he and his comrades have 
been filling up the path and the end of the 
journey is none the less immortality. Now 
they seem to swarm in the world's highways, 
and even to give a new distinction to 
the unfrequented byways. No one can interpret 
the long perspective and not have to 
reckon with the missionary. He and his 
fellows think, in the main, alike through the 
long millenniums. They love, they toil, and 
they die as if powerfully impressed with 
the sense of absolute devotion to the orders 
of the same great Commander. They go 
out as if they never cared to return. Their 
whole bent is centrifugal, not centripetal. 
They claim to be constructive, yet they 
leave houses, lands, wives, and children� 

15 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

all; forsaking things that other men covet 

having material values, and strain every 

nerve and challenge every hazard to get to 

"the uttermost parts." Nothing less than 

the outer rim will satisfy their ceaseless 

hunger for the last nation, the loneliest 

habitation, the abandoned man. They are a 

desperate set. Their fashion for marking 

off the stages of their advance is novel. 

They lie down and with their last breath 

call out, for encouragement to their fol


lowers, "Another empire!" At first glance 

they seem to be composing a sort of 

triumphal procession of blunderers, and 

their forward movement has to the un


initiated all the marks of an aimless quest. 

I find no mention of this breed of men in 

the forty-six parallel "Lives" and the four 

detached "Lives" of Plutarch, nor does 

Carlyle portray him for us in his "Heroes." 

Emerson has on his bead-roll philosopher, 

mystic, skeptic, poet, soldier, writer, but not 

16 


The Coming of the Man 

the man whom history is coming to regard 
as one of the "representative men" in race 
progress since the Christ came to earth. 
We have failed to discover any one to take 
his place. His greatness does not appear to 
be exhausted. He keeps succeeding himself. 
He defies oblivion. Rotation may be 
the law of nature, and people may say that 
they explore the horizon in vain for the 
successor of a great man, for his class is 
extinct, as Emerson affirms; but the 
world is not done with the missionary. To 
the past he was a necessity, the present is 
an epitome of his idealism, and the good 
future is inconceivable with him as a minus 
quantity. The philosophy of history is now 
coming to take him by the hand for a cordial 
greeting on the level. For the homiletic 
classic he is still an immortal supporting 
column. Romanticism in the pulpit 
welcomes his everlasting freshness. 

The infinite variations of his appearance 

2 

17 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

make him an unspeakable benediction to un


numbered pulpits and pews. One of them is 

seen swimming through the angry surf off 

the island of Malta; he is an expert in 

prayer and in the swimmer's art. His ver


satility takes the breath out of our won


der. He got into history by the name of 

Paul. 

Yonder are men in a boat off the coast 

of Fife. They mourn the gloomy prospect: 

"The snow closes the road along the shore, 

the storm bars our way over the sea;" the 

leader says, "there is still the way of 

Heaven that lies open." It is Cuthbert 

speaking, the glorious herald of Northum


bria. And now, after long centuries have 

slipped by, it is a man in the hot streets of 

Goa ringing a hand-bell to attract the dusky 

peoples to hear his strange but comforting 

message. It is Xavier. Again, it is an


other swimmer cast on the coast of Mau


ritius, indeed twice wrecked before he ar


18 


The Coming of the Man 

rives in India. It is a Scotchman, and they 
call him Alexander Duff. Then the vision 
changes, and we are watching a fugitive in 
a jungle of India. Mutiny is astir; it is 
midnight; the burden-bearers have deserted 
; tigers prowl about. The man steps 
out from the path, lifts his hat, in the time 
of awful peril, and prays two minutes as 
he had never prayed before. He steps back 
into the path and there he finds the bearers 
bent to their loads. It is William Butler. 
And there in Calcutta goes a tall form, 
with a white cotton umbrella overhead. He 
is barefooted. It is Taylor calling the 
Eurasians to Jesus. Once more: the blue 
sky of the New Hebrides overarches a 
placid form lying in a canoe; his breast is 
covered with palms, and underneath are 
five spear-wounds. The boat floats out into 
the lagoon and is welcomed by weeping followers. 
It is the body of John Coleridge 
Patteson, bishop, and like Bishop Coke he 

19 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

is lowered for burial into the sea. As the 
pictures of this man's wanderings and 
apostolates and evangelisms rise before us, 
the tribute to Livingstone comes to mind. 
One night, in I887, Henry Morton Stanley 
was on board the Peace, on the broad 
bosom of the Congo, talking of Africa and 
her degraded condition, and the only regeneration 
possible for her. Stanley said, 
"If Dr. Livingstone were alive to-day I 
would take all the honors, all the praise, 
that men have showered upon me; I would 
put them at his feet and say, Here you are, 
old man; they are all yours." 

It begins to dawn upon us that the missionary 
interpretation of history may in the 
long run hold good. If so, it behooves the 
Christian Church to adopt his theory, 
breathe his spirit, and pray God for a share 
of his power. What has he done? Look 
a bit. What has he not done ? 

20 


II 

His Miracles 

IN this light he makes his first appearance, 
a worker of miracles. If we had had 
insight we might have surmised the truth; 
for the Master, one day before He left him, 
said that he would do greater things than 
He Himself had done. It might take time, 
but they would not fail of performance. 
And now, behold! Three centuries file by 
in slow procession, each column bannered 
with the insignia of a haughty imperialism. 
A marvelous change takes place; for in the 
beginning of the movement Rome's eagle 
swoops down upon conquered peoples with 
all her old-time ferocity. In due time the 
far-famed title "S. P. Q. R." "Senate and 
Roman People," gives way to the "I, H. 

21 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

S.," the mystic letters leading in the spelling 
of the name of the Nazarene whose 
triumph in the most distant lands was destined 
to make the victories of the Caesars 
appear but the gains of a provincial captain. 
The missionary has substituted his 
own for the Roman's ancient standard. 
None but the most wealthy and active imagination 
can re-create this most tremendous 
conversion of all time. Renan, indulging 
in extravagant appreciation of 
Greece, has this: "I will even add that, in 
my opinion, the greatest miracle on record 
is Greece itself;'' and another writer, more 
eloquent than sober, has said, "Except the 
blind forces of nature, nothing moves in 
this world which is not Greek in its origins." 
Surely a scholar's strabismus. For 
while Greece was easily the master of the 
field of culture, and forever glorious, Rome 
surpassed her in the field of practical politics 
; and yet the latter, long time illustrious 

22 


His Miracles 

in imperial rule, found her master in the 
humble evangelist. The same missionary 
who left his message upon the hill with the 
Athenian philosophers lifted the scepter of 
the Nazarene over the Capitoline Hill. So 
Professor Edward A. Freeman is right in 
declaring, "The miracle of miracles, greater 
than dried-up seas and cloven rocks, greater 
than the dead rising again to life, was when 
Augustus on his throne, pontiff of the gods 
of Rome, himself a god to the subjects of 
Rome, bent himself to become the worshiper 
of a crucified provincial of his empire." 
Not even the devotion of the able 
reactionary Julian could restore the pagan 
faith which this itinerant had so uprooted. 
The missionary smiled at the helpless disgust 
of the emperor when he discovered 
that, at one of the greatest shrines in Asia, 
the hecatomb which should have been offered 
had shrunk to a paltry goose. The 
itinerant knew as only he could know 

23 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

why the statue of Victory, Rome's chief 
patron in her last days, was voted 
out and down by the rising Christian majority 
in the Senate. The transformation 
of pagan into Christian Rome took place 
over his dead and often defiled body, but 
it took place. 

The swift spread of early Christianity 
was an expression of its conviction that 
the world was to be the field of its beneficent 
imperialism. Its dominion bordered 
no neighbor's realm. It got its first missionary 
center in Antioch, and then along 
the great Roman highways the messengers 
marched on and on. Peter entered Babylon; 
Mark gained Alexandria, an even 
more important missionary arsenal than the 
city on the banks of the Euphrates. Within 
less than a century a network of Christian 
Churches covered the Roman Empire. The 
activity of the early Church has had no 
rival in all the centuries until one reaches 

24 



His Miracles 

the twentieth century. And this is the more 
striking when we remember that the first 
century leaped forth, as it were, from a 
state of inertia preceding Pentecost, while 
we now move on borne by the mighty momentum 
of the past. Origen, writing later 
on, speaks of the city Churches sending out 
their own missionaries to preach in all the 
surrounding villages. On the Roman roads 
built for military expeditions, down the 
current of strange rivers, into forest recesses, 
into the thick of city life where 
the convention of culture and the cruelties 
of paganism offered bitter welcome they 
went forward to their destiny, evermore 
dreamers who made the dream come true. 
Their lot was not an easy one. They were 
accused of atrocious crimes; lampooned; 
cursed; charged with treason; outlawed by 
the judges; and sent to the stake, when a 
single word of acknowledgment of the 
divinity of the emperor would have ensured 

25 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

their liberty. Juvenal may have been an 
eye-witness of the carnival in Nero's gardens 
when he tells how 

"At the stake they shine, 
Who stand with throat transfixed, and smoke 
and burn." 

Their veins might supply rivers with bloody 
tides; their only honor be the accusation of 
shameful deeds; their homes be dens; their 
faith in Jesus be called "atheism," and the 
lion's maw their goal; but even so they went 
smilingly forward�to victory. 

Tender girls joined stalwart men in the 
march to the grave. In one of the persecutions 
through which the early Church 
rose to more vigorous life a number of 
martyrs suffered in Carthage, among whom 
were two young women, Perpetua and 
Felicitas. All the prisoners were condemned 
to fight with the wild beasts on the 
birthday of the Caesar. One of the martyrs, 
Saturus, was speedily released from 

26 


His Miracles 

life by the bite of a leopard. Perpetua and 
Felicitas were put into a net and exposed 
to a wild cow. On her hair and dress becoming 
disarranged, Perpetua quietly reordered 
them, modest to the last. Being 
about to receive the death-blow, Perpetua 
called to the soldier, Pudens, "Be strong, 
and think of my faith, and let not all this 
make thee waver, but strengthen thee." 
They greeted one another with the kiss of 
peace, and were slain with daggers. When 
the gladiator came near who was to kill 
Perpetua, his hand trembled. She took his 
hand, guided it to her throat, and died as 
calmly as if falling asleep. It needed no 
prophet to tell the future of such assurance, 
for the endurance of the Christians wore 
out the hate of the heathens. No efforts at 
annihilation could prevail when love had 
armed the sufferer for the conflict. The 
executioner might behead the Bishop Sixtus 
in the Catacombs, and scatter his blood 

27 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

on the spot where he had just celebrated 

the Lord's Supper, and four days later 

roast his deacon Laurentius in an iron 

chair�the victory of the truth was sure to 

fall to those who loved it sincerely, and the 

crowning of martyrdom followed hard 

upon the crowning of Csesarism. 

From Rome to Madagascar and Poly


nesia is a long leap, but the same miracle-

worker is present to astonish us with his 

power. What if Froude writes despair


ingly of the work in Zealand? Charles 

Darwin declared that "the lesson of the 

missionary is the enchanter's wand." Lord 

Lawrence, viceroy of India, said, "I be


lieve, notwithstanding all that the English 

people have done to benefit India, the mis


sionaries have done more than all other 

agencies combined." What if Dr. Oscar 

Lenz sneers in the London Times that mis


sions in Africa are a failure ? James Rus


sell Lowell votes with mighty conviction 

28 


His Miracles 

that they are not, and Count Limburg-
Hirum returns to Europe amazed at having 
been "welcomed in the land of cannibals by 
children singing hymns," and the father of 
modern geography, Ritter, calls the work 
of the missionary a "miracle" indeed. In 
I8I9 the Church Missionary Society sent 
to Sierra Leone a poor German laborer, 
William B. Johnson, to a refuse population 
in which there were twenty-seven tribes, 
and as many dialects, and war was perpetual. 
In seven years Johnson died, but he 
lived long enough to see the country transformed; 
every trade represented, even the 
professions, a family altar in every home, 
thousands of children at school, a church 
�builded by natives�holding two thousand 
hearers. To work this miracle these 
men have not canted, they have not cringed, 
they have not despaired; they have not 
halted before a hard job, nor made courage 
wait on caution, nor hesitated to pay for 

29 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

success at the expense of their own lives, 

preferring death to failure. They earn the 

encomium of the Lord's fools rather than 

that of worldly wise men. The sheen of 

dress parade is always more offensive than 

the dust of the battle. They have not al


ways had the pleasure of choosing the alter


native of the Spartan mother, "either with 

your shield or on it," for oftentimes it has 

been neither, and Patteson is dropped into 

the sea, Williams of Erromanga is eaten 

by cannibals, and Hannington is decapi


tated, and his head likely set on a pole to 

adorn the rude entrance to the hut of some 

chieftain in Equatorial Africa. Living


stone's bones, it is true, get interment in 

Westminster, but his heart is now mingled 

with the dust of the shore of Lake Bang


weolo, and so he holds two continents in 

holy bonds for the redemption of both. 

"The old, old story" has to do, not only 

with the love of Jesus, but with the de


30 


His Miracles 

votion of His disciples in all ages, and the 
latest records of heroism in China are as 
brilliant as any in the days of Nero. Ch'en, 
the gatekeeper of the compound in Pekin, 
welcomed the birth of a baby girl, and 
named her Mary (pronouncing it Ma-li), 
after the mother of our Lord. He became 
a licensed preacher. The Boxers came. He 
was urged to flee to the hills. "No," said 
Ch'en, "I will not leave until all the members 
of my flock are first hid away." The 
Boxer chief with his rabble, caught him, 
with his wife, son, and little "Apple," as 
his beautiful thirteen-year-old daughter 
was called, demanded all his money, and 
then whatever else he had. Ch'en gave up 
all, and turning to the crowd of ruffians 
said, "Now I am through; you may do with 
me as you like." The mob killed and beheaded 
the father; and then the mother, 
the brother, and the girl were hacked to 
pieces. Months later, when the third son 

31 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

had gathered the mangled bits and given 
them a decent burial, he was asked by the 
officials, now anxious to curry favor with 
the victors, what indemnity he wanted; he 
said he wanted no indemnity. One request 
he made: "I should like to go to that 
church and preach the Gospel to the people 
who murdered my parents." They 
gave him permission to go. And he joins 
the host of world-saviors who, in the olden 
time, put up Christ in the place of Caesar. 
Love's miracle is to transform the earth. 
The Master has said it; 

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that 
believeth on Me, the works that I do shall 
he do also; and greater works than these 
shall he do" 

32 



III 
New Peoples 


THE missionary has always had his eye 
on the nations of the future. He has never 
failed to divine the regnant qualities that 
lie latent in certain races. He must needs 
work for the distant goal of the Kingdom 
through those peoples, who, by reason of 
their rapid growth, their instinct for expansion, 
their industrial supremacy, and 
their masterful ability in government, and 
the long call of God, are to control the next 
half hundred and the next half thousand 
years. He is after the masters of men, to 
bring them to the Master of all. When 
he takes his stand at the base-line of what 
Merivale calls the greatest event of secular 
history, the fall of Rome, he rushes off 

3 

33 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

to seed down the new peoples with the 
faith that is to conquer the world in the 
future. They are worthy of being called 
the founders of the new nations which 
arose out of the chaos of the centuries in 
which Rome was tumbling to her ruin. 
The barbarian conquerors were not able 
to secure to civilization what they had 
wrested from the imperial city. The Goths 
took Rome by storm; the missionary captured 
the peoples of Western Europe by 
love, and ushered in a more enduring conquest. 
The Teutonic invaders, when at last 
they overflowed Italy, were already tamed 
and brought under law; their idolatrous 
heathenism had become a thing of the past. 
For three hundred years the missionary 
was performing a double task; he was both 
mounting the throne of the Caesars, and 
mingling with the half-clad men on the 
frontiers of the Rhine and the Danube. 

Now the missionary was a hostage, like 

34 


New Peoples 

Ulfilas, who became the bishop of the 
Western Goths, dying in 388 at Constantinople 
; now a captive, like St. Patrick. The 
latter was taken captive at the age of sixteen 
by the Irish. After seven years he escaped 
; but in 432 he returned to Ireland to 
begin his wonderful labors, lasting thirty 
years. His monastic establishments became 
outposts of civilization. Ireland soon 
exhibited fervent ecclesiastical activity, and 
got the name of the Isle of Saints. 

There were hermits, like St. Severinus, 
of noble origin from the East, who took 
his journey to the Roman province of Noricum, 
and near Vienna ministered to the 
warriors of the invading tribes for thirty 
years. The earliest patron saint of France 
was Martin of Tours. He was a soldier by 
profession, became a follower of Jesus, 
won his mother to his Master, and laid the 
foundation of a beautiful fame by his long 
labors in Genoa and Tours. To the north


35 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

west is seen St. Columba, who founded the 
settlement at Iona, to whose sacred ruins, 
long centuries afterwards, Dr. Sam. Johnson 
thought it not belittling to make a pilgrimage. 
Columba was a civilizer as well 
as a preacher. In the opening of the fifth 
century, when the Emperor Honorius, 
weakling and craven that he was, fell down 
helpless before Alaric, even then a monk 
by name of Honorius redeemed the name 
from dishonor by his devotion to the cause 
of right, and sent from his home in Lerins 
on the shores of the Mediterranean 
numerous laborers to the south and west of 
Gaul. As we turn our eyes to Germany we 
note the contributions made by the teacher 
Columban, and his pupil Gallus, in the 
Vosges hills and around Lake Constance. 

The sixth century bore witness to the 
power of fresh consecration on the part of 
the Benedictines, the first Catholic order, 
not only in art, but also in the larger his


36 



New Peoples 

tory of civilization. Monachism up to the 
end of the fifth century presents a sorry 
record of idleness, fanatic absurdities, and 
false claims of superior sanctity. Benedict, 
while not able wholly to clear himself of 
the influences of his age, yet became the 
founder of a really great and beneficent 
movement. His followers were the bearers 
of the Gospel into the wilds of the 
North of Europe, and made the hidden 
places of Britain, Gaul, Saxony, and Belgium 
resound with the praises of God; and, 
as if in this revival of evangelistic zeal they 
would include all good possible, they became 
the builders, the agriculturists, the 
teachers, and the artists of mediaeval 
Europe. 

When the rough Saxon swept back the 
Briton to the west of the island, a new man 
appears, and they call him Augustine, and 
the seventh century starts out with a fresh 
guarantee that the future is to fall in with 

37 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

the plans of this breed of men who live to 
bring young and vigorous peoples to their 
Master. The Saxon added permanence to 
the evangelism of the emotional Celt. None 
have left more inerasible footprints than 
those of the good monk of Exeter, Boniface, 
"the apostle of Germany." On the 
shores of the Zuyder Zee and in the forests 
of Thuringia this man is paying back 
the debt of England to the Continent, and 
overpaying it, as with his kinsmen Wilibald 
and Wunnibald, and their sister with 
her thirty companions, he gave permanence 
to the earlier settlements, and expanded the 
narrow confines of earlier labors. At seventy-
four he hears the footfall of armed 
men approaching his tent. Pagan insolence 
bears down the saint as he cries to his 
followers, "Lift not a staff against them," 
and gains a martyr's death. In the ninth 
century the periphery is pushed farther to 
the north, when Ansgar, another apostle, 

38 


New Peoples 

brings Norway in line with the trend of 
the ages and the mercy, the patience, and 
the love of God. "The far-ofl divine event" 
draws a trifle nearer when the fiery vikings 
of Scandinavia get the conviction that to 
them, too, is committed the "faith once delivered 
to the saints." 

Ansgar was as willing to die the death of 
a martyr as Boniface, and it is told how one 
of his followers often discovered him in 
tears because he was not regarded as 
worthy of martyrdom, which he supposed 
had been promised him by his Lord. From 
Denmark to Norway is but a step. Thither 
the Gospel is taken in the ninth century by 
some sea-faring young men, and by I033, 
St. Olaf, the Christian king, earns the title 
of the patron saint of Norway. The conversion 
of the Northern nations saved those 
countries of Europe which bordered on the 
seas from the ravages of pirates. 

Far to the northeast flames the holy torch 

39 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

in the hands of the Greek missionaries, 

Cyrillus and Methodius, whose gift of the 

Bible in the vernacular of the Slavonic 

tribes tempered the harshness of the mas


terful and turbulent folk of the plains of 

Poland and beyond. However, the strength 

of the Church lay to the West. 

A dark cloud arose in the East. Arabia 

sent forth her great man in the seventh 

century to check the extension of the Gos


pel towards the sunrise. The power of the 

Moslem carried the crescent with furious 

charge over the north of Africa, and even 

into Spain, where it got a foothold which 

lasted for seven hundred years. Its expul


sion occurred in the era of the discovery of 

America. But it seemed at one time as if, 

pressing up from the West and from the 

East, now beating at the gates of Paris and 

then at those of Constantinople, the cause 

which the missionary had taken so to heart 

was to suffer extinguishment. The East 

40 


New Peoples 

crowded hard upon the West. The missionary 
got no great fruit of his labors in 
the Orient for many a long age. A century 
of persecutions, far back in the fourth 
century, nearly annihilated the Christian 
Church in Persia, and the violently aggressive 
evangelism of Islam swept all before 
it in Egypt, Syria, Persia, and the 
African provinces. In Asia Minor nothing 
but the brilliant and stout defense of 
Leo the Isaurian, in 7I7, saved Constantinople 
from falling into the hands of the foe. 
For seven centuries the Mohammedan 
hammered at the door which the Roman 
emperors in their wisdom had put up 
against the invaders of the East, going so 
far as to remove the capital of the world 
from the Tiber to the Golden Horn. But 
at last it fell, and when, in I453, the Turk 
broke through all defenses, and changed 
St. Sophia from a Christian Church to a 
Mohammedan mosque, Christian Europe 

41 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

looked westward for its destiny. True, the 

Crusades had left their half-sad, half-heroic 

story of an effort to beat back the tide of 

invasion in the two centuries just before 

Europe woke up from her sleep which men 

call the Dark Ages; but her triumph in that 

direction was not essential, and she found 

her highway to the Orient by way of the 

Atlantic, discovering America as she went 

thither. Dates often have little significance, 

but it must be evident to the interpreter of 

the ongoings of history that the year I453 

is out of the ordinary; for at the very time 

the Turks captured Constantinople, Eng


land ceased her attempts to conquer France, 

ended the Hundred Years' War, and found 

a fairer destiny awaiting her in the con


quest of the Spanish Armada and the set


tlement of North America. 

In the Roman Catholic Church the mis


sionary spirit was by no means inactive, 

nor were there lacking men who, even in 

42 


New Peoples 

the days of the military expeditions against 
the Saracen, saw the better way of spreading 
the truth. The illustrious Raymond 
Lull was a second St. Augustine in his 
wayward youth, and also in his later humble 
spirit and tireless zeal for the Master 
of scholars as well as of saints. He put his 
vast learning at the feet of Christ, and appealed 
to warrior popes for backing to 
carry, not a weaponed, but a reasonable 
Gospel to the adherents of Mohammed in 
Northern Africa, and there in his old age 
died a martyr's death. 

The opening of the Western world offered 
an opportunity which Roman Catholicism 
seized for her expansion. In this she 
had at first the advantage of Protestantism. 
She was better organized. She had the 
power that comes from centralization. She, 
at first, controlled the seas. Contemporary 
with the birth of Lutheranism she produced 
the most marvelous order of its kind in 

43 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

human history, the Society of Jesus. The 
Jesuits had no limit set to their authority 
touching things temporal and spiritual, and 
while Protestantism fell into disputes in the 
seventeenth century in the effort to adjust 
itself to the new forms of life, political as 
well as religious, and to justify itself before 
human thought, the Jesuit flung himself 
to the farthest shores. He outran even 
the most ambitious commerce in his purpose 
to reach Asia, and even Central Africa 
and South America. The new openings invited 
rare men; for when Xavier and Las 
Casas, the former in the East and the latter 

in the West, set the example of apo�tolic 

surrender to a noble idealisr, the world 
was the richer for their living in it. The 
College of the Propaganda, I627, was admirably 
fitted to train children of the Catholic 
faith for missionaries to all nations. 
The idea of this institution had been realized 
by Ignatius Loyola in I552. The work 

44 


New Peoples 

of the Jesuits in India, where Xavier had 
baptized probably one hundred thousand 
pariahs and outcasts, was destined to give 
way to Mohammedanism; and even though 
his zeal laid the foundation for a splendid 
ecclesiastical establishment in Japan, 
Buddha proved for a time too mighty for 
the followers of the Christ, and by the middle 
of the seventeenth century every vestige 
of Christianity went down before the wrath 
of the native pagans. The day of Japan 
was not yet come. In China the characteristic 
disdain for everything foreign refused 
audience to the missionary until the 
Jesuit Ricci, contemporary of Shakespeare, 
and a famous astronomer, attained high 
distinction and paved the way for the Gospel. 
In the West Indies the Jesuits did 
some of their best work, and with genuine 
courage pressed into the primitive forests, 
and laid the foundation for the Republic 
of Paraguay, prohibiting Spaniards from 

45 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

getting control, and ruling in a patriarchal 

style. 

Luther had said, as his eye took in the 

rise of factions and the spread of strife in 

Western Europe, "In a hundred years it 

will all be over!" For a while a chill fell 

upon the centrifugal ferment of Protestant


ism. Yet soon the Elijah mantle dropped 

upon the shoulders of the colonizers of the 

Western world. 

It was Raleigh who made the first subscription 
for foreign missions, and the 
diarist of Sir Humphrey Gilbert tells the 
faith of the English mariner: "The sowing 
of Christianity must be the chief intent 
of such as shall make any attempt at foreign 
discovery, or else whatever is builded 
upon other foundation shall never obtain 
happy success or continuance." Now it is 
broad day in the expansion of the Anglo-
Saxon race. The seventeenth century 
walks into view leading John Eliot by the 

46 


New Peoples 

hand. And the very year, I649, in which 
the faithless Charles Stuart lost his head, 
saw the organization of the first Protestant 
Missionary Society in England. Old 
Europe is amazingly interested in the New 
World and in Asia, in many ways with 
abominable selfishness; but at times, from 
the anvil on which she is pounding out and 
shaping destiny, there falls a bright spark 
of idealism that lives on until it becomes a 
star of the first magnitude. In I705, Bartholomew 
Ziegenbald departs for India, and 
August 7, I707, he dedicates the first 

Protestant Church in Asia. It was the 
sense of the needs of the Colonial Church 
in Maryland that led Dr. Bray from London 
as "ecclesiastical commissary," and he 
it was who inspired the organization, in 
I701, of the Society for the Propagation of 
the Gospel. The modern movement is on, 
and there is no stopping it. 

In the seventeenth century theology had 

47 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

lacked warmth, and polemical passion 

usurped the place of spirituality. However, 

towards the close of the Thirty Years' War 

the lifeless skeleton of dead orthodoxy be


gan to feel the thrill of life. Spener was 

the German Wesley. Francke, his pupil, 

founded the orphan asylum at Halle and 

made the university a radiating center of 

light. At Tubingen, J. A. Bengel lifted 

pietism to its noblest height. Closely al


lied to the Pietists were the Moravians, 

with Count Zinzendorf as their bishop. His 

life was romantic. He lived from I700 to 

1760. His followers vied with the Jesuits 

in missionary zeal. 

That ever-glorious eighteenth century, 

though called by Carlyle "an unheroic age," 

gets its name upon God's honor roll, for 

the year I732 is no more great because it 

is the birth year of Washington than 

because it marked the matchless faith 

and fine fervor of the Moravians at 

48 


New Peoples 

Herrnhut to get to "the uttermost parts,*' 
for in that year, as if, too, in answer 
to the "Lettres Philosophique" of Voltaire 

just issued, two plain men, the one a potter 
and the other a carpenter, Leonard 
Dober and David Nitschman, left Herrnhut 
at three o'clock one morning carrying hand 
bundles, and with less than four dollars in 
pocket, to begin a journey of six hundred 
miles afoot, with four thousand miles farther 
to follow. In the years immediately 
after this one, their missionary passion attained 
the most prolific proportions known 
in history. And with the coming of the 
matchless nineteenth century the Teutonic 
peoples, who had thus far been shaping history 
for Europe and America, now outdo 
themselves in their set determination to fix 
the standard for the rest of the world and 
multiply missionary societies through the 
century at the rate of more than one for 
every two years. 

4 

49 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

We go too fast. What Christian David 
was to the Moravians, what Antoine Court 
was to the Reformers at Lausanne, what 
Jonathan Edwards was to New England, 
and Howell Harris to Wales, John Wesley 
was to England, and, more, to the world. 
In this way the able historian of England 
in the eighteenth century, Lecky, speaks of 
him: "Although the career of the elder 
Pitt, and the splendid victories by land and 
sea that were won during his ministry, 
form unquestionably the most dazzling episodes 
in the reign of George II, they must 
yield, I think, in real importance to that 
religious revolution which shortly before 
had been begun in England by the preaching 
of the Wesleys and Whitefield." The 
leader of the new spiritual impulse of the 
century is a divinely gifted missionary. In 
the same decade that witnessed the departure 
of the two humble men from Herrnhut, 
John Wesley goes as a missionary to 

50 


New Peoples 

Georgia. Then he is back in England. 
Then occurs the scene in Aldersgate Street, 
of which the same philosophic writer just 
quoted says, "It is scarcely an exaggeration 
to say that the scene which took place at 
that humble meeting in Aldersgate Street 
forms an epoch in English history." And, 
also, in future history, the world around. 
From that time the people he gathered 
about him took on the color and the power 
of his enthusiasm, so that Justin McCarthy 
is correct when he says, "All the early 
Methodists were missionaries." The bitterer 
the opposition, the more passionate 
grew their zeal. This man who was by 
common consent cut out for a statesman 
"by his extraordinary powers of organization 
and reasoning," took the leadership of 
the modern missionary movement; for 
there has been nothing like it in the two millenniums 
since Calvary. Hear Lecky once 
more: "Methodism in America grew and 

51 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

flourished beyond all its rivals, and it is 
now the largest religious body in that great 
country, which is destined to be the most 
important center of the English race." Walter 
Scott said of a sermon he heard 
preached by Wesley that it was too colloquial 
for the Scotch taste. It may be. But 
his word has become the vernacular of the 
world, and that is better still. All that is 
wanted is. that Oxford scholarship shall be 
tipped with "tongues of fire." Wesley's 
frame of iron, his unflagging spirits, and 
his lofty consecration gave to his wide 
learning, his extraordinary knowledge of 
men, and his unparalleled administrative 
powers their largest influence and fruitage. 
From his work may be dated the new impulse 
which has gone out to the ends of 
the earth on the part of the evangelical portion 
of the English and American Churches. 

The missionary is the man who is teaching 
the world that John Fiske was right in 

52 


New Peoples 

saying that there is to be not less, but more, 
of religion in the future. "The world needs 
to know," says Dr. E. E. Hale, "when it 
speaks of physical discovery and material 
progress, that discovery itself is never physical, 
and that progress is itself always spiritual." 
In his emphasis upon this proposition 
the man with the Book under his arm, 
and in the vernacular of the new people he 
faces, surveys a future of whose riches in 
all the agents of progress�the newspaper, 
the railroad, steamships, telegraph, schools, 
factories, art halls, churches, and even its 
militarism � he is the comprehensive 
augury, exposition, regeneration, and 
crown. For the multiplied agencies of our 
advance are getting results like those to 
which Sir James Mackintosh referred when, 
in conversing with Henry Martyn, he remarked 
that there was a striking analogy 
between the situation of the English peoples 
in the Orient and that of Alexander 

53 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

when he made the East Greek in order to 

make way for the religion of the Lord 

Jesus. In the same fashion we see the nine


teenth century striving after control of 

peoples in Asia and Africa who are to have 

a hand in the affairs of the future. They 

must not become injurious users of the easy 

privileges of modern intercourse among 

nations, old and new, and they must be 

won to Christ if those nations already 

Christian are to be safe from evil contact 

with twentieth century forms of heathen


isms. So William Carey reaches India in 

I793. Dr. Morrison gets to Canton. China, 

in 1807. Henry Martyn is in Persia in 

I8II ; Adoniram Judson in Burma, I8I2; 

Dr. Duff in Calcutta, I829, (the subsidence 

of the Sepoy mutiny finds William Butler 

at Delhi) ; and the stream has flowed full 

since then. 

The world has been eyeing that wonder-
child among the nations, come to power 

54 


New Peoples 

within a half century�Japan. In I859 the 
missionary got a footing there, and won a 
convert after five years; by twelve years 
he had ten. Then behold: in twenty years 
there were twenty-seven missionary societies 
on the ground, and in the great war 
just closed, Christian chaplains, officers, 
and privates, and nurses prayed and fought 
and died on the road to Harbin, winning 
victories for progress far up in Manchuria. 
The powder-cart is an uncouth chariot for 
the King's agent to charter for a short passage 
; but somehow the Cause of causes gets 
on, even if for a while the only music is 
the vicious shriek of the cracking shrapnel. 
Neither Russia nor Japan can ever be 
closed to the Gospel. The fact to be evermore 
remembered is, that this man with the 
Book must now be in haste, tremendous 
haste. 

Turn to this man's record in Africa. At 
the close of the last century but one, the 

55 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

Moravians, renewed their grip there; in 
I8I2 the Wesleyans entered; in I832 Melville 
B. Cox sails to Liberia, not to return; 
then in goes Livingstone, and soon Mackaye 
at his heels, to be followed by Hannington, 
the last two dying�one of fever, 
the other of spear-thrusts�but leaving in 
their train a vigorous body of native Christians 
in Uganda, able to preserve their integrity 
and to propagate their faith. It 
was my good fortune to hear Mr. Stanley, 
just four days back from his Emin Pasha 
expedition, address the Church Missionary 
Society in Salisbury Square upon the work 
of Mackaye. He declared it his profound 
conviction that, if every vestige of Christianity 
were erased from the earth save the 
Church in Uganda, there was enough life 
there, enough intelligent spirituality, 
enough power, to start the Gospel around 
the world again. Truly it was a wonderful 
people for whom the Scotch honor stu


56 


New Peoples 

dent and the crack oarsman of Oxford gave 
their lives just in time to get Equatorial 
Africa in line with the plans of God for 
the twentieth century. 

This file-leader of civilization turns to 
the Pacific Ocean in good time to make 
things ready for some stupendous happenings 
in the present century whose 
outcome none of us can know. Australia 
owes its wonderful rise in civilization 
during the last three-quarters of a 
century largely to the missionary. Four 
generations ago there was not a civilized 
man on the Australian Continent. The influence 
which this vast territory, half as 
large as the United States, will exert upon 
Polynesia and the Asiatic nations can only 
be great. New Zealand is called upon to 
line up with the forces of the one Kingdom 
toward which all others are gravitating. 
Williams of Erromanga is the first 
martyr. James Calvert gets the hearts of 

57 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

the Fijis and lives to see cannibalism transformed 
to a Christian civilization. In I850, 
Captain Gardiner leads the Gospel expedition 
to Patagonia, and is the first to land 
and the last to expire on that inhospitable 
coast. Most precious seed is this "blood of 
martyrs." At Aneityum, in the Samoan 
group, is this legend on a memorial tablet 
telling of Geddie: "When he landed here, 
in I848, there were no Christians, and 
when he left here, in I872, there were no 
heathens." Surely too much was done there 
for more not to be done. In these islands 
savagism, infanticide, lust, cannibalism, ran 
riot, yet in less than fifty years nearly thrice 
twenty thousand had joined the Church, 
and not a cottage lacked its Bible and 
hymn-book. Thirty years after the first 
missionary put foot on the shore at Hawaii 
the native Church had organized a "Society 
for the Promotion of Foreign Missions," 
the very men who had offered 

58 


New Peoples 

loathsome sacrifices now giving and getting 
money for the purpose. So when Mr. 

M. D. Conway, a graduate of Dickinson 
College, but later a liberal preacher in London, 
visited Honolulu he was disappointed, 
on Sunday, at not finding the natives 
"swimming around the ship in Arcadian 
innocence," but, instead, the city quiet and 
"paralyzed by piety." He had to go to 
Church to see the people. 
No one can have watched the swiftly 
moving events of the last few years without 
a deepening conviction that in some 
way, clear or clouded, but surely, America 
is to be the influential factor in the commercial, 
the political, and the religious future 
of the peoples that bask or busy themselves 
on the shores of the mighty Pacific. 
Let it be recalled that we began our national 
career, at a time when European 
monarchs were skeptical of the experiment 
of a democratic nation, on such a scale as 

59 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

lay before us. The world's leading historian, 
Edward Gibbon, was giving his vast 
talents to portraying the "Decline and Fall 
of Rome." It was the past that charmed 
him. On a memorable night in June, 1787, 
he closed his ever-great history on the 
banks of Lake Geneva. It was at the very 
same time that the men of immortal fame 
met at Philadelphia to fashion a working 
frame of government for a new people who 
were to keep step with God ; and they called 
it the Constitution of the United States. 

Never in all history has the itinerant 
kept such step with the pioneer as in the 
march of the American settler towards the 
setting sun. He even anticipated him. The 
story of the entrance of Oregon into the 
Union can not be truly told, H. H. Bancroft 
being witness, if the narrator leaves 
out the work of the Methodist, Jason Lee, 
the first on the ground, and the Congregationalist, 
Dr. Whitman, whose famous ride 

60 


New Peoples 

back to the Eastern settlements is part of 
our annals of heroism. George Herbert, 
orator to the University of Cambridge, 
wrote: 

" Religion stands on tiptoe in our land, 
Ready to pass to the American Strand." 

These lines were first published in I633. 
The vice-chancellor objected to their publication, 
but, on consenting, said, "I hope 
the world will not take him to be an inspired 
prophet." But that is what he was. 
The first work of the American Churches 
in the colonization of the Western Continent 
was to solve the home missionary 
problem. And right nobly was this done. 
To keep in touch with the ever-shifting 
frontier, and adroitly, bravely, powerfully 
to mold the raw settlements for Christ, has 

cost the various home missionary societies 

$I40,000,000 in the effort, as Dr. J. B. 
Clark has said, "to leaven America." But 
religion was not only to pass to the Amer


61 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

ican strand, not only to cross the American 

Continent, but to go far beyond with the 

American ideals of life and of government. 

God has some good purpose in pushing the 

bearer of the Stars and Stripes past the 

Golden Gate. Fresh witnesses repeat the 

story of earlier ones. Sober fact becomes 

the voucher for prophetic dream. 

Bishop J. N. Thoburn tells of a Scotch


man in India who, scarcely fifty years ago, 

published in his paper an article with the 

title "The Pacific Ocean an American 

Lake," in which, as he looked to the ap


pearance of Commodore Perry in the Jap


anese harbor, he declared that events were 

taking a shape which would give America 

a paramount influence in the Pacific Ocean 

in all the future. The thunder of Dewey's 

guns before Manila, and the unexampled 

influence of President Roosevelt in bring


ing Russia and Japan to end their bloody 

strife, have so enhanced American prestige 

62 


New Peoples 

in all the Orient that we must take up 

whatever burden falls to us to carry in 
righteousness. It looks as if we were destined 
to be the St. Christopher, "Christ-
Bearer,"' around the shores of the Western 
sea. There is labor, and there is reward. 
President Benjamin Ide Wheeler said at 
the Educational Congress of the Lewis and 
Clark Exposition, "The great problem with 
which world-history will have to deal in the 
next half-century concerns the assimilation 
of Eastern Asia to the other world-half," 
and added, "Our nation was shaped for 
the work of evangelization." To be known 
as the world's peacemaker�what an honor! 
to take the Hand of the Master and go 
around the world quieting distrust, promoting 
peace, and becoming expert in 
bringing in the Kingdom! Yet events 
were moving that way even in our own 
strife half a hundred years ago. 

During the Civil War Colonel Vincent 

63 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

Marmaduke was a bearer of dispatches 
from Jefferson Davis to Mr. Mason, who 
represented the Confederacy in England. 
While in London he was advised, one evening, 
to hear John Bright, who was to speak 
in the House of Commons. He afterward 
said to a friend, who now tells the story, 
that Mr. Bright, in the course of his speech, 
which related to European affairs, stopped 
for a moment and then remarked, before 
resuming his argument: "Mr. Speaker, if 
our kinsfolk on the other side of the Atlantic 
settle their Civil War satisfactorily, 
and get back together in peace, in forty 
years there will not be a gun fired in the 
world without their consent." Colonel 
Marmaduke has since admitted that Mr. 
Bright's picture of the possible future of 
this nation gave him some uneasiness of 
mind, because he was striving to promote 
permanent disunion. "I am glad," he said, 
years after the close of the war, "that the 

64 



New Peoples 

Almighty has preserved us for purposes of 
His own, which will some day be unveiled 
before the world." 

The sum of it all is in the words of the 
Master: 

"Ye shall be witnesses unto Me, . . . 
unto the uttermost part of the earth." 

65 

5 


IV 

Brotherhood 

THE preceding phase of the main subject 
had to do with the flow of time and the 

of new peoples. The present one treats 
of humanity. In his idea of manhood the 
missionary is typical of the new day. 
Rather, he has always pointed to the present 
hour, and has been steadily leading 
up to it. He has consistently held the advance 
of the movement toward a truer 
recognition of the world-wide fraternity 
among men. 

The missionary knew what he was sent 
to accomplish, and so he began with the 
only hopeful way of regenerating society, 
and laid the foundation anew, in marriage 
and in the family. The heathen world had 

66 


Brotherhood 

allowed domestic life to fall into decay. 
Marriage centered in the State, with its 
end to produce citizens. Christianity made 
marriage free. Contempt of marriage in 
favor of celibacy did not attach itself to 
the progress of the Church until long afterwards 
in an untimely environment. Of the 
true Christian home. Clement of Alexandria 
finely said. "The children glory in 
their mother, the husband in his wife, and 
she in them, and all in God." This was 
higher than heathenism. In the eye of the 
early missionary the little children had for 
the first time great recognition and justice 
and love. The law of the Twelve Tables 
of Rome gave the father the right to abandon 
or to kill them. Christianity made 
abandonment murder, for children were a 
gift from God for which the parents were 
responsible to Him. 

Not less did the proclamation of the missionary 
concern the slave. He went up and 

67 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

down the shores of the great inland sea, 
crying out of court heathen caste with the 
words: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, 
there is neither bond nor free, there is 
neither male nor female; for ye are all one 
in Christ Jesus." The accident of mas 
or slavery did not appear of note. The only 
real slavery was the bondage of sin. So 
Christianity did not immediately attempt 
changes in civil society. Yet it was not 
long ere the good seed sprang up, and men 
began to manumit their slaves. Things were 
not left as the first herald found them. 

Master and slave were members of the 
same Church. They adored one God, and 
mingled their songs and prayers together. 
A slave might be an elder in the same 
Church of which his master was only a 
member. When the spirit of freedom began 
to fill the nostrils of men through the 
work of the Church, it was common for 
masters to bring their slaves to the altar, 

68 



Brotherhood 

and before the congregation declare them 
free, thus casting over the transaction the 
sanction of the Church. In this undisguised 
love for men as such, Paul espoused 
the cause of Onesimus the slave, and wrote 
to Philemon his master, "Thou shouldest 
receive him, not now as a servant, but 
above a servant, a brother beloved." Then. 
too, and as a fitting accompaniment to the 
new theory and practice, labor got to itself 
a high estimate. It was now no disgrace, 
but an honor. The Lord was a carpenter, 
Peter a fisherman, Paul a tentmaker. 
While the sages like Plato deemed manual 
labor unworthy a freeman. Paul exhorted 
that a man should "labor, that he may have 
to give to him that needeth." Thus the 
true end of labor was pointed out, and the 

high ideal of toil for the salvation of the 

other man was published to the world. 

Things were starting on the upgrade. Self


ishness and stoic egoism were ready for 

69 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

banishment. How unlike are the two 
views,�that of Plautus, saying, "A man 
is a wolf to a man whom he does not 
know;" and the golden counsel of the Master, 
"A new commandment I give unto you, 
that ye love one another!" 

The doctrine and practice of the early 
missionaries have won out in the march of 
the ages, and nineteen centuries after the 
apostle spoke his good word for Onesimus, 
I see a man on the bank of the Nile writing 
to his sister in Scotland, "I have just seen 
one of my black sisters toiling up the steep 
path, carrying a heavy burden;" and he 
goes by the name of General Gordon, belonging 
to the proud English race. And in 
the same spirit the young aristocrat of 
Eton, Coleridge Patteson, refused to call 
the heathen of the South Seas "savages." 
They were all "men" to him. Ziegenbald's 
first converts in India were slaves. Once in 
Cape Colony the words over the church


70 



Brotherhood 

doors were, "Dogs and Hottentots not admitted." 
But not for long. The French 
governor of Madagascar told the first missionary 
he could never make the blacks 
Christians, for they were brutes. The missionary 
waited a bit, and then published his 
answer. Hundreds of churches and thousands 
of lay preachers, with their devout 
followers, have long since removed the inhospitable 
sign and stilled the inhuman 
word. 

In his purpose to preach the Gospel to 
the poor, the missionary is in line with the 
German philosopher, Wundt: "Religion, 
moreover, is always the point where the 
man who is debarred from all higher interests 
of intellectual culture can meet his fellow-
men." Sometimes good men err in 
this matter, as when Dr. Durbin, in 1859, 
said that his plan would be to marry into 
the family of a rajah, and then, by means of 
the inherited control of the destinies of a 

71 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

few millions, he would speedily accomplish 
the work of righteousness. The nodding 
of this Homer, however, did not prevent 
him from outrunning this sorry 
dream with his masterful stewardship of 
the policy of our Church. Let us not miss 
the mark. Let us not follow the leaders of 
caste in the Orient in their scorn of the 
"lower classes." The mandarin Pung 
Kwang Yen, at the Chicago Parliament of 
Religions, advised missionaries to appeal to 
the upper classes by offering them advanced 
learning and technical information. 
Our foundation is not culture first, and 
then righteousness; and if China is to trail 
after the great Teacher she must have not 
foremost the title "Bachelor of Arts," but 
"Born Again." One B. A. is divinely fundamental, 
the other is humanly inevitable. 
When the economic reformer cries out, "I 
am for men," it is high time for the Church 
to pray again for a true vision of true duty. 

72 



Brotherhood 

Bishop Thoburn tells of the conversion 
of a man in India who came from the lowest 
caste, it" he was not indeed an outcast. 
His surrender placed him and his family 
upon an inclined plane upward going, and 
now the son occupies a high social and official 
position as the confidential secretary 
of the governor of the Northwest Province 
of India. Schools? Yes, evermore yes; 
but not unbaptized with the Spirit of 
Christ. 

No one can read the story of the black 
bishop of the Niger, Samuel Adjai Crowther, 
without having forever a better baseline 
for computing the possibilities of manhood 
when stirred by the grace of God. 
He was born in I8I2 in the West Coast region 
of Africa, was enslaved at nine years, 
and sold for a horse; bartered again, he 
suffered intolerable cruelties; a third time 
he was sold, for tobacco and rum; sold 
again to the Portuguese, he was finally re


73 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

deemed from slavery and rescued by a British 
man-of-war. His conversion, his training 
in London, his consecration as bishop 
of the Niger territory in I864, are significant 
milestones in the life of a man of simple 
piety, of great intelligence, and of monumental 
zeal. 

The missionary has, all down the ages, 
held before the eyes of men the vision of a 
commonwealth of humanity. The prevailing 
conception of this commonwealth is 
that of a common faith, of God as Father, 
and Jesus Christ as Brother. In a thousand 
things unlike, in this alike. In a 
thousand features of a progressive civilization 
differing, in this held together by a 
common bond. And in all the implications 
of the idea of brotherhood the missionary 
is a notable contributor to progress, where 
many least look for proofs of his influence, 
He reaches down into the problems of labor 
with mighty ability to secure settlement of 

74 


Brotherhood 

difficulties, and to gain for labor a high 
place of honor in human progress. 

No other type of leader in the ages has 
so consistently realized the peculiar value 
of the ideal he has held aloft in its relation 
to man as a toiler, as a conqueror of 
the natural world, as one destined to find in 
commerce, in the exchange of goods, 
whether across the banks of the Po or the 
shores of the Pacific, an expression of his 
larger life. For the life of trade is peace, 
and the economic argument against war is 
only the reverse side of the appeal of the 
missionary to men to love one another. 
Speaking broadly, the civilization of all ancient 
times, as Mackenzie has emphasized, 
was bottomed, not on the subjection of nature 
by man, but on the subjection of some 
races by others. Naturally, with such dominion 
there followed cruelty, luxury, 
sloth, oblivion. On the contrary, a civilization 
which rests upon the undisturbed ac


75 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

tivities of man in his conquest of nature 
has an endless task and an exhaustless field 
before it; and once given peace, fraternity, 
and love, labor gets its highest honor. 
When man puts self foremost in his effort 
to subdue the material world, he gains the 
triumph of an hour, and dies sighing for 
other worlds; but with Christ the inspirer 
of labor, its very soul, giving it reverence, 
a lifetime will not be enough to exhaust the 
victory of toil, and one world will be more 
than man can subdue. 

When the good day conies for which the 
herald of the cross runs to the ends of the 
earth, the Carpenter's Son will be seen 
building in unembarrassed and free power 
with both hands, not, as some of old, with 
a sword in one hand and a trowel in the 
other, but commanding all His omnipotent 
resources for the redemption of all the 
needs of the world, and giving to the task 
both hands with the same abandon of love 

76 


Brotherhood 

with which He stretched them out upon 
the cross of Calvary. 

It can not fail to attract the attention of 
the thoughtful that, as man has gained 
recognition in the capacity of the toiler, he 
has reached up and secured a place in the 
realm of government. Democracy is in 
the air. The worth of the representative 
republicanism of America is far-famed. 
Mr. Bryce has said that the American type 
is that to which all others are inevitably 
tending. Cavour declared that "Society is 
marching with long strides toward democracy. 
. . . Is it a good ? Is it an evil ? 
I know little enough, but it is, in my opinion, 
the inevitable future of humanity." If 
the form of government which is of, by, 
and for the people is to he imperishable, it 
will become so only as the world rises to 
the high valuation set by Paul, by Aidan, 
by Xavier, by Eliot, by John Hunt, by Alexander 
Mackaye, by Henry Martyn, by 

77 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

James Thobum, by Hudson Taylor upon 

the common man of the world. 

The larger field of the exercise of the 

spirit of brotherhood affords a dazzling 

view of what is to be the ultimate result of 

the missionary experiment. If the dream 

of peace on earth is to be realized, it will 

be by pushing to its limit the ideals of the 

missionary, who lifts into noble promi


nence, and with unfailing sanity of vision 

and unconquerable zeal, moral and spiritual 

causes of progress. He holds that the ex


planation of the willingness of men to be 

ruled by majorities, in the spread of demo


cratic ideas, is not to be discovered in phys


ical force, as so often claimed on the 

ground that three men are stronger than 

two men, but in moral causes. In human 

progress it is becoming evident, as Canon 

Freemantle has pithily said, "We must, I 

repeat, learn to lean on the unselfish much 

more than on the selfish impulses of man


78 


Brotherhood 

kind." Apply this principle to the tangled 
schemes of diplomacy among men to-day 
and in the future. It may be that there is 
no well-defined system of diplomatic procedure, 
or such a thing as a concert of nations 
near at hand, to justify the optimist 
in his hopes, but that we are on the trail of 
the peacemaking itinerants of the ages is 
evident from the statements of such great 
writers on international questions as Bluntschli, 
who declares that the arbitration of 
international difficulties is more difficult because 
men do not know how to establish 
necessary courts than because they are unwilling 
or have not the power to do so. In 
any event, knowledge and will and power 
can not fail to come to their proper kingdom 
when the popular mind and heart are 
filled with the same vision of fraternity as 
gave to the Master the unspeakable charm 
with which He has woven a glorious spell 
over an increasing host of souls in the pass


79 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

ing of the ages. His "Kingdom" is to 
come. The character of "The Kingdom" 
explains, demands, and secures its supremacy. 
It is aggressive, missionary, and 
not stationary. "The righteousness of 
which both the Old and the New Testament 
speak, is one which goes beyond its 
possessor; not a righteousness which is 
even with a law, but a righteousness like 
that of Christ, loving, merciful, beneficent, 
self-sacrificing, and universal in its application. 
It can never rest content until it 
has assimilated to itself all the spheres of 
life with which it has to do. This alone has 
the promise of the Gospel attached to it. 
But he who dwells upon the universal love 
of the Eternal Father, and believes that the 
self-sacrifice of Christ had the salvation of 
the world for its object, will not find it 
hard to believe in the full extension of that 
which St. Paul called 'the mighty working 
whereby he is able to subdue all things to 

80 



Brotherhood 

himself.' " With such a vision Freemantle 
inflames our hearts. 

The faith the missionary proclaims is 
mighty, not because it is a fixed and unchanging 
expression of God's love for men 
which he is called upon to defend against 
all comers, but a spiritual power, windlike, 
its origin and its goal often undiscoverable, 
but its energy felt beyond all doubt. To 
change the figure, it is leaven with exhaustless 
energy and sure of spreading to the 
limit of the mass of which it is any part 
whatever, always its own best evidence, affecting 
for good all hearts and all institutions 
and all governments, and by its very 
inmost principle of life tending to universal 
triumph. 

And thus have the ends of the earth come 
together; for though our file-leader of 
progress goes out alone, he returns with 
such tributes to his might as no other messenger 
ever garnered. Men are brothers, 

6 

81 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

the world over. Some quote the first two 
lines of what follows, from Kipling, to 
prove the irreconcilable difference between 
the mind and character of the East and the 
West; but they should finish the stanza: 

"(), the East is East, and the West is West; 
And never the twain shall meet. 
Till earth and sky stand presently 
Before God's judgment-seat. 
But there is neither East nor West, 
Nor border, nor breed, nor birth. 
When two strong men stand face to face, 
Though they conic from the ends of the earth." 

The final word is that of the great Apostle 
to the Gentiles: 

"We warn every one, and instruct every 
one, with all the wisdom we possess, in the 
hope of bringing every one into God's presence 
perfected by union with Christ." 


82 



V 

Philosophy 

TH E missionary has found the key, the 
"master-key," to history. He has no such 
mixture of views as Fourier, who had for 
his key ''the theory of universal harmony," 
and yet, in his deranged imagination, believed 
the ocean should be lemonade, and 
that there should be thirty-seven million 
poets, philosophers, and writers like 
Homer, Newton, and Moliere. He is not 
inconsistent like Michelet, who, looking for 
"ideas under events," put the Stoic above 
the Christian, and made Christianity merely 
a stage in the revelation of reason�a verse 
in a universal Bible. Nor does he, like 
Hegel, regard history as following the 
course of the sun, going from East to 

83 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

West. Nor, like Herder, does he count 
history to be the manifestation of the 
powers of nature in moral progress. Nor 
is he like Comte, who finds the law of history 
in the evolution of the intellect. Nor 
does he, like Renan, regard religion to be 
a sort of superior kind of poetry. The true 
missionary is thoroughly practical. In the 
exercise of his divine calling he counts all 
good as the inspiration of his Lord and a 
part of the Kingdom he toils to usher in 
among men ; and he holds tenaciously to the 
notion that the uplift he seeks is one which 
includes all the various powers and activities 
of men, played upon by every good 
agency furnished by Cod. Jesus Christ being 
the Chief Corner-stone of the whole 
glorious structure; and thus, even more 
than the heavens and the earth, he believes 
that history declares the glory of God. 

The missionary is not a captive running 
a gauntlet, depending upon his fleet foot to 

84 



Philosophy 

win his freedom. He is an epitome of 
Christianity on a march. He is an ever-
present challenge, not an obnoxious 
apology, in the face of all faiths and creeds. 
His victor}' is one of high practical advantage 
to the race. He is more concerned 
about life than dogma. As the rationalist, 
Lecky, has declared, he is the builder of 
"the only example of a religion which is 
not naturally weakened by civilization," 
and, we may add, the only example of a 
religion having supreme power both to 
adapt itself to alien peoples and to work out 
their purification, unweakencd by passage 
of time, never so vigorous as now, and soon, 
by the hand of God, to achieve after a fashion 
never dreamed of in past days the supremacy 
of The Kingdom over all kingdoms. 


The glory of his theory is that it works. 
What he has done in the two millenniums 
just closing is ample praise of the genius of 

85 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

the missionary for bringing things to pass. 
All needed backing of approval that one 
could wish is his. No one has had more 
glorious success in applying a theory to 
practice. If his program holds out to the 
end of his days, he will need to show himself 
approved to the most advanced thought 
of progress. For the ages discover some 
things in their march, and either sanction 
for further usage unworn theories, create 
new explanations of old deeds, or lay down 
new programs for future action. But 
human philosophy is still saying to the 
plans, the prospects, and the progress of 
the missionary, "Amen!" It is worth noting 
that the new philosophic tendency, the 
latest school of thought, getting to itself a 
fresh setting and emphasis on American 
soil, is set forth in the opposition on the 
part of Professor William James and others 
to the overemphasis of intellectualism, the 
rationalism of traditional philosophy. Man 

86 



Philosophy 

is active, creative, and thought and intellect 
are auxiliary functions in the process of 
realizing his destiny. The ultimate principle 
of mind is not therefore intellect, but 
will. Intellectual interests are secondary to 
practical interests, and derive their value 
and content therefrom. Man is not solving 
his problems in a vacuum, but "the degree 
of bis intelligence and the terms of his intelligence 
are determined by the practical 
needs of life." So the philosopher reaches 
the conclusion that any theory is true that 
works, that supports the interests of life involved 
in it. This makes belief a possible 
program of action, and faith becomes the 
living, active altitude of realizing an ideal. 
Action, then, is man's true destiny. Only 
thus can he fill his life with meaning. Only 
thus can he justify his claim that life is 
worth living, namely, by making it worth 
while to live. So we have come to believe 
that the practical grounds the theoretical, 

87 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

and not the reverse. "Be ye doers of the 
work," is a genuine forecast of the latest 
expression of truth on the banks of the 
Charles. "The world will be richer in spiritual 
realities in coming year? as the creative 
activities of those who believe in spiritual 
realities bring it into being and give 
it supremacy." 

Thus is the word of the Master justified: 
"Jesus answered them, and said, My doctrine 
is not Mine, but His that sent Me. If 
any man will do [wills to do] His will, he 
shall know of the doctrine." 

If this is not a description of the character 
and work of the missionary, it will be 
hard to invent a truer one. His conquering 
faith is his program of action. He is 
evermore interpreting the world to itself, as 
he goes about revealing God in His grace 
to man. He lifts into high prominence the 
prevailing tendency to look upon the defense 
of Christianity, not as a matter ex


88 


Philosophy 

ternal to, but part of, religion. The shifting 
of belief from the merely intellectual 
to the moral portion of human nature is a 
sign of the times that demands attention. 
Each dogma may embody and express 
truth, but only in part; and, after all, it 
needs the vivifying power of that truth to 
give it worth. 

Herein is the unity of history. We live 
in a moral universe. Prophets and apostles 
saw a divine unity in the moral unfolding 
of the ages. Where fruitless theorists 
feared disintegration, they discovered a 
glorious synthesis. Where others found 
cheap content with fragmentariness, they 
encouraged a noble curiosity and search 
for the secret of the ages. They fastened 
themselves to the center of things, and beheld 
with calm faces the living reality, abiding 
and undisturbed. They were spiritual 
in an age of orthodox ritualists; patriots 
in an age of orthodox traitors; heavenly


89 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

minded in an age of orthodox worldlings; 
idealists in an age of orthodox materialists; 
faithful and positive in an age of orthodox 
skeptics; and brave in an age of orthodox 
cowards. Their visions helped to make history 
after the fashion of God's thinking 
and will. The spirit of the prophet is that 
of the missionary. 

We dare not get away from this view 
of the world-movement. The missionary is 
in line with the thought of a universal Gospel. 
He links hands with the Master in 
His closing words in St. Matthew's Gospel, 
he grasps the hand of St. Paul in Athens; 
he echoes St. Peter's hope of the new world 
in which dwelleth "righteousness;" he 
anoints his eyes with the apocalyptic splendors 
of Revelation: "The kingdoms of this 
world are become the kingdom of our Lord 
and of His Christ." 

The recognition of God and the moral 
order inevitably tends to universality. Po


90 


Philosophy 

litical development tends to unity and organization 
of moral relations. The human 
race is being drawn together. Ideas are in 
the mart for rapid exchange. Fellowships 
and moral sentiments are not to be made 
supports for selfish materialism. So the 
philosophy of history is a sort of clearinghouse 
of all human facts, and the purpose 
of history is ever charming foremost minds. 
The philosopher may have discovered the 
stream of tendency, yet have hesitated to 
define the goal. The missionary balks not 
at this, for he sees the end of all things in 
their holy consummation in Jesus Christ. 
Kant dreamed of a sound political constitution 
; Herder pointed the path to mental 
liberty and individual freedom; Guizot 
looked to the complete sociality of the 
process of civilization ; yet, in all, the vague 
note and the dim vision sound in the 
rhythm and grow dull in the color of the 
dream. St. Paul and David Livingstone 

91 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

are so sure of the divine goal that they 
calmly die and pass on to others their commission, 
the one on the banks of the Tiber, 
the other in the marshes of pagan Africa. 

And when the modern doctrine of evolution, 
with whatever modifications may 
mark its further statements, sets before us 
its view of unity, its tracing of a single 
principle of life working through all known 
forms of life, "so that the barriers fall 
away which seemed to separate organic 
from inorganic matter, or species from 
species, or animal from man, or, to carry 
the thought to its fullest result, ordinary 
men from Christ," it will appear that this 
is not other than to affirm the doctrine of 
the Spirit and the Word working upwards 
from the beginning to the end, evermore 
keeping in eye the consummate form, and 
the loftiest power, and the holiest ideal of 
human development. 

92 


Philosophy 

These all unite in Jesus Christ, and the 
Word fits once more: 

"Wherefore God hath highly exalted 
Him, and given Him a Name which is 
above every name." 

93 



VI 

Enthusiasm 

IN one other light the man of whom I 
write has always been supreme: in his enthusiasm. 
From the days when the Jewish 
synagogue and the Roman Senate failed to 
confine within its original limits the new 
Faith, down to the days in which the East 
India Company sent a solemn memorial to 
Parliament declaring that "the sending of 
Christian missionaries into our Eastern possessions 
is the maddest, most extravagant, 
most expensive, and most unwarrantable 
project that was ever proposed by a lunatic 
fanatic," this man put up against the stoic 
spirit that dominated the Eternal City that 
contagious sympathy with human suffering, 
and against the internal selfishness of the 

94 


Enthusiasm 

great commercial monopoly that sublime 
devotion to the will of God, before which 
adamant melts like wax. To-day the Company 
is a bad memory, while hundreds of 
churches dot the banks of the Ganges. 
What will you call that which led Carey to 
work seven years to get one disciple; or 
the Moravians in the mountains of Tibet to 
wait from I856 to I879 for their first baptized 
convert; or that kept the Church Missionary 
Society in Foochow for eleven 
years, like the needle to the pole, without 
a single addition? This spirit is supreme 
after two millenniums of trial. It shows no 
sign of degeneracy. The stamp of the 
Divine is upon it. It comes to the home 
Church at this time with power for inspiration 
just as men are saying that enthusiasm 
is dying out. 

This is the tercentenary of the publication 
of the immortal "Don Quixote," and 
well do Spaniards celebrate the fame of 

95 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

Cervantes. Heine said, "It was the greatest 
satire against human enthusiasm ever 
penned." Is he right? He can not be. 
"No one, not even a Cervantes, can make 
a satire against human enthusiasm. On 
that vast target every arrow must lose itself." 
Cervantes shattered the dream of 
Chivalry that he might give substance to 
the hopes of true zeal, of real daring, and 
of enduring self-devotion. He substituted 
the modern for the mediaeval world, the 
world of realities for that of shams, and 
for the knight who took a tilt at windmills 
he ushered in "the valiant man and true." 
This divine fire will respond to all calls. It 
makes good against all despair. It sees in 
brown skins men for whom Christ gave 
Himself to the Jerusalem mob. It pulls out 
the Cambridge cricket champions, the 
famous Studd brothers, from their round 
of excitements in England, and extemporizes 
a mission in Central China. When 

96 


Enthusiasm 

one man falls, it offers a score. James 
Hannington is murdered in Africa. A memorial 
service is held at Oxford with two 
thousand men present to grit their teeth 
and vainly grieve. A speaker in closing 
asked, "Who will take Jim Hannington's 
place?" Two hundred men rose to their 
feet. It will not fail to make its appeal to 
the home Church if pulpit and pew only 
get to know of the endless jubilee in missionary 
biography. It is the most transferable 
of all earth's riches. It gains by going. 
The "Haystack Monument" at Williams 
College, while it celebrates a noble 
passion for souls in the hearts of Mills, 
Richards, Rice, and Hall, will yet crumble 
before the enthusiasm their self-surrender 
generated ceases to exert its wholesome energies 
for the good of men. A flaming life 
is a perpetual stimulus. David Brainerd 
led his class at Yale, gave himself to the 
Indians, and burned to the socket, but not 

7 

97 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

till he set in motion an ideal passion for 
men under which Levi Parsons, first 
Protestant missionary to Jerusalem, and 
Carey, Chalmers, and Martyn leaped at the 
call of God. Adoniram Judson, first-honor 
man of his class at Brown University, was 
keyed up to his mission work by a holy determination 
under whose spur he defied 
twenty-one months of prison life in the 
East, part of the time in the cage in which 
a lion had died. This expansive philanthropy 
corrals whole families for service. 
Dr. H. L. Gulick went to the Micronesian 
Islands, and thirty-five years were not sufficient 
to wilt his dauntless spirit. His next 
younger brother went to Spain, and a still 
younger brother left for Japan. So they 
are to go on till the King is universally 
heralded. To no class of workers for the 
uplift of humanity is the declaration of 
Emerson so fitting as to the missionaries 
of the cross: "Every great and command


98 


Enthusiasm 

ing movement in the annals of the world is 
the triumph of enthusiasm." 

We have spoken much of men engaged 
in the cause of spreading the truth. But, 
of late, they have been greatly re-enforced 
by women, and a shining procession of 
world-saviors goes by. There is Mrs. 
Hannah Marshman, first woman missionary 
to India; Lydia Mary Fay, the first single 
woman sent to China; Miss Clara 
Swain, the inaugurator of the first medical 
work among women in Asia; Fidelia Fiske, 
in Persia; Ann Wilkins, in Liberia; Mrs. 
Hannah Mullens, who founded the zenana 
missions in India; and Miss Isabella Tho-
burn, whose work on the banks of the 
Ganges is alive for evermove. 

The enthusiasm of the missionary is 
boundless. It reckons all is lost unless 
Christ is enthroned. It confronts obstacles 
as if they were a plain path; it glories 
in matching its power, against opposition 

99 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

of the most gigantic character; it glows in 
the heart that beats high with hope even 
when the storm is at its utmost. It blazes 
up from the passion of death-beds. John 
Hunt lay dying. The attendant friends 
noted how he kept on silently weeping. His 
emotions increased, and he sobbed as if in 
acute distress. Mo longer able to withhold 
himself, he cried out: "Lord, bless 
Fiji! save Fiji! Thou knowest my soul 
has loved Fiji; my heart has travailed in 
pain for Fiji!" His own prospect was unclouded. 
His treasures, wife and children, 
were in the upper kingdom. Mr. Calvert 
said to him, "The Lord knows you love 
Fiji. We know it." For awhile he grew 
quiet, but the burden was heavy. Finally 
lifting his hand, mighty in its trembling, he 
cried with passionate force: "O, let me 
pray once more for Fiji. Lord, for Christ's 
sake, bless Fiji, save Fiji!" Then he grew 
quiet, and reached his end in unbroken 

100 


Enthusiasm 

peace. Such glowing love can have no failure. 
It shares the omnipotence of God, inspired 
as it is from contact with His own 
heart. It looks at the world-problem from 
the same point of view the Master had on 
the cross. It sees, hears, feels, toils with 
the eyes, ears, heart, and hands of the 
Christ. It does not mark its sacrifices. 
Hear David Livingstone addressing the 
young men of Cambridge University: "I 
never made a sacrifice. Of this we ought 
not to talk when we remember the great 
sacrifice which He made who left His 
Father's throne on high to give Himself 
for us; 'who being the brightness of His 
Father's glory, and the express image of 
His person, and upholding all things by the 
word of His power, when He had by Himself 
purged our sins, sat down on the right 
hand of the Majesty on high.'" 

The missionary joins the host of heroes 
in all ages who have made free contribu


101 



Missionary Interpretation of History 

tions of trial, of toil, of love, of life itself, 
for us and our children, who bear lighter 
burdens now because they bore heavier 
ones then. He gets into noble company, 
and with fullest right of comradeship. He 
holds rank with Milton, who was upheld in 
his dishonored old age, blind, poor, and at 
the mercy of an indecent Stuart rule, yet 
in himself able to cheer coming ages with 
the vision of a man reliant, tender, brave, 
"amidst the ruin of all he loved and the 
obscene triumph of all he despised." With 
Dante, he walks forth outlawed and into 
exile, yet singing a song of liberty and for 
ultimate peace. He is as serene as the noble 
philosopher of the French Revolution, Condorcet, 
a victim of its fury, who, pursued to 
his death, surrounded by all the chaos and 
bloodshed of its bitterest days, spent his 
last hours in sketching the vision of a 
happy future, in which all nations should 
rise to a common level, all separate peoples 

102 


Enthusiasm 

should progress towards equality, and the 
lot of man should achieve practical amelioration. 
It has not been many years since 
Bishop Hannington, shut in by hostile savages 
in the heart of Africa, and awaiting 
inhuman death at their hands, composed 
himself to write as usual in his diary and 
to quote from Bickersteth the melodious 
lines: 

"Peace, perfect peace, our future all unknown? 
Jasus we know, and He is on the throne." 

One of the graduates of Cambridge University, 
in I878, was Keith Falconer, third 
son of the Earl of Kintore, taking principal 
honors in Hebrew and Arabic, a foremost 
athlete, and an earnest Christian. He went 
as a missionary to Aden that he might 
reach the Mohammedans of Southern 
Arabia, and there, in I886, this high-born 
hero died on a bed of fever, as truly a 
martyr as the Oxford oarsman, Hannington, 
from the stroke of the savage. Surely 

103 


Missionary Interpretation of History 

the missionary is not lacking in power to 
walk with the choicest of souls and to claim 
fellowship with leaders of thought and of 
action. After all is said, 

" The greatest gift a hero leaves his race 

Is to have been a hero. So we fail ? 

We feed the high tradition of the world." 

Dr. R. S. Storrs well expressed the glory 
of the conquering faith of this man with' 
out whom history would possess another 
meaning: "He expects long toil, dreary 
wildernesses, battles with giants, and 
spasms of fear in the heart of the Church. 
But he looks, as surely as he looks for the 
sunrise after nights of tempest and of lingering 
dawn, for the ultimate illumination 
of the world by Faith. And however full 
of din and dissonance the history of mankind 
has seemed hitherto, seems even today, 
he anticipates already the harmonies 
to be in it as, under the guidance of Him of 
Galilee, it draws toward its predestined 

104 


Enthusiasm 

close, not sentimental or idyllic, but epic 
and heroic." May the whole Church be 
aroused by the contagion of this man's wisdom, 
his faith, his heroism, to speed the 
work of the world's redemption, until onlookers 
shall not be skeptical when we cry 
out, with Zinzendorf, "I have but one passion, 
and it is He�He only!" 

Thus will it be to the end of the mighty 
task, and when the glorious triumph is 
finally won: 

"For of Him, and through Him, and to 
Him, are all things; to whom be glory forever. 
Amen." 

105 



c.s 
BV 
206; 
.S7 
1905