V 
 
 FEB 25 1898 "^ 
 
 -^ficalSe^ 
 
 BV 2063 .M15 1897 
 Mackenzie, W. Douglas 1859 
 
 1936. 
 Christianity and the 
 
 p r oar e ss_of _man__ 
 
Christianity 
 
 and the 
 
 Progress of Man 
 
 As Illustrated 
 by Modern Missions 
 
 By W. Douglas Mackenzie 
 
 Professor in Chicago Theological Seminary 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 Chicago : : New York : : Toronto 
 
 Publishers of E'vangelical Literature 
 
Copyrighted i8^y, by Fleming H. Rev ell Company 
 
DEDICATED 
 
 TO 
 
 MY FATHER, JOHN MACKENZIE 
 
 AND 
 
 ELLEN MACKENZIE, MY MOTHER — 
 
 WHO HAVE LABORED TOGETHER AS 
 
 MISSIONARIES OF JESUS CHRIST 
 
 IN 
 
 SOUTH AFRICA 
 
 FOR 
 
 THE PAST FORTY YEARS. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 We begin to speak with increasing frequency of 
 the characteristic events and changes of the nine- 
 teenth century, as it draws rapidly to its close. 
 Two of the greatest facts, I ought to say the two 
 greatest facts, are undoubtedly the unification of 
 the race and the establishment of the Christian re- 
 ligion as a working force among nearly all nations. 
 The two facts are closely related both in nature 
 and history. How the one universalistic religion 
 has been molding the life of the one race of man- 
 kind during the nineteenth century — that is the 
 subject of this little book. 
 
 My obligations to friends and authors are nu- 
 merous. The works to which I owe most are, the 
 great missionary biographies of Dr. George Smith, 
 the remarkable " Keport of the Missionary Confer- 
 ence, London, 1888 " (which I cite by the abbre- 
 viation, "L. M. C"), and Mr. Edwin Hodder's 
 comprehensive history of modern missions enti- 
 tled, ** The Conquests of the Cross." Of course 
 there is a large amount of missionary literature to 
 which I am indebted which it is needless to specify. 
 
 w. D. M. 
 
 Chicago Theological Seminary^ 
 June 22nd, 1897. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 chapter. page 
 
 Preface 
 I Introduction 9 
 
 II The Universalism of Christianity ... 21 i/ 
 
 III The Missionary as Pioneer: the Unity of the 
 
 Race 43 
 
 IV The Missionary as Translator: the Bible and 
 
 THE World 57 
 
 V The Missionary and Education .... 86 
 
 VI The Missionary and Self-sacrifice: the Value 
 
 OF Martyrdom 106 
 
 VII The Missionary and Civilization . . . 135 v 
 VIII The Missionary and Other Religions . . 163 
 
 IX The Missionary as Savior 194 
 
 X Christianity and the Progress of Man . 213 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The aim of the following chapters may be brief- 
 ly described thus. We have seen in recent years 
 a revival of interest in the problem of religion. 
 Books and essays have appeared which indicate 
 that the superficial judgment of, say, twenty years 
 ago, which relegated religion to the region of the 
 superstitious and the irrational, is being aban- 
 doned. The mood has changed. Few people now 
 think that religion, that the Christian religion, can 
 be removed from the field of intellectual discus- 
 sion without serious injury to other departments 
 of science and philosophy. This change of atti- 
 tude is due to various influences, of which I shall 
 name three. 
 
 On the one hand we find that the over= confi- 
 dence of the Positivists and the Agnostics has dis- 
 appeared. Their philosophy is not final. Their 
 characteristic theories of knowledge, of evolution, 
 of reality, have by no means solved the problems 
 presented by human nature and history. Their 
 failure suggests to many minds the idea that after 
 all, the assertions of the Christian religion at 
 which they were wont to gird most vigorously, 
 may be true. At any rate not one of these funda- 
 mental assertions has been really disproved. On 
 the other hand the deeper study of the history of 
 
 9 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 man is making more apparent every day the pro- 
 found, nay, the organic place which religion occu- 
 pies in the evolution of society. This is one re- 
 sult of the Science of Comparative Religion, es- 
 pecially as it reveals its almost constant and intri- 
 cate relations with the evolution of society and 
 hence with the still inchoate Science of Sociology, 
 whose object is to understand that evolution. Ev- 
 en Mr. Herbert Spencer recognizes this and traces 
 many mistakes in sociological reasonings to the 
 influence of the " anti=theological bias." " Ignor- 
 ing the truth for which religions stand," he says, 
 "it (this bias) undervalues religious institutions 
 in the past, thinks they are useless in the present, 
 and expects they vv^ill leave no representatives in 
 the future." ^ Mr. Benjamin Kidd has done good 
 service by the vigorous protest which he enters 
 against the folly of neglecting the study of religion 
 as a " true cause " in social evolution. Now in the 
 third place, this change of attitude regarding re- 
 ligion seems to be accounted for largely by the ar- 
 dor with which the Church of Christ has extend- 
 ed and deepened its influence during this century. 
 We have before us a spectacle which, looked at 
 from any point of view, must be called sublime. 
 From being on the whole a European religion 
 Christianity has begun in this century to deserve 
 the name of " world-religion." In Great Britain 
 and America it appears to be as vigorous, and as 
 thorough in its influence as ever it was. There it 
 
 The study of Sociology." p. 812. 
 10 
 
Introdudion 
 
 is coping with forces which never before met it in 
 such power and intensity. They are the creation 
 of that freedom of thought, that freedom of action, 
 that marvelous development of industry and its 
 correlative passion for amusement and recreation, 
 which characterize especially the English-speak- 
 ing world, and which in their combination are par- 
 alleled in no earlier period of history. If the 
 Church seems to have lost its hold on some sec- 
 tions of society, it has yet more than maintained 
 its own life of faith and its determination to pene- 
 trate all industry and politics and recreation with 
 the spirit of Jesus Christ. A temporary and par- 
 tial " set-back," which must be admitted, is being 
 made the occasion for a stronger exertion of its 
 characteristic forces. Few will be inclined to af- 
 firm that at any earlier time the masses of the peo- 
 ple manifested more of intelligent faith in the 
 gospel, or more of the spirit of Jesus Christ in 
 their social and political ideals, however much 
 there may be yet to attain. 
 
 But, after all, it is in the work of Foreign Mis- 
 sions that the Church has done most to prove its 
 social influence. For Christianity is now at work 
 practically in every land. Amongst rude savages 
 and under the shadow of hoary oriental institu- 
 tions it is seeking to establish itself. And its suc- 
 cess has been so remarkable, its religious and so- 
 cial influence so undeniable, that every thoughtful 
 man who had rejected its claims, is bound, in the 
 mere name of his intellectual integrity, to pause 
 
 and face the facts afresh. 
 
 11 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 But, if religion holds an organic place in the evo- 
 lution of society, do we not have before us an oppor- 
 tunity for studying its influence which no other gen- 
 eration may enjoy in the same way? We can see 
 with our own eyes a superior religion as it comes in 
 upon lower forms of social organization, abolishes 
 their evils, corrects their defects, and begins the de- 
 velopment of all that is best in the ripest forms 
 of civilization. In ordinary conditions, where a 
 religion, whether Christianity, or any other, has 
 been long established, its influence is more subtle 
 and more intricate; it is less easy to separate out 
 the actual effects, good or bad, of the religion itself 
 from those produced by collateral causes. But in the 
 phenomena presented by Christian missions the stu- 
 dent of sociology has the task wonderfully simplified. 
 He can watch the transformations of society, as 
 they proceed with a rapidity which Europe has not 
 seen since the third and fourth centuries. Even at 
 that time the European tribes and nations did not 
 move so fast towards Christian ideals of society as 
 many in other regions are moving to-day; for then 
 there did not exist a Church with eighteen hun- 
 dred years of experience to make it strong and 
 clear and wise in the avoidance of dangers, and in 
 the pursuit of its true goal along paths which are 
 safe for Church and State. The gathered wisdom 
 and power of all these centuries is now being con- 
 centrated by the Church upon the deliverance of 
 all tribes and races out of barbarism into the pos- 
 session of Christian institutions. This is true 
 even though we believe that the Church is by no 
 
 12 
 
Introdudion 
 
 means yet perfected in wisdom and that not all 
 its representatives abroad are worthy of its ideal. 
 
 In the following pages an attempt is made to 
 outline the kind of facts which belong to the 
 history of missions in the nineteenth century, 
 and which throw light upon the action of 
 Christianity among heathen and Moslem peoples.* 
 Briefly put the argument runs in this way. We 
 find that the Christian when compared with other 
 religions is the only one which is inherently ca- 
 pable of becoming universal. It is worth while to 
 inquire into those elements in the religion of Eev- 
 elation which fit it to be the religion of the race 
 and which are steadily molding history towards 
 that end. (Chapter II.) During the nineteenth 
 century this capacity has been put to the test 
 among almost every people upon earth, and in 
 competition with every form and grade of social 
 and religious organization. What is called the 
 "missionary movement" is the means through 
 which the battle is carried on. The result is 
 that we see this religious impulse occupying, 
 not the sole, but the supreme place in the work 
 of unifying the race and exalting the conditions 
 of life. This is done by the pioneer work of 
 the missionary (Chapter III); by the marvelous 
 process of Bible translation through which one 
 universal basis and permanent standard of relig- 
 ious experience is being given to all mankind 
 (Chapter IV); by popular education which is 
 provided always as a necessary part of the mis- 
 sionary movement, which thus springs from the 
 
 13 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 religious impulse and is sustained by the pe- 
 culiar ideals of the Christian religion (Chap- 
 ter V); by the influence of that noble spirit 
 of self-sacrifice for benevolent ends which is the 
 unique possession of this religion, which lies 
 at the root of self^discipline and reaches its sub- 
 lime expression in martyrdom (Chapter VI); by 
 the immediate effect which conversion to Christ 
 begins to produce upon personal character, family 
 relationship, and thus upon social life and civili- 
 zation (Chapter VII); by the influence which the 
 Christian system exerts upon preceding religions 
 of all kinds, rebuking and gradually putting to 
 an end what is false or incomplete, inept or peril- 
 ous, and glorifying whatsoever is true and health- 
 ful and inspiring (Chapter VIII). In these chap- 
 ters it is necessary to assert from various points of 
 view one fact which, however, needs to be espe- 
 cially emphasized. It is this. The processes, in- 
 fluences, or results of Christian missions cannot be 
 understood or explained without taking continual 
 account of the purely religious element or purpose 
 which underlies them all. The missionary avow- 
 edly goes as a savior, to bring men into that which 
 is the central feature of Christianity, viz., the ex- 
 perience of personal fellowship with God through 
 faith in the Savior, Jesus Christ. The missionary 
 and the convert, of every age and clime, assert that 
 the personal and the social effects described above 
 only follow this experience; and on that moment- 
 ous affirmation Apostolic Christianity is at one 
 with the young Church of Polynesia, Africa and 
 
 14 
 
Introdudion 
 
 Asia to-day. (Chapter IX.) In the last chapter I 
 try to draw out and summarize the significance 
 of the movement which has thus been described. 
 The progress of man is a- phrase not easy to de- 
 fine, but it represents something real and Chris- 
 tianity appears to be intimately bound up with 
 it. It must be possible to dissipate some of the 
 vagueness which generally envelopes our idea of 
 human progress and to state some of its elements. 
 It must be also possible to set down some of the 
 main characteristics of the influence which the 
 one universal religion is exercising upon the 
 race of mankind. And perhaps this view of 
 the interdependence of human progress and the 
 Christian faith may help us to decide whether 
 that faith is false or true. (Chapter X.) 
 
 There is one matter connected with the follow- 
 ing chapters to which I must briefly refer. It 
 will be noticed that little or nothing is said about 
 the faults and failures of individual missions and 
 missionaries; and some may imagine it to be sug- 
 gested that there have been none. That would of 
 course be absurd. I can adopt the language of 
 Bishop Westcott when he says: "I will admit to 
 the full the fewness, the weakness, the errors, the 
 frailties, if you please, of the workers." But the 
 Bishop also says: "When I see the results which 
 have been x^roduced I am startled, touched, hum- 
 bled by the wholly disproportionate magnitude of 
 what has been done when compared with the 
 means which have been used to effect it." The 
 fact is that missionaries have manifested various 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 degrees of ability, devotion, diligence, piety, self- 
 sacrifice. Some have possessed elements of dis- 
 position and character, and defects of training, 
 which either prevented or lessened the success of 
 their work. A few have proved to be total failures. 
 The same things must be said about individual 
 converts from heathenism and the churches which 
 they form. Some of the complaints which travel- 
 ers and others make concerning the imperfect 
 characters of many native Christians are no doubt 
 founded upon actual failure on the i)art of the lat- 
 ter to manifest the pure spirit of Jesus Christ. 
 The apostle Paul found the same facts in the 
 churches of Galatia and Corinth. 
 
 There are two classes of men whom one finds em- 
 phasizing these defects and failures. The one 
 class consists of shallow scoffers at missions and 
 even at Christianity; the other class consists of 
 earnest Christians who view defect and failure, 
 among missionaries and converts alike, as a dis- 
 honor to the name of Jesus Christ. But the man 
 who desires to treat the matter scientifically has 
 no right to be influenced by this strange concur- 
 rence in opinion of opposing classes of men. 
 Neither the hackneyed superficialities of the 
 scoffer nor the spiritual criticisms of the saint, 
 ought to influence our judicial estimate of the 
 actual work done by the Christian Religion. 
 Christianity never professed to be a force work- 
 ing in a vacuum. It is a force among forces suf- 
 fering friction, reaction and direct collision of all 
 kinds. Hence the history of its effects must in- 
 
 16 
 
Introdudion 
 
 elude, as Church History confessedly does, the 
 record of many fierce conflicts, of periods when 
 movement was slow, of those when there seemed 
 to be an arrest of progress, as well as of those 
 when advance was rapid and triumphant. But no 
 student of evolution would maintain that the signs 
 and incidents of the struggle for existence lessen 
 the significance of the survival of the fittest. 
 Rather will he consider that they help to empha- 
 size the inherent vitality of that form of life which 
 has triumphed. It is the aim of these pages to 
 describe what the missionary movement has act- 
 ually achieved, to emphasize the positive aspects of 
 the warfare which is going on between human 
 nature and the forces of this wondrous fact called 
 the Grospel of Jesus Christ. In the closing chap- 
 ter something will be said regarding the con- 
 ditions which render its progress gradual, and 
 hence any one of its stages in the individual or in 
 the community both morally and spiritually im- 
 perfect. 
 
 In attempting to present the evidence for my 
 conclusions in the following chapters nothing like 
 a full account of the facts has been aimed at. To 
 describe the phenomena of missionary experience 
 with anything like completeness would require the 
 prolonged labors of a specialist in this wide and 
 ever extending field.^ My aim has been to draw 
 
 ^ Since these chapters were written I have been allowed to 
 see the proof=sheets of part of a work which exactly answers 
 the description suggested above. It is entitled, " Christian 
 Missions and Social Progress." (Fleming H. Revell Com- 
 
 17 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 illustrations from various countries and the work 
 of various societies. These illustrations are not to 
 be considered as in themselves alone affording 
 final proof; they derive their evidential strength 
 from the fact that they are typical. No one inci- 
 dent or experience in these pages stands alone in 
 the history of modern missions. Each might be 
 easily multiplied over and over again, and most 
 could be multiplied a hundred or a thousand times 
 by any one who cared to scan the pages of maga- 
 zines, reports and books with that end in view. 
 
 In order to make the mass of evidence which 
 lies behind the arguments from missionary expe- 
 rience appear in its true proportions the reader 
 should keep the following facts in mind: 
 
 1. As to the geographical extent of missionary 
 operations. Dr. George Smith several years ago 
 said that there were " five great regions of the 
 world as yet totally unreached by the missionary." ^ 
 These are Thibet and High Asia, Arabia, The Sou- 
 dan, Amazonia, Russia in Asia. Now this state- 
 ment means that, if we subtract these regions, the 
 rest of the world is open to, and is being occupied 
 
 pany.) The author, the Rev. J. S. Dennis, D. D., is indeed a 
 specialist in this department and has spared neither time, 
 energy, nor expense to make his work as complete as possi- 
 ble. The bibliographies attached to the various chapters 
 are extensive, the summation of facts elaborate, and the 
 tables of statistics with which the second volume is to con- 
 clude will certainly be the most exhaustive which have ap- 
 peared in relation to the work of foreign missions. 
 ^ In " Missions at Home and Abroad," p. 146, 
 18 
 
Introdudion 
 
 with great rapidity by, the missionary agencies. 
 China is not, of course, adequately occupied, nor 
 India, nor Africa. But these portions of the world 
 are open and in them missionary effort is steadily 
 spreading year by year. No one doubts that in a 
 few years all the lands named by Dr. George 
 Smith, except Russia in Asia, will be penetrated 
 by evangelical missionaries. 
 
 2. Nor is the army of workers merely sporadic. 
 However inadequate it may be when compared 
 with the work which has yet to be done, no one 
 can fail to be impressed by its vast extent when 
 considered in itself, and in relation to the short 
 period of one hundred years during which it has 
 grown. One writer puts the matter thus: " Chris- 
 tendom is represented in heathendom by about 
 11,450 Europeans and Americans of both sexes 
 Of these about 4,300 are ordained, something less 
 than 1,000 are unordained, 3,650 are wives, and 
 2,575 are unmarried women. With these are asso- 
 ciated 4,200 ordained and 43,000 unordained na- 
 tives toiling as pastors, evangelists, teachers, etc 
 The entire missionary force numbers not far from 
 55,000." ' 
 
 According to Dr. Vahl, one of the leading au- 
 thorities on missionary statistics, the following 
 were the figures for the year 1893 : ^ There were 
 
 ^ " A Hundred Years of Missions," by Rev. D. L. Leonard 
 (Funk and Wagnalls), p. 417. 
 
 2 Missions to the Heathen in 1892 and 1893. A Statistical 
 Review. (Copenhagen: Fr. Berthelsen.) 
 
 19 
 
Chrltslanity and the Progress of Man 
 
 in existence 331 missionary societies and committees 
 whose work was that of evangelizing the heathen. 
 Their income amounted to $12,397,605. There 
 were 5,638 missionaries, the majority being mar- 
 ried, and 2,893 unmarried female missionaries. Of 
 native workers there were 4,074 ministers and 49,- 
 718 helpers. This great force is everywhere work- 
 ing for the same ends, by the same means, under 
 the same inspiration. 
 
 20 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE UNIVERSALISM OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 Religion is the main fact tbrough whose in- 
 fluence the spirit of man becomes released from 
 selfishness or individualism. It is true that pa- 
 triotism has exerted a remarkable power of this 
 kind upon the minds of the world's citizens; thrill- 
 ing heroism is found in the annals of most peoples, 
 certainly of all those who have contributed any- 
 thing of value to the history of mankind. And 
 indeed patriotism and religion were for long almost 
 synonymous terms. But selfishness is not really 
 being eradicated from the human heart until some 
 force is at work which so exalts men that they be- 
 come interested in man as man. Patriotism in its 
 noblest forms in Athens and Babylon, in Carthage 
 and Rome, always resulted in contempt for the 
 rest of the world. To be a foreigner was to be a 
 barbarian, fit only for conquest, tribute and slavery. 
 Hence patriotism, where it has been unreleased 
 from its narrowness by a wider religious outlook, 
 has been an incentive not only to sublime self^ 
 sacrifice, but also to the utmost cruelty and o^^- 
 pression. For a moment a Latin poet might 
 catch a vision of the worth of mankind as such, 
 and sweep a Roman audience into enthusiasm 
 
 21 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 at his vigorous expression of the rare concep- 
 tion, — " Nihil humanum a me alienum puto." Or 
 again, a man like Socrates might call him- 
 self a citizen of the world. But these moments of 
 illumination were extremely rare; not only rare, — 
 they were also purely personal. Neither philoso- 
 phy nor poetry could make them the heritage of 
 the common mind and a working force in human 
 society. It needed that which religion alone can 
 give viz., the higher view of God and of every 
 man's relations to Him, to dignify man before the 
 eyes of men. 
 
 But religion itself has had many forms and 
 degrees in the history of man. Not all of these 
 were by any means adapted to have a share in the 
 work of liberalizing man's thought of man. When 
 the religious spirit was still so impoverished as to 
 think of the god of a people or a tribe as being 
 merely a local deity, religion became identified 
 with patriotism in the work of developing tribal 
 and national selfishness. It needed the advent of 
 what have been called the world-religions, to lift 
 man to the view^point from which the true dignity 
 of man could become a reality for the practical life. 
 This was in part attained, for example, in Buddha, 
 and possibly in Confucius. But the fact is that 
 the teaching of these men, being disconnected from 
 a definite doctrine of God and from the conception 
 of a future life, could only retain the interest and 
 affection of the masses of men, by becoming asso- 
 ciated with the ordinary faith of the people in the 
 existence of the gods and a future sphere of re- 
 
 22 
 
The Universalism of Christianity 
 
 wards and punishments. Nevertheless in their 
 systems there was so real a perception of the deep- 
 er moral obligations between man and man as such 
 and, at least in Buddha, of the relations between 
 practical morality and spiritual, or religious, vision 
 and experience, that a partial foundation was laid 
 for a certain kind of interest in humanity. Then 
 it was that men found themselves under a sense of 
 obligation to deliver to others the truths which 
 had been made known to themselves, and religious 
 missions arose. Not now as a part of patriotism, not 
 now in the interest of the tribe by means of war, 
 did the Buddha and his successors make known his 
 rules and advocate his views, but because they had 
 come to see, if but dimly, a little of what man is 
 and of what man ought to be. Both Confucianism 
 and Buddhism failed either to maintain the orig- 
 inal, high convictions of their founders or to re- 
 lease themselves from the corruptions of idolatry in 
 which they so speedily became entangled; and 
 they lost their first glory and elevating power. 
 
 It was reserved for the religion of Revelation 
 to attain true and permanent universality. It first 
 established among men those views of God and 
 man, which first made the world of men loom 
 up as one race with one greatest and deepest 
 need and so created what we called distinctively 
 the missionary movement. And this sublime 
 power it derived from the fact that those views 
 were not any longer the mere theories or dreams 
 or aspirations of the human heart seeking God, but 
 proceeded from the acts of the divine heart seeking 
 
 23 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 man. The new conceptions of human nature were 
 derived from those conditions of fellowship with 
 Himself, which the living God in the course of re- 
 velation historically established and made possible 
 for all men. In its earlier stage this religion of 
 revelation was indeed confined to one people; in 
 connection with the history of that one people it 
 passed from the simplest stages, in the beliefs of 
 the desert tribes who found themselves in cove- 
 nant with Jehovah, to the lofty axDprehension of the 
 nature and being of God represented, say, in the 
 Book of Isaiah, to the deep and rich spiritual experi- 
 ences reflected alike in Psalmist and Prophet. Even 
 the development of the idea of sacrifice and ritual 
 in the worship of Israel may instruct us concerning 
 the steps by which deepening awe of the living 
 God and deepening dread of sinful relations to 
 Him, led the conscience of Israel to seek more and 
 more adequate means of expression and a more 
 inv/ard reconciliation with Him. It is a common 
 but a serious mistake to suppose that this religion 
 of the Old Testament, because concerned immedi- 
 ately with the chosen people, was therefore, narrow 
 and exclusive. It is true that it made use of the 
 national spirit and even strengthened and empha- 
 sized that si)irit; it is true that at certain periods 
 prophetism laid great emphasis upon the necessity 
 for maintaining a policy of separation from all 
 other tribes and peoples, with their idolatrous 
 customs and degraded habits. But it must be re- 
 membered that this was demanded just in order 
 that Israel might be preserved for its unique and 
 
 24 
 
The Universalism of Christianity 
 
 sublime function in the world. And it must be 
 also remembered that this insistence upon the isola- 
 tion of Israel was not felt even by the prophets to 
 be inconsistent with the idea that ultimately Israel 
 would come to have the utmost signiticance for all 
 peoples, 
 
 If we ask how it was that the religion of Israel 
 came to possess this element of universalism and 
 to be fitted as the precursor of the one only relig- 
 ion which is actually and fully universalistic, the 
 answer will direct our attention to three aspects of 
 Old Testament teaching. First, there is the doc- 
 trine of God. Israel no doubt began with a very 
 simple and even crude idea of Jehovah. Very 
 probably they spoke of Him just as neighboring 
 peoples spoke of their gods and for a long time 
 their forms of altar service may have been quite 
 indistinguishable by any fundamental feature from 
 those of kindred tribes. But Israel came to feel 
 and to see that Jehovah is the living God; that the 
 universal God had laid hold of their national life 
 and history and connected His Self- revelation 
 with their fortunes and attainments. The result 
 has vindicated their faith. He who was known to 
 Israel as Jehovah was and is the God of all ages 
 and of all men. It was only gradually, "at sundry 
 times and in divers manners," that God spoke to 
 Israel " by the pro^Dhets." But He verily did 
 speak and the Old Testament contains from its 
 first page to its last many marvelous statements 
 regarding Him. The main facts which we learn 
 are that God is the one and only God, that He 
 
 25 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 created the world, that though the nations wor- 
 shiped other gods, they are false or unreal gods, 
 that Jehovah alone lives and He is the God of all, 
 that He hates iniquity and loves righteousness, 
 that He has chosen Israel, His servant, but that 
 He has done this in order that at last all nations 
 may call themselves blessed on account of and 
 through Israel. 
 
 Second, there is the doctrine of man. Mankind 
 is regarded even in the Old Testament as being 
 one race. The division between one section of the 
 race and another, between Asiatic and Ethiopian 
 for instance, is traced not to a difference of origin, 
 but to the action of divine providence. The very 
 differences of language which to the heathen world 
 seemed so mysterious were accounted for, to the 
 thought of Israel, by attributing them to the ju- 
 dicial wrath of God. But all such differences are 
 almost superficial. Men are all one before Jeho- 
 vah, who created all, who is the actual Master of 
 all and who will yet vindicate His indefeasible 
 rights and His universal authority.^ Although 
 man feels himself lowly and of no account when 
 he thinks of Jehovah, who has set His glory above 
 the heavens, yet, when he sees his own place in 
 nature man feels that upon humanity itself there 
 rests a peculiar dignity; he is " crowned with glory 
 and honor." ^ Man belongs to a double system, for 
 he is capable not only of beholding and appreciat- 
 ing the wisdom and might of God, as displayed in 
 
 1 Gen. 1-11. 2ps. 8:5. 
 
The Universalism of Christianity 
 
 the outward universe, but of turning to another 
 which is no less real and infinitely more precious. 
 This is the world of moral and spiritual law, the 
 realm where man moves in personal relations with 
 
 Third, the Old Testament record of Revelation 
 contains' that great doctrine of a Messiah and a 
 Messianic salvation. The Israelite pictures Abra- 
 ham as having received an assurance that the deal- 
 ings of God with him would be significant for all 
 nations. And indeed throughout these Scriptures 
 we find many references not only to the attitude 
 of grace which God sustains towards the heathen 
 world,' but to the definite purpose which He had, 
 to reach through Israel to all the nations. It is 
 true indeed, as has been said, that "it belonged 
 essentially to the idea of God prevalent among his 
 countrymen that the Israelite should claim the 
 whole earth, as the kingdom of his God." ' But 
 this idea of the universal relation of God to all 
 men becomes specially developed in connection 
 with the hope of a Messianic age. This hope as- 
 sumed various forms under the divine guidance, 
 these forms being largely determined by the moral 
 and religious condition and the political problems 
 of the generation to which a prophet spoke or out 
 of which a psalmist sang. In a very large number 
 of cases the promise of that final boon, that com- 
 
 iCf. Pss. 19, 139; Is. 40: 12-31; Prov. 8: 22-36, etc. 
 2 Is. 19 : 18-22 ; Mai. 1 : 11. (R- V-) 
 SRiehm's Messianic Prophecy (Trans.), p. 93, 
 27 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 pleted national blessedness to Israel was made to 
 sweep also the other nations within its influence. 
 Hence the perfect King who is described so glori- 
 ously in the seventy-second Psalm, who is to rule 
 over the whole known world, is to be served and 
 blessed by " all nations." 
 
 Even that strange conception of the mountain of 
 the Lord to which in Isaiah so much reference is 
 made, which is pictured as being reared in the 
 Holy City, is to be like a magnet drawing the na- 
 tions unto it.^ Jehovah shall lift up a signal for 
 the nations and the feast of fat things which He 
 provides shall be unto all peoples.^ " And He shall 
 annihilate in this mountain the covering which 
 covereth all peoples, and the web which is woven 
 over all nations." ^ In the second book of Isaiah 
 these references to the universal significance of 
 the Messiah and His kingdom become still more 
 clear and more impressive. It is true that even in 
 the loftiest of these we find that special note of 
 patriotism still ringing strong and clear, which ex- 
 pected that in the golden age to come the world 
 would be subject to Israel and Israel would be ex- 
 alted to an actual lordship over the nations.* But 
 there are occasions when the conception is dis- 
 tinctly subordinated to the religious and spiritual 
 hope of seeing mankind redeemed. It was not till 
 the New Covenant was actually established that 
 the last vibration of the ancient tone of narrow pa- 
 
 Us. 2:2,3. 2is. 11: 12; 25: 6. ^ is.25: 7, 8. (Prof. Cheyne's 
 Trans.) *Is. 60: 3, 9, 10-16; 62: 1, 2. 
 
 28 
 
The Universalism of Christianity 
 
 triotism was stilled and the mere blessing of man 
 as man contemplated as the supreme issue of all 
 history. At last, however, in Christianity itself 
 the true religion was finally established and freed 
 from all artificial restrictions and national limita- 
 tions. Then the true world^religion appeared 
 among men and began that marvelous redemptive 
 and educative process which to-day it is carrying 
 on more widely and more powerfully than in any 
 earlier age. 
 
 This universalism we should expect to find in 
 the Gospels, of course; for, if in the life and work 
 of our Lord Himself it does not appear, we would 
 find it difficult to resist the argument that it was 
 an addition to His Gospel made by Paul and cer- 
 tain other apostles in after days. But an addition 
 to the Gospel can never hold our allegiance, how- 
 ever high its authority, half so powerfully as that 
 w^iich belongs to its very nature and essence. 
 Now when we examine the Gospels, we are, per- 
 haps, surprised to find that Jesus makes hardly 
 any explicit references to the world at large or to 
 the universal range of the revelation which He has 
 brought into the world. He does, indeed, say 
 once, " The field is the world," ^ and twice He speaks 
 of His disciples in like manner, saying: "Ye are 
 the salt of the earth"; ''Ye are the light of the 
 world." ^ Once, in describing the kingdom of God, 
 He says explicitly: " They shall come from the east 
 and the west and from the north and the south and 
 
 Matt. 13 : 38. 2 Matt. 5:13, 14. 
 2d 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 shall sit down in the kingdom of God " ; ^ and He 
 speaks of the final judgment, " when the Son of 
 man shall come in His glory," as an hour when 
 " before Him shall be gathered all the nations." ^ 
 The fourth Gospel seems to attribute to Him the 
 glorious universal affirmation, " God so loved the 
 world that He gave His only begotten Son that 
 whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but 
 have everlasting life"; and again records that He 
 said: " I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw 
 all men unto me." ^ 
 
 But after all, the deepest and most impressive 
 feature of this universalism of the Gospel of Christ 
 is not to be found in these few incidental expres- 
 sions which fell from His lips; it lies rather in the 
 very Gospel which made them so appropriate and 
 natural that they seem incidental and in themselves 
 inadequate to account for the world-wide reach of 
 His authority to=day. While He restricted His 
 personal ministry and the missionary activity of 
 His disciples during His lifetime to Israel, we yet 
 feel that in doing so He was conscious of a delib- 
 erate act of self = restraint; that He was aware of a 
 seeming contradiction between the substance of 
 His Gospel and the range within which alone He 
 made it known. There are recorded words of His 
 which seem to bring this element of His conscious- 
 ness to the surface.* " As He was willing to be 
 the corn of wheat cast into the ground to die. . . . 
 
 iLuke 13:29. 2]y[att. 25:32. 3 joh^ s-ig. i2:32. *Matt. 
 JO: 5, 6, 23; 15:24-28; Mark 12:9; 13: 10, U: 9; Jphn 12:20. 
 
 §0 
 
The Universalism of Christianity 
 
 So, He was willing to be God's minister to the 
 Jews, as the best preparation for a future ministry 
 among the Gentiles." ^ The real source of the 
 universalism of the Gospel is in the Gospel itself. 
 That Gospel is the Christ Himself. He is both 
 the messenger and the message of God. Through 
 Him men come to know the Father. When a man 
 gives up all to follow Him, that man begins to 
 have eternal life. The Father's love reaches the 
 world through the Son. Man receives the assur- 
 ance of the forgiveness of sins, of fellowship with 
 God, through Him, the Son of man, who is ap- 
 pointed Son of God and Savior of the world. Now 
 throughout the elucidation of this Gospel by means 
 of His words concerning both God and man as 
 well as by His deeds of power and of self=sacrifice, 
 the fact becomes more and more evident that no 
 national conditions whatsoever belong to the new 
 experience which is being created for mankind in 
 and through the Son of man. While He restricts 
 His outward presence to Israel and His move- 
 ments almost wholly to Galilee and Judea, His 
 appeal is ever made to man, His Gospel is for 
 man. This will appear most clearly from a con- 
 sideration of two chief features in His teaching 
 and work. 
 
 First, there is His manifestation alike in word 
 and work of the grace of God. On His first 
 Messianic visit to Nazareth He referred to the 
 fact that even in the Old Testament there were 
 
 ^ The Kingdom of God, by Prof. Bruce, p. 57. 
 31 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 signs of the kindness of God towards those who 
 were outside the covenant ; ^ and through all His 
 ministry He strives to make it plain that divine 
 grace is effectual unto all who are lost, and, there- 
 fore, it would seem, breaks down all national and 
 artificial barriers. He never connects the bestowal 
 of salvation with any conditions except with those 
 which are possible to all men, viz., faith and re- 
 pentance. Eitual has no place in His conception 
 of worship. A Samaritan may worship the Father 
 as truly as a Jew.^ A Samaritan may show an 
 obedience to God superior to that of either Levite 
 or Priest.^ Wherever there is conscious need, the 
 grace of God is active. Even publicans, who have 
 become worse than mere Gentiles, who are guilty 
 indeed of a kind of apostasy in acting as tax-gath- 
 erers for the Roman Empire, may enter into the 
 Kingdom of God. 
 
 Second. In correlation with the grace of God 
 as the only fountain of salvation there is the 
 faith of man as its only channel. The divine 
 grace is a transforming force, and faith is its in- 
 strument. Now, Jesus Christ was the first teacher, 
 in the history of the world and of the world's 
 religions, who swept all other considerations 
 aside and made faith the sole and indispensable 
 ground of fellowship with God. His dealings with 
 men in this regard are more powerful evidence 
 than any set exposition of justification by faith 
 from His lips, could have been. Righteousness 
 
 Luke 4 : 25-27. 2 John 4 : 21-24. 3 j^^^q iq ; 33. 
 32 
 
The Universalism of Christianity 
 
 He does demand, obedience full and free. But it 
 is obedience to God apprehended as the Father; it 
 is obedience to the words of Jesus; it is the service 
 of man, even unto the bearing of the cross, " for 
 my sake." That is to say, before there can be 
 obedience or service, there must be faith. Before 
 there can be true worship of God as Spirit, He 
 must be named as Father; and before or in that 
 act there must be faith. All men are capable of 
 faith as soon as they begin to hear of Jesus the 
 Christ and to feel their need of boons which God 
 can give through Him. The publicans and har- 
 lots, the Gentile centurion, the Syrophenician 
 woman, the Samaritans who receive Him, are all 
 ecxually welcome to His love and to the blessings 
 which He can bestow; for they show themselves 
 capable of faith towards Him as " the Sent " of God. 
 This Gosi^el of Jesus, this announcement of a fel- 
 lowship with God whose only conditions on the 
 manward side are repentance and faith, this is a 
 Gospel for a world of lost men and women. At its 
 heart it is universal, because it reveals God face to 
 face with every man and it bids every man look up 
 and see that face of love. 
 
 All this becomes clearer still after the Death and 
 Resurrection have taken i3lace. Then the Gospel 
 becomes in fullest manner what it had not been 
 before, a working force in human hearts. We 
 sometimes speak as if the words of Jesus interpret 
 the meaning of His death and resurrection. But 
 to the apostolic experience the opposite was the 
 case. It was the crucifixion and the victory that 
 
 33 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 followed it, which interpreted His ministry and 
 His words. Then His Gospel became intelligible, 
 then His influence attained a new glory. Then 
 they were begotten again unto a living hope and 
 knew that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, and 
 that they had reconciliation with God through faith 
 in Him. ^ Then also those who stood around Him 
 ere He ascended heard Him say, " Go ye into all the 
 world and preach the Gospel to the whole crea- 
 tion." * They only gradually came to apprehend the 
 universal meaning of all this. Unto Peter this rev- 
 elation came when he was sent to Cornelius and saw 
 the Holy Spirit produce on heathen men the same 
 external signs which had resulted from His descent 
 upon those who were Jews. Then the Pauline 
 ministry began and Paul came to see, that, when 
 the Jews rejected and the Gentiles accepted Christ 
 and received the Holy Spirit, the Gospel of justi- 
 fication by faith carried with it the abolition of all 
 race and sex and class distinctions.^ " God is no 
 respecter of persons," both Peter and Paul ex- 
 claimed. But it was Paul who grasped the signi- 
 ficance of it most deeply. To the churches of 
 Galatia, made up both of Jews and Gentiles, he 
 says: "There can be neither Jew nor Greek; there 
 can be neither bond nor free; there can be no male 
 and female; for ye are all one man in Christ 
 Jesus." To the Corinthians he said: " Unto them 
 that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the 
 
 1 1 Pet. 1:3; John 20: 31. 2 j^att. 28: 18, 19; Mark 16: 15. 
 3 Gal. 3:26-28. 
 
 3^ 
 
The Universalism of Christianity 
 
 power of God and the wisdom of God." To the 
 Eomans he says that the Gospel of Christ, " is the 
 power of God unto salvation to every one that be- 
 lieveth, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile." ^ 
 Writing to the Colossians from his Roman prison, 
 the great Apostle explains that the barriers which 
 had separated Jew and Gentile have been destroyed 
 " through the blood of His cross." That one life 
 of Jesus Christ, the Son of God who gave Him- 
 self in sacrifice for the sins of many, belonged to no 
 one race but to all. The virtue of His person and 
 work cannot be limited by aught save the unbelief 
 of those who reject Him. This unbelief turns His 
 grace into " a savor of death unto death " to them- 
 selves. This great wonder, Christ in a man, " the 
 hope of glory," is the glorious secret which God 
 has kept so long hid from ages and from genera- 
 tions, for inscrutable but divine reasons, which 
 now at last is laid open for all men. It is to be 
 made known among the Gentiles, " that we may 
 present every man perfect in Christ Jesus." 
 
 Here then is at last a religion which is for the 
 world. It has the fullest consciousness of the 
 terrors of the Lord; it faces the awful majesty of 
 His holy name; it knows as no other religion 
 what horror and shame is wrapped up in that 
 word sin. It confronts the weakness of man and 
 his unworthiness as frankly and fully as is con- 
 ceivable. And yet it gives to man an experience 
 of personal fellowship, of living reconciliation with 
 
 ^Gal. 3: 28; 1 Cor. 1: 24; Rom. 1: 16, {R. V.). 
 35 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 God. It announces to man the individual love of 
 God for every man; it assures him of this love by 
 pointing to the cross of Christ and the glory of 
 Easter morning; it calls on him to love and trust 
 God in Jesus Christ. It lays down no conditions 
 regarding the kind of sins a man has committed in 
 the past, or the rank in life, or the tribe or nation, 
 into which he was born. Wherever the Word goes, 
 it goes to man as man, to the weak as weak, to the 
 strong as strong, to the lost as lost. It summons 
 him to life, life with God, life in God, life for God 
 through faith in Jesus Christ. 
 
 Very speedily the religion of Christ was spread 
 through the known world. Within the first four 
 or five centuries it had conquered the Roman 
 Empire. From Constantinople to Spain and from 
 Asia Minor to the west side of India, from Britain 
 to the Sahara Desert and on to Abyssinia, the 
 Church had extended its influence and the life of 
 fellowship with God had been received by those 
 who believed in Jesus Christ. Then came the 
 hordes of unchristianized peoples, who swooped 
 down upon the corrupt lands of southern Europe 
 and northern Africa. They found a civilization 
 which had become utterly corrupt and which was 
 slowly paralyzing the energies of the Church 
 which it had been compelled to recognize. 
 People who inveigh against the Church for its ap- 
 parent inactivity during the next twelve or thir- 
 teen centuries in a missionary direction should 
 master the facts of the case. They should consider 
 what it meant to carry Christianity to every home 
 
 36 
 
The Universalism of Christianity 
 
 in Europe ; and not to carry the mere message of a 
 passing missionary, but to introduce it as a work- 
 ing force, gradually, painfully into the family and 
 social and national life and consciousness. They 
 should consider again that Christianity had to 
 reckon with various enormous problems without 
 whose solution the Church would remain unfitted 
 to conquer the world. The great problems of 
 Theology had to be faced; the discussions of the 
 theological centuries, down to the eighth century, and 
 the remarkable discussions of the Reformation were 
 absolutely necessary. There is much to say even 
 for the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages. The 
 intellectual life cannot be kept out of religion. 
 There can be no strong religious life unless the 
 intellect is put into it with as much energy as the 
 heart and the will. The Gospel has not descended 
 in set phrases, like pet dogmas, out of heaven. It 
 is the life of a person with a person through a 
 person; and these personal relations must be de- 
 scribed, if they are to be apprehended and if human 
 faith and life are to be fed upon them. But to de- 
 scribe the mutual relations of these persons is to 
 face the greatest problems which Philosophy can 
 hope to deal with. And inasmuch as the ultimate 
 mysteries had long been matters of discussion even 
 in heathen Greece and Rome and these discussions 
 had given rise to many schools, the Christian 
 facts had to be submitted to scrutiny from the 
 point of view of the Philosophies which made 
 the intellectual atmosphere of the Greek world. 
 Hence theories and counter theories arose and 
 
 37 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 all the enormous literature, the great develop- 
 ments of heresy and orthodoxy, the passion, the 
 fervor, the love and the hate, so well known to the 
 students of European history, gathered around 
 these attempted solutions or descriptions of ulti- 
 mate mysteries and the substance of the GospeL 
 Men saw the vast importance of disowning what- 
 soever seemed to interfere with the integrity of 
 the Gospel or to undermine the magnificent cer- 
 titude of the Christian consciousness. No one 
 who sees how necessary all this intellectual labor 
 was, and the various developments of doctrine 
 which it involved, no one who appreciates the 
 enormous difference between the clearness of state- 
 ment and the fulness of intellectual equipment with 
 which a modern missionary can go out to the 
 heathen world, compared with Vv^hat was possible 
 to the earliest missionaries in Germany and Great 
 Britain, will fail to see also that those long centu- 
 ries wherein the Church confined its energies to 
 the deepening of the Christian life intellectually 
 and socially in Europe were necessary to the future 
 spread of the Gospel over the world. " All this 
 was not simply a waste of force in wandering away 
 from the right path and returning to it again. 
 Rather every step of this long process was needful 
 to the result and survives as a necessary element 
 in it. And if humanity had not already gone 
 through such experience, it would require still to 
 go through it, or something like it." ^ 
 
 ^ Professor Ed. Caird on "Christianity and the Historical 
 Christ." The New Review. March, 1897, p. 10. 
 
 38 
 
The Universalism of Christianity 
 
 At the same time it should be said that during 
 those long centuries when Christianity practically 
 mastered Europe, it was not entirely forgotten that 
 the world is concerned in the Gospel message. 
 The American world was of course unknown until 
 the 16th century. Mohammedanism had swept 
 down over northern Africa, had covered Syria and 
 and Asia minor with its relentless hordes, and had 
 shut the doors of approach to Africa and Asia 
 against the Church of Christ. And yet we read of 
 various efforts made by the Eoman Church to 
 establish its version of the Christian faith in China, 
 in India, and in Africa long before the times of 
 the modern movement had dawned. As soon as 
 the Americas were discovered the work of evangel- 
 ization began there. The Roman Church persisted 
 in its own way until South America became almost 
 entirely Roman Catholic. The early Colonists from 
 England, who chose Virginia and Maryland, as well 
 as those who went to Pennsylvania and New Eng- 
 land, recognized from the beginning that as Chris- 
 tians they owed a great debt to the Indian aborig- 
 ines who had become their neighbors. The char- 
 ter of the original Virginia Company, which had a 
 number of remarkable men on its London Board of 
 Directors, contains a statement of the hope that 
 the work of colonization " may by the providence 
 of God, hereafter tend to the glory of His divine 
 majesty in propagating the Christian religion to 
 such peoples as yet lived in darkness and miserable 
 ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of 
 God and may in time bring the infidels of these 
 
 39 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 parts to human civility and to a settled and just 
 goverment." ^ 
 
 Even the East India Company, which in the 
 days of its enormous wealth and power, at the close 
 of last and the beginning of this century so bit- 
 terly opposed the missionary movement began its 
 history in quite another spirit. " The charter of 
 1698 actually enacted that the Company should 
 provide ministers who were to apply themselves 
 to learn the native languages of the country where 
 they shall reside, the better to enable them to in- 
 struct the Qentoos (as they called the Indians at 
 first) that shall be servants or slaves to the said 
 Company in the Protestant religion." It seems 
 that the Directors did on one or two occasions 
 send Bibles in several languages, and Catechisms, 
 in order to fulfil this provision in their charter. 
 
 The earlier Protestant attempts at missions were 
 hampered by the fact that the Church was still 
 almost universally under state patronage. Ofii- 
 cialism has always tended to starve evangelization 
 of every kind. For evangelism lives on the free 
 impulses of love, and ofiicialism cannot live with- 
 out the bonds of red=tape, which curb individual im- 
 pulse. It was not until communities arose like 
 the Moravians, or the Churches of North America, 
 that the conditions for permanent missionary 
 effort were established. When free Churches were 
 established in England and when, through them, 
 
 ^ Vide, Life of Nicholas Ferrar. (Longmans) p. 51. Vide, 
 also " The Missionary Year Book, 1889." (Fleming H. Revell 
 Co.) p. 17 ff. 
 
 40 
 
The Universalism of Christianity 
 
 societies were formed for the specific object of 
 carrying the Gospel to the whole world, then in all 
 its marvelousness the modern missionary move- 
 ment arose. At last the conditions had been 
 created which made it possible for the Church 
 intelligently, deliberately and powerfully to plan 
 for the evangelization of all the nations of man- 
 kind. Freedom at last from state persecution; 
 freedom also from ecclesiastical politics; depend- 
 ence upon, and organization of, the direct interest, 
 prayers, faith, and sacrifices of the individual mem- 
 bers of the Christian Church ; these were the con- 
 ditions within the Church which it had taken 
 nineteen centuries to attain, and which made at 
 last the conquest of the world an intelligent 
 aim. 
 
 A brief summary of the argument of this chap- 
 ter would emphasize the following points. Relig- 
 ion has attained true universality in Christianity. 
 This universality is seen alike in the truths which 
 constitute its central teaching and in the spirit 
 with which it fills its adherents. The truths are 
 such as to awaken reverence and even love for 
 man as man, to deepen our feeling of awe in view 
 of the dignity of his nature and the greatness of 
 his destiny. The spirit is seen in that wide 
 beneficence and self-sacrifice which from the 
 beginning characterized the Church of Christ, 
 which has passed it is true through many phases, 
 but has shone out in this century more radiant 
 and far-reaching than at any previous period of its 
 
 history. 
 
 41 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 Whether this universalism of Christianity is 
 more than a theory of theologians or a dream of 
 enthusiasts may be a matter of question. It is 
 quite legitimate to ask if the alleged universalism 
 is being realized by Christianity becoming the 
 sole and universal religion of mankind. I hope in 
 the following chapters to deal with that question, 
 the intention being to obtain an idea of the extent 
 of this movement, the methods in which the spirit 
 of beneficence just alluded to has taken effect, and 
 the results for the human race which have followed 
 or are following its operations. 
 
 42 
 
' CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE MISSIONARY AS PIONEER; THE UNITY OF 
 THE RACE. 
 
 In the beginning of the century and up to about 
 the year 1870 the missionary was popularly classed 
 amongst the adventurers. A halo of romance en- 
 circled his name wherever his reports were read. 
 When he returned to the homeland, his public ad- 
 dresses were made before large and enthusiastic 
 crowds; his exhibits of curios from native lands 
 were gazed upon with intense delight; his descrip- 
 tions of the manners and customs obtaining in the 
 sphere of his travels and labors were listened to 
 with bated breath. Magazines did not exist then 
 in the abundance which bewilders our minds to^ 
 day, and those which did exist had not learned the 
 art of catering to the public taste for whatever is 
 novel, foreign and sensational. The missionary 
 supplied that lack and fascinated many whose minds 
 were by no means deeply interested in the central 
 meaning of his career. 
 
 And truly the missionary during the first dec- 
 ades of this great movement found himself a pio- 
 neer in almost every land whither he went. Few 
 Europeans and in many cases none had entered 
 before him into the regions of his missionary serv- 
 ice. Travelers, like the great discoverer, Cook, 
 
 43 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 in the South Seas, may have brought back records 
 of islands discovered and brief descriptions of the 
 inhabitants; but the missionary was to all intents 
 and purposes the first man to attempt* to establish a 
 living and intelligent contact with these peoples. 
 Many of those travelers and traders who had pre- 
 ceded the missionary had failed to do anything to 
 make their travels or their trade contribute to the 
 real opening up of the countries which they visited. 
 When Adoniram Judson went to Burmah, and 
 Jones to Madagascar, and Williams to the South 
 Seas, and Marsden to New Zealand, and Chalmers 
 to New Guinea, and Mackay to Uganda, they 
 found themselves, indeed, in lands and amongst 
 peoples that had been in a sense already discov- 
 ered; and yet they were in very truth pioneers. 
 To them it was given to see much and to describe 
 much which their transient predecessors had failed 
 to notice or to make known. The reports of men 
 like these and of several hundreds like them have 
 proved to be of the utmost value in accumulating 
 geographical information of every kind. " Geog- 
 raphy," it has been said, " is the most valuable of 
 the allies of foreign missions, which have done in 
 return, so much for the development and elevation 
 of this most interesting and comprehensive of all 
 the sciences." ^ 
 
 The region of the world where missionaries have 
 done most as pioneers or where their achievements 
 have been most striking and interesting, has un- 
 
 ^ Dr. George Smith, in " Missions at Home and Abroad," 
 p. 140. 
 
 44 
 
The Missionary as Pioneer 
 
 doubtedly been the " dark continent " of Africa. 
 It was in 1837 that Ludwig Krapf, a young student 
 from Basle, was sent out to Africa by the Church 
 Missionary Society. His efPorts to settle in Abys- 
 sinia were in vain, and in 1844 he landed at Mom- 
 basa, one hundred and twenty miles north of 
 Zanzibar. He was joined by two men of like 
 spirit, Rebmann and Ehrhardt. In subsequent 
 years he made repeated journeys inland, penetra- 
 ting far into the heart of the continent, encounter- 
 ing many dangers, both from wild beasts and 
 savage peoples. In 1856 the companions above 
 named displayed before the Royal Geographical 
 Society in London a map of the interior of Africa. 
 It contained many inaccuracies, no doubt, but its 
 real discoveries were so remarkable that the scien- 
 tific world was thoroughly stirred. From the im- 
 pulse given by these men, " Burton went forth— 
 Speke and Grant went forth." In the meantime 
 there was living, working and traveling in South 
 Africa a man whose name was destined to a fame 
 greater than any of these explorers attained. David 
 Livingstone had already begun his series of great 
 discoveries. In 1849 he had reached Lake Ngami; 
 and had become gradually convinced that north of 
 the regions which he had explored the " country 
 beyond was not the large sandy plateau of the phi- 
 losophers." His mind was made up to press on 
 into those unexplored territories in order to open 
 them up to missionary and other enterprises. Of 
 his subsequent achievements, this is no place to 
 speak. His toils, his sufferings, his victories, are 
 
 45 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 part of the heritage of every intelligent man and 
 and woman.^ 
 
 The spirit of this man is abundantly revealed in 
 the letters and the jottings in his journal towards 
 the end of his life. With what courage he pressed 
 on through all manner of difficulties, with what 
 marvelous success he encountered and mollified 
 the fierce opposition of the wildest tribes, remain- 
 ing unarmed and never threatening to employ 
 force, need not here be enlarged upon. When 
 the first rumors that Livingstone was dead reached 
 the homeland, the minds of many millions of peo- 
 ple were aroused to the most intense interest in 
 his career and achievements. The interest was 
 deepened almost to a painful degree by the uncer- 
 tainty which for long weeks filled many minds re- 
 garding the truth of these sad rumors. When at 
 last in 1874 the news was flashed over the land, 
 that Livingstone's body had been carried hun- 
 dreds of miles to the coast by two of his native 
 servants and that it was about to be brought to 
 England in a ship of the Royal Navy, the excite- 
 ment was universal. For a career like his it 
 seemed to be the only fitting earthly close, that his 
 body should find its last resting place among the 
 illustrious dead in Westminster Abbey. The close 
 of Livingstone's career was the opening of Africa 
 to commerce and missions. Three or four of the 
 leading missionary societies used the opportunity 
 presented by the public enthusiasm to establish 
 
 * Vide, "The Personal Life of David Livingstone," by Pro- 
 fessor Blaikie. 
 
 16 
 
The Missionary as Pioneer 
 
 new missions in various parts of the vast regions 
 now open to European influence. Commercial 
 companies and individual traders of all kinds 
 eagerly penetrated into these fields which promised 
 such magnificent results to their enterprise.^ 
 
 I wish to return to the thought that the chief 
 work of missionaries, as pioneers, is not to be 
 measured by the mere number of geographical and 
 other discoveries which they have made. Their 
 influence upon the world has mainly arisen from 
 the fact that in nearly all parts of the world they 
 have been the first Europeans who have really set- 
 tled down and made their homes amongst heathen 
 and oftentimes amongst savage peoples. Their 
 stations have thus naturally become well known as 
 stages or j)laces of call along the great trade routes, 
 whether by land or by sea. The trader comes to 
 think of the mission station as a place where life is 
 more secure and where gradually business becomes 
 more abundant.^ If it is true, on the one hand, 
 that the instructions of the missionary gradually 
 enlighten the people and make it less easy for an 
 unscrupulous trader to cheat them right and left, 
 it is true also, on the other hand, that the same in- 
 structions increase the appetite of the natives for 
 the products of civilization. Missionary work, as 
 we shall see in a later chapter, has always been 
 found to stimulate in any tribe or people the pro- 
 
 ^L. M. C, Vol. I, pp.275, ff. 
 
 2 Cf. The saving of Dr. Junker's life by Alex. Mackay in 
 Mackay of Uganda," pp. 315, 320. 
 
 47 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 cess of civilization. The mere pioneer trader has 
 never succeeded in doing so. His influence has 
 not developed the taste of the natives, has not 
 made the places which he visits more inviting for 
 the occupancy of other Europeans. In West Af- 
 rica, for example, the extensive operations of trad- 
 ers, in connection with the rubber trade, have the 
 sole effect even at this day, of oppressing and de- 
 grading the natives. Deliberate cruelty and per- 
 sistent injustice may gradually depopulate the 
 country, but cannot be said to open it up to any 
 further connections with the civilized world than 
 are involved in the mere processes of the one or 
 two forms of trade created by the natural products 
 of the country. The observations of missionaries 
 and others in the South Seas, combine to corrobo- 
 rate this view that the pioneer trader is unable 
 to open up the lands which he visits to a living 
 and healthful connection with the world at large. 
 The pioneer missionary, on the other hand, as 
 he remains in such a West African village, which 
 is suffering from the incursions of the trader, sets 
 forces agoing which more or less speedily change 
 the aspect of affairs. He builds his house, opens 
 his school, plans and cultivates his garden, trains 
 native servants to help him, and advises the com- 
 munity at large regarding their homes, clothing, 
 tools and gardens. Thus a demand is created for a 
 larger trade in a higher class of articles than had 
 hitherto been supplied. Shoddy stuffs, bead orna- 
 ments and worthless trinkets cease to attract pur- 
 chasers. The village has fifty points of living in- 
 
 48 
 
The Missionary as Pioneer 
 
 terest in the world beyond its bounds for every one 
 which it possessed before the missionary arrived. 
 This aspect of the missionary's work deserves em- 
 phasis, because it is often supposed that the car- 
 rying of religion and trade to heathen lands are 
 industries which have nothing in common. Some 
 traders have even sought to describe missionary 
 activity as an enemy of trade. As a matter of fact 
 the worst kind of traders precede the mission- 
 ary, the best kind almost always come after him. 
 
 It is worthy of record that it has in several in- 
 stances been reserved for the Medical missionary 
 to open the way into countries which had strenu- 
 ously resisted the approaches of civilized commu- 
 nities. Into Siam, Corea, and Cashmere, for ex- 
 ample, scarce a ray of light from the Western 
 World could find its way until the medical mis- 
 sionary daringly entered and touched the needs of 
 men with his merciful hands. His power to help 
 human beings in the hour of their greatest distress 
 and his persistent refusal to make any personal 
 gain out of their gratitude, has over and over again 
 broken down national prejudices and led to the 
 emancipation of a people from the thraldom of its 
 isolation. The magnificent courage of young Elm- 
 slie and his young wife in the conquest of Cash- 
 mere has written one of the most pathetic and 
 brilliant pages of heroism and self^^denial. 
 
 There is another direction in which missiona- 
 ries have proved themselves of great service to 
 mankind, namely, in the accumulation of scientific 
 knowledge. Concerning this it is not within my 
 49 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 purpose or plan to say much. But it may be of use 
 to state a few of the leading facts. The missionary 
 has proved himself a man of wider interests than 
 some sections of society have attributed to him. 
 From all parts of the world his contributions to 
 science are numerous and valuable, and in some 
 cases have proved themselves of first=class impor- 
 tance. If the 'Transactions ' of Botanical, Zoolog- 
 ical, Geological, Archaeological, Ethnological, 
 Philological and Geographical Societies in Ger- 
 many, Britain and America were ransacked, they 
 would be found to contain well-nigh innumerable 
 contributions, in the form of memoranda, reports 
 and discussions, which have been sent by mission- 
 aries from all over the world. The late Professor 
 Agassiz said: " Few are aware how much we owe 
 them (the missionaries), both for their intelligent 
 observation of facts and for their collection of spec- 
 imens. We must look to them not a little for aid 
 in our efforts to advance future science." ^ A work 
 known as " The Ely Volume" has been published 
 in America, which confines itself almost entirely to 
 the contributions made to science by the represent- 
 atives of that great society. The American Board 
 of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Although 
 thus restricted in its range, it amounts to a volume 
 of over five hundred pages of small print, describ- 
 ing original discussions and observations in almost 
 every department of science. 
 Among individual instances of service rendered 
 
 1 Quotea in the " Ely Volume," p. 122, 
 5Q 
 
The Missionary as Pioneer 
 
 to Science two or three of the more remarkable ex- 
 amples may be given. Carey, the great missionary 
 to India, who in the one task of mastering oriental 
 languages and translating the Scriptures may be 
 said to have done the work of ten men, carried on 
 at the same time most valuable investigations in a 
 quite different direction. He was a keen observer of 
 nature and his love of botany led him to establish 
 a large garden for the study of the Indian flora. 
 His contributions to Science concerning the natu- 
 ral history and botany of India were of such im- 
 portance that he was elected to the Asiatic Society. 
 But greater than that was the fact that he proposed 
 and founded " The Agricultural and Horticultural 
 Society of India." At its first meeting only five 
 were present. But so diligent and wise was he that 
 it grew rapidly and has exercised great influence 
 in Science and on the development of India.^ In 
 the South Seas there have lived and worked two 
 brothers. Rev. J. T. Gulick and the Rev. L. Halsey 
 Gulick, each of whom has done scientific work of 
 unusual value. The former is the man whose name 
 has been made so famous in recent days by its as- 
 sociation with the development of thought through 
 which the late George J. Romanes passed. He 
 gave his attention to certain conditions of life ob- 
 taining in the Sandwich Islands, which seemed to 
 him to illustrate the laws of the modification of 
 species. The results of his observation and 
 
 ^Vide, Dr. George Smith's splendid chapfer in his Life of 
 Carey on "What Carey did for Science." 
 51 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 thought were sent to the Linnaean Society in 
 London. Concerning these communications, Mr. 
 Romanes published the following opinion in the 
 well-known weekly paper called Nature \- "I can- 
 not allow the present communication to appear in 
 these columns without again recording my convic- 
 tion that the writer is the most profound of living 
 thinkers upon Darwinian topics, and that the gen- 
 eralizations which have been reached by his twenty 
 years of thought are of more importance to the 
 theory of evolution than any that have been pub- 
 lished during the post=Darwinian period." We are 
 told that the Rev. L. Halsey Gulick while in 
 Micronesia made observations of a geographical and 
 Meteorological nature which are used to this day as 
 a basis for drawing up charts of navigation.^ 
 
 I have already adverted to the almost incalculable 
 debt which geographical science owes to the 
 travels and observations of missionaries in every 
 part of the world. Carl Ritter, the most pains- 
 taking and influential of modern geographers, 
 freely recognized the missionaries as indispens- 
 able coadjutors of his work. Of the Missionary 
 Herald he says: " It is the repository to which 
 
 1 Vide " Nature," April 10, 1890. The facts concerning Mr. 
 Gulick's correspondence with Mr. Romanes are given in Bibli- 
 otheca Sacra, Vol. 53, pp. 68, 69, and 165-167. In the same vol- 
 ume, Mr. Gulick's 'Statement,' made on the request of Mr. 
 Romanes, entitled " Christianity and the Evolution of Ration- 
 al life," is printed in full, pp. 70-74. Cf. Romanes' "Thoughts 
 on Religion," passim. 
 
 2 Life, by Frances Gulick Jewett, pp. 161 ff. 
 
 52 
 
The Missionary as Pioneer 
 
 the reader must look to find the most valuable 
 documents that have ever been sent over by any 
 society, and where a rich store of scientific, 
 historical, and antiquarian details may be seen." * 
 The same remark will apply in a great measure to 
 the organs of all the leading missionary societies. 
 It is of course in the region of Anthropological 
 science that the largest mass of materials has been 
 contributed by the missionaries. They, it is safe 
 to say, have become more intimately acquainted 
 with the customs, institutions, not to speak of lan- 
 guages and religions of heathen peoples, than any 
 other class of men. Allusion has been made to 
 the many contributions sent by missionaries to the 
 "Transactions" of learned Societies and to the 
 pages of missionary magazines. The scientific value 
 of these is of course far surpassed by the volumes 
 of all kinds, large and small, learned and popular, 
 which missionaries have written during this century. 
 They will be found to deal in varying degrees of ful- 
 ness and detail with the history, religion, language, 
 physical conditions, government and social life of 
 most of the peoples of heathendom. No one who 
 has not glanced over a large missionary library 
 and discovered hoiu incomplete it is, can have any 
 conception of the extent of this literature. And 
 no one who has not read pretty widely in it can 
 have any idea of its value in relation to the sub- 
 jects above named. 
 
 * Professor G. Frederick Wright, D. D., in " Missions at 
 Home and Abroad." p. 351. 
 
 53 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 The missionary may then be looked upon, in the 
 light of what has been said of his influence as a 
 traveler and a recorder of facts, as a considerable 
 force in the development of the race during this 
 century. But there is one point regarding his 
 function in this development which is of peculiar 
 significance. If the facts stated above and those 
 which I hope to establish in the following chap- 
 ters are facts, and are correctly interpreted, it fol- 
 lows that the missionary movement has done more 
 than anything else to hasten the reunion of the 
 race. The unity of mankind may or may not have 
 been a realized fact in the beginning of history; 
 but since the time when seas and mountains, 
 deserts and rivers, first broke the race up into iso- 
 lated and independent sections, that unity has been 
 more of an ideal or a dream, than a living and con- 
 crete truth. The nations have been divided from 
 one another for many ages ; there has been little or no 
 interchange of intellectual, religious, or social in- 
 fluence. Even the extension of the Roman Em- 
 pire over many races did not and could not serve 
 to make them one in more than a merely formal 
 sense. In all that made life what it was to each of 
 them, they were separated from one another. To= 
 day we are in presence of a most remarkable phe- 
 nomenon. The basis is being laid deep in the 
 consciousness of every people on earth which 
 makes it possible for all peoples to realize their 
 common brotherhood, and to feel the fascination of 
 a reunited humanity. The force which more than 
 any other is working towards this consummation 
 
 54 
 
The Missionary as Pioneer 
 
 is the Christian religion. Deep down below those 
 levels of thought and emotion which are touched 
 by commerce, war, politics, industry or secular 
 education it is doing this work. It is the relig- 
 ious impulse which alone accounts for the career of 
 the missionary. He becomes the pioneer who makes 
 his home far in advance of all other Europeans 
 within the confines of heathendom and savagery, 
 because he has heard what he names " the call of 
 God," and has felt the mysterious impulse which 
 he and all who think with him attribute to the 
 Spirit of Jesus Christ. It is only the communica- 
 tion of this religious experience to heathen men 
 and women which is creating the conditions for 
 that unity of sentiment and life towards which the 
 world is moving. For when the missionary has 
 succeeded in winning converts, the latter receive 
 a new consciousness regarding their relations to 
 the world at large. As we shall see in greater de- 
 tail, and be compelled to emphasize again, it is out 
 of this community of religious experience that the 
 other affiliations of race with race and tribe with 
 tribe are developing before the eyes of us all. If 
 the work were not proceeding so quietly and 
 steadily, if its most important operations were not 
 being carried on in the deeper regions of religious 
 attainment and moral development, and if its 
 sphere were not so vast, comprehending all nations 
 and languages, more of us would be astounded by 
 the thing which is happening in our generation. 
 Humanity is becoming one organism. But the 
 life which is permeating the separate members, 
 
 55 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 many of which were almost fatally atrophied, is 
 the life of the Christian religion. And this life is 
 at present working through the class of men whom 
 we call missionaries. Throughout the world in 
 their myriads of mission stations, on lonely is- 
 lands and amongst teeming oriental cities, they are 
 all ceaselessly busied about their magnificent task. 
 The army seems scattered, but it is thoroughly or- 
 ganized, and it is the most effective instrument 
 ever dreamed of by men for making one humanity 
 out of the scattered and isolated tribes of earth. 
 The missionaries are all drawing the hearts of 
 mankind to one center of supreme interest and in- 
 finite power. Ask them all in their scattered sta- 
 tions, lonely and yet not alone, what motive has 
 brought them there, and why there is this extra- 
 ordinary identity of aim and of influence pervad- 
 ing all. their separate spheres of labor, and they 
 unanimously give one name as the explanation of 
 these facts. It is the name of Jesus Christ. 
 
 56 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE MISSIONARY AS TRANSLATOR; THE 
 BIBLE AND THE WORLD. 
 
 One of the most remarkable and impressive 
 phases of the history of the Christian Church is 
 undoubtedly the circulation of the Bible through- 
 out the world, as that has been achieved during 
 this century. I propose in this chapter to de- 
 scribe briefly the extent, the cost, and the effects 
 of that work. 
 
 At the end of last century the Scriptures had 
 been translated into less than fifty languages. 
 That number was of course, in large measure, con- 
 fined to the languages of Europe. As soon as the 
 movement outwards to the great world of heathen- 
 dom began, attention was directed to the necessity 
 for giving the Bible to those who were to be evan- 
 gelized, in their own languages. It is well known 
 how early the founders of missions in the East di- 
 rected and how completely some of them concen- 
 trated their attention upon this task. William 
 Carey and Henry Martyn in India, deeply as they 
 longed and hard as they labored for the conversion 
 of individuals to the Christian faith, yet allowed 
 nothing to interfere with their pursuit of the ideal 
 which glowed before their minds, that, namely, of 
 giving to the peoples of India the Word of God in 
 57 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 their own tongues. Indeed, of Martyn it is said 
 that, " His devotion to the study of the languages 
 which interpret and apply to the races of India, 
 Asia and Persia, the books of the Christian reve- 
 lation, was so absorbing as to shorten his career." ^ 
 It was not long before the friends of the Gospel 
 in the homelands found that this work must be 
 undertaken by special agencies and that the ordi- 
 nary missionary societies could not grapple with 
 the task of superintending the printing and pub- 
 lishing of the Scriptures. Hence arose the Bible 
 Societies. These institutions which now number 
 nearly one hundred all over Christendom comprise 
 many whose work is almost purely local and is 
 confined to the work of dissemination of the 
 Scriptures. The larger and graver task has de- 
 volved almost exclusively upon five or six societies. 
 Of these the best known are the British and For- 
 eign Bible Society, The American Bible Society, 
 and The National Bible Society of Scotland. An 
 idea of the amount of energy and devotion which 
 is annually devoted to this work may be gathered 
 from a glance at the figures which these Societies 
 published for the one year, 1895. In that year the 
 British and Foreign Bible Society had an income 
 of $1,069,810, and circulated 3,970,439 copies of 
 Bibles, New Testaments and portions of the Bi- 
 ble. The American Bible Society had an income 
 of $437,220, and circulated 1,750,283 copies. The 
 National Bible Society of Scotland had an income 
 
 ^ Life of Henry Martyn. By Dr. Geo. Smith, p. 419. 
 58 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 of $144,880 and circulated 814,408 copies. The 
 three Societies together had an income of $1,651,- 
 900 and circulated 6,535,130 copies. It has been 
 computed that the thirty largest Bible Societies 
 had up to the year 1893 put into circulation no 
 less than 250,000,000 copies of either the whole 
 Bible or a portion of it. This vast amount of 
 work is being carried on day by day by means of 
 the ordinary missionary agencies and by means al- 
 so, in many lands, of colporteurs appointed and 
 supported by the respective Bible Societies for the 
 express work of distributing or selling the Scrip- 
 tures and explaining their teaching whenever they 
 can find opportunity. The latter are among the 
 most efficient agencies at present working for the 
 redemption of the world. They must be men of 
 great devotion, of constant and ready wit, able to 
 suit themselves to each emergency and to have an 
 answer at once wise and attractive for all the abun- 
 dant words of opposition or ridicule which are 
 cast upon the book which they sell and the work 
 of selling it which they have undertaken. High 
 among those who have done great things for the 
 Kingdom of God will stand the name of many a 
 colporteur whose fame has not gone far in the 
 world. 
 
 Concerning the Bible Societies two facts of de- 
 lightful significance ought to be recorded. In the 
 first place they have cooperated with great mag- 
 nanimity and unfailing courtesy with all kinds of 
 missionary societies. Their connections with 
 some of the societies have been peculiarly inti- 
 69 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 mate and constant. Negotiations regarding the 
 making and printing of translations, regarding the 
 payment of missionaries as translators, revisers, 
 proof -readers, etc., and regarding the supply of Bi- 
 bles and portions to the various fields where they 
 were needed and payment for the same, have often 
 involved delicate personal and other matters. But 
 the whole spirit of their ideal has entered into the 
 hearts and minds of these directors and informed 
 their dealings with one another. In the second 
 place the Bible Societies have offered to the world 
 the spectacle of at least one platform on which all 
 who are of the evangelical faith can stand togeth- 
 er. The British and Foreign, and the American 
 Bible Societies both describe the aim of their ex- 
 istence in identical terms: "its sole object shall be 
 to encourage a wide circulation of the Holy Scrip- 
 tures without note or comment." They are almost 
 the only institutions of an interdenominational 
 character which have survived the tendency to 
 form denominational societies. 
 
 It requires a considerable effort of the imagina- 
 tion to realize the extent of the work, and still 
 more the extent of its influence, as the task of Bi- 
 ble distribution proceeds throughout the world. 
 Let me state a few facts bearing upon various as- 
 pects of the work in various parts of the world to 
 aid our imagination. The Bible, which, as I have 
 said, existed in less than fifty translations at the 
 end of last century, has now been translated and 
 is now published, in whole or part, in nearly four 
 hundred languages and dialects. So persistent 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 and serious has been the toil of missionaries over 
 this one great task that in a recent period of ten 
 years (1882-1892), no less than fifty new transla- 
 tions were made. There are many native lan- 
 guages in Africa into which no translation has 
 yet been possible. There are probably districts 
 in India and China in a similar position. There 
 are probably some more important languages in 
 Central Asia to which this supreme evidence of 
 admission to a central place in the world's history 
 has not yet come. But nine4enths of the peoples 
 of the world speak the languages into which 
 translations have been made, while only one4enth 
 speak the tongues as yet unconquered for this end. 
 It is true, therefore, to say, that now at last no 
 considerable section of the world's inhabitants 
 speaking one language is without the Scriptures. 
 A few facts illustrative of details may help us to 
 realize the character and extent of the work. The 
 National Bible Society of Scotland has divided 
 China into five great agencies. In them it em- 
 ploys eight European agents, and one hundred and 
 fifty native colporteurs. The work of these men 
 is to go from place to place striving to get the peo- 
 ple to buy the Scriptures. They speak to them, 
 explain the nature of the strange wares which 
 they offer, answer difficult questions, read passages 
 in order to whet the appetite and excite the curi- 
 osity. But they neither preach nor teach in any 
 stated place. Their life work is to scatter the 
 Scriptures. This army representing only one So- 
 ciety did in China in 1896 dispose of 379 Bibles, 
 
 61 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 5,246 Testaments and 208,165 portions, making a 
 total of 213,790 copies of Scripture sold. Turn to 
 another religion. In the Turkish empire two 
 books compete for supremacy over the religious 
 life of its inhabitants, viz: the Koran and the Bi- 
 ble. Now, the Mohammedan religion forbids that 
 its sacred books be translated out of the holy Ara- 
 bic language into infidel tongues; and any Turk- 
 ish subject who is found with a copy of such trans- 
 lation would have to forfeit it that it be committed 
 to the flames. But the Christian Bible is now 
 translated into eleven of the languages spoken 
 within the boundaries of that empire, and no less 
 than fifty or sixty thousand copies are sold annu- 
 
 ally. 
 
 The story of the labor involved in the transla- 
 tion of the Bible into more than three hundred 
 languages, and its revision in many cases over and 
 over again, can probably never be fully told. It 
 lies buried in the records of the various mission- 
 ary societies. Nay, much of it is not even there. 
 For missionaries, as a class, do not complain of 
 their toil nor recount its details. Their periodical 
 reports seldom reflect with any adequacy the wear- 
 iness, the monotony, or, at times, the drudgery of 
 their daily life. Hence the difficulties which have 
 been encountered and surmounted must be largely 
 left to our imagination, working upon certain gen- 
 eral facts and multiplying these into the effort and 
 the silent endurance of months and years and 
 decades. 
 
 The great work of Bible translation and distri- 
 62 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 bution is going on everywhere continually. The 
 laborers are well-nigh innumerable, their toil in- 
 calculable. None of them is paid in cash accord- 
 ing to the commercial value of his work. They 
 all do this work out of the depths of a passionate 
 love. They may be utterly wrong, their love inde- 
 fensible, their toil a stupendous blunder. But 
 there it is, stupendous at any rate, and covering 
 the earth more and more completely year by year. 
 These untiring toilers are placing in more and more 
 homes among all peoples, without any discrimina- 
 tion whatsoever, the pages of this unique Book, the 
 silent witness of the origin of the Christian man's 
 faith and the grounds of his eternal hope. 
 
 The difficulties have varied of course in kind 
 and degree according to circumstances. Some- 
 times the work of translation has been undertaken 
 by men of comparatively high scholarship, men 
 who like Henry Martyn, enjoyed the advantages of a 
 thorough university education. At other times it 
 has been entered upon by men like William Carey, 
 who, without a thorough preparation, yet pos- 
 sessed a native genius for the acquisition of lan- 
 guages. But in a large number, perhaps the ma- 
 jority of cases, the labor of translation has been 
 undertaken by men who neither had a high train- 
 ing nor natural genius for linguistic work. They 
 were men of good natural ability who never would 
 have entered upon any such effort in their home- 
 lands, but who having given themselves to the 
 task of converting heathen into Christian peoples, 
 and, finding a translated Bible quite essential, set 
 
 63 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 themselves with a stubbornness born of their cen- 
 tral aim and deepest passion to the mastery of a 
 native language, and oftentimes to the acquisi- 
 tion or deeper study of Hebrew and Greek. For 
 example, can anything be more pathetic than the 
 position of the first missionaries to Greenland, who 
 found themselves unable to reach the people with- 
 out the Scriptures, and yet unable to translate them, 
 because they were uneducated men without a knowl- 
 edge of the grammar of their own language ! Yet these 
 men did surmount even these frowning mountains 
 of difficulty by the exercise of a humble and patient 
 courage, and began to reduce the Esquimaux lan- 
 guage to writing. They and their successors toiled 
 at the work till the entire Scriptures were trans- 
 lated. Or even consider the case of a man like 
 Robert Moffat. He went out to South Africa with 
 only the most meager and hurried education. He 
 was a man first and last of outward activity, who 
 made C07i amove long journeys, planted and culti- 
 vated large and beautiful gardens, loved in fact the 
 open air and physical activity. Yet that man per- 
 sisted for many years in the task of translation, 
 studied various versions of the Scriptures, spent 
 hours and even days over one verse or clause, to 
 find the exact shade of meaning and put it into an 
 equivalent native idiom. The result was that he 
 performed the rare task of translating the whole 
 Bible with his own hand, completing the new Tes- 
 tament in 1838 and the entire book in 1857. 
 
 Yet again the difficulties which have been over- 
 come must be estimated by a glance at the variety 
 
 64 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 of languages into wliich these translations have 
 been made. In some cases, those, for example, of 
 Chinese, Hindoostani, Sanskrit, Persian, etc., mis- 
 sionaries found a more or less elaborate native lit- 
 erature. For centuries literary idioms and fashions 
 had been formed and very extensive vocabularies 
 developed. The man who desired to see the Scrip- 
 tures take rank at once at the head of an already 
 abundant native literature must master those vocab- 
 ularies, and whether he employ them all or not, 
 he must be familiar enough with the idioms and 
 literary forms, that he may choose which would best 
 suit the varied portions of the Scriptures. Henry 
 Martyn was wisely advised by a welhknown Ori- 
 entalist of his day not to begin translating till he 
 had " resided some years in the country. He said 
 it was the rock on which missions had split, that 
 they had attempted to write and preach before 
 they knew the language. The Lord's prayer, he 
 said, was now a common subject of ridicule with 
 the people on account of the manner in which it 
 had been translated." ^ William Carey, in many 
 ways the greatest missionary of them all, found 
 himself under necessity to master Sanskrit, 
 which he calls "perhaps the hardest language 
 in the world"; but he set himself to it with his 
 invincible powers of application. So early as 1798 
 he says: "I have nearly translated the Sanskrit 
 grammar and dictionary into English, and have 
 made considerable progress in compiling a diction- 
 
 Life, by Dr. Geo. Smith, p. 72. 
 65 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 ary, Sanskrit, including Bengali and English." 
 Even in the case of these literary languages the 
 difficulties were not confined to the mastery of 
 idioms and finding of appropriate translations. 
 Referring to his earliest Bengali version in 1800, 
 he says: "In the printing I have to look over the 
 copy and correct the press, which is much more 
 laborious than it would be in English, because 
 spelling, writing, printing, etc., in Bengali is 
 almost a new thing, and we have in a manner to fix 
 the orthography." ^ In spite of these difficulties, 
 which presented themselves in connection with 
 each language which Carey and his colleagues un- 
 dertook to learn and to use for translation pur- 
 poses, he succeeded in either translating, or super- 
 intending the translation of, the Bible in whole or 
 part into no less than thirty-six languages. The 
 whole Scriptures had been at the time of his death, 
 1834, translated into no less than seven languages 
 (Bengali, Oorissa, Assamese, Sanskrit, Hindi, 
 Marathi and Chinese). "The Bengali, Hindi, 
 Marathi and Sanskrit translations were his own. 
 The Chinese was similarly the work of Marshman 
 (his colleague). The Hindi versions in their many 
 dialects and the Oorissa, were blocked out by his col- 
 leagues and the pundits. He saw through the press 
 the Hindoostani, Persian, Malay, Tamil and other 
 versions of the whole or portions of the Scriptures. 
 He ceased not night and day, if by any means 
 with a loving catholicity, the Word of Grod might 
 
 iLife, by Dr. Geo. Smith, Ed. 2, p. 188. 
 66 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 be given to the millions." ^ The life work of Will- 
 iam Carey is one of the most wonderful which our 
 world has seen, not less for its difficulty, its 
 amount, its enthusiasm and its influence on the 
 history of the race, than for the humility, the gen- 
 tleness, the patience of the great heart that under- 
 took and carried it forward without weariness until 
 the close of his arduous and brilliant career. 
 
 When we turn to the unwritten languages of 
 the simpler peoples we find the missionary facing 
 problems of another but oftentimes no less puz- 
 zling kind. The learning of the language must be 
 derived wholly from conversation and the grammar 
 mastered very slowly and painfully, as the inflec- 
 tions and constructions grow familiar. Then fol- 
 lows the task of finding letters to represent the 
 various sounds. When these difficulties have been 
 surmounted, the preacher and translator finds 
 himself in many cases confronted by the fact that 
 the natives, having very poor ideas of a spiritual 
 world, have no words to express the central facts 
 contained in the message of the Gospel. It is 
 only with extreme labor, care and patience that 
 words are gradually found which can be used with- 
 out misunderstanding or with a minimum of dan- 
 ger. Then these words have to be explained with 
 new shades of meaning, so that a gradual trans- 
 formation is effected, such as took place in many 
 Greek words when they came to be used for the pur- 
 poses of Christian experience and Christian thought 
 
 1 " Life," by Dr. Goo. Smith, p. 214. 
 67 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 at the beginning of our era. No one who has not 
 attempted this task or heard much about it and 
 pondered it sympathetically can easily conceive 
 of the work which it has implied and implies 
 to=day throughout the world. Some cases of 
 difficulty have occasioned considerable contro- 
 versy, as in China where there has been seri- 
 ous difference of opinion regarding the word 
 which should be employed for the name of 
 God. In a certain part of India difficulty has 
 been found with the word "flesh." The near- 
 est native equivalent which could be found meant 
 " flesh^meat " in distinction from bone or blood. 
 It is easy to see what ludicrous misunderstandings 
 this word would suggest in many parts of Scripture. 
 For example one native, on the text, " I will not 
 fear what flesh can do unto me," said: " It is plain 
 enough, but it is a very curious thing to say. It 
 means of course, * I will not fear even though the 
 eating of flesh causes me indigestion.' " In Jap- 
 anese the translators finding no word for " kiss " 
 had to manufacture one, and then, I suppose, 
 had to explain its meaning. In a certain West 
 African language, the missionaries found that 
 in translating the word " heaven," they had 
 employed a native word signifying only " at 
 the top of a tree " or *'of a pole." But nowhere has 
 there been serious failure of perseverance and 
 faithfulness. Everywhere these and many other 
 difficulties have been or are being gradually over- 
 come and the natives are receiving in their own 
 language this Book of God. 
 
 68 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 Thus far I have attempted to describe the ex- 
 tent and nature of this work of translating the 
 Bible which has proceeded at so rapid a rate dur- 
 ing this century of Foreign Missions. Let me now 
 attempt to describe something of the value of this 
 kind of labor to the church and to mankind at large. 
 It may be assumed that there must be some deep 
 significance attaching to this volume which has 
 made it seem not only worth while, but morally 
 imperative, to so many men in so many parts of 
 the world to engage in its translation. 
 
 First of all, it is obvious that, judged even from 
 the scientific point of view, these achievements 
 must have a great value. One of the many fields 
 in which our century has seen scientific advance 
 of an almost incalculable extent is that of lan- 
 guage. Comparative Philology and Comparative 
 Grammar are children of only a recent generation, 
 and yet no one man is now able to follow out all 
 their ramifications for himself at first hand. The 
 languages of all races are being subjected to the 
 closest scrutiny and the results are being used to 
 throw light upon other most important depart- 
 ments of investigation. For example, Ethnology, 
 while it owes much to the study of the anatomy of 
 the races, especially to craniology, and much also 
 to archaeology with its investigation of the relics 
 of antiquity and comparison of these with utensils 
 and weapons in use to=day, yet derives a large 
 mass of its material, sometimes the most certain 
 and trustworthy, from the labors which have been 
 spent upon the comparative study of languages. 
 
 69 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 The same is true of the science of Comparative 
 Religion. Professor Max Mtiller has made us 
 familiar with some of the invaluable results which 
 accrue to that science from a careful study of the 
 history of significant words. Now it is perfectly 
 safe to say, that no one body of men has done so 
 much to make the widest and most thorough study 
 of languages possible than the missionaries of the 
 nineteenth century. This is a glory, which like 
 those of the pioneer and the observer of natural 
 life, can only belong in a much less degree to the 
 men who go out into the field in the next or any 
 later century. Through all history, the nineteenth 
 century will be remembered for this. Many of its 
 other scientific attainments will be surpassed and 
 remembered only by the most minute student of the 
 history of physics and biology. But no student of 
 language will ever be able to forget that it was in 
 the nineteenth century when all the principal 
 languages of the world were used for the transla- 
 tion of this one book, and thus a universal basis of 
 linguistic comparison was established. In that 
 future time many languages and dialects will 
 have disappeared, of which no record would 
 or could have been kept other than these trans- 
 lations of Scripture which have been made 
 by missionaries of our own and three preceding 
 generations. Professor Max Mtiller has empha- 
 sized the importance of missionaries in elucidating 
 the problems of the dialectic life of language. 
 He says that " whatever is known of the dialects 
 of savage tribes is chiefly or entirely due to the 
 
 70 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 missionary." ^ It is easy to see many reasons 
 why this should be the case. Not only are mis- 
 sionaries in the very large majority of cases the 
 only Europeans or Americans of education who 
 make prolonged residence among savage peoples 
 and so have fullest opportunities for mastery of 
 native languages; they are also bound by the most 
 solemn motives of their lives to give the closest 
 attention to the study of these languages. They 
 know that with imperfect idioms and inaccurate 
 pronunciation, they seriously hamper their work. 
 While the more completely they speak as the na- 
 tives do, the more deep and persuasive is the spir- 
 itual influence which they may hope to exert. 
 Hence we have the spectacle of literally thousands 
 of men and women all over the world who have 
 obtained a familiarity with many scores of lan< 
 guages such as few scholars would or could have 
 attained in the mere interests of philological re- 
 search. Moreover these missionaries have done 
 more than merely translate the Scriptures. In 
 nearly all cases it has been found necessary, in 
 order to teach the natives, to write and publish 
 lesson=books, grammars, and in very many cases 
 even dictionaries of the native languages. Some of 
 these works have proved to be of immense im- 
 portance to scholarship in the most important ori- 
 ental languages. For example, there is the great 
 Chinese dictionary of Robert Morrison in six large 
 quarto volumes, which he compiled through six- 
 
 ^ Max Mailer's " Science of Language," Vol. I, pp. 58, 471. 
 71 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man. 
 
 teen years of incessant labors, and which cost the 
 East India Company over fifty thousand dollars 
 to print. This work had compelled Morrison to 
 gather a library of ten thousand Chinese books, 
 and it contained fifty thousand words printed in 
 Chinese characters. That work has been the basis 
 of all future progress in the scientific study of that 
 language. 
 
 The breadth of view, the calm and yet 
 strong powers of discrimination which have been 
 displayed by many of these men, finds nowhere 
 more adequate expression than in a letter of 
 Carey's, written in 1811. " I have of late been 
 " much impressed with the vast importance of lay- 
 " ing a foundation for Biblical criticism in the 
 " East by preparing grammars of the different lan- 
 " guages into which we have translated or may 
 " translate the Bible. Without some such step, 
 " they who follow us will have to wade through 
 " the same labors that I have in order to stand 
 " merely upon the same ground that I now stand 
 " upon. If, however, elementary books are pro- 
 " vided, the labor will be greatly contracted; and a 
 " person will be able in a short time to acquire 
 " that which has cost me years of study and toil. 
 " The necessity which lies upon me of acquiring 
 " so many languages, obliges me to study and work 
 " out the grammars of each of them, and to at- 
 " tend closely to their irregularities and peculiari- 
 " ties. I have, therefore, already published gram- 
 " mars of three of them, viz: the Bengali, the San- 
 " skrit, and the Mahratta. To these I have re- 
 
 72 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 " solved to add the grammars of the Telinga, Kur- 
 " nata, Orissa, Punjabi, Kashmeeri, Goojarati, 
 " Nepalese, and Assam languages. Two of these 
 " are now in the press, and I hope to have two or 
 " three more of them out by the last of next year. 
 " These," he adds with quiet humor, " may not 
 " only be useful in the way I stated, but may serve 
 " to furnish an answer to a question which has 
 " more than once been repeated, ' How can these 
 '' men translate in so great a number of languages?' 
 " Few people know what may be done till they 
 "try and persevere in what they undertake."^ In 
 the library of Serampore college there are pre- 
 served five colossal volumes of a polyglot diction- 
 ary which had been prejpared by the Carey band of 
 workers for use in the translation of the Bible. 
 
 Surely no higher service can be rendered to a 
 people than that which Dante did for Italy, and 
 Luther for Germany, and the translators of the 
 English Bible for the English speaking race, when 
 to these lands and races books were given which 
 once for all made each of these languages a liter- 
 ary vehicle and through it gradually penetrated 
 the great masses of the peojDle with the glory of 
 new and inspiring ideas. Yet this has been done 
 over and over again in our own day for various 
 peoples by these missionaries of the Christian re- 
 ligion. This thought has been finely expressed by 
 Dr. George Smith in his Life of William Carey." 
 'Like the growth of a tree is the development of 
 
 « Life " by Dr. Geo. Smith, pp. 220, 221. 2 pp. 041 f. 
 7.S 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 ' a language, as really and as strictly according to 
 'law. In savage lands like those of Africa the 
 ' missionary finds the living germs of speech, ar- 
 ' ranges them for the first time in grammatical 
 ' order, expresses them in written and printed 
 ' form, using the simplest and most perfect and 
 ' most universal character of all — the Roman, and 
 ' at one bound gives the most degraded of the 
 ' dark peoples the possibility of the highest civi- 
 ' lization and the divinest future. In countries 
 ' like India and China where civilization has long 
 ' ago reached its highest level, and has been de- 
 ' dining for want of the salt of a universal Chris- 
 ' tianity, it is the missionary again who interferes 
 ' for the highest ends, but by a different pro- 
 ' cess. Mastering the complex classical speech 
 ' and literature of the learned a ad priestly class, 
 ' and living with his Master's sympathy among 
 ' the people whom that class oppresses, he takes 
 ' the popular dialects which are instinct with the 
 ' life of the future; where they are widely luxuri- 
 ' ant he brings them under law, where they are 
 ' barren he enriches them from the parent stock, 
 •' so as to make them the vehicles of ideas such as 
 ' the Greek gave to Europe, and in time he brings 
 ' to the birth nations worthy of the name by a 
 ' national language and literature lighted up with 
 ' the ideas of the Book which he is the first to 
 ' translate. This was what Carey did for the 
 ' speech of the Bengalees." 
 
 It is only necessary to do here, as we must in 
 the other studies of missionary labor in which 
 
 74 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 we engage, exert our imagination to see this 
 kind of work being done in varying measure 
 throughout the world. Wherever these more than 
 three hundred and fifty languages and dialects are 
 spoken, the missionary is at work translating the 
 Bible verse by verse, writing the lesson^books, the 
 grammars, the vocabularies and dictionaries, the 
 hymn-books, the prayer-books, the evangelistic 
 tracts and the school geographies, histories, and so 
 on. Then we may grasp, but even then only 
 faintly, the enormous service to the science of lan- 
 guage which has been rendered by the spread of 
 Christian missions. 
 
 It is time now to approach this matter from a 
 more intimate point, from that, namely, of the 
 Christian religion itself. It is a natural question 
 to ask, Why has all this labor been undertaken? 
 It is obvious that no mere scientific interest could 
 possibly have led to such self=denial. No man 
 ever thought of translating the Bible into a bar- 
 barian tongue for the sake of i^hilology. Many 
 great oriental scholars have been interested in the 
 languages of India and China and their literatures, 
 but very few of them have cared much about the 
 provision of a higher or better literature for the 
 people who speak those languages. It is the re- 
 ligious motive alone which can account for this 
 work. To the Christian man one of the most sol- 
 emn and indisputable obligations of life is, to seek 
 the salvation of the world. His loyalty to Jesus 
 Christ includes loyalty to the sublime purpose of 
 Christ. His acceptance of that which he believes 
 
 75 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 and feels to be the supreme grace of God, makes 
 him a debtor to the world. He is recreant to the 
 noblest instincts of the new heart and the new life, if 
 he cherishes no desire and makes no effort to see 
 this divine experience pass to other men and wom- 
 en. Hence the willingness of hundreds of mis- 
 sionaries to undertake the kind of work which we 
 have been trying to measure and understand. 
 For the Bible is deemed essential by all evangel- 
 ical Christians to a healthful Christian life. The 
 Mohammedan may be able to count up his con- 
 verts in Central Africa by hundreds when they 
 have only the most meager conception of the teach- 
 ing of the Koran. The Roman Catholic may be 
 content to count as converts to Christianity all 
 those whom he can persuade to be baptized, to 
 learn certain prayers and attend the mass. But 
 the evangelical Christian has at once a harder and 
 a higher task before him. He will not baptise un- 
 til he has somewhat adequately taught his cate- 
 chumen and he does not consider that teaching is 
 sufficient until the Spirit of God has given evident 
 signs of His will in the matter, by a changed 
 mind and heart and a transformed manner of life. 
 Now this teaching, which is absolutely essential, 
 cannot be carried on by mere word of mouth, by 
 committing to memory the sayings and traditions 
 on which faith fastens and by which conduct is 
 molded. The hope of the Christian religion lies 
 in the constant presentation of its substance to 
 the minds of men through the Scriptures. For it 
 is a clear lesson of past experience, that whereso- 
 
 76 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 ever this ceases to be done, the power of this relig- 
 ion begins to wane and the outlines of a Christian 
 character begin to grow dim. The effect of Chris- 
 tianity upon the social and family and individual 
 life of the European peoples has always been pro- 
 portionate to their familiarity with the person and 
 the work of the Savior as He is depicted in the 
 New Testament. In those countries where 
 the Bible has been a sealed book, the priest has 
 stepped forth to occupy its place and has striven to 
 become the medium of communication between 
 the human spirit and the divine. That has al- 
 ways meant a more or less rapid descent into igno- 
 rance, superstition and practical heathenism. As 
 soon as the Bible has broken through the fetters 
 of priestcraft and once more found admittance 
 to the homes of the people, the life of direct fel- 
 lowshij) with God has been once more established. 
 The most striking proofs of the effect of the Bible 
 are to be found in the contrast between Roman Cath- 
 olic missions, with their results in heathen lands, 
 and Evangelical missions. It is well known that 
 India and Japan were mission fields of the Church 
 of Rome centuries before the Protestant world 
 thoroughly awoke to its task. It is also well 
 known that these missions, apparently successful 
 as far as number was concerned, did almost noth- 
 ing to illumine and purify the peoples. They 
 substituted new idols, as it seemed, for the old; 
 new priesthoods for the old; new forms and more 
 solemn rites of worship. But still baptism and 
 the mass simply took the place of the other magic 
 
 77 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 acts to which supernatural efficacy had already 
 been attributed. No Bible meant practically no 
 Christ, and no Christ meant no living faith, no 
 consciousness of fellowship with God.^ But 
 where that is not attained, Christianity is not 
 attained, the real heart of the religion and its 
 most sublime boon is not realized. 
 
 What, then, has been the result in this one 
 regard of the wide-extended translation of the 
 Scriptures during this century? In a word it 
 may be said that abundant testimony comes from 
 all the regions where these four hundred modern 
 versions are being circulated, and the testimony 
 combines to show that it is beyond human lan- 
 guage to express the influence of this unique volume. 
 Many, of course, have read it and have not become 
 Christians. But this is only what the nature of 
 the religion and its history from the beginning, 
 aye, from the hour when they shouted, "Crucify 
 Him," would lead us to expect. The significant 
 facts are connected with the multitudes who 
 through the reading of these pages have found 
 coming upon them the same experience as up- 
 on all who have entered into the true Christian 
 life from the time of the apostles to our own. 
 The fact is that the preaching and teaching mis- 
 sionaries are, in some lands outstripped by this 
 silent herald of divine truth. We are told that 
 
 ^ It is a remarkable fact that the successors of St. Francis 
 Xavier in Japan translated a good many books and tried to 
 educate the people, but the Bible was not translated. 
 
 78 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 the very first edition of Carey's translation of the 
 New Testament into Bengali, imperfect as it was, 
 was not without its self^evidencing power. " Seven- 
 teen years after, when the mission extended to the 
 old capital of Dacca, there were found several villages 
 of Hindoo=^born peasants who had given up idohwor- 
 ship, were renowned for their truthfulness, and, as 
 searching for a true teacher come from God, 
 called themselves "Satya-gooroos." They traced 
 their ne w faith to a much= worn book kept in a wooden 
 box in one of their villages. No one could say 
 whence it had come; all they knew was that they 
 had possessed it for many years. It was Carey's 
 first Bengali version of the New Testament of our 
 Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In the wide and 
 elastic bounds of Hindooism and even amid fanatic- 
 al Mussulmans beyond the frontier, the Bible, 
 dimly understood without a teacher, has led to 
 puritan sects like this. ^ " 
 
 Or take an instance from another land. In 
 Japan there arose a few years ago a young 
 man, Neesima, who did more for the higher 
 education of his fellow countrymen than any 
 other. He was the far-sighted and enthusias- 
 tic founder of the Doshisha, the pioneer university, 
 if we may use the term, among that remarkable 
 and fascinating people. Neesima was a man of 
 remarkable Christian experience, who throughout 
 his educational labors kept in view the evangeliza- 
 tion of his country. He was born and brought 
 
 ^ Wm. Carey, by Dr. Geo. Smith. 
 79 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 up in a family where he had no opportunity to 
 learn aught of the Christian religion. At about 
 twenty years of age he stumbled on a book in 
 Chinese which consisted of extracts from the Bible. 
 These broken pieces of the story of revelation 
 awoke him. He determined to discover more about 
 this marvelous, this illuminating literature. It was 
 during that dark period when Japan was closed to 
 foreigners, and Neesima, seeing no hope of light 
 unless from foreigners, fled his country. He 
 reached Singapore and there finding a copy of the 
 Scriptures for sale he actually, and against the 
 whole sentiment and tradition of his class, sold his 
 sword in order to purchase this book. Hearing 
 that from America the men had come who knew 
 most about this book, he resolved to sail thither. 
 On the voyage he read alone and unaided in its 
 pages. At last those words which have proved 
 themselves light and life to so many of the sons of 
 men passed under his scrutiny: " God so loved the 
 world that He gave His only begotten Son, that 
 whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but 
 have everlasting life." This verso was his golden 
 gate, and Neesima was one more added to the 
 innumerable host who, through the central message 
 of this book, have found a living and personal 
 fellowship with the living God. 
 
 Or again take the case of Madagascar during the 
 great persecution which lasted nearly a quarter of 
 a century. The missionaries, after barely twenty 
 years of work in that country, were compelled to 
 leave. They left nothing behind them except the 
 
 80 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 Bible and the men and women who had already 
 become Christians. But that was enough. When 
 the enemy came and the churches were broken up, 
 this Book was multii)lied enormously in value. 
 Copies of it were most carefully hidden away. 
 People would walk long distances to have it read 
 in secret or to buy even a very small portion of it. 
 Those who could read taught others and the mes- 
 sage with its strange power was spreading even 
 through flames and torture and bloodshed. The 
 result was that when the country was opened 
 again to civilization, the missionaries, who were of 
 course the first to enter, found that, although thou- 
 sands of Christians had been put to death, there 
 were more Christians at the end of the long trial 
 than at the beginning. Undoubtedly this most 
 remarkable outcome of that protracted and system- 
 atic effort to exterminate the Christian Church 
 was due almost entirely to the fact that the Bible 
 had been translated and circulated, and could be 
 read at first hand. Mere preaching could not have 
 done it; organization had nothing to do with it. 
 It was the Scriptures, possessed and owned by 
 the people, which maintained and increased their 
 enthusiasm for the faith and life of the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 Or again let us pass into Central Africa, up in- 
 to the great kingdom of Uganda where Mackay la- 
 bored and where the brave Bishop Hannington 
 perished. No story of missions during the last 
 quarter of a century is more inspiring, more thrill- 
 ing, almost over-awing than the story of Uganda, 
 
 ax 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 Here again we find that from the very first the 
 missionaries aimed at translating and circulating 
 the Scriptures. The consequence is seen to-day 
 in the intense interest of those people so recently 
 savage, in every sense of the term, in this Book. 
 They buy it as fast as it can be supplied. They 
 read it in their homes, discuss its histories, its 
 teachings, in twos and threes, in families and cas- 
 ual groups. They borrow English reference Bi- 
 bles from the missionaries to aid them in their 
 study. To them, as to the hunted martyrs of 
 Madagascar, as to the learned pundits and deeply 
 religious peasants of India, as to the enthusiastic 
 youth of Japan, this Book has brought light and 
 purity, the awakening of mind and heart to the 
 noblest ideals and highest hopes. 
 
 Go throughout the world and the result is the 
 same. In Bolivia a colporteur entering a mere 
 hovel of the poorest description, finds a man read- 
 ing a book which he hurriedly tries to hide. It is 
 the Spanish Protestant Bible. Inquiry proves 
 that he thoroughly enjoys it and that more than 
 twenty of his companions are reading the same 
 copy. In Italy where Romanism has done her 
 best to keep this Book from the people it can be 
 kept no longer. Educated people, whether pas- 
 sionately sceptical or Romanist, are one after an- 
 other conquered by it. An army officer sternly 
 prohibits the sale of the Book among his soldiers. 
 One of his own attendants secretly buys a copy 
 which the officer begins to read. It conquers him 
 and he becomes a man of the Book. These are 
 
 821 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 mere specimens brought from here and there 
 among various classes and races of men. They 
 are bits of evidence which we must multiply by 
 thousands and tens of thousands, if we would give 
 them their scientific value. The two hundred and 
 fifty millions of copies of the Bible circulated in 
 four hundred versions throughout the world, are 
 doing this kind of work throughout all nations. 
 The educated and the savage, the hardened canni- 
 bal and the hardened Romanist, the eager heathen 
 seeking light and peace for his conscience, and 
 the cynical sceptic denying that there is any light 
 or peace or any need of either for the con- 
 science, are all being overcome by this Book, and 
 brought to the experience of the Christian faith. 
 We are here presented, then, with the fact that 
 this Book is laying the deepest foundation for the 
 unification of the human race. Its adaptation to all 
 casts of mind and all conditions of civilization is 
 being demonstrated beyond the possibility of in- 
 telligent denial. It is not peculiar in molding 
 European history, it is now making history all 
 over the world. Of all facts upon the earth, it liter- 
 ally contains the deepest and strongest force, which 
 is at work amongst mankind. It is evident, then, 
 that if any man of purely scientific interest wishes 
 to estimate the factors which are at work in the 
 social evolution of to-day, he must name the Bible 
 among the very highest. And if he is to explain 
 these factors, is it not incumbent upon him to ac- 
 count for the Bible and its influence? It will not 
 help him much merely to investigate the author- 
 
 83 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 ship of its various portions and formulate theories 
 regarding their independence or dependence on 
 one another. What if Moses did not write the Pen- 
 tateuch, or the Apostle John, the Fourth Gospel? 
 The work which this book is doing as a whole re- 
 mains to be accounted for as an entirely distinct 
 problem. Nor will it help the investigation very 
 much, if a man sit down and write an elaborate 
 treatise against the miracles of Scripture. The 
 fact remains still to be explained that to-day, after 
 eighteen hundred years of existence, the writings 
 of this book are the means of conferring upon men 
 the consciousness of fellowship with God, and are 
 actually giving new life to millions of people who 
 belong to what were considered '' decadent races." 
 Nor will it help to say, that it is the magnetism of 
 the missionaries, or the touch of a superior civili- 
 zation, or the influence of a purer literature that 
 produces these results in heathendom. The expe- 
 riences which we have described are not due finally 
 to these causes. For when the missionary preaches 
 he refers to the Bible as his supreme authority, 
 and he constantly bases his teaching upon and 
 compares his own experience with that which is 
 there described. Moreover, the Bible did not come 
 out of a civilization which was in any great meas- 
 ure, if at all, superior to that of India or of China. 
 Nor on the other hand does it help us much merely 
 to say that the Bible produces these eflPects be- 
 cause it is inspired. We still want to know the 
 relation that exists between its substance and its 
 effects. It must b© the substance of the book and 
 
 84 
 
The Missionary as Translator 
 
 not its form, its substance and not the mere 
 method of its inditement, which accounts for its 
 place and function in that progress of man which 
 is proceeding at so unparalleled a rate to=day. 
 The Christian man explains it, as we have seen 
 already, by saying that the Bible is that book 
 which describes the revelation of God and the re- 
 demption of the world, it is that book which more 
 clearly, more convincingly, and more powerfully 
 than any other that could be written, presents the 
 figure and reveals the spirit of Jesus Christ, the 
 Lord and Savior of the race. There is its power, 
 there is the secret of its fascination, says the Chris- 
 tian man. It is the Book through which now God 
 speaks to men, because it describes God's own acts 
 among men, for mankind. Those acts are its sub- 
 stance. It is as men find those acts bearing down 
 upon their own consciences, their own affections, 
 their own ideals, their own wills, that transform- 
 ation begins. 
 
 85 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE MISSIONARY AND EDUCATION. 
 
 The close connection which exists between pop- 
 ular education and advanced civilization is one of 
 the most obvious facts which our century has 
 brought to light. No less remarkable is the close 
 connection which has always subsisted between 
 the Christian faith and the work of education. 
 No other religion appears to require education or 
 even naturally to stimulate it. Mohammedanism 
 which enjoins amongst its followers a certain de- 
 gree of knowledge of the teachings of the Koran, 
 is content if these are learned by rote. Buddhism 
 and other religions of the East possess more or 
 less extensive religious literatures, and there are 
 classes of people to whom these are familiar, and 
 who feel themselves under a religious necessity to 
 read them; but again none of these religions has 
 done anything either to stimulate intellectual in- 
 terest in other matters than those immediately 
 concerned with the religious instinct, or to make 
 the conferring of education upon the general 
 masses of the people a religious duty. How is it 
 that wherever Christianity, in its evangelical 
 form, extends, thither the work of education inevi- 
 tably goes with it? In a land like this where 
 government has made the work of education an 
 essential part of the life and growth of even the 
 
 83 
 
The Missionary and Education 
 
 smallest communities, it seems only a matter of 
 course to every one that the work should be done 
 on this large scale. No one seems to see that 
 there exists a very close connection between, I do 
 not say education, but universal education and 
 religion. Indeed, we have become so accustomed to 
 this idea of a universal and popular education, that we 
 have come to deem it what we call a natural right, 
 and we can hardly imagine the existence of a civ- 
 ilized government which does not give a foremost 
 place in its work to the education of the young. 
 The fact is, however, that we owe the popular edu- 
 cation of modern European countries to the Chris- 
 tian religion. Rulers did not dream either of the 
 possibility or the advisability, still less of the duty, 
 of conferring it upon their subjects and citizens 
 until after the Reformation. Then education be- 
 gan to spread among the people. In Germany 
 and Scotland especially, provision was made, be- 
 fore any other great nation had seen the ideal, for 
 the establishment of local schools where the poor- 
 est might have the elements of education taught 
 to them. And why? Because in those countries 
 there lived certain men who were determined to 
 make it possible for every citizen to read the Bi- 
 ble. Where the Reformation was not so thorough, 
 as in France, or where it was accompanied by the 
 retention of a certain theory of authority, and a 
 certain doctrine of sacramental grace, as in Eng- 
 land, there popular education spread much more 
 slowly. Where, as in Spain and Italy, the Refor- 
 mation did not penetrate, popular education has 
 
 87 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 hardly been attained even to this day. Not only 
 is it religion as such, but what we call evangelical 
 religion which, as a matter of history, has given 
 the primary impulse towards the establishment of 
 universal popular education. 
 
 I may add that, as I believe, evidence could be 
 obtained from the history of education even in 
 Britain and America to prove, that in those sec- 
 tions of society where interest in evangelical 
 Christianity is on the wane, the conviction of 
 the necessity of popular education and personal 
 interest in it begin to lose their force. Just as 
 only a society which is nourished on the ideals of 
 evangelical Christendom can make true democracy 
 permanent, so sure is it that only where the same 
 instincts are regnant will the people who manage 
 the affairs of state continue to care much about 
 universal education. 
 
 Moreover it has been well said that: " It 
 is the Christian school in England, in Amer- 
 ica, in China, and in India that is at the founda- 
 tion of Christian institutions." ^ But on that fact 
 I need not dwell. 
 
 The first explanation of this close alliance be- 
 tween Christianity and education will be found to 
 lie in the facts connected with its historical origin. 
 We shall find reason to hold that this faith cannot 
 be maintained in its purity except as the Bible is 
 read widely and familiarly among those who be- 
 lieve. Now, that book describes the history of the 
 
 » F. A. Noble, D. D., in L. M. C. Vol. II, p. 204. 
 88 
 
The Missionary and Education 
 
 revelation of God and the redemption of man. It 
 is upon these historical facts that our faith is 
 founded. Make them dim to the mind of the in- 
 dividual, and his conscience, his love, his fulness 
 of hope are made correspondingly dim and poor. 
 He must have those words abiding in him which 
 describe the fountains of divine life in man. He 
 must have those great events ever present to his 
 imagination, and subject to the scrutiny of his 
 intellect which opened those fountains. Hence 
 it is, that wheresoever this gospel is preached 
 throughout the whole world, there the hunger is 
 awakened in all hearts for knowledge of those 
 events, for the possession of those records, at first 
 hand. Men and women who believe that God has 
 done great things for them, and offered great 
 blessings to them, yearn to have personal access to 
 that which they are told is His own Word concern- 
 ing these divine acts and these sublime promises. 
 But when men hitherto Tinlearned come to fa- 
 miliarity with the Bible, they find in it a collec- 
 tion of books, a literature possessing very great 
 educational value and influence. There is no mon- 
 otony, but rather an entrancing variety of literary 
 forms into which its stories and revelations are 
 cast. Moreover there is no narrowness in the 
 range of its influence. Every kind of human in- 
 stinct has its representation here, and nearly 
 every phase of human character and activity re- 
 ceives some description in connection with some 
 portion or another of this history of revelation. 
 Love and war, religious festival and regal splendor, 
 
 89 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 the woe of doubt and unbehef, the joy of faith and 
 divine fellowship, the temporary tragedy of right- 
 eousness and the final overthrow of the world's 
 incalculable evil, are all depicted here, often with 
 great dramatic force and passion. All the elements 
 of human nature, its appetites and affections, 
 struggles and toils, sorrows and triumphs, com- 
 bine to form the rich harmonies which are heard 
 by him who comes to these pages with the sim- 
 plicity of faith and the aspirations of love. 
 
 And yet again this book gives a wider view of 
 the world to the poor heathen who begins to read 
 it as God's word to him. There is an outlook up- 
 on all nations suggested, if not clearly defined, by 
 the earlier part of Genesis, — an outlook which may 
 seem at a later stage of the history almost wholly 
 lost, but which rises again like the sun in his 
 morning splendor when Christ has ascended and 
 His disciples contemplate a redeemed world, which 
 " God so loved." It fs not easy to estimate the 
 influence which this book in virtue of these char- 
 acteristics has exerted upon the race. Whole re- 
 gions have been awakened to the beginning of the 
 intellectual life by this means. Vast hosts of hu- 
 mankind have been thus liberalized and ennobled by 
 these wider conceptions, by these feelings of per- 
 sonal interest in the fortunes of a people with 
 whom otherwise they could have had no commu- 
 nity of sentiment, and above all by that marvelous 
 consciousness of having been received into the 
 glorious brotherhood of mankind which this book 
 
 90 
 
The Missionary and Education 
 
 confers upon the poorest citizen or the meanest 
 tribe in the world. 
 
 But there is another point of view. The Chris- 
 tian faith not only rests on a history, it also im- 
 plies or yields a philosophy. Jesus said, " I am 
 the truth"; and that may be taken to mean, at 
 least that His teaching and the faith of His dis- 
 ciples are founded upon ultimate facts. Every 
 religion does, more or less directly and intelligent- 
 ly, lead the mind to form conceptions regarding 
 the relations of God and man, the origin and des- 
 tiny of the world, etc. Concerning these ultimate 
 problems the mind of man possesses an insatiable 
 curiosity. Missionaries tell us of the eagerness 
 with which those who first begin to read the Bible 
 listen to its exposition, and fasten upon its teach- 
 ings about creation and providence. The Chris- 
 tian faith since it contains affirmations concern- 
 ing God and man and the world, and their mutual 
 relations, leads the mind right into the midst of 
 the hardest problems which it can encounter. 
 
 These affirmations, when men begin to reason 
 about them, are seen to constitute or suggest a 
 philosophy. The early centuries of church histo- 
 ry show us the effect of thus presenting the Chris- 
 tian religion, as containing or implying certain 
 great doctrines concerning the ultimate nature of 
 things, to peoples that had for centuries discussed 
 philosophy. What enthusiasm of thought! What 
 wide=spread absorption in abstruse problems! 
 What eagerness in the defense of the most intricate 
 
 91 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 theses! And what intensity of feeling about the 
 effect which this or that theory of God or man 
 would produce upon the substance of Christian 
 faith and experience! The same awakening which 
 took place in and through the early Christian Church 
 in southern Europe, northern Africa, and wes- 
 tern Asia, which gained further and deeper exten- 
 sion at the Reformation in northern Europe, has 
 been spreading through all the world during this 
 century. The missionary Societies are literally the 
 greatest educational institutions in the world, if 
 by greatness we understand not the mere numbers 
 who attend their schools, though these are very 
 great, but the influence which they exert in 
 awakening the minds of all races to the highest 
 problems and efforts of the intellect, and the signif- 
 icance of their work for the future development 
 of wide and densely populated regions of the earth. 
 It has been said by one of themselves that mission- 
 aries, " have probably devoted more time to educa- 
 tional work, in one form or another, than to all 
 these others combined," and he refers to preach- 
 ing, translating, overseeing, and so forth. 
 
 Let us trace the stages through which this 
 educational work passes in a savage land, say in 
 the South Seas or in Africa. The missionary 
 as soon as he has got a few pages of the New 
 Testament, with the alphabet, printed, finds one 
 or more persons who are willing to learn to read. 
 They take delight in it. Their delight is con- 
 tagious, for they immediately begin to communi- 
 cate to others what they have attained. As soon as 
 
The Missionary and Education 
 
 possible the missionary adds to the reading of the 
 New Testament the elements of writing and arith- 
 metic. New enthusiasm is awakened. Old and 
 young are eager to be taught. By this time some 
 have learned enough to be recognized as assistant 
 teachers and they are appointed to class work. As 
 neighboring towns and villages demand teaching, 
 suitable young men, if possible Christian men, are 
 sent to open schools in new fields. This imposes 
 new duties upon the missionary^ He must now 
 oversee the teachers in their various fields and he 
 must institute special advanced classes for the 
 training of future teachers and evangelists. This 
 means the preparation of more text books, the 
 translation of more books of geography and his- 
 tory, of practical religion and Bible instruction. 
 He is' now sowing the seed of a college and theolog- 
 ical seminary. The minds of the erstwhile savage 
 people, whose sole thought was of hunting or fish- 
 ing or fighting or gardening, of sleeping and eat- 
 ing and quarreling, are opened to the wider world 
 and its interests. In the meantime commerce has 
 increased with European and American traders, 
 government by the chief or king has become more 
 complex, the people have in fact ceased to be a 
 group of gregarious animals and have taken an 
 intelligent place in the family of mankind where 
 their own influence is definite and palpable. 
 
 The results of the process which I have sketched 
 are visible in the millions of people who now have 
 the privilege of education, where fifty or sixty years 
 ago there was no such thing as a book. The South 
 
 93 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 Sea Islands are well-nigh thoroughly covered with 
 day schools. Madagascar had, before its occupa- 
 tion by the French, about one thousand schools and 
 one hundred thousand pupils. At Antananarivo 
 the college for educating teachers and the semi- 
 nary for educating a native ministry were year by 
 year increasing in efficiency and in the thorough- 
 ness of the intellectual training which they gave. 
 In Africa whether we look at the missions in the 
 North, South, East or West, we find the same 
 phenomenon. All the missionaries of all societies 
 in all lands are educators. They are doing that 
 work whose importance for the future history of 
 the race simply cannot be estimated. No other 
 institution has been doing it in these savage lands, 
 until, the foundations having been laid by the mis- 
 sionaries, the state at some stage in the progress 
 of civilization steps in and becomes responsible 
 for it. 
 
 But let us turn to lands where before the mis- 
 sionary arrived some kind and degree of education 
 was already enjoyed by the people. For example, 
 look at the work of the American missionaries in 
 the Ottoman Empire. When these men and 
 women began work in this region they found, in- 
 deed, that there were some schools in which Moham- 
 medans received a mere smattering of an education 
 and some schools in which Gregorian priests were 
 trained. But real education, there was none. The 
 brave missionaries set themselves to supply the 
 lack. They established not only day schools 
 for children, but also advanced schools which grew 
 
 94 
 
The Missionary and Education 
 
 into noble and high-class institutions. Robert 
 College at Constantinople, the colleges at Beirut 
 and Harpoot and elsewhere are vigorous and strong 
 centers of rational education. This kind of work 
 has been indeed bitterly opposed by those who 
 take a narrow view of the missionary's work and his 
 relation to the people among whom he lives. Pres- 
 ident Washburn of Robert College has said, " The 
 attacks made upon this kind of work, although 
 not altogether without excuse, were undoubtedly a 
 mistake which put back the missionary work of 
 the East a quarter of a century. The results of 
 this interesting and noble work is that both Mos- 
 lems and Catholics have been aroused throughout 
 the Empire. Whereas in that Empire in 1829 
 there was not one school for girls, to=day there is 
 hardly a town in which girls may not learn to 
 read." After the American schools had been in 
 operation for forty years the Turkish Government 
 did in 1869 officially promulgate school laws and 
 instituted a scheme of governmental education. 
 In connection with this field of labor it has been 
 said : " It would take a long list to exhaust the relig- 
 ious, literary and scientific contributions to the 
 Arabic language from the missionaries of Syria. 
 They include the translation of the Scriptures and 
 the stereotyping of the same in numerous styles; 
 the preparation of a Sc^'ipture guide, commenta- 
 ries, a concordance, and a complete hymn and tune 
 book; text=books in history, algebra, geometry, 
 trigonometry, logarithms, astronomy, meteorology, 
 botany, zoology, physics, chemistry, anatomy, 
 
 95 
 
Cnnstianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 physiology, hygiene, materia medica, practice of 
 physic, surgery, and a periodical literature which 
 has proved the stimulus to a very extensive native 
 journalism. The Protestant converts of the mis- 
 sion, educated by the missionaries, have written 
 elaborate works on history, poetry, grammar, arith- 
 metic, natural science, and the standard dictionary 
 of the language, and a cyclopsedia which will make 
 a library by itself, consisting of about twenty vol- 
 umes of from six hundred to eight hundred pages 
 each." ' 
 
 Now, in all these lands the problem of educa- 
 tion has been comparatively simple. The path of 
 the missionary has appeared plain and straight 
 and inevitable. He could not be a missionary 
 without becoming a teacher. But there are coun- 
 tries where the relation of the missionary to edu- 
 cation is both intricate and perplexing. In India 
 above all other countries the difficulties have been 
 immense. True, in many parts of that great 
 region the missionary finds himself among peo- 
 ples as simple, as ignorant, as destitute of the 
 opportunities of education as the inhabitants of 
 Madagascar. Here the work of founding schools 
 and training teachers goes on in the most obvious 
 and unembarrassing manner. The real problem is 
 connected with the attempt to evangelize the higher 
 castes. They would enter certain schools which 
 the government had founded for the purpose of 
 fitting them to use their own language in the trans- 
 action of business on behalf of the government. 
 
 ^ Cf. Dr. Jessup, in " Missions at Home and Abroad," p. p. 258, 9. 
 96 
 
The Missionary and Education 
 
 At last the government even went to the length 
 of providing teachers at Calcutta to give instruc- 
 tion in the vernacular, the non^literary and popular 
 languages. But the children of these castes were 
 found by early missionaries practically inaccessible. 
 
 It was reserved for the great Scottish mis- 
 sionary, Alexander Duff, to introduce that sys- 
 tem which has done more than anything else to 
 develop the Indian mind and enabled it to grasp 
 western ideas. While yet a young man and a 
 comparative stranger in Calcutta he decided that 
 the right thing to do was to teach the higher caste 
 Indians through the English language. His the- 
 ory was scouted as an impossible dream. But he 
 managed to put it into practice, gathered a num- 
 ber of youths who had at the government schools 
 been emancipated from their native superstitions 
 and fears, and taught them in English. Of course, 
 for this purpose the native languages had to be 
 used. Their progress was so rapid as to encourage 
 Mr. Duff himself. At the end of a year he invited 
 X:)rominent government officers to visit his school. 
 He conducted a public examination and the results 
 were so amazing that henceforth his plan had the 
 support of the British rulers of India. Most grat- 
 ifying of all to Mr. Duff was the fact that some of 
 the most brilliant of his earliest pupils became 
 Christians and exercised great influence afterward 
 in behalf of the Gospel. 
 
 Thus was begun that which is known to=day 
 as the Christian College system in India. To 
 the mind of its founder. Dr. Duff, it seemed to 
 
 97 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 be the case that the use of the English language 
 and the power to read English literature would 
 prepare the minds of the Indian youth very 
 rapidly to grasp Christian truth. He had 
 found that it was extremely difficult to express 
 the doctrines of this religion in native terms. 
 Their languages had been molded by certain theo- 
 ries, religious and philosophical, which were dis- 
 tinctly anti^Christian. Hence it could only be 
 with the greatest difficulty, by coining words, or 
 using what they had with explanations which mod- 
 ified their current meanings, that adequate in- 
 struction could be carried on. Now the English 
 language has been molded by the Christian relig- 
 ion. Its words have been fitted by long centuries 
 of history to the nicest discriminations in Chris- 
 tian theology and philosophy. If only, then, the 
 Indian youths could be taught to read the English 
 language fluently and to become familiar with its 
 modes of expression, that would at once lift them 
 into the intellectual atmosphere where the Gospel 
 has lived and breathed freely for ages. Of course. 
 Dr. Duff made the reading of the Bible a promi- 
 nent feature of his school work and its teachings 
 were fully explained. That has remained to this 
 day an essential part of the work of these institu- 
 tions. It is indeed their raison d^dre. 
 
 It must be confessed that within the Christian 
 Church at home, both in England and America, 
 there has been considerable criticism of this 
 kind of work. It has been urged that this is 
 not the evangelism for which people have 
 
The Missionary and Education 
 
 subscribed their money to the great societies, 
 that the labor and expenditure are not justified 
 by the number of conversions of educated 
 young men to faith in Jesus Christ. On 
 the other hand it is urged that most valuable con- 
 versions have taken place, that the young men who 
 go out of the colleges, knowing the Bible as they 
 do and mixing with the Christian people as they 
 do, not only cannot longer hold their own religion, 
 but cannot entertain the hatred for Christianity 
 which they otherwise would have done. None in 
 India are so dangerous to the welfare of the whole 
 people as the youths who have grown up in gov- 
 ernment colleges in infidelity and who have caught 
 the tricks of phrase and thought of the latest and 
 most blatant opponents of religious faith in Eu- 
 rope and America. The most thoughtful Indians, 
 even when they are not avowed Christians, dread 
 this drift into infidelity. They see its immense 
 dangers, not only to the individual youths who so 
 drift, but to the whole structure of society against 
 which they turn. These 'emancipated' young 
 men have no substitute of a positive kind to offer 
 for the customs and the faiths of their ancestors. 
 They are mere iconoclasts, not builders of a new 
 and fairer temple for humanity. The educated and 
 infidel young man is felt by all who regard him 
 thoughtfully in India, whether they are heathen 
 or Christian, to be a social pest. 
 
 One of the ablest missionaries in India said 
 at the London Conference in 1888: "While I 
 "am ready to admit that the spread of western 
 
 99 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 " knowledge is powerful in pulling down old sys- 
 " terns and uprooting grotesque forms of belief, 
 " the fibers of which are subtly interlaced with 
 " the religious and social life of the vast commu- 
 " nities dwelling in India, it is at the same time 
 " opening the floodgates of infidelity, non-relig- 
 " ion, ay, and immorality too. For where a man's 
 " principles are not kept in check by any acknowl- 
 " edgment of moral responsibility, where the man 
 " is not awed and restrained by any fear of coming 
 " retribution, immorality must almost of necessity 
 " follow." The same speaker bore witness concern- 
 ing the Christian Colleges: "It is a mistake to 
 suppose that because the Bible is prominently 
 taught in the mission school it is in disfavor. The 
 very opposite opinion and feeling obtain. There 
 is no institution throughout the length and breadth 
 of India that has drawn to it half the popularity 
 of the Christian College in Madras; and, as far as 
 academic distinction and universal success are 
 concerned, it outstrips every other. The govern- 
 ment institutions are simply nowhere. And yet 
 in the Christian College the Bible is prominently 
 taught." Mr. Burgess then added this significant 
 evidence from heathen sources of the value of the 
 Gospel in relation to education in India: "I knew 
 a member of the Madras legislative council years 
 ago who daily sent his son in a carriage and pair 
 a mile and a half further than the government in- 
 stitution to a place where all religion was not ig- 
 nored. I know a Mohammedan nobleman in 
 Hyderabad at the present time. He was nursed 
 
 100 
 
The Missionary and Education 
 
 in the lap of luxury; he is learned in everything 
 that Spencer has written; but yet the other day, 
 when his patronage was asked for a certain educa- 
 tional appointment by an avowed atheist, he said, 
 'Well, if I must choose, give me the Christian 
 with his Bible, but not the atheist in India.' " ' 
 
 It comes to this, then, that in India men of all 
 kinds recognize the extraordinary function which 
 the Christian schools of every grade are exercising 
 upon the social development of the people. For 
 what is true of these Christian colleges, that they 
 alone seem to give stability of character and dig- 
 nity of ideals to large masses of the educated 
 youth of India, must be true also of the thousands 
 of Christian schools througliout the whole country. 
 They are all at the very center and contain in 
 themselves the secret and source of the progress of 
 man throughout these teeming populations. More- 
 over, they manifest their impulsive power in virtue 
 not of that secular instruction which they give in 
 common with secular schools, but in virtue of the 
 religious element which is introduced by the teach- 
 ing of the Bible into the life of these institutions. 
 It is that which is proving itself the preserving 
 and purifying salt and light in the midst of a 
 society which, already corrupt enough, is in dan- 
 ger of passing downwards into deeper darkness 
 still. 
 
 In one direction the missionary movement has 
 
 1 Rev. William Burgess, in L. M. C, Vol. I., pp. 206, 207. 
 Cf. Rev. Wm. Miller, Ibid, Vol. II, 234-6. 
 101 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 stimulated a form of education which appeals to 
 our sense of humanity in a peculiar manner. I 
 refer to the work of medical education. Most mis- 
 sionaries have been able to do something towards 
 the relief of suffering and disease. Even when 
 they attempted nothing difficult or intricate their 
 simple remedies have proved of great value. And 
 in some instances men who had little medical 
 training have done admirable work in this direc- 
 tion. But, of course, it is only since the medical 
 missionary became thoroughly established as a 
 necessary element in the equipment of the more 
 important missions, that this kind of work has ex- 
 ercised a great educational impulse. The medical 
 missionary aims at opening a dispensary and erect- 
 ing a hospital as soon as possible. For this he 
 needs assistants and is compelled at once to begin 
 the training of natives whether they be converts or 
 not. Sooner or later it becomes recognized that 
 he is fitting men to go out and become practition- 
 ers in the simpler kinds of medical work. It is a 
 fact that in all parts of the world these physician- 
 evangelists are the pioneers of medicine. In India 
 they have done their own share of medical educa- 
 tion at the more im^^ortant of their mission hos- 
 pitals. In Turkey the medical missionaries found 
 that there were hardly any doctors throughout the 
 empire, and these few were worthless. Now the 
 number of native doctors is very great and is con- 
 stantly increasing. The awakening of China to 
 the value of occidental experience in medicine was 
 effected by a young medical missionary from Eng- 
 
 102 
 
The Missionary and Education 
 
 land. In the life of Dr. J. Kenneth Mackenzie/ 
 the interesting story is told. His triumph in this 
 direction begins with his admission to the bedside 
 of the dying wife of that great Chinese statesman, 
 Li Hung Chang. Natural traditions and preju- 
 dices were torn down by tHe threatened loss of 
 that patient's life. She was restored. Li Hung 
 Chang was thereafter led to build and equip a hos- 
 pital under Dr. Mackenzie's care, and there the 
 first Chinese medical students were trained. They 
 were received with coldness and neglect when they 
 went out to practice. But afterwards the govern- 
 ment was aroused to the necessity of strenuous 
 action and it organized a system of medical educa- 
 tion on a larger scale. Even in Japan, where we 
 might have expected that the determination to 
 learn from the western world would have led to the 
 opening of schools of medicine, the same phenom- 
 enon presents itself. Again it was a medical mis- 
 sionary who seems to have given the initial im- 
 pulse. Dr. J. C. Berry made it a part of his work 
 to convene the native doctors and give tliem what 
 instructions were possible regarding more rational 
 methods in the treatment of disease than their 
 poor traditions had made possible. " He soon 
 had," we are told, " a band of one hundred and 
 twenty native doctors with him." Professional 
 enthusiasm thus created led to a great desire for 
 better and fuller training; students were sent to 
 Europe and America to learn medicine in the best 
 
 7 John Kenneth Mackenzie, by Mrs. Bryson. Revell & Co. 
 103 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 schools and return as the instructors and leaders 
 of their fellow countrymen. 
 
 The aim of this chapter has not been to mini- 
 mize any agency of a non^christian or a non^relig- 
 ious nature which is promoting education in the 
 world. It is a fact that education has become or 
 is becoming, in many lands hitherto known as 
 heathen, a function of the state, and it is of im- 
 measurable significance. It would be foolish, for 
 example, to compare the number of pupils in the 
 mission schools of India with the number in the 
 government schools. My argument is complete if 
 it can be taken as proved that in practically all 
 lands where the idea of popular education is to=day 
 taking root, the missionary enterprise has had 
 much or everything to do with the sowing of the 
 seed. Even in India this has been the case. For 
 it does not appear that the government of India 
 had thought of attempting the education of any 
 native until it wished to have clerks and other 
 officials for its own service. The establishment of 
 the present magnificent and ever extending system 
 of education was due to the Christian enthusiasm 
 of men who went out from England to be rulers of 
 a nobler type than their predecessors had been. 
 They cooperated with and were much influenced 
 by great missionaries, such as Carey and Duff and 
 Wilson. It was out of that religious atmosphere 
 that, in spite of the opposition of the older class 
 of officials, (those representatives of the non=relig- 
 ious civilized man,) the education of India arose. 
 
 In China, in Japan, in Madagascar the same 
 
 101 
 
The Missionary and Education 
 
 thing has happened. When each of these lands 
 was unsealed and western life poared in, the first 
 to land, the first to settle, the first to touch the 
 deeper sides of native life, the first to begin educa- 
 tion were the men and women whom we know as 
 missionaries of Christ. Now this is a fact of im- 
 mense importance for every student who would 
 fain see the inner meaning of the progress of man. 
 Whatever that progress may be or not be, and we 
 may have to discuss that, at any rate it cannot ex- 
 clude education. These nations of heathendom 
 cannot be brought into the family of mankind 
 except as they share in the education of the high- 
 est races. And here we have seen that the pio- 
 neers of education have been the men and women 
 who went out as preachers of Christ, as the instru- 
 ments of the highest and purest religious force in 
 history. 
 
 106 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE MISSIONARY AND SELF-SACRI- 
 FICE—THE FUNCTION OF 
 MARTYRDOM. 
 
 That which most impressed the churches in the 
 early part of this century was the heroism and 
 self=sacrifice of the Christian missionary. When 
 Carey or Judson went out to the East from their 
 home lands with a mere pittance of money at their 
 disposal, with no security as to salary, they mani- 
 fested a courage that amazed all. When they cast 
 themselves against the enormous difficulties of the 
 work of evangelization, their dauntless faith and 
 determination could not but evoke both amazement 
 and admiration. No one had preceded them upon 
 whose experience they could draw. They had to 
 fight their way through all prejudices, through the 
 obstacles created both by Europeans and natives. 
 They had to discover the best ways of approaching 
 the native mind and character, to ponder and to 
 decide how best to deal alike with the heathen, 
 who were willing to listen to them, and the con- 
 verts who were willing to confess Jesus Christ. 
 And far on into the century a considerable part of 
 the interest in foreign missions was created or in- 
 creased by the feeling of admiration which all felt 
 for those who left home and comfort to live among 
 
 lOG 
 
The Missionary and Self=sacrifice 
 
 cannibals in the South Seas or to pass into the 
 dark parts of Africa. They all possessed the de- 
 votion of spirit, expressed in the prayer of one 
 living missionary, who in his youth knelt down 
 and prayed that God would send him into the 
 darkest place on the earth. When such men left 
 home in those years, it was for good. The idea of 
 a regular furlough was not in their minds; the im- 
 mense dangers by sea and land, from human sav- 
 ages and savage beasts, were all in their minds. 
 And many a young man or woman, in saying fare- 
 well, said it as those do who go out to face the 
 almost certain death of a fierce campaign. In 
 those days, as I have said, the heroism and self-sac- 
 rifice were so obvious and great that no one ques- 
 tioned their supreme significance. 
 
 But in our day one hears a considerable amount 
 of speech somewhat derogatory of this self-sacri- 
 fice. On the one hand good and earnest mission- 
 aries themselves have come home and have denied 
 that they made any sacrifice. They have said that 
 the honor and the joy of the work were so great 
 as to obliterate from their minds the feeling that 
 they had lost or sacrificed anything comparable 
 with these, by entering the missionary career. 
 And a good many people who have no heart 
 themselves to follow that example are beginning 
 to echo these words of saintly self=sacrifice, and to 
 speak as if it were the bare fact that the mission- 
 ary life is not one of supreme sacrifice. Then this 
 matter is discussed from another point of view, 
 when men compare the life of the missionary with 
 
 107 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 that of the soldier, the trader, the traveler or the 
 civil servant. All these, it is said, leave their home- 
 land; bid farewell to their dear ones; go forth to 
 dangers of sea and land; live among savage and 
 degraded peoples; part with their children, 
 sending them home for education; encounter the 
 inconveniences, the sicknesses and the sorrows 
 incidental to residence in lands like those. What 
 does the missionary do more than these, it is 
 asked? Why not speak of their self=sacrifice, and 
 hail it with gratitude? 
 
 The result of movements of feeling and thought 
 like this is, that in various directions it comes to 
 be taken for granted, that the missionary career 
 should not now be encircled with the halo of the 
 martyr, nor be renowned for heroic qualities of 
 unique or surprising degree. On this whole mat- 
 ter the following observations seem to contain 
 some value. In the first lolace, no one would care 
 to depreciate the heroism involved in many of the 
 secular careers above referred to. They have 
 manifested a certain kind of bravery, a resourceful- 
 ness and even self-control. They do stand for 
 something in the progress of man; they have exerted, 
 merely as examples of heroism, a true influence 
 upon the life of the race. The whole world is the 
 better for manifestations of daring, of devotion to 
 a purpose and skill in its pursuit, which these 
 various classes of men have given to us all. 
 
 That which we wish to ask is not, at first, whether 
 the courage of the missionary or his self-sacrifice 
 has been equal to that of any other class of men, 
 
 108 
 
The Missionary and Self=sacrifice 
 
 but whether a difference of motive does not im- 
 part a difference of quality to self==sacrifice in such 
 careers. Does the trader, who sails to the South 
 Seas to stay there for ten years, buying and selling 
 and making gain, manifest self-sacrifice in the 
 same way as the missionary, who goes to the same 
 islands and settles down also for ten years to be 
 the teacher and savior of the natives ? Do we not 
 all feel and see that the difference of aim has im- 
 parted a difference of quality to the sacrifice of 
 self involved in the courage of these two men 
 respectively? Of course it does. The missionary 
 has not only given himself up once for all to the 
 service of Jesus Christ, — the other may have done 
 that. He has further resolved to cut himself off 
 from all desire for wealth or fame or earthly pro- 
 motion and to give himself in that distant island, 
 body and heart and mind, wholly and without re- 
 serve to the interests of those degraded people. 
 It is his life, himself, that he is giving to them. 
 Not so the trader. He may be a good man, quite 
 up to the ordinary standards of Christian goodness; 
 he may even take a benevolent interest in the 
 work of the missionary. But his leaving of the 
 homeland, though it cost tears and pangs, has 
 not gone so to the depths of his nature because it 
 did not of itself involve that further sacrifice of 
 self which the missionary has made. So it is 
 with the traveler or the soldier or the civil servant. 
 These men avowedly seek glory and honor for 
 themselves, for their work; and the sacrifice of 
 home has been made, not with a view to the deep- 
 
 109 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 er sacrifice of self in those lands, but to the gain- 
 ing of a higher earthly self, to the attainment of 
 a position whose glory shall be reflected far and 
 near, as the glory of this man or that man. 
 
 But now I believe that there is also a great differ- 
 ence in degree as well as in quality between the 
 self-sacrifice of these various classes of men and 
 that of the missionary; there is an immeasurable 
 gulf separating the whole attitude of mind and 
 heart in which the missionary and these others 
 stand towards the natives amongst whom they live. 
 The missionary is face to face with these natives, 
 with the burden of their individual souls upon 
 him. It is his task to open his thought and feel- 
 ing to all the impressions of horror and sadness 
 and despair, which his contact with idolatry and 
 immorality and ignorance and deadness of heart 
 make upon him. When he views these native 
 customs, it is not as the ethnologist purely and 
 simply, not as the mere observer and recorder of 
 sociological facts, but as the tender soul upon 
 whom each and all of these facts bring grief. He 
 lives a life of peculiar loneliness as a rule. He 
 stands face to face with degradation and darkness. 
 He sees the trader succeeding in his work and the 
 traveler marching rapidly to glory and a book of 
 many editions, and he can sympathize with them, 
 but hardly they with him. Seldom has he the joy 
 of intercourse with a human heart outside his own 
 home, which can understand the burden of souls 
 which he bears. Yet more, the missionary has to 
 identify himself so completely with the people for 
 
 110 
 
The Missionary and Self=sacrifice 
 
 whom he labors that he comes to love them as if 
 he were one of them. Few missionaries have left a 
 field where they have labored many years Vv^ithout 
 the deepest pangs of regret. Listen to a missionary 
 from Madagascar, or from India, or even from some 
 humble tribe in Africa, speak of his field and his 
 people, of the problems lying before them, of their 
 prospects as a race, of the triumphs of the- G-ospel 
 among them, and you will always feel that you are 
 looking into a heart ablaze with love itself. I 
 know of no love in the world so like that of Jesus, 
 so obviously a reflection of that central sun of love, 
 the Heart of the Eternal, as this love of the mis- 
 sionary of the 19th century for the people that he 
 is winning to Christ, It must be obvious that 
 such love costs what cannot be measured, as all 
 brooding, parental, redeeming love does. 
 
 And then we must speak not only of lives of 
 sacrifice, but of deaths. Who can number the 
 missionaries that lie dead in far off fields? How 
 many of these died in early youth of fevers and 
 pestilences? Many will, no doubt, remember Pro- 
 fessor Henry Drummond's description of the mis- 
 sion station at Livingstonia in Central Africa. 
 There, " on the silver sand of a small bay stood 
 the small row of trim white cottages. A neat path 
 through a small garden led up to the settlement, 
 and I approached the largest house and entered." 
 He passed through several, " And so on to the next, 
 and the next, all in perfect order, and all empty. 
 Then a native approached me and led me a few 
 yards into the forest. And there among the mimosa 
 
 HI 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 trees, under a huge granite mountain, were four or 
 five graves. These were the missionaries." ^ When 
 Alexander Mackay bade farewell to the committee 
 of his society, before leaving with some other young 
 men for Central Africa, he said, " Is it at all likely 
 that eight Englishmen should start for Central Af- 
 rica and all be alive six months after? One of us 
 at least — it may be I — will surely fall before that. 
 But what I want to say is this: when the news 
 comes, do not be cast down, but send some one 
 else immediately to take the vacant place." ^ In 
 the same spirit M. Golaz, a young French mission- 
 ary, when dying within one year of his arrival in 
 Senegambia, spoke thus, " Do not be discouraged, 
 if the first laborers fall in the field. Their graves 
 will mark the way for their successors, who will 
 march past them with great strides." ^ 
 
 Many missionaries have fallen by the hand of the 
 assassin. No doubt among the other classes men- 
 tioned above, who live and work in heathen lands, 
 multitudes have died, and many have been slain. 
 But there is one feature connected with the murder 
 of missionaries which we do not find manifested 
 when any other class of men is put to death. It is 
 this, that no missionary, so far as I have ever heard, 
 fights for his life. He will escape, if he can; he 
 
 ^ "Tropical Africa," p. 41. One of the most pathetic scenes 
 in missionary history will be found described in " Ten Years 
 North of the Orange River," by John Mackenzie, Chapter X. 
 
 2 " Mackay of Uganda," p. 32. 
 
 3 Vide, « The Gospel»Mes6age," by R. N. Cust, LL. D., pp. 
 45-63, 
 
 113 
 
The Missionary and Self-sacrifice 
 
 will use persuasion and all other straightforward 
 and legitimate means of escape, but he will not lift 
 his hand to slay his assailant. It is not to their 
 shame that the wounds of many dead missionaries 
 have been in their backs. They have had guns 
 v/ith them, but have not used them against even 
 the most malignant foes. They have followed the 
 example of Jesus in this matter, as He may have 
 intended that all His disciples should follow it to 
 the uttermost. They have persistently loved their 
 enemies, and done good to those that cursed them, 
 and prayed for those that despitefully used them, 
 and cried not for vengeance but for mercy upon 
 those who put them and their families to slaugh- 
 ter. The ordinary soldier or trader or traveler 
 does not believe in allowing himself to be put to 
 death by a " cursed nigger " without resistance, 
 and, if possible, vengeance. Even Christian men of 
 undoubtedly high character have not scrupled to 
 slay their assailants, although they knew that re- 
 sistance was of no avail. For example, of one civil 
 servant in India, described as a " godly judge " 
 and " a brave official," it is said that when he found 
 himself, in the time of the Indian mutiny, sur- 
 rounded by Mohammedans seeking his life: "hav- 
 ing read the comfortable words of Scripture and 
 having commended himself to God, he brought out 
 all the arms he had and prepared to defend his 
 life. . . . Summoned to abjure Christ and ac- 
 cept Mohammed, he resolutely refused. As the 
 police guard (the mutineers) advanced, he shot 
 fourteen or sixteen of these — the accounts vary — 
 
 113 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 before he fell, confessing Christ." " Eobert Tuck- 
 er," Dr. George Smith adds, " was the glory of the 
 Bengal civil service, and he was not alone in his 
 heroism or his confession." ^ 
 
 The martyr spirit which has thus been man- 
 ifested by the missionaries of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury has been communicated to the converts whom 
 they have made. It is impossible to realize the 
 amount of suffering and sacrifice which have been 
 incurred by those who have confessed Christ 
 throughout heathendom. The earliest confessors 
 have almost invariably become the objects of rid- 
 icule and hostility from their own countrymen. 
 In some parts of the world this time of open per- 
 secution has, indeed, passed rapidly away. In the 
 islands of the Pacific, where the idols were cast 
 aside over and over again by a public tribal reso- 
 lution and act, the penalties involved in submit- 
 ting to baptism have not been prolonged or severe. 
 And yet one of the most remarkable facts connect- 
 ed with the spread of Christianity in those islands 
 has been the heroism with which the converts, as 
 soon as they gained sufficient education, have been 
 willing to devote their lives to the work of evan- 
 gelization in other islands. The great progress 
 which has been made in New Guinea during the 
 last twenty years would have been impossible 
 without the assistance of native evangelists from 
 other islands already Christianized. No Europe- 
 an or American missionary could have excelled 
 
 1 " Life of Dr. Duff," Vol. II, p. 344. 
 
The Missionary and Self=sacrifice 
 
 some of these in the courage with which they 
 have faced fever and assassination far from their 
 own homes, sometimes in utter loneliness amongst 
 fierce and cannibal tribes. 
 
 The difficulties which lie before every man 
 or woman in India who would confess Christ 
 are now thoroughly known to us all. We know 
 how the caste system has surrounded with 
 peculiar horror the act of receiving baptism; 
 how the poor youth who cannot deny his love 
 for Jesus Christ is treated as one who has 
 degraded himself and his whole family in the 
 eyes of the community. He must tear himself 
 sometimes from the clasp of a mother's arms, whose 
 pleadings and tears have been applied to soften 
 his heart and whose shrieks of bitterness follow 
 him into his life of homelessness. Such men have 
 been spat upon by their wives, have heard their 
 children told to curse them, have been disinherited 
 and sent out poor and naked and bruised into the 
 world. Many have been put to death. 
 
 Where men of promise and position have be- 
 come Christians as in the case of Khama, one of 
 the leading chiefs of South Africa, they have been 
 compelled to face persecution after another fash- 
 ion. The story of this confessor is now well 
 known. For refusing to marry more than one wife 
 or to take any part in the native practices of witch- 
 craft, to which as heir to the chieftainship he ought 
 to have been given, this man and his brother were 
 openly driven from the town and attacked with 
 arms by their heathen and dark^hearted father. 
 
 115 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 While as Christians they could not yield to his 
 evil will, as Christians they refused to lift a hand 
 against him, except in self=^defense. Entrenching 
 themselves with the Christian party of the tribe in 
 a strong position, outside the town, they simply 
 fought when attacked. By maintaining an atti- 
 tude of noble patience, of quiet dignity, by reveal- 
 ing the purity of his motives, the tenderness of 
 heart and at the same time the strong will of a 
 born ruler, this man at last himself became chief 
 and has made his mark in the history of the de- 
 velopment of South Africa. Everywhere on 
 the mission field, which now practically means 
 throughout the world, the same old martyr spirit 
 has been revealed in thousands and tens of thou- 
 sands of cases as that of which we read with bated 
 breath and worshipful awe in the early Church or 
 in the times of the Reformation. And to-day it is 
 proved that the ancient saying of the brave Latin 
 father is true, that the blood of the martyrs is the 
 seed of the Church. When every missionary was 
 driven from Madagascar and a reckless queen 
 sought to exterminate the Gospel by slaying two 
 thousand of her own subjects, she really only in- 
 creased the numbers of Christian believers. In 
 India the awful mutiny broke out and was directed 
 towards the destruction of the Christian Churches; 
 many Christian pastors and teachers as well as 
 missionaries were put to death. The chief result 
 of this effort was that during the decades that fol- 
 lowed the mutiny, Christianity spread at a rate far 
 surpassing that of other periods. 
 
 116 
 
The Missionary and Self-sacrifice 
 
 One feature of missionary work ought not, in 
 this connection, to be passed over without more 
 emphasis than I have given it. There has always 
 been, and there probably always will be, an element 
 of sorrow in the service of man. The great teachers 
 and reformers of the past have not slept on beds 
 of roses nor found life pass like a bright summer 
 breeze. The progress of man is no easy process, 
 with banners waving and music leading the march- 
 ers in steady and strong strides. The price paid 
 by human hearts for human progress is infinite! 
 Those who through faith have subdued kingdoms, 
 wrought righteousness, obtained promises, have 
 always paid a bitter price for these conquests and 
 the privilege of this glorious labor. They have 
 indeed obtained a good report. We now say of 
 them, that the world was not worthy. But alas 
 the men for whom they immediately labored did 
 not say it. Missionaries do not deal in their 
 reports and home speeches with this side of their 
 life. But I fancy he must have a strange life and 
 a strange sphere who has been a missionary and 
 not sorrowed through and for his work. I shall 
 never forget, as a youth, bidding farewell to one 
 man of whom the world has heard little, when he 
 went back to his apparently hopeless field among 
 the Matebele people in South Central Africa. 
 When Mr. Sykes turned his back upon his native 
 land, with his years increasing and his distaste for 
 traveling accentuated by the years, he knew that 
 he was leaving home for the last time. He had 
 already worked five^and-twenty years amongst a 
 
 117 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 people not easily surpassed anywhere for their 
 brutality of life, and he had not baptised one con- 
 vert. As I spoke with him and heard his humble 
 words of determination and even of love for his 
 life's task, and saw the love soften his face, I felt 
 the thrill of having spoken with a man whom one 
 could not but call in the deepest and highest sense 
 of the words " a heroic soul." His martyrdom last- 
 ed a life time. Similarly one could not speak 
 with James Gilmour of Mongolia, as I did, during 
 his last brief visit home, and remember the kind of 
 life he had been living in Mongolia and the cheer- 
 lessness and loneliness to which he was about to 
 return without profound emotion. It is this kind 
 of work which is lifting the world everywhere. 
 By no other kind is man lifted. Progress, if, as 
 we have said before, it has to do fundamentally 
 with character, must then always, everywhere, at 
 home and abroad, inevitably mean struggle, sacri- 
 fice, conquest. Every lift must cause some great 
 strain to some one heart. No habitual sin is re- 
 pressed, no social shame is abolished, no individual 
 vice is overcome anywhere without pain. They 
 are the promoters of the evolution of man, who 
 having conquered self are teaching others to do the 
 same, who having submitted their whole nature to 
 the control of the Spirit of God, give up life itself 
 to teach others that through the same act they, too, 
 may mount nearer unto heaven. At home where 
 we are surrounded by what we call, and what is 
 largely, a Christian civilization, these facts strike 
 us not so clearly; yet it is true and can be demon- 
 
 1T3 
 
The Missionary and Self=sacrifice 
 
 strated that here too the men who do aught for the 
 real uplifting of our race suffer for it and work 
 through sorrow. But on the mission field you can 
 see this awful and wondrous law operating openly 
 and continually. There you can imagine, when 
 the missionary has begun to mold the thoughts 
 of some, and the new life is beginning to shake the 
 foundations of ancient wrongs, you can almost im- 
 agine that every tear washes some stain away, that 
 every sigh of the faithful heart helps to swell the 
 breeze of heaven which is blowing the clouds of 
 thick darkness away. 
 
 I would not have these facts leave the impression 
 on any mind that the career of the missionary is 
 all pain, all darkness, all struggle. I have named 
 them, described them, emphasized them, because it 
 is through these that the progress of man is being 
 secured. But no less is it true that there is a 
 brighter side to the missionary's life. The bright- 
 ness does not diminish the reality of the darkness, 
 the joy does not diminish the value of the martyr- 
 dom. But it is there, — evidence that the mission- 
 ary is living on the right lines and that under all 
 the sorrow, all the discord that enter into his life 
 through the kind of work that he is doing, there is 
 a real harmony, a deep source of peace. For ex- 
 ample, be it noted that his kind of life and his 
 very devotion to it react on the missionary himself. 
 Face to face there with all that denies God, the 
 missionary casts himself the more completely upon 
 God, and realizes more profoundly the characteris- 
 tic experiences of the Christian life. With nothing 
 
 113 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 around him to encourage his faith, he must have 
 recourse to a deep and more constant communion 
 with God. The inward force of spiritual facts 
 must be multiplied in strength, in clearness, in 
 truth, in beauty for the nourishing of his own faith 
 and the filling of his hope. It was a young med- 
 ical missionary in China v/ho wrote home to his 
 father saying, "Out here, where I am much alone, I 
 get to know, I am thankful to say, more of Christ 
 as a personal Savior." * 
 
 Other facts of a more material kind enter 
 into his experience. He goes out sometimes, as a 
 man of comparatively limited intellectual training, 
 with little more than the average interests and 
 attainments of the ministry, and he is plunged 
 into conditions which arouse not only his whole 
 spiritual, but his whole intellectual nature to activ- 
 ity. The very task of learning a new language or 
 languages and doing so far more thoroughly than 
 almost any ordinary minister learns any language, 
 except his own, mastering all matters of idiom and 
 pronunciation, this alone is sufficient so to train 
 his mind as to confer upon him the very substance 
 of that which we call culture. 
 
 Yet again, as he faces the conditions of society 
 around him and realizes that it is his task, by God's 
 grace, to transform these; as the actual work takes 
 shape and form before him and he must organize 
 in this direction and in that, he finds himself deal- 
 ing with facts of a greater and more momentous 
 
 * Life of John Kenneth Mackenzie, p. 68. 
 120 
 
The Value of Martyrdom 
 
 kind than any of those which engage the mind of 
 the average minister at home. He is forced to be- 
 come a statesman. He must study the laws of the 
 land, the organization of society, and in many cases 
 must himself deal with the reconstruction of these. 
 For a man with high and noble possibilities in 
 him, all this must afford a deep and true satisfac- 
 tion. 
 
 And, lastly, there is the joy of the missionary, 
 as he sees his own great work succeeding. Who 
 knows but the man who has been through it, what 
 it is to baptize the first convert, to gather with a 
 few for the first time around the table of the Lord's 
 Supper, to listen to the first song and prayer of 
 family worship in a native home, to hear a native 
 begin to teach his fellows to read, or the first evan- 
 gelist open his mouth to preach the Gospel of 
 Jesus Christ. When the missionary is a man ab- 
 sorbed, first and last, in prayer and labor and hope 
 for these as the highest results of all his efforts — 
 and how few there have been of whom this is not 
 true — it may be said that his Joy on such occasions 
 is a joy unspeakable and full of glory. 
 
 II. 
 
 At one time it was thought self-evident that mar- 
 tyrdom is a direct proof of the truth of the Chris- 
 tian religion. It was urged that the fact that men 
 and women were willing to offer their lives and 
 endure untold agonies for the sake of the Gospel 
 is in itself enough to establish the reality of the 
 revelation in whose name they suffered. In recent 
 
 121 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 years there has been a tendency to disparage this 
 appeal to the witness of martyrs for confirmation 
 of the Christian faith, and people have gone to 
 the other extreme. It is now very commonly al- 
 leged that martyrdom proves nothing; that all 
 kinds of superstition have had their martyrs; that if 
 only excitement enough is aroused many people 
 will die for the most despised forms of doctrine. 
 The Hindoo is pointed out as on the whole a will- 
 ing sufferer through his prolonged acts of self- 
 mutilation or self-denial in the pursuit of his re- 
 ligious ideal. He will deform his body, allow 
 hooks to be passed through his back for the hor- 
 rible swinging festival, in the enthusiasm of his 
 religious faith. Yet, again, the Mohammedan will 
 gladly rush on death with the cry of " Allah " upon 
 his lips, assured that if he die for the sake of his 
 religion he will pass immediately into the paradise 
 of sensual joy. Yet, again, the internal history of 
 the Christian church itself is furnishing evidence 
 that martyrdom proves nothing, for there the op- 
 posing parties have often been willing to sacrifice 
 their lives in the defense of the doctrines which 
 they respectively defended. Eomanists and Prot- 
 estants alike have gone into the flames or laid their 
 heads upon the executioner's block. How, then, 
 it is urged, in the face of facts like these can it be 
 argued by any man who is abreast of the thought 
 of his day, that the history of the martyrdoms 
 which have accompanied the spread of the Gospel 
 is of any value in determining the truth or the 
 
 122 
 
The Value of Martyrdom 
 
 untruth of the Christian or of any other form of 
 belief? 
 
 To begin with, I must confess to a feeling of dis- 
 trust regarding any and every tendency to decry 
 any of the great characteristics of human history 
 as being worthless. I do not think that the self^ 
 immolations of the Hindoo are valueless, nor that 
 the passionate devotion of the Mohammedan stands 
 for nothing in the evolution of man, nor that the 
 devotion of opposing parties within the Christian 
 church has not been necessary to the development 
 of the race. It seems too easy to push aside all 
 the sacrifices of mankind on behalf of their relig- 
 ious ideals as being mere superstition or mere 
 enthusiasm or merely hysterical; and therefore 
 unworthy of scientific investigation. This class of 
 phenomena must be taken more seriously than it 
 has been and investigated on a wide scale with 
 sympathetic interest, ere there can be a chance of 
 doing justice to it and its influence in history. In 
 the first place, we must distinguish between the 
 various classes of martyrdom which have occurred 
 in the history of religion. It is evident, for exam- 
 ple, that the wild enthusiasm of the Mohammedan 
 which invariably takes the form of the intoxication 
 of battle is distinct from the spirit of either the 
 Hindoo devotee or the Christian martyr. The 
 Mohammedan is not taught that he will gain para- 
 dise for mere martyrdom, he must fight and fight- 
 ing, die for his faith. His is not the meek and 
 quiet spirit that endureth all things, because it 
 
 123 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 loves all men. It contains no ethical element ex- 
 cept that of determination to win a physical para- 
 dise and if necessary to kill as many human beings 
 as possible in the effort. 
 
 And then as regards the Hindoo, one cannot but 
 see in such profound self-denial a fact of real 
 value. His martyrdom, although self==inflicted, is 
 not worthless, is not to be swept aside as the blind 
 and unreasoning outcome of an ignorant and base- 
 less superstition. Is it not the expression of his 
 profound sense of the reality of the ideal life, whose 
 glory is so great, though he but dimly see it and 
 feel after it and know not when he has found it, 
 that he will give up all else for that? The Mo- 
 hammedan merely wants another world, another 
 and longer life, like this. The Hindoo or the Bud- 
 dhist devotee stands amongst men as a wonderful 
 witness to the infinite value of the spiritual world, 
 into which the physical and the sensual enter not, 
 for hearts that have caught the vision of its reality. 
 
 As regards the martyrdoms that have arisen in 
 the course of the struggles between the parties in 
 the Christian church, we must be careful again to 
 distinguish. Some of these have a religious signifi- 
 cance which is immediate and evident, while some 
 have been the expression simply of devotion to a 
 party or to a national ideal. Where patriotism or 
 partisanship have entered in, they must be esti- 
 mated after the same fashion as we estimate the 
 significance for the human race of the soldier's 
 devotion to his country. Where these martyrdoms 
 have contained true Christian or religious signifi- 
 
 124 
 
The Value of Martyrdom 
 
 cance has been where those who suffered, whether 
 heretic or orthodox, Romanist or Protestant, be- 
 lieved sincerely that the doctrine for which they 
 contended had an essential connection with the 
 central facts of the Christian faith and experience, 
 as such. They may have been wrong on either 
 side, sometimes on both sides; but so far as they 
 seemed to themselves to see a vital connection be- 
 tween specific doctrines and the very essence of 
 the Christian religion, their martyrdom must be 
 considered as belonging to the same class as the 
 martyrdoms of those who suffered for the faith at 
 the hands of heathen men. 
 
 What, then, have been those elements in the 
 sacrifices of Christian martyrs which distinguish 
 them from sacrifices made by all other religious 
 devotees? The following observations may be 
 taken as, I hope, not incorrect and not without 
 some important bearing upon the problem before us. 
 
 (1.) In the first place let the case of the Chris- 
 tian martyrdoms be stated thus: Throughout 
 these nineteen hundred years innumerable in- 
 dividuals have been put to torture and death on 
 account of their faith by their own tribal or na- 
 tional authorities. The torture is not of their 
 choosing; it is inflicted upon them; and this not 
 amid the excitement of battle, but in cold blood, 
 before the eyes of thousands of onlookers, or in 
 lonely dungeons and secret chambers of horror. In 
 accepting the Christian faith they have, as indi- 
 viduals, broken away from all the traditions and 
 customs of their people. They have laid them- 
 
 125 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 selves open to the derision and contempt of their 
 fellow countrymen, of all whom they count dear. 
 In many cases they have stood alone, unsup- 
 ported by any sympathy from any other human 
 being. In suffering they endured all that was 
 done to them without resistance. In these partic- 
 ulars, as it seems to me, the Christian martyrs are 
 so entirely separated either from the warlike devo- 
 tion of the Mohammedan or the self-inflicted pains 
 of the Indian devotee as to necessitate their being 
 put into a class by themselves, that the nature and 
 significance of their function in history may be 
 understood and studied on its own merits. It is 
 the shallowest conceivable method to group them 
 all together and to pass a contemptuous judgment 
 on them, saying that people will die for any super- 
 stition, that the appetite for martyrdom spreads 
 like contagion, and that the history of Christian 
 martyrdom is valueless for that reason. There are 
 species of martyrdom which should be studied sep- 
 arately as well as comparatively, and of these the 
 Christian martyrdom seems to be specifically dis- 
 tinct from all other forms known to history. 
 
 (2.) It is of great importance to observe that 
 this course of persecution has characterized the 
 introduction of Christianity into nearly every na- 
 tion and tribe upon the earth. Wheresoever this 
 religion has gone it has aroused a deep hostility 
 toward itself. And those who have broken away 
 from their native religions and become its adher- 
 ents have, practically without exception, been com- 
 pelled to pay a bitter price for the transference 
 
 126 
 
The Value of Martyrdom 
 
 of their allegiance from idols and fetiches and 
 Mohammed to the name of Jesus Christ. 
 
 (3.) Wheresoever these martyrdoms have been 
 endured they have, again I must say almost invar- 
 iably, led to an extension of the Christian faith 
 among the masses of the people and even among 
 the persecutors and executioners themselves. " The 
 blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church," 
 is one of those utterances which have become pro- 
 verbial because universal experience proves them 
 true. Again it seems not only the easiest but the 
 least satisfactory way of accounting for this phe- 
 nomenon to say that the sight of suffering produces 
 a reaction of excitement amongst the onlookers 
 and executioners, and arouses in them a willingness 
 to enter upon the same experience. Enthusiasm 
 is indeed contagious. The enthusiasm of the 
 veteran kindles ardor in the shrinking heart of the 
 recruit as they rush towards battle. The enthusiasm 
 of a great orator will inflame the hearts of a great 
 multitude for some great cause. It is a familiar 
 fact that crowds are easily swayed, that the same 
 people who at one time are filled with insatiable 
 desire for a king's blood may, by means of a clever 
 retort or some act which sets in motion a wave of 
 sympathy through their hearts, swing their fickle 
 feelings to the opijosite pole and they are ready 
 to shout, " Long live the king." But I have yet to 
 see a successful exposition of the psychological 
 steps through wdiich the seeing of men under tor- 
 ture awakens a desire in the observers for the same 
 experience. We do not read that when eastern 
 
 127 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 potentates caused their captives to be slain in their 
 presence any other people were willing to become 
 captives on the same terms. There must be some- 
 thing in the sight of Christian martyrdom, giving 
 it that strange power which for nineteen hundred 
 years it has manifested in every part of the world, 
 amongst all kinds of human beings, which is not 
 to be found in other forms of religious self- 
 sacrifice. 
 
 (4.) When Christian martyrs have suffered 
 they have often seemed to triumph. The rule has 
 been that they have carried themselves calmly and 
 bravely and have manifested a serene joy and 
 spoken of a certain hope which filled their hearts 
 even in the midst of darkest physical distress. 
 This hope must not be confused with the burning 
 passion of the Mohammedan. There have been 
 spurious Christian martyrdoms wherein some men 
 appear to have cherished expectations somewhat 
 resembling the sensuous. But we must not judge 
 any movement by its spurious imitations, but by its 
 normal type; and the normal typical attitude of 
 the Christian martyr is presented in his hope of 
 immediate admission to the presence of Jesus 
 Christ. The whole motive of his life is summed 
 up in that name and the whole glory that he sees 
 before him, even through the martyr flames or up 
 beyond the circles of the amphitheater in the blue 
 heavens, finds its fullest expression in the apos- 
 tolic longing to be with Christ. Now whether this 
 hope is rational or not, it must, as one that has ex- 
 ercised so large a place in the history of the Chris- 
 
 128 
 
The Value of Martyrdom 
 
 tian centuries, receive scientific justice. Its na- 
 ture must be understood in distinction from what- 
 ever other motives have made men willing to 
 endure suffering and death. 
 
 (5.) Along with this joyous hopeful spirit the 
 martyrs have, as a rule, and certainly in all those 
 cases where their martyrdom has proved fruitful, 
 manifested a spirit of purity and kindness and 
 patience towards their persecutors and the world 
 at large. They have not striven to resist by shed- 
 ding the blood of their enemies. They have not 
 looked at these with hatred or scorn, but only with 
 calm dignity, sometimes with tender pity. They 
 have gazed as from a superior level upon the very 
 men who judged them and spoken mercy to the 
 poor creatures who were used as the instruments 
 of their execution. This purity, sympathy, lov- 
 ingness of spirit must be closely connected in our 
 minds with that faith in the God of Jesus Christ 
 for which they died. We have seen in other pages 
 that in their religion, morality and religion were 
 not indeed identified but unified. Here for the first 
 time in history the religious and the ethical have 
 become indissoluble. The relation of the believer 
 to the Savior is an ethical one because it is per- 
 sonal. It involves him instantly in obligations 
 towards his Master whose fulfilment is seen in the 
 new character which he wears. The relationship 
 is religious, because it is the dependence of a 
 creature upon the Creator, of a sinful man upon 
 the Savior, but it is ethical, because it involves him 
 in obligations of a definite and indisputable kind. 
 
 129 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 And there in the martyr's face, this union shines. 
 He looks up and it is with a religious hope; he 
 looks round and it is with a forgiving love. And 
 the one name of Jesus Christ explains both the new 
 religion and its indissoluble partner, the new mo- 
 rality. 
 
 (6.) Now as to the communication of the mar- 
 tyr's faith to others. It seems to be capable of a 
 very clear and definite proof, that the elements 
 which have, at any rate in the vast majority of 
 cases, attracted the interest or awakened the faith 
 of the persecutors have been the expression and 
 look of religious enthusiasm, and the new ethical 
 qualities manifested even in cruel death by these 
 sufferers. These features of human experience 
 when presented to the conscience of those who saw 
 them, amid much horror, have awakened that insa- 
 tiable hunger after the same condition of heart and 
 life. It seems in fact not to have been the flames but 
 the personal qualities of the sufferers that attracted 
 the enthusiasm of the crowds; the patience, the 
 love, the purity, as well as the confidence and the 
 hope of those whom they watched in martyrdom, 
 have convinced men that this is not mere physical 
 excitement, that this phenomenon could only be 
 explained by a wondrous experience, whose beauty 
 and glory were revealed in the new light which 
 shone out of their souls. That which results, 
 then, when the spread of the Christian religion 
 through martyrdoms is normal from the Christian 
 point of view, is not that these, who become con- 
 verts, immediately thirst for martyrdom and them- 
 
 130 
 
The Value of Martyrdom 
 
 selves seek the flames. They do nothing of the sort. 
 They go away with guilty consciences to Christian 
 teachers and learn of them. They have been 
 pierced to the quick of the deeper man and, de- 
 termined to attain that condition of conscience 
 and will which they saw in those martyrs, they 
 X^ersist in learning until they too have won this 
 faith in Christ, and until in them this religious re- 
 lationship has produced those ethical qualities 
 which always flow from it and which, so far as the 
 heathen world knows, have flowed from it alone. 
 Always from first to last the phenomena connected 
 with the expansion of this religion are spurious, 
 are disowned by the religion itself and its wiser 
 adherents, are found in the long run to affect others 
 with anything but sympathy and devotion, unless 
 this ethical element is evident in the lives alike of 
 those who bear witness and those who through 
 their witness whether in life or death become con- 
 vinced and converted. 
 
 The ordinary notion that martyrdom spreads 
 through the awakening of a kind of physical ex- 
 citement will not bear the test of comparison with 
 any actual instances, Take the case of the per- 
 secution in Madagascar to which reference has 
 been made. Can it be maintained that when that 
 first sufferer, a young girl of attractive appear- 
 ance, asked to be allowed to pray and was speared 
 as she knelt on the ground, that that scene 
 was likely to arouse a desire in the minds of 
 others to kneel there and be speared in their 
 turn? Yet that was the beginning of a magnif- 
 131 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 icent series of martyrdoms in that land. We 
 are not told that the people who witnessed those 
 dreadful events tried to get themselves killed. 
 That which we are told is that more and more 
 inquirers came forward who besought the Chris- 
 tians to teach them the secret of the new life 
 which they were so manifestly living. Or let us 
 look at the extraordinary story of the conver- 
 sion of Uganda. The work of putting down the 
 new religion began with the burning of three 
 young boys aged sixteen, fourteen and twelve 
 years respectively. They had never seen, perhaps 
 never heard of, a martyrdom and they could not 
 be induced to give up their new faith. When 
 challenged by some of the executioners we are 
 told that they raised their young voices in a 
 Christian hymn. The effect of their demeanor 
 and that of others who followed them to the mar- 
 tyr's death was such that some even of the ex- 
 ecutioners became Christians. Why and how was 
 this? Not because a wave of excitement was 
 making the stake popular, which is what some 
 would have us believe. On the contrary when 
 their turn came these men and women naturally 
 and rightly did their best to escape. For ex- 
 ample, when a certain man who had been sent out 
 by the king to collect tribute from a subject tribe 
 returned, he was met with the pleasant news that 
 he was to be slain for his faith in Christ. He did 
 not rejoice. On the contrary he shrank in a very 
 healthy fashion from a violent death. Neverthe- 
 less he carried his royal master's treasure to the 
 
 132 
 
The Value of Martyrdom 
 
 palace lest it should be said a Christian had been 
 unfaithful to his trust, and then precipitately fled 
 for his life. All the deaths of violence in Uganda 
 had not made him even " half in love " with death, 
 as Keats said the nightingale had made him. 
 The martyrs would seem to have drawn men to 
 the Christian faith because in the moment of 
 death these heroes made it plain that they had 
 received a new experience so real, so glorious, 
 that they were willing to give up all rather than 
 deny Him from whose love they have all always 
 believed it had come. That executioner in Ugan- 
 da who hurried to the missionary as an earnest 
 inquirer had seen in those victims of his an ex- 
 perience which he longed to possess. His sense 
 of need was aroused. His conscience was made 
 quick. A nobler man was beginning to stir in his 
 brutish heart. 
 
 That is how the Church has spread through 
 martyrdom from the beginning of its history till 
 now. Who will say that such phenomena appear- 
 ing constantly, everywhere, for nineteen centuries, 
 prove nothing? 
 
 (7.) In fine, let it be repeated that the change 
 of character which, I believe, above all else has 
 given the martyrs of the Christian church their 
 influence over the world, has been always in their 
 own minds allied with, and has by all Christian 
 people been felt and said to depend upon, that 
 condition of pardon, of union with God, which 
 they attain through faith in Jesus Christ. Ap- 
 proach the problem of the spread of Christianity 
 
 133 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 form whatever poiot we may, study its influence 
 upon society from any aspect, we are always 
 brought face to face with this, that the Christian 
 religion develops all its life, all its ethical influ- 
 ence and manifests all its purifying power in the 
 human race, from this condition of fellowship 
 with God, which all Christians say that they re- 
 ceive through faith in Jesus Christ. 
 
 134 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 THE MISSIONARY AND CIVILIZATION. 
 
 One hears from various critics of the missionary 
 movement the expression of two ideas which one 
 cannot call anything but superstitious. They are 
 criticisms not founded upon accurate observation 
 of the facts, either in connection with the lives of 
 the savages or with the effects of the introduction 
 of the Christian religion. 
 
 The first of these asserts, that the savage is, on 
 the whole, an innocent, simple-hearted and happy 
 being. The severe morality of the Christian re- 
 ligion is supposed to enter as a disturber of the 
 peace upon the calm and satisfaction of savage 
 life. This sentimental criticism is only made by a 
 certain class of people, who have exercised con- 
 siderable influence in recent years, the same class 
 of people who have preached art for art's sake and 
 the substitution of what is called 'Hellenism' for 
 Christianity. It is all superstition; they simply 
 do not know the facts. A man who will go into 
 a truly heathen village almost anywhere will find 
 such customs and barbarities as will make his 
 blood run cold. Not to speak of the fearful deg- 
 radation which reigned over the South Sea Islands 
 and New Guinea when cannibalism was practised; 
 if we only go to tribes of South Africa, we shall 
 find sufficient of shame and bitterness and murder 
 
 135 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 and rapine to dispel forever that vision of the 
 peaceful and innocent savage which some have 
 tried to cherish. The actual morality of heathen- 
 ism is indescribable. Nowhere in heathenism 
 does society as such cast a stigma upon the liar or 
 the cheat. The murderer may be avenged, but 
 not by law, only by the vengeance of the relatives 
 of his victim. As for what we understand by pu- 
 rity, it is simply undreamt of, even as a possibility, 
 far less conceived of as a law incumbent upon 
 individuals. Mrs. Bishop the welhknown travel- 
 er says, "Missionaries come home and refrain 
 from shocking audiences by recitals of the 
 awful sins of the heathen and heathen world. 
 When traveling in Asia, it struck me very much, 
 how little we heard, how little we knew, as to 
 how sin is cultivated, and deified, and worshiped." ^ 
 The same remarkable traveler and observer has 
 made the following authoritative statements re- 
 garding the conditions of home life in lands which 
 we are accustomed to speak of as possessing a cer- 
 tain degree of civilization. " I have lived in zena- 
 " nas, and harems, and have seen the daily life of 
 " the secluded women, and I can speak from bitter 
 " experience of what their lives are — the intellect 
 " dwarfed, so that the woman of twenty or thirty 
 " years of age is more like a child of eight intel- 
 "lectually; while all the worst passions of 
 " human nature are stimulated and developed in a 
 
 1" Heathen Claims and Christian Duty" by Mrs. Bishop 
 (Boston). 
 
 136 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 "fearful degree — jealousy, envy, murderous hate, 
 " intrigue, running to such an extent that in some 
 " countries I have hardly ever been in a woman's 
 " house or near a woman's tent without being 
 " asked for drugs with which to destroy the favor- 
 " ite wife, to take away her life, or to take away 
 " the life of the favorite wife's infant son. This 
 " request has been made of me nearly two hundred 
 " times. This is only an indication of the daily life 
 " of whose miseries we think so little, and which is 
 " a natural product of the system that we ought to 
 "have subverted long ago." ^ I shall not waste 
 time in proving that what is true of the orientals 
 is true, at least as true, of less civilized people. 
 
 The second superstition consists in the idea that, 
 if only the missionary would let well alone, the 
 effects of contact with higher forms, i. e., European 
 and American forms, of civilization would gradually 
 give new personal and social ideals to the heathen 
 world, and civilization pure and simple would raise 
 the condition of the heathen world to the political, 
 industrial and family attainments of what we call 
 Christendom. Again it must be said that such a 
 theory can only be cherished by those who ignore 
 the facts. The testimony as to the effects of con- 
 tact between a higher and a lower civilization as 
 such, is nowadays almost superabundant, and it is 
 painful in the extreme to any true lover of mankind. 
 In no single case is it favorable to the theory which 
 I have stated. Throughout the world the contact 
 
 1 Ibid, p. 9. 
 
 137 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 of the heathen peoples with civilization has been 
 through the three avenues of war, commerce and 
 Christianity. Nowhere has European civilization 
 communicated itself to lower races simply through 
 the first two, conquest and trade; rather must it 
 be said that the tendency of these two species of 
 communion between the higher and the lower, has 
 invariably been towards the destruction of the 
 lower races. The trader with a few noble excep- 
 tions has not been a man, either in Africa or the 
 South Sea Islands or in the Orient, whose influence 
 tended to raise the character of those with whom 
 he dealt; and the conquerors, the soldiers and gov- 
 ernors of these peoples were not, until the close of 
 the first quarter of this century, men who gave 
 much thought or care to the uplifting of those 
 from whom they exacted the homage of subjects. 
 In fact, it is notorious that these representatives 
 of civilization have, as a rule, lived lives which 
 would have brought upon them disgrace and ostra- 
 cism from ^11 decent society in their homedands. 
 Where they have come into contact with mission- 
 ary operations, the natives have in thousands of 
 cases pointed the finger of scorn at them and said 
 to the missionaries. Are these the products of your 
 Christian religion? Hence, one may with every 
 confidence quote the strong affirmation of the Rev. 
 James Chalmers, one of the noblest of living mis- 
 sionaries: "I have had twenty-one years' experi- 
 " ence amongst natives. I have seen the semi-civil- 
 "ized and the uncivilized; I have lived with the 
 *' Christian native, and I have lived, dined and 
 
 138 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 " slept with the cannibal. I have visited the 
 " islands of the new Hebrides; I have visited the 
 " Loyalty Group; I have seen the work of missions 
 "in the Samoan Group; I have known all the 
 "islands of the Society Group; I have lived for 
 " ten years in the Hervey Group; I know a few of 
 " the groups close on the line, and for at least nine 
 " years of my life have lived with the savages of 
 "New Guinea; but I have never yet met with a 
 " single man or woman, or with a single people, 
 " that your civilization without Christianity has 
 " civilized. For God's sake let it be done at once! 
 " Gospel and commerce, but remember this, it 
 " must be the Gospel first. Wherever there has 
 "been the slightest spark of civilization in the 
 " Southern Seas, it has been where the Gospel has 
 "been preached; and wherever you find in the 
 " island of New Guinea a friendly people or a peo- 
 " pie that will welcome you there, it is where the 
 " missionaries of the cross have been preaching 
 "Christ. Civilization! The rampart can only be 
 " stormed by those who carry the cross." 
 
 In the report made by a Parliamentary Commit- 
 tee in 1837, of which Mr. Gladstone is the only 
 survivor, the following strong language is used: 
 "It is not too much to say that the intercourse of 
 Europeans in general without any exception in 
 favor of the subjects of Great Britain, has been, 
 unless when attended by missionary exertions, a 
 source of many calamities to uncivilized nations." 
 It is an interesting fact that in similar rejDorts 
 made by the United States Government concern- 
 
 139 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 ing the condition of the Red Indian tribes a simi- 
 lar assertion is made: "When the Government 
 wholly failed, the voluntary efforts of the Churches 
 have been crowned with success. The preaching 
 of the Gospel has done the work and it alone." ^ 
 
 Instead of merely answering criticisms based on 
 ignorance of the facts, let the following statement 
 suffice regarding the results which can be proved 
 almost invariably to follow from the contact of 
 higher with lower races. In the first place, this 
 contact, as it becomes more and more intimate and 
 as education and the reading of foreign literature 
 spreads, tends to destroy the faiths of these peo- 
 ples in their own religions. Now every religion 
 has been a center of strength for preserving some 
 measure of order and decency in the social life of 
 the humblest peoples. The richer the faith, the 
 stronger has been its influence in this regard, the 
 higher the sanction which it seems to afford to the 
 ideas of rectitude obtaining among the people. 
 Naturally, therefore, the removing of faith intro- 
 duces disorder into the social life and tends to low- 
 er the character of the individuals so affected. 
 The evidence for this is especially abundant from 
 among the higher races. The Marquis Ito, one of 
 Japan's greatest statesman, who has done so much 
 to bring in the new Japan of to-day, though not a 
 Christian himself, has recently said that he and 
 
 ^ " Linguistic and Oriental Essays," 3d Series. By R. N. 
 Cust, LL. D., pp. 359, 362. For a terrible description of 
 the eflEects upon lower races of unchristian civilization, vide 
 Ibid., 2d Series, pp. 533, 536. 
 
 140 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 his associates have always looked with favor upon 
 missions and they are now certain that the pres- 
 ence of Christians in the land saved the students, 
 even in the Government Schools, from sinking in- 
 to an immediate immorality which would otherwise 
 have been unavoidable. That is to say, this man, 
 who is an authority regarding Japan's attempted 
 rush into civilization, says that this rush was ac- 
 companied by a terrible dissolution of sach sanc- 
 tions as had hitherto obtained among the youth of 
 the land. And he sees that a widespread immoral- 
 ity would have been the result. The same experi- 
 ence has presented, on a vaster scale, terrific prob- 
 lems to the rulers of India. It was one of the 
 earliest observations of Dr. Duff, as well as of 
 Christian men amongst those who v/ere in posi- 
 tions of civil authority in that Empire, that the 
 young men who attended the Government Schools, 
 having lost all faith in their own gods, showed 
 marked tendencies towards unscrupulous and li- 
 centious modes of life. 
 
 The second effect which is produced by this 
 contact of culture with heathen forms of civiliza- 
 tion is that the native forms of government 
 cease to be effective. This appears especially in 
 cases like those of the South African tribes; but 
 one of the most notorious and remarkable is that 
 of Hawaii whose governmental history has been 
 so full of incident and change in recent years. 
 When a number of Europeans have settled with- 
 in their territory and have begun to affect the tri- 
 bal life and habits by means of trade, the chiefs be- 
 
Chritsianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 gin to find their hold upon their own people loos- 
 ened. The Europeans, being most evidently su- 
 perior to all the natives and even to their chiefs, 
 and being sometimes apt to treat the latter with 
 freedom and an air of condescension, do undoubt- 
 edly help to bring the chiefs into contempt among 
 their own subjects. One can easily see that, as 
 Europeans settle in increasing numbers among 
 such peoples, their evident power gradually over- 
 shadows the authority of those who hitherto 
 have been the guardians of law and order in those 
 regions, and oftentimes great disorder ensues. 
 Here again the natural tendency of civilization, 
 as such, is not to elevate the lower races. 
 
 Not so is it that the Christian religion acts in such 
 cases. For if it be true that war and trade and 
 secular education have not tended to civilize but 
 to destroy heathen peoples; it is nevertheless evi- 
 dently true that scores of races have not only been 
 saved from extinction, but have been placed in 
 what seems to be the line of continuous prog- 
 ress by the work of the missionaries. 
 
 This is a fact of such extraordinary importance 
 for our understanding of the progress of man that 
 we ought to look somewhat closely into it. By 
 what means is it that the religion of Christ, as 
 taught by the missionary, has produced the mo- 
 mentous eflPects here alleged? We have already 
 glanced at this matter in connection with the 
 spread of education. But we must in this place 
 go a little deeper into the substance of the prob- 
 lem. In the first place, the Gospel of Christ, 
 
 142 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 while it humbles all those who enter into its teach- 
 ing and receive its spirit, yet confers upon them a 
 new self-respect. To a man who has considered 
 himself little more than the mere slave of a chief 
 or has lived in utter ignorance of his destiny, 
 sleeping, hunting and eating, the changes wrought 
 by the inflow of Christian faith have the force of a 
 revolution. What must it mean to such a 
 man to receive the inward consciousness of what 
 Christians call eternal life, of sonship towards God? 
 And what must it mean to him to see and feel the 
 brotherhood that connects him with the white mis- 
 sionary and all whom he represents? He stands 
 now in a new world, in relations to God which 
 awaken in him the hope of a new and glorious des- 
 tiny, in relations to man which awaken a new 
 sense of humanity. This naturally creates a no- 
 bler spirit. As a larger outlook thus gained digni- 
 fies all the personal habits and ways of every man 
 so affected, the action of the Gospel through them 
 upon the social civilization must be very evident. 
 A sense of decency is awakened with that new con- 
 sciousness, and desire for ampler surroundings in 
 what the native begins to call his home; his ideas 
 of comfort become refined; his whole life rapidly 
 assumes something of the aspects of civilization. 
 
 This point has been well illustrated by Dr. 
 Lindley, a welhknown missionary among the Zu- 
 lus: "The first evidence of coming to Christ 
 "among the Zulus was the sense of comparative 
 " nakedness. A man, for instance goes to mission 
 " premises, and for some small article which he bar- 
 
 143 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 *' ters in trade obtains a common calico shirt, worth 
 " from fivepence to sixpence. Then putting that 
 " on, he comes the next day for a pair of common 
 " duck pants, costing about the same amount. He 
 " cannot have comfort of that shirt without some- 
 " thing to cover his nether extremities. Then the 
 " next day he goes back, and he wants a threedeg- 
 "ged stool, such as those on which, when we were 
 "boys, perhaps we used to milk the cows; for he 
 " must not sit on the ground any more and soil his 
 "pants. Now, when that man gets that calico 
 " shirt and those duck pants on, and he sits on that 
 " stool nine inches high he is about nine thousand 
 "miles above all the heathen around about him. " ^ 
 Not only so, the Spirit of Christ has been said 
 from the beginning to act directly upon moral 
 character, and illustrations literally teem through- 
 out all missionary reports from all parts of the 
 world, regarding the immediate transformation of 
 character, which begins as soon as the sway of 
 Christ is acknowledged by the conscience and 
 affections of even the most degraded man. Most 
 thrilling, for example, is the story of the Canadian 
 Indian whose heart burned within him to avenge 
 the murder of his son by a trusted companion. 
 He heard a missionary preach on the words of 
 Jesus: "Father forgive them, for they know not 
 what they do. " The Gospel had taken hold of his 
 heart and when he heard the direct application 
 of this passage made to himself, — "if you would 
 
 » L. M. C, Vol. I, p. 182. 
 
 144 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 be a Christian, you must be Christ^like. He for- 
 gave and prayed for His murderers; and to be Hke 
 Him you must forgive even the man who has done 
 you the greatest harm," — the lesson went home. 
 The chief actually had the manhood and the cour- 
 age to say, when the opportunity for vengeance 
 came and the murderer was in his power: "As I 
 wish Christ to forgive me, so I forgive you. " Who 
 can measure the cost of that action to that man? 
 It was a great sacrifice when he threw away that 
 opportunity for that reason, and thus broke with 
 the traditions of his tribe, with the habits of his 
 own* lifetime, quelled the turbulent impulses of 
 his heart and introduced not only into his own con- 
 duct, but into the life of the tribe this vision of a 
 higher and nobler spirit. It is indeed by sacrifices 
 like this, by countless acts of self-control and self= 
 conquest, that morality spreads and civilization of 
 the higher type becomes possible. We are told 
 that never again did this man go on the war-path; 
 and from that one fact we see how, for him, one act 
 of renunciation in regard to one sinful practice, 
 flooded with light whole tracts of tribal customs 
 which hitherto had seemed both right and natural. 
 So again is it that the Christian religion has ever 
 tended rapidly to carry men past the lower stages 
 of progress, for it has blotted out by a clear and 
 awful revelation entire classes of evil traditions 
 and degrading habits. 
 
 Or from another region let us take another ex- 
 ample. Mr. J. G. Paton lonely and sick in the 
 Island of Tanna can only depend upon the assist- 
 145 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 ance of two people, a man and his wife, who had 
 not long before this practised cannibalism. Yet 
 of him Paton writes: " Any trust, however sacred or 
 "valuable, could be absolutely reposed in him; 
 " and in trial or danger I was often refreshed by 
 " that old teacher's prayers, as I used to be by the 
 " prayers of my saintly father in my childhood's 
 ''home. No white man could have been a more 
 "valuable helper to me in my perilous circum- 
 " stances, and no person, white or black, could 
 "have shown more fearless and chivalrous devo- 
 "tion."^ 
 
 Again take an example from yet another portion 
 of the missionary field: A certain reformer in 
 Japan was foully assassinated. He had a relative 
 who became a Christian and ultimately, a native 
 pastor. Many years after the death of his brother 
 he was celebrating the Lord's Supper, when an 
 old man got up and said, " I am one of those who 
 wounded that man twenty=five years ago and I 
 confess my share in the crime." The reply of the 
 pastor was, " By all the ancient customs of Japan I 
 am bound to avenge that blood=feud by plunging 
 my dagger into the throat of the man who was the 
 murderer of my relative; but Christ's blood recon- 
 ciles all blood^feuds, and in Christ's name I wish 
 to extend to this brother the right hand of fellow- 
 ship." ' 
 
 Not only do missionaries see and therefore be- 
 
 J. G. Paton." p. 173. 
 
 'Japan, Its People and Missions," by Jessie Page. p. 72, 
 146 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 lieve in the remarkable ethical changes wrought 
 by the power of their religion; the natives them- 
 selves are quick to mark the facts. A story, for 
 example, is told of a bank officer in Japan, who 
 came to the missionary in utter despair over the 
 fact, that the young Japanese who were employed 
 in a national bank were proving themselves utterly 
 untrustworthy. They were very clever at their 
 work and made excellent cashiers, tellers and book- 
 keepers and clerks; but they were thoroughly dis- 
 honest and those who were in authority could see 
 no way of raising up a race of honest bank clerks. 
 This bank officer admitted that he did not believe 
 in any religion whatsoever. He claimed that the 
 Japanese intellect was of too philosophical a nature 
 to accept the Jewish myth called Christianity. 
 " But, " he said, " your religion does something that 
 "our religion cannot do; it makes men honest. 
 *'Now we wish our employes to be carefully in- 
 " structed in these principles, so that they may 
 " discarge their duties with integrity." ^ 
 
 Dr Post, the great Medical Missionary of Syria, 
 narrates the following interesting incident.^ Many 
 years ago a Governor General in Syria dismissed 
 his staff of native physicians for incompetency and 
 corruption. He applied at the College at Beirut 
 for a corps of its graduates, and in doing so he said 
 " It is not merely because of their superior scien- 
 
 ^ Dr. Maclay's, "A budget of letters from Japan;" page 
 216, quoted by Rev. John Liggins, in "The Great Value and 
 Success of Foreign Missions. " 
 
 2 In " Missions at Home and Abroad^" p. 846. 
 147 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 tific attainments, but because I have confidence 
 in their moral character that I choose my staff 
 from them. " 
 
 The work of the missionary, when he acts as an 
 agent of civilization, depends for method upon 
 the kind and degree of civilization which he finds 
 in the scene of his labors. For example, when the 
 early missionaries first began work in the cannibal 
 islands of the South Seas, amongst people who 
 were extremely ignorant as well as extremely sav- 
 age, whose social life possessed only the rudiments 
 of organization, their work as civilizers would be 
 quite direct and open. They not only had to in- 
 stil the elements of religious faith into the minds 
 of the natives, but begin immediately thereafter to 
 teach them the simpler arts. Those whom they 
 employed as servants and helpers in building their 
 houses, making their own furniture, tilling their 
 own gardens, became teachers of others. Ex- 
 amples of this literally abound in every direc- 
 tion. The following passage is typical. It de- 
 scribes the state of matters which Bishop Selwyn 
 found in a certain part of New Zealand on his first 
 tour of inspection. " Nor was it religion only which 
 had been taught to this promising race — agricul- 
 ture also and the arts of civilized life had long ago 
 been introduced. So long ago as 1830, the station 
 at Waimate had made itself independent of New 
 South Wales for its supplies of provisions. More 
 than fifty thousand bricks were made; seven hun- 
 dred thousand feet of timber were felled; three 
 wooden houses were erected, with stabling for 
 
 148 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 twelve or fourteen horses; eight or ten cottages 
 were built, and ultimately a spacious chapel, 
 plows and harrows were constructed; and roads 
 were cut through the dense forests; while January 
 8, 1835, was made forever memorable by the intro- 
 duction of a printing-press, to be worked by a na- 
 tive assistant." Can we wonder that Charles Dar- 
 win wrote of this field: " I took leave of the New 
 Zealand missionaries with feelings of high respect 
 for their useful and upright characters. . . The 
 march of improvement consequent on the intro- 
 duction of Christianity, throughout the South Sea 
 probably stands by itself in the record of history."^ 
 
 The missionary has often been in a position to 
 advise both the chiefs and the people as to many 
 matters connected with the tribal life. Their evil 
 customs he has openly rebuked, their cruelties and 
 ignorance and lawlessness he has sought to remove 
 by the establishment of some rational system of 
 legislation and administration. 
 
 One only needs to read narratives of the work 
 done in Hawaii, in Fiji and in New Guinea to see 
 that in such cases the missionary has acted almost 
 as a chief whose moral authority and influence was 
 practically supreme in the tribe. It is one of the 
 sublime spectacles of this century, one of the most 
 remarkable signs of progress within the Chris- 
 tian Church itself, that in all such cases Protestant 
 missionaries have consistently striven to establish 
 the power of others; they have not even been tempt- 
 
 ^ " Life of G. A. Selwyn," by Canon Curteis, pp. 69, 70. 
 149 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 ed to assume the reins of power, when such a step 
 would have been attended with no danger or dif- 
 ficulty and would have seemed even to the leaders 
 of the Church in earlier ages to give to the cause 
 of Christianity a great opportunity of obtaining 
 sway amongst the natives. The missionaries, 
 I say, have without exception avoided a step 
 which the whole church now sees would have 
 proved disastrous to the truest interests of the 
 Gospel. So much at any rate has been learned 
 from the experience of Europe regarding the rela- 
 tions of Church and State. 
 
 When we go amongst people who are found in 
 a somewhat better condition as to organization 
 and habits of life, as, for example, many of the 
 tribes in South Africa and the remarkable Hova 
 tribe of Madagascar, we find that the influence 
 of the missionary, though obvious and powerful, is 
 yet exercised less directly than in the former cases. 
 Here the advice given and personal influence ex- 
 erted are more private and personal, though con- 
 ferences of a more or less formal nature with the 
 chief or king and his representatives upon public 
 affairs may sometimes take place. Here also the 
 presence of the missionary has resulted in the 
 molding of the tribal character and policy in many 
 and most remarkable ways. In fact as regards 
 Madagascar, it may be said that the extraordinary 
 strides which were taken during the last thirty 
 years towards civilized methods of government and 
 improved moral conditions, were the direct outcome 
 of the counsel and guidance given at many critical 
 
 150 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 points to the king or queen and his or her advisers 
 by the heralds of the Christian religion. 
 
 When we come to observe the influence of mis- 
 sions upon civilization in the ancient empires of 
 the East, we find a different state of matters. In 
 Japan and India and China the missionary enters 
 into the midst of civilizations possessed of digni- 
 fied and ancient histories. He cannot approach 
 rulers and administrators with the same simplicity 
 and directness as among the simpler tribes to 
 which we have already referred. Here everything 
 is more imposing, more elaborate, more formal. 
 Conservatism of the most unyielding kind has 
 settled its dark shadows over the land. More- 
 over, ancient and native religions have saturated 
 the whole system of life with their influence. 
 The worship of gods, the observance of religious 
 ceremonials are bound up with almost every 
 act of daily life and with every institution in society. 
 The attempts of the missionary to procure reforma- 
 tions where customs are most cruel or most abomi- 
 nable are just as hopeless in those lands as if an ob- 
 scure minister from an obscure village were to walk 
 into the House of Congress, at Washington, or the 
 House of Commons, in London, and demand a 
 change in the vital policy of the American or Brit- 
 ish governments. And yet it remains to be said, 
 that in these very lands the missionary forces are 
 exerting an almost incalculable influence. Many 
 of the leading rulers of great Indian provinces 
 have borne witness to the fact that the missiona- 
 ries' influence has done most to secure the remark- 
 
 151 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 able changes which have taken place in regard to 
 many Indian customs and religious observances. 
 The old East India Company government lived in 
 such dread of rebellions that they weakly tolerated 
 and even at last shamefully participated in some 
 of the worst of these customs. And early in the 
 missionary movement, that which they feared most 
 was, lest the missionaries should seek to interfere 
 with what they considered fundamental native in- 
 stitutions. Nevertheless the missionaries speedily 
 gave voice to their judgment on these things. 
 Henry Martyn and William Carey burned in heart 
 over the sufferings and the shame imposed contin- 
 ually upon thousands of their fellow beings in 
 India by these fearful heathen institutions. And, 
 when the time came, when the missionary influ- 
 ence had grown powerful enough, and when above 
 all amongst the rulers themselves there began to 
 appear men of noble Christian character and lofty 
 ideals, the work of moralizing this ancient civili- 
 zation began. Some of the results have been 
 summed up in the following striking manner by 
 Canon Hole: 
 
 "Seventy years ago, (I quote from a statement 
 "published in India, in the Indicm Watchman,) 
 " the fires of Suttee were publicly blazing in the 
 " Presidency towns of Madras, Bombay and Cal- 
 " cutta, and all over India, the fires of Suttee, in 
 " which the screaming and struggling widow, in 
 " many cases herself a mere child, was bound to 
 "the body of her husband; and with him burned 
 " to ashes. Seventy years ago young infants were 
 
 152 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 ' publicly thrown into the Ganges, as sacrifices to 
 ' the god of the river. Seventy years ago young 
 ' men and maidens, decked with flowers, were slain 
 ' in Hindoo temples before the hideous idol of the 
 ' goddess Kali, or hacked to pieces at the Meras, 
 ' that their quivering flesh might be given to pro- 
 ' pitiate the god of the soil. Seventy years ago the 
 ' cars of Juggernaut were rolling over India, crush- 
 ' ing hundreds of human victims annually beneath 
 ' their wheels. Seventy years ago lepers were 
 ' burned alive, devotees publicly starved them- 
 ' selves to death, children brought their parents to 
 ' the bank of the Ganges and hastened their death 
 ' by filling their mouths with the sand and the 
 ' water of the so-called sacred river. Seventy 
 ' years ago the swinging festival attracted thou- 
 ' sands to see the poor writhing wretches, with 
 ' iron hooks thrust through the muscles of their 
 ' backs, swinging in mid^air in honor of their 
 
 • gods. For these scenes, which disgraced India 
 ' seventy years ago, we may now look in vain. 
 ' And need I remind you that every one of these 
 
 * changes for the better is due directly or indi- 
 ' rectly to missionary enterprise, and the spirit of 
 ' Christianity? It was Christian missionaries, and 
 ' those who supported them, who proclaimed and 
 ' denounced these tremendous evils. Branded as 
 ' fanatics and satirized as fools, they ceased not 
 ' until one by one these hideous hallucinations 
 ' were suppressed." ^ 
 
 * Quoted in "The Great Value and Success of Foreign Mis- 
 sions," by Rev. J. Liggins, pp. 90, 91. 
 
 153 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 To turn to Japan again for one moment, we find 
 that even the Japanese recognize the great influ- 
 ence exerted by the Christian religion upon the ex- 
 traordinary developments which have taken place 
 in that country during the last century. A lead- 
 ing citizen of Tokyo said in an address, that the 
 younger men did not know what older Japan was, 
 and that practically the Christian missionaries had 
 "saved the Empire." One of the leading mis- 
 sionaries of that land (Mr. S. L. Gulick) has said: 
 " The Kingdom of God is coming in Japan as in 
 " no other non^Christian land. The national ideas 
 "as to government, education, morality, justice, 
 " law and the family have become in fact largely 
 " Christian." 
 
 The difficulties of direct influence are of course 
 greater in China than in any other land; for there 
 the government remains stolidly indifferent 
 and separate from missions. The missionaries are 
 looked down upon as of the poor and the despised 
 classes. It is only through slow processes, espe- 
 cially perhaps through the translated Bible and 
 medical missionaries, that access is being obtained 
 to the higher classes of Chinese society. It is too 
 early yet to say in what direction that ancient civi- 
 lization will be molded by the evangelical spirit. 
 It is evident that in all such cases the missionary 
 can only modify the conditions of civilization 
 through the Christian literature which is in circu- 
 lation and through the work of teaching and influ- 
 encing one individual after another. Of course 
 through the Christian literature he can secure the 
 
 154: 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 presentation of the ideals of the Christian spirit 
 to a very large and ever increasing circle of read- 
 ers. The subtle influence of truth when she 
 shines with her own peerless light on the dark cus- 
 toms of heathendom, it is beyond our power to in- 
 dicate or tabulate. We may say this much, how- 
 ever, that wherever the Christian religion is being 
 learned from her own literatures, there the intrin- 
 sic reality and beauty of her ideals will begin to 
 affect the heart and imagination, the mind and the 
 conscience of every heathen reader. Of course 
 the most powerful civilizing influence which in 
 such lands the missionary exercises, is through the 
 direct molding of the character of individuals. 
 Wherever Christian Churches are formed under 
 faithful oversight, and the members manifest even 
 some lineaments of the character of Christ, sur- 
 rounding society cannot possibly remain unaffected. 
 The natural conscience of man is aroused to sen- 
 sitiveness, when neighbors manifest the chief 
 characteristics of an ideal man. 
 
 One fact is of great importance. While the evi- 
 dence for it is drawn from India primarily, one 
 can, after the experience of Europe during these 
 eighteen hundred years, prophesy with great confi- 
 dence, that the same phenomena will appear in 
 China and Japan. In India there are vast portions 
 of population consisting of poor and, as we say, of 
 primitive peoples. They have practically no edu- 
 cation, they are of no caste or of very low caste. 
 They are not the people to whom a government 
 would look hopefully or from whom aristocratic 
 
 155 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 Brahmins would expect much. But if all signs 
 fail not, the redemption of India may be reached 
 through these people. For already not only have 
 many hill4ribes received the Christian religion and 
 entered upon careers of great promise, but the in- 
 habitants of the vast plains in South Central India 
 show the same eagerness to receive the Gospel, 
 and the Gospel is manifesting its ancient ennobling 
 and civilizing power amongst them. The mission- 
 aries complain bitterly that they have not money 
 wherewith to pay for the teachers and evangelists 
 who are demanded by these peoples. Sometimes 
 a whole village is ready to cast away its idols, turn 
 its temple into a school, receive a Christian teacher 
 and avow the discipleship of Jesus Christ. The 
 missionaries have actually to restrain their ardor 
 with sad hearts, for lack of funds. But they turn 
 their eyes with brighter thoughts to the villages 
 where already work has been begun; for there they 
 see the abundant signs of a transformation of 
 character and life which is so surprising that the 
 members of the higher castes are filled with as- 
 tonishment and even with envy at the changes which 
 are visible. These people have a new look, the 
 cringing fear of their social superiors has disappear 
 ed; nor has it given place to insolence, but to the 
 dignity of that self^^respect which Christianity be- 
 stows. They become industrious, intelligent and 
 full of enterprise. They build better houses, do 
 better work, make more money. Some of them be- 
 come teachers and preachers. In fact the lowest 
 classes of India have received that impulse which. 
 
 m 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 will carry them to the top of the social scale and it 
 comes from their faith in Christ and their new 
 spiritual experience. 
 
 One of the elements which must be considered 
 in estimating the influence of the missionary is the 
 impression universally made by his personal charac- 
 ter. The natives throughout the world very speed- 
 ily learn to distrust the average European trader 
 and traveler. ^ But as steadily as this revelation of 
 character is made, the trustworthiness of the mission- 
 ary becomes more and more apparent. ^ His word 
 
 ^ Sir William Hunter, the distinguished Indian Administra- 
 tor, says: "The confidence of the people of India in the 
 purity and unselfishness of the motives of the mission- 
 aries is complete, and neither the officials nor any other class 
 of foreign residents is held in so much esteem as they are." 
 
 2 Another instance of the same trust which the missionaries 
 awaken in the hearts of heathen people is to be found in the 
 strange act of a South African chief, Sekhome by name. He 
 had for long been stirring up strife amongst his people, seek- 
 ing to drive outthe missionary, persecuting his ownsonswho 
 were earnest Christians, and had even created a civil war by at- 
 tacking the latter and the Christian party who sympathized 
 with them. Yet when all his vile machinations had failed and he 
 himself become a fugitive, fearing vengance, it was to the 
 missionary he fled. On that evening when he left his own 
 royal courtyard and fled to the rocks and the caves, " a solitary 
 figure " we are told by the missionary " was observed descend- 
 ing the mountain near to my house. It was Sekhome. He 
 could no longer trust his own people; he knew that he could 
 still trust the missionary. He seemed relieved when he entered 
 the house. I had now a glorious opportunity of rewarding 
 good for evil, and took advantage of it." " Ten Years North 
 of the Orange River " by John Mackenzie, pp. 449 ff, 
 15T 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 can be depended upon; his kindness is untiring; his 
 fairness in matters of dispute is unquestioned; his 
 own unselfishness in matters of business and where 
 money is concerned, after the first suspicions have 
 passed away, becomes visible to all and a matter of 
 public observation and wonder. Alike among the 
 older civilizations of the East and the poor tribes of 
 Africa or the South Seas this faith in the mission- 
 ary is a fact notorious and indisputable. He lives 
 what his religion teaches. On the whole, he is 
 seen to manifest the outlines of the character of 
 Jesus Christ and this gives an enormous power to 
 his teaching and his exhortations. 
 
 Yet another and perhaps the steadiest and most 
 powerful of all single instruments of civilization 
 that can be named is the missionary home. The 
 home life is the fountain head of the character of 
 a people. The relations that exist there give char- 
 acter and form to all other relations in the social 
 system. Where mutual trust and love and honor 
 exist among the members of the homes of a peo- 
 ple, these qualities will inevitably stream out, like 
 light from a center of light, upon the surrounding 
 system. It is the evidence of one who has had 
 unsurpassed opportunity of observation in differ- 
 ent parts of the world, " that one Christian mis- 
 sionary home, with a Christian wife, does more to 
 humanize, elevate and evangelize a race of people 
 than twenty celibate men."^ It is a perception 
 of this fact that led, for example, a Japanese mis- 
 
 Bev, Wardlaw Thompson. L. M. C. Vol. I, p. 409. 
 X58 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 sionary (Eev. C. A. Clark) to open his house, in- 
 vite visitors from the surrounding country and show 
 them the whole of the interior arrangements, in x^ar- 
 lor and kitchen; explain to them the uses of the 
 children's room, the stoves and the wire mat- 
 tress which were chief curiosities; explain to 
 them also the reasons for the absence of the god- 
 shelf, which they immediately missed. In two 
 years this missionary received into his home no 
 less than 12,000 visitors. He made his house the 
 center of a loaning library and reading-room. All 
 this was done with the simple purpose of giving the 
 Japanese an opportunity for seeing and feeling 
 something of the characteristics of a Christian 
 home. How much, even in Japan, this special in- 
 fluence is needed, may be gathered from such facts 
 as the following: The Japanese home is said to 
 consist of " father, mother, concubines, and various 
 sorts of children, who are born of the wife or of the 
 concubines, or have been adopted into the family. 
 Filial piety, which no doubt exists and is insisted 
 upon, is distorted into a horrible outrage upon 
 humanity, and especially on womanhood. The 
 father may always command the daughter to sell 
 herself into a life of shame to pay his debts and 
 she incurs merit by this act of sacrifice." ^ 
 
 In China,* where annually no less than two hun- 
 dred thousand infants are put to death, the influ- 
 ence of Christianity on the home life is transform- 
 
 i"The Religions of Japan" by W. E. Griffis, D. D., pp. 
 122-123. 
 
 159 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 ing many of the conditions which form the worst 
 features of the Chinese civilization. Chinese 
 Christian homes are verily fountains of most bless- 
 ed influence upon the community. A well-known 
 lady missionary from China has said: *'The 
 women in these Christian homes become true, de- 
 voted and earnest Christians. . . . It is a bless- 
 ed thing to go into one of these homes, where 
 there is a Christian mother, and see the stimula- 
 ting influence which she exerts, compared to the 
 misery of the home where the heathen mother ex- 
 erts her influence." ^ 
 
 In India the same momentous results are follow- 
 ing the exertions which are being made by all 
 missionary societies, to establish and extend Zen- 
 ana work. Leading Indians see the significance 
 of this. They feel that through the home the mis- 
 sionary is conquering India. And yet, because 
 the women medical missionaries bring their skill 
 to bear upon the suffering and disease of the wom- 
 en in their homes, they are unwilling to shut the 
 door against them. Some of the more far^^sighted 
 of the educated Hindoos have openly acknowledged 
 that through their influence upon the home life 
 these Christian missionaries have at last captured 
 the stronghold of the ancient Indian faiths and civ- 
 ilization. Travelers, like Miss Gord6n Cumming, 
 who have gone to the South Seas and watched 
 the manner of life of the natives in islands, 
 like Fiji, which have been most profoundly affect- 
 
 1 Mrs. Edge. L. M. C. Vol. I, p. 114. 
 160 
 
The Missionary and Civilization 
 
 ed by Christianity, express their amazement at the 
 transformation of the home life. The houses have 
 more than one room; the father and mother are 
 faithful to one another, train their children in the 
 Christian faith, maintain daily family worship, 
 filling the villages at even=tide with songs of praise. 
 And these peojDle were, many of them, cannibals 
 not many years ago. ^ 
 
 The consideration of the influence exerted by 
 the missionary home upon native peoples inevi- 
 tably suggests a subject to which I can only briefly 
 refer, but one which for the future of the race is 
 of immeasurable importance, I mean the status of 
 woman. In no heathen land does woman receive 
 a modicum of the respect and honor which we see 
 to be her rightful due. The degradation of wom- 
 ankind is one of the darkest accompaniments of 
 heathenism and one of the strongest barriers 
 against the progress of the race. The elevation of 
 the home life means, first and last, the elevation 
 of woman. As she receives her due place in the 
 thought and affection of her husband and sons and 
 brothers, her own nature is ennobled; the deeper 
 and finer instincts of her soul are awakened to 
 dominate her life; she becomes the gracious and 
 purifying influence which Christianity has made 
 her and Christendom now finds her to be, 
 
 We have seen in this chapter the chief methods 
 by which the religion of Christ is molding the civ- 
 ilization of the heathen world. We have seen that 
 
 1 Cf. "At Home in Fiji" by C. F. Gordon Gumming. 
 161 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 when the individual becomes converted he comes 
 under influences which begin more or less rapidly 
 to change his personal habits of thought and life. 
 The lower the past life of such a man, the more 
 striking are the results immediately following his 
 conversion. We have seen that the work of en- 
 lightening, guiding, strengthening that man is 
 carried on by means of the church and its adjunct, 
 the school. We have also seen that as soon as a 
 few people have been gathered together, family life 
 assumes a higher and purer tone, and from that 
 center very strong influences flow out upon the 
 surrounding community. The great work of civi- 
 lizing the world is thus effected hy the Church of 
 Christ through the moralizing of the individual 
 and the family. In the simpler tribes the immedi- 
 ate effect is to create new personal and social wants 
 which are closely allied with the maintenance of 
 decency and comfort. Amid the more elaborate 
 institutions of India the first civil effect of Chris- 
 tianity has been seen in the removal of various 
 customs which seemed to be deeply rooted in the 
 national life, but which were with comparative 
 ease eliminated as soon as the light of a higher 
 conscience shone upon them and condemned them. 
 The further modification of the social conditions 
 in those Eastern lands must necessarily be a some- 
 what slow process. But there can be little doubt 
 that each decade will mark a steady progress, and 
 that the most potent force will prove to be the 
 rapidly increasing Christian community with its 
 keener conscience and its loftier ideals. 
 
 162 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE MISSIONARY AND OTHER RELIGIONS. 
 
 It is now recognized, practically by all investiga- 
 tors and thinkers, that religion is universal. No 
 tribe can be found which does not possess a relig- 
 ion of some kind. This means that it belongs to 
 human nature, both as we know it now and so far 
 as history can discover its past operations, to be 
 conscious of some kind of connection with that 
 which is called the superhuman or supernatural. 
 This implies, of course, that there must always be 
 some point of connection which can be found 
 between the crudest forms of belief and Christian- 
 ity. Were it not for this. Christian missions would 
 be impossible. If the preacher of Jesus Christ 
 could not find some instinct, some working of con- 
 science, some apprehension of the mind, some 
 movement of the imagination, even amongst the 
 lowest races, which manifests an affinity with the 
 highest attainments of Christian exi3erience, he 
 could not begin his work. But this just means 
 that if a race so utterly destitute could be discov- 
 ered, it would be one that is forever entirely cut 
 off from the rest of mankind. No elevation of 
 such a people could possibly take place in any di- 
 rection. The very absence of the possibility of a 
 religion would relegate them to a separate species. 
 
 163 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 " These ideas," said J. G. Paton of the New He- 
 brides concerning his work amongst the canni- 
 bals, "had to be woven into their spiritual con- 
 sciousness, had to become the very warp and woof 
 of their religion. But it could be done, — that we 
 believed, — because they were men, not beasts." ^ 
 
 We know now far more fully than in any earlier 
 generation the characteristics of the various relig- 
 ions throughout the world. The poorest form of 
 fetichism has been subjected and is being sub- 
 jected to close scientific scrutiny by men of the 
 highest scholarship and ability; and, needless to 
 say, the elaborate and higher religions of the East 
 are exercising a wonderful fascination upon the 
 minds of scholars and thinkers. In this work of 
 investigating the actual forms of belief possessed 
 by the natives, the grounds of those beliefs and 
 their effects upon the morals and civilization of 
 the people who hold them, the missionaries are, as a 
 class, supremely interested and ceaselessly diligent. 
 It is true that we every now and again hear a piece 
 of condescending advice, from one direction or an- 
 other, suggesting that the missionaries should study 
 the religions of the people to whom they preach, 
 and should try to employ whatever is of value in 
 those religions, making these points of contact the 
 starting=points for higher instruction. But there 
 surely have been few missionaries, and they both 
 foolish in mind and futile in labor, who have ever 
 needed such advice. It may have been held by a 
 
 J. G. Paton,*' p. 121. 
 
 164 
 
The Missionary and Other Religions 
 
 few people in the early history of the missionary 
 movement, say three-quarters of a century ago, 
 that the light of Christianity is self=evident, that 
 the missionary needs only to let it shine through his 
 declarations to allow him the joy of seeing multi- 
 tudes arise and accept it. But those who held this 
 view in ignorance must have speedily found it im- 
 possible. Since the day when Henry Martyn 
 thought that a miracle was necessary ere a Hindoo 
 could be converted, all intelligent supporters of 
 missions and all missionaries themselves have real- 
 ized that their relation to the religions of the 
 heathen world is much more intricate and intimate 
 than that picture would suggest. As Sir William 
 Hunter has said: " We no longer suppose it possible 
 for an ignorant and zealous man to go forth simply 
 armed by his own desire to do what is right and 
 state the truth; we no longer believe it possible 
 for that man to succeed." ^ 
 
 It may not be too bold to say that probably the 
 missionaries, more than any other class of men, re- 
 joice over every feature of value which they can 
 discover in heathen religions. For, every element 
 of truth which these contain, every form of sensi- 
 tiveness to the higher ethical demands and relig- 
 ious affirmations of Christianity which they reveal, 
 makes it easier for the missionary to approach the 
 people, makes him more hopeful of seeing his own 
 great message take hold and do its work. It is a 
 welhknown missionary of the East who said: 
 
 L. M. C, Vol. I., p. 14. 
 
 165 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 " These delicious glimmerings of light we do find 
 by patient search in the religions of the orient, and 
 in the existence of such we missionaries who have 
 to combat those systems continually rejoice. We 
 gladly use those flashes of light in bringing home 
 the truth to the peoi^le, as did Paul at Athens. . . 
 But we sadly recognize how utterly inadequate is 
 that light to lead sinful man to XDcace with God." ^ 
 
 The missionary believes with the whole Christian 
 Church, that all these religions are about to be dis- 
 placed by the Christian faith. He does not wish 
 to see them merely destroyed; for the mere destruc- 
 tion of these religions, without the supply of what 
 is more adequate, would be only deplorable. That 
 which is hoped for and is being worked for with 
 such infinite ardor, self sacrifice and hope is the 
 substitution of the Christian religion for all other 
 forms of religion whatsoever. The missionary longs 
 for the day when there shall be placed before all men 
 the one severe and inevitable alternative between 
 Christianity and an irreligious life. Then it will 
 not be possible for a man to think it worth while 
 proving that he has any other positive relation to 
 the Unseen and the Eternal than that which is re- 
 vealed and granted in the Gos^^el of Jesus Christ. 
 
 So far as the work of evangelizing the world has 
 gone, various efPects have been produced in relation 
 to the other religions of the world. In the first 
 place, and as might be expected, the lower forms of 
 religion wholly and rapidly disappear. All those 
 
 ^ Rev. Dr. Chamberlain, " The Religions of the Orient," p. 10. 
 166 
 
The Missionary and Other Religions 
 
 which have a poor intellectual ground-work, which 
 have had less of the ideal in them and which have 
 had less connection with the ethical life, give way 
 at once, like children's sand heaps when the rising 
 tide washes over them. The earlier missionaries in 
 the South Sea Islands were not only rejoiced, but 
 utterly amazed, to discover with what ease whole 
 tribes could sometimes be persuaded of the absurd- 
 ity of their idolatrous beliefs. On several occasions, 
 when the missionaries sent native evangelists in 
 advance of them, they arrived some months after- 
 ward to find that the revolt against idolatry had 
 taken place merely by the teaching and arguments 
 of these evangelists. It was a comparatively sim- 
 ple matter in some of these cases to j)rove that the 
 idols most dreaded had no power, and to persuade 
 the leaders of the tribe to have done with a religion 
 based on such worthless conceptions. 
 
 It is when we come to consider the relation of 
 Christianity to the great religions of the East that 
 the problem assumes some complexity and the dis- 
 cussion possesses great importance. Nowhere are 
 the difficulties of this contact between Christianity 
 and its rivals more widely felt, more carefully 
 weighed, than in India. For, as has been said, " it 
 is the peculiar distinction of India that it has been 
 the theater of nearly all the religions." There we 
 have at any rate those two great religions, Hindu- 
 ism, with the elements of Buddhism which it con- 
 tains, and Mohammedanism; while in Ceylon we 
 have an intelligent and aggresssive Buddhism. 
 These religions like Christianity profess to be 
 
 167 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 founded, first, upon historical revelation and, sec- 
 ond, upon philosophical conceptions. Each of them 
 is able to point to events in the distant past through 
 which they assert that the supreme truth regarding 
 man and his spiritual relations was made known. 
 And they are able in support of the reality, nature 
 and results of this revelation to adduce what they 
 consider more or less irrefragable metaphysical 
 principles. These facts make the task of convic- 
 tion very much more difficult. And the question 
 which many persons are inclined to ask is, whether 
 there is hope that these religions will be speed- 
 ily displaced by the Christian faith? This half 
 sceptical wonder has in recent years been very con- 
 siderably increased by the attempts that have been 
 made in Europe and America to rehabilitate some 
 of these oriental religions. Oriental enthusiasts, 
 theosophists and spiritualistic cranks have com- 
 bined, by means of their imagery and mysticism 
 and their ethical enthusiasm, to suffuse over the 
 greatest Asiatic religions a glory which is not 
 their own. Constant appeal is made to the facts 
 that, in a sense, many of these are elder than the 
 Christian religion, have secured dominance over 
 the minds of hundreds of millions of the human 
 race, ^ and contain in their sacred writings a very 
 large number of noble and inspiring ethical princi- 
 ples and exhortations. 
 
 ^ The number of Buddhists has been often greatly exagger- 
 ated. "The best authorities are of the opinion that there are 
 not more than one hundred millions of real Buddhists in the 
 world." " Buddhism.," By Sir M. Monier=Williams. p. xv. 
 
 168 
 
The Missionary and Other Religions 
 
 Let us ask ourselves regarding the fitness of these 
 religions to cope with Christianity in meeting and 
 satisfying the deepest needs of men? 
 
 And, first, looking at the matter from the purely 
 religious point of view, the following statements 
 seem to me to be within the mark and easily de- 
 fensible. Christianity is infinitely superior to 
 Buddhism in that the latter is practically atheistic 
 or agnostic, while the Gospel of Christ finds its 
 fountain head in the doctrine of a living and per- 
 sonal God. No people have been long content with 
 a mere negation regarding the ultimate Being or 
 Fact which is the ground of all life and, therefore, 
 the object of all hope. Hence we find that, in those 
 regions where Buddhistic teaching has exercised 
 its influence, the general masses of the people have 
 not been content with Buddha's own placid nes- 
 cience regarding God. ' The heart of man reaches 
 out into the unseen, feeling after that which is per- 
 sonal and, judged from the purely religious point of 
 view, that religion would seem to be the highest, 
 the last in the order of evolution and the fittest to 
 control the homage of mankind, which contains the 
 deepest and most illuminative affirmations concern- 
 ing a supreme and personal God. 
 
 As one student has well said of the Buddhist relig- 
 ion: " Its ideal is to empty life of everything active 
 and positive, rather than to concentrate energy on a 
 
 i«As it (Buddhism) is atheistic in its origin, it very soon 
 becomes infected by the most fantastic mythology and 
 the most childish superstitions."-Art. "Religions, m En- 
 cyclop. Brit, by C. P. Tiele. 
 
 169 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 strong purpose. It does not train the affections to 
 virtuous and harmonious action, but denies to them 
 all action and consigns them to extinction. This 
 condemnation it has incurred by parting with that 
 highest stimulus to human virtue and endeavor, 
 which lies in the belief in a living God." ^ The 
 pessimism of Buddha is not a feature which is 
 made prominent by the people who recommend 
 Buddhism to our western world. But it was cen- 
 tral to the teaching and spirit of Buddha himself. 
 For him, conscious existence was an evil so dire 
 and painful that he believed religion consisted in 
 the prolonged effort to escape from it. This could 
 be accomplished, he thought, by a gradual separa- 
 tion of self from all passion, from all self-exaltation, 
 from all in fact that would nourish the desire for 
 personal existence. Hence the need of winning 
 the heart from all lusts of the flesh and preserving 
 a mind that is meek and lowly. The end thereof is 
 not life, but the loss of life. For that purpose 
 seek pureness, ensue those rare virtues, — simply 
 in order the more certainly and speedily to cease 
 to be. That is the soul of Buddhism, its strongest 
 motive and its loftiest ambition. Christianity 
 will displace Buddhism, because the latter is a re- 
 ligion " having no hope and without God in the 
 world." 
 
 Then, in the next place, Christianity is superior 
 to Mohammedanism, because of the relations which 
 it establishes between the worshiper and the living 
 
 History of Religion " by Professor Menzies D. D., p. 379. 
 i7n 
 
The Missionary and Other Religions 
 
 God. Mohammedanism, though it arose after Chris- 
 tianity and owes some of its most powerful features 
 to Mohammed's vague acquaintance with the Jew- 
 ish and Christian religions, yet belongs in order of 
 religious value to an earlier stage of development. 
 It is strikingly and severely monotheistic; but its 
 Grod is one whose ethical qualities are ill defined, 
 whose personal relations to the worshiper do not in- 
 vite responsive faith, love and service. The wor- 
 shiper feels a reverence for Allah, but at a great 
 distance. He believes in the protection of Allah, but 
 it is the protection of merely jjliysical force against 
 foes. As to the inward life of worship, the over- 
 shadowing of the wings of an infinite and watch 
 ful love, which is characteristic of Christianity, 
 Mohammedanism knows nothing. 
 
 Yet again, Christianity is superior to the vast and 
 subtle religion of Hinduism. This can be proved 
 thoroughly only by comparing the one religion 
 with the other, point by point. ^ Suffice it here 
 to make one general comparison. Hinduism is 
 proud of being what it would call universal. It 
 has succeeded in the past in absorbing into itself 
 the teaching of one great system after another. 
 The root of its life as an organized system is to be 
 found in its priestcraft. It was this which trans- 
 formed the earlier and simpler Nature Religion, 
 out of which it grew, into that terrible instrument 
 of human torture, the Brahmanism which existed 
 
 ^ Cf. " Buddhism " by Sir M. Monier=Williams, Lect. xviii. 
 Also F. F. Ellinwood D. D., in L. M. C, Vol. I, pp. 50-60. 
 
 171 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 in the days of Buddha. Buddhism really arose as a 
 kind of rationalistic modification of certain aspects 
 of this inhuman system. Over against its system of 
 caste Buddha taught the love of man, v/hich, whether 
 he foresaw it or not, would tend to abolish all caste ; 
 over against its demands for innumerable sacrifices 
 of blood to appease angry deities, Buddha set 
 his indifference whether there be a God or not.^ 
 Personal goodness seemed to him the supreme 
 matter of interest, as over against the miserable, 
 formal righteousness demanded by the priests. 
 But Hinduism waited its time and then quietly 
 adopted Buddha himself as one of its gods, and 
 Buddhism as a distinct religion departed from 
 India. When again Mohammedanism gained 
 its hold on sections of the iDeople, Hinduism 
 adopted some of its features. And now it is 
 striving in this century, though some think 
 not for the first time, to take into itself those 
 
 ^ There has been some discussion regarding the degree 
 of revolt against Hinduism of which Buddha may have been 
 conscious. Some describe him as a deliberate revolutionary. 
 Others deny that he meant to oppose any fundamental points 
 of the older religion. His attitude seems to have had some 
 resemblance to that of St. Francis of Assisi. In each case 
 principles were passionately adopted whose consistent real- 
 ization would have destroyed the ecclesiasticism of the day. 
 In each case the new preacher was met by both praise and 
 blame, both welcome and opposition from the authorities. 
 In each case the purity of the new light was dimmed by 
 being formally acknowledged and tolerated by the reigning 
 power and mixed up with its own lower and lowering institu- 
 tions and doctrines. 
 
 172 
 
The Missionary and Other ReHgions 
 
 elements of Christianity which it can conveniently 
 assimilate. There are some people who feel as if 
 this power of indefinite assimilation seems to 
 indicate that, in India at least, Hinduism can suc- 
 cessfully cope with Christianity. But, on the 
 other hand, we must remember that this system of 
 eclecticism, the mere adoption into itself of what 
 seems to be best in other systems, is not growth 
 from within. It is an arbitrary proceeding. It 
 resembles rather the enlargement of objects in the 
 inorganic world by accretion, than the development 
 of the energies of a living thing in the control of 
 more, and more intricate, organs and their func- 
 tions. Hinduism is not truly universal, because 
 it has no true unity. It has been well called a 
 conglomerate. Christianity, on the other hand, 
 is universal in a true sense, in that, while it 
 has affinities with whatever is real and valuable 
 in all systems, it has yet a distinctive life of its 
 own and takes up towards all a positive and 
 decisive attitude. While fitted for all men it is 
 one and the same in all men. When it recognizes 
 what is of value in Hinduism or Buddhism, it 
 simply finds there what it already contains. Its 
 sympathies arise not from its readiness to adopt 
 new elements from other systems, but from the 
 fact that the elements of good in all systems are 
 already in its own heart. 
 
 Lastly, it may be pointed out that Christianity 
 is superior to all these systems, from the purely 
 religious point of view, in that its supreme affirma- 
 tion has regard to God Himself as acting on be- 
 
 173 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 half of men; yea, as suffering with and for them 
 Any religion which falls short of this ideal is 
 thereby unfitted to cope with Christianity in the 
 effort to win the allegiance of the human heart. 
 If we are to have any thought or image of God, 
 any ideal of a religious relation to Him, none seems 
 conceivable that is higher than this, that God 
 Himself should spare not His own Son, but in 
 view of our deep and dire need should deliver 
 Him up for us all. Whatever is best in the 
 Pantheism of the Hindoo, in the enthusiasm of the 
 Buddhist, finds a more glorious expression and a 
 more living energy in the gospel of Christ. 
 
 Then we must pass to a comparison of Chris- 
 tianity with these religions from the social and 
 ethical point of view. It is too late merely to 
 admit that these great religions contain many 
 beautiful and true words regarding human rela- 
 tions in society. That is one of the ordinary facts 
 known to all, which ought to make all hearts glad. 
 Nor should any one hesitate to admit that within 
 certain limits these religions have performed im- 
 mense services to mankind. Concerning Buddhism 
 Sir M. Monier= Williams has said: "It promoted 
 progress up to a certain point. It preached purity 
 in thought, word and deed, though only for the 
 storing up of merit. It proclaimed the brother- 
 hood of humanity. It avowed sympathy with 
 social liberty and freedom. It gave back much 
 independence to women. It inculcated universal 
 benevolence, extending even to animals; and from 
 its declaration that a man\s future depended upon 
 
 174 
 
The Missionary and Other Religions 
 
 his present acts and conditions, it did good service 
 for a^ time in preventing stagnation, promoting 
 activity, and elevating the character of humanity.'" 
 As concerning Mohammedanism it must be said 
 that while, where its armies have taken and con- 
 quered regions of the world which were already 
 Christian, it has degraded their civilization; yet, on 
 the other hand, it has improved the social condition 
 of some of those tribes in India and Africa whom 
 it has overcome. It is able to raise up to its own 
 level, but only able also to drag down to its own 
 level peoples already above it. Nevertheless in 
 Mohammedanism, as in Buddhism and other ori- 
 ental religions, there are elements of an ethical na- 
 ture, features of social teaching which are, on the 
 whole, of real value. Concerning the value of 
 these elements of truth and their social influence, 
 as compared with the moral teaching and civilizing 
 power of Christianity, two or three other facts re- 
 quire to be observed. 
 
 (1). These true and beautiful sayings and com- 
 mandments are mingled in the sacred writings of 
 these religions with much that is wrong and even 
 degrading. Professor Max Mtiller, in his intro- 
 duction to the translation of the Sacred Books of 
 the East, apologizes for the fact that, though 
 these books were being translated for scientific pur- 
 poses and the use of scholars, there were passages 
 in them which, " though harmless and innocent in 
 themselves, cannot be rendered in modern language 
 
 1 L. M. c. Vol. I, p. 37. 
 
 175 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 without the appearance of coarseness."^ Even 
 though the accomplished editor suggested an ex- 
 planation of this by saying, that the oriental mind re- 
 gards many of these matters in a different way from 
 us, and that man at that time " really was an animal 
 with all the strength and weakness of an animal," 
 the explanation does not obliterate the fact nor 
 minimize its significance for our argument. Upon 
 this point Professor Chamberlain of Japan has 
 said concerning the Kojiki, the Japanese sacred 
 books which he translated: "The shocking ob- 
 scenity of word and act to which the * records ' bear 
 witness is another ugly feature which must not 
 quite be passed over in silence. It is true that 
 decency, as we understand it, is a very modern pro- 
 duct, and it is not to be looked for in a society in a 
 barbarous stage. At the same time, the whole range 
 of literature might perhaps be ransacked for a paral- 
 lel to the native filthiness of certain passages here."^ 
 Dr. Griffis, than whom there is no higher or fair- 
 er judge of the history of religion in Japan has 
 said: "Buddhism has had a fair field in JajDan, 
 and its outcome has not been elevating. Its influ- 
 ence has been atheistic, and not ethical. It added 
 culture and art to Japan as it brought with itself 
 the civilization of continental Asia." Mohammed- 
 anism, it must be said, suffers under the same dis- 
 ability as Buddhism, for the Koran also contains 
 much ethical teaching that is to be reprobated. 
 
 1 "The Sacred Books of the East." Vol I., Preface p. xxi. 
 
 2 Quoted by W. E. Griffis in " The Religions of Japan," p. 66 
 
 176 
 
The Missionary and Other ReHgions 
 
 Professor Max Mtiller, in the passage already 
 referred to, describes the causes which led to that 
 growth of what appears to us a heterogeneous 
 mass of irrelevant, inferior and oftentimes deplor- 
 able material around the purer and nobler teach- 
 ings which these religions possessed. Those which 
 he names may be " true causes," but he omits to 
 mention the one condition whose absence made the 
 operation of these causes ejffective, and whose 
 presence saved the records of the religion of Keve- 
 lation from the same disaster. This condition was 
 the possession of a standard of judgment. What 
 standard guided the minds of the Jews in the for- 
 mation of their canon it may not be easy to say. 
 Assuredly it was no ideal of scientific history, nor 
 any modern conception of the ethics of authorship 
 and publication. Probably the standard was a re- 
 ligious one, and was derived from the prophetic 
 teaching about the character of Jehovah and 
 about His purposes and dealings with Israel. The 
 canonical literature of the Old Testament does on 
 the whole deal with these two mutually related sub- 
 jects. In the formation of the New Testament 
 canon the early Church was guided by the ideal of 
 apostolic authority. The central figure in their 
 life and worship, the fountain head of truth and 
 supreme object of intellectual interest, was indeed 
 their Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ. But this 
 very fact made it the more obvious that henceforth 
 the normative Christian teaching must be formed 
 out of the writings of those who stood in unique 
 relations to Him both before and after His death 
 177 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 and resurrection. This close connection between 
 the standard of the canonical literature of the New 
 Covenant, and the personality of Jesus, undoubted- 
 ly accounts for the unexampled freedom of the 
 New Testament from all that is foolish and intellec- 
 tually contemptible, as well as from all teaching 
 that is unhealthy and impure/ The heathen re- 
 ligions had no such standard. The natural causes 
 which Professor Max Miiller has enumerated had 
 freedom to act corruptingly, unintelligently upon 
 the growth of the Sacred Books of the East. 
 
 (2). Although these religions do recognize the 
 need that men should give up certain forms of self- 
 ishness and evil-doing and live according to the 
 higher standard, they do not provide or manifest 
 any force that shall enable their adherents to 
 realize this ideal. Buddhism, while urging with 
 passion the ideals of the pure heart and the 
 clear mind, distinctly asserts that no man can 
 possibly escape the direct penalty of his sins. The 
 utmost that a man can hope for is that he may be 
 able by good deeds, by pure thoughts, to lay up for 
 himself a store of merit. How the man who is 
 
 ^ There are, indeed, in the Old Testament a few narratives 
 of shame, and the people of Israel did^pass through various 
 stages of religious and moral attainment. It is the peculiar 
 glory of the religion of Revelation that it has preserved the 
 main outlines of the progress of that Revelation, and that in 
 Jesus Christ we have the standard by means of which we can 
 distinguish what was false or evil from what was true and 
 good in the faith and practice of earlier days. This is the 
 only religion in the world which possesses that feature, and 
 no religion can be final which does not possess it, 
 
 178 
 
The Missionary and Other Religions 
 
 not only capable of evil, but is also sold under 
 sin, enslaved to his past, can reform himself, has 
 been the permanent problem of human history ; 
 and Buddhism like Mohammedanism has failed to 
 provide a solution. Although in each case one 
 man, a teacher or prophet, stands out as the 
 founder of the religion, the revealer of all the 
 wisdom which it contains, each of these religions 
 suffers in comparison with Christianity, the 
 moment one even thinks of contrasting Buddha or 
 Mohammed with Jesus Christ. In Him the 
 ideal man is at once the fountain of light and of 
 strength, the object of hope and inspiration. From 
 Him His followers have learned; in Him they 
 believe that they receive personal and actual invig- 
 oration; and unto Him they hope, one and all, 
 personally to return. Were He not the Ideal Man 
 at the beginning of their history, the hope would 
 be no inspiration; were the hope not shining 
 there before their eyes the memory would be a 
 bitter mockery; and were He only a memory and a 
 hope, but not a living presence, His followers 
 would find it hard to pursue their ideal and to 
 cherish their love. It is because they find 
 in Him one who from day to day is in actual touch 
 with their separate selves, that they have gone out 
 to shed His light upon all parts of the earth. 
 
 (3). But further, there are many positive teach- 
 ings characteristic of these religions and derived 
 from their founders, which we now know to have 
 been simply blunders and which put them, when 
 compared with Christianity, in a realm below com- 
 
 179 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 parison with it. Various matters might be named 
 in proof of this; let one be final and sufficient, as a 
 test, i. e., their teaching concerning women. As 
 Dr. Post, that great observer and teacher, who has 
 lived so long in Mohammedan lands, has said: 
 "Women determine the social condition in any 
 country and any race. No race has ever risen 
 above the condition of its women." The condition 
 to which Mohammedanism has reduced woman= 
 kind is too well known to need description. The 
 land of the veil is the land of woman's degradation. 
 And this is the result of a gradual lowering of the 
 tone of Mohammed himself. It is the result of his 
 personal example and of the legislation which his 
 criminal life led him to issue. His own life was 
 the fountain from which the long-drawn-out and 
 most wretched history of womankind in the great 
 Mohammedan countries has been derived. And 
 as regards Buddhism again, let this be sufficient, 
 that Buddha had no message for womankind. As 
 the great authority whom I have already quoted 
 has presented it. Buddhism says; "Avoid married 
 life; shun it as if it were a burning pit of live coals 
 or having entered on it abandon wife, children, 
 home, and go about as celibate monks engaging in 
 nothing except in the meditation and recitation of 
 Buddha's law, that is if you aim at the highest 
 degree of sanctification." ' In this matter also the 
 teaching of Buddhism appeals not merely to the 
 words but to the example of Buddha himself. For 
 
 ^ "Buddhism " by Sir M. Monier=Williams p. 562. 
 
 180 
 
The Missionary and Other ReHgions 
 
 he not only forsook his own wife and child, but 
 encouraged others to do the same. His opening 
 of the new religion to women was wrung 
 from him and did not belong to his original plan. 
 It seems almost an impertinence to name these 
 forms of religious teaching in the same breath 
 with the example and precepts of Jesus Christ. 
 Let the Christian ideal of a wife and mother and 
 sister stand out as proof that in this matter 
 Mohammed or Buddha are not fit even to be com- 
 ]pared with the Founder of Christianity. 
 
 The comparison of Christianity with these other 
 religions may still further be carried out by looking 
 at the course of their respective historical develop- 
 ments. On this matter it is sufiicient to say that, 
 while the history of Christianity has been upwards 
 and progressive, the histories of Mohammedanism 
 and Buddhism, not to speak of Hinduism, have 
 been downwards. As regards the first, the lack 
 of a true power of development is evident from the 
 life of Mohammed himself.. Concerning him Dr. 
 Bruce of Persia has well said: "During the first 
 fifty4wo years we see him in his boyhood and 
 youth among the Arabs as a young man of excep- 
 tional sincerity, truthfulness, and purity of life. 
 From his twenty^fifth year to his fiftieth, while 
 he is a monogamist, we see the picture of his 
 family life; and it is perhaps one of the most 
 beautiful that we can find in all the history of non== 
 Christian peoples. But when we pass to his ma- 
 tured age and see him set up his standard in 
 Medina as a prophet when he is fifty^wo years of 
 
 181 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 age, and when we study the last eleven years of his 
 life, we are struck at once with the most awful and 
 most terrible of contrasts." ^ Concerning Hindu- 
 ism, on the other hand, it has again been well 
 said: "The sacred books of Hinduism have degen- 
 erated from the lofty aspirations of the Vedic 
 nature-worship to the vileness of Saktism, from 
 the noble praises of Varuna to the low sensuality 
 of the Tantras, from Vedic descriptions of creation 
 sublime as the opening of John's Gospel to the 
 escapades of Krishna or the polyandry which dis- 
 graced the celestial family of Pandu." ^ 
 
 No one can maintain that Mohammedanism in the 
 Turkish Empire is a noble or x)ure religion, or has 
 yielded any promise of developing into such since 
 the early years of its military triumphs. And no one 
 can maintain that, even in Ceylon or Japan, 
 Buddhism has in this last century manifested any 
 forces which are fit to carry a people forward in 
 religious and ethical attainment. The history of 
 these religions has been a steady decline of purity, 
 truth and power. On the other hand the history of 
 Christianity is the history of a progressive move- 
 ment in thought and in personal life. The devel- 
 opment of religious and ethical ideas in the Old 
 Testament is now more fully described and appre- 
 ciated than it has ever been before. And the 
 Christian Church, in spite of many dark periods 
 that have intervened, in spite of disagreement in 
 
 ^L. M. C, Vol. I, p, 18., in The "Life of Mohamet," by 
 Sir. Wm. Muir. pp. 506, 7. 
 2L. M. C, Vol. I, p. 57. 
 
 182 
 
The Missionary and Other Religions 
 
 various directions, ecclesiastical, theological, social 
 and ethical, whose memory it is a pain to cherish, 
 has yet manifested the true elements of evolution 
 towards an ideal. Alike in the world of theology 
 and the world of practice, the life of the Christian 
 Church can be proved to be incomparably richer, 
 purer, nobler, and of course vaster in the nine- 
 teenth century than in the second. Let the 
 hymns sung in our Churches, the great sermon lit- 
 erature, the ever accumulating manuals of devotion 
 to the deeper life, the wide and wise systems of 
 charity and evangelization, which all flow from the 
 life of the Church of Christ to=day, bear witness to 
 the fact that it is in process of evolution toward 
 some great ideal of worship and character, of love 
 and purity. When you take a wide enough view 
 of the whole course of Christian history, even af- 
 ter you allow for all the questionable experiments, 
 all the miserable failures of individual men in this 
 institution during the centuries that lie between 
 the raising of Christ from the dead and the close 
 of the nineteenth century, nothing can reduce the 
 significance of this one fact that at last one religion 
 has been found whose life after two thousand years 
 appears to be more vigorous and even more full 
 of the spirit and ideal of its Founder than in any 
 of its earlier generations. 
 
 If then, Christianity is in process of destroy- 
 ing the older and most impressive systems of relig- 
 ion, what are the weapons by which this work is 
 being done? On the aggressive side the weapons 
 are two=fold. In the first place, the philosophical 
 
 183 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 ground^work of all these religions is being sub- 
 jected to the severest test by being compelled to 
 face the scientific and philosophical theories and 
 achievements of the western world. The latter 
 are largely the creation of the Christian spirit. 
 Generation after generation has arisen, some of 
 whose sons in Europe and America have thought 
 that at last the argument or the system had been 
 discovered which would annihilate Christianity; but 
 Christianity has triumphed over them all. And her 
 repeated triumphs enable one, with some confi- 
 dence, to say that the philosophical ground=work 
 upon which this religion rests is incomparably the 
 noblest and the truest which the world has yet 
 seen. But how different is the result of that con- 
 tact between oriental religions and occidental 
 thought during our own generation! Concern- 
 ing Buddhism Dr. Griffis has said: "Despite its 
 apparent interest in and harmony with statements 
 of science, it does not hold the men of thought or 
 those who long for the spiritual purification and 
 elevation of Japan." ^ And in India, with some 
 notable and remarkable exceptions, it seems to be 
 found impossible for educated men to retain their 
 beliefs in the religion of their fathers. The scien- 
 tific and philosophical training which they receive 
 in the higher institutions of learning makes the 
 whole outlook of Mohammedanism and Buddhism, 
 as these have hitherto existed, simply impossible. 
 Before the white light of knowledge they pale and 
 
 1 " The Religions of Japan," p. 285. 
 
 184: 
 
The Missionary and Other Religions 
 
 vanish Kke ghosts. But in another direction 
 scholarship is undermining the authority of these 
 religions; for orientalists are investigating, with the 
 most minute care and the most sympathetic atti- 
 tude of mind, the historical origins of these relig- 
 ions. This process of investigation is also mak- 
 ing it impossible for educated men to remain be- 
 lievers in Buddhism or Mohammedanism, as these 
 have hitherto existed. 
 
 But this brings us to another matter of very 
 great importance and interest. Many minds are 
 now asking, whether or not it is possible that these 
 eastern religions, in the conflict with Christianity 
 and in cooperation with it, may not give birth to a 
 new religion which shall comprise the excellencies 
 of all religions at present in existence, exclude 
 their errors, and so become the ideal embodiment 
 of truth and the ideal inspiration of virtue? The 
 last quarter of a century has seen many most inter- 
 esting experiments of this kind in the East. The 
 action of Christianity and Western civilization 
 upon the adherents of these ancient religions, and 
 upon the peoples that have been so long bound in 
 the fetters of Hindoo civilization, has created a ver- 
 itable fever of energetic independence. Men's 
 minds are striking out in various directions, full of 
 daring and full of hope. For example, even among 
 Mohammedans of India there are certain men who 
 seek to prove that the bad features of Islam, 
 as it is historically known, such as its approval 
 of polygamy, its religious devotion to war, its 
 subjection to the authority of the Koran, are not 
 
 185 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 original elements of Mohammedanism, are not 
 essential to it, are now rather to be discarded 
 as incidental evils that have appeared in the course 
 of time. Some men of considerable acuteness and 
 great earnestness are seeking in this direction to 
 reestablish Mohammedanism while purifying it 
 from obvious errors. Amongst Hindoos there are 
 many who cherish strong hopes of being able to 
 purify both Christianity and their own religion by 
 such a process of mutual criticism. Certain of 
 these movements have become widely known 
 throughout Christendom. The work of Keshub 
 Chunder Sen in his leadership of that most inter- 
 esting movement known as the Brahmo^somaj, is 
 the best type of these. Followers of his, like Mo- 
 zoomdar,^ have done much in the spirit of their 
 leader to throve light upon the impossibility of 
 such a task as he undertook. Even in Japan, or 
 rather I should say, of course in Japan, where we 
 may expect to see every kind of experiment in 
 every line of life attempted by that sprightly peo- 
 ple, we have various efforts at religious compro- 
 mise. We are told that recently a fraternal con- 
 ference was held in Tokio in which nineteen 
 Buddhists, sixteen Christians, a few Shintoists 
 and a few others of no decidedly religious convic- 
 tions, met to describe and emphasize those matters 
 in which they agree and by virtue of which they 
 could proceed to work amongst their fellow-coun- 
 
 ^ Cf. Mozoomdar's two most devout and interesting works, 
 "The Orientr.l Christ," and "The Spirit of God." 
 
 186 
 
The Missionary and Other ReHgions 
 
 trymen. " Much was made of trying to adapt 
 Christianity to Japanese thought and character." 
 The Japanese periodicals described the movement 
 as " Yabutsu Sekken," which means, " the question 
 of the coming together of Buddhism and Christi- 
 anity."' 
 
 We may expect that these experiments will be 
 made in still greater numbers and with still greater 
 vigor. But their success depends upon the ques- 
 tion whether those religions contain any doctrine 
 or reveal any source of inspiration which is of es- 
 sential moment to the religious consciousness of 
 man and which Christianity does not already con- 
 tain. This is the point which many very confident 
 prophets of the success of some such system of 
 eclecticism habitually forget. For, if these relig- 
 ions do contain some such force or truth, let it be 
 named, and let its absence from the Christian 
 Church be proved. If they do not, compromise is 
 a logical impossibility. Yet another fact in con- 
 nection with this attempt to establish a final relig- 
 ion out of the ruins, as we must call them, of the 
 oriental faiths, is frequently ignored. When one 
 turns to any books or tracts intended to describe 
 those ethical teachings in Buddhism or Hindu- 
 ism or Mohammedanism which are of permanent 
 value, we soon begin to discover that the stand- 
 ard of selection is that of the spirit of Jesus Christ. 
 For example, when Dr. Paul Carus, of Chicago, 
 publishes a book of great interest and entitles it, 
 
 ^ Vide Art. by Dr. J. D . Davis, in " The Advance," Mar. 11, 1897. 
 187 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 " The Gospel of Buddha," a brief examination re- 
 veals the fact that only a Christian man, or a man 
 with a Christian training, which for this argu- 
 ment is the same thing, could have made this 
 selection. And, when one reads on certain of its 
 pages that leading Buddhists in India or else- 
 where have highly praised it as a summary of the 
 essence of Buddhism, one cannot but remember 
 that the taste of these educated people has been 
 much molded by their own personal acquaintance 
 with the ethical teaching of the New Testament. 
 After all it seems to be the fact that all these com- 
 promises, where they are intelligently made or 
 possess any value whatsoever, are a tribute to the 
 incomparable truth and worth of the Christian 
 religion. It is the Lord of the religions of the 
 earth. They are all submitting themselves to its 
 judgment, even in order to discover what is best 
 in themselves and what has been most important 
 in their own history. 
 
 One argument employed in favor of the idea that 
 Christianity cannot cope with these great religions of 
 India arises from the exaggeration of the difference 
 between the oriental and occidental types of mind. 
 The oriental mind is described as so peculiar in its 
 methods of thought, so molded by the ideals of 
 religion which have obtained sway over it through 
 long generations, that it is hopeless to think of 
 instilling into it what are called purely Western 
 ideas of religious thought and life. And no doubt 
 the oriental mind is strangely different from the 
 European. No doubt also in virtue of its habits 
 
 188 
 
The Missionary and Other ReHgions 
 
 the Indian or the Chinaman may find it exceedingly 
 difficult to assimilate the theology of the historical 
 Christian Church. But this does not prove that 
 Christianity is so unsuited to the oriental mind that 
 the latter will not be persuaded to receive it. 
 
 For, in the first place, we must remember that 
 Christianity had its origin in the East and that 
 the Christian Scriptures are full of modes of 
 thought and mystic conceptions which claim close 
 kinship with those of the oriental religions. 
 
 And, in the second place, a double inquiry 
 suggests itself regarding this oriental type of 
 mind. To begin with, one must inquire whether 
 its modes of working are superior to those which 
 the European mind has attained. It is not at 
 all obvious that, so far as the oriental mind is 
 incapable of appreciating the severe scientific 
 methods of the European, it is not inferior to 
 the latter. Its characteristic elements may, per- 
 haps, be described as, first, thinking through 
 imagery. No doubt the mind that is content to do 
 its thinking by similes and metaphors does obtain 
 frequent illuminations. The contemplation and 
 comparison of conceptions which in themselves 
 seem diverse may gradually bring to light 
 apparent points of similarity and suggest 
 thoughts both novel and beautiful. But this 
 kind of thinking, which pervades the sacred 
 books of the East from end to end, and may 
 be said to be characteristic of the oriental type of 
 mind, has very decided limitations. There is no 
 certainty regarding the conclusions to which it 
 189 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 leads. There is required the more sober work of 
 analysis, the use of some standards of reality, the 
 appeal to some facts whose nature is already inde- 
 pendently ascertained, ere this kind of thinking 
 can be considered of objective value. As a matter 
 of fact it has resulted in making oriental religion 
 so intensely individualistic as it has become even 
 in its Buddhistic form. Then, further, there is 
 that element of the oriental type of mind, known 
 as the mystical. To be sure Europe has had its 
 mystics and some of them are not unworthy to be 
 compared with the most sublime of Indian thinkers 
 and teachers. But in the East, mysticism, the 
 sense of inward personal contact with the ideal, 
 the infinite — the submission of the mind and heart 
 to the sway of thoughts which are vast, indefinite, 
 which seem to bring the individual soul into con- 
 tact, vague but real, inexpressible but sweet 
 and entrancing, with the Alhsoul, the One, 
 the Eternal — this has been at once the strength and 
 the weakness of oriental thought. It is open to 
 the severest criticism not only on intellectual 
 grounds but for its religious and moral effects, for 
 its easy exaggeration of a truth into a most danger- 
 ous if impalpable superstition. Then, yet again, 
 this oriental thought is distinguished by its lack of 
 dependence upon the historical and actual. Its 
 religions profess to be grounded upon events in the 
 past, but so little has the oriental mind cared for 
 this, so little are the facts essential to the religion, 
 that they have become overlaid with all manner of 
 legend and folly. The individual founder of the 
 
 190 
 
The Missionary and Other Religions 
 
 religion is not necessary to its continuance; he 
 passes away and henceforth becomes the subject 
 of popular, endless and entirely uncritical descrip- 
 tion and faith. 
 
 Over against these elements of the oriental 
 mind we place those of the western mind, with 
 its clinging to the concrete, which is at once 
 the fountain and the result of its marvelous at- 
 tainments, and its careful scrutiny of history. 
 One young Japanese scholar after a prolonged 
 course of study in America returned to his native 
 land to become a professor. He resolved to apply 
 the scientific methods of inquiry which he had 
 learned abroad to the history of his ancestral re- 
 ligions. The results were so surprising, and pro- 
 duced such dismay among his pui^ils and in the 
 minds of the authorities, that he had to cease from 
 that kind of work. It may be said of course that 
 similar methods of coercion have been applied by 
 ecclesiastical authorities to those who investigated 
 the history of Christian origins and Christian 
 documents, and who reported in terms not favor- 
 able to traditional ideas of these matters. But it 
 has to be remembered, on the other hand, that 
 while in Japan the investigation was killing and 
 is killing the faith of educated people in those 
 stories, the far deeper investigations into Christian 
 history have not ended in that way. In fact so 
 valuable have historical studies proved to the life 
 of the Church, that to-day they are pursued with a 
 thoroughness and on a scale unsurpassed by any- 
 thing in the intellectual life of man. 
 
 191 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 The enormous importance which the Christian 
 religion has come to attach to exactness of his- 
 torical statement, arises from the fact that this 
 religion is nothing without its history. The 
 powers that to-day work in the human heart are 
 said by it to be vitally connected with events and 
 deeds which occurred amongst men. Without the 
 appropriation of the latter a man remains dead to 
 the former. 
 
 These features which indicate the immense supe- 
 riority of the European over the Asiatic mind raise 
 now the second inquiry, whether that which is 
 likely to take place, instead of being the absorption 
 of Christianity into the vague cavern of the " ori- 
 ental type of mind," will not be, to change 
 the metaphor, the emancipation of that mind from 
 its age long fetters. The experience of the Education 
 Department of the Government of India, as well 
 as that of the Missionary Church, seems to indicate 
 that Eurojpean science and philosophy, as well as 
 religion, are about to produce in the Eastern world 
 one of the swiftest and mightiest intellectual revo- 
 lutions known to history. That contributions of 
 value will be made from the East to the stock of 
 the world's wisdom and to man's spiritual insight, 
 goes without saying. The Church is ready to wel- 
 come them all. But it is practically certain that the 
 Church of Christ and the European mind will, as 
 regards modes of thought and forms of religious 
 life, give infinitely more than they will ever re- 
 ceive. Signs of this are abundant enough already. 
 For, after all, something like two millions of Asiatics 
 
 192 
 
The Missionary and Other Religions 
 
 have become converts to Christianity, and there are 
 many thousands of Indian men whose minds are 
 saturated with the methods and spirit of occidental 
 science and philosophy. That the result is at pres- 
 ent confusing, and is accompanied by some phe- 
 nomena which are ludicrous, as well as startling, 
 in the crude theories and expressions of opinion 
 characteristic of the young Indian who has slight- 
 ly tasted European modes of thought, is only 
 what we ought to expect. But the work of trans- 
 formation is proceeding. It may not be too bold 
 to assert, that as a result, the leading races of the 
 world will receive one more proof that their prog- 
 ress in philosophy, in science and in religion has 
 been real, by finding that their communication of 
 the wealth so hardly won is making the poorer 
 people of the Orient rich after the same fashion. 
 
 193 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE MISSIONARY AS SAVIOR. 
 
 In the preceding pages we have discussed mis- 
 sionary activity in various phases and the influence 
 of the missionary movement upon the heathen 
 world in various directions. We have seen the 
 preacher of Christ as the pioneer, opening up 
 new countries and bringing them into living 
 connection with the centers of civilization. 
 We have seen him as the linguist, translator 
 and author; we have watched him as the edu- 
 cator, the overseer, the adviser of native teach- 
 ers, converts and chieftains. Such a survey might 
 suggest to some minds that the aim of the mission- 
 ary is to be found in these activities and labors, 
 and that the final reason for this great movement 
 must be discovered in its social and visible effects. 
 It would be, however, a great mistake to sujppose 
 that the missionary engages in any of these forms 
 of service to mankind for their own sakes. He 
 knows their value and rejoices in it; he would be 
 the last to depreciate any portion of the work which 
 he has done or the results which he has seen in the 
 midst of a heathen civilization. But these activi- 
 ties have all been entered upon as means towards 
 another end, which is the supreme object of his 
 ambition. They may all be described as the means 
 
 191 
 
The Missionary as Savior 
 
 or the adjuncts or the consequences of his devotion 
 to that one aim. 
 
 The missionaries have gone out to do the work of 
 saviors. They believed that this is the one 
 purpose for which it is worth their while to sacri- 
 fice their whole careers and, if necessary, yield up 
 their lives. Their whole object, the one constant 
 endeavor which is ever present to their minds, is the 
 making of individual heathen men and women 
 into Christian converts. For this they translate 
 and educate, for this they travel and suffer, organ- 
 ize and preach. They desire to bring men to that 
 act which the Christian world calls faith in Christ, 
 to that accompanying experience which the Chris- 
 tian world calls the new birth. In the pursuit of 
 this aim, they believe that they are acting in the 
 spirit and following the example of Jesus Christ, 
 their Master. He spoke of men as lost, as separate 
 from God, like the prodigal from his father; and 
 the supreme aim of His ministry and death was to 
 bring this condition to an end, to save the lost, to 
 arouse the trust and love of man towards God. 
 This aim passed from Him to His apostles; they 
 too went everywhere seeking to persuade men to 
 believe in Christ, to enter upon those relations 
 with God which He had made possible. The 
 missionary, as a man who himself has received this 
 consciousness of the new life and finds himself in 
 relations of trust and harmony towards God, strives 
 to do for the heathen world the same work which 
 the apostles accomplished for so many in the 
 Graeco=Roman vforld, in the name of Christ. To 
 
 195 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 the mind of the missionary, the word " lost " which 
 fell from the lips of Jesus describes accurately, if 
 dismally, the condition of heathen men and women. 
 Having received something of the Spirit of Christ 
 into his heart, he yearns to be the means of deliver- 
 ing some men and women out of their dread con- 
 dition into the life of divine fellowship. It is 
 this alone which seems so glorious a work, that for 
 its sake he will give up all that he counts dear, as 
 we have seen, and toil in all directions at any task 
 which promises to aid him in this supreme purpose. 
 If we examine the journals, letters and speeches 
 of evangelical missionaries of any section of the 
 Christian Church, working amongst the children of 
 any race, we find that it is for this they watch 
 and work through all the years. When Henry 
 Martyn, after landing in India, expressed the de- 
 sire to " burn out for God," his thought was fixed 
 upon this work of a savior; when Carey spent his 
 forty years and more in toil of many kinds, his 
 eyes were ever directed forwards towards the per- 
 suasion of the Indian peoples to become believers 
 in Jesus Christ; when J. G. Paton remained on 
 Tanna after the death of his wife, lonely, crushed 
 and fever=stricken, when he turned a deaf ear 
 to proposals that he should leave the island for a 
 time, when he saw the ship sail out to sea and 
 went from the shore to his desolate house again, 
 that which was in his mind, which shone like a 
 beacon of hope before the eyes of his soul, was the 
 prospect of watching some fierce and brutal is- 
 
 196 
 
The Missionary as Savior 
 
 lander begin to see the light, to feel the stings of 
 conscience, to seek the forgiveness of God and find the 
 transforming fellowship of Jesus Christ; when a 
 man so full of domestic tenderness and sympathetic 
 love as James Gilmour gave himself up to the mis- 
 erable loneliness of those long winters in Mongo- 
 lia, when he stood under his little awning on the 
 public street day after day, selling medicines and 
 books, and speaking with all who would approach 
 him, what did he hunger most for, but the sight 
 of some dull, self-satisfied Mongol heart, broken 
 down by the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? 
 As the missionary directs all his energies towards 
 this one end, he finds that there are two agencies 
 of a personal nature through which he may hope to 
 succeed. In the first place, he appears amongst 
 these strange races simply as a witness to the ex- 
 13eriences which the Christian religion has brought 
 to himself. Formal preaching is of no avail, regu- 
 lar instruction has no place, until some have been 
 persuaded and have entered into sympathy with 
 his thought. In order to create that sympathy he 
 must be able to describe and bear personal testimo- 
 ny to certain great moral and spiritual experiences 
 whose value will be evident or can be made evident 
 to his heathen auditors. " My experience of 
 Christ" is the text of all his preaching. I have 
 heard one of the most successful missionaries in 
 India say, that when he enters a new village and 
 gathers a few people round him, he begins by tell- 
 ing them what Jesus Christ has done for him per- 
 
 197 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 sonally. It is his peace and hope and love felt 
 toward God, his assurance of the Fatherhood of God, 
 to which he directs attention. Then he asks them if 
 their religion has done that for them. But, in the 
 second place, his teaching must receive illumination 
 from his own character and life. For, as it has 
 been well put," the Moslem must first find Christ in 
 the missionary, before he can find Him in Jesus of 
 Nazareth."^ Here in a Christian land we are per- 
 haps able to distinguish between the value of a 
 minister's teaching and that of his personal char- 
 acter; we have learned from repeated and bitter ex- 
 perience not to make the truth of the teaching and 
 its influence upon our hearts to depend exclusively 
 upon its fulfilment by the preacher himself. And 
 yet who has not felt that added force which is given 
 to the exhortation of the plainest man, when we real- 
 ize that his own character and life accord with the 
 ideal which he is urging upon us? In a heathen 
 land they are unable to make any such distinctions; 
 the missionary must himself be an evidence of 
 Christianity. He must reveal the Gospel at work; 
 in his own relations with the natives, he must 
 exemplify the relations in which he says that Jesus 
 Christ stands towards all men. The mind which 
 was in Christ must be also obviously in him. 
 The result may be that the heathen come first of 
 all to trust him as their friend ere they can be con- 
 vinced that his friendliness is derived from 
 
 ^ President Washburn in " Missions at Home and 
 Abroad." p. 154. 
 
 198 
 
The Missionary as Savior 
 
 Another. But by whatever steps the native mind 
 may move towards the great conclusion, it is prac- 
 tically impossible that a man, calling himself a mis- 
 sionary of Christ, who is notoriously unlike Him, 
 should lead them through those steps. It may be that 
 the conclusion reached is after all not that which 
 the missionary desires. A man may be content to 
 say, as an accomplished Indian Mohammedan is re- 
 ported to have said, — " I think Jesus Christ must 
 have been a wonderful man. He must have been 
 something like Mr. Hewlett of Benares," — naming 
 a well=known missionary. But whether the great 
 desire of the missionary is attained or not, this one 
 thing he knows is essential to its attainment, that, 
 amidst the many disappointments which he meets 
 and the many trials of his patience, he should 
 manifest the strong self-control and sympathetic 
 meekness of his Master. His aim, as it has been 
 well expressed, must have nothing sectarian in it. 
 This too is part of the character which he must 
 display, viz. the charity that overpasses differences 
 of opinion with his fellow Christians. The unity 
 of spirit which, as a matter of fact, is being exer- 
 cised in so inspiring a fashion by the missionaries 
 of the various evangelical denominations, as they 
 work together in foreign lands, is essential to 
 the task of winning the heathen to faith. " The 
 true aim of missionary work," it has been well said, 
 " is to make Christ known to the world. Nothing 
 is foreign to this work which reveals His spirit or 
 the characteristics of His Kingdom, and nothing 
 199 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 is essential to it which is peculiar to a sect, a class, 
 or a civilization." ' 
 
 These facts receive their best illustration, many- 
 think, in the work and influence of the medical 
 missionary. This department of missionary en- 
 terj)rise has developed with extraordinary rapid- 
 ity during the latter half of this century; and it has 
 proved to be one of the most effective weapons 
 which can be employed in the heathen world. 
 Whereas fifty years ago they were exceedingly fev>" 
 and far between, there are now throughout the 
 world over four hundred fully qualified medical 
 missionaries, ninety of whom are women. They, 
 with a large number of assistants, are said to treat 
 more than a million persons every year. In India 
 alone there are eighty^seven male and fifty-seven 
 female missionaries, who have trained and employ 
 one hundred and sixty^eight native medical assist- 
 ants, and who carry on their labors in connection 
 with forty- eight hospitals and eighty^seven dis- 
 pensaries. It is unnecessary to enter with any 
 detail upon the significance of the work which the 
 medical missionary does. He himself sees in his 
 ministry the nearest possible human approach to 
 that of Jesus. This healer of the sick means not 
 only to relieve suffering, but in doing so to reveal 
 the grace of God, to touch some responsive chord in 
 darkened hearts and win from them appreciation 
 of the divine love. In the daily work carried on 
 amongst innumerable out^door patients the opportu- 
 
 ^ President Washburn of Constantinople, in " Missions at 
 Home and Abroad," p. 164. 
 
 200 
 
The Missionary as Savior 
 
 nity may not be good for that awakening of person- 
 al and intelligent interest in Christian experience; 
 but these transient patients by going forth to 
 sound abroad the praises of the missionary's skill 
 and the missionary's friendliness do valuable work 
 in stimulating the interest of the community far 
 and wide. It is, however, amongst those who be- 
 come inmates of a hospital, or whom the Christian 
 doctor is able to treat for prolonged periods in their 
 homes, that the greatest results are obtained. That 
 mutual understanding and sympathy which springs 
 up always between physician and patient is a new 
 experience to the native. The fact that the 
 medical missionary accepts no personal reward for 
 his exhausting and inexplicable self-denial is a new 
 cause of wonder. The fact that most of these cases 
 are serious, that the sufferer is on the borderland 
 between life and death, and that the whole problem 
 of existence and personal responsibility is con- 
 genial to his state of mind, give the alert and 
 eager herald of Christ opportunity for bearing 
 witness to the name of his Master in its signifi- 
 cance for his own heart and for the destiny of all 
 men. The results which flow from this kind of 
 work are in many cases most startling. Stories 
 are innumerable, from all parts of the world, of 
 the effects produced, in places far from the scene of 
 the medical mission, by the example and teaching 
 of converts who have gone to their distant homes 
 from its hospital. From such small beginnings 
 large churches have grown, new mission fields 
 have been opened up, over and over again. 
 
 201 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 Nowhere has the work of the medical missionary 
 been more beautifully portrayed than by Dr. Post 
 of Beirut, himself one of the most successful 
 physician=evangelists. " There is a language," he 
 says, " which all can understand, and which carries 
 a message which every man cares sooner or later 
 to hear. From the moment the medical missionary 
 sets foot on his chosen field he is master of this 
 universal language, this unspoken tongue of the 
 heart, and welcome to the homes of strangers. 
 The simple Arab lifts for him the curtain of his 
 goat's hair tent and bids him enter. The mandarin 
 calls him to his palace, the peasant begs him to 
 come to his lowly cabin, the Brahmin leads him to 
 the recesses of his zenana. He stands before 
 kings, and governors escort him with squadrons of 
 cavalry, or take him to and fro in their gunboats 
 or their barges of state. Kings build hospitals 
 for him, and the rulers of the earth aid him with 
 their treasures and their power. . . . You take 
 the Bible to the heathen, and he may spit upon it 
 or burn it, or throw it aside as worthless or harm- 
 ful. You xDreach the Gospel to him, and he may 
 regard you as a hireling who makes preaching a 
 trade. He may meet your argum^ents with sophis- 
 try, your appeals with a sneer. You educate him 
 and he may change from a heathen to an infidel. 
 But heal his bodily ailment in the name of Christ 
 and you are sure at least that he will love you and 
 bless you, and that all you say will have to him a 
 meaning and a power not conveyed by other lips." * 
 
 ^ 111 "MiBsions at Home and Abroad," pp. 316, 347. 
 202 
 
The Missionary as Savior 
 
 The medical missionary seldom or never allows 
 himself to forget that his life has been given to 
 what has aptly been called " the double cure." ^ 
 He is appointed to heal the bodies of men in his 
 hospital as a missionary of Christ, in order that 
 through the avenues of sympathy and trust thus 
 opened, he may be able to secure for his patients 
 the healing of the deeper and more dismal diseases 
 of the soul. He is unfaithful to his calling if the 
 latter is neglected under the stress of the former 
 labor. Where the two aspects of his work are kept 
 well in view, and arrangements are made for the 
 wise and affectionate instruction of the inmates of 
 the hospital, the number of converts to the Chris- 
 tian faith is often very great. 
 
 One of the most striking results of the medical 
 missionary movement has been that through the 
 work of these Christian men and women admission 
 has been obtained to the homes of the noble and the 
 wealthy in oriental lands. The homes of the Chinese 
 dignitaries, the zenana of the Brahmin open their 
 doors, — uneasily, it may be, and reluctantly at 
 first, — to the medical missionary. To all others they 
 are sternly closed and their inmates remain beyond 
 the reach of Christian teachers ; but when the stern 
 demands of disease or the approaching horror of 
 the shadow of death have compelled the patient 
 and the anxious relatives alike to break away from 
 tradition and invite the help of the foreign doctor, 
 then these secluded hearts are brought within the 
 
 ^ Life of Dr. John Kenneth Mackenzie. App. IV. pp. 
 400 ff . 
 
 203 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man . 
 
 sound of that most potent moral and spiritual in- 
 fluence in the history of man, the story of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 When the missionary by means of his personal 
 testimony and teaching, and the influence of his 
 own character and life, has won some converts to the 
 faith of Jesus Christ, they begin to live the life of 
 fellowship, of closer intercourse with one another 
 in the brotherhood of an organized Church. 
 When the life of such a young community begins 
 to manifest its own features in a heathen land, 
 one fact becomes apparent which seems to be of 
 great significance, as it seems to be of a unique 
 character. It is this, that the religious experience of 
 the converts from heathendom to-day is, in all essen- 
 tials, identical with that described in the New Testa- 
 ment as possessed by the earliest followers of the 
 Apostolic faith. We are accustomed to hear much 
 said concerning the enormous developments which 
 have taken place in Church life. Emphasis is laid 
 upon the difference between a Cathedral service in 
 London and the service in a little room or a syna- 
 gogue which Paul may have conducted; or men 
 contrast him, the homeless herald of Jesus Christ 
 who gave up wealth and position, with a well 
 paid minister or a high dignitary of modern 
 evangelical Christendom. Or again a contrast is 
 drawn between the stately and dignified intellec- 
 tualism or the refined and subtle spiritual teaching 
 of a modern sermon and that sympathetic, direct, 
 passionate and brief outburst which seems to have 
 been the main form of exhortation amongst the 
 
 20t 
 
The Missionary as Savior 
 
 primitive Christians. Some profess to find part of 
 the secret of what they consider to be a deep diver- 
 gence from primitive Christianity by describing 
 the Sermon on the Mount as expressing the true 
 spirit of the latter, while the elaborate creeds of 
 the Church are said to be the fetters which have 
 interfered with the Church's freedom and im- 
 paired its influence over man. These contrasts, 
 whether they be exaggerated and misleading or 
 not, after all do not deal with the substance of 
 Christian experience. The modern missionary 
 movement has served more than any other event 
 to make this manifest. A visit to these fields will 
 reveal phenomena exactly, sometimes ludicrously, 
 similar to certain of those depicted in the New 
 Testament, as belonging to the cruder stages of 
 Church life. But the observer and student of 
 Christian experience cannot escape the similarity 
 which there is between the deeper, the real essence 
 of the new lif^ as that appears to==day, and as it 
 appeared eighteen hundred years ago. Then, as 
 to-day, men entered into the consciousness of new 
 lifethrough the narrow gate of misery about their 
 sin, and repentance; then, as now, men became per- 
 suaded that Jesus Christ is the appointed Savior 
 of the world through whom deliverance could be 
 obtained; then, as now, they saw in His cross the 
 supreme ground and proof of the mercy of God 
 and the distress of man; then, as now, they passed 
 through the time of struggle with self to the time 
 of trust; then, as now, they received what we call 
 the Holy Spirit, a new feeling regarding God 
 
 205 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 swept over them ; a new consciousness concerning 
 their whole condition as moral and responsible 
 beings was awakened within them, a new sense of 
 the worth of man filled their hearts, a kindlier love 
 for him who is their brother in this experience and 
 a yearning pity for the men who have tasted it 
 not, were borne in upon them. Then as now, these 
 fundamental forms of Christian experience, in 
 varying proportions but in essential identity, gave 
 proof to tlie Christian converts themselves that 
 God had taken possession of their hearts, and 
 roused in the outside world a feeling either of awe 
 or contempt mingled with wonder, at this thing 
 that was happening amongst men. 
 
 To put the matter shortly, it may be said that, 
 the same ethical and religious phenomena are be- 
 ing produced by the preaching of Jesus Christ as 
 the Savior of men in the nineteenth century as 
 in the first century. The most solemn, and, apart 
 from the Gospel, the most crushing and dismaying 
 facts are turned into grounds of joy and awaken 
 thoughts of triumph. The judgment of the holy 
 and righteous God, the sense of sin, the approach 
 of death are transmuted in their significance for 
 the Christian heart. The dawn of faith, the quick- 
 ening of conscience, the inflow of joy, the outflow 
 of love, the experience of a moral energy, — these 
 are the permanent characteristics of the Christian 
 religion. All these are effects which everywhere 
 follow upon the preaching of the name of Jesus 
 Christ. That this preaching is conducted in vari- 
 ous languages, or that there are differences of stand- 
 
 206 
 
The Missionary as Savior 
 
 point on many matters more or less important 
 amongst the preachers of the Gospel, does not de- 
 stroy the identity of the message which they have 
 presented through all the centuries and throughout 
 the world. The words of Jesus and His apostles 
 come home to them all with an authority before 
 which they bow. They universally find in Holy 
 Writ the fittest expressions of their own thoughts 
 and the clearest descriptions of their own experi- 
 ence in relation to God and eternal life. 
 
 These facts seem to demand a most thorough 
 investigation even from those who deny that the 
 Christian faith is grounded in truth, and should 
 receive an explanation more adequate than any 
 which has yet been offered to us. The mere denial 
 that the Christian faith is true is not sufficient; 
 the scientific task remains. And that task consists 
 in explaining how these religious phenomena 
 have persisted during two thousand years, how it 
 is that they have had such influence over the de- 
 velopment of all sides of European civilization, 
 and how it is that to=day, throughout the world, 
 races of the most divergent intellectual and religious 
 types are being brought into a fundamental unity 
 of religious life by the same means. This is the 
 effect of the work of missionaries, as the saviors 
 of men. Their intense passion for what they call 
 ' saving the lost ' lies behind this movement, and 
 the movement is successful in their eyes only in so 
 far as they behold individual men and women 
 brought into this religious relation to Jesus Christ, 
 and through Him to the living God, 
 207 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 It is this rehgious element which, both as the 
 cause of the missionary's devotion and the center of 
 the native convert's nev/ experience and new insight, 
 is the spring of all those events and changes, so 
 innumerable, so varied, so vitally important for the 
 history of mankind, which we call the missionary 
 movement. No theory can possibly explain either 
 the rise of that movement or its remarkable results 
 which does not give full weight to the religious 
 consciousness of the missionary, — for this alone 
 gives him at once his motive and his aim, — and to 
 the religious consciousness of the convert, which 
 constitutes the missionary's triumph and is the 
 seed of progress. 
 
 In the missionary fields of the evangelical 
 churches, it is the universal custom to baptize and 
 to receive formally as communicants only those 
 who have become the subjects of this religious 
 experience. Not because they have been taught 
 in the schools or have been healed by medical mis- 
 sionaries, not because they have adopted European 
 clothing or enlarged their houses, or have tried to 
 use any other of the personal and domestic adjuncts 
 of civilized life, are they added to the Church. 
 To-day, as in the earliest weeks of the Church's 
 life, those that are being added are those that give 
 evidence that they are " being saved." As this is 
 the aim of the missionary's labor, it is the starting^ 
 point of the Church's life in these lands. When 
 a few converts have been gathered and organized, 
 then the spread of Christianity in that region 
 assumes more or less distinctly the form which it 
 
 208 
 
The Missionary as Savior 
 
 has attained in older lands, viz., that of self^prop- 
 agation through local communities. The members 
 of the Church are banded together for aggressive 
 purposes. Whether the community ignores them 
 or not, they never ignore the community. They 
 stand together and labor individually and col- 
 lectively for the furtherance of the Gospel. The 
 history of the Church is continuous from the days 
 of the apostles to the formation of the latest little 
 group of disciples in central Africa or central 
 China. From community to community the light 
 has spread, and from each community it shines 
 out upon the surrounding world. The ambition 
 of the missionary Churches of Christendom is to 
 see the Church of Christ so established and devel- 
 oped in India and China and Africa, and in all 
 other parts of the earth, that at last the word " foreign 
 missionary " shall cease to have a meaning. The 
 Church will have become as truly indigenous in all 
 those lands as it now seems to be in Germany or 
 England or in the United States of America. No 
 earthly force or organization is at work seeking this 
 end; no temporal ambition or scheme whether of ec- 
 clesiastical politicians or statesmanlike dignitaries 
 will account for the self^propagation of the Chris- 
 tian Church. It is a spontaneous, perpetual, irre- 
 pressible outflow of its deepest life. What is the 
 law of the spread of this communion of believers, 
 as they love to call it, throughout the world? 
 Surely, in the extraordinary phenomena which are 
 before our eyes in the mission fields of the world, 
 evidence can be discovered which suggests or com- 
 
 209 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 pels the right and inevitable conclusion. The 
 old formulae of Gibbon in his description of the 
 spread of the early Church, although true in part, 
 are inadequate for the statement of this law. No 
 mere assumption that these phenomena belong to 
 the realm of superstition, and that therefore the 
 sober mind and advanced thinker may afford to 
 despise them, can possibly be treated with respect 
 to-day. The spread of the Church in our day has 
 been characterized by many of the same features 
 which are familiar to the student of the first Chris- 
 tian centuries. The same power which gave it the 
 victory over the heathen world of those times must 
 be the secret of its triumphant progress to-day. 
 Many depreciate its victories by pointing to the 
 unworthy life of some of its converts and adherents 
 in Christian and heathen lands. This unworthiness 
 is undeniable and deplorable, but it only makes the 
 victory the more remarkable. Professor Sohm, in 
 his vivid little book, the " Outlines of Church His- 
 tory," has described the matter with so much elo- 
 quence and authority that I cannot refrain from 
 quoting the following passage in full: ''And yet 
 " the Church has remained unconquerable. The 
 " marvel of Christianity and its grandest achieve- 
 "ment is just this: that it could not be destroyed, 
 " that it won the victory although so miserably rep- 
 " resented by its followers. Apostasy, weakness, 
 " and sin have had no power to destroy the imperish- 
 " able strength of Christianity. It became secular- 
 " ized, yet it still remained a leaven to leaven the 
 3XQ 
 
The Missionary as Savior 
 
 ** whole world. It was betrayed by a large ^ nuniber 
 " of its followers yet there abode within it that 
 " spirit which, in one little band of the chosen, in 
 "spite of sin and error, was powerful enough to 
 " overcome the world, and, through its glorious ex- 
 " ample of martyrdom, to arouse the spirit of resist- 
 " ance even in the ranks of the lukewarm, the waver- 
 " ing and the faint. By this time Christianity was 
 " no more that unknown religion against which the 
 " falsest and most hideous scandals were circulated 
 " and believed (as in the first and second centuries). 
 " The spirit of Christianity had become visible and 
 " it stretched forth its sheltering wing over its fol- 
 " lowers. . . . Already, not only were the convic- 
 " tions of the best minds of the age opposed to the 
 " State, but it had against it the whole of the spiri- 
 " tual power wherewith Christianity (once seen as it 
 "truly is) influences even the outer world. The 
 " spiritual power was made manifest and developed 
 " all its forces to the utmost, in spite of the weak- 
 " ness of its followers. Through all the shades and 
 " darkness which surround us in the history of the 
 " Christian Church, there breaks forth evermore 
 " victorious — like the sun going forth in his 
 " strength, rending the clouds asunder and gleam- 
 " ing through the rift, now in one place now in an- 
 " other— the imperishable light of true Christian- 
 
 ^The Translation which I use here says, "by the greater 
 number." Prof. Sohm in 6th, 7th, and 8th, Edd. says, "Von 
 einer grossen Zahl." 
 
 211 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 **ity. So it was then. The Church conquered, 
 "not because of the Christians, but in spite of 
 " them — through the power of the Gospel." ^ Now 
 the Gospel is the announcement that men may 
 have individual and collective fellowship with God 
 through faith in Jesus Christ. The experience 
 which that announcement is spreading among men 
 is the one great aim for which the missionary 
 labors as a savior of men, and from that experience 
 all the great branches of the tree of human prog- 
 ress draw their life, their nourishment and their 
 fruitage. 
 
 ^ Rudolph Sohm, in " Outlines of Church History," pp. 21-22. 
 212 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROGRESS 
 
 OF MAN. 
 
 It is not at all a simple task to describe what is 
 meant by "The Progress of Man." The idea 
 floats hazily before our eyes, and we all speak 
 of it very confidently as well as very constantly; 
 but we do not find it easy to name its elements and 
 conditions. It seems natural to speak of it when 
 we are discussing certain aspects of social change 
 or national expansion, and specific forms of prog- 
 ress can be easily selected and named. For ex- 
 ample, it is no doubt a form of progress that we 
 should be able to travel at sixty instead of six miles 
 an hour. It is also progress in the eyes of many 
 that our legislators in city and nation should be 
 chosen directly by the people. It is also progress 
 that each morning our newspaper should lie on the 
 breakfast table, putting the news of the world's 
 chief events during the previous twenty-four hours 
 before us. To name the printing-press and elec- 
 tricity and steamships and representative govern- 
 ment and popular education, is to name the signs 
 and the proofs of some kind of progress. But 
 when we have named them all separately, can we 
 put them all together into one concept, and say 
 exactly wherein the progress of man consists? A 
 recent writer repeats with emphasis and frequency 
 
 213 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 that " Evolution is universal but progress very- 
 rare."^ It becomes us therefore to ask by what 
 signs we are to recognize progress, and to distin- 
 guish that form of evolution which promises an 
 endless, or at least a real, advance from those forms 
 which have passed' or are destined to pass away, as 
 mere oscillations in human history. 
 
 There are three conditions, two of which must 
 be fulfilled ere there can be progress in any section 
 of the race, and the third of which must be added 
 ere we can speak of the progress of man as a whole. 
 
 It must be evident, to begin with, that evolution 
 implies, as Mr Spencer has so fully argued in his 
 essay on " Universal Progress, " the elaboration of 
 social relations. There are those who feel impa- 
 tient at the intricate and almost bewildering mul- 
 tiplication of functions which has been going on 
 in the body politic during the very rapid changes 
 of this century. But as a matter of fact this divi- 
 sion results from the vast increase of work which is 
 now needed to meet the demands of accumulating 
 population and to disseminate the benefits of 
 mechanical inventions. At the same time, it is a 
 question whether this growing complexity itself, 
 the mere subdivision of functions in society, is the 
 
 ^"Introduction to the History of Keligion,'* by J. B. Jevons, 
 page 5. Compare with Mr. Jevons's form of statement, the 
 late Walter Bagehot's words in his essay on " Verifiable Prog- 
 ress ": — " A stationary state is by far the most frequent condi- 
 tion of man, as far as history describes that condition; the 
 progressive state is only a rare and an occasional exception." 
 TFor/es(American ed.) Vol. IV, pp. 583. 
 214 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 exact essence of man's progress. Mr. Spencer's es- 
 say does not seem to meet that problem. He sim- 
 ply assumes that the increasing " coherent hetero- 
 geneity " of the organs of life, which is the mark of 
 organic evolution, is the fundamental characteristic 
 of social progress. Mr. Spencer's words are; "It 
 is settled beyond all dispute that organic progress 
 consists in a change from the homogeneous to the 
 heterogeneous." " The law of organic progress is 
 the law of all progress." " The evolution of the 
 simple into the complex, through successive differ- 
 entiations holds throughout." ^ We need not de- 
 spair of some day seeing this advance in the com- 
 plexity of social life traced to man's moral nature 
 and even to his religious instincts; so, its place 
 in the idea of progress will be more clearly defined 
 than has been done or attempted by Mr. Spencer. 
 If we conceive of a tribe of people as living, 
 unwarlike and in the enjoyment of a comparatively 
 simple organization, a change in the condition of 
 its life can only occur in one of two ways. Either 
 the advent of strangers with a higher form of civili- 
 zation will at once begin to break up and alter its 
 organization, or the rise of fresh ambitions from 
 within will have the same effect. The organization 
 of many an African or Polynesian tribe is being 
 affected in the former way to=day. The organiza- 
 tion of English social life was affected in the latter 
 way by the awakening which followed the intro- 
 duction of steam engines. In the former case the 
 
 * " Universal Progress." By Herbert Spencer. (D. Apple- 
 ton and Co. N. Y.) pp 3 flf. 
 
 215 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 tribe usually becomes demoralized, and what is 
 called 'decadent,' unless there come, along with 
 the new social demands, higher personal character 
 to meet them. The ordinary unchristianized, that 
 is unmoralized, native cannot as a matter of fact 
 sustain the stress put upon him by the more elab- 
 orate social system which is growing around him. 
 We are apt to blame the native thus placed for 
 lack of intelligence, whereas what is wrong is the 
 lack of that sense of responsibility, that moral 
 courage, that self^^resi^ect which would enable him 
 to take a definite place and fulfil a real function, 
 however humble, in the life of the reorganized 
 social system. It is the absence of moral qualities 
 which keeps the Zulu unprogressive, nay which 
 makes him seem to be more of an animal than 
 before, when a civilized government has taken 
 charge of his tribe and himself. 
 
 But the connection between growth in social or- 
 ganization — coherent heterogeneity of social func- 
 tions — and moral character may be seen still more 
 clearly by watching the experience of large cities 
 in America, where great masses of immigrant peo- 
 ple with innumerable forms of social, family and 
 and religious traditions are thrown together and 
 compelled to organize themselves into a civilized 
 community. The evidence proves beyond all possi- 
 bility of refutation that, when the city is governed 
 by unprincipled men, mostly saloonkeepers, the 
 government assumes an oligarchic form. The so= 
 called political parties fall into the hands of a few 
 men, who practically reelect themselves or kin- 
 
 216 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 dred spirits year after year. The democratic form 
 of government is then really in a state of 
 suspended animation, having a name to hve, 
 say, on the Fourth of July. The result is 
 this, that the differentiation of civic functions is 
 arrested or hindered in its growth. Men are ap- 
 pointed to offices who are not fitted for them and 
 who are liable to dismissal at the next election. 
 Hence there is inefficient work done. The organ- 
 ization does not grow, functions are not differenti- 
 ated, to meet the ever-growing life of the social 
 organism. Streets are allowed to remain in disre- 
 pair which ought to be repaved, refuse accumu- 
 lates to the danger of health, crime increases so that 
 burglary insurance companies may refuse to do 
 business in such a city, bribery and corruption lay 
 their hands so heavily on business that some men 
 try to move their concerns out of it. If this pro- 
 cess were allowed to go on indefinitely no city 
 could fail to be utterly ruined. Happily these 
 American cities have a very great amount of civic 
 enthusiasm which, while generally torpid, is aroused 
 at times to speak and act so that the worst events 
 are prevented, and progress of a retarded degree is 
 maintained pretty steadily. 
 
 What I have meant to say is this, that the increase 
 of organization, which for Mr. Spencer seems to 
 constitute progress, cannot be the ultimate fact 
 since it appears to be absolutely dependent upon 
 growth of character. And the experience of, say. 
 New York and Chicago, proves that, first, failure 
 in the character of its rulers tends evidently to dis- 
 
 217 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 locate the organization of the city and so hinders 
 that differentiation of functions which, I prefer to 
 Qay, marks progress: while, secondly, the demand 
 for better organization — which to a large extent 
 and necessarily takes the form of the civil service 
 movement, because that best secures differentia- 
 tion of functions — always begins by securing mor- 
 ally decent legislators, and always springs from 
 citizens of high character and religious faith. 
 
 There is another aspect of man's evolution which 
 we must look at, namely, the great and wonderful 
 power which has been gained over nature. 
 The effects of man's continuous triumph over the 
 forces of the physical world are most varied. The 
 most obvious results are the increase of the wealth 
 of the average citizen in Europe and America, and 
 the spread of luxury through the community. 
 Only the least thoughful will be likely to insist 
 that these things form the essence of progress. 
 And yet it would be almost equally thoughtless to 
 say that ihey have nothing to do with it. When 
 one thinks of the marvelous scientific attainments 
 of the last few centuries, the daring which con- 
 ceived and the thrilling genius which has accom- 
 plished the binding of all lands together by ocean 
 cables and steamships and railroads, which speak 
 now of regulating the fall of heaven's rain and of 
 sailing through the air as safely and more swiftly 
 than upon the waters — when we think of these things 
 we can hardly resist the conclusion that man's tri- 
 umph over nature constitutes another, the second, 
 essential element in that which we call his progress. 
 
 218 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 The facts become ahuost startling when we realize 
 that through his power over her forces, nature has 
 become in a new and most real manner an exten- 
 sion of man's self. In earliest days his self was 
 absorbed in nature, lost he seemed to be amid the 
 whirl of irresistible and inscrutable forces. Then 
 the consciousness of war awoke, when man's soul 
 seemed to be striving against a world peopled with 
 evil powers; that was the age of crushing supersti- 
 tions, of witchcraft and incantations. Then grad- 
 ually nature began to be understood and conquered. 
 The forces that hitherto only appalled began to 
 be used and once more nature seems to be a part 
 of man's self, her forces the instruments of his pur- 
 pose. Has this progress in science and the practi- 
 cal arts any living connection with morality and re- 
 ligion? 
 
 I believe it can be proved that science owes 
 her deepest and most influential conceptions, those 
 which have most profoundly given her life and 
 health, to religion, nay even to theology. Science 
 is the daughter not only of faith but of theolog- 
 ical discussions. It is the habit of some more talk- 
 ative and self-conscious wooers of that popular 
 maiden to deny her descent or deride her mother. 
 But the mother is very patient and, for all her occa- 
 sional scoldings, loves her offspring. Tlie wiser 
 students of nature, and they in sufficient numbers 
 through every generation, own the deep connec- 
 tion that exists between progress in science and 
 faith in the illuminating ideals, the glorious reali- 
 ties, of the spiritual world. 
 219 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 The question can be dealt with in a more con- 
 crete way. The triumphs of science are of two 
 kinds, theoretical and practical, and progress in 
 both kinds is very closely allied with character, 
 with the moral condition of society. It is well 
 known that the men who have done most as inves- 
 tigators of nature have almost invariably borne 
 high personal characters. They have been clean 
 and straightforward, courageous men. The fact is 
 that no other kind of man can go far in the pur- 
 suit of any science. When his departures from 
 rectitude become serious and habitual they wreck 
 his work, almost as soon as they wreck that of a 
 minister of religion. But further, it is obvious 
 that when science becomes practical her triumphs 
 become immediately connected with the moral 
 condition of the community. At once, for exam- 
 ple, there is a demand for increased numbers of 
 specialists in various forms of skilled labor, — the 
 differentiation of social functions. Every fresh in- 
 vention demands and effects a reorganization of 
 society more or less extensive according to its im- 
 portance. But the multiplication of departments, 
 as we have already seen, depends upon the moral 
 character of the community and of the rulers whom 
 it elects. For example, the holders of a monopoly 
 in a city can by means of bribery, prevent the 
 adoption of some improved means of transit or 
 illumination which would interfere with their 
 profits. We know that where a sweating system 
 prevails, invention is retarded; honest payment for 
 honest work stimulates invention. And similarly 
 
 220 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 we know that if a community become very careful 
 about protecting the rights of working men and 
 women and children, the extra demands thus made 
 upon employers tend always to improve machinery, 
 and so to cheapen manufactures, and so to increase 
 the material welfare of the community. 
 
 We are thus brought face to face with the fact, 
 not that material wealth is progress, but that prog- 
 ress in the widest and fullest sense must include 
 that mastery of the forces of nature which pro- 
 duces material wealth. It seems also clear that 
 this advance in science is closely dependent upon 
 progress in the moral character of the community. 
 
 The third condition of universal human progress 
 remains to be named. The progress which we 
 hope for and whose nature we are trying to under- 
 stand is the progress of man, of the race as such. 
 We are not concerned with this or that nation, 
 whether ancient or modern, and its supremacy 
 over others in this or that direction. Many great 
 nations have fallen into decay, many types of 
 civilization have been more or less completely ob- 
 literated, because they lacked something which 
 would have enabled them to absorb and elevate 
 the savage hordes who overwhelmed them. Som^ 
 types have reached a certain height and then 
 ceased to make progress, evidently because they, 
 too, lacked something which would have carried 
 them further on. A new vision and a new hope 
 have been slowly dawning on our inapprehensive 
 minds. The vision is that of all nations drawn 
 irresistibly into one common life; the hope is that 
 221 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man. 
 
 the forces which make the nations one will prove 
 adequate to secure a iDermanent progress. The 
 nineteenth century opened when that vision was 
 before few if any minds, whether of poet or saint. 
 Men could not think of the one life of mankind, 
 with Africa an unknown darkness, India in jDris- 
 tine disorder, China enjoying still her ancient 
 slumber and her impenetrable dreams, Polynesia 
 but a number of scattered spots of human degra- 
 dation in the Pacijfic ocean. To=day we are gazing 
 on the rapid realization of the unity of mankind in 
 commerce, politics, education and religion. These 
 forces are daily increasing the communion of all 
 parts of the world with one another and deepening 
 the interdependence of all races and nations. 
 
 Now this feature of history is of the utmost im- 
 portance for our right understanding of the prog- 
 ress of man. Without this fellowship of all 
 peoples the progress made by any portion of man- 
 kind must be incomplete and its permanence 
 uncertain. All must at last go forward together if 
 any may claim that they are moving toward the 
 ideal. The brotherhood of man as an actual fact 
 is essential to the real and endless advance of 
 humanity. 
 
 So far we have seen that the growth of social 
 organization, of power over nature, and of the 
 unity of all nations, are essential to a true concep- 
 tion of the progress of man. We have also seen 
 that these forms of advance are all closely depend- 
 ent upon what we have called character. What 
 does that mean? 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 Writers who occupy such divergent standpoints 
 as T. H. Green and M. Elisee Keclus agree in lay- 
 ing much emiDhasis ui)on character as necessary to 
 a true theory of progress. Says the former: " The 
 Spiritual progress of mankind is thus an unmean- 
 ing X3hrase, unless it means a progress of personal 
 character and io personal character — a x^rogress of 
 which feeling, thinking, and willing subjects are 
 the agents and sustainers, and of which each step 
 is a fuller realization of the capacities of such sub- 
 jects. It is simply unintelligible unless under- 
 stood to be in the direction of more perfect forms 
 of personal life." Green makes another remark 
 which shows that he does not think of " spiritual 
 progress " as simply one among other aspects or 
 forms of progress. " If it were not for certain 
 demands of the spirit which is ourselves, the 
 notion of human progress could never occur to 
 us." ^ M. Reclus puts the matter in the following 
 way in a recent article: Progress "ought above all 
 to be understood as a complete development of the 
 individual, comprehending the improvement of the 
 physical being in strength, beauty, grace, lon- 
 gevity, material enrichment, and increase of knowl- 
 edge — in fine, the perfecting of character, the be- 
 coming more noble, more generous and more 
 devoted. So considered, the progress of the 
 individual is identified with that of society, united 
 more and more intimately in a powerful solidarity."^ 
 
 1 T. H. Green's "Prolegomena to Ethics." p. 195. 
 
 2 Article on "Progress" in Contemporary Review. Dec. 
 1896, p. 762. 
 
 223 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 And yet again, Professor Huxley says with equal 
 emphasis that "Social progress means a checking 
 of the cosmic process at every step and the substi- 
 tution for it of another which may be called the 
 ethical process." ^ These thinkers, working from very 
 different philosophical and religious standpoints, 
 arrive unanimously at the conviction that the moral 
 life of man is the region where we may find at once 
 the source, the essence, and the test of progress. 
 We have been in part helped to understand or at any 
 rate to see this in preceding paragraphs. We have 
 found not only that the three main elements and 
 collateral results of progress, viz., the elaboration 
 of social relations, the triumph over nature, and the 
 unification of the race, are naturally connected and 
 very largely interdependent but that, each and all, 
 they are in some vital manner dependent upon 
 " character." If now we would push our inquiry 
 further and ask what we mean by " character," 
 why progress in that should be progress itself 
 and should secure a correlative progress in other 
 directions, we find ourselves face to face with 
 another of the most elusive and yet fascinating 
 of problems. We can only deal with a small sec- 
 tion of it here. 
 
 Manifestly, when we speak of '' character " or of 
 "the ethical process " we are thinking of good char- 
 acter, or of a process through which higher person- 
 al relations are being arrived at and realized by any 
 
 ^Huxley's "Evolution and Ethics." p. 81. (Appleton and 
 Co. N. Y.) 
 
 224 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 community. The members of a group of people, 
 whether a little tribe or a great nation, are pos- 
 sessed of the conviction that certain habits of life, 
 towards which it is easy to drift, are disgraceful 
 and dangerous, and that certain other kinds of con- 
 duct or personal relationship are pure and noble. 
 If the average man in the community is unable to 
 speak definitely of these moral ideals as ideals, not 
 having had the training or the meditative ca- 
 pacity to think of them, he is conscious of their 
 attraction or repulsion as a kind of feeling or 
 social instinct. There are, however, men and wom- 
 en to be found in almost every community whose 
 work it is to propagate throughout the social 
 system an enthusiasm for these ideals and a sense 
 of their high and indisputable authority. 
 
 It will be found of course that the ideals which any 
 group of people cherish, are very closely connected 
 with their material welfare or even with their very 
 existence as a community. In early Rome, for 
 example, the conditions of life were such that the 
 city could only live by maintaining certain strict 
 and noble laws of family and civic life. The em- 
 phasis which they laid upon filial reverence, making 
 it almost the equivalent of religion, upon womanly 
 dignity, sobriety and purity, upon manly patriotism, 
 was the result of brooding not upon abstract ethics, 
 but upon the immediate necessities of the com- 
 munity. But the stern insistence upon these vir- 
 tues, which elevated them from mere rules of exped- 
 iency into authoritative ideals, did more than merely 
 preserve the community. They secured its progress. 
 
 225 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 Pure families sent forth disciplined men into senate 
 and battlefield. The increase of the citizens in num- 
 ber and power flowed from and yet also stimulated 
 the qualities which made the growth of civic or- 
 ganization possible. Where men can be trusted 
 progress is inevitable. Trustworthiness is the 
 deejpest fact in God; it is the root or all movement 
 towards an ideal, alike in Himself and in His in- 
 telligent creatures. In that little city of Rome men 
 could be trusted as husbands, as fathers, as sons, as 
 soldiers, as rulers; and that central moral condition 
 led them to cherish various detailed virtues and to 
 meet the demands for faithful service which pros- 
 perity and growth made upon them. 
 
 When we speak then of character as the root and 
 secret of social progress we must think, first, of the 
 possession of high moral ideals and, secondly, of 
 personal loyalty in their pursuit; the citizens accept 
 certain virtues as of binding authority and can de- 
 pend on one another to aim at their fulfilment. When 
 that mutual confidence begins to disappear through- 
 out large sections of a community decay sets in. 
 
 Few if any thinkers would now dispute the 
 assertion that religion has been always vitally con- 
 nected with social morality. All efforts to imagine 
 mankind in a pre^religious condition are failures; 
 and hence all efforts to describe the rise of a social 
 state without the influence of religion are equally 
 futile. The fact is as Kaftan has well put it: 
 " The question as to the historical origin of religion 
 is inseparable from those others which deal witli 
 the beginnings of the human race or with the ori- 
 
 226 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 gin of all that which, like speech and morality and 
 objective knowledge, is along with religion distinct- 
 ive of man." ^ You can as soon conceive mankind 
 speechless as irreligious. Various attempts have 
 been recently made to describe the exact function 
 which religion exerts in the social organism. Every 
 one feels, as Professor Huxley did, ^ the difficul- 
 ty of accounting for the transition from the al- 
 most pure individualism of the animal state to the 
 moral life of mankind. The cosmic process de- 
 mands that the individual organism shall maintain 
 its own existence; human society demands that a 
 man shall sacrifice his pleasure and even some- 
 times his life for others. Spinoza tried in vain to de- 
 duce all practical ethics from that root, the striving 
 to maintain one's own existence ; and no one since 
 his day has done any better. But how do we pass 
 from the one to the other? More and more widely 
 it is being seen that the bridge from the self-cen- 
 tered life of the animal to the social morality of 
 man has been built by faith in supernatural powers 
 and is forever pillared upon religious experience. 
 The fact is described in different ways according to 
 the method of approach, but the agreement of 
 thinkers upon this matter is growing more and 
 more impressive.^ 
 
 » " Das Wesen der Religion." 2nd Ed. p. 20. 
 
 ^Cf. quotation above p. 223. 
 
 'For example compare with Mr. Kidd's form of statement 
 what Bagehot says when speaking of law as "the primary 
 want of mankind " — " To gain that obedience, the primary 
 condition is the identity — not the union, but the sameness — 
 
 227 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 Whatever may be the defects of Mr. Benjamin 
 Kidd's definition of religion or of his curious, but 
 not inexplicable, use of the term " ultra^rational," he 
 has certainly described the function of religion in 
 the development of society in a most suggestive 
 manner. Religion has stood, as it were, between 
 individual impulse and social obligation, curbing 
 the former and quickening the latter. The former 
 is the spring of all conduct and, if unregulated, 
 would lead only to selfish action; but impulse is 
 regulated by the demands of law or of social 
 obligation, and this is supported by the authority 
 of the powers who are worshiped, whether in 
 faith or in fear. However crudely some religions 
 have expressed the essential element of this relig- 
 ious instinct, that which seems common to them 
 all, so far as they have become forces in society, 
 has been that sense of responsibility to some power 
 which is above both the individual, whose impul- 
 ses stir him to selfish action, and society, which 
 demands that he shall live for it. Manifestly 
 the higher conception of that power which is over 
 both the individual and his social environment, will 
 lead to a higher conception of the mutual relations 
 of the members of society. It is here that we 
 must look for the deej)est explanation of the varied 
 effects produced by the religions of the world. 
 That which any people believed the supreme 
 
 of what we now call 'church' and ' state'. The king must be 
 
 priest and prophet king — the two must say the same because 
 
 they are the same." Works (American ed. ) Vol. IV, p. 440. 
 
 228 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 powers to be, has been one of the main roots of 
 their history and of their place in civihzation. 
 And yet, as Kobertson Smith pointed out in a very 
 striking passage, all heathen religions have fail- 
 ed to reach the conception of sui^ernal powers that 
 possessed a. fixed as well as a noble or ideal character.' 
 A Greek or a Roman god or goddess, might repre- 
 sent or idealize a certain virtue, but that had little 
 or no /o?'ce in compelling obedience to that virtue. 
 In fact Rome had never so many altars to deified 
 virtues, as in the period of her decay. The higher 
 the place of a deity in the hierarchy of heaven the 
 more vague and unmeaning was his character. 
 Surrounded with loftier dignity, clothed with the 
 majesty of physical power or superhuman wisdom 
 he might be; but his moral nature, where it was 
 not evil, was at least indistinct, and exercised little 
 or no influence upon the actual motives of men. 
 
 Here we meet one of the most difficult problems 
 in the history of religion. There can be no doubt 
 that religion has been a moulding force, has acted 
 beneficially in providing some kind of sanction for 
 those tribal and national customs which, however 
 crude or far from a true morality, yet seem to 
 maintain order and lay the foundation of civiliza- 
 tion: on the other hand we find that throughout 
 the heathen world the deities which have been at 
 any period most profoundly worshiped, whether 
 in faith or in fear, have reflected the current moral- 
 ity of the people. That there has been action 
 
 " The Prophets of Israel " Ed. 2 p. 66. 
 229 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 and reaction between the character of the people 
 and the character of their deities is evident. How 
 to state the terms of that mutual influence is 
 the delicate task. 
 
 But now, in the Religion of Revelation, we find 
 that the two fundamental requisites, which no other 
 Religion has been able to describe even as ideals 
 with any approach to fulness and accuracy, are 
 fulfilled. On the one hand, the Object of Christian 
 faith is a Being who is manifested as at once holy 
 and loving. He has a Character which we dare not 
 judge, because it judges all men, which we cannot 
 praise except in worship, whose vision has given the 
 world a new morality, a new hope, and is giving 
 individual men a new heart. On the other hand, 
 this Being, the living God, is manifested as seeking 
 and securing the fellowship of men. All heathen 
 attempts at worship, at prayer, at incantation or at 
 prophecy, at philosophic scrutiny of the Highest 
 Good or at mystic absorption in the thought of the 
 All, the One, the unchanging Eternal, are at last re- 
 buked and blessed, crowned and cursed. For now 
 God enters into a living intercourse with men in the 
 person of Jesus Christ. The eternal character is re- 
 vealed, and revealed in the double act of redeeming 
 by a supreme sacrifice and of establishing an eternal 
 fellowship with men. That is Christianity. It is 
 the fulfilment of those instincts which worked in the 
 heart of all religions; and yet it is at the same time, 
 the condemnation of all in those religions that was 
 "of sin " and led men into darkness and despair. 
 
 We are learning to=day to appreciate more 
 
 230 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 accurately the stages by which this wondrous 
 result has been reached. When we stand with 
 Abraham and behold in his faith the faint begin- 
 nings of monotheism; when we trace the growth of 
 that faith through the critical periods of Israel's 
 history; when we realize that here a new phenome- 
 non is before us, namely, a faith which grows purer 
 and stronger, instead of baser and weaker, with the 
 flight of time, one which becomes grander and 
 deeper in its intellectual assertions instead of fall- 
 ing away into the inept, the vague, the puerile, — 
 then the conception of a God who has taken hold of 
 individual men and of man's history assumes an 
 overwhelming authority. When at last we see and 
 watch and prove Jesus Christ, and find that through 
 Him we have a life of intercourse with God, the 
 evidence becomes irresistible that here at last the 
 real relations of mankind to the Eternal are made 
 known, that now a fellowship with God can be ex- 
 perienced which will carry the moral nature of each 
 man forward to its true glory. 
 
 In fine, we see in Christianity the ideal of the 
 divine character and the ideal of man's fellowship 
 with God both realized. No man can possibly pict- 
 ure either of these ideals in a fashion which shall 
 surpass the manner in which Jesus Christ has pre- 
 sented them to us. Else were that man a greater 
 benefactor to the race, a truer Savior, a more sub- 
 lime and convincing personality than Jesus Himself. 
 The perfect God and the way of man's ever perfect 
 fellowshiiD with Him! Any whisper of another 
 destiny or another religion, which the world may 
 
 231 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 have heard since that revelation was made, has only 
 been heard to be scorned as poorer, meaner, less 
 worthy of God and of man, and therefore false. 
 Here religion burning with its intensest bliss and 
 morality shining with its utmost beauty, are inter- 
 fused. Here a personal fellowship with God is not 
 separated from, but inwardly united with, charac- 
 ter. It depends on, it flows from the character of 
 God: and it creates in man the image of the divine, 
 the Christlike character. 
 
 But this experience of fellowship with God, 
 while itself as inscrutable as thought or feeling or 
 life, can be and must be tested in its manifesta- 
 tions. Such an experience, if it be real, can only 
 be founded upon unique events, propagated by 
 unique means, and manifested in unique effects, 
 among the characters and lives of men and of na- 
 tions. 
 
 In the preceding chapters we have been attempt- 
 ing to watch some of the forces which the Chris- 
 tian religion is bringing to bear upon the human 
 race as a whole. We have seen that it alone of all 
 religions has been able, without the exercise of 
 physical force or external prestige, to propagate 
 its life amongst all races and classes of men. We 
 have seen that, alike in its nature as a religion and 
 in its actual operation throughout the world, it 
 alone can claim to be a universal religion. The 
 study of the spread of Christianity during this cen- 
 tury has shown us both the means through which, 
 and the manner in which, it is taking hold of the 
 heart and life of humanity. Through the gift of 
 
 232 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 the Scriptures which present a common basis and 
 a supreme standard of religious ideals and experi- 
 ence to all men; through the work of education 
 which this religion has naturally stimulated and 
 which it finds necessary to its own true life and 
 deepest influence; through the work of transform- 
 ing individual moral character which Christianity 
 has from the beginning accounted its supreme vis- 
 ible task; through the impulse which it has given 
 to what we call the civilization of savage races, an 
 impulse which, so far as one can see, they were not 
 receiving and were not likely to receive from any 
 other source; through these various instrumen- 
 talities Christianity has proved itself a living 
 force of universal significance. 
 
 We see this force drawing all nations together 
 through one common faith and worship, through 
 the possession of one moral ideal and one eternal 
 hope. We see it fitting men to sustain the posi- 
 tions of trust in which the growth of civilization 
 places them. We see it molding their characters, 
 and so making human progress possible wherever 
 man breathes and this gospel is preached. In fact, 
 this force has been, before the eyes of this gener- 
 ation and on a scale unequaled in history, acting 
 as the principal cause of that which we all feel 
 to be a reality and which we rejoice in as "the 
 progress of man." 
 
 There are four features connected with the 
 spread of the Christian faith in heathendom which 
 seem to need special remark in their relation to 
 the progress of which we have been speaking. 
 
 233 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 1. It has been said by Mr. Herbert Spencer, 
 in describing the "Theological Bias,"^ that the 
 Christian man who is a theologian, is apt to pass 
 over " the proofs found everywhere, that a people 
 is no more capable of suddenly receiving a higher 
 form of religion than it is capable of suddenly re- 
 ceiving a higher form of government; and that 
 inevitably with such religion, as with such govern- 
 ment, there will go on a degradation which pres- 
 ently reduces it to one differing but nominally from 
 its predecessor." One feels tempted to enter a vig- 
 orous denial that proofs of that last affirmation are 
 " found everywhere." Undoubtedly the proof may 
 be " found everywhere " that many converts from 
 heathenism to Christianity do not honorably adorn 
 the doctrine of the New Testament. We have 
 already dealt with the fact that in the general loos- 
 ening from old sanctions and customs some moral 
 disasters take place. It no doubt does happen 
 that the profession of the white man's religion is 
 felt by many to give them a kind of social pres- 
 tige and so exalts them unduly in their own eyes. 
 The very association of an intimate and confi- 
 dential kind which the converts enjoy with the 
 white man tends to create in some, conceit, lazi- 
 ness and selfishness. But these phenomena are 
 not unparalleled in the New Testament descrip- 
 tions of the life of the early Church. It must 
 also be admitted that when a community of fresh 
 converts is left too soon to manage its own aflPairs, 
 
 ^ "The study of Sociology." (Appletou & Co., N. Y.) p. 301. 
 
 234: 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 the spirit and methods of management will some- 
 times contain elements that are ignorant and 
 heathen. The general aspect of such a commu- 
 nity might seem to casual observers to " differ 
 but nominally from " what preceded. But there 
 is another side to the question. That which is 
 fatally WTong in Mr. Spencer's assertion is the im- 
 plication that "the degradation" he refers to is 
 final. It is no such thing. Nowhere in the mis- 
 sionary field, so far as I have heard, is the charac- 
 ter of Christian converts persistently declining. 
 On the contrary it is everywhere persistently ad- 
 vancing. Out of the first, the inevitable, moral 
 confusion and intellectual errors, the converts are 
 passing into a clearer life and loftier apjprehensions 
 of the truth. 
 
 There are enemies of the Christian faith, and some 
 of them even exponents of evolutionary philosophy, 
 who, when they deal with the truth or untruth of 
 Christianity, argue from premises that are quite 
 unworthy of evolutionists. They appear to as- 
 sume that if Christianity be true, if the Spirit of 
 Christ be the very power of God Himself, then 
 the social effects of the Spirit ought to be sudden, 
 catastrophic, miraculous. They do not seem to be 
 able to conceive of Christianity as the appearing 
 in history of the latest evolutionary force, whose 
 task it is to take up and use for its own character- 
 istic ends the material presented in human nature 
 as it previously existed, unredeemed and unrecon- 
 ciled with God. 
 
 We have found in the preceding chapters ample 
 
 235 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 ground for the opinion that the action of the Chris- 
 tian religion in and upon the history of the race 
 may be truly described as an evolutionary influ- 
 ence. It is true that Christianity affirms the con- 
 nection of every man thus influenced with God 
 Himself, and there are those who have so poor a 
 conception both of God and the universe, not to 
 speak of the conditions of evolution, as to imag- 
 ine that the presupposition of direct personal con- 
 tact between God and human beings would destroy 
 the reality of the evolutionary process. Neverthe- 
 less when we concentrate our attention upon the 
 work of the Christian religion, comparing its in- 
 fluence upon the progress of man with the influ- 
 ence exercised by other religions, and studying its 
 relation to these, the history of the missionary 
 movement, of the self ^propagation of the Christian 
 religion in our century, will be found capable of 
 analysis and description like any other aspect or 
 element of social evolution. The inflow of Euro- 
 pean civilization upon the vast territories of North 
 America provides us on every hand with interesting 
 illustrations of these phenomena. One can look 
 out upon wide prairie regions which a few years 
 ago were covered with wild grasses and dense for- 
 ests, but which to-day are plowed, and sown with 
 grain, and dotted over with villages and cities. 
 The present aspect is as unlike the former as could 
 be conceived. And yet there has been no break 
 in the operation of the principle of continuity. 
 All may seem strange, and even in some aspects 
 supernatural, to the wondering gaze of an aborigin- 
 
 236 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 al Indian. At first he may have thought the white 
 man a god and his powers derived from other 
 worlds. He was only ignorant of the extent of the 
 relations of the North American continent and of 
 the possibilities lying buried in the soil under his 
 feet. So it is with the relations of the Christian 
 religion to the soil of heathendom, indeed of uni- 
 versal humanity. There it finds rank grasses, 
 jungles of superstition and horror. But it comes 
 to the soil with a new seed and, behold its power! 
 Amongst peoples who only seem capable of idola- 
 try and witchcraft, and into whose minds the 
 thought of a high morality hardly entered, it has 
 proved itself capable of producing the fairest fruits 
 of pureness and love, of honor and self=sacrifice. 
 Just as in North America new crops supplant the 
 old, new kinds of buildings and means of transport 
 take the place of the Indian wigwam and canoe, 
 so does the student observer see this universal re- 
 ligion take the place of the other religions of the 
 world. It does so just because in the struggle for 
 existence it proves itself more capable than these, 
 its competitors, of fulfilling those functions which 
 are peculiar to religion in the development of the 
 nature and history of man. 
 
 We have seen why it is that the earlier and 
 ruder conditions of society must give way as 
 soon as progress begins. Destruction is, in nature, 
 always the accompaniment of upbuilding. The 
 new displaces the old. The heightening of the ideal 
 of personal comfort or of social relationship will 
 heighten the ideals of personal character; the latter 
 
 237 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 again tend to call forth greater exertions of self- 
 control. While in this manner the sense of 
 personal inadequacy and moral failure may be 
 deepened, the hope of a better self is set before the 
 individual and becomes a spiritual energy. 
 
 2. This is what the Christian religion would 
 seem to have been doing before the eyes of this 
 century. It is apparently unable to meet with a 
 race which proves itself entirely incapable of social 
 redemption. True, we hear very frequently of 
 so-called "decadent races." Even a writer so 
 moderate and careful as M. Elisee Eeclus has 
 said: "One tribe is in full course of progressive 
 evolution, another in incontestable decay." * This 
 appears to mean that there are certain races whose 
 moral and social condition is of such a nature that 
 they are being gradually destroyed from the face of 
 the earth. Or it may mean, as we sometimes hear 
 it expressed, that a race has lost its vital energy 
 and is for that reason dying out. This "vital 
 energy " is one of those abstractions which occupy 
 so much place in . loose thinking and are used to 
 fill up so many of the lacunae in our knowledge, 
 but which do not really help to clear thought or 
 solid conclusions. As a matter of fact the races 
 which are disappearing are doing so, either as in 
 Greenland through the enormous diminution of 
 the population by epidemic diseases, or, as among 
 certain South African tribes and more evidently in 
 the case of the Australian and New Zealand aborig- 
 
 ^ Contemporary Review, Dec. 1896. Art. "Progress," p. 761. 
 238 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 ines by the destructive assault of peoples possessed 
 of superior weapons of war; or, as in the case of 
 some tribes, through the spread of European vices, 
 which are extremely fatal in their effects amongst 
 such people on account of their ignorance and the 
 simplicity of their past experience. But over 
 against the so called decadence, which one would 
 rather call the destruction of these races, one must 
 place the change which is being produced upon 
 certain tribes which were once in their position or 
 even undergoing ' decadence.' There are, for ex- 
 ample, hill tribes in India which undoubtedly 
 were conquered and driven to the hills by races 
 superior in warlike methods. Their refuge in the 
 highlands was probably the sole cause of their 
 deliverance from destruction. These hill tribes 
 having now come in contact with Christianity give 
 promise of manifesting an energy and vitality quite 
 inconsistent with the theory of their decadence or 
 the exhaustion of their blood. A few years of rum- 
 selling and of contact with traders and sailors 
 would have probably swept the inhabitants of 
 Tierra del Fuego out of existence. But Christian 
 civilization has begun to take hold of them and has 
 wrought a change so marvelous as to have elicited 
 the admiration of Charles Darwin, and that famous 
 annual subscription of five pounds to the society 
 working amongst them. The North American In- 
 dians were no doubt " decadent " one hundred years 
 ago. But since they were protected from the rav- 
 ages of rum and the tricks of unscrupulous dealers, 
 and are becoming amenable to Christian education, 
 
 239 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 they have increased steadily in numbers. It is 
 time that the word "decadent" were used with 
 more discrimination regarding the causes which 
 work the destruction of a people and the forces 
 which may intervene to prevent it. 
 
 3. By large numbers it is taken for granted 
 that the goal of human history will be reached in 
 this world. Many who know better yet allow 
 themselves to put most emphasis upon the prospect 
 of an age when, amid things seen and temporal, 
 mankind will be perfected. They do this chiefly 
 for purposes of practical exhortation. According- 
 ly we have many dreams of the time when the re- 
 lations of each to all will be in perfect equipose, 
 when the outward and the inward life of every man 
 will be in ideal harmony. It would not be im- 
 possible to present arguments of considerable force 
 against the theory that man has a right to picture 
 his heaven upon earth, or to picture the time when 
 his descendants will at last stand perfect amid a 
 perfected race under these skies. It may be said 
 that, as of our spiritual ancestors so of our suc- 
 cessors, they without us shall not be made perfect. 
 
 On the one hand we have the very clear assertions 
 of science that the present structure of our world 
 cannot last forever. Few facts have been borne in 
 upon the minds of many agnostics with more dis- 
 mal effect than this, that visible, physical evolution 
 must have a distant but definite and inevitable end. 
 Professor Huxley in his Romanes Lecture said: 
 " The theory of evolution encourages no millennial 
 anticipations. If, for millions of years, our globe 
 
 240 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 has taken the upward road, yet, sometime, the sum- 
 mit will be reached and the downward route will be 
 commenced. The most daring imagination will 
 hardly venture upon the suggestion that the pow- 
 er and the intelligence of man can ever arrest the 
 procession of the great year." ^ The note of cheer 
 which the famous lecturer tried to infuse into the 
 sentences which follow that passage was not reassur- 
 ing. His assurance that we may still have much 
 to live for does not dispel our conviction that even 
 his strong heart needed to rouse itself with much 
 energy from the gloomy depression of that pros- 
 pect. Men can hardly believe with their whole 
 heart that the race is doomed to extinction and yet 
 live as if the future were all bright. A Huxley 
 might have the courage to say that we must work 
 for such progress as is possible while we may. 
 The ordinary citizen will feel that the very mean- 
 ing of progress is destroyed and that the inspira- 
 tion has gone from life. Despair about the des- 
 tiny of the race will stop progress; it will send man 
 back to the life of brutes that perish in a brutal 
 scheme of things. 
 
 But to my mind the most startling fact about 
 this conception of a heaven on earth is, that it 
 has never received the sanction of any religion. 
 No religion, and of course philosophical theories 
 and ethical aspirations of individual men are ex- 
 cluded from this assertion, no religion which has 
 taken hold of the hearts of men and ruled them. 
 
 ^"ilYolution and Ethics." (Appletou & Co., ^[. Y.) p. 85^ 
 HI 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 and which has given powerful impulses to human 
 progress, has ever pictured the ideal condition of 
 man as being attainable in this world. All relig- 
 ions look forward into the future. Not even of 
 Buddhism can it be said that it presents an ideal 
 of human progress without the vision of a future 
 life or with the vision of an earthly bliss; for while 
 it is true that it refuses to consider the continuance 
 of conscious life as anything but a disaster, it re- 
 fuses also for that very reason to present any pic- 
 ture of a social ideal. For the Buddhist the end 
 of all things is to escape self^^consciousness; and 
 towards that his best energies are directed. 
 
 As we have said before, that which nearly all 
 religions, and certainly those which have been 
 most influential in the history of society, have 
 more or less dimly foreshadowed, has been some 
 kind of contact between mankind and a power or 
 powers conceived of as supreme. The ideal im- 
 plied in this yearning of man's prophetic heart came 
 to fullest light in Judaism and to fulfilment in 
 Christianity, namely, a life of perfected personal 
 relations with the living God through His Revealer 
 and our Savior. But nowhere is it suggested in 
 the New Testament that the aim of Christ was to 
 perfect mankind here; the whole of His own teach- 
 ing and certainly the entire religious experience of 
 the apostles refute such a notion. " Our citizen- 
 ship is in heaven," said Paul, and he lived from 
 and for that assurance. " It is not yet manifested 
 what we shall be," said John, and he lived by the 
 hope set on Him who was his ideal of personal 
 
 3421 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 pureness. Even the doctrine of the Kingdom, 
 which many describe as if the Savior had limited 
 it to this world, is tantalizing for the very fact 
 that at times it shimmers between heaven and 
 earth, and at times is concerned wholly with the 
 life which is to come. It is never altogether an 
 institution of this world. 
 
 The history of modern missions proves that, to- 
 day as in the first century, the newborn hope of a 
 future glory, which is personally assured to the 
 Christian heart, exerts an enormous power over the 
 present life. No more shallow criticism of Chris- 
 tianity could be made, none which ignores facts 
 more amazingly, than that the intense hope of 
 heaven weakens the service of man upon the earth. 
 A psychological theorist might show some strong 
 reasons for expecting such a result, but the uni- 
 versal experience of the Christian Church disproves 
 it. When the love and hope of heaven are real and 
 potent over the saint's imagination, then he begins 
 to pray, " Thy will be done on earth even as it is 
 done in heaven"; and when men mean that prayer, 
 they begin to work for its realization. The loss of 
 that vision of a sphere where the divine will is 
 universally obeyed, makes it less possible for men to 
 cherish in their hearts a burning desire to see that 
 will realized among men. The loss of that infinite 
 future casts gloom upon earth. The fading of the 
 Christian hope is the paralysis of altruism. Indeed 
 a dim heaven makes all prayer less full of interest 
 and significance. 
 
 It is not easy for theoretical critics of Christian- 
 
 243 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 ity to realize how and why it is that this faith, 
 which at heart lives on the hope of a future life, 
 has done so much for this world. They easily slip 
 over the fact, which will bear the deepest and most 
 thorough scrutiny, that it is love which unites the 
 cherishing of that hope with the most arduous 
 labor for the visible betterment of human condi- 
 tions. It is always love which labors. The faith 
 which confers the purest love as a living force upon 
 the hearts of men must be, and is, the mightiest 
 influence known to history. 
 
 However, while Christianity does not and can- 
 not tell men to expect the realization of humanity's 
 ideal in this life, yet the spirit which it infuses 
 into man has given him the power to take the long- 
 est strides of which record can be found towards 
 that very consummation. 
 
 The fact is that we see, and are in the midst of, a 
 universe which is all in the making. If any part 
 of nature had reached repose, had attained her ideal, 
 there might be ground for the expectation or the 
 longing that man may share in that perfection here 
 and now. On the contrary everything is in move- 
 ment, we think it is a movement forwards. The 
 visible and the present is not the whole fact. We 
 are surrounded on every hand with manifest fail- 
 ures, with prophecies rather than attainments of the 
 ideal, with suggestions of the perfect beauty and 
 truth which nature does not fulfil in anything 
 which is seen. Religion, therefore, is to be judged 
 in the light of this fact, that the heart of man has 
 never felt the present form of human history to be 
 
 2M 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 that on which the highest hopes could be centered. 
 We must not ask more of religion than she professes 
 to accomplish, nor of the Christian religion that 
 she should fulfil a function which in her heart of 
 hearts she passionately repudiates, viz., to give 
 man bliss in this world. That which Chris- 
 tianity professes to be is a power that can lead 
 humanity towards its ideal in the eternal world, 
 and there to reach the perfect man. Her power to 
 do that is essentially bound up with her power to 
 manifest the main outlines and qualities of that 
 life, at least in their moral aspects, even amidst 
 the imperfect conditions of the present. If man 
 is made for an immortal life, if in some future state 
 of existence all the generations that have been and 
 all that are yet to pass through this world, shall 
 meet face to face in the marvelous communion of 
 an eternal experience, then the above is all that 
 the ideal religion ought to do. It is all that the 
 Christian religion professes to do. 
 
 Now the purpose of the preceding chapters 
 has been to deal with a few sections of the 
 evidence which can be offered in support of the 
 claims of Christianity to be the final religion. The 
 spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the 
 heathen world has afforded illustrations of a most 
 remarkable, vivid and imiDressive nature, of the 
 power which this religion possesses. This power 
 it has manifested, first, by gradually removing and 
 probably making impossible any other form of re- 
 ligion. The day seems to be not far distant, as we have 
 seen, when the peoples of India and China, not to 
 
 245 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 mention other and smaller lands, will have lost 
 their confidence in the forms of worship which 
 they have hitherto practised and in the beliefs 
 which have nourished that practice. No less clear- 
 ly has the Christian religion manifested its extra- 
 ordinary power of seizing those depths of human 
 nature which those other religions had only im- 
 perfectly controlled, of actually, visibly raising 
 mankind, making the race move onwards towards 
 loftier ideals of personal and of social life. 
 
 4. But this approximate realization of the ideal 
 is made possible by the Christian religion accord- 
 ing to its own teaching, only as it is able to bring 
 mennowinio actual, conscious, personal, fellowship 
 with God through Jesus Christ. It is true that 
 within the range of the Church there have been 
 many and serious divergencies of statement re- 
 garding this life of fellowship with God. We may 
 emphasize for example the distinction between 
 Latin Christianity and the doctrine of the Evan- 
 gelical Churches,^ where disagreements of the most 
 startling nature will be found. Nevertheless a 
 glance into the higher devotional literature of the 
 Koman Church, even in this century, will prove 
 that to the whole of Christendom the experience of 
 a present and conscious fellowship with God con- 
 stitutes the essence of Christianity.^ Disputation 
 
 'Cf. "Social Evolution." By Benjamin Kidd, (pop. ed.) 
 p. 319. 
 
 2 A young missionary from Africa closed an address before 
 the Royal Geographical Society by saying: " The one reason 
 for my success in Africa was the reality of the presence and 
 
 2iG 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 regarding some of the means and manifestations 
 of that fellowship leaves much common ground be- 
 tween these great sections of Christendom. 
 
 The consciousness of fellowship with God is the 
 heart of this religion. Without that all its doc- 
 trines and precepts lose either their meaning or 
 their efficacy or both. It is the intense personal re- 
 alization of contact with God Himself, which ac- 
 cording to their own testimony has sent out all 
 those thousands of foreign missionaries into the 
 fields of heathendom, and which has stimulated 
 tens of thousands of men and women in the home 
 land, to follow them with their sympathies, their 
 prayers, oftentimes their tears, as well as with 
 material sustenance. Further, the missionaries 
 have found that into this experience of a fellow- 
 ship with God, identical in nature with their own 
 and with that which was attained by the apostles, 
 multitudes of heathen men and women and chil- 
 dren are now entering. They are not cut off 
 from it by the poverty of their past religious 
 conceptions or the abundance of their past vicious 
 habits, by the subtilty of their national mind or 
 the utter crudeness of their previous thought. 
 They may be all mistaken of course, but the 
 fact remains that this religious movement is to-day 
 spreading throughout the world by arresting in- 
 dividual cannibals, or Brahmins or negroes or Chi- 
 nese, as apostles of old were arrested and as all the 
 
 power of God with me night and day." "The Gospel Message. 
 By R. N. Cust, LL. D., p. 81. 
 
 247 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 scholars and saints of Christendom have been ar- 
 rested and brought into the divine life. More- 
 over we have seen that the experience of this re- 
 lationship with God begins to transform character, 
 and as character is transformed, civilization makes 
 progress amongst all peoples. It is a gradual 
 work, of course. The miracle is not wrought 
 in a moment. This force works, like all others, 
 in time. Converts are not often turned into saints 
 even in a decade. Vices are not quenched through- 
 out the Christian communities which are being 
 formed. All that need be proved as well as all 
 that can be proved, is that astounding progress is 
 being made; and that the Christian religion is at 
 the root of it all. But at the root of the Christian 
 religion when it becomes implanted in heathen 
 soil is the experience of fellowship with God. 
 Without that the Christian religion would be 
 powerless in the opinion of all those who know 
 best its nature and possibilities. 
 
 Christianity is to=day creating this inward re- 
 lationship to God and its resulting manifestations 
 of a purer heart and a nobler will, on a scale un- 
 paralleled in its own history, and not only unap- 
 proached but undreamt of in the history of any 
 other religion. 
 
 The task of the man who has made up his mind 
 that Christianity is false, and who would fain estab- 
 lish his judgment by scientific means, is, to prove 
 that this widespread experience of personal fellow- 
 ship with God is unreal. Or, to put it otherwise, 
 he must aim at proving that one of the main factors 
 
 248 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 of evolution has been a baseless fabric of man's 
 imagination called religion, that an agelong cause 
 of progress has been only a miserable misbelief. 
 If this problem were presented in any other 
 range of human experience the hostile investigator 
 would find himself compelled to establish one 
 or other of two alternatives. First he must 
 prove if he can that the alleged Object of faith 
 does not exist and hence that fellowship with 
 God is not the supreme cause of human progress; 
 or, secondly, that the phenomena of Christian ex- 
 perience, associated in the minds of their subjects 
 with that one Cause, can be adequately explained 
 by other causes. It would not be easy, of course, 
 to prove that God does not exist. As the Chris- 
 tian world unanimously attributes its experience 
 to the working of His Spirit and as the attempt has 
 been made times without number to attack the 
 reality of His existence, we may take for granted 
 that no man of our day desirous of the reputation 
 of possessing a sober mind would attempt that task. 
 There remains then only the alternative. And 
 surely it is not too much to ask that those who feel 
 it their duty to attack Christian beliefs, should in 
 some thorough and scholarly fashion present us 
 with a scientific explanation, not only of man's re- 
 ligious experience as a whole, but of the religious 
 experience of Christendom, an explanation which 
 ignores God. The spread of this religion as de- 
 scribed in these pages affords an opportunity for 
 scientific investigation at first hand which must be 
 considered of inestimable value. Is religion but the 
 
 249 
 
Christianity and the Progress of Man 
 
 foam on the surface of the river of human history? 
 Is Christianity just the last result of the dreams 
 and the superstitions of the aflPrighted childhood 
 of human history? Can these or similar positions 
 be adequately or scientifically expounded and de- 
 fended in the light of the phenomena presented by 
 the missionary movement in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury? In view of all this it seems not too much to 
 say that this movement, when fully studied in all 
 its power and extent, when seen to be intimately 
 connected with and to complete the deepest aspi- 
 rations of the human heart and to exercise in a 
 transcendent fashion the permanent functions of 
 religion, when seen to be full of the richest and most 
 glorious blessings to mankind, and lastly, when 
 found to be dependent upon and to flow from an 
 alleged fellowship v/ith God through Jesus Christ, 
 leaves us with only one or other of two conclusions. 
 Either, the whole movement is a self-deception, 
 grounded on folly; or, the man who studies it is 
 looking into the very mind and heart of the living 
 God. 
 
 250 
 
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