tibravy of the theological Seminary PRINCETON . NEW JERSEY FROM THE LIBRARY OF ROBERT ELLIOTT SPEER BV 2091 .C34 1901 The call, qualifications and preparation of candidates THE CALL, QUALIFICATIONS AND PREP- ARATION OF CANDIDATES FOR FOREIGN MISSIONARY SERVICE PAPERS BY MISSIONARIES AND OTHER AUTHORITIES STUDENT VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT FOR FOR- EIGN MISSIONS, 3 WEST29TH STREET, NEW YORK 1901 CONTENTS PAGE Introductory Note I What Essentially Constitutes a Missionary Call ? By Robert E. Speer, M.A 3 Christ's Call to Foreign Missionary Service By Rev. George Wilson, M.A 7 The Call to Foreign Missionary Work. By Rev. Jacob Chamberlain, M.D., D.D 10 Who Ought Not to Go as Foreign Missionaries. By Rev. Henry H. Jessup, D.D 14 Essential Spiritual Qualifications of the Volunteer. By Rt. Rev. M. S. Baldwin, D.D., Bishop of Huron 23 Three-fold Preparation for Foreign Missionary Work. By Rev. Jacob Chamberlain, M.D., D-D 33 Qualifications in Missionary Candidates as Indi- cated by a Tour of the Fields. By Robert E. Speer, M.A 41 All-Round Preparation for Foreign Missionary Service. By Rev. James L. Barton, D.D 48 The Intellectual and Practical Preparation of the Volunteer. Bv President J. C. R. Ewing, D.D ' 52 The Practical Preparation of the Volunteer By Rev. Harlan P. Beach, M.A 62 CONTENTS PAGE Practical Preparation for Women Student Volun- teers. By Isabella Thoburn 71 The Training of Character. By Eugene Stock. M.A ." 76 Mental Preparation for Missionary Work. By Principal T. W. Drury, M.A 81 The Need of Thinkers for the Mission Field. By Rev. John Clifford, D.D., LL.D 91 Some Studies Suggested for Missionary Can- didates. By Rev. J. H. Bernard, D.D 102 Broad Culture Demanded of Missionaries. By Rev. J. H. DeForest, D.D 109 Preparation for the Mission Field Gained Through Personal Work. By Rev. H. P. Beach, M.A. 115 Personal Dealing, the Great Missionary Method. By Rev. S. M. Zwemer, F.R.G.S^ 119 Advice to Volunteers. By the Ven. Archdeacon Moule, B.D 123 Advice to Missionary Volunteers. By Bishop J. M. Thoburn, D.D 127 Practical Suggestions to Missionaries. By Rev. J. G. Brown 133 The Importance to a Missionary of a Knowledge of the People. By Rev. A. H. Smith, D.D. . 137 Hints Concerning the First Study of Language on Missionary Soil. By Rev. Chauncey Goodrich, D.D 141 Missionary Efficiency and Service. By Luther Gulick, M.D 147 Medical Advice to Outgoing Missionaries. By Herbert Lankester, M.D 151 The Young Woman's Missionary Outfit. By Mrs. Lucy W. Waterbury 155 INTRODUCTORY NOTE. This is not a systematic treatise on the call, qualifica- tions and preparation of candidates for foreign mis- sionary service. It is simply a collection of papers prepared, with one exception, for The Student Volun- teer, New York, The Student Volunteer, London, The Inter collegian, New York, and the Conventions of the Student Volunteer Movement in Great Britain and in the United States and Canada. Each one is by an expert who is fitted to give helpful advice to those preparing for work in the foreign mission field For the convenience of student volunteers these papers are published in this form, as the original sources are accessible to very few. The reader will discover repeti- tions. This is to be expected in a collection of mis- cellaneous papers on the call, qualifications and prepa- ration of missionary candidates prepared by different writers independently of each other. Each paper, how- ever, treats the subject under consideration in an original way, and merits being given some permanent form. These articles will be of value to students who are endeavoring to decide what their life work shall be. The various phases of missionary work and the quali- fications necessary for successful missionary service are clearly presented. Any student, whether thinking of giving his life to foreign missions or not, will be profited by a careful reading of these papers. It is believed that the volume will furnish a basis for a series of studies on the call and preparation of missionary candidates in the regular meetings of the Volunteer Band. Such a course will not duplicate the work of the mission study classes or the subjects pre- sented in the regular missionary meetings of the Asso- ciation. To aid Bands in such studies a brief outline has been prepared. It will be sent on application to the General Secretary of the Student Volunteer Move- ment, 3 West 29th street, New York. Fennell P. Turner. WHAT ESSENTIALLY CONSTITUTES A MISSION- ARY CALL? 1 ROBERT E. SPEER, M.A., NEW YORK There is an assumption underlying this question, which almost justifies the reply that that which essen- tially constitutes a call to the foreign field is the absence of a call to stay at home. And although that answer would be altogether too summary, yet, from one point of view, it would be fair to give it. The man who assumes that some special kind of call is required to send him out to the mission field might properly be answered by the inquiry as to what special call other men ought to have to justify them in staying at home. The fact that a man is born in a certain condition does not carry the assumption that he is bound to continue forever in that condition, for he may be born a klepto- maniac. Being born here or there only lays upon us the responsibility of ascertaining whether that is the place wherein we are intended to spend all our lives. However, the answer suggested would not be a fair one. Life is a very complex business, and the Holy Spirit does not work in mechanical grooves. We can- not draw up any brief formula which shall infallibly direct the life. This matter of the missionary call is a complex thing. It involves, for one thing, God's will ; and, for another, man's discovery of that will. Possi- l Report Student Volunteer Convention, London, 1900. 3 4 WHAT CONSTITUTES A MISSIONARY CALL? bly, God may have a will for a man which that man is not willing to discover; or the man may desire to do a certain thing and pursue a given course which is not God's will for him. There are two points which may help to answer the question in a negative way. First, we cannot assume that the absence of a desire to go to the mission field is an indication that we are not to go. Many proceed on the assumption that, unless they want to go, they are not called to go ; but that does not follow. One of the best of our old missionaries in China told me, during his fourth visit to the United States, that he never came to America without meeting dozens of ministers who told him that they had made the great mistake of their lives in not answering God's call to the foreign field; yet they did not discover that they had made the mistake until it was apparently too late for remedy. God will not coerce men. He works along the channels of per- sonal desire and inclination. If we refuse to have sym- pathy with His Son and with His world, He will not drive us into the mission field. I do not believe that a man has any right to ask for a call to missions which shall be of a character or quantity different from the call to practice medicine or law, or to lay bricks, in his own country. A man has a right to take up any kind of work, only so far as God assigns it to him. We have no right to ask, for missionary work, any leading of a kind different from that which we receive as we look toward this or that occupation at home. Having said these things by way of clearing the ground, I may now say that there are three elements which enter into the determination of a call to the mis- sion field. The first is the need. We know that. WHAT CONSTITUTES A MISSIONARY CALL? 5 clearly, the need constitutes a call. I stand, for exam- ple, upon a river bank, and some people are drowning in the stream. I do not need to have any legal process assigning me to the duty of their rescue. It is enough for me that people are drowning ; that they are in need and that I can help them. That constitutes as much and as a great call to me, as if an officer of the law were to take me by the throat and say, "Save those people, or I will put you into prison for your negli- gence." Need is one great element. A second is ab- sence of any personal disqualification ; and we ourselves are not the best judges there. A great many men think they are too intelligent to go out to the missionary field, and others think they are not intelligent enough ; but no man is able to judge himself either way. All kinds of qualifications enter into missionary life; but whether we possess the requisite qualifications or lack sufficient of them to disqualify us, is best determined for us by someone else. The third element is absence of any insuperable hindrance, and of course the ques- tion whether it is insuperable or not depends upon the personal ability to get over the hindrance. A great many persons are hindered by a difficulty that would not hinder others. I think that when once one has gained a vision of the world's need, like Christ's vision, and a love for it like His love, a great many hindrances will no longer appear to be such. Take these three things together — the need of the world, the presence of subjective qualifications for missionary service, and the absence of any insuperable obstacles in the way, and I think those three will constitute a presumption that a man ought to go to the missionary field. I think that is not an unfair 6 WHAT CONSTITUTES A MISSIONARY CALL? way of putting it. In that way it was that Keith- Falconer dealt with himself just before he went out to Arabia. "Whilst vast continents are shrouded in almost utter darkness, and hundreds of millions suffer the horrors of heathenism, or of Islam, the burden of proof lies upon you to show that the circumstances in which God has placed you were meant by Him to keep you out of the foreign mission field." In other words, the question for us to answer is not, Am I called to the foreign field? but, Can I show sufficient cause for not going? We may be quite sure that if we face in that direction God can much more easily deter us from going, if He so determines, than He can get us out there if we face in the opposite direc- tion. As a friend of mine said, "God Himself cannot switch a powerless engine; but He can use the man who is willing to go out as a missionary, who is moving all the time right out towards the missionary field, trusting God to turn him aside if He sees fit." As we read the life of the Apostle Paul, we find that he was not like a balking horse, always waiting to be driven ; but he was ever moving and expecting to receive direc- tions as he moved. He tried this door and that; and when they were shut in his face, he went around until he came to the open door. He did not sit down indo- lently until God forced him along His way and until he came to the single open door for which he looked. I think one might properly answer this question by saying that the essential element of a missionary call is an openness of mind to the last command of Christ and to the need of the world; and then one needs only to subject himself to the judgment of the proper authori- ties as to whether he is qualified to go. CHRIST'S CALL TO MISSIONARY SERVICE 3 REV. GEORGE WILSON, M.A. What constitutes Christ's call to a Christian man or woman, personally, to leave home and home-land, to live and labor in some "uttermost part of the earth"? We take two things for granted. ( I ) That you are scripturally, radically, and consciously converted. If you are not this, or if this is to you short of a humble certainty, then you are neither qualified nor called to be a missionary, either at home or abroad. (2) That you are absolutely surrendered to the will of Christ; that in relation to Christ you are in the position of a ready "bond-servant," waiting on Him and on no one else for the sphere of your service, and for your serv- ing orders. This is the only attitude in which you can hear, understand, and obey Christ's call to the office of a missionary. I. Do not settle your staying at home as a mere mat- ter of course ; you may take for granted that you have no distinct call to go abroad. Have you had a distinct call from Christ to stay at home? Christ has no un- called servants, and His servants have no self-chosen spheres. Do not drift to a home sphere on the current of circumstances. The parting of the ways of your life is with the Lord, and be quite sure that you stay at home only under direct orders from the Master. He 1 The Student Volunteer, London, February, 1897. 7 8 CHRIST S CALL TO MISSIONARY SERVICE has given you grace and gift to be a preacher, a teacher, a doctor, and these are given for the sake of the world. He who gave the gifts must choose for you the sphere in which they are to be used for Him. It is, therefore, as important for you to have a call from Christ to stay at home, as to have a call from Him to go abroad. 2. In waiting on Christ for the distinct missionary call, begin by asking Him to show you where He has most need of you. Do not begin by telling where you would like to go, but by asking where you can best serve. Has He more need for you among the Christ- refusers in the home-lands than among the millions in the heathen world, who have never heard His name? Do not settle that question for yourself. Let Christ settle with you. But face it bravely, trustingly, and obediently at His feet. He holds the disposal of His forces in His own hand, and will settle with you where He has most need of you. If you thus set yourself to be placed by Him in the sphere where you can best serve Him, then we are sure that you will find your personal liking lying directly in the line of His need of you. You and the Master will be perfectly at one, and if He points out to you that He needs you in some remote sphere of a far-off land, that sphere will be dearer to your heart than home or friends or father- land. His sweet and gracious call is far more than compensation for all we have to give up in obeying. The thought that He calls you to where He most needs you, is not only your highest honor, but your purest joy. 3. When Christ by the in-shining and in-pressing of His blessed Spirit beckons you to some far-off field, CHRIST S CALL TO MISSIONARY SERVICIi 9 do not be cast down with difficulties. Remember that the questions of health, gift to acquire a foreign lan- guage, capacity for guiding men, strength to endure hardship and ability to get on with others are impor- tant, but they are secondary questions. I do not think the Holy Spirit will move your mind to go, if you are not fitted to be taught by Him and qualified for the work. We have seen men sent on the plea of splendid natural gifts and utterly fail. We have seen men thrust forth by the Spirit with what seemed weak natural gifts, and prove wonderful witnesses and the instruments of a wonder-working God. Do not des- pise common sense, but in the Spirit-guided life there is an uncommon sense. If God lays it upon your heart by a calm and continuous inward pressure to go to the mission-field, obey the call and believe that He will see to the imparting and the culture of all the needed gifts. Place His will with you, and for you first, and you will go forth in the strength of His en- dowment. 4. Settle the missionary call with Christ now, what- ever be the stage of your studies. The declaration which the members of the Student Volunteer Move- ment sign contains this condition, "if God permit." This is ample provision for all the contingencies in the life of faith. And it is of immense advantage to have an early missionary outlook. The Spirit then brings all your reading to bear on the life work to which the Lord has called you. While you are seeking the train- ing of a wide and generous culture, the Spirit will pre- pare you to be a specialist in bringing souls to Christ. Settle the matter with Christ, and settle it now. THE CALL TO FOREIGN MISSIONARY WORK 1 REV. JACOB CHAMBERLAIN, M.D., D.D., OF INDIA There is, I believe, a widespread misapprehension on the subject of the call to be a missionary. Many a young man and young woman has said to me, "I think I would be willing to be a missionary if I felt a call to that work, but I do not feel that God has called me. He has never indicated to me that I should go." A special call from God seems to be waited for by many even earnest young Christians. They will never get it. There is no doubt that in the opening up of the foreign missionary work in this century, and for enter- ing upon new and untested fields in later years, God has issued special calls to individuals. He has felt it necessary Himself to select the leaders, the pioneers, in each field. He has sent into their souls such a "call" that they have felt "Woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel" in that particular field. Many of the heroes of missions have been thus "thrust into the harvest/' and we have been thrilled by the story of their "call" no less than by the story of their achievements. God may thus call special leaders in the future. But those are the exceptions, not the rule. God does not waste His special providences, His special calls. Our Commander-in-Chief, when He had completed His work on earth, and was ascending again to be on *The Inter collegian. New York, November, iooo. 10 THE CALL TO FOREIGN MISSIONARY WORK II the throne, did not feel it necessary to send an indi- vidual or special call to each one of His believers; but addressing the multitude around Him, those bought by His blood — yes, all believers — He said, "All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth Go ye therefore and disciple all nations." Ye — every one looking for redemption through My blood, go ye and pass on this news to all those in all the world who know it not. That is thy call, O young man, young woman. Will you say, "O crucified One! that is not enough for me. Unless you send me a special letter, a special providence — unless you speak directly to me, in my individual soul, so that I shall hear Thy special sum- mons, I will not go"? Treat not thus the once given positive command of thy Royal Master, or leanness may shrivel thy soul for thy neglect. Every young man or woman entering upon life's opportunities owes it to his Lord, who bought him, to open his New Testament and put his finger on that verse where it says in positive tones, "Go ye," and loyally ask, "Why not I? Is there any reason that I can give, which Christ would consider sufficient, why I should not obey that behest?" Not all can go. Even in the conscription for the war of all able-bodied men for the army, the examining boards rejected full many who reported for service. Certain physical defects incapacitated some; certain mental ailments disqualified others; certain filial or family duties, certain social or professional obligations, certain official responsibilities were held to absolve others. So in Christ's order to the front in the foreign missionary enterprise He says to all believers, "Go ye, evangelize all nations." But woe to those 1 2 THE CALL TO FOREIGN MISSIONARY WORK who in this case give a false excuse, for He knows the inmost soul; He measures the validity of each excuse. And the loving, tender son of Mary said, "He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me." And to those who would keep their sons, their daughters, back from His special service comes that earnest warning voice, "He that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me." Alas, alas ! for that man or woman, young or old, of whom that voice should say, "He, she, is not worthy of Me." Physical, mental defects, filial, family duties, social, official complications must indeed be taken into account, but let them be weighed with the consciousness that the loving eye of Christ is peering into thy inmost soul, and then, whatever be thy decision, joy of heart and a fruitful life may confidently be anticipated. But what are the needed qualifications for being a successful missionary? I presuppose such physical condition as would enable one to obtain an insurance policy in a first-class life insurance company, and such intellectual capacity as to pass through college and professional school with credit. What further is needed may all be summed up in the old minister's "three royal G's" — Grace, Grit, and Gumption. Grace means here consecration to Christ and ardent love for man. Without these a missionary would be a sad misfit. Grit is a dogged perseverance in the performance of one's work, even if one sees no immediate fruit, relying implicitly on Him who said, My word "shall not return unto Me void." Gumption implies a fair quantity of that somewhat uncommon quality, common sense — the ability to adapt one's self to circumstances, to make the best of one's surround- THE CALL TO FOREIGN MISSIONARY WORK 1 3 ings, while judiciously, zealously endeavoring to better them; the capacity to work in harmony with one's fellow-workers, and the ability to seize and wield every available weapon for the prosecution of our warfare. With health, mental capacity, grace, grit, and gump- tion, no one need fear that the Master cannot use him or her as a mighty force for the pushing forward of His kingdom, even in the most difficult fields. Possessed of these, the work in all lands will itself furnish round holes for round men, square holes for square men. Every kind is needed and can be utilized. The eloquence of a Paul, or the quiet persuasiveness of a Barnabas, or the blun- dering energy of a Peter will tell in evangelistic work. The skill of a Gamaliel in educational work will find its scope, for we must, on the ground, train up in each land native Pauls and Timothys, Aquilas and Priscillas, Apolloses and Salomes for founding, instructing, and extending the native Church. The most expert linguists will find their place in translating and revising translations of the Bible and in preparing needed vernacular Christian literature; the most highly qualified physicians in following in the footsteps of the Great Physician in healing all manner of diseases and preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom ; trained nurses in nursing the sick back to life and into the life in Christ Jesus. All and more than all of these qualifications are to be desired, but no one with health, capacity, and "the three G's" need fear to undertake this royal service in any land, for he goes in the service of Him of whom the Apostle Paul, who had tried it, said, "My God shall supply all your need." WHO OUGHT NOT TO GO AS FOREIGN MISSION- ARIES ' REV. HENRY H. JESSUP, D.D., OF SYRIA. Who, among Christian students ought not to go? As the result of an experience of nearly forty years at the front I can mention twelve classes of men who will be justified in remaining at home. i. Those in infirm health. It is not wise to send invalids so far away from home. The expense is so great and the risk so severe that none but those of mens sana in corpore sano should go abroad. No one should go who cannot pass the examination of a medical examiner of a reliable life insurance company. 2. Those too old to learn a foreign language. It is not often that one over thirty can master a difficult foreign language. Mr. Calhoun of Syria began to study the Arabic language at nearly forty and suc- ceeded, but he had had previous experience with the modern Greek. Good linguists can learn a foreign language at thirty-five or even forty, but such cases are the rare exceptions. Some foreign tongues are easier than others, but as a rule it is better to send the young to grapple with Zulu clicks, Arabic gutturals, and Chinese characters. 3. No one should go who is unzvilling to go any- where. There should be complete self-surrender. The The Student Volunteer, New York, February, 1895. 14 WHO OUGHT NOT TO GO 1 5 wise and experienced officers of our Mission Boards are always ready to consider the personal preferences of candidates for special fields. But the true spirit of a missionary is one of readiness to go "where duty calls or danger," making no conditions. 4. Those who believe that the missionary enterprise is doomed to failure. Mr. Moody once said at a meet- ing of the American Board, "Pessimists have no place in the Christian pulpit. We want hopeful men." And we can say with equal truth, Pessimists have no place in the foreign missionary work. We want hopeful men in this glorious aggressive warfare. Our King and Captain is going forth "conquering and to conquer." It is a winning cause. Expect to succeed. Omnip- otence is on your side. The Eternal Spirit of God is with you. Christ is "with you alway, even unto the end of the world." The Dispensation of the Holy Spirit is not a failure, and was not intended to be a failure. You go to lead men to Christ, to organize churches, to train a Christian ministry, to lay founda- tions for a glorious spiritual building to the praise and honor of Christ. If you expect only disaster, retro- gression and final collapse, and can only look on the dark side, do not go abroad to cast the gloom of your pessimism over your fellow laborers and finally sink in despair. You can do little at home with such a spirit. You can do still less abroad. 5. Impatient men. It is a long hard work and needs patience. You must prepare the soil, sow the good seed, water it with your tears, and then wait for the harvest. The Baptist Board of Missions got tired of waiting for the seed to germinate in the Telugu soil of India and were ready to give up the work and with- I 6 WHO OUGHT NOT TO GO draw. But a few patient, faithful workers refused to withdraw, and soon after, 10,000 were baptized in one year ! Be willing to sow and to let others reap. How many missionaries have lived and toiled and died with- out the sight of fruit! But others entered into their labors and gathered the harvest. An impatient man is easily discouraged. The Lord's patience is great. If He can wait for the harvest, His servants can. 6. Men without common sense. This is a virtue the want of which nothing else will supply. Brilliant tal- ents, great linguistic gifts, impetuous zeal, all, alas, will fail without mental balance. A man without level- headed common sense will do more mischief in a day than a whole mission can undo in a year. A person calling himself a missionary went from England to India. After some months he wrote to his home com- mittee, "I should get on very well if it were not for these wretched natives who come crowding in upon me, but now I have got a bull-dog and hope to keep them away !" Religious enthusiasm has led some to go abroad, despising the means God has given us for pre- serving life and health, and they have sacrificed their own lives and the lives of others and given occasion to the enemies of God to blaspheme. Some of them have become a charge on other missionaries. What would St. Luke, the beloved physician, have said to the mod- ern school of enthusiasts who denounce doctors and medicines as of the Evil One? Common sense in every day life is a sine qua non in the foreign mission work. 7. Intractable men. Such men cannot yield to a majority vote. They are not needed abroad. The work needs tractable, courteous men, willing to take advice and to work with others. One self-opinionated, WHO OUGHT NOT TO GO I 7 arbitrary, wilful man will bring disaster upon a mis- sion. Missions are self-governing bodies, and the majority must decide every question. Intractable men make trouble enough at home, yet in a Christian land they soon find their level, under the tide of public opin- ion. But in a little organized self-governing body in a distant corner of the earth, such men work great mischief. Dr. Anderson of the American Board told me in 1857, that a young man once came to the mission house in Boston as a candidate for the foreign mission field. Dr. Anderson invited him to spend the night with him in Roxbury, and as they were walking together the young man suddenly said, "I prefer to walk on the right side." Dr. Anderson said to him, "May I ask why you walk on the right side? Are you deaf in one ear?" "No," said the young man, "but I prefer to walk on the right side and / always will walk on the right side." That young man was not sent abroad. It was evident that a man who was bent on having his own way without giving reasons would be likely to make mischief, and his right side would be pretty sure to be the wrong side. 8. Superficially prepared men. No one can predict what duties may devolve on a foreign missionary: Bible translation, organization of churches, the mould- ing of a new native Christian social fabric, dealing with subtle philosophies, preparing a Christian literature, founding institutions of learning, and perhaps a whole educational system, guiding the ignorant, and often- time dealing with kings and rulers. Surely such a man should be well trained. If a physician, he should be thoroughly equipped, and not be satisfied with any 1 8 WHO OUGHT NOT TO CO short, hasty course of preparation. He should be able not only to secure the diploma of a medical college, but pass the test of examination by the New York or Mas- sachusetts State Board of Examiners. The most com- plete all-round, theological or medical training is the best preparation for the foreign missionary work. To this should be added, experience in personal Christian work in the cities or the country. 9. Men of unsettled religious views. The foreign mission work needs men who believe something, who are anchored to the Rock, who believe in the Bible, and in Christ as the only Saviour. Not men who regard the Bible as one of the sacred books, and Christ as one of the Saviours. The world wants something positive. It is tired of feeding on ashes and wind. If you do not know what you believe, stay at home until you do. Preach the old, old story without modification or dilu- tion. The Gospel is what the nations need. Redemp- tion through the blood of Christ is the only revealed way of salvation. There is not wisdom enough on earth or among the angels of heaven, to devise a better plan of salvation than that given us in the gospel of Jesus Christ. 10. Men who are afraid of torrid climates and hard languages. There is nothing in these to alarm a Chris- tian soldier. When Stanley advertised for men to go to Equatorial Africa, twelve hundred men offered to go, fearing neither serpents, savages, cannibals, mala- ria, starvation, nor death itself. The British Govern- ment has thousands of candidates applying for posts in the East India service, though it involves exposure to that trying climate and an expatriation of at least twenty years. And shall we do less for Christ and our WHO OUGHT NOT TO GO 1 9 fellow men ? And as to languages, if the native babies in Asia and Africa can learn those hard guttural lan- guages, you can. Grace and grit will triumph over the hardest language. You will make mistakes, morti- fying, shocking mistakes, but no matter, try again. You will need the humility of a little child and his good- natured perseverance in learning his mother tongue, but any young man or woman of good health, and habits of mental discipline, can master any Asiatic or African language, as others have already done. II. Men who hesitate to condescend to the lowly, depraved and besotted. The unevangelized nations are not all besotted and repulsive in their habits, but there are tribes of half-naked, filthy and imbruted children of nature from whom a civilized man involuntarily shrinks. Yet they are men for whom Christ died. Can you go and live among such men and women ? Do you say, I am not called to such a degradation, this is too great a sacrifice, too exacting a condescension ? Think what Christ has done for you. In the year 1854, the Rev. Dr. W. Goodell, of Constantinople, said in a charge to a young missionary just setting out for Western Africa, "When your whole nature revolts from contact with degraded and naked savages, and you feel that you cannot bear to associate with them, remember what a demand you make every day, when you ask the pure and sinless Spirit of the Eternal God to come not to sojourn but to abide in your vile, sinful heart !" Think what Christ has done for you. You need a heart full of love to men for Christ's sake. If you love men, you will see their nobility and the beauty of God's image in them, in spite of the scars and deformities of sin. And if you love them they will see it and feel it, 20 WHO OUGHT NOT TO GO and will love you in return. Love them and you will win them, and they will love you, and then how easy to lead them to Christ ! 12. Lastly> men who think of the missionary work as a temporary service, or a convenient way of serving themselves. Some men have entered the foreign mis- sionary work in order to study foreign languages and fit themselves for a position at home; or in order to travel in foreign parts ; or to engage in mere scientific exploration or commercial pursuits. Such men do not deserve the name of missionaries. The missionary work should be, if possible, a life work. If you go abroad, expect to spend your life among the people and to identify yourself with them. Let nothing turn you aside from your work. Missionaries are sometimes tempted to leave their work by the allure- ments of literature, diplomacy, or commerce. Their familiarity with foreign languages, with the treasures of Oriental literature, and with the mineral resources of distant lands, render them peculiarly liable to temp- tation from these sources of emolument. But none of these things should move them. If you go abroad, hold on to your work until the Lord Himself separates you from it. If then the Christian student finds that he is of sound health; of proper age; willing to go where God shall call ; hopeful ; patient ; with good common sense ; tract- able; thoroughly trained; of settled religious views; willing to go to the most trying climate and the most difficult language; ready to love the humblest and the most degraded; and to make his work a life service; it is evident that he is called of God to go. He needs no voice or sign from heaven. The call of lost men WHO OUGHT NOT TO GO 21 and the command of Him who came to seek and save the lost, alike urge him to go. Let such a Christian ask himself these questions : Has the religion of Christ been a blessing to me? Is it adapted to all men? Does the unevangelized world need the gospel now as it did when Christ gave His last command? Am I a debtor to myself alone? Do I owe a duty only to my own family or my own country ? Is the voice of Christ still ringing with the command, "Go, teach all nations" ? Are the heathen still crying, "Come and help us"? If I am Christian should I not be like Christ? If I am soldier should I not obey marching orders? If I am a workman should I not make the best use of my life ? If I am a scholar, should I not make my education most effective? Where am I most needed to-day? Can a fair-minded Christian young man or woman then fail to consider these questions honestly? It is not honest to shut our eyes and ears and disclaim all responsibility. We shall thus only postpone the inevi- table day of reckoning. Be honest to yourself; honest to your Saviour, honest to your perishing fellow-men ! It is wise to settle it while you are engaged in your course of study. If you can do it while in college or high school so much the better. If you have sufficient reason to justify your remaining at home it will always be a blessing to you that you considered the question ot duty fairly, fully and faithfully. You will be more useful as a pastor at home, if you were willing to go, and found yourself detained at home by the constraints of the Divine Providence. But do not think that such a question can be decided without a struggle. The thought of a life separation from home and friends and 22 WHO OUGHT NOT TO GO country, from father and mother, brothers and sisters, will cost you many a pang. And the thought of what they will suffer will be more bitter than any anxiety about yourself. You may have had cherished ambi- tions, even in the thought of the Christian ministry at home. These must be set aside. Am I willing to give up all for Christ? Where will you decide this ques- tion? There is but one place — on your knees before your Saviour, in prayer, in holy, rapt communion with Him. Let Him into the secret council chamber of your soul, set Him on the throne, ask His decision, His counsel, His help, His command. Then all will be right, and you need not fear to go ahead in the strength of God to this blessed and glorious service. ESSENTIAL SPIRITUAL QUALIFICATIONS OF THE VOLUNTEER RT. REV. M. S. BALDWIN, D.D., BISHOP OF HURON There is a modern astronomer who tells us that this planet of ours consumes only the two-hundred-mil- lionth part of all the rays which issue from the sun, and we can none of us believe that in the economy of nature a beam of light is ever lost. There are other planets they must illuminate, other fields they must fructify, other plants they must nurse into exquisite beauty and loveliness ; and the question comes : Does the whole church throughout the world consume as, much as the two-hundred-millionth part of all the full- ness that is in Christ? No, by no means. He is the brightness of His Father's Glory and the express image of His Person. In Him dwelleth all the full- ness of the Godhead bodily, and all that we can take is but a drop in the ocean of His grace. The super- abundance that we cannot possibly use is for the dying world about us ; for the uncounted millions who are sinking on every side, unsaved, unknown, unwept for want of that glorious gospel of which we have not only enough, but abundantly to spare. Such being the case, the important question at once arises : Who are the fit men to preach the gospel to a dying world? 'Report Student Volunteer Convention, Cleveland, i! 23 24 ESSENTIAL SPIRITUAL QUALIFICATIONS They are, first, those whom God the Holy Ghost has called. The first mission the Gentile church ever sent forth was from Antioch. On that occasion the Holy Ghost said: "Separate Me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them." We cannot fail to notice that the Eternal Spirit in His infinite wisdom first chose these holy men, then called them, then en- dowed them with superabounding grace, then sent them forth to sow the seed and reap the harvests of the Lord. Who were these men? They were, first of all, men who had set their seal that God was true. St. John says: "He that hath received His witness hath set his seal to this, that God is true." In the midst of a crooked and troubled world, with paganism and in- fidelity on every side, these men had set their seal to the testimony of God the Father, concerning His Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. They not only believed that testimony themselves, but they exhorted all others with whom they came in contact to do the same. They lifted up their voices throughout the highways of the world, and said to those who sat in darkness: Your idols are a lie, your philosophy a sham, your power weakness, your life a breath. Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world. Repent, believe, be saved. They affixed their seal to God's truth by saying Christ alone was the Truth. They showed the reality of this faith by laying down their whole being in attestation of it. Dear students, be assured God will not choose those who are airing their doubts as to the eternal truthfulness of His inspired Word. If you belong to what is called the destructive school of criticism and think you have discovered ESSENTIAL SPIRITUAL QUALIFICATIONS 25 cracks and flaws and fissures in the Bible, no doubt you may hereafter be chosen to minister to some splendid church where the stipend will be beyond the dream of avarice, and cushioned splendor lie in rich profusion all about you, but certainly God will not choose you for the foreign field. He only wants those who set their seal that God is true. Again, they were men who were themselves sealed by the Holy Ghost. They were so filled with His holy presence, and so enriched with all His precious fruits and glorious charismata that men took knowledge of men that they had been with Jesus. Whatever inward joys God's sealing bestows upon the individual Christian, its out- ward manifestation to the world is the miracle of a life in union with the ascended Christ, and rejoicing in that divine liberty from sin which was forever ef- fected on the cross. Grace dwelt within and the glory of God shone down upon them. They had not only life, but life abounding. Dear young men and women, the unction of the Holy One is what you need most. Without this your ministry will be "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean." With this it will be the ministry of power. "Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endowed with power," was the Saviour's command at the first ; it is His command now. It is a power you cannot obtain from schools of learning, from the lips of the wise or the precepts of man. You can only obtain this power in one place, and that is alone with God at a throne of grace. There, in deep solitude with Him, resting believingly on the availing interces- sion of our great Melchizedek Priest, ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, for "if ye then, being eril, know how to give good gifts unto your children, 2 6 ESSENTIAL SPIRITUAL QUALIFICATIONS how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him ?" Secondly, God chooses a man who believes himself unfit for the work given him to do. God never wants the self-sufficient. They are not the material He wishes to employ. St. Paul gives us a marvelous list of the extraordinary forces which God employs for the discomfiture of the world. They are five in number : The foolish things that He might put to shame them that are wise ; the weak things that He might put to shame the things that are strong ; the base things, and the things that are despised did God choose ; yea, and the things that are not, that He might bring to naught the things that are. When we through grace reach the point that we esteem ourselves as noth- ing we are eligible for God's eternal election. Let us look for a moment at Moses at the dawn of his manhood. He felt perfectly sure in his own mind that he was just the man to lead Israel out of Egypt. He had great learning. He was taught in all the wis- dom of Egypt. He had been brought up in the court of Pharaoh. What could he possibly want more? Acting on this assumption, he proceeds to the vindica- tion of his people, only to learn that he had to fly the country and escape for his life. God's plans were deeper far. He sends him to school for forty years in Midian, there to learn God's power and his own nothingness. Forty years is a long time — longer far than any of you propose to spend at college — yet I am sure it was all needed before the man Moses was fitted for God's work. At last the time for action came, and as he is tend- ing his flock he sees a strange and unprecedented ESSENTIAL SPIRITUAL QUALIFICATIONS 27 sight — a thorn bush and a fire. The fire was within the bush, and the bush was not consumed. Two antithetical truths were here before his eyes. The bush was to represent the weakness of man, the fire the omnipotence of God. The bush itself was the dry acacia of the wilderness, almost valueless, but a fit figure of Moses — a fit figure indeed of every man that God intends for service. Only a poor thorn bush in a dry and desert world. On the other side, there is the fire, emblem of consuming power and disintegrat- ing might. This is not all. The fire is in the bush and the bush is not consumed. What was the lesson God intended him to learn? The fire in the bush was infinite strength dwelling in utter weakness. God, the omnipotent One, was about to dwell in the poor thorn bush Moses, and make him efficient for his holy work. Now, fire has many qualities. In the darkness it will illuminate, in cold will warm, in contamination purify and in might consume. Here, God said to Moses : It is quite true you are all weakness and irresolution; only, as the thorn bush, a thing of naught, but I am with thee, and My power shall supply all thy need. Young men and women, it is the same to-day. God prizes most those who only esteem themselves as weak and helpless as the thorn bush. God, not you, will be the fire. You want to feel fit. He wants you to feel unfit; our extremity is always His opportunity. A modern expositor has pointed out that the man who was given the greatest work in the Old Testament dispensation was a man who offered no less than seven objections to prove his own unfitness. Certainly he was wrong in making any objections when God gave the command, but the facts prove the lowly estimate 28 ESSENTIAL SPIRITUAL QUALIFICATIONS Moses had of himself and the high regard in which he was held by God. Goliath clothed himself with an immense amount of armor. His spear was like a weaver's beam and his sword a terror to his foes, but what did it all effect? Absolutely nothing. A smooth stone in the sling of a youth who went against him in the name of the Lord felled him like a cedar. And so it always will be. If you are going forth in the presence and power of God, it matters not how high are the walls, or how mighty the Anakim, all opposition will give way before you. Thirdly, another and most important qualification is that we should bear the image of the Lord Jesus Christ in our life and character. The most stupendous and irrefragable proof of the truth of Christianity is our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. Infidels, who have rejected all revelation, find them- selves at a loss to explain the solitary grandeur, the sublime character, the divine teaching of this to them Mysterious One. The one question that they cannot possibly answer is this: If Christianity is not true, who in the past ever invented the character, spake the words and did the works of this infinitely Holy One? Chadwick, in answering these infidels, asks : "Did this eagle, with sun-sustaining eyes, emerge from the slime of the age of Tiberius, the basest age in history? Whence is the trumpet, and whose is the breath in it, which has blown that dying supplication round the world and down the ages : 'Come unto Me, and I will give you rest'? Who built the throne, and reared the pillars of it, which knows no change amid the revolu- tions of centuries? 'Truly this was the Son of God.' ESSENTIAL SPIRITUAL QUALIFICATIONS 29 Christ, our Divine Redeemer, is the Sun of Righteous- ness and if you bring a blind man out at midday and find that he is utterly unable to see the sun shining in its strength, it is idle to bring him out at midnight to see whether he can see Vega or Capella." And, dear students, it is this mysterious, sublime Christ; this effulgence of His Father's glory and express image of His person we are to resemble. Not some glowing seraph who stands beside His throne, not some great archangel who flies to do His will ; but like Him who is the chiefest among ten thousand and the altogether lovely. Now, when you go to the heathen to preach the gospel of the grace of God your words have to be the words of Jesus and your character the character of Jesus. Your words will be only weighty when they see Christ shining out of you. Now, what was the appearance of Christ? St. John tells us that he saw our Lord when the heavens were opened, and that by the throne He stood — a "Lamb as it had been slain." Now we ourselves never saw a man who had been dead and was raised to life again, but when St. John saw our Lord He bore the marks of death. He not only looked like a "Lamb," but as one that had been slain and was risen to life again. To be like Christ, therefore, is to look like one who has died, been buried and raised to life again in the image of His resurrec- tion. How many of us look like those who have died and been buried? What the world sees is the old unslain natural life, and unsatisfied they turn away and say: "Is this Christianity?" That which im- presses men when they see and hear us is the human; what impressed men when they saw and heard Christ was the Divine. Now, whv is this? It is because so 3° ESSENTIAL SPIRITUAL QUALIFICATIONS many professing Christians exhibit in their daily life the old unslain natural man, with all his sins and evil propensities. When they are offended the law of the jungle obtains. Blow is met by blow, insult by insult, wrong by wrong. When self-interest is concerned, trickiness in trade, deceit and fraud betray the exist- ence of that nature to which by profession they are dead. What the world needs is to see a man abso- lutely dead to the mind of the flesh — a man who will give good for evil, a blessing for a curse, a prayer for a blow ; in other words, the character of Christ, which is divine, and not his own, which is human. People are never so impressed as when they see God in you. They may doubt your arguments, dispute your con- clusions and oppose your progress, but in some way they will believe in you. And when you place a mis- sionary, with the character of the Lord Jesus manifest in him, amid all the impurity, idolatry and shams of heathenism, he shines like a meteor in the midnight sky. It is not only what he says, but how he lives; his life is to them a miracle. If you are to do the work of the Lord, live much in His presence, bury yourself in His infinite fullness and there stay until when at last you go forth on His errand, people will say: "These men look like those who have died forever unto sin and risen again unto righteousness — look like the Lord Jesus Christ." If some of you ask, How can we become like Christ? I answer: Kneeling down, in the solitude of your room, plead this promise: "Whom He did foreknow He also did predestinate to be con- formed to the image of His Son." It is God's eternal purpose to make you — not like the beloved John, the mighty Paul or even like some glorious seraph near ESSENTIAL SPIRITUAL QUALIFICATIONS 3 1 His throne — but like Him that sits upon the throne; like Jesus Christ Himself. Fourthly, another qualification is that those who go forth should understand thoroughly what their mes- sage is. They are to understand first of all that the gospel is a message; not a scheme of philosophy, not a vast system of human reasoning, not a poem or guesses at the truth, but a simple message sent down by God in heaven to man on earth. The message is: "God so loved the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." This they are to proclaim. No human mind can understand the Infinite, and there may be many deep things in Revelation which we can- not now fully grasp, but we can all give a message. A fact people forget is this : We are not advocates. The advocate of the Father is the Son, and the advo- cate of the Son is the Holy Ghost. An advocate is a much higher being than a mere witness; an advocate has to be one learned in the law, but a witness may be a poor, unlettered man. He has not to explain law ; he has to witness to a fact. Now God says : "Ye are My witnesses." God the Son will vindicate to the uttermost God the Father; and God the Holy Ghost will vindicate to the uttermost God the Son. We are to say: "God is light and in Him is no darkness at all" — that all truth dwells in Him, and that the Lord Jesus Christ has been lifted up upon the cross that whosoever believeth in Him might have everlasting life. They are to have no hesitating message, but one clear statement to a dying world — Christ and Christ 32 ESSENTIAL SPIRITUAL QUALIFICATIONS only. They are to tell the heathen that the most precious thing in the whole world is the precious blood of Christ; that Christ is able to save to the uttermost all that come unto Him, and that He is the Rest where- with God causes the weary to rest, and He is their refreshing. THREEFOLD PREPARATION FOR FOREIGN MIS- SIONARY WORK 1 REV. JACOB CHAMBERLAIN, M.D., D.D., OF INDIA The preparation should be threefold : Of body, of mind, of heart; or, physical, intellectual, spiritual. I. The first of these often receives far too little at- tention. Many a consecrated student, in college or professional school, gives himself with intense earnest- ness to his studies and to his religious duties, both closet and public, while paying scant attention — or none at all — to the cultivation of his physique. This is a mistake : it is a crime. Under the Mosaic dis- pensation, the sacrifice looking to the coming Messiah was to be a lamb without physical blemish. So should our offering to that risen Messiah be a body with all the powers He has given thoroughly developed for His sake, for His service. I do not say that the best athlete always makes the best missionary, but I do say that the careful, tem- perate training of a college athlete will necessarily fit that man for more royal service in God's foreign war than if he had moped along in inactivity and lack of physical culture, while giving all his thought to the intellectual and spiritual. Indeed, physical prowess alwavs stands the missionary on the field in good stead, l The Inter collegian, New York, December, 1900. 33 34 THREEFOLD PREPARATION and often saves him for farther service. When, be- cause of the conversion of a young Brahman whom I knew, the mob sought his life and that of the mis- sionary, and, though not daring to strike a blow, sought to hustle them to death, the football tactics of the stalwart young missionary, which he had practised when captain of his university team, enabled him to get himself and the convert through the mob to a place of safety. The missionary may oft-times be called upon to undergo great physical toil, endurance, and privation, and with a physique well developed he can render far better service — yes, use to far better advantage — his intellectual and spiritual gifts. Not only mens sana is needed, but, for the most royal service, it should be in cor pore sano. To every student volunteer I would say: Take plenty of vigorous exercise; cultivate every physical power to its best; look well to your digestion. Some dyspeptic missionaries have, it is true, done excellent service; but they have done it in spite of their dys- pepsia, and, but for it, could have done far better. With all, cultivate a cheerful disposition. It can be cultivated. It will be needed. Cynics do not accom- plish much as missionaries. Do not be afraid of a good healthy, hearty laugh. I knew a consecrated missionary of whom it was said, "He died because he could not laugh." He always took a gloomy view of things. He could see no humor in anything. He sank under the climate and died. A good hearty laugh now and then might have enabled him to throw off depressing symptoms and disease, and made him live longer to win many more souls. One of the most con- THREEFOLD PREPARATION 35 secrated, spiritually minded missionaries I even knew was one of the best laughers. Beware of any personal habits that sap the vital energy. These are insidious. They are often known to one's self alone and to his God. Each one must study well his own case, and hunt them out for the Master's sake; and here I wish to say a word on a delicate subject — the use of tobacco. I am not a crank on that subject. I willingly admit that some of the most spiritually minded, most devoted men I have known, do use tobacco. At their feet would I gladly sit and learn, but not learn the tobacco habit; for I am sure that it would stand in my way in effective service on the mission field. Indeed, I have known even devoted missionaries in the tropics whose ser- vice — yes, whose lives — have been declared by their physicians to have been cut short by that habit. It is more seductive in a tropical climate than in a cold, and the very loneliness, often, of a missionary's life in any foreign land encourages it. Many a missionary who has come out to the field a smoker have I known to give it up there, for Christ's sake, and for years after to feel the satisfaction of doing better work be- cause of giving it up. To any prospective missionary who has formed, or is forming, the habit I would, with all brotherly earnestness and love, say, "Don't." Be pure in all things : "Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?" The temple of God must be pure and holy. 2. The intellectual preparation should be the very best attainable. We are, none of us, responsible for the amount of intellectual ability with which we have been endowed, but we are responsible for its thorough 36 THREEFOLD PREPARATION culture. The intellect is the mighty weapon which we are to wield for Christ. We should sharpen it, develop it, strengthen it to our utmost. When I was about to enter college, my sainted mother, having first consecrated me to the missionary work, thus charged me : "My son, if you are to be a missionary, you must stand high in scholarship. Do not let it be said that seconds are palmed off upon the Lord for missionary service." It was good advice. I pass it on to you. If any man needs to be well equipped, it is the mis- sionary. He often has intellectual giants to contend with, and though he has the promise, and now and again realizes the fulfillment of it, "I will be with thy mouth and teach thee what thou shalt say," God gave not that promise to encourage intellectual lazi- ness either in preparation for, or in fulfilling, His commission. The missionary should be a well-read, well-equipped, "all-round" man, obtaining all the knowledge he can on all subjects. History, science, philosophy, psychol- ogy, mathematics, languages, poetry, travel, geogra- phy, art, mechanics — everything will come into use on the missionary field. Fiction even, should not be entirely avoided, but it should be utilized judiciously, temperately. We have all known students whose col- lege standing was much lowered by excessive novel- reading. Alas, I have known missionaries on the field of whom it has been said, and I fear justly, that their work and their influence was much lessened by the excessive reading of novels! In reading fiction choose only the best, and read with moderation and thought. It will then be not harmful, but helpful. The studv of other religious systems, especially of THREEFOLD PREPARATION 37 the country where one's missionary life is to be spent, should by no means be neglected. We should at once dismiss the thought that there is no truth to be found in non-Christian systems. God has not left Himself without a witness in any age or nation. Zealously culling all that we can of truth in that system we are combating, we should utilize that truth as a common ground on which to stand in pointing out how Chris- tianity, with its loving God the Father, its atoning God the Son, its enlightening, sanctifying God the Spirit, supplies what is still lacking in their system, and puts a capstone on all the truth contained in all the systems, and is itself alone able to raise the sinful soul to God. Here let me give a word of caution and of cheer. Many a prospective volunteer has held back because of a fear that he, or she, will not be able to acquire the language of the country to which they would be sent. That is a bugbear put forward by Satan to frighten off recruits whom he does not want sent. Can an uneducated Scandinavian, German or Pole, who comes to America to better himself, acquire that most difficult of languages, the English, so as to use it not only in trade, but in social intercourse as well — many becoming very fluent in its use — and shall we, the educated children of the King, fear to go to any land to which He calls us, to attack any language His children there speak, that we may tell those wandering sons and daughters the way back to Him? One who goes thus, goes not at his own charges. God, who formed the ear, the tongue, will help the ear to catch, the tongue to enunciate, the memory to retain the strange sounds until they become the familiar mes- sengers of the message of love. No one who has the 38 THREEFOLD PREPARATION ability to obtain an education at home need fear to attack any missionary language if he or she is willing to do it energetically, persistently, prayerfully, as unto the Lord. For a missionary has a right to pray over the grammar and the sounds and the idiom of his new- language, and to count on God's helping him to con- quer it. I speak that I do know. 3. We discuss, last, preparation of the heart, not because it is the least important, but the most; for the missionary work demands men and women of strong faith, who have learned to take God at His word, and to rely implicitly upon it. "Brother Lawrence" never uttered a truer word than when he spoke of "the practice of the presence of God" as a reality and as a thing to be zealously cultivated. A missionary who does not believe in the literal truth of Christ's promise which was coupled with His commission, "Go ye," viz., "Lo, I am with you alway," misses much of his possible power. That presence becomes very real at times. On one occasion, when I stood facing an angry mob in a large city in a native state, who were gathering stones to put an end to "those preachers of another God," the presence of the Christ at my side seemed very real. I could almost feel His hand upon my shoulder as He whis- pered, "Say this, and they will listen"; "Say that, and they will hear." And when the mob had become an audience, and had with deep attention listened to the story of redeeming love, I felt that it was not I that had been speaking — for no words of mine could have quelled that mob — but that the Saviour's word had been fulfilled, "For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you." Mission- THREEFOLD PREPARATION 39 aries of to-day in India, China, Turkey, in all the world, need, and should learn it young, to take God at His word. To do this, one must be a diligent student of God's Book. That is God's secret place, where we may al- ways find Him, and "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty." Ay, there are we safe and strong. Those who have studied Greek will do well to make a specialty of Biblical Greek, and to make the New Testament in the original, containing the very words used by our Saviour and His apostles, their daily de- votional reading. I speak from a life experience when I tell what new and helpful ideas one thus daily finds in his closet reading of his Greek Testament. Take the whole Bible with you to India, to China, to Japan. No emasculated substitute will there answer your purpose. When the Revised English Bible first appeared, an old lady went to a book-store and inno- cently inquired of the clerk if he had any copies of the "Reversed Bible." No reversed Bible does for us on heathen soil. Christ, the one atoning Saviour, the God-man, whom Paul preached with all his hard doc- trines, is the only one who can lift up the heathen of to-day. The missionary needs the whole panoply of God. Cultivate an intense love for the Saviour and for your fellow-man. It is not the one who reaches down with tongs to take hold and says, "You poor wretches, come up out of that pit of mire," but the one who clasps the hand of his brother-man as a brother and says, "Come with me and I will do thee good," that will succeed as a missionary. 40 THREEFOLD PREPARATION Finally, in all this preparation, in all this service, let us "ask great things of God, expect great things from God," and we shall not be disappointed. God will fulfill His word to us, in us, by us, and when our missionary career is over, be it long or be it short, the ecstatic words will greet our glad ears, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant." More than this, no human heart could crave. QUALIFICATIONS DESIRED IN MISSIONARY CAN- DIDATES AS INDICATED BY A TOUR OF THE FIELDS l ROBERT E. SPEER, M.A., NEW YORK The conditions under which the foreign missionary does his work have a great influence on character. He is alone, among people of standing inferior to his. It is true that in some countries there are many who affect to despise him ; Mohammedan mollahs, Confucian scholars, Hindu priests, Japanese of different sorts — but most of these have at bottom a real respect for him. Even where he disavows and denies it, he is still re- garded as a representative of the powerful and pitiless Western nations which are back of him with mailed hands. Yet, though respected, and by the common people and the poor often unduly exalted, he is isolated. He has come with something to give. So coming, he as- serts his superiority. Yet no influence about him con- tributes to feeding the springs from which his superi- ority flows. There is much to encourage dictatorial- ness, dogmatic assertiveness, slothfulness, spiritual in- dolence, mere formality of service, weakening of moral fibre and tone, degeneration of standard and ideal for self and others, a general professionalism of work "The Student Volunteer, New York, March, i\ 4i 42 QUALIFICATIONS DESIRED IN CANDIDATES touched with kindness and forced conscientiousness and a little despondency. Missionaries testify to the reality of these perils. The men and women who go to the mission field must be able to stand against them. The ability to stand can not be acquired by mere geo- graphical transplanting. Whoever would resist all such temptations must have the qualifications therefor in this country before ever setting forth on his mission. And on the positive side the missionary should be able to make a definite spiritual impression on the lives of men, many of whom have been devoid of all save the most elementary spiritual notions, and to whom all our spiritual world with its ideas is unintelligible. Perhaps even words are lacking in which to express our notions. Or old systems of belief are to be con- fronted, whose standards run fair athwart the teach- ings of the Gospel, and have in some cases so woven themselves into the social and civil life of the people that Christianity is literally a revolutionary assault upon the very foundations of their institutions. Prob- lems of intricate perplexity need to be solved. Hard- ships, the more difficult because they are not romantic and bear no kinship to martyrdom, must be endured. Hard, trying work must be done. Little by little, spiritual impression must be made; surrounded all the time by the grossest materialism and superstition, the spiritual ideals must yet never be clouded or lost for an instant. The people of the world are ready to have their bodies cared for, and to be put in the way of greater material prosperity. They do not wish for spiritual revolution or the holiness of Christ. The temptation to spend life in giving them what they are willing to receive, and to constrict or to neglect the QUALIFICATIONS DESIRED IN CANDIDATES 43 effort to give them what they need, what Christ came that they might receive, the Revelation of the Father, the Way, the Life abundant, the Heavenly Calling, what our mission exists for, must be sternly throttled. That men may be able to resist these temptations, and do the vital spiritual work, which is our supreme business, they must have qualifications of character and capacity, assured and vindicated here before they go. And among these qualifications should be set first, the need of a deep and holy life. There are two words of Christ which must be familiar to every missionary and which should have been received and absorbed into the life by the missionary candidate. One He spoke first to the woman of Sychar : ''Whosoever shall drink of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up unto eternal life." The other He cried as He stood in Jerusalem on the last, the great day of the Feast of Tabernacles: "If any man thirst let him come unto Me and drink. He that believeth on Me as the Scripture hath said, out of the depths of his life shall flow rivers of living water." The new missionary joins some little company of men and women who are already under the fullest strain. He dare not draw on them for spiritual life. There is none in the surrounding hopeless, lifeless people. If he has no springs within him where the Living Water is flowing, woe to him ! Can he give to others if his own supply is scant? And the missionary's life must be a holy life, a life of holy gentleness, holy pur- ity, holy love. It is to be subject to fearful strain. It will have to give to others at times when in heat, dis- comfort, fever, dirt, it is needing most to receive, when 44 QUALIFICATIONS DESIRED IN CANDIDATES endurance is tested to the uttermost. It will break under this trial if not profoundly held by the power of Him before Whom the Seraphim called to one an- other through the smoke of the temple while the pillars rocked to and fro, "Holy, Holy, Holy." I know of a missionary whom the natives called "Mr. Angry Face," because at times he so lost control of himself, as to blaze on them with wrath. It may not be so with the man who would please Christ. A second qualification is the spirit of willing sacri- fice, in the sense of endurance, of hardiness as a good soldier, and of surrender of all devotion to comfort and ease. The lot of the missionary is much easier in these regards than it used to be, and in many places is devoid of special privation. But where men would do what needs to be done in reaching the people, in thorough and far-reaching itinerating work in coun- try and villages, in energetic and unresting activity, they will have to esteem home and the companionship of loved ones and ease and pleasant surroundings, as of less account than Christ and souls. Men are wanted who will be willing to be absent from home most of the time, and who will regard themselves as on a cam- paign and not as sitting down in a parish. And this spirit must be ready to count life as lightly as Paul counted it. I do not mean that martyrdom awaits us, but we must be ready to spend ourselves utterly. "Sin worketh, Let me work too. Sin undoeth, Let me do. Busy as sin my work I ply 'Till I rest in the rest of eternity." QUALIFICATIONS DESIRED IN CANDIDATES 45 We must not only be willing to burn up for God, if that impossible fate should befall. We must be ac- tually burning out for God now, toiling, striving, driv- ing; knowing that we must work the works of Him that sent us while it is day ; for the night cometh, when no man can work any more. And this qualification must be put in evidence by the missionary candidate here and now. Is he likely to be a flaming fire in the service of his God in Asia, if he is not one here in the United States and Canada? If I have set these spiritual qualifications so promi- nently in the foreground it is because I believe that we are in danger of magnifying other aspects of the mis- sion work above its primary spiritual character, and that the world's evangelization is a spiritual work, a work of spiritual influence, and that the man who is not fit for it spiritually in the fullest sense, though he may do much good, is not a man after God's own heart, doing all His will. But next to these require- ments I would place the need of a solid, balanced judg- ment, and of a clear, grave, alert mind. A man can not have more brains in quantity than God has given him, but he can improve their quality, and if they be phenomenal or not is of little consequence, if so be that only he has disciplined them and got them in hand, so that they go square at any problem set for them, and are reliable and true in their judgments, and honest and unflinching. The mission work demands thought and study and the faculty of decision and determination on the basis of facts examined and con- ditions understood. The missionary candidate must learn how to use his mind, delivering it of all fancies and caprices. There are many men who are not de- 46 QUALIFICATIONS DESIRED IN CANDIDATES ficient in mental gifts who are deficient in that steady, well-tempered adjustment of will to mind wherein the former holds the latter true to the demands of each given task, and then taking the results pushes all life and work up to them. Good, grave sense ; solid, clear, unexcited action; quiet, steady will — these are quali- fications which, with a deep, holy, devoted life, make up the required man. He should be a free man — belonging to no prejudice, and no person, save to the One who bought him, and to those who have been given him to love; open to large ideas and yet also to fidelity to the good that has already come. The candidate will have a vast deal to learn after reaching the field. Let him believe this, and not go as though knowing all. One of the dangers of the Volunteer Movement is that its members may, with their fine preparation and great advantages, for- get that they are only preparing to learn, and scarcely learning as yet. To be sympathetic, humble, large minded, progressive on the foreign field, the mission- ary candidate must be these now. And there is no new Gospel with which he needs to familiarize himself, or which is desired on the mission field. The old Gospel is the only Gospel. No men are wanted whose theologies have lost hold of the divine Christ, the Cross of Calvary, and the Holiness of God. It is true that many men with weak and unarticulated convictions have been forced in the face of heathenism and the evident sin of the world, to a Biblical and sub- stantial faith ; but it is a risk to send such men. Men rather are needed who have experienced the Gospel of Christ, and know and believe it as the only Gospel of God. Such men will not be blown to and fro by every QUALIFICATIONS DESIRED IN CANDIDATES 47 wind of doctrine, but will stand calmly and peacefully with their feet on the Everlasting Rock; and their calm and peace will enable them to do in one year what others do in three, and to spend on the mission field three years where others spend one. Some may feel that these qualifications are too high. I have no words of apology for that. I have spoken of no qualifications which are not wholly within the reach of every missionary candidate. He should, of course, have a good constitution physically and the will to learn the language, but that has been assumed. These other requirements are such as are denied to no man who will receive them. Christ stands ready to give them to any man who will enter His fellowship and in the education of the abiding life submit to be taught and endowed. These qualifications are as old as the Day of Pente- cost and the Upper Room and the shores of Gen- nesaret. There are no nostrums, no short cuts, no outer embellishments worth a moment's thought. We are to do the work our Lord began in Galilee. We need for it the qualifications He possessed, none others. Let us find them where He found them : "I came down from heaven not to do mine own will, but the will of Him that sent me," and "He that sent me is with me. He hath not left me alone ; for I do always those things that please Him." With these qualifica- tions, we shall be workmen not needing to be ashamed at the day of His appearing. ALL-ROUND PREPARATION FOR FOREIGN MIS- SIONARY SERVICE 1 REV. JAMES L. BARTON, D.D., BOSTON In entering upon the discussion of this subject, let us lay down two self-evident, though oft-forgotten, propositions which are counterparts of each other: (1) When the Lord calls one to a particular field and work, He does it with the expectation that the one called will prepare himself for that place and work. (2) The Lord calls no one to a work for which He does not give a sufficient time for adequate prepara- tion. The question turns then upon what constitutes an adequate preparation for foreign missionary service. When this is clearly settled it will be easier to decide whether a call to this service has come, and if so, whether the present preparation is sufficient. It is safe to declare that the old idea, "That all who are com- mendably devout and are ready to go abroad are called into this work," has long since been exploded. There is no doubt that the Lord can prepare anyone for any part of His service, but the fact is, He does not do it. The Lord calls, and the one receiving the call pre- pares himself with divine help to meet it. The ques- tion of preparation is as important as that of the call. *Thc Inter collegian. New York, January, 1900. 48 ALL-ROUND PREPARATION 49 It is of great moment that all volunteers settle clearly the question of a call, and at the same time be clear in their minds as to what constitutes adequate prepara- tion for the work to be done. Each individual must decide for himself upon his knees alone with God, the question of the call to the mission fields abroad, but after that he must bestir himself to secure the necessary preparation. Better be ready to go and not receive a call than to be called and never get ready. Perhaps I can do no better than to direct attention to what is expected of the foreign missionary that each one may decide for himself what kind and how much preparation is imperative. 1. To-day in nearly every foreign mission field in the world, a missionary is an educator, a creator of literature in various languages, a preacher of the Gos- pel, an evangelist, an organizer of a new society, the personal representative of the best Christian civiliza- tion and life, a director of native forces in every kind of Christian work, a foundation-layer of future Chris- tian institutions, and a multitude of other things be- sides. 2. Missionaries are compelled to assume the position of leaders and directors ; even when they do not appear so to do, they must be able to wisely shape the Chris- tian thoughts of the people and lead them into right methods of work. In most fields they have as their associates, well-educated native men and women, some of whom have taken university courses in Europe and the United States. Colleges and theological seminaries have been planted and are filled with native students who are not one whit behind in ambition, mental acumen, and intellectual ability the students in Ameri- 50 ALL-ROUND PREPARATION can seminaries, colleges, and universities. The mis- sionary must command the respect of such men and their native teachers so as to exercise the right influ- ence and leadership over them in matters of education, religion, and in Christian work. 3. No missionary, except possibly the physician can select, before going to his field, any one department of work with the expectation that it will be possible for him to devote his energies to that alone. In every mis- sion field conditions are liable to sudden and extensive changes. Such changes are constantly taking place. Every missionary must be prepared to meet all emer- gencies and turn them so as to make them aid in the advancement of the Kingdom. No department of the work exists for any man or woman, but every mission- ary is at the front to do what needs to be done at that time, without reference to what he was sent out to do or what he wishes to do. Every missionary is a minute man ready at a minute's notice to undertake anything and make it count most for the kingdom. 4. The name ''missionary" has come to have large significance among the people in most mission-fields. The sum of the virtues of all preceding missionaries are looked for in every new-comer. All that they have done, he is expected to be able to perform, and even more. It is important that, so far as possible, these not unworthy expectations be met. The present gen- eration of missionaries enters upon work whose foun- dation was laid by men of breadth, wisdom, and power. The conditions that surround the work are such that only those of the broadest, all-round training can meet the requirements. I have mentioned but a few of the leading reasons ALL-ROUND PREPARATION 5 I why candidates for missionary service should have the most complete training. The foreign missionary work is the broadest, all-round Christian work the world offers, and only broadly trained men can expect to make the greatest success in it. I have never seen a missionary, among the hundreds whom I have met, who gave the impression that he thought himself too broadly trained, while I have heard many of the best men and women express regrets that they had no more opportunities for obtaining for themselves a better mental and spiritual equipment for the work they must do. Medicine is about the only specialty mission work tolerates, and that department now calls for the college- trained physician. It is expected that as soon as natives can be trained in the medical profession, the necessity for foreign doctors will practically cease. The foreign missionary of spiritual and mental power, with a thorough, all-round training, will never fail to find unlimited opportunity to use his every talent for the Master. He will always and everywhere make a place for himself and gain a hearing for his message. He becomes an ambassador for Christ, recognized even by multitudes who do not yet accept his preaching. This largest, broadest work to which the Lord calls His disciples, demands the consecration of the best Christian talent, prepared for the service by the broad- est training our best institutions can afford. THE INTELLECTUAL AND PRACTICAL PREPARA- TION OF THE VOLUNTEER 1 PRESIDENT J. C. R. EWING, D.D., OF INDIA The work of winning the world for Christ is a veri- table warfare with principalities and powers. The evan- gelizing of the nations is no light and insignificant task. For its accomplishment the best gifts of the Church are demanded. For the successful missionary certain defi- nite qualifications are essential. He must be one who can say, not only at the outset, but always, every day throughout the years : "The love of Christ constraineth me." He is giving his life to a work which has in it vastly more of monotony than of romance. To live amidst conditions that have a tendency to depress rather than to stimulate is the lot which he has deliberately chosen. If, then, the love of Christ constrain him not, nothing else in the world can do so. But, aside from this spiritual equipment, the call of the Spirit to the work, and the indwelling of the Spirit in the worker's heart, without which the missionary will be a disappointment to himself and a disappoint- l Report Student Volunteer Convention, Detroit, 1894- 52 INTELLECTUAL AND PRACTICAL PREPARATION 53 ment to those who send him forth, is there not some- thing else upon which emphasis ought to be laid? Is mere personal devotion to the Lord Jesus always suffi- cient to guarantee efficiency in the missionary? The obvious reply to this question is precisely that which would be given were it to be asked concerning the work of Christian leadership in our own nominally Christian country. The thorough presentation of God's word to the non- Christian world — this is what the Church has under- taken to do. Side by side with our dependence upon the Holy Spirit to enlighten the dark mind is the human side. It is ours to strive to show the reasonableness of the faith which we profess and preach. To accomplish this the brightest and best intellectual gifts to be found in the Church are needed, and anything less than that we surely will not dare think it meet to give. The missionary goes to stand face to face with hoary systems of faith, some of which have not a little to say for themselves. The disciples of Confucius and Bud- dha and Mohammed and Laotze and Dayanand Saras- wati are by no means ready to accept our statements as to the superiority of Christianity merely because we utter them. The preacher not seldom finds himself confronted by representatives of these faiths whose familiarity with the doctrines of the Christian Scrip- tures startles him. There are those amongst them, too, who have become familiar with most of what has been urged against the teachings of the Bible by sceptics of this and earlier ages. It is amazing how quickly any- thing which may seem to militate against the authen- ticity or genuineness of any portion of God's Word finds its way to non-Christian lands and gains utter- 54 INTELLECTUAL AND PRACTICAL PREPARATION ance from the lips of those who would oppose the mes- sage of the preacher in school or college or market- place. The marvelous spread of the knowledge of our English tongue has made it easy for any one who fan- cies that he has anything new to say against Christian- ity to say it in quarters where it will meet the mission- ary. Western agnosticism and all forms of sceptical speculation have encouraged in some quarters a revolt against the propagation of the gospel. The Brad- laughs and Ingersolls, the Blavatskys and Olcotts and Besants, together with the Humes and Voltaires and Paines of the past, are striving with an activity scarcely less than that of the Christian missionary to influence great sections of the non-Christian world. As illustrating the desirability of the best possible intellectual and educational equipment on the part of those who contemplate entering upon the work of a missionary, I would suggest : I. Ability to master a strange and difficult language is of the utmost importance. While it may be admitted that a very imperfect acquaintance with the language of the people to whom you go, familiarity with a few words, supplemented by vigorous gesticulation, may enable one to convey something of his thought to the patient and polite Oriental who is all the while man- fully resisting the temptation to burst forth into laugh- ter, nevertheless the fact remains, and can scarcely be too strongly emphasized, that the preacher or teacher of Christian doctrine falls far short of the highest effi- ciency who is unable to meet, on the common ground of familiarity with the speech of the country, those for whom he believes himself to have God's message. As a rule, those who are conscious of marked inaptitude INTELLECTUAL AND PRACTICAL PREPARATION 55 in the direction of linguistic study would do well earnestly to question whether, after all, they are not called to put forth their energies in the service of Christ on this side of the ocean. A well-known missionary, when asked how long a time was required to gain the mastery of the language of the country in which he labored, replied : "Oh, about thirty or forty years." It is a lifetime's work. No person with less than five years of hard study can speak to the peoples of oriental lands as he should. True, he may begin to speak in the language after a few months, but he is almost certain to share the ex- perience — not once, but many times — of the Indian missionary who, after having discoursed for a quarter of an hour to a street audience, using what he imag- ined was intelligible Hindustani, was startled and dis- comfited by his leading hearer's respectful request that he speak Hindustani, as they were not familiar with English ! Imagine a foreigner taking his stand in the market- place of one of our great American cities to preach to a waiting crowd the doctrines of a strange religion. He hesitates, stammers, violates every rule of English grammar and idiom, and brings good old words into new and strange and ludicrous positions. Think of the effect upon his audience, and of the inevitable and pitiable failure to secure for his message the candid consideration of even the most thoughtful and earnest of the people. Something quite as ludicrous and sad as this characterizes every attempt of the missionary who fails to use, and to use well, the speech of the people amongst whom he labors. 2. Again, a good degree of familiarity with the 56 INTELLECTUAL AND PRACTICAL PREPARATION faiths which it is our aim in Christ's name to under- mine and to overthrow is essential. The mere mastery of a language will not suffice. The spirit or genius of the people must be understood. Their institutions, philosophy, literature and faith we dare not ignore. These must be studied. There can be no effective and true preaching of the gospel without such study. To pass rapidly from village to village with the announce- ment of certain great and precious truths, but which the inhabitants fail to understand because the preacher is unable to appreciate their attitude of mind and spirit — this, I protest, is not preaching the gospel ef- fectively or in such way as to discharge our responsi- bility. We must know the main currents of thought in order that we may bring the truths of the Bible to bear upon them. Pantheism, polytheism, atheism, idealism, fetichism, materialism, in their baldest and in their subtlest forms, have to be met. Representa- tives of one, or it may be of all of them, are before the preacher as he stands to deliver the formal dis- course or sits amid the little group to talk to them of Christ. Power to understand and appreciate in very considerable measure the workings of those minds, imbued as they are with ideas which are the product of the thinking of many generations of thinking people, is an indispensable condition of real efficiency. A Hindu was heard to express himself thus : "It is an insult to our intelligence that a man should preach to us and expect us to accept his religion when he him- self is unable to give any real reason for supposing our religion to be inferior to his own ; since he knows of our religion nothing at all!" 3. Furthermore, ability to reason intelligently with INTELLECTUAL AND PRACTICAL PREPARATION 57 objectors who are often honestly troubled over some of the great mysteries of our blessed faith is another important qualification. Questions of the most tre- mendous import are often fairly hurled, one after an- other, upon the missionary. "Who died upon the cross? Was it God, or was it man? If He was God, why did He cry out and say: 'My God! Why hast Thou forsaken Me?' If He was man, how can we sup- pose that a man's death could atone for the sin of a whole world full of men?" "Explain to me, please, the doctrine of the Trinity." "You say that the doc- trine of the transmigration of souls is not true; will you give me any argument outside the Christian Scrip- tures to prove your position on the subject." "Some of the greatest of the Christians say that a part of the Bible is not God's Word ; which part is that, and how do you know that the rest is inspired?" "Will you give me any reason for believing that there is a state of conscious existence after death? Of course I want a reason outside the Bible, for that book is not with me an authority." These questions are but typical of a whole host of the keenest inquiries which meet the missionary at every turn. No sophistry will be ac- cepted, were the preacher so foolish and wicked as to descend to that. In some countries of the world, at least, he is in perpetual contact with a people who can detect a flaw in an argument as readily and who ap- preciate candor in discussion as highly as we ourselves do. Objections to the faith for which he stands, of every conceivable type, are placed before him, and an answer expected; and if he fail to give reasonable answers to reasonable questions, it would seem as though it would have been the part of wisdom not to 5 8 INTELLECTUAL AND PRACTICAL PREPARATION have assumed the part of a teacher, when his failure must result in almost incalculable injury to the cause which he represents. 4. Regarding the great fundamental truths of Chris- tianity the young missionary should have definite, set- tled views. We cannot afford to export doubt to foreign countries. Those lands have enough and more than enough religious speculation of their own. Faith and a system of vital truth as opposed to doubt and profitless speculation must be the substance of our mes- sage. In a very real sense must the messenger speak that which he knows and testify of those things which he has seen. If it be otherwise, how pitiable his blind attempt to lead the blind ! In view of what has been said it is obvious that mis- sionaries should be thoroughly educated men and women. The best natural gifts disciplined and de- veloped by the training of years are in demand. Let there be no short-cuts into the mission field. Seven years of literary and theological training may seem long to some of you whose hearts are throbbing with enthusiasm for Christ, and who contemplate with horror the rapid rate at which the unevangelized mil- lions are passing into eternity without having heard a word of the world's Saviour. To you I would say: Wait ! Here God is fashioning you into workmen who need not to be ashamed. Toil on at that Greek and German and Hebrew and Latin. Master as best you can the philosophies and histories and sciences of the schools, studying all the while to know more and more of the mind of the Master. Every fact learned now will count for something by and by, and you will ex- ceedingly rejoice over this equipment when in the INTELLECTUAL AND PRACTICAL PREPARATION 59 future you discover how very inadequate, after all, that which you gain through your years of patient prepara- tion is to enable you to accomplish what your heart prompts you to attempt for Him whose service is your joy. What may be termed the practical preparation of the missionary is perhaps of but little less importance than that which consists in an adequate intellectual equip- ment. You are proposing to engage in spiritual work abroad. Have you ever tested your powers at home? Much of your life is to be spent in personal dealing with individuals; in striving to guide men to a point where they will recognize their need of a Saviour, and in pointing them to Christ as the Great Physician. I venture to believe that skill in thus dealing with men is rarely, if ever, born with us ; neither does it neces- sarily accompany the highest intellectual attainment. On the contrary, it is a thing distinct, an attainment of itself. Experience in practical Christian work, in the teaching of God's Word in the Sunday school or the Bible class, personal contact in the Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations, with those who need help and guidance — here is a training school for the missionary, second in importance and fruitfulness to no other. We would all unite, doubt- less, to deplore the going forth as a foreign missionary of one who himself has had no definite experience of the power of Christ to transform a human life. Such an experience we feel to be an essential qualification. But of the utmost importance, second only to our own personal experience, is the ability to guide others over the path which we ourselves have trod. The great work of life is to be that of winning souls for Christ. 60 INTELLECTUAL AND PRACTICAL PREPARATION The ability to do this should be fully tested as an es- sential preliminary to the going forth of the mission- ary. Those who do not succeed in showing some apti- tude for this in their own country give little promise of better success in a strange land. Tact in dealing with men is a quality the value of which in every place is obvious. In treating with peoples of national or racial tastes, habits and affinities other than our own, practical common sense is mightily effective. In your own land your countrymen may overlook and forgive the most pronounced idiosyncrasy or failure to adapt one's self to special conditions. In the foreign land such lack of adaptability to circumstances often stands as a barrier between the Christian and those whom he longs to influence. In dealing with the great problems of morals and religion he will, of course, persistently follow the same great lines which are marked out for him as well as for the pastor or other Christian worker in America, but in numberless details of his work, of his dealing with people, he will if he be wise adapt his plans and methods to the conditions of the people whom he seeks to guide. If he fails to do this much that he might do will remain undone, while his nervous system is being rapidly enfeebled by useless friction. It is not always best to insist upon doing everything in the English or the American way. The missionary who has learned the art of making friends possesses a powerful adjunct to his efficiency. This faculty is of immense importance here. It would seem to be even more essential abroad. To repel men is a fatal be- ginning to our task of influencing them. I could name to you to-day those who have gone to live and labor amongst men of tastes, race and customs wholly INTELLECTUAL AND PRACTICAL PREPARATION 6 1 diverse from their own, and who have won for them- selves not only the highest esteem, but the genuine affection as well of that strange people. Such men are mighty. The work of organization is a prominent element in the life of the missionary. Non-Christian countries are not, I believe, to be evangelized by foreigners. Chinese, Indian, African and Arabian Christian heralds are the only messengers of Christ who can ever adequately convey the tidings of salvation to the hundreds of millions of the countries which they repre- sent. The foreign preacher reaches the few, he gathers about him the little company; to instruct and to guide these so that they in turn may influence the masses of their countrymen, this is to be your task. Questions the most delicate and perplexing connected with the organization of churches, the pecuniary allowances of helpers, the discipline of offenders against those rules which are necessary to the effective working of the organization, are perpetually pressing for solution. And, as we contemplate the calamitous consequences which must follow the course of the missionary whose judgment is of the haphazard sort or the one who measures men and things by unreasonable, standards, can we hesitate to believe that the practical man and woman are the ones — all else being equal to whom the call to go far hence among the Gentiles comes most loudly ! THE PRACTICAL PREPARATION OF THE VOLUNTEER 1 REV. HARLAN P. BEACH, M.A., NEW YORK I. I would call your attention first to the importance of knowing your own Board. You will love that Board when you get ten thousand miles away from it, and will wish you had cultivated its acquaintance a little more while in America. Do you know the policy of the Board to which you have committed yourself? Are you acquainted with its officers? That acquaintance will be of the utmost importance to you, you will find, when you get too far away to make it. There are two officers especially whom I think you can practically help here before you go out. One of those men is the Treasurer of your Board. If you talk with him you will find that mission money is very care- fully expended and religiously accounted for. Can you keep accounts? If not, I would advise you to learn how before you launch out upon that great sea of foreign accounts and exchanges and different kinds of silver, where you are to be cheated day by day by every man. Drop into the office of your Editorial Secretary, and you will find that it is a very valuable thing to be able to illustrate the foreign field. The so- called camera fiend is not supposed to be a friend of missions ; but if you will learn how to use a camera, you will find it of service to your Board. Report Student Volunteer Convention, Detroit, 1894. 62 PRACTICAL PREPARATION OF THE VOLUNTEER 63 2. A second line of preparation has to do with your field. It is obvious that in order to prepare for your field in the way of outfit, you need to know something about its topography, its climate, its prevailing diseases. In case you are one of the early missionaries in a coun- try, you will need to be a follower of the Apostle Paul, and know where your strategic points are. But when you get in a heathen land there are few means of com- munication between different parts of the country ; so that you can learn a great deal more in your college libraries about the strategic points to be occupied than you can out on the field. I would advise you to learn a great deal about its people. Learn how they think, what their religious views are, what forms of government and civilization you are going to live in the midst of. So also I would suggest to you to learn very definitely just what portion of your country your Board occupies. Learn what other portions are already occupied by other boards; and then, if you are fortunate enough to go to a land where missionary conferences have been held, I would advise you to get those conference reports. If there are none, get the periodicals published by missionary boards in your field, and study them ; learn the methods employed and the comparative results, and you will find them of great assistance to you when you get out there. I want to emphasize the value of biographies. The periodicals do not give accounts of the failures of mis- sionaries, but biographies, if true, will show you where all sorts of men have blundered. Now, missionary failures are the stepping stone to missionary success. It is not necessary, however, for you to lay that founda- 64 PRACTICAL PREPARATION OF THE VOLUNTEER tion when others have done it for you. You should have success from the start, if you can. 3. A third line of preparation which I would suggest has to do with the material needs of yourself and your fellow missionaries. You want to make some prepara- tion for food and raiment and habitation, for disease and death; for man is very human, and you will have all kinds of experiences to meet, and might as well be ready for them. I suppose that Dr. Nevius in China, and the Catholic missionaries throughout the world, have not only benefited themselves, but the countries to which they went, simply because they believed in carrying something along to eat. You can do some- thing for humanity, you can gain the friendship of many men who might be opposed to you, by a simple knowledge of gardening. Many a man who has been called upon to go abroad to be the dispenser of the Water of Life, has had his life cut short simply because he partook of the waters of unsanitary wells. I would commend to you that apostle to the New Hebrides, Dr. Paton. See what you can do with a well. Remember, too, that in heathen cities there is generally no satisfactory water supply, and that life may depend upon your knowledge of how to make a simple filter or a condenser. It is something worth looking into now. I would suggest to you in this connection also that clothing has to be provided. Just think of that culti- vated man, the Bishop of New Zealand, sitting on the back of that vessel of his, making garments for women who wished to leave the ways of heathenism! You will find that nakedness is one of the evils you must fight against. You young women know how to cut PRACTICAL PREPARATION OF THE VOLUNTEER 65 and make your own dresses; but you young men, can you cobble a pair of shoes? I remember that I prac- tically was obliged to retire for about a week while my only pair of shoes were carried at a slow walk eighty- three miles and brought back. Since that time I have had the greatest respect for the Church Missionary Society College, which has a class in cobbling. You are to live in a house. Do you know anything about building one? Can you plane a board or do anything in the line of mason's work? If not, you can watch masons and carpenters, and can at least direct that line of effort in your new home. You will find that furniture is a desirable thing, and that freights are enormously expensive. If you will spend some Satur- day afternoon in a furniture maker's factory you will learn enough about the principles of cabinet making and upholstering so that at a greatly reduced expense you can have furniture made by native workmen. But life is more than any of the things I have spoken of, and I exhort you, men and women who are expect- ing to go abroad, not merely to feel your way there with just strength enough to get off the steamer; but go there with the fullness of strength. Patronize the gymnasium; get as strong as exercise can make you. Remember that you are temples of the Holy Ghost, and that you can make your temple a very efficient instru- ment. Some women, going to countries like Persia, for instance, have almost wrecked their lives simply because they didn't know how to ride horseback. A tooth may make you useless for several days, because you didn't learn how to extract teeth or bring with you a pair of forceps. When common diseases arise in your family or among your native friends, and there is no 66 PRACTICAL PREPARATION OF THE VOLUNTEER physician within a hundred miles, perhaps you will wish that you had learned a little about medicine. Very frequently a life dear to you and important to mis- sionary work hangs in the balance, and a little knowl- edge of nursing would carry that life through. One other point in this line — it is an important one : death is the means by which a great many missionaries glorify God. It is a sad hour for you when you close their eyes in death, but it is a sadder thing still if you don't know how to perform the last rites for them. I would advise you to ask a few questions of an under- taker ; it will help you wonderfully in that sad hour. 4. A fourth line of preparation: practical educa- tional preparation, 1 will call it. A great many lines of work have to be done for mission purposes solely, and perhaps the commonest are bookbinding and print- ing. Nearly every mission has a press. Are you going to know enough about the work so that when the man- ager who has technical training is called to America you will be able to take his place? Suppose you are five hundred miles from a book-bindery, can you bind a book ? You can learn enough about it in an afternoon to bind your own books and periodicals ; get the prac- tice now. But the industrial education is the special thing which I wish to speak of under this head. It is a practical necessity in a great many countries where the arts of civilized lands are unknown, or where competi- tion is so great that the men or women becoming Chris- tians are practically thrown upon the church for sup- port. If you will read the story of Lovedale in South Africa, or of Mangalore in India, or of Norfolk Island, you will see what a wide field this opens up before you. PRACTICAL PREPARATION OF THE VOLUNTEER 67 If your Board, in the field to which you are going, happens to have industrial schools, learn carefully all you can here about those lines of work which are favored by your Board. I wish you would look up that passage in the life of Mackay and see what he says about normal training as the key to the solution of many problems in Africa. Kindergarten work I want to speak of. You young women, many of you, will go into thousands of heathen homes; you will come into contact with multitudes of young lives. Have you ever been in a kindergarten and asked yourself, Would not this same work be of even greater value on the foreign field? I think that over the door of every kindergarten of heathenism there should be the same inscription that there is over a para- dise of children in Kobe, Japan, "Glory Kindergarten." Not only is the life of the children made glorious, but the great God is made glorious in their thoughts. You will have to teach music whether you sing or not. You might just as well learn to play an instru- ment and sing in some sort of fashion now. I would advise you to take steps immediately to do that. Music suggests time, time suggests watches. Heathen coun- tries of course know nothing about eternity, conse- quently they care little about time, and it is a great part of the missionary's work to make them feel its value. I spent a solid day once in mending the main spring of my watch. Now, if I had known what you may know, that it is a valuable thing to learn how to put in a watch spring, and if I had carried one along with me, I would have saved a day of missionary time. 5. Another line of preparation that I would suggest has to do with evangelistic work. A magic lantern 68 PRACTICAL PREPARATION OF THE VOLUNTEER is an instrument of the Lord if you know how to use it. Another suggestion in this same line is the value of street preaching. Now, it is not an easy thing when you only half know a language or are liable to be inter- rupted, as St. Stephen was, to learn how to do street preaching. You would better do it right here in this country; you can prepare yourself for that kind of work here. 6. A sixth line of preparation has to do with organi- zation. You are to be the leaders of a new church. You can use the training you have in your societies here to prepare you for the work of organization. There is a young people's society which ought to be established in your church; it is a hard piece of work. Take it up and follow up that line until you become thoroughly familiar with it. I suppose that home mis- sionary work during a summer vacation would give you an all-round preparation which perhaps would be of greater value than anything else. 7. A seventh kind of preparation which I wish to suggest has to do with shepherding the mission flock. It is not a flock which is easily shepherded ; much will have to be provided for. The Sunday school is the best agency so far discovered to do that work. But do you know the best methods of conducting a Sunday school ? All your church, remember, will be in the Bible school. The work which a great many of you might profit- ably do, that of house to house visitation, is of great value abroad. I can't tell you how much that will help you in the work of shepherding the strange flock that is to be committed to you. 8. The last point that I wish to speak of is this — preparation for personal work. The time has passed PRACTICAL PREPARATION OF THE VOLUNTEER 69 when a man will simply go out and harangue a great crowd of heathen. That has its place, of course, but missionaries have found out, what the Young Men's Christian Association discovered years ago in America and England, that the most effective form of effort is hand to hand work. Have you ever thought of debate as a means of preparation for that? If you have not, and you have much to do with Mohammedans, or the Brahmin pundits, or the Japanese philosophers, you will say, "Oh, that I had been taught to think on my feet !" Another art to be acquired is that of making friends. You must get hold of men before you influence them. Heathen men and women are hard people to get hold of. It is easy to make friends with persons who are congenial to you, but have you the power to go to a man or woman differing from you in culture or nation- ality or religious views and make that person love you ? Can you pour the great love of your heart out upon persons indiscriminately? If you have not that power, learn something about it. And I would suggest that you learn how to do this in the slums of our great cities, for there are your foreigners, your men of dif- ferent creeds. Personal work with your own fellow students is a most valuable preparation for missionary work. Oh, fellow students, if I could only live over again my four years in Yale College, I tell you, under God, more men would be brought to Jesus Christ than were brought to Him by me. I did not realize the value of personal work then as a preparation for future service. You are not sure that you will ever touch foreign shores ; God's plan for you may be very different. But you have a 70 PRACTICAL PREPARATION OF THE VOLUNTEER mission field wherever you are. Just say, "O God, I want to do Thy work among the perishing heathen; but help me to do this work here and now. I will take any success in it as an indication that Thou wishest me to do a wider work." A great many of these things you will never be called upon to do. There are a multitude of things not men- tioned that you would give a great deal to know how to do when the time comes. My only plea then is this: you must touch humanity at a multitude of points ; pre- pare to do so now, and don't suppose that it necessitates a lowering of your consecration. You remember that the usual Hebrew word for consecration means "to fill the hands." For this great work of the Master in the world-wide field I urge you to fill your hands as well as your heads and hearts. PRACTICAL PREPARATION FOR WOMEN STUDENT VOLUNTEERS l MISS ISABELLA THOBURN, OF INDIA The preparations which a volunteer may require must depend upon what she has already received ; that is, she may have, or be receiving an educational prepa- ration so far as books or a course of study can give it, and yet have no practical training of the kind that every foreign missionary feels the need of. But she may have had this preparation during or before begin- ning her college course. A case comes to mind of a young woman who earned the money that carried her through college by such various industries as were found possible or convenient at the time. When she graduated she was sent out to superintend an orphan- age which in a few years, under her leading, developed into an industrial school of the most practical kind. Another had had unusual opportunities for Bible study and had prepared herself in the part which is often the most neglected. The preparation required will also depend somewhat upon the character of the college in which the vol- unteer is studying. In some — too few — a Bible course is provided ; in too many the book has no place in the curriculum. In some there are live branches of the Young Women's Christian Association, which keep its members alert in direct Christian service; others 1 The Inter collegian, New York, May, 1900. 7i 72 PREPARATION FOR WOMEN VOLUNTEERS have not this agency for practical training. In some colleges the atmosphere is charged with missionary spirit. A sense of personal responsibility to those around is impressed upon all serious students; in others the intellectual life is so all-aborbing, or the preparation for pleasant forms of worldliness, that one gets no sense of self-denying Christian duty to others, either from the lecture-room or from the social life of the school. Let us suppose a student volunteer without any preparation before or at the time, and consider what she should set before her as necessary. 1. To grow in grace. Her Bible will tell her how — the Holy Spirit will help her — prayer will keep her heart open to that help. The danger in Christian work, from preparation to finish, is that the letter is held more essential than the spirit; not intentionally, but method and routine make such demands upon time and strength that we give these and do not notice or know that we have failed to give that without which they are nothing — the life within us, which is not our life but Christ's. 2. She should make perfect health of body second only to perfect health of soul. Happily the gymna- siums and tennis courts of the modern colleges give opportunity for this. Not only there, however, but in the dining-room and bed-room should this object be kept in view. An appetite for plain, wholesome food at regular hours should be cultivated, and nature's demand for eight hours of sound sleep gratified. It should be held a sacred duty to bring the body under the will to this extent. A missionary who suffered from dyspepsia and nervousness was advised to take PREPARATION FOR WOMEN VOLUNTEERS 73 daily walks — no other kind of exercise being available. She replied, "I never could walk just for exercise. I must have a place to go or an errand to do." The dyspepsia and nervousness continued and marred her work and her happiness because she had not learned to make her will and her body serve each other. 3. Next to the practice of prayer and of healthy habits should come the practice of helpfulness. Some favored natures are spontaneously thoughtful and help- ful for others, and are blessed with tact that tells them what and how to offer service; others are naturally selfish, and some who are not selfish are timid or awk- ward about helping. What to do for others' need, how to do it, and the daily practice that forms and fixes the habit of serving, should be kept in mind by the volunteer. There is opportunity for this in college life. There will be the sick or lonely, the dull and discouraged to help, and there will be students who do not know Christ. No one ought to expect to be sent to save the heathen who has not first saved some one at home. This proof, or seal, of her ministry (service) each volunteer should claim and strive for. Young men and women have undertaken to be mis- sionaries who had not this preparation, and they could tell you of sorrowful failure. Only the other day it was said to me, "I should like your work. People there do not seem so hard to reach as they do here — they are more open to influence." It is a mistake. We tell you of those who hear and respond, but there are multitudes so joined to their idols that they are deaf and blind ; and those who do hear and see have much to learn and to unlearn before they become useful, re- liable Christian workers. All the personal qualifka- 74 PREPARATION FOR WOMEN VOLUNTEERS tion required for success in Christian service at home is required there, and much more. 4. And that brings us to the consideration of the books to be read. The course of reading suggested for student volunteers provides what is needed. The reading should not be confined to the prospective field of the reader, but should include other countries and be a study in comparative missionary methods as well as in comparative religions. It should also include histories of philanthropies and biographies of phi- lanthropists. There have been many missionaries in the world not called by that name — such as George Miiller, Florence Nightingale, and Mary Lyon. 5. Then will come the question of the special line of work to prepare for. That should depend upon per- sonal adaptations. There is use for every talent on the mission field as well as in America. "Should I study medicine?" one asks. Yes, if you believe you have the gift of healing — that is, if you believe you could work more successfully in that department than in any other. One who has the gift of teaching — and teachers "are born, not made" — should take a normal course and qualify for that work. Music is not thought necessary for missionaries, except the ability to sing hymns, but in both India and Japan music teachers are called for. In all lands there is place for industrial schools; and everywhere there is room for the evangelist. If I mention last that which should seem to come first, it is because the evangelist must so often stop and be something else. She will find quinine and other simple medicines called for as she goes among the villages ; and she will find that in order to make her work permanent and able to bear fruit in PREPARATION FOR WOJVTEN VOLUNTEERS 75 itself, she will sometimes need to stop and teach. Some knowledge of business methods every missionary candidate should have. A course in bookkeeping should be a part of one's training. When possible, she should spend a year or two in a missionary training-school after the collegiate course is completed. Happily there are schools now which make this possible, where one may learn something of everything desirable. That is, there are lessons and lectures on nursing, teaching, kindergarten, and indus- trial methods, house-to-house visiting — and all with daily practice. And throughout the course there are daily Bible lessons, with the best helps in exposition and books of reference. As it was said in the begin- ning, one may have had a personal experience or op- portunity that supplied this need, but in nineteen cases out of twenty the training-school is needed to complete the preparation of the student volunteer, and the time thus spent is well worth while. THE TRAINING OF CHARACTER EUGENE STOCK, M.A., LONDON In the mission-field abroad, as in fact at home, too, character counts for more than learning, for more than skill. Character, humanly speaking, is almost every- thing. In speaking of character I am going to take three points. Character is tested by the consideration of three things: "I and my work," "I and my com- rades," "I and my Lord." i. "I and my work." I have been asked often by missionary candidates, What country shall I be suit- able for? But how can I tell you — how can you tell either? Testing is needed before you can tell what practical work a man or woman is fit for. First I want you io recognize diversities. Look at that famous passage I am so fond of quoting in I. Corinthians xii.: "There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are diversities of minis- trations, and the same Lord. And there are diversities of workings, but the same God who worketh all things in all." Diversities of gifts, that is personal characteristics ; diversities of ministrations, that is the conduct of missions ; diversities of workings, that is variety of work in the field. Secondly, while you recognize diversity, believe in your own work and do it. Let a man when he is ap- ^eport Student Volunteer Convention, Liverpool, 1896. 76 THE TRAINING OF CHARACTER 77 pointed to do some work for Christ, do it and believe in it. Do not envy somebody else because he has some other special class of work, and do not imagine that the other class is more important than yours; thank God for what you have, and ask Him to bless it. Then, thirdly, take the lowest place. Oh, to be ready to do that! We often sing, "Anywhere with Jesus," but we do not always like our locations. But a man must be ready to take the highest place, if necessary. There is such a thing as over-humility, and sometimes a man is called to rise to the responsibility of his posi- tion. Ask the Lord to fit you for either place, and think of it soberly. That is a remarkable verse in the twelfth chapter of Romans, where St. Paul says, "I say, through the grace that was given me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but ... to think soberly." We have to make a fair, reasonable, humble and yet rational estimate of ourselves, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of capability. Men miss opportunities for usefulness sometimes by not believing they can do a thing which God can enable them to do. Fourthly, do the small things first and do them faith- fully. This is the best training for character that can be found. Yes, do the small thing first, trade with your pound faithfully, and the Lord will perhaps give you the talent by-and-by and say, "Have thou author- ity over ten cities," and then after that, "Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." 2. Then we come to "I and my comrades." My fellow-workers, I come back to that text in I. Cor. xii. 4-6. As there are diversities of workings, so there 78 THE TRAINING OF CHARACTER are diversities of gifts. Again in Rom. xii. 4-5. "As we have many members in one body, and all the mem- bers have not the same office; so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and severally members one of another." Then, in the same chapter, the natural and necessary consequence of being of one body comes out in practical details. "Be tenderly affectioned one to another; in honor preferring one another." Is there any lesson we need to learn more than that ? Brethren and sisters, ask the Lord to teach you to be able in honor to prefer one another. It is one secret of suc- cess in home operations, and in the foreign field most emphatically. Further on we have, "Be of the same mind one toward another. Set not your mind on high things, but condescend to things that are lowly . . . if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men." Yes, learn to fit into your places. Let the arm do the arm's work, not the leg's work, not the brain's work, nor the work of the finger. Let us fit in with the work of others, prefer them, love them, help them, appreciate them, and speak well of them behind their- backs, not whispering nor backbiting. One might make a speech on every one of these topics, and there is not a word I am saying which could not be illustrated from any part of the mission-field. When the devil has failed to keep people back from going out, his next device is to set them by the ears. The Lord save them from it. Do not expect your fellow-workers to be perfect. We shall not find them so! But let us bear with one another. And then — oh, must I refer to it? I dare not omit it ! — if there should arise, and God forbid it, fric- tion between those who ought to love one another in THE TRAINING OF CHARACTER 79 the Lord, oh, fellow workers, what then ? Well, I have had years and years of experience with colleagues in our great home office without a single note of discord; therefore, my experience is very small on this point. But I would say to those dear friends who are suffer- ing in this way, do not let it sleep. Have it out, hum- bly, prayerfully, and quietly, face to face, blaming yourself more than the other side even if you think you are not in fault, and express your sorrow for any pain given. And if you fail after all to move the other brother, you can still lay it before the Lord, saying, "Thou must deal with this, for I can do no more." 3. "I and my Lord." That is the wrong way of putting it, but it is so put for convenience. The work is not mine, it is my Lord's. But there are two sides to all great truths. There is a striking passage in Acts xiv. I. Paul and Barnabas came to Iconium; "they entered together into the synagogue of the Jews, and so spake that a great multitude . . . believed." We are to speak and work as if all depended upon us, and yet know all the while that it does not. There is such a thing as fatalism in leaving all to God and forgetting our responsibility. But Faith and Fatalism are not the same thing. "Trust in the Lord," said Cromwell, "and keep your powder dry." Many interpret this by saying, "Take care that the powder is dry," and they care little about the trust. But that is not it ; we must trust wholly in God, and yet at the same time do all as if it rested on ourselves. "My Lord." He is my Lord, and I am at His dis- posal. I am to do as He bids me. I am not to have my own will. He is entitled to my loving, loyal, con- tinuous, and perpetual service. He is My Example. So THE TRAINING OF CHARACTER Take the Gospels; go through them chapter by chap- ter, verse by verse, and put down the practical way the Lord acted in dealing with other people. As an example in the training of character see how He trained His disciples' characters, and how His own character came out during the course of that training. Lastly, He is My Saviour. Back again to Romans xii. How do these exhortations begin? You know the chapter; it follows on after that grandest theological treatise ever given to men, those first eleven chapters of Romans. And what is the theme in them? The theme is our salvation from the penalty of sin, by the atoning sacrifice of Jesus; salvation from the power of sin by the daily indwelling of the Spirit; and salva- tion from the presence of sin, when we are taken up to be with the Lord. And then there comes that mag- nificent argument: "I beseech you, therefore, breth- ren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service." Then follow those beautiful pre- cepts about our being tenderly affectioned one to an- other, and so on. But something else first. "Be not fashioned according to this world, but be ye trans- formed." We need it, do we not, fellow students? We want now the transformation. God grant it to us by the power of the Holy Ghost, for Christ's sake. MENTAL PREPARATION FOR MISSIONARY WORK 1 PRINCIPAL T. W. DRURY, M.A., LONDON The first thing that strikes one in the question be- fore us is the unique position of the missionary. In many ways his work lies parallel to that of the home worker, but in many it widely differs. We should face the problem fully before we try to solve it. I am not sure that this is always done in the matter of foreign missions. There is the difference of language. The mental energy, which at home is on the whole free for other uses, must partly be employed in hard linguistic study. To use a phrase with which we are unhappily too fa- miliar, the new language is a "containing force" which must for some time detach a considerable part of a man's mental power from direct missionary effort, and let us remember that often two or more new languages must be learned. Moreover, the thoughts which the missionary has to express are such as demand most careful expres- sion. Every student of the early centuries of the Christian era is only too well aware of the danger of neglecting this fact, and it is confirmed by the experi- ence of those who have been called to act on com- mittees of Translation or Religion. The historic Creed of Christianity may, it is true, be simply ex- J Report Student Volunteer Convention, London, 1900. 81 82 MENTAL PREPARATION pressed. But those who really try to get behind the barrier of indifference or prejudice which stays the advance of Gospel truth, know that, in order to find the human conscience, God the Holy Spirit works in many ways and in divers manners according to na- tional and personal characteristics. And in doing so He is pleased to honor and bless human thought. Next, there is the religion, or religions of the people. We live in an age when weapons of precision are revo- lutionizing the strategy of armies. The same principle affects our attack on Satan's strongholds. We must study his tactics if we would conquer his legions. It is increasingly certain that a missionary must not only know the Gospel, but that he must know the systems of religion which the Gospel is destined to supplant. Hardly less important are the habits and ways of a foreign people. Imagine that one of the most essen- tial factors of successful missionary enterprise is a knowledge of the people. To deal with them as if they were the population of an English city or village is to face a problem of which you have not mastered the most elementary details. Side by side with the study of language and religion, there must be the study of the social habits, and of the thoughts and cravings of the natives of a foreign land. "Get to know what people are thinking about," was a piece of advice given at Islington College by the Bishop of Victoria, which I trust we have never there forgotten. These and many other things press upon us the cer- tain fact that the choice and the probation and the training of our missionaries are matters which require much thought and much prayer, as well as much com- mon sense. We want more and more men, and we MENTAL PREPARATION 8$ want more of our best men to face the difficult task that lies before us. It is God's task, the task which he has set us, and success is sure, but it may be de- layed by human slackness and error. In a letter just received from India, the writer (a missionary of much experience) presses on us the need of careful training. The Twelve, he says, were called to be disciples, before they were called to be Apostles, to be fiaOrfrai, "learners," before they were fit to be aTzoaroXot, "messengers." In other words "the call" came some time before "the mission." And this is the lesson which these considerations enforce. Let me first make this preliminary remark. If the mental training is to be healthy and vigorous, it must have its proper place in relation to other kinds of train- ing. There must be a right proportion in our educa- tion. True education is not one-sided. It is the draw- ing forth and putting into healthy action of all the powers of man, whether they be of body, mind, or spirit. True education may be described in the lan- guage of St. Paul as "exercise unto godliness," and it is profitable unto all things. All partial exercise whether it be of body or of mind has but a partial profit. It is folly to train the mind of a young mis- sionary at the expense of the body, and it is not need- less to say, even to those training for spiritual work, that bodily exercise may occupy a place disproportion- ate to other interests. It may be asked, Is it, then, possible to overtrain the spiritual faculties? The true answer is that such training cannot be at its best if other interests are for- gotten. You cannot neglect the mens sana in cor pore sano, even in the highest and holiest experiences of 84 MENTAL PREPARATION life without distinct loss. The aim of the Christian teacher is so to train that the whole man may be grow- ing in all his parts "unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." Again, much of our education is misdirected. Teachers frequently aim at informing the mind, not at education in its true sense. It is not what you learn but how you learn that really tells. What then is to be the aim of our training? It is the formation of character. It is not so much the mes- sage as the man that must be prepared. The message may be all that can be desired in simplicity, directness and form, but it is such a message when backed by a life which calls forth sympathy and trust, that hits the mark. It is the story of Jesus Christ and the doctrine of the Cross, told from a heart that is itself "lightened with celestial fire," that will kindle the hearts of other men. There have been many cases where the daily life of the missionary has won converts even "without the Word." This, then, is our aim. We must so train the mind as to form the character, that is, we must so apply the "discipline of Christ," as to mould the habits after the example of Christ. It is not, there- fore, a matter of imparting information, of cramming the mind with facts, but what is far more difficult, of setting the current of a man's intellectual life in a right direction, of teaching him to be a true learner, a dis- ciple in the school of Christ. It is easy to criticise, and still more easy to talk vaguely of true ideals of education. I will at least try to be practical and to explain my meaning, when I say that the aim of our education is the formation of character. MENTAL PREPARATION 85 There must be mental discipline. "Think hard" was the advice given to the boys of the South Eastern Col- lege by Lord Kinnaird, at a recent prize-giving. It is a tendency of modern education, says a thoughtful writer of to-day, to make study smooth and pleasant; "the grooves and channels of life are made to tend easily and naturally towards good;" and the "educa- tion of the will, the power to breast the current of our desires, and to do what is distasteful is much less cultivated." We do not deny that the older form of training was too severe, and retained unconsciously too much of the asceticism of medieval study, but there is a great dan- ger of going too far in the other direction. Sir John Lubbock, it is true, places study among the "pleasures of life," yet no one knows the real pleasure of study who does not put good hard work into it. And for the missionary this is all-essential. The conditions of study are for him very trying. There is the climate, there are the insects, and so forth. He above all men must have formed at school, in college, and in the home, the habit of hard work. He must have learned, by God's help, so to discipline the will as to breast the current of his desires, and to do easily and gladly what is often distasteful. Mr. Ruskin strikes the same note when, in his complaint of recent architects and build- ers, he says that our modern work "has the look of money's worth, of a stopping short wherever and whenever we can, of a lazy compliance with low con- ditions : never of a fair putting forth of our strength. Let us have done with this kind of work at once." And so I plead that our first aim should be genuine discipline of the mind. We must teach that, however 86 MENTAL PREPARATION pleasant work may be, we cannot be really cultivating our powers if we are not habitually touching the line of sacrifice, and following the toilsome, if not painful, path of patient, concentrated, and sustained study. There is no royal road to true knowledge — Tadrjfiara fiaOrjfxara. There must be a true student spirit. ■ Not to be "learned," but to be fond of learning, is our aim. Many make a great mistake as to the end of education. They regard it as completed when the doors of school and college have closed behind them. One has heard of "finishing schools," and of a young lady — I never heard it of a man — going abroad to "finish her educa- tion." And this is not merely an inaccurate phrase. Many young men do regard school and college work as something to be endured for a time, while certain useful facts and methods are learned, and then to be gladly dismissed forever. Now this view of education will not do for the missionary. You must be students to the end of life. I have been ctruck with this fact in university life. No one has completed his education. We are a body of learners. Masters and professors, tutors and principals, graduates and undergraduates, are all students. Of course, there are exceptions, but I think you will find them less among the teachers than among the taught. Some may take alarm at the thought that all mis- sionaries must be students ; but there is a love of study which the most active evangelist cannot dispense with. Preaching which draws only on past stores of knowl- edge, or even from present spiritual experience apart from learning, will, save in exceptional cases, wear thin and lose its force. MENTAL PREPARATION 87 The following words were spoken at the foundation of the Church Missionary College by one of the Found- ers of the. Church Missionary Society, and they show what importance those heroes of missionary enterprise laid upon a love of study as a qualification of mission- ary work : "The union of sound learning with Scrip- tural piety is of the last importance. If the cause of missions is to flourish there must be a charac- ter of solid judgment and competent knowledge in the missionaries we employ. The leaders of the Reformation were men of deep piety, of devoted love to the Saviour, of holy zeal, but they were men of learning, too." Now one of the highest aims of the teacher is to teach men to love to learn. What men love to do. that they will generally find the means of doing, and if we who have to teach can only get men bitten with the delight of learning, depend upon it they will to the end of their days remain students still. That is what I mean by the student spirit. Let us train men to be seekers after truth. That does not mean a jelly-fish kind of training, which makes a man believe that everybody is right, and no- body is wrong. It does not mean that we are not to teach distinctive lines of doctrine, and warn against what we believe to be positions hurtful to the doctrine of the Atonement, or the authority of God's Word. But while we use the lines of order and canons of in- terpretation which we believe to be right, we must never tamper with a man's conscience, or with our own in applying them. If we are to persuade men to adopt our position there must be conspicuous fairness of statement, and the absence of that vicious habit of try- 88 MENTAL PREPARATION ing merely to score a point rather than to arrive at the genuine truth. There must be sympathy in our study. Love to God and man must be the predominant factor. The mere student — I mean the man who shuts himself up with his books and shuts himself off from the common in- terests of life — is almost sure to become narrow; he loses the true perspective of study, and believes in no methods but his own. "Knowledge puffeth up — love edifieth." You who are going to be missionaries must, there- fore, be trained not only in the class-room, but also in the parish. You must live in touch with real present- day life. First of all for yourselves you must learn to translate your newly acquired thoughts into actual practice, and test your conclusions by the experience of your daily life with men, and your daily walk with God. Directly a man comes to believe in any truth, that new-born faith should work by love, and should begin to influence his own life and his relations to others. You must remember that bookworms are not ideal students. You must not only study books, but men. Strive to solve the problems of life which con- front you by getting at the mind of those with whom you have to do. Find out what people are reading about and thinking about, and see how the Gospel bears a message which can adapt itself to present needs. We work at men's consciences too much at random. The most common hindrance to the Gospel, we are told, is indifference. Of course it is, but why are men indifferent? There are various causes and we must find them out, and sympathy coupled with careful MENTAL PREPARATION 89 thought alone can do it. Don't be content with saying a man is indifferent, just as doctors are content with telling us we've got the influenza, but get to the root of the matter if you can. This was the mind which we see in Christ Jesus, as we watch Him dealing with the anxious or indifferent soul, and the missionary must let this mind be in him, if he is to get at hearts which Satan is closing against the truth. At these three things then you must aim, mental dis- cipline, a love of learning, and a spirit of sympathy. Let me say three words in conclusion : The study of all studies for the missionary is the study of God's Word. That is the training ground for mind as well as for spirit. I remember the words of a missionary to us at Islington, "Steep your minds in Scripture." I say to all young missionaries, "Steep your minds in Scripture." Learn all you can about the Bible, but above all, learn the Bible itself. I know something about examinations for Holy Orders, and I am sure that these popular books of introductions to the Bible, and helps to the knowledge of every fact about the Bible, however useful in their proper places, are hindering men from learning the Bible itself. The Bible must, of course, be studied as a whole, but it is after all the whole Bible that is the Word of God, the Sword of the Spirit, which we have to wield. The teacher of all teachers is God the Holy Ghost. I counsel all students to pray definitely, daily for His help. Kneel down for a few moments before you open your books for study, seek His aid, and you will never study in vain. His gifts are sevenfold, that is to say, they are such as to equip the humblest, the feeblest, the most peculiar mind for sacred study and consecrated 90 MENTAL PREPARATION service. You are to love God with all your mind. Don't forget this. Offer your minds to Him, yield your powers of thought to His impulses, then do your best and He will bless you. They are weighty words in the Ordinal of the Church of England — "As much as lieth in you, you will apply yourselves wholly to this one thing, and draw all your cares and studies this way ; and that you will con- tinually pray to God the Father, by the mediation of our only Saviour, Jesus Christ, for the heavenly as- sistance of the Holy Ghost ; that by daily reading and weighing of the Scriptures, ye may wax riper and stronger in your ministry." Above all and last of all we must let our mental training lead both teacher and taught direct to Christ. My old friend, Dr. Dyson, who was a fellow worker for many years at Islington, used often to tell us that what, after all, told in converting men to God was not logic, not eloquence, not philosophy, but the simple story of Jesus Christ coming into the world to save sinners. Yes, that is the first thing and the last thing — that mental training is valueless for missionary work which does not teach men to know more and mere, as day by day of study passes by, of Jesus Christ. And so I will close with the hexameter lines of some old monk : Si Christum discis, nihil est si cetera nescis, Si Christum nescis, nihil est si cetera discis. In study, as in everything else, make Christ your all in all. THE NEED OF THINKERS FOR THE MISSION FIELD l REV. JOHN CLIFFORD, D.D., LL.D., LONDON We feel acutely that " thinkers " are urgently called for on the mission field, and that every missionary must seek the highest education, and prepare himself to understand the mental habits and mental stock of the people whose salvation he seeks. We have arrived at a moment in the development of the missionary work of the churches when we need more men who will do what Bacon and his successors have done for the study and interpretation and use of Nature ; what Alessandro Volta did, exactly one hundred years ago, for the electric current, and what Faraday and his col- leagues have achieved for electrical science since. We need students — men who will work upon the facts of religion as Richard Owen amongst fossils and Sir Joseph Hooker on plants ; scientific students, exact, severe, painstaking, hating inaccuracy as they hate a lie, and devoted to truth; rigid in their scrutiny and flawless in their reasoning, never passing a single datum however repulsive, nor accepting an illusion however full of charm; eliminating the possibility of error by the repetition of experiments and the accumu- lation of observations, and so furnishing the churches and their workers with that knowledge of the realities Report Student Volunteer Convention, London, 1900. 91 92 NEED OF THINKERS of life without which energy is wasted, mistakes are made, and work is marred. 1. The thinker is primarily an observer. To-day he must be scientific or he is of no use ; and to be scientific he must begin with the observation of what is, and of all that is, in religion. Sitting in the study spinning theories may be exhilarating, but it is not scientific. We want facts — facts in the lives of the founders of religions, Confucius and Zoroaster, Buddha and Mo- hammed; facts in the literature of religion, the sacred texts of the Sanscrit, the "Conversations" of Confucius and the Koran of Mohammed; and the authoritative commentaries of their most distinguished disciples — i. e. } we must have scholars, men who know the natural history of religion, of Confucianism and Parseeism, Buddhism, and Islamism, as Huxley knew the biology of the horse or Tyndall the laws of light. 2. But he must not be merely a scholar, stored with the lore of the sacred literature of religions ; he must be, in Emerson's phrase, a " scholar thinking," not a bookworm, not an emendator nor a bibliomaniac ; not a " worker subdued by his own instruments," but a student of religion as it appears in the lives of the people, in their curious customs, in their acts of wor- ship, their moods of mind, ways of thinking, and above all, in their individual and social conduct. The interval between the religion of the book and the religion of the life is often ghastly. The sayings of the sages are luminous and inspiring ; the emptiness and sorrow and misery of the people are unutterably pathetic. He who has mastered the sacred books of the Chinese knows that the ethic is lofty in standard, pure in tone, and unimpeachable in its truth ; but when he puts into the NEED OF THINKERS 93 crucible the concrete Confucianism of the Chinese of to-day he finds that it is a spent force, and has no vital- ity. It is conservative, that is, it is inert, dead, and therefore it must go, displaced by the throbbing, ag- gressive vitality of the Gospel of Christ. 1 3. Nor is this all; not, certainly, if we take as our pattern the great missionary of the ages — the Apostle Paul. He was not only an eager student of the whole of God's revelation, and a scholar trained in the schools of Tarsus and Jerusalem, but also a philosopher — a man who penetrated to the secrets of thought and life, sought out the underlying unities of the religion of Christ he had accepted, and the Mosaism into which he was born ; and so discovered the ideas by which he could not only aid the Jew in his transfer of allegiance from Moses to Christ, and the Greek in realizing by the Cross the power of God and the wisdom of God, but could bring Jew and Greek, bond and free men 1 "The student of religions who has tried to compare those of India with those of other peoples and places soon finds that religions wear a very different aspect when seen on their own soil and under their own sun from what they have when studied in a library, as ancient or alien systems, through the literatures they have created, or in books written to describe their growth or decay. . . . The literary side of the religion suffered an eclipse, or, rather, was set in a context which seemed to de- mand a revised interpretation, when viewed through its actual forms or in the concrete and complex system it had created for the collective life. In the face of the religion regarded as worship and custom, and the attitude to it of the higher Hindu thought, I had many a hard struggle with myself, criticized myself for lack of insight, for intolerance, for failure in judi- cial faculty, for indulging inherited instincts and interests, for applying standards to another race and religion which I dared not apply to my own ; but, do what I would, I could not escape from the dominion, or, rather, the tyranny, of these first vivid impressions." ("Race and Religion in India." By A. M. Fair- bairn, D.D. Contemporary Review, Vol. 76, pj>. 155-56.) 94 NEED OF THINKERS and women, into one great and ordered social unity in Christ. The unities of life are deep though obscured, and real though difficult of interpretation. The affini- ties of religions are facts. The soul of man is the soul of man all the world over, and everywhere it is restless, save as it rests in God. Ideas are our real world, and they rule us as with a rod of iron. Wherever we go they go, and they hold us in their thrall. Hence the Eastern mind is closed to the Western, and the West- ern is not, except in the rarest cases, and after long study, penetrated by the Eastern. 1 It is the work of the missionary to dig down to the fundamentally human, to the unquestionably Divine, through all the superimposed strata of historical religious customs, superstitions, corruptions, social practices, and politics. We need and must have more men to do this for us, to save us from being misled by appearances, and from applying false standards of judgment; to abate an- tagonisms, economize resources, feed patience, and facilitate progress by enabling us to see facts as they really are. 4. A fourth function grows out of these three. The missionary who is a scholar, a student, and a philoso- pher should also be a master builder, gifted with con- structive ability, capable of solving the problems of social life and development that rise up in the mission- ary field, a master of missionary strategy, skilled in " understanding of the times " at home and abroad, and able to tell Israel what to do, so as to secure in the most abiding way, not only the evangelization, but the regeneration of mankind. 'Cf. Dr. Fairbairn, ibid., pp. 154 et seq. NEED OF THINKERS 95 Erskine said the working-men of his day had not had the message of Christ presented to them, " except in immoral form," and therefore were not chargeable with rejecting it. However that may have been, the Christian Churches to-day are keenly awake to two facts — (i) that in order to preach the Gospel we must know it, in its intrinsic significance, and in its variety and fulness, so as to be able to place its wealth over against the specific needs of the souls of men; and (2) that we must know, as far as we can, the mind of the listener; his ideas of God and religion, of sin and duty ; his habits of thinking, and moods of feeling ; the investing religious atmosphere in the home and State, and thus discover the way in which Christ Jesus should be presented so as to inspire his confidence and win his love. Two unveilings are taking place just now: one is of the measureless wealth of the Gospel of Jesus, and the other is of the wonder, variety, complexity, mystery, and misery of the world of man ; of the multitude of races, so different in blood, in capitalized ideas, in inheritance, in moulds "of thought, in industrial effort, in political achievement, and in social order ; and of the terrific grip of the religions we are seeking to displace by the Christianity of Christ. The veil has been lifted. We see man in his multitudinousness as we have never seen him before. Our missions have opened our eyes and forced upon us the wide range and the unexpected difficulty of the task. We see the radical differences of condition in the mission fields, and the amazing variety of the work required. Our classification of the world into " heathen " and " Christian " no longer con- tents us. We cannot lump together Buddhists and 96 NEED OF THINKERS Hindus, Taoists and Brahmins, Congoese and Maoris as though they were all to be treated alike, and the man who was fitted for Bechuanaland was equally suit- able for Shantung. There are innumerable kinds of heathen, and though all need and must have the Gospel of Christ ; yet each tribe has its peculiarity, its special inheritance of religious custom, and its special diffi- culty in separating itself from the existing religion and accepting the message of Christ. We are surprised — e. g., to be told that the Hindu thinks the one thing the Englishman lacks is religion. He confesses that he is a ruler, a magistrate, a soldier, a statesman, but a religious man he certainly is not. So totally opposed are our conceptions and theirs of what religion is. But that is the fact, and it is ex- tremely helpful to know it; it supplies us with a measure of what we have to do in evangelizing the polyglot, metaphysical and contradictory tribes of Hin- dustan. Half a century ago the missionaries' work was not understood. The impenetrability of Hindu and Chinese men and women to Western thought was not realized. The hoary religions of the wonderful East had not been interpreted. The science of com- parative religions was hardly born, and it is to be feared that Christian missionaries were, sometimes, inspired by a blinding contempt for the faiths they sought to supplant. That is of the past. To-day the churches under- stand their work better. We know more, not merely of the geography and commerce, of the climate and customs of the myriads of the East, but of their mind and heart, their yearnings and aspirations, of the roots and fruits of their religious practices and customs, and NEED OF THINKERS 97 therefore we look forward with deepening interest to the arrival of God's gift of men, called and equipped and drilled by His spirit to utter the Gospel, not only in its fulness and sweetness, but also with such fault- less aptitude that it shall have free course, and be glorified in the Christianization of all the people and all the nations of the earth. Of the special and immediate aids the churches need from these thinkers in the mission field, I may mention two or three. Take Africa. However it may be with politicians and merchants, the Churches say, we go to Africa not for our own sake, but for the sake of the people, and of all the people. The "White Man's Bur- den" is to save his brethren, black and white alike ; and what a gigantic task it is! To weld together these increasing and conflicting tribes with the Dutch and English, in one just, free, and mutually helpful brother- hood, to bring seven or eight millions of blacks out of their tribal antagonisms, to lift them to the level of the white races in thought and ideal, to fuse all of them together so as to make them a redeemed people, and good and useful citizens of the great Empire. That is what has to be done, and that is what the churches must do for the sake of the African people. Expansion of Empire is vanity and death without the evangelization of the Empire. Who, then, of you is ready to follow in the train of Moffat and Livingstone, Mackay and Hannington, and give his whole redeemed being to this difficult task ? Dollinger says, " No founder of a religion has ever encountered a people or society who in naive sim- plicity would allow themselves to be moved by his preaching if it contained an entirely new and strange 98 NEED OF THINKERS revelation. Nobody, indeed, has ever undertaken sim- ply to set aside or eradicate the received religion, and to substitute a totally new one in its place." But what an amalgam of religions is presented to the missionary in China! We talk of Confucianism as if it were the only road marked on " the map of life " for a China- man. But there was a Confucianism before Confucius. Taoism was there, and Buddhism entered six hundred years after the birth of Confucius. And these three faiths, though discordant at many points, have been blended together; and temples are found all over the Empire in which the founders of the three religions stand side by side. If Dollinger is right, and history asserts the truth of his doctrine, then our " thinkers " must find out the stones in the old religions which may be used as the foundations on which to stand in winning disciples to Christ, just as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews seizes upon the abiding principles of the Old Testament and shows how they are set to a nobler work in Christianity, in order to fortify the faith of the converts to Christianity in their allegiance to Christ. Who, then, will follow in the train of Morison and Legge, Burns and Timothy Richard, in the effort to discover the points of contact between the three religions of China and Christianity; in showing pre- cisely what Christianity does and does not reject, what corrections and qualifications it introduces, and what is the character and content of the addition it makes, and so facilitate the transition from the inherited faith to the clearer and fuller teaching of Christ ? But it is impossible to enumerate the subjects in the mission field calling for the immediate service of thinking men; such as (1) the best treatment of the NEED OF THINKERS 99 rapid changes of thought and method in Japan; (2) the effect of the recent introduction of the Theosophy of the United States and England into the dead body of religion in India and Ceylon, rousing Buddhism to a momentary power, and clothing it with a fleeting authority; (3) the demonstration from a century crowded with experiments conducted in the laboratory of missions, of the true, the most economical and effective methods of work in such different fields as amongst the Maoris of New Zealand, the Agnostics of Calcutta, the Mahatmas of Thibet, and the Indians of North America; (4) the proof from "fruits" as to what doctrines are harmful and what helpful to indi- vidual manhood, the creation of a new social order and the advance of the Kingdom of God; and (5) the preparation of a convincing argument for the measure- less superiority of Christianity by accumulating and arranging the evidences which show that it omits no good quality in any religion, is free from the errors and defects of each religion, and has in its Founder qualities and forces which no other religion possesses, and which all other religions together do not equal. I read a day or two ago that the " greatest need of our missionary societies is men, fully qualified men. When would-be missionaries seek appointment to the foreign field, it is discovered in many instances that there is some reason for not commissioning them, either because of lack of full preparation or of fitness in other ways." Is that true? Do the men of highest education hold back ? Is not Christ winning the think- ers? I know the campaign for money cannot be dropped ; but the most urgent campaign is for men, Christian men ; out and out Christian men ; men like IOO NEED OF THINKERS Moody, ready to say, they " will show the world what God can do with a wholly consecrated man" ; men who, like Paul, have faith and patience enough to go to Arabia, and meditate on the revelations of God to their souls, and adjust them to all they knew before; men like Buddha, who spent six years of probationary studies into the mysteries of life, reading over and over the tear-stained book of poor men's souls ; men who will not " muddle through " their work, but will find out the strategic points and occupy them, and so make the best and biggest of themselves for the God who has redeemed them by the sacrifice of His Son, and con- secrated them to the service of the world by the gift of His Spirit. God Himself says, " Who will go for Me, and whom shall I send? " "When the first Napoleon suddenly found himself among the quicksands of the Red Sea, he ordered his generals to ride out in so many opposite directions, and the first who arrived on firm ground to call on the rest to follow. This is what we may ask of all the various schemes and agencies — all the various inquiries after truth now in work in all the different branches and classes of Christendom — ' Ride out amongst those quicksands ! Ride out in the most opposite directions, and let him that first finds out solid ground call out to us ! It may perchance be the very ground in the midst of their quaking morass where we shall be able to stand firm and move the world.' M1 Mary Lyon said : " If you want most to serve your race, go where no one else will go, and do what no one *Dean Stanley, in "Chips from a German Workshop." Max Miiller. Vol. iv., p. 307. NEED OF THINKERS IOI else will do." Look for positions that will make the heaviest demands on your self-sacrifice, test the fibre of your sainthood most severely ; and remember every inch of your journey that " God can accomplish won- ders through a man if he will only get low enough to let Him use him." SOME STUDIES SUGGESTED FOR MISSIONARY CANDIDATES REV. J. H. BERNARD, D.D., DUBLIN In the case of men who have undertaken, if God permit, to consecrate their lives to the foreign field, we may assume that their sympathies have already been enlisted, and that therefore they will naturally read a good deal of missionary literature, and gain a good deal of information as to the details of what is being done. There is no need to tell them to do that. But there are probably three lines of reading which they ought particularly to keep before them : I. They should not neglect the study of the ancient missionary work of the Church, in the days when the Church was young and rejoicing in the new life which she had received, in the days when she was the only witness for truth and goodness and purity in a world which had lost faith, even in itself. History often re- peats itself, and it may be that the methods of mission- ary work which were so marvelously blessed in an- cient days may be methods which we could apply with profit to our own. It will be a real advance in mission- ary education to have gained a clear view of the methods adopted by the Heralds of the Cross in the past. The method of St. Paul — for he had a method — have we tried to understand that? His work was not Report Student Volunteer Convention, London, 1901. 102 SUGGESTED STUDIES 103 taken up in any haphazard fashion, but we cannot doubt was organized with the most anxious care. Or, again, it has often occurred to me — I may be wrong, but let me put it to you — that the methods adopted by Chris- tian teachers in the second and third centuries as they labored in the face of the prejudice, hatred and con- tempt openly expressed for them by the official au- thorities of the Roman Empire may have deep lessons for those of our brethren who are now working in a country like China, where the conditions seem to be not wholly dissimilar. How to sow the seed of the Gospel without exciting the open hostility of the many enemies to which a strange religion must be exposed, in a land where tradition and custom have consecrated much that is base and cruel and impure — that is a problem upon which the study of ancient missionary method may throw much light. Or, once more, an Irishman may be forgiven if he thinks that the study of the methods pursued in the middle ages by his own countrymen, St. Columba in Scotland, St. Aidan in the north of England, St. Columbanus and his eager band of comrades on the Continent of Europe, methods so signally blessed by God, may be not without lessons for us all. How to live, and if need be, how to die. As we look back, we find the answer suggested by the lives and deaths of the great cloud of witnesses, with which every missionary of the Cross is compassed about. 2. That is the first thing I w 7 ould venture to sug- gest — the study of ancient missionary organization. And the second is the study of the great non-Christian religions of the world, the religions which, we believe, are in the end to give place to the religion of the Cross 104 SUGGESTED STUDIES and the Crucified. For we dare not forget, while we call attention — and rightly call attention to the imper- fections, the superstitions, the corruptions plain to see in these ancient religions — we dare not forget, I say, that they are religions — that no matter how bad or de- graded they may seem, they are still religions. They are the expression of man's longing after the Eternal Power, above and around us, which is planted by the Eternal Father in the heart of man. And before we begin to expose all that is evil and base in these poor thoughts of God, let us in God's name try to under- stand them. Let us try to find the grain of gold in the dross which hides it. I know that this is hard enough at times to find ; but it must be there, if it be true that God has never, never left Himself without a witness among men. " All truth," said St. Augustine, " comes from Him Who said, ' I am the Truth.' " That is it. Though there be only fragments of truth elsewhere, yet in Christ we have the very Truth itself, and all the Truth, could we but discern it. The study of the ancient religions of the world, so far as it is possible to learn it from books, cannot but be an important equip- ment for the missionary of the Truth. It is not given to every man to be a master of lan- guages, other than his own, and there are often diffi- culties in the way of attempting the study of languages, like Chinese or Arabic, before the foreign field is reached. Yet there must be, here and there in our Uni- versities, among the Student Volunteers, one or two men who could do more profitable service to the cause of missions by a diligent, thorough and patient study, let me say of Arabic, than in any other way. Indian missionaries have told me — it has been said in print — SUGGESTED STUDIES 105 that one of the great needs at present of those who are engaged in the controversy with Mohammedanism is a critical edition of the Koran by a Christian scholar, which shall point out the sources from which its puerili- ties are derived. It is all but impossible for men who are struggling, short-handed, to get through the day's work abroal, to find time for such an enterprise. Is it unreasonable to think that in this great assembly of students there may be one — perhaps of our own race, perhaps from Germany, that nursery of scholars — one who could take up this sorely needed task in downright earnest and consecrate the talents with which God has endowed him to furthering the advance in missionary education in this way ? 3. I pass to the third point, more important than either of the two of which I have spoken. And that is the great value to a foreign missionary of a syste- matic and close study of Christian theology. Much has been done in the past, of course, by uneducated or half- educated men. There is no weapon but may be used in this warfare. But if a man is to preach the Christian Creed with effectiveness in the teeth of opposition, it must not only have touched his heart and conscience, but his intellect as well. He must have tried to master its exact meaning, its exact proportions. He must be able to explain it, as well as to preach it. More than once it has happened to me to have re- ceived letters from missionaries in the East, asking for advice as to points which had been raised in argument by Mohammedans ; hard questions as to our Lord's twofold nature, His Divinity, His sinlessness, His free- dom from temptation, and the like. They were ques- tions which my correspondents, though well educated 106 SUGGESTED STUDIES men, had not seriously considered before. They are not problems which present themselves as a difficulty to the practical intellect of the West. Now what was the fact ? Every one of these questions had been raised and argued about and answered — so far as they can be answered — 1,500 years ago, during the great intellec- tual upheaval which distressed the Church in the fourth and fifth century. I know that many men think the problems raised at the great Councils of Christendom at Ephesus and Chalcedon are quite irrelevant to pres- ent needs. They will not say so when they have had some practical experience of controversy with Moham- medan scholars. The Eastern mind is just the same now as it was in the days of Athanasius, and we shall do unwisely, if we think that we can escape, in India and Africa at least, from facing the difficulties which Christian men had to face then. We might well learn a lesson from the Mohamme- dans in this matter. For Mohammedanism is a great missionary religion ; its adherents believe in it with fervor and practise its precepts with devotion. And their efforts to spread the creed of Islam might often put us to shame, who prefer to believe the Creed of creeds. At the great Mohammedan College in Cairo, where there are said to be 10,000 men, all preparing for active missionary work in the future, there is, as I am informed, the most anxious labor expended upon teaching the students, with painful and minute accu- racy, every jot and tittle of the creed of the Koran. We shall not be wise if we send forth our men less perfectly equipped in regard to the Creed of the Bible, the Faith of Christ our Saviour. There is only one other thing I want to say. There SUGGESTED STUDIES Io7 is need of advance in missionary education for us all, whether we work at home or abroad, in one other direction — I mean in the enlargement of our missionary ideal. What is the ultimate ideal which we are setting before ourselves in all this missionary enterprise? What is it we hope to do? To preach the Gospel ail the world over in this generation ? Yes, but is that all ? Is that the ultimate ideal? Nay. The evangelization of the world is not the Christianization of the world. It is only the first step, and though it is the first step which costs, we must not stop short here. What do we look for and pray for? That the world may be won for Christ. Aye, surely, but that is not to pray that the world may be won for any particular form of Western Christianity. To win the world for Christ; that is a larger ideal than to gain it over to our own way of thinking. We have failed to understand the magni- ficence of the thought of the Kingdom of Christ, if we are accustomed to hope, as the end of our efforts, for the establishment in every quarter of the world of Christian communities in all respects like our own. Do we then suppose that we have the whole truth, that we have exhausted the fulness of the revelation made in Christ ? Something of it we know and under- stand, and it is enough to live by — enough to bear us beyond the gates of death with courage. But surely we cannot think that any single branch of Christ's Church here on earth has so fully entered into the mind of her Lord that she understands all His message, that she has extracted from His revelation all the good news it contains ? Nay, as Bishop Westcott once said, when we go, in person or by our delegates, to heathen lands, we go not only to bring a gift, but to claim an 108 SUGGESTED STUDIES offering. We go to unlock the Temple, the treasure house from which each race of man may appropriate the truth which it can use best. And it is the sum of these treasures, the sum of these truths, that is the full Gospel. The Christianity of the East can never be exactly the same as the Christianity of the West, for every race of men has its own needs, its own talents, its own powers. Japan is not Africa, any more than it is England. And no member of the body can say to any other member, " I have no need of you." Each is essential to the perfection of the whole. The ideal of missionary effort is not only that we may " tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King," but, as the Psalmist says elsewhere, that " the kings of Arabia and Saba may bring gifts" that they may bring back to the treasury of Christ, multiplied a thousandfold, the gifts that they have received. It is for us to do our part with the gift which is our own. And it is by each nation, each national Church, each household in the family of God, offering its own gift for the good of all, that the Kingdom of Christ shall be set up on earth, even as it is in heaven, that the peace of the Church, the unity of Christendom shall be reached. That is our ideal, and as we hope and pray for it, the splendid phrases of the Benedictus ring in our ears with a joyful message of hope, for they tell us that to carry the light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death shall at last guide our feet — our feet — into the way of peace. BROAD CULTURE DEMANDED OF MISSIONARIES 1 REV. J. H. DE FOREST, D.D., OF JAPAN Before saying anything about the culture needed, it is necessary to have some clear ideas of the condi- tion of these great historic nations of the East. Japan, of course, is the most progressive. So well up-to-date is this nation in its system of laws, in education, in moral ideals, that all the great nations of the West have contracted equal treaties with it. This is a most remarkable fact. Here is the first non-Christian nation that has ever been acknowledged by Christian States as a political equal. Here is the first nation outside of Christianity to have a constitution that recognizes re- ligious liberty as among the natural rights of man. To be a missionary in such a land is something quite different from the old idea of "going to preach to the heathen." China also, with her four hundred millions, is a na- tion whose beginnings are lost in dim antiquity. Though not progressive like Japan, the Chinese largely gave Japan the intellectual and moral stimulus without which modern Japan would never have been. The culture of which China justly feels proud necessitates The Student Volunteer, New York, November, 1896. 109 HO BROAD CULTURE DEMANDED culture on the part of all who would teach the supreme revelation of God through Christ to that people. Then there is India, with its vast mixed populations, in which is found every degree of culture as well as of degradation. All these peoples of the East have their standards of civilization, their ethical systems well wrought out, and their religious ideas that are older than our Christianity. And though their moral stand- ards are different from ours, and below ours, yet theirs have had a conserving power by which family and social life has been maintained, and in the strength of Which immense nations have been developed and held together longer than any others on the earth. Such peoples should have missionaries of the broad- est culture. Not that it is impossible for an occasional man or woman of iimited intellectual attainments to develop into a splendid missionary, but such are rare exceptions, and no Board will weaken itself by de- liberately sending out such people. Without attempt- ing to exhaust this great subject, I will briefly mention a few things that, in my judgment, should form a part of the intellectual equipment of the modern missionary. He should have some knowledge of international lazv. It was my privilege some years ago to meet Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, and after hearing his inimitable stories concerning the beginnings of missionary work in Con- stantinople, I said: "Dr. Hamlin, I see now why you are called a great missionary. It isn't because you know the Bible better than others, nor is it on account of your preaching ability, but it is because you know the methods of international intercourse, and the in- fluence of the legations, and how to use them." His reply was, "Well, I knew nothing about international BROAD CULTURE DEMANDED 1 1 1 law when I went out, but I soon discovered that if I was to accomplish anything, I must learn it." The missionary lives as an alien in a land that has treaties with his own, and he must at least know the kind of treaty under which he is permitted to work, and something of the authority and duties of his min- ister, the consul-general, and the consuls. In ex- territorial lands this is especially important, not so much for the sake of standing up for his rights, for the missionary who forever insists on his rights is a poor stick, but for the opportunity it gives for acquir- ing influence, of avoiding embarrassing mistakes, and of enriching his teaching and preaching with telling illustrations. There are a few missionaries whose ignorance of these things has led them into serious errors that have nearly ruined their influence for life. There are others who, had they known the principles of international law, might have doubled their Chris- tian influence by some timely publication in a native paper, or by public addresses. There are some treaties that discuss the classes "missionaries and merchants," and there are others that do not mention them. No man can study the development of the treaties of the nation in which he works without being a broader minded man, and, it is well to add, without being better able to teach the great and inspiring doctrine of the brotherhood of the race. The missionary of to-day should understand com- parative religion. We can no longer treat the old re- ligions according to traditional methods. The time was when these religions were regarded as instruments of the devil to hold the people in darkness and in bondage to superstition. Later on they were treated 112 BROAD CULTURE DEMANDED as merely natural and as obstacles to the acceptance of revealed religion. Under these views, to destroy seemed to be the aim of the missionary. But the re- ligions of these great Eastern nations are being studied with the newer thought that, in the Providence of God, they have a place in the education of the race. God has put in man universally an imperishable religious spirit, a light that lighteth every one. And though these re- ligions have fostered much of error and superstition and cruelty and sin, yet they contain gleams of light that prove them to be, to some degree, revelations of the one living and true God. They have done much good. They have supported systems of ethics that, in spite of their imperfections, have enabled the people to come up out of savagery and barbarism, into social and national life. So the missionary has a profound and practical problem before him : What is God's plan in these great religions? Of what use have they been so far? Have they aided in the development of the conscience, in the upbuilding of the family, in produc- ing peaceful relations between communities, in quick- ening virtues, in fostering art ? What have they failed to accomplish, and what positive evil have they wrought? The modern missionary must deal with these questions with the deepest sympathy and not merely as a philosopher. He must have the spirit of the Master who came "not to destroy but to fulfill." Another important branch of study is the character- istics of the people. To assume that human nature is the same everywhere, and then to preach to Asiatics just as you would to your own people, is to labor for nought. Human nature is the same at the bottom, but it appears in endless variations. To study the language BROAD CULTURE DEMANDED 113 so as to be able to use it with power, is a duty that is always emphasized. But to study the people is fully as necessary. To learn their characteristics is the work of years of thoughtful observation and careful reading of their history. No teacher in his own country is a marked success unless he studies his pupils. Every good preacher must know his parishioners. None the less essential to the missionary's success is an exact knowledge of the characteristics of the people about him. That this is no easy task is seen from the fact that it took Emerson years of contact with Englishmen by correspondence and by repeated visits to England, before he ventured to write his English Traits. Vastly harder is it to learn the traits of these Eastern races, whose traditions and customs, language and laws, morals and religions are so different from ours. To get accustomed to their ways of looking at things, to think as they do, to enter into their real life, and see as a native sees, this is as necessary as it is to have a divine message to deliver. Modem theological thought must be taken into con- sideration. The missionary cannot afford to ignore evolutionary philosophy, new historical knowledge or advances in psychology. His library should keep abreast of the times. He should — and I cannot say it too emphatically — know the fundamental truths in such a way that no changes of thought can rob him of their power and glory. Nay, he should make every advance of knowledge contribute to the rich- ness and inspiration of his message. The mission- ary ceases to be a missionary as soon as he doubts that he has a message that is eternal. But move- ments in the religious world have come to be world 114 BROAD CULTURE DEMANDED movements, and people of intelligence out here feel their force almost as soon as they are felt at home. No one need be discouraged by these demands. It is not meant that one should be proficient in all these great lines before he goes to a foreign field. "A man of consecration and average ability can accomplish wonders." Brilliance and oratorical gifts are not neces- sary. But patience, perseverance, a yielding yet deter- mined mind, a purpose to conquer difficulties, the knack of making friends instead of enemies, the art of being polite, are all necessary parts of the culture every missionary should have. PREPARATION FOR THE MISSION FIELD GAINED THROUGH PERSONAL WORK 1 REV. HARLAN P. BEACH, M.A., NEW YORK The phrase, ''personal work," as here used does not signify, merely, effort with individuals looking toward their conversion, but in addition such other forms of individual work as missionary candidates will need to do on the field. 1. Convincing persons not interested in missions or openly hostile to them of the importance of the cause is a part of the missionary's duty on shipboard, in foreign ports and oftentimes at interior stations. It is the supposed value of the testimony of such critics that has largely brought missions into disrepute. Prepare your strongest batteries for such opponents, and use them in personal conversation with similar sceptics in America. Many of them are hostile through ignorance. Dispel that ignorance by cogent arguments based on telling facts gathered from general missionary reading or massed in Liggins' "Great Value and Success of Foreign Missions." 2. Prepare for future usefulness by learning the art of raising funds for special enterprises abroad. When in India and China, or in a locality where foreign mer- l Th