Thf, T)aWN of THi Modern Mission W^ Fleming Stevenson, D D •V-i." v:-^.^^^'.''' :-^»' ,1 xu moHmt ^ PRINCETON, N. J. « 5/1^^. BV 2400 .S72 '' ' ' Stevenson, w. Fie„,ing 1832 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. The Rev. VJ, FLEMING STEVENSON, D.D., Born 20th September, 1832. Died 16th September, 1886. THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. RKV. \VM. FLEMING ''S^'EVKiNSON, D.l), AinilOK OK " I'RAVINC AND WORKING, " KIT. KiC. WITH FREFATOKY NOTE IIY THK R E V. A. H. CHAR I' E R I S, I ). D., Professor of Biblical Criticism in the Ihii^'osity of Eii/nlii)-g/i. NEW YORK: A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON. EDIMU'RCll : MACNIVEN cK: WALLACE 1888. PREFATORY NOTE. The following Lectures were delivered in con- nection with the Duff Missionary Lectureship* in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, during the years 1884- 1886. The Author, writing to the Secretary of the Duff Trustees in 1884, to ask an extension of time for their preparation, said : — " What I chose was to show Christianity in contact with the various heathen religions among which it has been placed by our modern Missions. This involves, of course, the endeavour to exhibit the characteristics of at least the more distinct heathen religions of our * Founded by Mr. W. Pirie Duff as residuary legatee of his father, the Rev. Alexander Duff, D.D., the subject being Foreign Missions, or a cognate subject. Professor Thomas Smith was the first lecturer, Dr. Stevenson the second. VI PREFATORY NOTE. time ; what they had come to be when the Gospel touched them, and the character of life and conduct which had grown up with them in the countries where they prevailed or prevail. " An interest gathers around the first contact that is felt in no other; and I proposed, therefore, though the treatment would be slight, to deal at this point with the more striking origins of our Missions of to-day (this word, however, covering two centuries) and with the story of their founders. " Having prepared the way, I proposed to show what effect the contact thus established had produced already upon the thought and conduct and elevation of the peoples — of each people — and to show what reason there was for believing in far larger changes to come. "And I proposed also to gather together from this survey, such hints, lessons, and encouragements as would serve for guidance and stimulus in the mission- work of the future. " Many minor questions, of course, must be taken up in the way — e.^., the difference between the contact of Christianity to-day, and in the first century ; the different results of Protestant and Roman Catholic Missions ; the irregular native movements produced by this contact, for example in India, China, and New PREFATORY NOTE. Vll Zealand, even though the movement may not tend to Christianity; and many more. "... The scheme was definite, and I had hoped not too ambitious. But you will easily see that it involves an extent and variety of reading that tended evermore to increase ; and when coupled with press- ing work that dared not be put aside, and with which my hands were already pretty full, it became more and more difficult to bring it within the compass of my allotted time." When Dr. Stevenson delivered the Lectures, he was greatly dissatisfied with the form in which his thoughts were presented, and he hoped that before publication the statement would be made more worthy of the subject and of his purpose. When his last illness suddenly struck him down, there were few things more upon his mind than the revisal and perfecting of his new contribution to the literature of Missions. But after his death it was found that the manuscripts were little changed from the state in which he had used them in delivery. Only one who knew his mind as well as his mode of writing could Vlii PREFATORY NOTE. have deciphered the scraps bearing pathetic witness of having been written in such fragments of time as he could command amid his work for his congregation and his Church. But they have been most accurately transcribed and printed just as they fell from his hand. They are not as he would have liked them to be, for his ideal of orm and rhythm was very high ; not even as he would assuredly have made them before they came to the public eye. He had accumulated stores of information, of which he had not time to make full use ; and the Lectures are far from being so substantial and extensive as his plan contemplated. They contain, nevertheless, a vivid picture of a time and a work which had been much in his mind ; and the friends who read them in manuscript were unanimous in recommending that they should be published. They convey lessons, and they are eminently such as will stimulate readers to further study of the problems of Missions. The author of " Praying and Working " always connected his teachings with some personal example, and it PREFATORY NOTE. IX will be seen how Ziegenbalg, and Zinzendorf, and John Eliot and others stand out from their surroundings as representative of the highest purposes of their times. The burden of preparing the book for the Press has fallen upon her of whom the lecturer had said in the Preface to his book of Hymns for the Church and Home, that without her encouragement and help it would never have been accomplished ; and it is at her urgent request that I write these lines to explain the circumstances of this posthumous publication. In another part of his letter to the Duff Trustees, he spoke of his " very busy and dis- tracted life," and no one who ever saw how he worked could wonder that his strength failed him before the day was done ; but there was notwithstanding such a glad peacefulness in his heart, that it shone through all his life, and made that life a Hymn of the Church and Home. He had personally visited all the chief Mission-fields of the world ; he had read almost every important book describing Missions ; as X PREFATORY NOTE. Convener of the Foreign Missions Committee of the Irish Presbyterian Church, he was toihng day and night for Missions ; and I am fully per- suaded that these Lectures, though they are not quite what he would have made them, will advance the cause of Missions to which he gave his life. A. H. CHARTERIS. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. The Dawn of the Modern Mission, . i II. The True Conception of the Mission, . 51 III. Struggling but Prevailing, ... 97 IV. The Conquest of India, . . . .149 I. THE DAWN OF THE MODERN xAlISSION. THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. " The night is far spent, the day is at hand." — RoM. xiii. 12. Let us place ourselves on the threshold of the The sixteent sixteenth century. We are fifteen hundred ^^^'^^^>'- years away from the birth of Christ, and we can trace the power of the new religion that sprang from His cradle, we can measure its advance. Broadly speaking, Europe is Europe. Christian, as much of it Christian as there is to- day ; and, broadly speaking, beyond Europe there is no Christianity. A great work has now been done. Not always swiftly, but always firmly and patiently, the new religion has made its way. Rome and its empire have become a Christian heritage. The Greek language and the Latin exist, but only to be the vehicle for the thought of Christian peoples. The wastes of wilderness and savage men that lay between the Elbe and the Danube have become Christian 4 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. kingdoms. Christianity has spread up into the north ; to the very seat of the Vikings who once swept the Christian shores of the Mediterranean with their plundering fleets. It has planted itself along the borders of the Baltic, and fringed the region of perpetual snow. The powers that rule our modern world have been growing up through periods of infinite confusion and unrest ; and they are all Christian powers : France, Italy, and Spain ; Germany and Russia ; Denmark and Britain. But with Europe the line of Christian conquest comes to an end. The religion of Mohammed has spread into Asia from the Red Sea and the Black, till it touches the mountains of Hindustan — and beyond that, over all Asia heathenism is supreme. Mohammedanism lies in a narrow belt along the north of Africa, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Nile ; and below that belt, to the Cape of Good Hope, all but Abyssinia is heathen. The rumours of a new world are bruited about, and the voyages of Columbus are raising the eager talk of men in every part of Europe ; but, from Behring's Straits to Patagonia, America is heathen. The mvriad islands of the sea are THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 5 undiscovered and unknown ; but a population, probably larger than what they show to-day, practises among them the same heathen rites that froze the blood of La Perouse and Captain Cook. A few faint streaks of light are seen, or Distant scarcely seen across the darkness, — such as the c^^i^^^^ • spurious Christianity of Abyssinia, flecked by the mission converts of the Portuguese, the Copts of Egypt, the dying churches of Asia Minor, the vanishing settlements of the Nestorians, the handful of Thomas Christians in Malabar. But there was worse than lack of conquest, there was lack of power to hold what had been won. Christianity had overrun Europe ; but it had Christianity almost disappeared from Asia, where it was "retreating. born. The very Palestine of Christ was in possession of the infidel. Antioch that had stretched its patriarchate over the East, and fostered churches as far as the wall of China, was trodden by the feet of Moslem conquerors. The schools of Alexandria were silenced by the sword of Mohammed. Hippo and Carthage and Tagaste, and every sacred spot of the African Church, the memories of Augustine, of Alypius, 6 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. of Cyprian and Tertullian, of Monica and Perpetua, the regions that had been hallowed by innumerable martyrs, were all overrun by teachers of Mohammedanism ; Christianity was assailed even in Europe itself. The cry of the muezzin was heard from a hundred minarets in the city where Chrysostom preached to Christian emperors. The fierce, strong faith of the Arab not only held Constantinople, but also reached to Rome ; and nothing but the narrow waters of the Adriatic lay between the centre of Latin Christendom and the eager outposts of the Turk. Hundreds of years before this, there had been a chain of Mission Churches from the Caspian almost to the Yellow Sea ; the little Christian kingdom of the Tartars, ruled by its Prester Johns, may not have stood alone ; but now, the Nestorian occupation of Western China had shrunk down to a tablet with an inscription, and Tamerlane had swept every trace of Christianity off the face of Central Asia. Ground had been lost, century by century ; and for half a millennium no ground had been won. No doubt, the loss was mostly on the THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. J surface, in the extent of the area covered, rather than in the lessening of any real power. Christ- ianity might shift for a season from the East to the West ; but it was still the ruling races that were Christian. If it disappeared from the older peoples, the patient, immobile, contem- plative and also stagnant elder world, if it rose up supreme among the younger as they spread their fresh life over Europe, it was only one more proof that it could control what was most masterful and progressive in human thought and action ; that it belonged neither to the West nor to the East, but was capable of being the religion of mankind. Christendom had not lost strength nor influence by this shifting of its base, but the lands that have dispensed with it have been losers ever since. Yet loss there was ; and the hearts of the few Christendom who raised themselves above their age were disheartened, smitten with dismay. The last forward movement of the Church seemed to have spent itself about the close of the tenth century, and with its expiring years flashes of Christian light had shot up into the northern sky; into Shetland, Iceland, Greenland, into efforts of the Tsars to abolish Pagan prac- 8 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. tices in Russia, and decrees of King Olaf sup- pressing in somewhat Viking fashion the Odin worship of Sweden and Norway. That seemed the farthest point to which the Church had been carried by the energy of its mediaeval Missions ; and there it paused, and the shadows of the Pagan night began to creep into the Christian sky. The exploits of the great missionary monks had come to be as much matters of remote and unnoticed legend as they are to-day. The magnificent enthusiasm of Raymond Lully was a tradition. Even the voices of the Crusaders had long died away, and they were no more than echoes of the far nobler spiritual voices that had preceded them. A great weari- ness and a great despair had settled down upon the world, and a man so strong and healthy as Luther, a man of the new epoch, could say as his final word, "Asia and Africa have no Gospel ; another hundred years and all will be over; God's Word will disappear for want of any to preach it." On the whole, this outlook on Christendom from the threshold of the sixteenth century is not so reassuring as it seems at first. It reveals a condition of pause, of Christian energy THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 9 suspended or exhausted. It points to a long line of conquest checked ; to lands that had been seized and held for Christ, yet now, little by little, overspread with awful shadows of the night of error ; to the danger (present in every age) that the unslumbering forces of evil will be sure to press the Church back, if ever the Church should stand still. Already, however, there was An inventive visible that restless ground-swell which precedes ^™^- the storm of thought ; the age of invention — invention which the times held in clumsy fingers — was anticipating the age of revolution. Dis- coveries more bewildering than dreams were kindling the young heart of Europe, and sign upon sign was pointing to a new epoch that would be the turning-point of Christian history. It was from this new age of unexampled influence that the Church caught again the passion for conquest, caught it indeed slowly, as it seized upon only one here and another there, but caught it surely, increasing its hold and striking its roots down into the soul of Christian thought, until the aggressive and missionary pur- pose of the Kingdom of God has assumed a pro- minence unknown since the days of the Apostles, and unexampled even then. The forces that 10 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. had already triumphed in a Christian Europe were now to be put forth with the ambition of issuing in a Christian world. Christianity was once more to touch the great heathen religions, and we are to watch the effect of the contact. We shall therefore glance briefly at that vast and Chrlstless multitude of men, into the midst of which the Church was to adventure, if she would plant in the soil that had been covered and impoverished by their own beliefs, the mustard seed of the Gospel. Contemporary The religions that face us include some of the religious oldest, the most powerful, and the most complex systems. in the world. They have developed from prim- itive forms into intricate systems. Their hold upon the people has been not only strengthened by centuries of use, but buttressed by philo- sophical speculation, and by an infinite variety of modes of worship. The people that they control are vastly more numerous and more homogeneous than those that have been found under any religion that has yet been displaced by Christianity. The most powerful of them were strong before Rome was built, or Troy was taken. They have been contemporary with all the line of Judaism, and all the growth of THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. II Christianity. Hinduism spread over all the vast Hindui region that stretches from the shadow of the Himalaya to the ceaseless surf that beats on the rocks at Comorin. It had passed through earlier stages in the slow motion of its long millenniums. The Vedic Hymns represent its earlier and simpler Vedas. forms, a perception of nature that is only else- where found in Christian literatures, but running into adoration of the mountains, rivers, springs, trees, and plants that had impressed the simple Aryan shepherd : an adoration that includes " the horse by which he is borne into battle, the cow which supplies him with nourishment, the dog which keeps watch over his dwelling." He recognises God everywhere, in the plough, the furrow, and the Avar-chariot. But, above them he recognises vaguely a divinity which he calls by many names : the principle of all life, the quickener of nature, whose breath brings fruitful- ness, whose essence is the fervour of prayer ; the dispenser of all good gifts, whose hand traces the course of every river, the flash of every thunder- bolt ; who holds the earth in the hollow of his hand, and sustains the vault of heaven without prop of visible pillar. The sun is his eye, the sky is his garment, the storm is his breath. 12 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. From his palace, with its thousand gates, he discovers the flight of every bird, the course of every ship upon the trackless sea. Seated on his throne of gold, he watches over the execution of his own decrees, directs the onward movement of the world, and, with a sleepless eye, regards all the doings of men. When he rises as the sun, he raises his long arms of gold ; when he sets, he withdraws them to his bosom. Monotheism and Pantheism struggle together for expression in these ancient hymns, and beneath the struggle there arose the persistent growth of a vast idolatry. A later stage was reached when the meaning of the sacred writing became less important than the keeping of it ; when the directness of communication with the invisible was lost ; when ritual took the place of knowledge ; and the priest, or Brahman, the place of the people. Sacrifices and ceremonies were multiplied without restraint. There were over a thousand sacrifices, and there were rites which should occupy a thousand years. Still later stages were also reached, though slowly : the gods and the cult with which we are familiar to-day, and which have retained the place they hold since before the Christian era, THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 1 3 making up that complex Hinduism which, at the period of our survey as well as now, had largely lost the power to understand itself, and had become a wearisome Polytheism held together by priestcraft and caste. And thus there had come to be in India a Subtle religion more subtle, more powerful, more deftly ^ ^^' woven into the daily life, more patient, persistent, and cohesive than any which Christianity had yet encountered. While a religious revolution had swept across the West, removing every land- mark of the old Greek and Roman faiths, Brahmanism had been calmly adding to its strength, and hardening into the shape which it presents to-day. It had completed its later literature, reconciled its conflicting parties by the Trimurtti, added the gods that had been wanting to its Pantheon, and forged the last links in a system of caste and ritual that has ever been without a rival. It possessed a theology that touched on the profoundest questions of being, a metaphysic that attracted all the speculative sympathy of the Oriental mind, and a profuseness of religious worship that seemed able to exhaust every craving of spiritual fear, and every longing of spiritual desire. Often full, on the higher side 14 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. of a dignity and splendour unknown to other non-Christian reHgions, on the lower it sank into a gross licentiousness that could only debauch the worshipper. Beginning as a strangely pure and abstract spiritualism, it passed into an extravagant Pan- theism. It formulated the doctrines of Maya, or Illusion, by which the world resolved itself into so many appearances of God, and then, having proclaimed that there is nothing but God, it rushed helplessly downward into Polytheism. These three stages of thought exist in India side by side, and, as now constructed, Brahmanism admits the extremes of inconsistency, a religious system in which men, wide as the poles asunder, find a common footing. With a belief so abstract that it almost escapes the grasp of the most speculative intellect, is joined the notion that sin can be atoned by bathing in the Ganges or repeating a text of the Veda. To an ideal Pantheism like that of Hegel, it unites the opinion that Brahma and Siva can be driven from the throne of the universe by whoever will sacrifice so many wild horses. To be ab- stracted from matter, to renounce the gratifica- tion of the senses, and to macerate the body, is THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 1 5 considered the true road to felicity ; yet nowhere in the world are luxury, licentiousness, and the gratification of the appetites carried so far. It is a principle of Hindu religion not to kill a worm, nor even to tread on a blade of grass for fear of injuring life; but the torments, cruelties, and bloodshed inflicted by Indian tyrants would shock a Nero or a Borgia. Half the best informed writers on India will tell you that the Brahmanical religion is pure Monotheism ; the other half as confidently that the Hindu worships a million gods. Such as it was, it swayed, at the time we have chosen for our survey, a population larger than that of Europe, and speaking more languages. Its priests might smile at the suggestion of being conquered, for Brahmanism had as yet come out victorious from every religious conflict. It had conquered Buddhism, its own child, and Buddhism, cast it out, and although, at the time, Moham- medan conquerors sat upon its thrones and scourged its idolatries, although Akbar's court was soon to astonish the world by its splendour, the Brahman would prevail over the Moham- medan, and all the fabric of Mohammedan power melt away like a dream. 1 6 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. Confucianism. In China there was Confucianism, most sterile and least impressive of religious systems, an ethic rather than a theology, with treatises on government instead of religious formulas, a consistent agnosticism after its kind, yet often beautiful upon the side of precept and the practical virtues. Brahmanism was imposed on the Hindus by its centuries of philosophical schools ; Confucianism was imposed by the personal influence of the master himself, who has become, " during twenty-three centuries the daily teacher and guide of a third of the human race." But, besides Confucianism, there was the Taoism. Taoism of Laotze, who was Confucius' philoso- phical, and to him unintelligible contemporary. Taoism has been defined as " rationalism in philosophy and stoicism in morals." It is only on one side that it has met, if even there, a popular acceptance — the side of its magic and worship of departed spirits. Those who found no answer to the cravings of their spirit in Confucius or Laotze turned to Buddhism, which had already become the popular religion, and dwelt with the others in perfect harmony, the one controlling the relations to the State, the other the relations to the future. Here, then, THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 1/ was another huge field of conquest, a religion no less ancient than Hinduism, a people more homogeneous (for the same alphabet runs from end to end of the empire), and a population even more unwieldy than India. And Buddhism was larger than China. It had spread over the entire of Eastern Asia, and then into Japan, where it assumed much the same relation to Shintoism that in, China it had borne to Confucianism. The religion of the Zendavesta, with its lofty Parsism. dualism, has nobler elements than any I have mentioned yet ; but, as it reckoned only a fev/ thousand adherents, we may meanwhile pass it by. Those religions that remain are all of one Lower types, type, and it is the lowest. The Eskimo were roaming over the snows of Greenland and Labrador with shadowy belief in spirits and some after-world, in charms and oracles and wizards. The Red Indians held the great hunting fields and mysterious forests that covered Canada and the United States, the best of them with a rude nobility, grave, sagacious, and indifferent to pain, rich in curious myths of an older world, acknowledging one great Spirit 1 8 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. and Creator, but worshipping innumerable spirits that they disHked and dreaded ; the worst of them as near to the brute as it is possible for man to come. The Spaniards were rapidly destroying the people of Mexico and Peru, and with them, their curious civilisation, their human sacrifices, and their abominable lust. Africa and Polynesia swarmed with fetish worshippers, and were red with the blood exacted by their monstrous gods. But, whatever were the varying forms of faith, the influence of idolatry was everywhere the same. It was long since the purer elements in those religions had exerted any supremacy, and the only power that moulded life was the cruel and corrupt belief of every day. Mohamme- We have not yet taken count of another danism a com- religion, and, up till now, the most obstinate of all against attack. The religion of Mohammed was not a religion of idolatry, nor was it a religion of the heathen. It was in some sense a protest — a spurious protest — against the idol- atry that in the sixth and seventh centuries was spreading in the Christian Church. It availed itself of Bible truth, and incorporated, mixed with various legends, many Bible stories in its TIIK DAWN OK THE MODERN MISSION. I9 sacred books. Mohammed was willing to have prayed five times a-day toward Jerusalem, if the Jews had received him as a prophet. His system was a bold Monotheism, which taught originally "faith in one God, submission to His will, trust in His providence, and good-will towards His creatures." It accepted Adam, Noah, Moses, and Jesus, among its prophets, as well as Mohammed. It acknowledged the Pentateuch, the Psalms, and the Gospels to be sacred books, as well as the Koran. But Mohammedanism, which is the deification of will apart from righteousness, "the Pantheism of force," became as sterile, as cruel, and as hideous in its superstitions as any religion of the heathen. Its Arabs were still founding empires when our outlook begins. It was spreading over Asia, it was creeping westward and south- ward into Africa ; it was throned on the Bosphorus ; and, if the Cross was lifted high on one side of the Adriatic, the crescent gleamed upon the other. And wherever that crescent shone, it shone as a spiritual death, of which in our day it has become the sign. It is into that huge world, fringing Europe all around, that we now propose to enter, to follow 20 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION, the messengers of the Church as they cross the territory of those gigantic superstitions, to look on and mark as, one by one, each reh'gion is met by the Word of the living God. The over- throw of those religions is to be the new ambition of the Christian peoples, slow to dawn, but at last, as we see to-day, sure to come. We know what had come of it centuries before. Christianity had placed itself alongside, not only of the great religions of Greece and Rome, but of that group of religious systems that was found among the northern races. It had overshadowed them ; sometimes it had used them ; finally, it had replaced them. Per- haps the conquest was not as complete as it looked upon the surface. Greek and Latin were the classic tongues of Christendom, and when these tongues were at their best, every Greek and Roman who was not a sceptic, believed in the gods that had their seat upon Olympus. It was not strange, therefore, that when there were revivals of learning, they sometimes drifted into the revival, not only of classical studies, but of pagan modes of thought. There was also a sediment of superstitious belief in the powers of the northern mythology, that had remained THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 21 after Christianity became the rehgion of northern countries ; and when the sediment was stirred, it made the waters of the Christian faith turbid enough. There was a lack of thoroughness in most of the older work, noble and often magni- ficent as it was, an overlooking of the individual in the bigness of the race, a want of pure, com- mon, definite teaching, for which there is no excuse in these days, when the school goes hand in hand with the mission. We must admit that, even yet, the conquest within Christendom is not complete, that there are districts all over Europe where, if we probe deep enough, we shall find heathen notions. In the history of a people, the time required for the growth or the decaying of its religious beliefs is immense. All that I shall repeat is this — that, at the The Reforma- threshold of the sixteenth century, the main ^^°"' part of that work had been done for what is now Christendom ; and done so thoroughly that there has been no undoing of it. With the exception of Turkey, Europe was Christian. And I will say this also, that the impress made by Christianity before the Reformation will never be surpassed for its peculiar quality. No races, while heathen, can ever again influence 22 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. the world as it has been influenced by Greek thought and culture, or shape the course of history as it has been shaped by Rome. But the new conquest which we are to follow, aims at subduing by far the largest populations of the world ; kingdoms, each of which is as gigantic as the empire of Augustus ; not one, but every continent ; and, once these kingdoms have accepted the Christian revelation, there are no limits to the power with which they may inter- vene in all the graver questions of life, with which they may colour and enrich the entire thought of the future. I propose that we shall here trace the dawn of this modern enterprise, the origin of some, at least, of the more important Protestant Missions. It will be found to be inseparable from the stor}' of the men who founded them. Of the after- conduct of those missions, and their history during the later period of this century, I do not intend to say a word. That forms a subject by itself, and one on which the mission literature of the day throws abundant light. If I succeed in carrying these lines of advance up to the point where Christianity is fairly planted among a heathen people, where we can note the effect THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 23 of the teaching, and see it in actual contact with the old religion, and compare the two, my object is gained. It may be possible to notice also the results already produced upon thought and conduct, the moral elevation, the modifica- tions of idolatrous religions that are compelled by the growth of Christian teaching, and the indirect, even more than the direct results. It may be possible to suggest the question whether there are reasons for believing that changes must soon take place on a vastly larger scale, and to examine if there are any indications that point to this era of living conquest, as the greatest, if not the last of all. All that I may hope to do is to follow unworthily in the steps of my distinguished predecessor, and to build some plain and temporary bridge (until some one builds a better) between the missions of the Middle Ages and the missions of to-day. It is more than fifteen hundred years since P.iradoxes of Origen noticed the paradoxes of Christianity. Ch'^^stiamty. It was the only universal religion, and it sprang from the smallest and narrowest of sects. It was a religion without the sword, and ft con- quered the Roman legions. It had nothing to do with the politics of the time, yet it shaped 24 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. the policy of the empire. Its King was born in a stable, and He claimed to rule the world. The centuries that followed have added fresh para- doxes of their own. The greatest spiritual out- burst since the Founder of Christianity had appeared, was when the churches of the Reformed grew up in the sixteenth century ; yet the Reformation was without missionary enter- prise, and almost without the conception of a mission to the heathen. The great people of the English tongue were most in contact with the distant and foreign races of the East and West ; yet it was in Germany, without commerce and without colonies, that men began to think of conquering new worlds for Christ. And when we watch the dawn of the modern mission, we trace some of its brighest and richest flashes of prophetic colour to that eighteenth century which we have been wont to regard as the type of prosaic dulness, an arid moral soil from which no beautiful enthusiasm could ever spring until the soil itself had been convulsed and torn by agonies and upheavals that unsettled the world. No doubt, even here, we miss much that we had been hitherto accustomed to associate with the advance of Christendom. There is nothing THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 25 of the rapid rush, the ceaseless propagation and extension, the glow of a universal passion that marked the first three centuries. The heroic figures, the conflict of gigantic forces, the spec- tacle of kingdoms won over to the Christian side, and of pagan kings and courts bowing low before the Crucified, the stories, trembling all over with romance, of the birth of Christianity among those lands which hold to-day the empire of the world, the splendour, and the warm colouring of the mediaeval missions, are all wanting. The conditions and the character of the Changed form mission have changed. We see no rush of °.^ ™^''^°^' ^" eighteenth heathen races in upon Europe, as the Slavs century. poured down their swarms across the Danube in the seventh century, till in the eighth, the huge human lava stream had reached the Pelopon- nesus and the islands of the yEgean. There are no royal princes on their travel touching at Christian capitals, forming alliance with Christ- ian princesses, and returning to found Christian states. Christian prisoners are no longer swept away into remote fastnesses of heathenism to introduce their faith as Anschar found it intro- duced in Sweden. There are no bodies of armed 26 THE DA^YN OF THE MODERN MTSSION. men sent out to subdue heathen countries, to plant themselves as colonists upon the soil, and raise up a curious forced civilisation, such as was once imposed on Courland, Esthonia, and Livonia. We shall find no spiritual orders of a very brilliant but most swiftly corrupted knight- hood, no shadowy processions of the Crusaders, as they flash and pass like visions in a dream through Europe, on their way to Palestine. Everything is more prosaic. Pious kings may still be the founders of a missionary enterprise, but with this exception, the old order has changed, giving place to the new. There are colonists that sail away on perilous voyages, to settle among the heathen, but they are men of peace, seeking only " freedom to worship God." There are knights, and of a spirit as knightly as in any Christian chivalry, but they are the unarmed messengers of the Cross. To understand these missions of the eigh- teenth century, we must go back for a little to the century preceding. Sir James Mackintosh is reported to have said to Henry Martyn, that he thought the oriental world was made Greek by the suc- cesses of Alexander, in order to prepare the way THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 2/ for Christ. M. Renan gives another turn to the Renan. same thought, when he bids us notice that primitive missions tend westward, so as to keep the advantage of the Roman Empire. What they mean is, that time moves slowly when it is big with the plans of God. Epochs do not come suddenly, but only when all things are ready. We have begun our survey of the modern The growth mission at the threshold of the sixteenth cen- ° .^ "^^?^ ary idea dur- tury ; yet the first mission proper is not till the ing two cen- eighteenth. It is only slowly, while one century ^^^'^^^^^ melts away after another, that the purpose gathers consistency. Forces that had been set in motion were working through all that inter- vening period, but working as steadily as the light of the morning works through clouds and fogs and leaden skies into the splendour of triumphant noon. There were at least five of these forces which Preparation contributed something towards the issue. There ^°'' "^^^s^^"'- was the printing press. There was the Revival of Letters, which had already created an atmos- phere for the Reformation. Erasmus, who was its prophet, contributed more to missions than all the Reformers. There was the brilliant 28 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. series of maritime discoveries. There was the Reformation itself, pouring a breath of spring over frozen Europe. And there was the common work of the Reformation and the printing press together, the distribution of the Word of God to the people. These were all working, but for two hundred years their influ- ence upon the Christianising of the world was obscure. The Reformers To the Student of the mission there is no not mission- period SO disappointing and perplexing as the age of the Reformation. Every great spiritual outburst until then, was accompanied by a glow oi missionary splendour. The fires of every Pentecost burned into men's souls until they also took fire, and some went everywhere preaching the Word.^ It seems so natural, that we uncon- sciously accept it as a law of spiritual history. Yet, on the one hand, the Reformed Churches were empty of the missionary spirit, and, on the other, the line of missionary enthusiasm turns away from them, and appears in the great Latin Church from which they broke off. Perhaps we have under-estimated the spiritual influence of the Reformation itself upon the Church of Rome. Perhaps the losses that she had sus- THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 29 tained in Europe impelled the better spirits to seek for broader gains among the heathen. We must remember also that the impression made by the new world was first felt in Catholic coun- tries, and that their people were the first to come in contact with the heathen. The fact remains, that the only great missions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were those of the Jesuits, and that the Reformers did not produce a single missionary. It would be difficult to discover even a distinctly missionary aspiration, as we use the word, in their writings. Their cry for light, was for light within the Church. When they speak of the heathen, they mean the Gentiles as distinct from the Jews. The Bible had taken the wings of the press, but their joy in its freedom was not that it might be borne through other skies, but be preached without let in Christendom. The men of the Reformation inherited the Reformers sad burthen of preceding centuries. The op- 1"^^'^^^^^^ ^ ^ ^ , . -^ burthen. pressed feeling of decay, of ruin, and confusion, the feeling of a spent and worn-out world which gave birth to so many of the later hymns of the Latin Church, had descended upon them. Though the Saracen had just been expelled 30 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. from Spain, his crescent was supreme in all south-eastern Europe, — supreme, and not quiescent. It was the time of the end. God was delivering His Church, and then the crash would come. In the splendour of the empire and court of Charles V. they sometimes saw not so much the hope of a new epoch, as the brilliant sunset of an old. The emperor him- self had caught something of the same feeling, and stepped from his throne to the monastery of San Yuste, with the sombre music of the Dies ires in his ears. So they wrote brave and com- forting words for their flocks, to strengthen their faith against false doctrine, and to inspirit them against some threatened inroad of the Turk ; but the conception of a mission to Turk and heathen was buried out of sight under this false eschatology. Nor can it be forgotten that neither the German)^ of Luther, nor the France of Calvin, had any contact with that broadening world that filled the mind of Spain and Portugal. Somewhere Livingstone has said that where the geographer ends, the missionary begins, and that, when we are placed alongside races of men, our heart learns to beat for them. The heart of the Reformers beat for the Church they were THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 3 1 knitting together under infinite peril in Europe ; it was left to their successors to feel for that great human heart that beats to ours through a thousand millions of our fellow-men who know not Christ. As neither sermon nor symbol nor even table- talk of the Reformation gave any impulse to the mission, we are prepared to find that mission there was none. The expedition which Ville- Villegaignon s^aignon induced out to Brazil, was not a mission, ^ ^^^^.^ ^ ^ , , ' ' colonist. but a colony of men willing to flee from oppres- sion, and little caring where. We may wonder that the clever, gay, light- principled adventurer was ever entrusted with so serious a task, or what link there could have been between him and the grave Genevan ministers and tradesmen whom he had begged from Calvin. We may feel for the bitterness of those poor exiles, unhoused and unprovisioned, sickly, and with eyes wistfully strained towards Europe, when their would-be leader turned against them, and they had rather face the tedious and dangerous journey home in a leaky ship than live .longer where they were. It was a pitiful journey, the sea one day rushing in like a river ; on another, fire threatening to burn ■^2 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. them all alive ; the monkeys and parrots they had on board devoured for food, the sweepings of the floors made into pottage, rats sold for four crowns apiece, a fortune offered for a penny- worth of bread ; and the very day that land was sighted, the horrid whisper going round that some one must be slain to feed the rest. It is a miserable tragedy, but the breaking-up of the colony did not affect the missionary spirit one way or other ; nor did the failure, quite as tragic, to form a colony in Florida six years after : and, with the exception of an obscure and unsuccessful attempt to reach the Lapps, not so much for propagating the Gospel among them, as to give them better teaching in the Christian faith, — this is all the missionary outcome of the Reformation during that century when it began. In the next we have a distinct advance ; but for the roots of it we must go back into the century preceding. The Spaniards and the Portuguese were not long left in sole possession of the brilliant discoveries that made them masters of new worlds. The English and the Dutch, their chief commercial rivals, and vieing with one another for the supremacy of the seas, fitted out ship after ship, and sailed in quest of THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 33 settlements and of all the barbaric wealth which fired the imagination of the West. They were the children of the Reformation, and besides the love of adventure, they were moved by deeper thoughts, and the deeper thankfulness of men who had come face to face with the Word of God. We shall follow the English first — born sea- English rovers, and with the far rarer gift of being good ^ ^'^^^^^• colonists ; quite as ambitious moreover to possess as they were to discover, to raise new Englands and settle in them sons and daughters beyond the farthest seas. A vein of simple piety runs through the chronicles of these early voyagers ; but the " keen sense of missionary duty " that some have discovered is not so clear. Their conception of the mission was entirely sub- ordinate to their conception of the colony. There was to be a kind of spiritual clearing round the settlement. As far as the heathen came within its ranges, were settlers on its lands, or fringed its log-houses, they were under Christ- ian care. The settlers became the stewards of a solemn trust. Whenever letters-patent were given, this condition was specified. " The principal end of the plantation," so it runs in one, "is to invite and win the natives of the D 34 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. country to the Christian faith." Thoroughgood, who should know, and who reflects the spirit of that time, affirms that the mutual interchange- able pact and covenant of donor and receiver, in all these charters, is "the conversion of the heathen." The pact was not always kept. The governors of these London Companies were in the habit of writing to New England to keep the settlers in mind of the propagation of the Gospel. Sometimes permission was asked to found a new colony, on the ground that the other plantations had done little to convert. Eliot himself says that one of the chief motives to his labours was, " to fulfil the covenant made by the New England people unto their king." Even the Long Parliament, influenced no doubt by the publication of Eliot's narratives of his work, created a " Corporation for propagating the Gospel in New England," ordered a national collection, was joined by Oxford and Cam- bridge, and received its most liberal response from the army. The oath administered to the governors and deputy-governors of the Com- pany bound them to do their best endeavour to draw in the natives to the knowledge of God, and the seal of the Company was an Indian THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 35 with extended hands, and the motto, " Come over and help us." It is evident that the ideas of the Reformers Mistaken still prevailed, and men were still overshadowed "^^^^ °^ ^^^^ by a mistaken eschatology. There were earnest settlers in New England before Eliot, but some held that the heathen could not be approached without extraordinary gifts, and others, that it was wrong to preach to them until the Jews had been first brought back ; so the former waited till the Indians would learn English, and the latter felt no concern. Nor did even men like Williams rise higher than to regard them as heathen in their own parishes, and therefore under their jurisdiction. John Eliot might be the apostle of the Indians, but he was always the minister of Roxbury. More than a century had yet to pass before a voice would be heard rousing England, and saying, " The world is my parish." Out over that narrow rim of their own lives, the big heathen world lived and grew brutal, and died, and lived and died again as the generations painfully followed each other, and no one said to himself: How can they believe in Him of whom they have not heard, and how can they hear without a preacher ? 36 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. Yet what was done was good as far as it went ; it was better than doing nothing, and it was beautified by examples of the highest missionary heroism. Later years leave us nothing finer than the figure of John Eliot, the Cambridge student, who sails for New England seeking freedom of conscience, and, with comrades from the same place, settling down upon the steep wooded hill of Roxbury, where they " Shake the depths of the desert gloom With their hymns of lofty cheer," the man ripening in wisdom, the leading spirit in the settlement, and also the pastor, bold, determined, yet becoming filled with a heavenly presence, and learning, as he says, the mean- ing of three words, " Bear, forbear, forgive ; " until strife melts away when he appears. Then, the misgiving that he has neglected one part of his parish, and that the Red Indian will call him to account at the last day. And, upon that, the uncomplaining self-denying toil of more than forty years, while he unravels a language whose words, Mather says, have been growing since the confusion of tongues ; then sits for hours among the red-skins, while THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 37 they ask him in one breath, " How may Indians come to God ? " and in the next, " Why is the sea salt ? " preaches with stammering speech his first sermon ; travels through the endless woods in every weather, and writes : " I have not been dry, day nor night, although I pull off my boots, wring my stockings, on with them again, and so continue," and he continues until his "praying Indians " are known about the colony, and build their own houses, "as well behaved and well clothed," the governor reports, "as the other settlers," some of them even learning Greek and Latin, while he patiently toils at his Indian Bible, his hair white now, and his eager figure stooped, too infirm even to act as pastor, but still able to write to Robert Boyle, " My understand- ing leaves me, my memory fails me, but I thank God, rny charity holds out." No sweeter saying than that has been dropped upon the confines of infirm old age ; no more helpful psalm of life can be borne round the world, than that brave refrain of his : " Prayer and pains through faith in Jesus Christ can do anything." No man but would wish to say with him, " Were I sure to go to heaven to-morrow, I would do what I am doing to-day." 38 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN T^HSSION. If we now turn to the Dutch, we find them working out the mission after their own fashion, but under the shadow of the same mistakes. In the East an island, or a fragment of the mainland, was wrested from some other power, from adven- turers of Europe, or potentates upon the spot. A Dutch settlement was planted ; the district with all its people became a Dutch parish, and among them, but not beyond them, the Gospel was preached with great vigour. These Dutch settlers were not hindered by theological opinions about the Jews, nor indeed by tender scruples of any kind. They took possession of the spacious churches of their Roman Catholic predecessors, and apparently of their congregations-; simply placing over them the new title of " Reformed," and not one in ten of the ministers (for it would scarcely be correct to call them missionaries), understood the language of the people ; but on the report of the schoolmaster that the people could repeat the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Com- mandments, and a grace, baptism was adminis- tered without hesitation. As they were so few, the native ministers undertook the greater part of the work, and would baptise hundreds of children at a time, sweeping in from the highway THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 39 any whom they found to act as sponsors. They prohibited the erection of temples, imposed penalties on heathen ceremonies, put in irons any Christians who retained the practice of idolatry, proscribed the Romish religion as firmly as the Buddhist, allowed caste churches to be built, and made subscription to the Helvetic confession the condition of the smallest govern- ment employment, or even of farming an acre of land. Some of them were men of great learning, the earlier in the field were certainly men of sincerity and zeal ; they compiled cate- chisms, and they laboured bravely to put the Bible into the hands of their own people, trans- lating from it into Tamil, Cingalese, Malay, and Formosan ; they made the education of the people a feature of their work, and they had the full support of the authorities. Eliot and his friends may have placed the standard for admission to the Church too high, but these men swung round into a laxity so great that Great laxity, admission to the Church ceased to have any spiritual meaning whatever. At one time there were three-quarters of a million of these Christ- ians in Ceylon, Java, Sumatra, Antigua, and Formosa, but not one in two thousand of these 40 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. Eighteenth century. was a communicant. The thin veneer of the creed and the commandments soon wore away. The immorahties and superstitions of the Christ- ians were not to be distinguished from those of the Pagan ; the numbers dwindled down, and the churches fell into decay, and were lost even to view, like the converts, in the tangled growth of the jungle. The theory could scarcely have been wrought into practice under more favour- able conditions, but it was vicious to the core. While Dutch settlers and merchant adven- turers were crushing the mission out of existence by false methods, and English colonists were sometimes attempting the conversion of the Indians, the seventeenth century had drifted into the eighteenth, and we pass from Baxter and Alleyne to Butler and Berkeley. In the next century we find a distinct advance, of a superficial character it is true, and on wrong lines, yet most noteworthy. The true beginning of what we now recognise as mission- ary work must be put almost a century later, and with two brief episodes that it covers, I must close this lecture. It was in Germany, which had no shipping trade, no sea-rovers, no colonists, and no direct THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 4I links with heathen countries, that we first notice some conception of the mission as we understand it now. There was a goldsmith, named Heyiing, Heyiing. who had a modest business in the town of Liibeck, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and who gave his son Peter the best education he could afford, at the then famous High School of that free port. Young Heyling's abilities were so marked that, before he left school, he was engaged by a wealthy citizen as tutor to his sons ; and soon after, like many of his town- folk, he left Lubeck to pursue his studies abroad. He remained for four years at Paris, in .charge of some reading men (his own neigh- bours), and here he made the acquaintance, and afterwards the friendship of Hugo Grotius, the Swedish Ambassador. The influence of Grotius over the young man was profound, and it was not confined to Heyiing. Other young men were drawn under its spell, until there was a group of seven, all lawyers, and all from Lubeck, living in the closest fellowship, drawn together by • common spiritual longings, and proposing, with a beautiful enthusiasm, to carry light into the world beyond them. They were young, but they were beyond the age of mere romantic 42 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. dreams ; and it was not long before some of them put their resolutions to the test. Van Dome went to Jerusalem. Unhappily, upon the way, he seems to have fallen into a misery of troubled thought, that prevented all missionary activity. A touching letter to his companions reveals his state of mind, and when he left the East, he turned up at Padua, where he became Pro-rector of the University, and finally held office under the burghers of Liibeck at the town of Mollen, where he died. Blumenhageii went to Turkey, where he seems to have met a violent death, and of him we have no further record. Heyling, leaving Paris in 1632, went to Abyssinia by way of Malta, where his simplicity and earnestness gained him friends in the most unlikely quarters. A knight of Malta was ready to bear him company on his mission, but missed the ship, and the Roman Inquisitor gave him a letter of commendation to his ecclesiastical brethren, although with sore misgiving, as he said, that if Heyling were to do as much for him, and if he, a Capuchin monk, were to appear in the streets of Liibeck, he would be stoned to death. At Alexandria, Heyling pursued his THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 43 Studies in Arabic ; and, while stoutly maintain- ing the Lutheran faith, won over the patriarch to his plans, and by his advice, set off to visit the libraries of the Coptic monasteries, twenty days' journey into the desert. Here he added the study of Syriac to Arabic, and pursued his quiet controversies, pointing out the errors of the clergy from their own Church Fathers, but with so much gentleness and love, that he gained a higher place in their esteem. Travellers sometimes came by, mostly of the ecclesiastical order, and stared at this German student qualifying himself to be a Protestant missionary, while he lived with the monks of the Thebaid ; and some of them were afterwards ill at ease, and endeavoured to procure his arrest. We fancy we can detect a smile, as he relates how he outwitted the Egyptian police, he taking himself with his precious MSB. into the Chapel, which they were unwilling to profane. "Abyssinia," he wrote, "is still far off!" and while the way was getting ready, he returned to Cairo, and journeyed as far as Jerusalem, holding controversy there, after his honest fashion, with both the Syrian and the Roman prelates. It was approaching the end of 1634 before he could 44 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. fulfil his passionate desire, and then he attached himself to an Abyssinian Embassy, returning from the Patriarch of Alexandria, with a new Abanas. On the way, they learnt that a Roman Catholic patriarch was captive on a neighbouring island, held in durance by a speculative pasha, who bargained for a ransom. To Heyling the temptation was irresistible. He paid a visit to the prisoner, who seems to have been well treated, and he records with satisfaction their debate on points of doctrine, and how he changed it from Latin to Arabic, so that those present might understand. With his entrance into Abyssinia his letters cease. He seems to have remained for years, to have won the confidence of the king, who presented him with a stately residence, and if Bruce is to be believed, he was regarded as the real ruler of the kingdom. We can be certain that he used his influence fearlessly on the side of truth, and there is evidence that it did not prevent him from being universally beloved as Dr. Peter." Dr. Peter. A young Abyssinian made the long journey to Amsterdam in 1653, that he might see the Lubeck from which his teacher had come, and hold fellowship with its citizens. THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 45 " Oh, Dr. Peter, Dr. Peter," he cried, as he sprang up, his face bright with joy, yet wet with tears, when Samarius, the Mezzofanti of that day, asked of him if perhaps he knew Peter Heyling. Of the seven Lubeck lawyers who had given their hearts to the mission in most unHkely Paris, he alone fulfilled the trust. We know that when he found the Ethiopian language used only by the clergy and the learned, he proceeded to translate the New Testament into the Amharic, which the people understood. We know that, 200 years afterwards, MSS. of this version were still in circulation. We know too that pains were taken at Rome, then certain to be well informed, to prevent the news of his success from reaching Germany ; and there our knowledge ends. In his bravery, his patience, his tact, his learning and devotion, he recalls the earlier days and heroes of the mission ; in his broad, loving, reconciling spirit, he anticipates the later. It was at least no common man of whom Grotius wrote, that he could not sufficiently admire the greatness of his soul ; it was no common missionary who left the most brilliant city in Europe, to shut himself for life within a jealous African kingdom, content if he 46 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. might sow the seed of the Word, and of his own life, even by the wayside. About the time that Heyling finally dis- appears from view, a young Austrian Baron met a young Ratisbon advocate in a bookseller's shop of that city. They were both eager, enthusiastic, and on fire for Christ ; they were both mourning over the deadness of the Church. Baron von Welz opened his heart, and unfolded his plans. He would draw the Lutheran and Reformed together, and end the weary strife that kept the Churches barren. He would also found a society for preaching the Gospel to the heathen. It would be a Jesus Society, rallying to itself those whom the love of Jesus constrained to the work. Gichtel fell in with the idea. It was his habit to fall in with most novelties, either in work or religion, and there were few extravagances of the mystical school into which he did not contrive to fall, and out of which he did not manage to struggle. Von Welz deserved a wiser comrade, but the two men put their heads together and developed a scheme. The missionaries need not be versed in the learning of the schools. They might be laymen, even pious artisans, but they must be willing to THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 47 go anywhere. Von Welz would furnish the capital of 30,000 thalers, and the interest would support the missionaries in training. This was the plan which they sent to the foremost theo- logians in Germany, Von Welz following it up by two appeals " to all right-minded Christians of the Augsburg Conference," and they waited the result. Ursinus, one of the leading men of his day, and Gichtel's antagonist at Ratisbon, was unsparing in his condemnation. "The heathen," he declared, " brought their fall upon themselves. The holy things of God's Word were not to be cast before such swine ; any conversion that had ever been meant for them was accomplished long ago in the days of the Apostles. As for the Society of the Love of Jesus, God save us from it." Von Welz was wounded in spirit, but the fire was not quenched. He withdrew to Holland, and issued a new appeal. It was to the German students at Amsterdam, but it fell flat like the rest ; and finding, as many true and eager spirits have found, that he was before his time, he resolved to carry out his society in his own person, was ordained an apostle of the Gentiles, took ship for Surinam, and died. 48 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. Progress ? We have traversed two centuries, and, as yet, we see no change in the sombre circle of heathen that met our eye when the sixteenth century began. There are a few faint flashes of dawn, quivers and starts of hght that shoot across the dark, but leave no breaking in the clouds ; not sunlight some of them, but fickle as auroras, gleaming with mock brilliance, then flickering and vanishing away. We may say that, till this time, the Churches of the Reformation have not thrown themselves into the struggle with a single false religion. Certainly there is no school like history for teaching patience. The way we have followed has been lighted more by failure than success, by beacons to warn rather than by inspirations to advance. The sneer, " manu- factured converts," was often the response of his contemporaries to the work of patient, saintly Eliot ; the cry of an unappeasable distrust, the suspicion of the faithless, who in every age have nought to say but, " How can these things be ? " There has been no clear purpose taking hold of the Church, and shining, luminous like the sun, as all true thoughts must shine, if they are to guide men into those upward paths where new worlds will swing into their ken. And yet we THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. 49 must beware of believing that there has been no advance. The period that was ushered in by the Reformation was one of the seed-times of the world. Many movements have combined to break up the crust of stiffened and frozen thought ; new ideas were sure to take root in the loosened soil, and that was what happened to the mission. The heathen were being brought home to the consciousness of the Church. Cromwell dreamt of a missionary Cromwell. college, and mapped out the world into sections for Christian conquest. Ten years before Gregory XV. founded the College of the Pro- paganda, Walseus established a seminary at Waleeus. Leyden for the education of Christian mission- aries ; Von Welz proposed that three missionary professors should be attached to every university, and drew up an outline of the subjects they would teach. Grotius wrote his treatise on the Grotius. Evidences for the use of the Dutch clergy going to the East. Boyle, w^ho founded the Royal Boyle. Society, defrayed the cost of more than one translation of the Scriptures, kept up a constant correspondence with the missionary colonists in New England, and, at his death, left what was then a fortune, ^^5400, for the propagation of the dawn. 50 THE DAWN OF THE MODERN MISSION. Gospel. Leibnitz inserted among the statutes of the Berlin Academy, a plan for sending missionaries out to China. When Baxter heard of Eliot labouring among the Indians, he wrote that there were many prepared to go to any unbelieving nation, preaching Christ. Only signs of These are signs of the dawn, and among these signs the seventeenth century closes. When the next century opens, we shall see the begin- ning of the first real struggle. We shall see adventurers from Europe attempting the over- throw of one of the firmest, oldest, most splendid, and yet most misleading of the great religions of the heathen. " Gather you, gather you, angels of God — Freedom and mercy and truth ; Come ! for the earth is grown coward and old. Come down and renew us her youth. Wisdom, self-sacrifice, daring and love. Haste to the battlefield, stoop from above, To the day of the Lord at hand." II. THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. ZlEGENBALG. II. THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. ZlEGENBALG. I HAVE already had occasion to notice that the birth of spiritual life, and the birth of the mission of the Church, usually fall together, and that the one becomes the parent and supporter of the other. In the subject before us this evening, we are to have a fresh illustration of this historical principle. In the later half of the seventeenth century Reaction there had sprung up at many points a reaction ^^^^^^^ ^^^^ against the formal, dry, lifeless orthodoxy that reigned over the Church in Germany. A purely logical theology controlled the pulpit, and dried up the springs of spiritual life ; the sermons were strings of formal propositions formally stated, while the Bible was scarcely mentioned ; and candidates for the ministry did not profess to understand the language of the Old Testa- ment, broke down in the most superficial 54 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. examination of their acquaintance with Biblical Greek, and frequently did not know a word of Greek at all. The troubles of the Thirty Years' War, as it swept across the land, broke through this religious crust, and men sought for some- thing deeper and more sustaining. As teachers rose up, touched by this new impulse, a powerful movement passed over Germany. It was nick- Pietism, named Pietism, and was treated with hostility, and frequently with rigour. Social and eccle- siastical persecutions broke out against it, and to be a Pietist was commonly to be a mark for reproach, and scorn, and coarse raillery, if nothing worse. There were noble-minded and great-hearted men, however, among the leaders ; and at the beginning of the eighteenth century their influence was remarkable, and was rapidly rising. The University of Halle was entirely in their hands, and was fed by students from the High School at Berlin, which was under the same control. Francke, best known to the present generation by his Orphan House and his life of faith, was the soul of the movement at Halle ; at Berlin it centred in Spener, chaplain to the king, and probably the most famous pastor of his time, and Lange, the rector of the THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 55 High School; and everywhere it drew to itself the more serious and earnest natures, and espe- cially the ardour of the young. While this movement gathered strength, on Frederic IV. a March evening in the year 1705, King °^ ^^'"^^'^• Frederic IV. of Denmark sat in deep thought in his palace. As he looked over the papers on the table, his eye rested on the petition of a poor widow. Her husband and eldest son had been murdered in a native outbreak at Tranquebar, and she sought redress and help. The circumstance was slight, and might have made little impression on a mind pre- occupied, but that the heathen population added by adventure or conquest to Denmark had already weighed upon the king. They could be found at many points of his dominions, in Greenland, India, and St. Thomas, and they had filled him with misgivings, that he had not acted fairly by them, that, as a Christian Prince, he ought to have sent messengers to preach the Gospel to them. He was engaged in war with Sweden, and perhaps the seriousness of his posi- tion at the time made his conscience sensitive ; a sudden conviction smote through his mind, and, like a famous king before him, '' his countenance 6 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE ^^SSION. was changed, and his thoughts troubled him." For ninety years there had been a Danish East India Company, under charter and protection of the Crown ; for ninety years Danish ships had sailed to Tranquebar, Danish merchants had traded and grown rich in it, Danish soldiers had defended it, and Danish governors had ruled it ; but no ship had ever carried a Danish missionary to preach the Gospel. For these ninety years the Christian conscience of the land had been asleep, and it was now high time to awake. Penitent, perplexed, and rest- Lutkens. less, he summoned Dr. Liitkens, his chaplain, who found him poring over a map of the coast of Coromandel. Could the chaplain procure him men, he would send out apostles to the Indies. He had taken his decision with a hasty energ}% for, while he was musing, the fire had burned, and Liitkens with a joy he did not hide, heaped, he says, fuel on the fire. Yet he could not answer the king's question. The Church of Denmark was no more alive to mission work than other Churches of that time, and such men as were wanted were scarcely to be found. He paused for a moment, then said, '' Send me ! " The king was moved by the old man's self- THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 57 sacrifice, but he could not part with him. He reckoned on his counsel, he must have him by his side ; it was younger men he wanted, who could face the hardships and the climate with less risk. " Get us the men," he said ; where- upon Lutkens went out to seek. Such is the story as it is popularly told, and, although some of the details are wanting in historical authority, the main facts are unquestioned. Dr. Lutkens found that he had undertaken a difficult task ; himself a German, he naturally turned to two of his old colleagues at Berlin. His correspondents took the matter up with warmth, and, on consulting with their brother ministers, it appeared they might return a favourable answer. The man who had been unconsciously trained for this work, was at the moment in their neighbourhood, and was about to leave it. One more illustration of the curious exactitude with which the parts of God's plans fit in to one another. The little Saxon town of Pulsnitz, not far from Dresden, lies in a happy valley among woods and bright green meadows, and some- what out of the world, to which, nevertheless, about once in a hundred years, it has regularly 58 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. made its contribution, blossoming like a century- plant in some famous name, then modestly withdrawing out of sight. It was on one of Ziegenbalg. those great occasions that Bartholomew Ziegen- balg was born, "on St. John's Day, 1683." Among his earliest recollections, there was one so far back that it would have been dim but for its impressiveness. His mother summoned the four children to her death-bed, and spoke to them with a touching solemnity. He could vividly recall that she said : " My children, I have laid by a great treasure for you, a very great treasure." " A treasure," cried the eldest girl, full of wonder, " and where may it be, mother?" "Seek it in the Bible, my children," she replied, " and you will find it ; there is not a page I have not wet with my tears." In due time Ziegenbalg entered the High School at Gorlitz, where he owed much to the influence of an older student friend, a man of warm Christian feeling and sound judgment, who had been touched by the new life spring- ing up in the Church. After his friend left, he passed through a long and trying period of spiritual anxiety. It was not till after nine months of incessant inward conflict that he could THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 59 write, " At last the joy and comfortable light of the Gospel shone upon my soul." Slender means and a sickly constitution were constantly recurring hindrances to his progress at the University. He was a short time in Berlin, and one session at Halle, but there was other than college training to be had, and he himself was beginning to feel he was being prepared for something, he could not tell what, beyond. Lange and Francke were unceasing in their helpful interest and friendship ; they directed his reading, dealt with his difficulties, and finally Francke procured for him a tutorship at Merseburg. At Halle he had been taught that men re- ceived the Gospel in order to spread it, that he might begin at once. So in Merseburg, " which hated Pietism," he organised Bible readings and prayer meetings, which speedily received the support of all the principal people of the town ; a Bible-class, that was opened for boys of the High School at their own request, and so many young persons gathered about him for instruction, that he was obliged to seek help. Ultimately, not being over strong, his Pietist friends found a quiet parish for him, twenty miles 60 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. from Berlin, where he was to take the pastor's place during temporary absence, all uncon- scious that his career was being fixed in another country by events of which he had no tidings, and could have no conception. Lange was commissioned by his brother ministers to write to Ziegenbalg and propose that he should go as a missionary either to Africa or to St. Thomas, telling him of the king's desire, and that their choice had fallen upon him and his old fellow- student, Plutschau. Ziegenbalg's first impulse was to draw back ; it was impossible he could be fitted for so peculiar a calling — then, characteris- tically, he yielded. If it was God's doing, he would not resist Him, but only prayed that he might be convinced he was right. The two young students were accepted, and a small sum was enclosed to each for travelling expenses. The hasty preparations were soon made ; there was no time for farewells. Ziegenbalg could not even take his beloved books, and leaving behind an only sister, and Plutschau an aged mother, they reached Copenhagen on the i6th October, and found that it was neither Africa nor St. Thomas they were to sail for, but Tranquebar ! Nothing had been heard of missionary success, THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 6 1 and, in the slow communication of these days, Eliot's work among the Indians, though begun fifty years before, did not get known in Germany till some time after Ziegenbalg's death. The missionaries did not know it, but it appears that, by the same vessel in which they sailed, secret instructions were despatched by the company, authorising the Governor of Tranquebar to offer every opposition, and, in effect, to crush the mission. The journey to India was then a serious Voyage to matter. Sailing on the 29th November, they ^ did not reach Tranquebar till the 9th July ; but, despite storm and perils, and the hostility of both captain and chaplain, their diaries record : " When it is calm, we spend our whole time in wholesome meditations and study of God's Word ; morning, mid-day, and evening we sing, pray, and praise Him." The storms only deepen their sense of rest in God ; the ship becomes their "university," where they "learn to know the Bible not only in the letter, but in its inner power and sweetness." Ziegenbalg begins a book on Wisdom, a subject suggested by the name of the ship {Sophia), and Plutschau com- mences another on Truth, as seen in the harmony between the kingdoms of nature and grace. 62 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. Comparing as they write, and turning wistful thoughts onward to their work, the time passes round till they lie in the harbour of Tranquebar. Ziegenbalg, greatly moved, saw the heathen in groups on the shore, and felt his heart stirred at the sight of the goal to which all his life had led. First The captain rigidly carried out his instruc- Protestant tions. Passcngcrs, crew, and freis^ht were all missionaries o ^ ^ o in India. landed. Hours turned into days, the Indian sun burned on the oily waters between the mission- aries and the beach, but no boat came for them, nor were they allowed to land in any, till at last, the captain of a ship lying near had compassion on them, brought them to his own vessel, and had them rowed to land. It was early in the morning, and they were ordered to remain in a house before the gate till the governor had leisure to come in the after- noon. On his arrival, assuming the utmost roughness, he asked. What brought them there ? They were a mere nuisance. Had they any authority ? What could he do ? That was no place for missionaries. They were not wanted. What could the king know about such things ? And so turned upon his heel and withdrew with his suite to the Fort. THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 63 Petrified by this contempt for the king's mandate, as much as cast down by so unex- pected a reception, the two young men slowly followed, expecting that some one would inform them of the arrangements made for their stay. But, at the market-square, the group suddenly separated, and in a moment, governor, council, and chaplain had disappeared, and the square was empty. The sun had set, and as the houses were already shrouded in gloom, the strangers could not tell what turn to take, but watched and waited under the silent stars — the first Protestant missionaries that ever stood on Indian soil, wondering much what would happen next, and bethinking themselves that even the Son of Man had not where to lay His head. Now that Ziegenbalg has set foot in India, Ziegenbalg' and stands bewildered under the stars, we ^"'"• may look at the condition of that tremendous problem which he has set himself to solve, exactly the same problem, moreover, that we are trying to solve for ourselves to-day. For, when we use this phrase, " winning India," it is in a prophetic, and, as yet, in no way historical sense. It is the heading of a long chapter of which only the opening pages have yet been written, but of 64 THE TRUE CO^XEPTIOX OF THE MISSION. which we have no more doubt that it will be completed, than that it has been begun. It is rather the work before the Church, than any work the Church has done. And if we may take such facts as numbers and area and influence, we are still far off from any point when we can speak of India as won for Christ. But the winning of it was Ziegenbalg's aim, the dream he had as he left home, the dream of all that have followed him, from Schwartz and Carey down to the noble man who founded this lecture. We are to look at something larger than the gathering of a few natives, whether they are hundreds or thousands, out of indescribable error and woe. No doubt, since the work of the rescue of the individual draws its impulse from the pricelessness of a human soul, it must always be eminent and inspiring, and is the basis on which all wider aims must rest. But the greatness of the modern mission, as we apprehend it, is in this, that it has fused into one, two ideas that were often distinct — the rescue of the individual, and the building up of a universal kingdom of God ; that it does not recognise any limits short of those which Christ assigned to His Church — the whole world ; and that it aims to win for Him THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 65 the busy life of vast peoples, their existence as nations or races, their polity, their literature and commerce, and all the springs of national being ; to change in fact, and that everywhere, heathen- dom into Christendom. It is this conviction, that they have engaged in a superb and far- reaching enterprise, which lends a pathetic interest to the figures of those two men, as we see rising up beyond them, the unbroken heights and fortress of the Hindu faith, which lends that pathos to every lonely figure that passes out of our sight to-day into any mission-field. The work seems so far beyond the workers, that the faith which lies behind it rises into the highest chivalry. Well — as Ziegenbalg stood under the shadow of this vast religious life, he would find that the India where he landed was divided into terri- tories as distinct from one another in language, and in much else, as the States of Europe, but bound together by common religious ideas and a common worship, a religious thought that so penetrated the daily and commonest acts of the people, that they were practically one. He would find a religion that was apparently Indian religions nothing but the worship of false and foolish facing F Ziegenbalg. 66 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. gods ; a land that was covered with temples and crowded with priests ; where almost everything was worshipped, and where the commonest prayers had often lost their meaning to the worshipper ; where idolatry was practised as a systematic cult, guided by its sacred books, its clergy, and, as one might say, its prophets or gurus, and where all the grossness of idolatry might be seen every day, precisely as St. Paul described it to the Romans from experience of his own. Caste. He would find himself confronted with Caste ; w^ith the most complete denial that has yet been framed of the brotherhood of man ; with an apotheosis of human pride and selfishness, wrought out into marvellous detail, and sustained by countless penalties, some of them worse than death. I shall pass by all the details of this picture, for I shall have occasion to refer to them again. It is the later, actual, and present forms of these religions of the world with which w^e are concerned, — the practical side which they present to the Church upon her mission. It is to that the Gospel is sent, and over that the Gospel must triumph. It is to be the remedy for the THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 6^ degradation which idolatry produced, the de- liverance from its hopelessness, its sensuality, and its curse. But he would find that this religion had purer The primitive and nobler forms, that it was full of noble ^^^^^^^ thoughts, almost on the threshold of Christianity itself, and that these forms often existed side by side with all that filled him with horror. He would find that when the fair-skinned Aryans crowded the passes of the Himalaya, chanting their Vedic Hymns, they acknowledged but one deity, the Supreme Spirit. He was the Lord of the universe, and the universe was His work. He would find that they brought with them neither idol nor caste, and scarcely one feature of that religious life that is stamped upon India to-day. He would find that, as the Aryan settlers advanced into the country, they found a primi- tive, dark-skinned race already in possession ; some retreating slowly into the same hills and jungles where their descendants live to-day, others remaining to be absorbed into the new population, and to carry into it such ancient worship as they practised, low enough in type, 6S THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. although with strange hopes and flashes of con- science struggling through its fetish grossness. Contact with the lower and idolatrous races could not fail to produce some change, and was the first, although by no means the most power- ful, in a long series of influences that were always modifying the original conceptions of the race. Even without contact, there must have been change. Religious thought does not stand still, and when there is no revelation to fix the type, the tendency to change is unchecked. As the people multiplied, and their traditions grew older, and perhaps less distinct, it became necessary to reduce their scattered institutions and prac- tices, their hymns and prayers, into a compact and binding form. The Vedas, which were the result, are apparently the work of many hands, and prolonged through a considerable period; but, whatever may be their origin, they are the first authoritative declaration of a Hindu creed, — and here again we find many pure and noble forms. The Deities He would find that while there were then names of more gods than one, they had been at first no more than personified attributes of the Supreme Being, "a remembrance of one god breaking through the mists of idolatrous phrase- in ihe Vedas. THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 69 olog}'." For, one of tJiese ancient verses runs, "That which is one the w-ise call many \\*ays. They call it Indra, Mitra, Vanina, Agni, and there is that heavenly beautiful-w-inged Garutmat ; " and another, " Each god is to the mind of the suppliant as good as all the gods." The songs of praise recall the ver\^ roll and music of our Psalms — " The heavens and earth bow down to Indra, He looses the waters with His thunder- bolt. The mountains are afraid at His might. He upholds the sky with its lamps of gold, He spread the green earth." A song to the wakening light runs : '' Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice ? He who governs man and beast, through whom the sky is bright, and the earth is firm, who created the bright and mighty waters, whose shadow is death, yea, and immortality." Varuna (the ovpav6<; of the Greek) is said to have " appointed the broad paths of the sun, stretched the starry sky apart, and made great channels for the days." To Varuna " the darkness shineth as the day," and God searches the heart : '' The mighty Lord on high, our deeds, as if at hand, espies, The gods know all men do. though men would fain their deeds disguise : 70 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. Whoever stands, whoever moves, or steals from place to place, Or hides him in his secret cell — the gods his move- ments trace." The gods, therefore, knew man in their hearts, and here there rises the thought-seed, rude enough, no doubt, and far enough removed from those deep truths that have grown up about it among ourselves. There is the cry for sin to be removed, for the breaking of the bonds of evil habits ; the cry for mercy, " Have mercy. Almighty, have mercy ; " the cry for forgive- ness, " Absolve us from the sins of our fathers, and from those which we have committed with our own bodies." There is the longing for communion that recalls the melody of the familiar words, " Like as the hart panteth after the water-brooks," when we read, "Oh, Agni, thou art like a trough in the desert, to me who thirst for thee." LawsofManu. The laws of Manu are certainly later, they belong to the period when Brahmanism was at its strongest and best. They succeed the growth of caste, and represent an age not so remote from our own. Yet in these twelve books of metrical sentences, there are still signs THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 7 1 of a nobler and purer life. " Only when the heart loathes sin," it is said, " shall the taint pass away." The old Psalm is recalled in " The wicked have said in their hearts, none sees them. The gods see them, and the spirit within them." In spite of the growth of idolatrous ritual, life is still regarded as higher than dogma. " He who governs his passions is more to be honoured than he who knows the three Vedas, yet governs them not ; " and the solidarity of evil is put into precept — " Whosoever sins with one member, the sin destroys his virtue ; and a single hole will let out all the water in a flask." He would find that the rules for conduct are quite as lofty. The father had absolute power over his house, but " is to regard his wife and son as his own body, his daughter with all tenderness." Children are to honour their father and love their mother. The care of the poor and sick is the test that the gods apply to a holy life. The description of the warrior might be placed beside the ideal picture of a knight of the Round Table. Injustice is not to be done in deed nor thought, nor a w^ord to be uttered that shall cause a fellow-creature pain. Even caste is not engraved so deep but that J2 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE >nSSION. a believer may receive pure knowledge even from a Sudra. He would find that the earlier writings allow the woman free choice of a husband ; they represent the only screen for her to be, not the zenana, but her virtue ; they are in perfect har- mony with the legend of Buddha's wife, who said, in apology for appearing unveiled, "Good women need veiling no more than the sun and moon." There are hymns by women in the Rig Veda. The seven Malabar sages were mostly of the female sex. There were priestesses who taught the princes learning ; and in the Hindu Epics, the purity and simplicity of domestic manners are painted almost as we would paint our own. Brahmanism He would find also that this powerful, uni- versal, and apparently immovable religion had been undergoing ceaseless change, that there was not an influence that had passed over the people in their earlier stages but had left its mark. He would find that, when its better spirits had felt it was changed, and that it was losing its power as a religion over the life of men. Buddhism had swept across it, — born in its own home, as the Reformation of Europe was born modified. THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 73 in the Church of Rome ; and that before Buddhism had passed away to other races less contemplative, and with a less ideal philosophy of life, it had modified Brahmanism once more. He would find that Greek philosophy had left a mark ; the Mohammedan conquerors a far deeper. He would find that Hinduism had been altered by its own thinkers, so that the later forms of it were entirely different from the older ; that the gods of its mythology had changed, so that there were some whose names had perished, and others surviving in names that had no meaning, and some whose temples had once overspread India, that were scarcely wor- shipped and scarcely noticed. He would carry with him a feeling of hope. If the worship of Brahma was ceasing, if change was everywhere, why should not the religion of Christ produce the greatest change of all ? He would find again that, where the darker Old Indian and primitive race had retreated, there, in the ^^'^^^' same hills and jungles, they remained ; savage, aboriginal races, often timid and weak, some- times cruel, numbering now nearly twenty millions, Santhals and Bheels, Kols and Khonds, and many more, worshipping not only a snake 74 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. or a leopard, a stone or the stump of a tree ; but, for the most part, the devil, and often offer- ing, where they can, a human sacrifice. So far as they are distinct from the Hindus round them, they are scattered in small tribes over the vast area of the country, and exercise little influence, and scarcely affect the strong caste- bound religion that everywhere prevails. So far as they were absorbed into the immigrant popula- tion, they could not fail to produce some change. India makes And then he would slowly learn that besides religions inert, ^j^^^^ ^j^^^.^ ^^^^^ Others Still. Brahmanism is not an eager proselytising religion. It is deficient in every distinguishing quality of a religion that would push forward to be universal. Passively tolerant of others, so long as they do not break off from it, it has allowed them their worship and their place beside itself Even Moham- medans were touched by this atmosphere of India, and a sovereign like Akbar was as liberal as he was powerful, in fact, a churchman of the broadest type, receiving lessons from Christian teachers, and bidding them God-speed, while he repeated the formula that made his sect a very sword of the Lord, and varied his submission to the Divine will by demanding Divine honours THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 75 to himself. So the Parsees sheltered themselves in the north-west, appointed their high-priests and Levites, and built their towers of silence. The Thomas Christians maintained themselves along the coast of Malabar ; and Armenian Christians settled where they would, thriving as merchants and bankers, and also, Mr. Ludlow thinks, as Russian spies. The independence of the various states contributed to this rare immunity, and along the broad lines of tolera- tion, Christianity could scarcely have shown a fairer spectacle. None, however, of these fractions affected the life or opinions of the vast multitude who represented the ruling faith. Hinduism stood out bold, massive, vast ; and the question between India and Christianity was practically between Hinduism and Christianity. Had Hinduism the power to resist the simple unpretending assault of a few pious men ? That was then the question at issue. It is scarcely a question at issue to-day. I have spoken as if, in Ziegenbalg, Christ- ianity and Hinduism had first come in contact. It was the only contact that was to be durable, but it was not the first. There is a spell in that word India that has always been drawing y6 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. the West towards the East. There were ancient routes of commerce that led to it over Syria and Persia. Alexandria spread out her white wings until the snowy sails entered Indian waters; and, where men adventured in the hope of gain, men were also ready to adventure in Thomas the Gospel. We need not accept the legend that Thomas the Apostle founded the Churches on the coast of Malabar, since all probability is against his having reached that distant point of India. Nor are we bound to believe that it was not St. Thomas, but the Ethiopian Eunuch ; nor need we build much upon the title of the Bishop at the Council of Nice, who was called Metro- politan of Persia and of the great India, for a word so lax and broad as the " India " of that period could scarce be found. Nor is there more foundation for the report, long after date, that Pantaenus, leaving his crabbed philosophy and the Christian schools where he was training up fathers of the Church, shipped himself for missionary work, to return, sweetened and chastened in spirit, and take up his old work again, dropping, no doubt, many a quiet seed- word that would spring up in some younger missionary ardour. And, since the Indian part THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. JJ of that story is not above suspicion, we may fall back upon Frumentius, who preached the Gospel there 1500 years ago, and having returned to Alexandria, was made a bishop, and tore himself from the manifold attractions of that famous city — greater to none than to the Christian scholar — to go back to India, where he died. Whoever may have brought the seed — over land or over sea — we are confronted with the fact that a Christian community spread along the south- west, and was described by travellers as we might describe it now. Those, indeed, were its better days ; nor is there evidence that it has ever spread beyond the limits where we find it — a curious survival and little more. For this Syro- Christian or Thomas-Christian Church of 300,000 people, seems to have been just able to live, vital enough to resist at bitter cost much enmity of the rapacious Jesuits, who could not bear a Christian speck in heathen countries if it was not marked with Roman letters ; vital enough to cling to its worship and its popular forms, but even then, in great decay of faith, overrun with superstitions, and content with a careless ignor- ance among its clergy, and a semi-heathen life among its people. It had never (within our 78 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. historic period) been missionary or aggressive, and, like all Churches that are thus centred, it reaped as it sowed. Yet I confess to a strange thrill, when, sailing slowly up that coast, the simple white-washed churches came often into view among the palms and dark green woods that lined the shore ; or, when landing and entering their primitive structures, we saw those simple Christian interiors where the population is densely heathen all about, structures and people carried our thoughts away back to an old and vanished Christian world ; back so far that the names of the time are Augustine, and Origen, and Cyprian, and the talk is of the Council of Nice, or perhaps the persecutions of Rome, or of some old enough to have seen the Apostles of the Lord. Goa. And then, higher up the same coast, there is Goa, which the Portuguese made a brilliant centre in its day, from which the whole mission- ary power of the Church of Rome went out for centuries ; from which Xavier sailed on eager embassies, and Robert de Nobili, and Juan de Brito, and a crowd of men, filled with devotion and contempt of pain. Never a ship arrived from Europe but some were ready to go on THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 79 board and nurse the sick. When the poor help- less slaves were turned out of their masters' houses to die upon the street, they carried them to hospital and nursed them there, and, when they recovered, presented them with freedom. When the plague broke out, they gathered the stricken round them, "Christian and heathen, Jew and Mohammedan, and tended them with- out distinction and at the peril of their lives. It cannot be said that nothing came of all this magnificent devotion, for there were districts where the Christians came to be counted by 30,000, 80,000, and 100,000, and the last census shows half as many more Roman Catholic Christ- ians in India as there are Protestant. And yet, next to nothing came of it ; for these men were so little different from heathen when they were baptised, and received so little teaching after- wards, and the methods taken to reach them were sometimes so radically wrong, so often based on the principle that the end justified any means, that the high figures count for little, except to warn others that this reduction of spiritual work into statistics is a dangerous process. For all real struggle with heathenism we must turn elsewhere. Paralysis of inertia So THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. has reduced the Syrian Christians to a cipher as regards any influence they may have on the future of India. Paralysis of error has reduced the experiment wrought out from Goa almost as low. Christianity had also been approaching from another direction. Commerce has always been the bond between Europe and India : sure and deliberate, like that which the lazy Greeks of Alexandria allowed to fall out of their hands into those of the Saracens, until the Italian galleys contended with the Moors for the prize of those Eastern waters ; and then, with the rush of discovery and the confusion of the sixteenth century, there followed those trading settlements or factories, out of certain of which there has grown our own possession of that brilliant empire. The Portuguese were first, and for nearly a century they retained an undisturbed possession, and that sovereignty of the East with which the Pope had invested them. But, with the seven- teenth century, there poured in the Dutch and the English, the Danes and the French : and these commercial colonies became a factor in the future of that country that it is impossible THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 8 1 to overlook. It is only, however, as a Christian factor that I am concerned with it this evening, just as it may or may not bring us nearer to the spiritual conquest of India. That there was a religious feeling entering The Trading into the formation of those trading companies Co^^P^'^^^^- is beyond a doubt. It is expressed in their charters, and sometimes in their acts. There was an awakened spirit abroad, and honest, thoughtful men saw the finger of God opening new worlds and possibilities that were like wild dreams, and they stood devoutly before Him to acknowledge it. But, whether the company was Roman Catholic or Protestant, the outcome of it was soon almost the same, and Lafiteau's stinging sentence on one may be accepted for the rest : " The greatest obstacle presented to the acceptance of the Gospel is the frightful contrast to its spirit in the example and conduct of the Portuguese." The Dutch settled at Surat, upon the west, where they entrenched themselves in a fort, lived far too luxuriously, maintained a state like princes, and, as they died, left their successors to build pompous tombs that are now almost the only sign of those old splendours. The 82 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. English followed, moving tardily in this direc- tion, although the bait was great ; and finding the taking up of ;^30,ooo in shares a more serious matter than the taking up of thirty millions would be to-day ; but gradually estab- lishing themselves after the Dutch fashion, both in the west and east The Danes settled at Tranquebar, an open roadway about midway between Cape Comorin and Madras ; the French, at Pondicherry, on the Coromandel Coast. The pictures of that old life are vivid enough. Records of the companies, letters home, reports of travellers, are all graphic and full of detail. We see the splendours of the native courts — and about the time these companies were formed, the splendours were at their height — with the eyes of curious foreigners, and we learn, in consequence, a less distrust of what would have seemed the sheer extrava- gance of Oriental historians. We have painful accounts of the people and then* customs, and we can trace the growth and strengthening of Brahmanical ideas. But as for any light thrown by these traders on the problem of a Christian India, there is none. If they are Dutch, they THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 83 maintain Divine worship twice a-day, and three times on the Sunday. If they are English, the heads of the establishment play cards on the Sabbath, or go out horse-racing, while those may attend the chaplain who will. But whether Dutch, English, or Danes, they care little for spiritual instruction for themselves, and nothing for the heathenism of the people. These settlements from Christian countries had no direct influence on the Christianising of India, unless it were an influence for evil. They were long a scandal and stumbling-block in the way of missionary effort. So all that had yet come of Christianity in The conflict India, up to the verge of the eighteenth century, ^" ^"^^^' was a little colour here and there upon the map ; colour mixed and dull and thinly sprinkled, visi- ble on the map, and one may almost say nowhere else. And thus, I think, it is with reason that we watch this new approach with an interest that as yet has belonged to no other, for it is the coming of a man with a pure creed, and with a heart on fire, and a living faith, that if the Word of God is planted, it must grow, and that where it grows heathenism must decay before it — the heathenism of India, like 84 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. every other, and that he, single-handed or not, will plant it there, God giving him grace ; the foremost in time of a long line of men who will follow with the same convictions, doing valiantly but silently the same work, placing one after the other, Christ and the living temple of Christendom beside those idol fanes and the beliefs even of millenniums, and persuaded that there, as elsewhere, there is the power of that uplifted and sovereign Christ to draw all men unto Him. Such faith as that must lie evermore at the root of such conquest as we are now to see resumed. We recognise that it is not here a solitary figure and another there, arrayed against this solid and as yet impregnable Hindu- ism, but the first soldiers of an army that is being summoned from every century by its great Captain ; that it is not even the armyy although we see it in the missionary breadth of our own day, but that it is the going out of Christianity leading and commanding these blessed messen- gers whom He has anointed. And once we grasp this, which lies underneath any right con- ception of the mission, the sense of disproportion vanishes, or rather it completely shifts. When Christ Himself, the living Word, the truth, the THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 85 light of men, comes into the conflict ; Christ, in whom any dim hopes and dull but right yearn- ings that the heathen express in their religions are fulfilled ; Christ, of whom every form of Pagan worship testifies that He is in some way the Desired of all nations ; Christ, who alone can see some fragments of His image among the perverse wreck that false and base idolatries have made of great races of mankind, and cer- tainly who alone can restore to man that which his following of idols has taken from him ; Christ, who was crowned where He suffered, King of all the world, and who, in every triumph of the mission, is only the King coming slowly to His own. When He comes in the splendour The personal of His Gospel, and confronts the supplanting Christ. thoughts that have withdrawn the love [and reverence of men from God, the superstitions, gross beyond words, that have held men in debasing bondage ; Christ, at whose coming Pentecost again breaks out, and winds of the Spirit rock our narrow Churches, it is not Hindu- ism that we feel towers above us in its strength, but that He towers above Hinduism, and that in the very nature of things, a conflict so unequal can end but in the one way, in the cry that will S6 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. one day go up from all the heathen world — Salvation unto Him that sitteth upon the throne; for the moments when we feel, as Valegiani felt when he saw the mountains of China, " Oh, mighty fortress ! when shall these impenetrable, brazen gates of thine be broken through ? " they are our moments of little faith : " the gates of brass before Him burst, the iron fetters yield." Now, returning to Ziegenbalg, we find him and his friend owing their shelter for the first few days to the pity of one of the Governor's suite; afterwards, they were allowed to occupy a house upon the wall, close by the heathen quarters, and here they settled down to their work with a patience and trust, a confession of their weakness and shrinking, and a quiet, manly resolution that are very touching. Six days after his arrival, we find Ziegenbalg busy acquir- ing the first rudiments of Tamul, without books, grammars, dictionaries, or even an alphabet ! By extraordinary industry he was able to speak the language intelligibly in eight months. This minor success only whetted his zeal. Locked up within the Tamul tongue were all the mysteries of the Tamul religion. The people had a THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. %y literature, and he was prudent enough to dis- trust the careless impressions of the Europeans,, and to believe that a knowledge of the native literature would give him a key to the native mind. All day long he was busy reading, writ- ing, translating, and reciting, in order to catch the pronunciation, in which there was an infinite variety of inflexion and tone. In 1709, he could speak in Tamul as familiarly as in his native German, yet even here he did not stop, but pro- ceeded to draw up a grammar and two lexicons, one of prose, and the other of poetry. The prose lexicon contained 40,000 words, the lexicon of poetry 17,000. He had scarcely been two years in India when he began the translation of the New Testament. It was finished within three years, and then, with characteristic tenacity of purpose, he took the opportunity of a serious illness which interrupted his other labours, to commence the Old Testament, a much more for- midable enterprise, and which he only succeeded in carrying as far as the end of Ruth. So this " young priest who can preach in Tamul " (for he was only twenty-six) had already become a great power in Southern India, and was shaking the heathen mind by his incessant " speaking about 88 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. the things of God ; " but Tamul was not the only tongue he used for that Divine speech of his. The language of the half-breeds all along the coast was the broken Portuguese, which was almost the only trace of ancient Portuguese possession. The slaves in Tranquebar, and many of the natives, spoke it ; and, as the missionaries had learned it on board, they speedily turned to those hapless and often baptised heathens. There was a school and a service in this lan- guage, and, before any native embraced Christ- ianity, five of the slaves had been received into the Church, as the first fruits of their labour. Then, besides the school children, there were orphans, whom the missionaries, with sometimes not twopence in the house and not twopence worth in the larder, took up and cared for, like the brave, loving, unselfish men they were. And all this time Ziegenbalg was fighting his up-hill battle with the Governor, who was deter- mined to crush out the mission by fair means or foul, and fighting it under heavy disadvantage. He could not help forming plans for Christianis- ing India that were daring and magnificent, nor seeing the proper moment and place for a good stroke, and he could not help the torturing feeling THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 89 that he had no means to execute them. For the mission was sorely crippled at home, intrigues against it were thickening, not so much from dislike to the Gospel as from political feuds ; the scanty funds came with great irregularity, and friends were few. Lutkens, the chaplain, had fallen into disgrace by remonstrating with the queen for going to masquerades. " God help us," he writes, " for I dare not utter the worst that I fear." His salary from the Academy ceased ; his salary as chaplain was not paid ; sickness and death visited his family and left him without his wife and eldest daughter ; and with a thousand crowns to pay, he did not know where to turn, and was in actual straits for money. His letters were written with a tremb- ling hand that refused to hold the pen, and then Lutkens' " a daily dying man," at last he died, thinking of '^^^^^' the mission to the end, grappling with its diffi- culties, and sending to the king dying charges which were afterwards to bear good fruit. There was a latent heroism in the simple man, who with his narrow views, and small cares, and querulousness, his profound sense of Court favour and dependence on the breath of kings, clung to the mission like a soldier to his standard, and return. 90 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. murmured out his last words of faith and hope beneath its folds. Ziegenbaig's Ziegenbalg sped home. In the summer of 17 1 5, the eyes of Europe were fixed upon Stralsund. There, pent in by the forces of four powers, Charles XI I. defied the world. The Kings of Denmark and Prussia were in the camp, for the struggle demanded every sacrifice. One evening, a stranger of note had an audience of the kings, who had shown him singular favour, and for hours, it was said, they had been closeted together. The soldiers who had gathered round may have been disappointed when they saw that he was only a clergyman, a man indeed of com- manding presence, of a wonderful dignity and fire, resolute and calm, with a keen eye, a bronzed and almost swarthy face, seamed with deep lines of care, and a winning courtesy and lovableness of manner ; but when he opened his lips and preached to them, and they heard it was young Mr. Ziegenbalg, the missionary from Tranquebar, there were some at least who ceased to wonder at his welcome. He seemed to have dropped out of the clouds, the mission had no time to spare, but he got his story told to the king and he was con- tent ; for details he was referred to Copenhagen. THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 9 1 Thither he journeyed with restless haste, and , then into Germany, to Francke and Halle, halt- ing little at any place, but preaching to vast crowds who filled the churches and swayed out into the street, "very weak" we are told, yet kindling by his presence the zeal of all the mission friends, and moving his audiences as he would by his glowing appeals. Accompanied by his newly married wife, he in London. hurried through Holland, and embarked for London in the dead of winter, where, from the king down, his company was eagerly sought, further help was guaranteed, he received a free passage from the East India Company ; and, still hurrying as if he had a presentiment that the time was short, stayed not, till, after a quick voyage of five months, he reached Tranquebar to find the hostile Governor recalled, and a friend of missions appointed in his place. For two years more he threw himself into every labour, but with an instinct that the hand of death was upon him. He preached at Christ- mastide, 1718; on New Year's Day his voice was so weak that he was scarcely heard, and he never spoke in public again. On the last Sun- His death. day he summoned the native congregation to 02 THE 7?.rE COXCEFTTOX OF THE iOSSION. his beds: ie. z::d ex--:::;i :. i" fist aUC !rT.rnoTa.r'a.c. r i;::: rdzru^^" .ic T*"as — -'^ -heernil i.--. ■ ^-i h^~ ~ -"ing : . - "-th his wife- . _ :.:'".e: "... f of death set in. ''Did he desire :: : : with Christ P'^ "Ah " ■ --i:iing.y: i:. re- sentences followed. - :^: scarcely spe^^^. . . . may God bless what I have spoken, ... I have daily given myself into Thy hsriis. O God ! . . . The Lord saiiK ' Father, I wiL that where I am. there also shall My servant be' "' A great peace rested oa his coantenance, a ier.se z: res: acii triumph, in spite of his pair. Scdienly he put his hands to his eyes, *■ How is it so bright," he cried- *as if the sun shone into my face?" Soon after he asked for the melody of the hymn ^ JesQs, meine Znversicht"' The chords seemed to revive him, ant r ;; : ".'" lie fell as'eep. r.:t yet thirty-six years : . The ^lission Chnrchtht.: zt tr.t jtis ctmrades had planted, had cost them ve.^rs td urtrtre- - the mission althcugh not that Danish r: ICyZ-ErTlOS OF THE MISSION. grow. It has 5 ever\' par: one day in sects of Ir its shaft Church h- idc: for bravery, and wisdczi. sT-f l^rrt iniirht, a chief among thez: i'! ir.i :: t rr rt ;:" the cairr :f r: Trhi. ~e:r l: I-L3 :t;- raised : t: I : ::~t- Z , conditic's :f zsit . e see' h:~ way across survive r Zie-er: - 92 THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. his bedside, and exhorted them to be steadfast and immovable. On the 23rd February he was more cheerful than usual, and had morning prayer with his wife, but soon after, the pains of death set in. " Did he desire to depart and be with Christ ? " " Ah, how willingly ! " Broken sentences followed. " I can scarcely speak, . . . may God bless what I have spoken, ... I have daily given myself into Thy hands, O God ! . . . The Lord saith, ' Father, I will that where I am, there also shall My servant be.' " A great peace rested on his countenance, a sense of rest and triumph, in spite of his pain. Suddenly he put his hands to his eyes, " How is it so bright," he cried, " as if the sun shone into my face ? " Soon after he asked for the melody of the hymn " Jesus, meine Zuversicht." The chords seemed to revive him, and presently he fell asleep, not yet thirty-six years old. The Mission Church that he and his comrades had planted, had cost them years of unappre- ciated labour, it had been watered by many tears, and beaten by the keen winds of trial ; but the prayers they had offered for their work were fully answered. From that day till now, the mission (although THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF THE MISSION. 93 not that Danish mission) has never ceased to grow. It has spread with its leaves of healing, to Results of every part of the Continent ; and when we see it ^^^ '^°^^- one day in its strength, and the many tribes and sects of India resting in peace and light under its shade, when, in every village, the Christian Church has taken the place of the now decaying idol temple, it will be for men to remember that he who fixed it in that ancient soil was not only the first Protestant missionary there, but, for bravery, and wisdom, and large insight, a chief among them all, and to lay one more upon the cairn of grateful memories that has been raised over Bartholomew Ziegenbalg. As yet, we have been trying to master the conditions of the problem ; we have seen how one man prepares to solve it ; but we have only reached a little way upon the road, and must reserve any summing up of the result. We shall have to watch with sorrow, how that early work first spreads till it reaches more than half- way across Southern India, and then slowly dis- appears. But if the work vanishes, the workers survive in our remembrance. In such men as Ziegenbalg and his companions, we see revived III. STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. H III. STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. We have traced one current of missionary im- The slender pulse, as it flowed from the Pietism of BerHn ^^'^^^^^^• and Halle. We have followed its slender stream, fed by that one fountain, with contributory rills (but nothing more), supplied by royal favours that are not always quite to be relied on, letters from kings and princesses, both Danish and English, collections of small amount from courtly and archiepiscopal people, and sympathetic but not very generous aid of the English Societies for Promoting Christian Knowledge and Propa- gating the Gospel. We have marked its course through Southern India, recognisable by com- panies of native Christians, and by churches and schools, and men as noble and brave and wise and devoted as were ever given to any work ; until, after almost a century, there were perhaps 50,000 who had been baptised. We have traced the stream so far that we found it in danger of lOO STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. being dried up and lost, like waters struggling through a waste of sand ! The converts shrink- ing in numbers and declining in piety, the missionary losing power, and all the work its freshness, and the question rises to our lips : What has this century of labour effected ? As for any impression on India or on Hinduism, has it not been like wasteful waves of the sea, beating upon scornful and impregnable rock ? We have seen that, in the midst of their decay, new streams were rising at the touch of this, and were to flow over Tinnevelly and Travancore, and until the Presidency of Madras became the most truly Christian soil of India, using even that phrase however with caution, and remembering that, even there, all the Christians of the Reformed Faith do not rise above 200,000 out of a popula- tion more than 200 times as great, and are prevented by caste from having any influence comparable to their number. We have come so far that we see, on the verge of this century, the beginning of those immense enterprises, rocked in the very heart of Christian Europe and Chris- tian America, which aim distinctly at the over- throw of Hinduism, and which strive to plant the Gospel in every Hindu community. STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. lOI But, before we watch the struggle further, and are caught by that strong tendency it has to absorb our interest and concentrate it upon itself, it will be necessary to trace another current of missionary eagerness flowing from the same source, and to follow it also down to the point where the two streams melt together into the broader flow of the modern mission. Struggling but prevailing is the motto that is written over this chapter : light breaking out, feebly and fitfully enough, yet somehow spread- ing wider, and clearing open spaces in the sky, where God's Word shines and triumphs in ever- lasting strength. I have said that these two currents (and there Missions are no other missionary movements of the ^°!^.^ °"!^ spiritual life. century that deserve the name) flow from the one source of a religious revival. It is not with- out interest, nor without a very close bearing upon the duty of the Church, that the revival of the mission always accompanies a revival of spiritual life. So soon as the Church recognises and rejoices in communion with her living Head and Saviour, it would seem that she makes effort to carry out His will and to preach the Gospel to every creature. I am speaking simply of 102 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. matters of history, and not of theory ; and the way in which the new-born mission Hfe betrays itself is very striking ; for there is no apparent reasoning out of duty, but an instinct or impulse like the movement of a limb that had been paralysed but has recovered power. It is as if, in their vivid sense of union with Christ, the same mind as was in Christ became the mind of His people ; and feeling as He felt, they act as He would act. Certainly the mission, as we trace it, gathers strength just as the spiritual life gathers strength, and connects itself, as if of necessity, with the revival of the Church ; and if that be a matter of historical fact, it is plain that the mission is the outcome of the Church when the Church is at its best. We think of the mission as among the Church's triumphs, but it is nourished among the Church's Pentecosts. Long before the burst of mission fervour that commenced this century, there was a certain Jean de la Badie, a French Protestant of noble family, who was born about the beginning of the seventeenth century, and was a brilliant student even at sixteen. After a career of curious change, — first drawn by the devout lives STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 103 of the Jesuits, who were then attracting the piety of France, afterwards joining the Jansen- ists because they were reformed in doctrine ; instituting such reforms in his adopted Church, as the communion in both kinds, and reHgious conferences, where every one came with a Bible in the hand ; sent, therefore, by Cardinal Maza- rin so quickly as might be from Amiens in the north to Guyenne in the south, and on the way, falling in with Calvin's Institutes, he finally drifted back into the Church of his fathers, and was received by the ministers of Montauban. Said by his contemporaries to be " the greatest preacher of his time," " an incomparable man," and a "prodigy of learning," he was welcomed by the Protestants as a second Calvin ; and holding conferences for some time at Geneva, attracted a group of young men, who became his diciples, and the apostles of his spirit. It is not needful to follow him into the later years of his life — always a centre of spiritual power and reform, but led away into a mild communion of the Brookfarm type, and into the founding of a sect that bore his name. His better influence survived in a brave but foolish effort after his death, when his congregation sent their preacher, 104 STRUGGLING RUT PREVAILING. with La Badie's widow, and many more of their number, to attempt the conversion of the heathen at Surinam. It survived to more effect in Jacob Spener. Spener, the most distinguished of the group that had gathered round their teacher at Geneva, a man whose influence on the religious Hfe of Germany, and partially upon our own, may be traced through more than one century. It was in this school of pious thought that the mission found a congenial home ; and, though Spener died when Ziegenbalg was on his way to India, a more powerful teacher survived. August Francke. Hermann Francke, Professor of Theology at Halle, is remembered in these days for his Orphan House, with vast buildings that eclipse the University, and the institutions — bewilder- ing in number and size — that are housed within its walls. He is known to a smaller number as a witness to that faith in faith, and in the power of prayer, out of which those institutions grew, and which has created some of the most striking charities of our own century, from those of John Falk, the Councillor at Weimar, down to those of George MUller and Mr. Spurgeon. The man as he was in his own home is largely forgotten ; " famous German saint," as Carlyle acknow- STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 105 ledges ; " founder of the Pietists," he adds, and His personal "of the grand Orphan House built by charitable i^^^^"^^- beggings ;" but in truth, one of the most learned and thoughtful and eloquent men of his age, a man of the widest views, and the largest heart ; and, though surrounded by his 2000 orphans, and holding the threads of correspondence, as we shall see, between Tranquebar and Halle, making " magnificent proposals " for an Oriental college and a universal seminary, which would train men for Christian service all over the world. At Halle, and even at Berlin, the mag- netic power of his personal influence carried all before it — and to Halle, and under that influence, there came a student whose connection with the mission lasts till this hour. Count Zinzendorf fell under Francke's care Zinzendorf. when he was only ten ; at sixteen he could compose a Greek oration and speak in admir- able Latin ; and at eighteen his mediation was accepted between the theologians of Halle and those of Wittenberg ; at twenty-two he resigned the ambitions of his order, and the friendships and brilliance of the Saxon Court, for the freedom to work for God. The child who had tossed letters to the Saviour out of the windows of I06 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. Hennersdorf, the boy of fifteen who had founded the Order of the Seed Corn, with its pledge to seek the conversion of the heathen, the student who wrote, " I would rather be despised and hated for the sake of Jesus, than beloved for my own," the courtier, who at nineteen, among the gaieties of Paris, chose as his motto, " ^ternitate," because, he says, " eternity alone fills my thoughts " — was to be led, by the strange, strong hand of God into such an entanglement of circumstances that his connection with the mission became inevitable. He had made a covenant with God before he was six. " Be Thou mine, dear Saviour, and I will be Thine ; " and on the day of his marriage, he and his wife had made another, " to be ready at a moment's warning to preach the Gospel to the heathen." Later he writes in an ecstasy of fervour, " I have but one passion, and it is He." Letters were already reaching Halle from Tranquebar, and the Orphan Press was carrying them to a multitude of readers ; Ziegenbalg himself on his hasty journey home, had stayed with Zinzendorf, and no man could have such a guest without feeling the fire that consumed his spirit; and in 1731, Zinzendorf STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 10/ Still young (for he was only born with the century), and always brilliant, found himself at Copenhagen attending the coronation of Charles VI. It was while there that he learned of two Two move- missionary movements, each of which left an "^^" ^' abiding influence. In the north of Europe, shrinking back The Lapps. among its wastes of snow and sterile land, there are still to be found the remains of an ancient people, Asiatic in their origin, dark and mean of feature, of low stature that seldom exceeds four feet, and of habits and traditions altogether unlike their neighbours. Slowly retreating before the stronger race, steadily crushed and dispossessed by them, unable to combine with them, they are fading off the earth, nor had they ever much footing on it, or left much mark ; but when they have passed away, they will be remembered for the sake of the brave, noble man who set up among them the kingdom of God. The land of the Lapps is weird and solemn. Lapland. Arctic seas beat upon its shores, the long arctic winter binds it in rigour of ice and snow, for weeks the sun never climbs the sky, for months I08 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. he flings a sickly light across the white, silent hills ; apparently for endless miles there are no houses, no roads, no voices. But when the year turns round, meadows and gay flowers spread up to the feet of the glacier. Countless streams rush down by wooded banks and busy sawmills to the ocean, the sun never sets, and the fish leap and sparkle in the warm night, the orchards are sweet with blossom and full of the songs of birds, glorious forests spread over the mountains, the reaper's sickle rustles among the corn, and mosquitoes dart and sting under the welcome shade of the trees. As in Switzer- land, the grass and the snow lie side by side ; while the valleys are sultry, the mountains are ice. There are lofty passes, walls of cliff, shepherd's huts perched in lonely spots among the hills, the cattle bells tinkling through the air. But this arctic Switzerland is not so beautiful as strange, it is vast and still. The mountains spread out in huge .shapeless bulk, with no peak to break the sameness of their blunt and flattened summits. The valleys are monotonous, and often bare, like deep troughs of mountain waves cut in a mountain sea. And everywhere there is silence, broken only by the STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. IO9 hoof of the reindeer, the cry of the wolf, or the roar of a cataract. Although now reduced to a few thousands, Settlers in these Lapps, or as they had rather be called ^'^'^^"^• Finns, once occupied the entire upper portion of the Scandinavian peninsula. Fishing in the fjords and rivers, or wandering over the pastures with herds of reindeer, they lived a contented and barbarous life, withdrawing into the hills as emigrants came among them from the south, and maintaining the wild customs of their fathers. Gradually, as the settlers multiplied, they came to be incorporated with the kingdom, and subject to its laws, dwelt with the Europeans in the same parishes, and were ministered to by the same clergy. And, at the close of the seventeenth century, though they were mostly confined to the province of Fin mark, and were so far separate, they were treated as an integral part of the population. Yet there had been really no fusion to speak of, and, although by the sea coast they and the Norwegians dwelt as neighbours, there was a trackless and almost boundless region, stretching into the interior and up into the North, and over which the Lapps and the rein- no STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. deer roamed undisturbed. Here also the Lapp was still a heathen. Behind his tent, on a rough table, rudely adorned with bunches of birch, there was a log of wood, and to this, if the season had been good, he sacrificed a reindeer. But sun and moon and stars, the thunder and the wind, rocks and mountains, rivers and seas, were all the objects of his homage and all to be propitiated ; and the Lapp was his own priest, and needed no temple. As his sense of God faded out, his fear of evil powers increased, and he fell under the enchantments and spells of the magicians, who controlled the demon world. After death, the souls of the good reached, although only by weary pilgrimage, a land of light, lying on the summit of a holy mountain, and where those who had been guilty of lying, theft, or strife, dared not enter ; and there they lived the life of the gods, drinking brandy and smoking tobacco. As for the evil, they passed into a land of pain, a cloudy land, where they found no rest, but wandered back into the world as wild beasts or wicked spirits to torment the living. Practically they had fallen into demon worship. " I found village after village," says an STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. Ill early traveller, " where they sacrificed to devils." The Lapps who went to Christian churches were little better. They kept up their magicians at home, and preferred them to their clergymen. When their children were born, they were pre- sented to their gods ; they were baptised, but a certain wise woman was at hand to wash away the baptism in hot water as soon as they got home ; they had been dedicated to Christ, but a ring was prepared with magical rites, and hung round the child's breast in token that it was a heathen ; it had received a baptismal name, but it was only used before Christians, and another secret name was imposed, one which the gods loved ; while the communicants asked the pardon of their idols for going to the Lord's Table ; when the sacrament was over, kneeling by the first running stream they crossed, they murmured, " Our God, or Christian God, may the mightier prevail, for we have done the will of both." They secretly preserved the Communion bread in their mouths, till the service was over, then plucked it out, hung it on a church wall and shot a bullet through it. When all this was so, one could scarcely expect that they would sacrifice no reindeer, or that 112 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. they did not believe in the shapeless log that had stood behind the tents of their fathers. Hither, into this forgotten and forbidding land, there had sped a messenger of God. Thomas von Westen was born at Drontheim in 1682. As the eldest of ten children, his father designed him for business, and a struggle which lasted long commenced between the boy's tastes and the father's prudence. Young Von Westen was seized with an ambition for the Church ; although books were kept out of his way, he would be found concealed in the hay, committing Latin words to memory, and at last, he had made such progress in these secret studies, that a benevolent neighbour offered to bear his college expenses. To this proposal his father yielded, although insisting upon the compromise that his son would study medicine, and at least make money. The bent of young Westen's mind was too strong, however, and as his father died when he was on the eve of taking out his degree, and he was left too poor to pay the fees, he seized the opportunity to shift from medicine to theology. His circum- stances, never good, were now worse, and he went through all the hardships of a genuine poor STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. II 3 student. Every second day he was able to pay for a scanty dinner, and as he and his com- panion had but one black coat between them, and that threadbare, only one of them could go out at a time. So poor a living does not seem to have affected his studies, and probably that they were congenial was sufficient compensa- tion. He seems to have busied himself especi- His scholar- ally with Oriental literature, and to have made ^^^P' so high a name that both Czar Peter and his own sovereign were anxious to employ him ; for, having travelled into Russia on some quest of his favourite study, he was offered a professorship at the University of Moscow, and declined it, as Frederic IV. had made him royal librarian. Income was certainly no inducement to his choice, for the office appears to have had no other salary attached than the hope of promotion, and dur- ing the three years he held it, he was indebted to the kindness of a pious widow who fed and clothed him. The promotion came at last in the appointment to the valuable living of Wedoens in the diocese of his native town, and he redressed the balance of the past by marry- ing his benefactress. He had reached at last the I Norwegian Church dead 114 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. object of his life, to be a preacher of Christ Jesus, and he was content. The beginning of his pastorate was not pro- pitious. The journey had to be made by sea, and on the way he lost one of his step-daughters by shipwreck, as well as the property his wife brought him. The parish itself received him The coldly. The Church of Norway at that time was in a state of supreme orthodoxy and utter spiritual death. Careless of their people, and incompetent to teach, selfish and avaricious, without the affectation of earnestness, and with- out the check of public opinion, the clergy were powerless for good, and often openly evil. Under such training, their flocks were little better. The more he preached Christ, the more wroth the people waxed against him. It had never been so, they said ; he was introducing new gods ; they accused him to the Bishop ; they demanded his deposition of the King ; they turned him from their houses, and laughed at his appeals. A picture of the Church at the time describes it as " waste ; the punishment of a Sodom may well be feared ; drunkenness is no longer a sin, envy and strife are habitual, false weights and measures are accounted fair gain ; STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. II5 ignorance of religion is universal, cursing and swearing are the common tongue ; Sabbath- breaking is no shame ; the Word of God is despised, and every means of furthering it is openly ridiculed ; with few exceptions, there is no more difference between Christians and our heathen forefathers, than the name." The higher pastors appointed the lower, and took care that the new men should be no better than themselves. There was only one Bible to every five thousand of the population. With what patient labour Von Westen wrought, how he reformed his parish, how six men gathered round him, of the same mind as himself, until these " seven stars " as they were called, shed their light over Norway. How, just as he had brought his strayed flock back to the Good Shepherd, as he says, he was con- strained to leave them and set off on a journey of infinite hardship, to the Lapps, a journey to be three tim.es repeated. How fearlessly he pur- sued his work, and in some slender fashion at least, planted the Gospel ; how he defended his mission and the plan of missions against all comers ; how at last he died so poor (for he His death spent all upon his work) that he did not leave Il6 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. enough to bury him ; how enemies and unkind- ness pursued him to the end ; and there was not a word spoken over his lonely grave ; but how from mouth to mouth in Finnland there ran for a century the simple tale of " The parson who loved the Finns ; " that is all too long a story to tell here, but may be read — with many touching letters of that brave heart — by those who will When Zinzendorf arrived at Copenhagen, it was all over. Von Westen was dead, the " seven stars " had set ; but there was another story that must have touched him still more. Lofoden. Far up in the mysterious north, where for weeks the sun never sets, among the countless islands of countless shapes, that lie like some vast breakwater across the wash of the North Atlantic, and over the xA-rctic Circle into the sweep of lonely arctic seas, is the strange island-labyrinth of the Lofoden. There is to be found the " row of shark's teeth," lofty peaks of rock, that descend for the most part sheer down into the waves without strand or beach, streaked with veins of grass and scraggy under- wood, and divided from one another by winding channels of deep sombre sea, often not broader than a river ; and on one of these, nestling in STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. II/ the shelter of a jagged mountain, as it curves toward the west, and fronting the mainland and the smoother waters, is the hamlet of Vaagen, a few wooden fisher houses, bright and warm to look at, but otherwise not noticeable. More than a century and a-half ago, in the Hans Egede. year 1707, a new minister had entered the par- sonage beside the little church, with charge over the hamlet and the scattered houses on the upland. Hans Egede was scarcely one-and- twenty when he left the University of Copen- hagen, and settled among the rocks and snows, and the few scattered fishermen and farmers that made up his congregation, and brought to him Gertrude Rask to be his wife, but he felt neither loneliness nor privation in the work about him. It was his simple ambition to follow Christ, and to set Him before his flock ; and as in this teaching and spirit, he had the hearty sympathy of his wife, and God gave the hearts of the people into their hand — they lived in great thankfulness. In the long winter nights he read in time-worn chronicles how, centuries before, the old sea-robbers swept down into softer southern waters, and left there their little colonies of brave, strong-willed, strong-limbed Il8 STRUGGLING RUT PREVAILING. adventurers to settle, and fight, and rule, until the name of the Norsemen filled Europe with wonder and awe. Norseman himself, his pulse beat quicker as he listened to the fresh, quaint story telling of the old sagas. But what touched him most was to read how his fathers were con- quered by a stronger than they ; of the quiet and steadfast progress of the Gospel as it crept from land to land ; of the lonely, peaceful men that carried it at hazard of their lives ; the fierce conflict that it bred as the North rose against it in defence of its old gods, and how the grim warriors bowed their heads at last, and turned the sword that had fought against Christ to fight for Him against the heathen. Then, also, as he read, there was wakened within him the thought that changed the purpose of his life. For it was written how that Eric the Red, sea king and pirate, was banished for three years from Iceland for some misdeed, and, setting forth at the head of a few followers, came by chance upon an unknown shore, then, when his exile was expired, brought back the news of a Green- land, rich in pasture and pleasant woods, richer even than Iceland where " the rivers were thick with fish and the grass dropped butter ; " which STRUGGLING BUT TREVAILING. I I9 SO took the fancy of his countrymen, that five and-twenty shiploads of them returned with him, and the land was settled. The Christian popula- tion multiplied till there were many villages and churches, and even convents, a cathedral, and a bishop, and then,Jn 1406, Greenland disappeared from history. Brooding over what he read till it became insupportable, there sprang up timidly another thought beside it — that he would himself go out in search of that strange lost land. He seems at first to have been almost afraid to entertain it, and he entered on a period of great excitement and perplexity. One day he w^as clear that he Egede's per- must go, the next he was all doubt. Sometimes P^^xities. he imagined it was self-will ; sometimes he felt it was the call of God. His thoughts grew so vivid that they took shape in visions, and he relates how, in a dream, a crowd of Greenlanders hemmed him round, crying, " O man, whom God has blessed, pity us." Finally, when the struggle was over in himself, he had to face another. His aged mother besought him not to bring down her grey hairs with sorrow to the grave ; his wife, clasping their children to her bosom, besought him to forbear his barbarous design. I20 STRUGGLING RUT PREVAILING. He tried a compromise, but with a pitiful result ; and at last he promised his wife he would make no effort that she did not sanction. The old sunshine came back, and he felt happy that, as he thought, he was done with his dream for ever. The rest of the story is curiously suggestive. Misgivings now began to cross his wife, the peace and gladness of their home were invaded by slander : The people grew cold, suspicious, and changed, and the irritations thrown in her way increased to such a pitch, that she became anxious to leave the place for which she had sacrificed her husband. Meanwhile, as he read one day in his study, the words in Matthew came Decision, upon him with overwhelming power : *' He that taketh not his cross and followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me ; he that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it." His dream of rest in a Norway par- sonage was broken for ever. He begged God that either He would drive the mission entirely from his thoughts or would incline his wife to it. With a strange, keen earnestness, he watched her struggles. One day she flung her arms about his neck and begged him to forgive her STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 121 faint heartedness and unbelief. " Henceforth and for ever I am entirely thine, and thy God is my God ; thy faith is my faith, and where thou goest I will go — death alone can divide us." It was the finger of God, Egede said, and from that day husband and wife stood side by side, the one as resolute and brave as the other. Strength- ened by God, he writes, and with her to help him, he was able to go through the pain of fare- well, and to leave the little church to which the people crowded with streaming eyes, and many a rough grasp of the hand that was meant to atone for hard words, while young and old heaped blessings on them as they went. There was no society to provide the cost or arrange the details. He had no private means or wealthy sympath- isers. The whale-fishers shook their heads and told him how it fared with the last colony that sailed thither from their harbour, and was cap- tured by the French and carried into Dunkirk. We find him at Copenhagen stirring up the Missionary College, where they beg him to wait for the " summer of peace," since the war with Sweden is straining the exchequer, and, " alas," as he adds, " there is no money to carry on the wars of the Lord." 122 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. Egede haunt- There are not many narratives in missions so mg quays. touching as the story of these four years, through which we see the figure of young Egede haunt- ing the streets and quays, the scheme of a colony in his head, knocking from door to door, plead- ing, persuading, and proving to the burghers that it was their interest to open up a trade, offering to go out in any ship if they would give him a passage, till finally everybody gets to know and wonder at him, till the merchants shun him as a bore, and the sailors marvel with a kind of reverence as they see him gazing wist- fully after the departing ships, and at the corners men whisper that he has seen strange visions of the Lord. Four years of alternating hope and disappointment, till at last the king not only sanctioned the colony, but guaranteed a yearly income of £4$ to the missionary, and, on the Sets sail. 3rd of May, the little expedition sailed out of the harbour of Bergen. It was nearly thirteen years since the first seed of the work was sown, and there had not been much visible growth ; but it had grown downwards, and struck such root in Egede's heart, that it was like a part of him- self On the 3rd of July they effected a landing STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 1 23 on what is now known as Hope Island, on the west coast, and knelt down and thanked God. One ship had been lost, but the men were saved. To the dismay of Egede, the few natives fled at their approach, and the huts were deserted. But, by the time the Christmas trees were burn- ing in their Norway homes, God sent, he says, a Christmas gift to them, for a hunting party, entering, as they thought, a group of desolate huts, found them occupied by a hundred and fifty Greenlanders, who used them as their winter but not summer residences, and, being detained there by stress of weather, opened communica- tions with such effect, that friendly relations were established, and Hope Island was no longer isolated. The burst of joy with which Egede welcomed Hardships. this intelligence is very touching. Not only must the situation have been dismal when so slight a hope could raise his spirits, but years were to pass before the promise held out would be kept. We see him settling down to his patient toil in a climate so rigorous that " water placed on the fire to boil will sometimes freeze before the heat can get the upper hand," and so repulsive, that to live in it was to live in perpet- 124 STRUGGLING RUT PREVAILING. ual banishment, without knowing a word of the language, without success to cheer him. His diligence and enthusiasm were unflagging. We cannot but enter into the hearty zeal with which he unlocks the native speech by means of a chance word, until, finally, Genesis and the New Testament were translated, and there was a printed language and the beginning of a Christ- ian literature. He had been nearly fifteen years at work without feeling that he had made any deep impression ; the people mostly marvelling with a perverse wonder that white men should spend so much pains to tell them what was of so little importance. He was weak and worn ; his wife lay sick, and he determined to leave his son in charge of the mission. In Norway he would find some easier work in which he might end his days, and by his efforts at home con- tinue to sustain the mission. His wife offered no opposition, and their return was determined, when he was overtaken by the great sorrow of His wife dies, his life. " On the 2 1st December, 1735, Gertrude Egede fell asleep in Jesus." The brave woman gone from his side, he was no longer himself. His strength utterly gave way, and he fell sick. In the summer of 1736, he preached his farewell STRUGGLING BUT TREVAILING. 12$ sermon from the touching words of Isaiah : " I said, I have laboured in vain. I have spent my strength for nought and in vain ; yet surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my work with my God." After service he baptised a child by his own name, Hans, and with a son, two daughters, and the dead body of his wife, embarked for Copenhagen. His great object was never realised, but God set him to a greater, and led him, like Paul, across the limit of his nation, to make of him an apostle to the heathen, and to be a light and example to many. And if his life was not His work one of any remarkable brilliance, nor crowned with any remarkable success, it was one of those brave, good lives by which God spreads His kingdom, and a life of which there lingers in Greenland the still fresh tradition, " He was our more than father." When Hans Egede was in Greenland, and before he could dismiss from his mind the vision of harvest fields such as rumour and the old chronicles affirmed, he tried the experiment of sowing wheat ; took a patch of ground in a sunny valley, burnt the long grass with the hope of charring and softening the upper soil, 126 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. dropped In the seed, and found that though The crop did the wheat grew, it would not ripen. When he not ripen. |g^^ Greenland that was the condition of his mission work. He had patiently prepared the ground, and patiently sown the seed, but there came no harvest. It is in keeping with his heroic faith, heroic in its stillness, that the disappointment never made him despond ; that, when he sailed away southwards to his home, he had as much faith in seeing the kingdom of God as when he sailed northward with the impetuous zeal of an apostle. He felt per- suaded that the seed of the kingdom would ripen among the very snows, though the gather- ing of the grain would fall to other hands. And it was so. While Zinzendorf was in Copen- hagen, he heard that the Egede Mission was to be abandoned. The trade was unprofitable, the traders were indifferent, the colony was turning out ill, and there was a growing persuasion that money was squandered and life risked for no adequate return. Paul Egede, who was pursuing his studies at the University, had made him acquainted with his father's hopes and anxieties, and two Eskimos, whom he had noticed among the crowd at Court, had roused his interest to STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 12/ the highest pitch. In the salons, where he was Zinzendorf welcomed, and with the kin^ over whom he had ^^]'^^[^^ ^^^ ^ mission. acquired a singular influence, he pleaded the cause of the mission with such effect that the tide slowly turned in its favour, not a little moved, also, by news from Godhaab of a great take of blubber ; and first the one year's support allotted to the missionary was extended by the king to two, and, finally, ships sailed out with the welcome greeting that the mission would be prosecuted with vigour. The same ships carried the missionaries by whom that pledge was so unexpectedly redeemed. Nine years before his visit to Copenhagen, Moravian Count Zinzendorf had opened an asylum on his Brethren, estate for certain persecuted Christians from Moravia. They were the descendants of T/ie Ancient Unity of the Brethren. Their fathers were reformers before the Reformation, and they had sought escape from a bondage that was intolerable. One Christian David, a carpenter, had been the leader in the spiritual movement, and he became the leader of the emigration. At the head of the first band of exiles, he Herrnhut. appeared on a little hill near the Count's village of Berthelsdorf, in Lusatia, smote his axe into teers. Boehmisch and Stach. 128 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. one of the trees, and cried, " Here the sparrow- hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young ; even Thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my king, and my God ; " and here, on this Hutberg, there was slowly and painfully built the famous Herrnhut, or Watch of the Lord. Two voiun- Among the emigrants who escaped to this refuge were Frederick Boehmisch and Matthew Stach. They were born about the same time, in the same rank of life, both of them of good parents, and in villages not far apart ; but, until their exile, they seem to have had no acquaint- ance. It happened that these two men found themselves, one day in 1 73 1, levelling ground for a cemetery. Those w^ho have loitered within the living wall of dense green beech w^hich encloses that space of garden-ground, and sauntered under the straight rows of even limes that intersect and fling their shadows down on level walks, and noticed the exquisite order of the square plots of grass, all numbered, and lettered, and alike, and the odours of sweet flowers, and songs of birds that seem muffled by the stillness, and watched the smoke curl up, a few paces down STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 1 29 the hill, from the village of the living, which is almost as grave, and peaceful, and regular as this God's acre of the dead, could scarcely con- ceive what it all looked like a century and a-half ago. But there, on that unpromising hillside, the talk fell upon Greenland. Four years before, Zinzendorf had told them of Egede's noble work, and as soon as he returned from Denmark, he pleaded for it with all the eloquence of his heart. They found that each had been fixing his thoughts upon it, secretly and timidly, as on something too daring for their humility and possibly not God's will, yet so steadily that, as they opened out their minds, it was plain they were both eager to go to the north, and, " believing, with all simplicity, in the promise to two or three, we knelt down by the next brush- wood, and begged we would be guided to do right." They wrote a letter to the congregation, offer- ing themselves as Greenland missionaries, which was received with depressing caution. These young persons were enthusiastic and, perhaps, carried away : they had not counted the cost ; How were they to get to Greenland, and what K 130 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. would poor peasants such as they do when they got there ? They were compelled to listen to these surmises for nearly a year, " not letting our spirit be disturbed thereby, but waiting in stillness the Lord's will ; " and then Zinzendorf asked if they abode by their resolve. Answer- ing a joyful Yes, they heard from him a recapit- ulation of the incredible hardships and dangers before them, but were told that if they still persisted and had trust in the Redeemer, they might make ready for the journey. It was nearly a year, however, after this before the resolution was carried out, and, by that time, Boehmisch was on a journey to look after some of the emigrants elsewhere, and Christian Stach Christian volunteered to go with his cousin. Christian David. David was joined with them, as, both by experi- ence and his trade, a valuable auxiliary, and, early in 1733, the three men set out for Copen- hagen. The outfit. Their outfit was very simple. A sum of money had come in from Venice, from which enough was taken to defray the cost of reaching Denmark. For the rest, "we did not trouble our heads how we should get to Greenland, or how we should live in that country, believing STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 13I that He who had sent a supply for our journey at the critical moment, would take care for all that was needful. The congregation consisted chiefly of poor exiles, and we ourselves had nothing but the clothes on our backs." Information was as scanty as means. " The congregation had no experience of missions ; and we were told to act as God and His Spirit would show us. We were to love one another brotherly, to look up to Christian David as our father, and to offer our assistance to the long-tried apostle of the Greenlanders, Hans Egede." The king was delighted with their simplicity and faith. "If all the brethren," he said, " will only go to Greenland, I will undertake to furnish them with a passage, and whatever is necessary for their subsistence." " I had not believed there was such a king," Christian David wrote back to Herrnhut ; and the king's chamberlain was saying, " I had not believed there was such faith." '' How will you live in Greenland ? " Von ^ Pless had asked them. " By the labours of our hands and the blessing of God. We mean to take out seeds, plant a garden, build a house, and be burdensome to no one." " But there is no timber." " Then we will dig a hole in the 132 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. ground, and live there." The difficulties and trials of the next few years were of a kind that men are rarely called to bear. Having no salary, and being therefore compelled to live by their own labours, they made speed to learn to hunt and fish, but with miserable ill success. Sometimes food was not to be had, their sup- plies from home failed, they were forced to strive to eat like the people, and for years the only water they could get was melted snow. Beck. Others had now joined them, Beck among the rest ; and after nearly six years, their journal recorded one man who asked them to repeat what the first minister had taught them about God. There were one or two who said they would have no objection to conversion if it were not so difficult ; and they learned that in Europe they were a laughing-stock, and the butt for witty ridicule, classical and unclassical. " My soul is often in a flame when they mock my God," Stach writes ; " however, the children all love me." There was at last the dawn of a better day. As Beck was sitting in his tent in the summer of 1738, writing a translation of the Gospels, a band of savages from the south entered. As STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 1 33 inquisitive and mysterious as children, they asked timidly what he did, and how the book could speak ? He told them of the creation of the world, and the happiness of God, and of sin and immortality. They listened with a stare. He told them of God's Son, who came down from heaven to save men ; of His love and sufferings, and the message that He left. They drew closer to the table and were very still ; and when he took up the manuscript before him and read the story of the Passion, one of them stepped forward and said, greatly moved, " How The first was that ? tell me that again ; for fain would ^'^^^• I be saved." With the tears running down his cheeks at this unexpected speech, Beck went over the story with still more emphasis, and when his brethren returned, they found him in the centre of an eager and agitated group. The man went away to tell his little son, but soon returned and stayed all night ; came again and again, and at last lived in the Mission House. After instruction and proof, he was baptised, and proved a most faithful evangelist. Kayarnak was the first fruits of a plentiful harvest. The Southeners came in crowds about the mission. The preaching was entirely 134 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. changed, the sufferings and atonement of our Lord being chiefly set forth, one baptism followed another, and from the middle of the last century, the history of the Greenland mission is the history of a settled Christian Church. Of the three men who had taken up Egede's work, and carried it to the point where the mission and the Church became one, Matthew Stach was spared the longest. No one had been so active in the mission. Six times he had journeyed to Europe to raise up friends and cheer the Church with reports of what he had seen and heard. He had visited America, and brought news to New Herrnhut of the missions among the Red Indians. He had been in London on fruitless efforts to reach Labrador and carry the Gospel there. He had sailed up and down the coast searching for stations in which to build, and preaching everywhere, and the last effort he made was, when he was grey- headed, and set out on an expedition to the south which was to last a year, and was more suited to the adventurousness of youth. Shortly before he left, Beck reminded him of the past. " We two alone are left," he wrote, " Boehmisch fell asleep seven years ago. It was we three who STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 1 35 made the covenant in 1735. Many a time, you remember, we begged with tears for but one soul out of all this nation, and now God has not only quickened five hundred to Himself, but there are still five hundred in New Herrnhut, and nigh three hundred here at Lichtenfels." The Gospel had been firmly and visibly intro- duced into Greenland, and Egede was spared to know that he had not left his Norway parsonage in vain. I have but hinted at the work done by these Moravian noble Moravians. Once the mission fire caught "^^^^^°"^- hold of them, it never ceased to burn. They went to Labrador, to Central and South America, among the Red Indians, to every coast of Africa, into the heart of Asia, up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean. Every road they took was marked by the same quiet sacrifice of self, the same heroic faith. Dober's words are still the inspiration of brave hearts : " I determined, if only one brother would go with me to the West Indies, I would give myself up to be a slave, and would say to the slaves as much of the Saviour as I knew myself I leave it in the hands of the congregation, and have no other reason for going than that there are souls 136 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. in the Island that cannot beheve because they have not heard." Volunteers to Three days afterwards, in the grey summer St. Thomas. , , ^ 1 -i 1 r tt dawn, three ngures moved silently out 01 Herrn- hut. They were David Nitschmann, carpenter ; Leonhard Dober, potter ; and Nicolas Zinzen- dorf, Count, and once Knight of the Order of the Seed Corn. Staff in hand, the two mission- aries set their faces northwards ; staff in hand and little else ; the congregation allowed each of them nine shillings, and Zinzendorf, at the village where he parted from them, added a ducat apiece. They were told to be guided in everything by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, and then left to make out that long road of six hundred miles to Copenhagen. There, Lord Chamberlain Von Pless, asked, " How will you manage in St. Thomas ? " " We will be slaves, and work with the negroes." "That is impossible; as white men you will not be allowed." " Then," said Nitschmann, " I am a carpenter and will live by my trade." " Fairly and good ; but what will the potter do ? " " He can help me and I will help to support him." " If that is your spirit, you can go anywhere in the world." Still we hear the homely, noble answer, as STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 1 37 Zinzendorf sends for one of those simple people and says, " Will you go to Greenland to-morrow as a missionary ? " "If the shoemaker can finish the boots that I have ordered of him by to- morrow, I will go." They sought out those that others would pass by, the lowly and smaller races lying worn out and unnoticed beside the broad highways of the world ; the lepers that no one else would tend ; the tribes that were fenced in by barriers that no one else would cross. Those on whom they lavished their devotion were not even among the permanent races of the world. They were often not only slender in bulk, numbering about the population of a tenth-rate town in India, but they were vanishing, either before the inroad of the stronger races, or sinking into decay from some subtle cause. There are many who have said with Mr. Trollope : " The game is not worth the candle, for the race is doomed." To the Moravians, who looked at the individual rather than the race, at the absence of the Gospel and not at the numbers, this consideration became a power- ful argument for their activity. If these heathen were to be reached at all, there was no time to 138 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. lose ; if they were too small to be of weight in the future movements of the world, that was just the reason why one should not pass them by. They may have thought also, they may have been right in thinking, that there was no neces- sary doom upon these weaker races, that what they needed was the vitality of Christian life. If numbering only a few thousands, they might roam over a country larger than France or Germany, and where they were the sole inhabit- ants; why should they not reverse the doom that men were ready to fix upon them^ and multiply and replenish even that uncongenial earth ? The weaker races have not always gone to the wall. The white trader, with white brandy, white vice, and white covetousness was working to that end ; but there are instances already, where the introduction of Christianity has checked the decline of population. There, at anyrate, these Moravians face us in unbroken lines of heroism, of daring, of an incredible activity. Within five years they began as many foreign missions, within four-and-twenty they had started eighteen more. TheMoravians Wilberforce was scarcely exaggerating when honoured. ^^ ^^j^^ ^^^^^ ^^ ^ ^^^^ ^^ Christians, they STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 1 39 excelled all mankind in solid and unequivocal proofs of the love of Christ Chalmers may have only anticipated or formulated the aspira- tion of other men as great of soul as he, when he wrote, " Who would not long to be in pos- session of the charm by which they wrought? Who would not willingly exchange for it all the parade of human eloquence, and all the confid- ence of human argument." Their line of light and life flows through a dreary century. It loses nothing by the dreary waste of Church life — or far more Church death — through which it passes. It is luminous with sacrifice, with self effacement, with martyrdoms, and all wrought only that Christ might touch the heathen with His Gospel. I question if in that century there are any figures that will afterwards show more radiant, more Christ-like, more in- spiring, than those of the homely men and women who went out in a ceaseless beautiful procession, more than 2000 strong, from quiet simple Herrnhut, and from the heart of a community that never exceeded 70,000 souls. I question if there was ever a spirit more faith- fully transmitted, illustrated by examples more lofty and sustained, than that inspiring the 140 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. broad words which Zinzendorf wrote, and which, for a century and a-half, the people have Hterally kept : " The whole earth is the Lord's. Men's souls are all His. I am debtor to all." Having traced these two streams to their junction on the threshold of our century, each bearing on its waters the light and love of God, we must return to where we broke off. So far as we have followed the missions of the eighteenth century, they have been confined to the Eskimo, the Red Indian, and the Negro. Von Westen had left his Danish parish, and in brave fashion had pushed up into Finnland ; he had found faint and decaying Christian beHefs struggling for a bare existence in the atmosphere of a vigorous paganism, and he had rallied them with such conspicuous success that his memory is still cherished as that of the Apostle of the Lapps. Egede had left his parish in Norway, and in Greenland had begun a mission which must compel the admiration of all who honour the supreme efforts of a heroic spirit. The splendours of his faith, and the devotion of his wife make a pathetic picture as we watch those solitary figures against their background of frozen snow, and recall their STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. I4I years of disappointed toil. Ehrhardt, sailing as supercargo of a merchant ship up to Labrador, had begun a mission there, " moved," he says, " by an amazing affection for those northern countries." Brave hearts had felt for the negro slaves of the West Indies, and there, and on the northern coast of South America, the mission churches rose up through fever mists, and among the shadows of death. Schmidt, fresh from the chains of the Spielberg, had ventured out to Africa to be for six years the first and only missionary to the Hottentots. Moravians, with nothing, but the clothing on their backs, had found their way to the Polar Sea, and to that Greenland heart where Egede had knocked in vain. Moravians had also taken up the task which John Eliot and the Mayhews had begun, and the red man of North America learned from them of the white man's God, This movement of a hundred years upon Moravian heathendom assumes no large proportions. ^P°s^^^s- Most of the slender forces proceeded from a single point, and an obscure hamlet in Saxony furnished the inspirations and the labours of a century. There never were braver acts wrought by the apostles of Christ in any age. A succes- 142 STRUGGLING BUT PRE:VAILING. sion of men of the finest spiritual type flung their shadows in that dull century of common- place, and scarcely more observed than shadows, they seemed to pass away. There were perhaps 50,000 Eskimo in Greenland and Labrador, and when our present century began, there may have been three or four thousand of them attending Christian worship. They belonged to the type for which Mr. Max Miiller has found the name of unprogressive savage. A people thrust out, as he suggests, to the moral and geographical extremities of the world. The red man was of a higher spirit, but he belonged to the same religious group, and he may have owed his less stunted nature, as well as his higher physique, to the climate and soil of a less rigor- ous region. Where the Eskimo ended, the red man began, roaming over the vast prairies and woods that stretched from perpetual ice down to Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific ; a population numbering not more than three or four millions, in a territory that might support six hundred, and doomed, like other populations of the same type, to melt slowly off that earth which they would neither till nor subdue ; yet, together with their northern neighbours, they STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILINCi. 1 43 represented half a continent, and to them also the mission had brought the good news, and there were perhaps 10,000 of them who met for Christian worship. The slaves of the West Indies were the negroes of Africa, the fruit of that awful and incarnate selfishness that stamped the blot of the slave trade on the fame of Christian England, a hideous iniquity that reached its height while the century ran out its course, and that sacrificed fifty millions of human lives on the altar of a lawless gain. Patient Moravian love — patient unto death — was teaching hymns of faith to these helpless children of the sun, and was pre- paring the way for that cry of an outraged conscience that was to utter itself at last in the Act of Emancipation. Such as they were, however, we are met by No English the unexpected fact that not one of these '^^ission. missions was English. The names, the pro- moters are all German, Danish, Norwegian. Britain, long since the foremost figure in the modern mission, had as yet made no sign, and the traces of any interest then in the conversion of the world must be sought for in a few private letters, in the featureless records of one or two 144 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. Societies that had no public favour, in some sentences scattered through the writings of a few- divines, and in the brief flashes of sympathy that stole across a few minds like Butler, Berkeley, Whitfield, or Wesley. Bishop Butler, in sketch- ing that noble ideal of a virtuous state in which he anticipates the glory and the ambition of the Christian mission, shows how the mission be- comes a supreme work of mercy, and that even on humanitarian grounds it is impossible to avoid or postpone it But I wish to rest it on a more solid and Divine foundation. Bishop A comrade of Butler's caught the spirit of the Berkeley, mission, and resolved to realise it in the islands of the West. We may not remember so well as the touching episode deserves, that the san- guine, impetuous Bishop of Cloyne, the brilliant prophet of Idealism, the friend of Swift and Arbuthnot and Pope, became himself a mission- ary after a fashion. " It is now about ten months," Berkeley wrote in 1723, "since I have determined to spend the residue of my days in Bermuda, where I trust in Providence that I may be the mean instrument of doing great good to mankind." In Bermuda he would "found a college where the English STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. I45 youth of our plantations may be educated in such sort as to supply their Church with pastors of good morals and good learning." In the same seminary he would " educate a number of young American savages, that they may become the fit- test instruments for spreading religion, morals, and civil life among their countrymen." He threw himself into the plan with an extraordin- ary ardour. Swift wrote good-humouredly : " He has seduced several of the hopefullest young clergymen and others here, many of them well provided for, and all in the fairest way for pre- ferment." When he went to London to ask for help, the subscriptions soon reached ^^5000, and Sir Robert Walpole, the minister of the day, was among the subscribers. The members of the Scriblerus Club met him at dinner, and rallied him about his plan ; but, when he had begged to be heard in his turn, they were struck dumb, and, after some pause, rose all up together, exclaiming with real earnestness, " Let us set out with him immediately;" and, in 1729, in his prime, sinking his deanery and all else in the one ambition, presenting his newly married wife with a spin- ning wheel since she goes with great thankfulness 146 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. to live a plain farmer's life, he sailed out with his party in a hired ship of 250 tons, and after what he calls a long time blundering about the ocean, landed in Newport, in Rhode Island. He never went farther. The support on which he had counted from home dissolved as soon as the charm of his eagerness was withdrawn across Disappoint- the Atlantic. In 173 1 he returned to London, ^^^^' disappointed but not disenchanted, and feeling that others would better carry forward the mission he had proposed, although none could bring to it a purer or more chivalrous spirit. Of the mission we may say to-day in the nervous and prophetic verse with which it kindled and inspired him — " The first four acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day ; Time's noblest offspring is the last." John Wesley. These transitory missionary impulses find another curious illustration. Four years after Berkeley's return, an Englishman was tempted to cross the Atlantic on a similar mission. Ogle- thorpe asked John Wesley to go out as a missionary to Georgia, and Wesley declined, saying that he was the staff of his mother's age, STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. 147 her support and her comfort. " Had I twenty sons," the brave woman replied, " I should rejoice that they were so employed, although I never saw them more." So he went out in a cloud of romance, believing that he would find the Indians "as little children, humble, willing to learn, and eager to do the will of God," and after two years he also returned, the cloud having left only the chill of disappointment, and his com- plaint being that the real Indians were "liars, gluttons, drunkards, thieves, dissemblers, impla- cable, unmerciful, murderers of fathers, murderers of their own children." It might have been supposed that this was False ideals, just the discovery he needed, if he were to be a missionary at all ; but it was not the spirit of Paul that led that generation to the West, but the yearning for a false ideal, where savage life would mean only a picture of sweet Arcadian simplicity. There is still one direction which the India remains, mission took, and of which I have said nothing — the beginning of the largest influence which the Church of the Reformation has exercised on pagan thought, of that bright and broadening river the streams of which already make glad many a Hindu home, and which we can trace 148 STRUGGLING BUT PREVAILING. back to where it began, in a tiny silver thread, as we cross the threshold of the eighteenth century. There is one country that has been able to cast its spell over three millenniums. India still attracts the ambitions, the soldiery, and the rulers of the West, and India attracted the forces of the Church while the Church was young. In our next lecture we shall turn thither, feeling instinctively that we have then reached the greatest enterprise and the hardest struggle in which the Church of God has yet engaged ; and as the sweep of Divine providence brings the conflict nearer, and knits the forces of the little Christian army, we feel already something of the awe and suspense that are inseparable from the collision of such powers. We shall watch the modern planting of the Gospel there, and stay by it till we can make sure that it is rooted in the soil, and until, having observed the modifying influence of Christianity upon Hindu- ism, we may perhaps be able to answer the question, "Will the Gospel conquer India?" IV. THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. IV. THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. At the death of Ziegenbalg, the founder of the German mission in India, the result of his labours would be represented by a few hundred converts, and by much manly, honest, and impetuous work at the translation of the Scrip- tures, and the creation of a Christian literature. Under his successors it continued to expand, responding, as the mission always does, with a quick sensitiveness to the greater or less devotion of its missionaries ; on the whole well served, though slenderly. The sympathy of Denmark Danish syi never went beyond the circle of the royal family. P^^^-'' Ziegenbalg had passed through England, and he had written, " I trust that England will now unite with other Protestant States of Europe to convert the heathen from darkness to light." There were warm letters from our Georgian kings and from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 152 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. circulating translations of the missionary's letters, and there was a collection now and then, pro- ducing little but wonder that it should be made. For the first fifty years the mission depended for its support, for money as well as men, on Halle. Its existence was a noble tribute to the spirit of faith and eager love in which it had been born ; but Halle alone could not supply the increasing demands of an increasing mission, and the Halle fountain itself was running dry. In the latter half of the century, the support, such as it was, came as much from England as from Germany. The men were few, seldom more than three or four upon the field at once ; and, with the approach to the nineteenth century, the mission was in its decline. Yet not without having blossomed out in one man, into a beautiful life, as brilliant and powerful as we find in any of the centuries before him. Schwartz. While the swift, impetuous life of Ziegenbalg was burning itself out, consumed by its own passion, we are introduced to a touching in- cident in the little town of Sonnenberg in Germany. A Christian woman lay there dying : before she passed away, she drew her husband to her side and told him that she had dedicated their THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 1 53 youngest child to God, and she charged him to forward any leaning to the ministry that he might discover in the boy. The lad went to school and college, and at last we find him as a young student in Halle, lodging in Francke's Orphan House. He had been impressed by a book of the presiding genius there, was acknowledged already as a man of learning and promise, and was daily coming under the in- fluence of Pietism and the mission. For, lodg- ing in the same house with him, there was one Schulze, fresh from the India mission, come home to see the Tamul Scriptures through the press ; and so swaying the young heart by his enthusiasm, that Christian Frederick Schwartz told his father that he too must go to India ; whereupon his father asked three days to con- sider (for he was his youngest son) and withdrew much into that chamber that was still hallowed by his wife's death ; from which he finally came down, with a face bright as from the presence of the Lord, gave the lad his blessing, and bade him depart as his Master's messenger to the heathen. Upon this there followed busy days. Schwartz studying Tamul with the missionary, and having "such freedom in the 154 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. language" that he could expound the Gospel of John in it before he left the university : and then the long voyage to India, where he preached his first sermon to the people within four months of landing, and so plunged into patient, faithful, but not noticeable labour ; merging that strong, noble character of his in the common work of his comrades for sixteen years. And then, when the time came, standing out clear from all, — to Christian thought and the history of the Church, perhaps the most conspicuous figure in India of that eighteenth century. It was not only the mission that advanced with almost rapid strides while this bright, pleasant-faced, low-sized man went eagerly from place to place : his journeys often like Ziegenbalg's, on foot ; his spirit unresting ; his preaching and speaking incessant ; congrega- tions (such as they were) gathered in everywhere. But he seemed to all men so complete an embodiment of what he taught, and his devotion and unselfishness, his quickness to seize each passing chance, and the nameless fascination that some natures wield over others, so distinct, that, wherever he went, men reposed in him a boundless confidence. The Rajah of Tanjore, THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 1 55 an indolent Akbar in his way, made him, on his deathbed, the guardian of his adopted child. Hyder Ali, the scourge of the Carnatic, the Hyder AH on man who let down upon the plains of Southern Schwartz. India a storm of war and woe, the like of which no eye had seen and no tongue could tell, made but one overture to the rulers of Madras : " Send me Schwartz, send me the Christian missionary, for him only can I trust." And so, through years of storm and carnage, we see this simple- minded, simple - living Christian missionary becoming a political power for the time, sent on critical embassies between contending armies because it is safe for no other man to go, administering a whole province, and writing elaborate State minutes upon the collection of revenue and the procedure of justice, and turned back by no danger from any work to which he had set his hand ; yet never pausing in his work of preaching Jesus Christ, and opening stations, and training native workers, and caring for the neglected soldiers, and building shelters for the orphan, and laying up, like Joseph, large provision for the years of famine — plain, un- pretending figure, clad in black dimity, and found everywhere with ministering hand where 156 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. sorrow, suffering, or need called him, leaving a memory more pure and enduring than even the beautiful memorial, wrought by Flaxman, and placed by the grateful Rajah in that Tan- jore to which he had brought the blessings of Christ and His good-will to men. With the death of Schwartz, the brilliant missionary prelude of the eighteenth century may be said to close. It was heroic and beautiful the most of it ; but, as the older spirit faded out, lesser men came forward — dull, pedantic, without enthusiasm. It suffered from End of Danish vagueness. It was not Danish nor German impetus. ^^^ English, but all three together ; and having served its purpose, it seemed almost to pass quietly away. It had helped to keep up a missionary spirit during a century that was unresponsive to that as to much else that was Divine ; it had given to the world men whose lives will always be an inspiration ; but it had not built up a native Church, nor, indeed built anything that did not speedily crumble away. The town where Ziegenbalg landed still lies by the sea, silent, lonely, and deserted ; the square where Ziegenbalg stood, the streets he trod, have been devoured by the encroaching waves ; THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 1 57 a place of dreams and shadows now, and that has long since transferred its importance, and even its population to other centres. I have not anywhere seen a spot of so great memories so weirdly changed. And as with the town so it fared with the mission, but not without the old order giving place to the new, while God fulfilled Himself in many ways. For, if it decayed within its original limits, it had already been swept far beyond them by the zeal of its brave messengers ; away down to Tinnevelly in the south, where there sprang from it (but under English auspices) the most power- ful mission in India ; up to Madras, and even Calcutta in the north, where it kept the ground under difficulties which will become plainer as we follow another of these thin lines, along which the providence of God may sometimes work for centuries, but always to large and gracious ends. Denmark, we have seen, was not the only Dutch settlers, country with an East India Company. There and English were others earlier in the field, of which Portugal has been mentioned already, and after Portugal, there came the Dutch and the English. Those who formed these settlements lived in 158 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. an age when the rehgious Hfe was strong. They may have been badly served, and in later times they caught the spirit of their fellows ; but a curious missionary tenor pervades their first instructions. They write to Madras that it is " their earnest desire to propagate the Gospel." They commission a schoolmaster, and if the Gentoos send their children to him, they are to be taught gratis. The missionary clause was inserted in the charter of 1698, requiring the chaplain to apply himself to the languages of the country, so that he might "instruct the Gentoos in the Protestant religion." And even half-a-century after, the missionaries at Madras were to receive certain moneys to be spent in propagating their faith. That spirit, however, faded out at home. It had scarcely existed abroad. Commerce and its gain were the absorbing passion of these little knots of Englishmen, and any higher motive ceased to influence them. The trader adopted some of the worst features of Oriental life, and then sunk the Christian name he bore steadfastly out of sight. "We looked no further," they said themselves, " than the advan- tages to our trade," and they boldly add what THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 159 we to-day disclaim as a libel upon a multitude of honest men, "We sought these advantages with the ingenuity and the selfishness of merchants." There was no church in Calcutta for eighty years, and such service as there was, was held in a private house. When the common practice of the civilian was to acquire seraglios ; when eight races were sometimes run on a single Sabbath at Chinsurah ; when deputy-governors had drinking parties during the hours of Divine service ; when the card-table and the nautch were frequented on Sunday afternoons ; w^hen the only recognition of the day was the hoisting of a flag ; when a lady could give as a valid reason for never entering a church during twelve years, that no gentleman had offered to escort her ; when one of the oldest and best inhabitants of Calcutta could say that he was not sure he could produce ten righteous men in the city, but he thought he could procure five ; when, outside the capital, there was no assembly for religious worship, nor any evidence that Englishmen had even a religious instinct ; and when any occasional attendance at church, if church there was, could be mentioned with a fierce contempt ; when the natives could speak in Hinduism. 1 60 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. of the Christian religion as devil religion — it was not wonderful that the life of the Presidency towns produced little change for the better in the life of the Hindu. Ideas regard- The bare suggestion of touching the religion of the people was met with alarm and surprise. A process had gone on, which Sir James Mackintosh aptly called, " Brahmanising the European." Hinduism was a religious prejudice which was not to be disturbed. Religion was considered an accident, like colour, or the form of the body, which it was ridiculous if not profane to alter. Some Europeans had become Hindus, others made it a point of etiquette to present offerings at idol shrines. "There are Directors of the Company," Mr. Grant wrote, " who are indulgent apologists of the forms of superstition " — and little wonder — for the Court proposed to build on the Ganges a temple that would accommodate the traders from Thibet ; they had drawn up an elaborate scheme for a college, where their professors would teach the various theologies of India ; and the Supreme Council made themselves custodians of the idol at Juggernauth, and receivers of the poll-tax levied on pilgrims to that shrine. It would have THE CONQUEST OE INDIA. l6l been strange if in an atmosphere like this, the faintest whisper of a missionary enterprise should have received encouragement. Nothing, it was declared, could be more extravagant than the hope of converting the natives ; directors thanked God that such a work was impractic- able. It w^as a wild, extravagant, expensive, and unjustifiable proposal ; the Company had pledged itself not to allow any interference with the natural religion of the people ; and there were some who went so far as to say that they should let the Hindu system rest on the broad basis of its own merits ; that it exhibited piety and morality at every turn ; and that, if ever there was an Arcadia, it must have been in Hindustan. It w^as openly affirmed that it was monstrous to disturb the people in their simple faith. Even the Bishop of St. David questioned the A Bishop's right of any people to send their religion to ^^^^^' another ; and it was felt, with much satisfaction, that if any occasion should arise when the natives would need a purer religion, the Omnipotent Power of Heaven would effect it, but certainly not by missionaries. If India was worth preserving, it could only be by the M l62 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. immediate recall of every missionary. They were dangerous maniacs to be placed under restraint ; a band of devils would be preferable to a band of missionaries ; and even the Bible Society was charged with placing our posses- sions in the East in the most imminent and unprecedented peril ; and with surpassing the ingenuity of Bonaparte in devising plans for destroying the British Empire in India. I have not cared to keep the shadows out of the picture ; for if that old Society seems dark to us now, it must have seemed darker to those men, who, when this century began, were struggling with its prejudice, its timidity, and its Brahmanised life, to get a bare footing for that Gospel, which the Christian opinion and the statesmen and the rulers of to-day believe to be for the supreme good of India, and for the most lasting security to our dominions. Yet, let us not take away an impression that Avould be unjust because it was exaggerated. The religious life of those commercial settle- ments was certainly not likely to gain any supremacy for Christianity in India ; but all along those years there was growing up a quiet supremacy of the English race that was to make THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 163 life and property as safe in India as in Britain, that was to make roads along which the feet of after missionaries might pass to every city — a race that was essentially Christian, and out of which, through much cloud and evil, as we must all admit, there grew that Indian Empire under English rule which is the boast and wonder of our time. I mention English rule, because, though other The English Christian powers settled and warred in India, ^^^^^" none of them has ruled it but England. The Dutch, the Danes, the Portuguese, and the French, ran through all their chances of oppor- tunity. We find their traces in the streets of Galle, half-buried by the waves in Tranquebar, in the inscriptions as of trading kings that are carved upon the pompous monuments of Surat ; in the pleasant alleys that lend the charm of Europe to Pondicherry — but they are the traces of the past, of powers that cling to the land though they could not govern the people. It is little more than a century since English hands caught the sceptre that was slipping from the feeble grasp of the Moguls. That century can speak for itself. The huge belt of jungle that then ran for 1500 miles below the shadows of 1 64 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. the Himalaya produces already eighteen millions a-year, or more than the cost of defending our Indian Empire. The seas that were swept by pirate fleets are as safe as the English Channel. Where camps of armed banditti overawed the population, the country is so quiet that two- thirds of the people never see the face of a soldier. Bomba}-, which Charles II. handed over to some London merchants for ;^io per annum, has twice the population of Manchester. Calcutta, which, in 1686, consisted of three groups of mud huts, has streets like the Chow- ringee Road, and enjoys an annual commerce of ;^io6,ooo,ooo sterling. Villages have increased their trade three hundred fold within half-a- centur}'. Healthy and well-drained cities have replaced the swamps, and the fever ; native states, whose history was a weary record of strife, trade quietly with each other, bound by railroads and roads, the post, and the telegraph ; and the coun- try, where, a hundred yesn's ago, the husband- man raised no more than enabled him to pay the taxes and support his family until the next harvest, now feeds itself and exports over and above ;^69,ooo,ooo sterling. I do not wish to detract in the least from the THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 1 65 marvel of that advance or the beneficent char- acter of our rule. There were many errors and unrighteousnesses ; the policy was often hap- hazard and inconsistent, the policy of men who would have avoided their responsibilities if they could, and who were often selfish and narrow- minded. The pride of race made men hard, even when they were just, and harsh when they were unfair. But, looking at our government of India in the main, it is impossible not to see through it purer instincts and a sense of duty worthy of a Christian nation ; a moral dignity, and in its servants a moral bravery that repre- sents us at our best. And in the strange if not unbroken series of pressures from without, by which a policy was being forced upon those who were unwilling to carry it into effect, that mysteri- ous, and if not Divine, inexplicable over-ruling, by which Great Britain has become the mistress and protector of India. I have said that the Tranquebar missionaries Kiemander. pushed out far beyond the natural limits of their work, and that one of them reached Calcutta. It was about the middle of the last century when Kiernander ventured there, driven by stress of war from his old station of Cuddalore in the l66 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. south ; and finding the more favour from the Factory, because he knew nothing of the lang- uage of the people, but conducted all his services in that Portuguese which was a lingucB Franca round the Bay of Bengal. Clive, who knew no more of the native language than the missionary, stood sponsor for his youngest child, and Kier- nander's eagerness, generosity, and unselfishness, gained him freedom to work. There were 1200 communicants reported in his mission before the last decade of the century, and the number is no doubt correct ; but they seem to have all been of the Eurasian type, and not to have left much mark on the community. Six years after he left Calcutta, there was not a native Christian, in the sense that we use the word to-day ; and Grant was writing home that "the labours of the Mission Church have been confined to the descendants of Europeans, and have hardly ever embraced a single heathen." Such work as he did was, no doubt, a part of the patient prepara- tion which precedes the fulfilment of the plan of God, and it may have helped to influence those whose position helped to make the effort possi- ble. It is at least certain that Kiernander fell in with a group of men, who, standing en the THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 1 6/ threshold of the last century as it disappeared, did what they could to make the next a century of Indian mission. The chaplains at their Factories were neither Chaplains. many nor oood. Up till the eighteenth century there had been only eighteen in all, and, con- sidering the quality, it was perhaps not desirable that there should have been more ; but there were exceptions in every Presidency town, and the group of chaplains that were now in Bengal made a brilliant exception. There are few more singular careers than that Claudius of Claudius Buchanan, the son of a Scottish i^^^^hanan. schoolmaster, and intended for the Presbyterian ministry; he conceived the idea of carving out his fortune in foreign lands, and set out, as has been said, with a lie and a violin for his stock in trade. Arrived in London, he was reduced to starvation, and, after various wanderings came under the spell of John Newton. His conversion led him into that circle of noble evangelical men who formed at Clapham the centre of the best Christ- ian influence in England at the beginning of this century; and from thence through Cambridge, he passed into the chaplaincy and into the East. No man served India with a warmer or more l68 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. Christ-like spirit. To touch it and penetrate it with the Gospel was the great purpose of his life ; and, undeterred by fever and ague, he set out in 1806 on a tour of inquiry for persons who might be fit instruments in a new plan that was seething in his brain. As he sailed out of the harbour, he passed within sight of another vessel sailing in, but all unconscious that it had on board one who was to surpass even him in extraordinary devotion, and to be a bright particular star in the history of missions. HenryMartyn. When Martyn arrived, he was carried off to some like-minded men at Serampore. Close by the river a small deserted idol temple was fitted up as a bungalow, a place that has since become one of the spots of pilgrimage for Christian India. Here, on the open platform overhanging the river, he would kneel to pray for the people, and here he writes, in that most pathetic of all modern journals ; " I lay in tears interceding for the unfortunate natives of this country, thinking within myself, that the most despicable Sudra of India was of as much value in the sight of God as the king of Great Britain." And here, later, he wrote, " I found THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 169 my heaven begin on earth, no work so sweet as that of praying and living wholly to the service of God." His labours were incessant. At Dinapore and Cawnpore, he discharged his duties as chaplain with a rare fidelity ; and in the evenings opened the gates of his garden to a crowd of devotees, beggars, and vagrants, to whom he read some simple words of Scripture. A frightful crowd, often 500 in number, clothed in rags, or without clothes, plastered with mud, and with long matted locks of hair streaming to their heels, every countenance foul and frightful with evil passion, the lips black with tobacco, or crimson with henna. From time to time interrupted by low murmurs and hisses, and fierce cries, which would rise till they drowned the pure calm musical voice ; but when the storm passed, he might be heard going on again where he had left off, in the same stead- fast tones, as if he were incapable of interrup- tion. But, if direct address failed, there was still the Word of God itself. The translation of the Scriptures into Hindustani was imperfect ; that of the Persian Scriptures was altogether unsuit- able. It was to remedy these defects that 170 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. Martyn bent all his powers, a road-breaker still, and leaving the path once made to be trodden by other feet. With a mingled patience and fervour that are almost without parallel, he employed every spare moment in this sacred toil, mastering one language after another, and giving himself absolutely no rest. " I felt," he says, " the cruelty and wickedness of wasting a moment, when so many natives are, as it were, waiting while I do my work." He had already produced a Hindustani version of the Scriptures, and now he was fascinated with the desire to render them into Persian, " a language that was understood and spoken from Dinapore to Damascus." " So delightfully engaged in translation," he writes, " the days seem to have passed like a moment. Never did I see such wonder and wisdom and love in the blessed Book, as since I have been obliged to study every expression." Jealously Working, then, at a white heat, unscared by the howls and threatenings of the loathsome congregation, jealously watched by the Govern- ment, lest by making a convert he should over- step the borders of this easy-going toleration, doing a chaplain's duties as few had ever done watched. THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. I /I them before, and when others and strong men would have rested, turning to the labours of translation, in his unquenched eagerness to put the Scriptures within reach of the people, we are little surprised that consumption struck him down. But illness only made him more feverishly anxious to accomplish his great work, and he was literally dying when he started for Persia, where he spent a year revising his translation on the spot. There is nothing grander in the annals ofMartyn' Christianity than the picture of Henry Martyn, ^^^ ' with the Bible in hand, alone and unsupported in a strange country, challenging the whole strength of Mohammedanism to a conflict. Cool, courageous, bold of spirit, subtle, astonish- ing the Mohammedan doctors by his wisdom, gaining the confidence of all by the gentleness of his manners, and the blamelessness of his life. His victory over the Mollahs complete, he journeys on from Shiraz to Ispahan from Ispahan to Teheran, from Teheran to Tocat ; struggling onwards, hoping to reach his home. And he did reach it — but it was heaven. What is the meaning of the Christian life ? Is it success ? or vulgar wealth, or name ? 172 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. Is it a weary struggle — a mean strife For rank, low gains, ambition, or for fame ? ^\'hat sow we for ? The world ? For fleeting time ? Or far-off harvests, richer, more sublime ? The brightest life on earth was one of loss, The noblest head was wreathed with sharpest thorn. Has He not consecrated pain — the Cross? What higher crowns can Christian's brow adorn ? Be we content to follow on the road Which men count failure, but which leads to God. Brown took up Kiernander's work, when old age and many trials compelled him to retire ; and, Yorkshireman as he was, stuck to it when it cost him the loss of the only position that brought him bread. These four chaplains may not have gathered many natives into the mission. They were all chaplains first, and missionaries afterwards; but such a book as "Buchanan's Christian Researches," and such a life as Henry Martyn's fell upon the Church at home like an inspiration ; and these four men represent the growth of a new order of thought in England, and of those kindling ambitions that were yet to issue in the real conquest of India. For the chaplains did not stand alone ; there was a missionary or two — considered dangerous, they were not allowed to live in Calcutta, but were THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 173 banished to a Danish colony. A dynamiter is not more closely watched to-day, than those men were followed, with a jealous apprehension and a nameless dread. But they were the van of an approaching army, and behind them there was the rising feeling and advancing tide of the greatest missionary epoch that the world has seen. There are flats along our shores where the Divine powei. receding waters leave interminable reaches of black, slimy, and unlovely ooze. It might seem a hopeless task to cover these gaunt spaces with the clean leaping waters. But high up in the sky there rules a mighty force ; and without hand or help of man, and before the evening sun, the waves flow irresistibly over the slush and ooze, and the play of waters fills the eye with beauty and the ear with music. It is not simply a hundred years ago, it is not in India only that we see spiritual wonders wrought with the same simplicity of Divine power. The dreary flats of unspiritual centuries, the unlovely wastes of heathenism cannot baffle the irresistible attraction of the Cross of Christ. High up in the spiritual heavens, there rides a force that turns these spiritual 174 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. tides, and, once set In motion by the hand of God, they advance with a supreme and glorious fixity that nothing but the hand of God can ever check. The tide of the missionary spirit is flowing through our century. The first waves are faint ripples such as a child might fancy it could arrest ; but the ripples ripple in, the tide rises, and the waves advance. The Careys and Kiernanders have been followed by the spreading lines of a huge missionary army ; and behind the broad lines of to-day, others broader still are advancing, and rank by rank as the years roll on, the waters of the Gospel will cover all these unlovely flats of heathen life as the waters come in from the sea. Carey. And it was out of this new spirit, then break- ing everywhere over England, that there issued in William Carey, the first great gift that England sent to foreign missions since the Reformation. The story of that life, and the lives of his two comrades, as noble as his own, needs no repeating ; but if it did, it does not belong so much to the dawn as to the morning, and would take us beyond the limits I have ventured to impose. There is nothing more brilliant or heroic in our modern Church than THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 1 75 tliat passage of her history ; and how nobly it rang out the old and rang in the new, as last century was changing into this, the crowded missions of to-day will testify. It is not easy to pause just on the threshold of the busiest and most stately missionary epoch that men have ever seen, to be carried just to the line where success seems at the door, and then to turn. But the study of this century demands a histor- ian for itself. We see the results before our eyes, and we can connect them with the long era of the preparation. When Carey died, the Gospel was firmly planted in India, so firmly, that every day bears witness it will grow to be there what it has grown to be at home ; and there are two touching episodes by which we may bridge over all the history. It was only six years after Ziegenbalg sailed for India that Kiernander was born, and when he was eighty-three, he received a visit from Carey, who records the fresh ardour he derived from the still burning fire of the aged saint, as he waited quietly by the Ganges for the summons of his Lord. The distinguished biographer of Dr. Duff, Duff and connecting that incident with another, has ^^^^v- 176 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. linked the first Protestant Mission in India with our own time, for he tells us of another visit, and how, three years before Carey died, a young Highlander sprang out of his boat at Serampore, and turning ir.to the study of the mission-house, saw what seemed to be a little, shrivelled old man in a white jacket, who, when he heard the name, rose from his book, tottered to meet his visitor, and stretching out his arms, solemnly blessed him. And we who know what happened since, know too, that the trembling hands could have been laid upon no worthier head ; that the blessing of one apostolic soul broke out in the life-long labours, the magnifi- cent ambitions, the fervid glow, and the splendid triumphs of that other — the latest apostle of them all, but not we hope the last ; and in that meet- ing by the Hoogly the centuries cross hands, the century of preparation, and the century of conquest, and Ziegenbalg's faith and ardour are prolonged through Schwartz and Carey down to Duff, and God fulfils Himself in many ways. I have said that with Carey the planting of Christianity was an accomplished fact in India, and by that I mean that Christianity will grow THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 1 77 there as the Gospel always grows, from being- the least noticeable of seeds, till its branches cover all the land with the grateful shadow of their leaves of healing. We have come to the limits of the period within which I have endeavoured to trace the outcome of the missionary spirit. The next step will take us beyond the dawn into the day, but I must recall to you, as we face the possibilities of change, that Hinduism has always been in a Hinduism state of change, and that doctrines and practices changes, that claim authority on the ground of their antiquity are comparatively modern. The Vedas know nothing of the incarnation and types of Vishnu, as they are familiar to every Hindu of to-day. The favourite characters of Krishna, the forms by which he is worshipped everywhere, are of comparatively modern inven- tion. Although the Siva worship antedates Buddhism, it has no place in the Veda. The preferential worship of Siva does not date further back than the eighth or ninth century, when the founder of it instituted mendicant friars for its propagation, and in the eleventh century a new teacher rose, deposed Siva, and set up Vishnu, and the mendicant orders he founded N 178 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. are almost the sole spiritual guides of the people to-day. None of the Puranas seem to be older than the third or fourth century before Christ, and even they were the result of change imposed by other religious movements. The most popu- lar Purana of all, the Purana Bhagavata, has been set down by learned Brahmans to an unin- spired grammarian of the twelfth century, and there is little doubt that the Purana Brahma Vairvarta is still more modern. Brahmanism has digested and assimilated something from all creeds — the fetishism of the Aborigines, the practices of the primitive tribes, ideas from the various Dravidian cults, and Sir Monier Williams thinks it may have even owed some- thing to Christianity. Buddhism left its mark in the abolition of frequent sacrifice, the tenderness towards animal life, the new intensity of faith in transmigration, and in the efficacy of self-mortification as a source of power. It betrays itself also in its veneration for the footprints of holy personages, and in the tendency, slight, but distinct, to recognise caste as evil. In the pre-Buddhist age, Brahma goes for nothing, and Krishna THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 1/9 began to overshadow other cults in popular favour, and there are careful inquirers who declare that Hinduism has assimilated nearly every doctrine of Buddhism but its Atheism. Mohammedanism has left traces of its own a good deal broader than the tiny pulpits of the Mogul that I saw carved on the roof of the Jain temples at Palitana, a good deal deeper than the fervour of those modern hymns that have borrowed their mystical warmth from the Persian Sufis. Sects powerful and long enduring, like those of Kabir and Nanak, have been constantly springing up with protests against idols and withdrawal from Brahmanical ritual ; and although, with apparently the same constancy, they have declined, yet never without some fragment of their teaching being lodged in the popular religion. It has been said that it is only by the practice Hinduism re- of a kind of universal toleration and receptivity ceptive. that Hinduism has maintained its ground. But this "accommodating and absorbing religion," this " ancient and over-grown fabric, patched, pieced, restored, and enlarged in all directions, inlaid with every variety of idea, looking as if ready at l80 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. any moment to fall into ruins, and still keeping its position securely," has now been touched by Christianity. According to the unbroken law that governs the history of this religion, Christ- ianity will impress itself in turn. We can watch the process already. It may seem over bold to say that the slender influence of Christian missions has led even to the threshold of con- quest. And yet, combinations of intellectual powers still unsurpassed were divested of their speciousness, and shown to be fallacies by the Ithuriel spear of Christian truth. The weapons which discomfited these delusions are in our hands. Have they lost their efficacy, or have we lost the skill to employ them? Much of Hinduism is held together only by the influ- ence of women and the influence of caste. These bands are loosening. What will be the influence of Christianity when they are loosened ? Three It IS three centuries ago since English adven- centuries ago. tui-gj-s^ travelling in pursuit of commerce, brought back from India such reports of the splendour of its princes and the solidity and magnificence of its government, that they fired the heart of England, and became the unconscious founders THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. l8l of the English rule. Is it unlikely that travellers of no remote date will bring us back from the same East, tales of another and a greater splen- dour, not, as they might to-day, of an India ruled by Christian men, but of a Hindu popula- tion that, from the Himalaya to Cape Comorin has accepted Christ ? We are working now as they worked at those The work of superb palaces and tombs which still dominate, ^o-f^ay. although in ruins, the towns of the Mohammedan conquest. Far down into the foundations they sank, with what infinite patience we may imagine, vast masses of dull red sandstone, and built it up in mighty walls that only lose their gloom when glowing in the setting sun ; but on the summit they placed, as if to last for ever, some structure of fair, white, pierced, and fretted stone, so fitting and beautiful, so airy and deli- cate, that it seems like a marble dream. Let us be patient and continuous, working bravely at the foundation of this Christian India, pouring into it true hearts and noble lives, the named and the nameless there together, treasures of thought and treasures of the price- less years. There is already rising on that foundation the vision of our faith and hope, 1 82 THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. once the dream, but now the fan* and stately fact of a Christian India, a fragment, yet com- plete in itself, of that great city — the holy Jerusalem which descends out of heaven from God, and where the nations of the saved walk in the light of His glory. THE END. INDEX OF PERSONS AND PLACES. Abyssinia, 4, 5, 42-44. Adriatic, 6, 19. iEgean Sea, 25. Africa, 4, 8, 18, 19, 45, 60, 135, 141, 143. Agni, 69, 70. Akbar, IS, 74, I55- Alexander, 26. Alexandria, 5, 42, 76, 77, 80. Alleyne, 40. Alypius, 5. America, 4, 100, 134, 135, 141. Amiens, 103. Amsterdam, 44, 47. Anschar, 25. Antigiia, 39. Antioch, 5. Arbuthnot, 144. Asia, 4, 6, 8, 17, 19, 135. Asia Minor, 5. Augsburg, 47. Augustine, 5. Augustus, 22. Badie, Jean de la, 102, 104. Baltic, 4. Baxter, 40, 50. Bay of Bengal, 166. Beck, 132-134. Behring's Straits, 4. Bergen, 122. Berkeley, 40, 144, 146. Berlin, 54, 57, 59, 99> 105. Bermuda, 144. Bethelsdorf, 127. Bhagavata, 178. Black Sea, 4. Blumenhagen, 42, Boehmisch, Frederick, 128, 130, 134- Bombay, 164. Bonaparte, 162. Borgia, 15. Bosphorus, 19. Boyle, Robert, 37, 49. Brahma, 14, y^y ^7^- Brahma Vairvarta, 178. 183 84 NDEX OF PERSONS AND PLACES. Brazil, 31. Britain, 4, 143, 163. British Empire in India, 162. Brito, Juan de, 78. Brookfarm, 103. Brown, 171. Bruce, 43. Buchanan, Claudius, 167. Buddha, 72. Butler, 40, 144. Cairo, 43. Calcutta, 157, 159, 164-166, 172. Calvin, 30, 31, 103. Cambridge, 34, 36, 167. Canada, 17. Canterbury, Archbishop of, 151. Cape of Good Hope, 4. Carey, William, 64, 174-176. Carlyle, 104. Carthage, 5. Caspian Sea, 6. Cawnpore, 169. Ceylon, 39. Chalmers, 139. Charles II., 164. Charles V., 30. Charles VI., 107. Charles XII., 90. China, 5, 6, 16, 17, 50, 86. Chinsurah, 159. Christian David, 127, 130, 131. Chiy SOS torn, 6. Clive, 165. Columbus, 4. Comorin, ii, 82, 181. Confucius, 16. Constantinople, 6. Cook, Captain, 5. Copenhagen, 60, 90, 107, 116, 117, 121, 125-127, 130. Coromandel, 56, 82. Courland, 26. Cromwell, 49. Cuddalore, 165. Cyprian, 6, 78. Czar Peter, 113. Danube, 3, 25. Damascus, 170. Denmark, 4, 55, 56, 90, 129, 130, 151. Dinapore, 169, 170. Dober, Leonhard, 135, 136. Dresden, 57. Drontheim, 112. Duff, Dr., 175, 176. Dunkirk, 121. Egede, Hans, 117, 121-123, 125, 129, 131, 134, 135, 140, 141. Egede, Gertrude, 124. Egede, Paul, 126. Egypt, 5. 43- Ehrhardt, 141, Elbe, 3- Eliot, 34-36, 39, 48, 50, 6 r, 141. England, 35, 143, 151, 152, 163, 167, 174, 180. INDEX OF PERSONS AND PLACES. .85 English Channel, 164. Erasmus, 27. Eric the Red, 118. Eskimo, 17. Esthonia, 26. Europe, 3-5, 7, 9, 10, 15, 19, 21, 25, 26, 28-31, 38, 45, 50, 65, 78, 80, 87, 100, 107, 109,118, 132, 134, 151, 163. Falk, John, 104. Finnland, 116, 140. Flaxman, 156. Florida, 32. Formosa, 39. France, 4, 30, 103, 138. Francke, 54, 59,91, 104, 153. Frederic IV., 55, 113. Frumentius, 77. Ganges, 14, 160, 175. Gariitmat, 69. Geneva, 103, 104, Georgia, 146. Germany, 4, 24, 30, 40, 45, 47, 53, 54, 61, 91, 104, 138, 152. Gibraltar, Straits of, 4. Gichtel, 46, 47. Goa, 78, 80. Godhaab, 127. Gbrlitz, 58. Grant, Mr., 160, 166. Great Britain, 165, 168. Greece, 20. Greenland, 7, 17, 55, 118, 119, 125, 126, 129-131, 135, 137, 140-142. Gregory XV., 49. Grotius, Hugo, 41, 45, 49. Guyenne, 100. Halle, 54, 59, 91, 99, 105, 106, 152, 153- Hegel, 14. Hennersdorf, 106. Herrnhut, 128, 131, 134-136, 139. Hey ling, Peter, 41, 42, 44-46. Himalaya, 11, 67, 164, 180. Hindustan, 4, 161. Hippo, 5. Holland, 91. Hoogly, 176. Hope Island, 123. Hutberg, 128. Hyder Ali, 155. Iceland, 7, 118. Indies, 56, 135, 141, 143. India, 13, 15, 55, 61, 63, 73-77, 80, 83, 87, 88, 93, 94, 99, 100, 148, 151, 155, 160-163, 165, 167, 168, 172, 175, 176, 180, 181. Indian Empire, 164. Indra, 69. Ispahan, 171. Italy, 4- 1 86 INDEX OF PERSONS AND PLACES. Japan, 17. Java, 39. Jerusalem, 19, 42, 43, 182. Kabir, 179. Kayarnak, 133. Kiernander, 165, 166, 171, 175. Krishna, 177, 178. Labrador, 17, 134, 135, 141, 142. Lafiteau, 81. Lange, 54, 59, 60. Laotze, 16. La Perouse, 5. Leibnitz, 50. Leyden, 49. Lichtenfels, 135. Livingstone, 30. Livonia, 26. Lofoden, 116. London, 91, 134, 145, 146, 167. LUbeck, 41, 42, 44, 45. Ludlow, Mr., 75. Lully, Raymond, 8. Lusatia, 127. Luther, 8, 30. Liitkens, Dr., 56, 57, 89. Mackintosh, Sir James, 26, 160. Madras, 82, 100, 157, 158. Malabar, 5, 72, 75, 76. Malta, 42. Manchester, 164. Manu, 70. Martyn, Henry, 26, 168, 170-172. Mather, S^. Maya, 14. Mayhew, 141. Mazarin, Cardinal, 103. Mediterranean, 4. Merseburg, 59. Mexico, 18, 142. Mezzofanti, 45. Mitra, 69. Mohammed, 4, 5, 18, 19. Mollen, 42. Monica, 6. Montauban, 103. Moravia, 127. Miiller, George, 104. Miiller, Max, 142, Nanak, 179. Nero, 15. New England, 34-36, 49. Newport, Rhode Island, 146. Newton, John, 167. Nice, 76, 78. Nile, 4. Nitschmann, David, 136. Nobili, Robert de, 78. Norway, 8, 114, 1 15, 120, 140. Odin, 8. Oglethorpe, 146. Olaf, King, 8. Olympus, 20. Origen, 23, 78. Ouranos, 69. Oxford, 34. INDEX OF PERSONS AND PLACES. 187 Padua, 42. Palestine, 5, 26. Palitana, 179. Pantaenus, 76. Paris, 41, 42, 106. Patagonia, 4. Peloponnesus, 25. Perpetua, 6. Persia, 76. Peru, 18. Peter, Czar, 113. Pliitschau, 60, 61. Polynesia, 18. Pondicherry, 82, 163. Pope, 144. Portugal, 30, 157. Prester John, 6. Prussia, 90. Pulsnitz, 57. Rask, Gertrude, 117. Ratisbon, 46, 47. Red Sea, 4. Renan, M., 27. Rome, 3, 6, 10, 20, 22, 28, 45, 7Z, 78. Roman Empire, 27, 95. Roxbury, 35, 36. Russia, 4, 8. Samarius, 45. San Yuste, 30. Saxony, 141. Schmidt, 141. Schulze, 153. Schwartz, 64, 153, 155, 156, 176. Serampore, 16S, 176. Shetland, 7. Shiraz, 171. Siva, 14, 177. Sodom, 114. Sonnenberg, 152. Spain, 4, 30. Spener, Jacob, 104. Spielberg, 141. Spurgeon, Mr., 104. Stach, Matthew, 128, 130, 132, 134- St. David, Bishop of, 161. St. Thomas, 55, 60, 136. Stralsund, 90. Sumatra, 39. wSurat, 81, 163. Surinam, 47, 104. Sweden, 8, 25, 55, 121. Swift, 144, 145. Switzerland, 108. Syria, 76, 80. Tagaste, 5. Tamerlane, 6. Tanjore, Rajah of, 154, 156. Teheran, 171. Tertullian, 6. Thibet, 160. Thoroughgood, 34. Tinnevelly, 100, 157. Tocat, 171. Tranquebar, 55, 56, 60-62, 82, 88. 90, 91, 105, 106, 163, 165. i88 INDEX OF PERSONS AND PLACES. Travancore, loo. Trimurtti, 13. Trollope, Mr., 137. Troy, 10. Turkey, 21, 42. United States, if. Ursinus, 47. Vaagen, 117. Valegiani, 86. Van Dome, 41. Varuna, 69. Venice, 130. Vikings, 4, 8. Villegaignon, 31. Vishnu, 177. Von Pless, 131, 136. Walseus, 49. Walpole, Sir Robert, 145. Wedoens, 113. Weimar, 104. Welz, Baron von, 46, 47, 49. Wesley, 144, 146. West en, Thomas von, 112, 115, 116, 140. Whitfield, 144. Wilberforce, 138. Williams, John, 35. Williams, Sir Monier, 178. Wittenberg,' 185. Xavier, 78. Yellow Sea, 6, Ziegenbalg, 53, 58, 60-65, 75» 86, 88, 90, 93, 104, 106, 151, 152, 154, 156, 175, 176. Zinzendorf, Count, 105, 106, 116, 126, 127, 129, 130, 136, 137, 140. 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