9-

THE ONE SOURCE OF MISSIONARY POWER.

A SERMON

DELIVERED BY THE

Rt. Rev. F. D. HUNTINGTON, D.D.,
BISHOP OF CENTRAL NEW YORK,

AT ' THE OPENING OF THE

Missionary Conference,

HELD IN

CALVARY CHURCH,
NEW YORK,
ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 9th, 1878.

NEW YORK,
AMERICAN CHURCH PRESS,
,- 76 East Ninth Street.

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The Rt. Rev. Frederick Dan. Huntington, D.D., Bishop of Central New
York.
Rt. Rev. and Dear Sir :
The undersigned, as representatives of the Board of Managers of,
the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, and speaking as they' well
may for the large congregation present at the time, most respectfully
beg that you will furnish for publication in pamphlet form a copy of the
masterly discourse delivered by you in Calvary Church, at the opening of
the recent Missionary Conference in New York. By your consent to this
request the whole cause of Missions, in their judgment, will be greatly
served. We are, Rt. Rev. and Dear Sir, with great respect,
Yours faithfully,
NOAH HUNT SCHENCK, \
y. LIVINGSTON REESE, I
LEMUEL COFFIN, \- Special Committee oj 'the Board.
A. T. TWING,
JOSHUA KIMBER. J .
C. VANDERBILT, \
ROBERT STUYVESANT, f
W. BAYARD CUTTING, > Local Committee.
woodbury g. langdon. \
Dear Brethren:
Having prepared and preached the sermon with a hearty wish to
help our Missionary Service, I see no reason for refusing assent to any
use of it, which, in the judgment of wiser men than I am, may be
thought best.
I am most faithfully, and with sincere thanks for your favor,
Yours in the Gospel and Kingdom of our Lord,
F. D. HUNTINGTON.
Syracuse, October 21st, 1878.

THE ONE SOURCE OF MISSIONARY POWER.

A Sermon delivered by the Rt. Rev. F. D. Huntington, D.D., Bishop of
Central New York, at the opening of the Missionary Conference,
held in Calvary Chureh, New York, on Wednesday
Evening, Oetober 9th, 1878.

The ending of the Epistle for last Sunday is my text :
" Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or
think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto Him be glory in the Church by
Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end." — Eph. iii. 20, 21.
An ascription is not commonly an argument or an exposition, but
in this one there is something of both. While the feeling kindles and
the thought rises, definite doctrines are compactly declared in the
several members of the sentence. Great things are " to be done," it
appears, not yet undertaken. Hearty Christians, of large faith, "think"
about them and " ask " for them. In the whole range of the Epistle it
is not personal disciples chiefly, but the one integral commonwealth of
Christ, whose coming life is unfolded. In souls of deep religion the
prophetic sense is always active, foreshortening the lines of the future,
seeing Missionary consummations as if they were close at hand. Dry-
minded commentators imagine they must make out some rational ex
planation of this perpetual advent cry of the Lord's coming. It is
really only the natural voice of three abiding convictions necessary to
the Catholic belief — that the world has been, in fact, already saved and
belongs to its Saviour; that many men and nations do not know it; and
that, compared with the certainty that it will be found out, the time of
its being found out is a small matter. Sure events look near to the
mind much in proportion as they are sure. Every believing generation
lives in the last days. So here. It is a period of expectation; St. Paul's
time was, and so is ours just as much. But human faith is never quite
up even with the possibilities of God. He only is "able to do." Sov
ereignty, immeasurable, unthinkable, is above us. Yet, after all, the
almighty ability there, "above all that we can think," and the power
here, are in their root the same; and the original terms are only forms
of the same word. No hint is given that the expected work is to be
done by supernatural blows in the air or without mortal energy. The
Missionary sermon which, more than any other, in England, less than
ninety years ago, broke the- nation's sleep and sounded the key-note of

had opened its ports on the eastern side, in India, and Palestine. Ethi
opia was waiting, a promise of prophecy not yet fulfilled, her hands
stretched out to tyrants and robbers, not to God. Four millions of
half-African freedmen at the South have been thrown upon Christian
hands, by emancipation. In moral weakness and savage strength three
or four hundred thousand red pagans have made themselves felt as a
moral charge by the Christian conscience and compassion of the coun
try. Everywhere beyond the Mississippi emigrant populations have
poured in, not taking with them a Ministry Creed, or Sacraments, —
thrift outrunning religion. All over the old States at least a third of
the people are found living without public prayer, in indifference or
unbelief. Two-thirds of the souls on earth know nothing of the only
Saviour of the world. Certainly there was incentive enough to make
the machinery perfect. It only remained, a year ago, taking up these
principles that had been declared, and facing the facts that had been
discovered, to create the best possible organization. Four principal
features distinguish this system. It brings the four several Departments
or Commissions into unity, simplifying what was complicated; it ren
ders the actual directing working-force at once compact and represent
ative ; it makes the Church of Christ at large in fact, what forty years
ago it avowed itself — and not any second or supplementary society —
the constituent and accountable Missionary body; and it sets forth as
its first public measure the Divine rule of universal, systematic, weekly
offerings to Christ as the sure supply of means to convert mankind.
We are together to-day for the first time, from the whole country, to
recognize and use this plan. I say, therefore, that legislation and
organization have done their best ; we are not to look to them, for the
present, either for employment for our time or an apology for our short
coming. The machinery is prepared. There is in fact a good deal
more of it than the angels of the Seven Churches knew anything about!
A second favorable condition is the decline of party spirit. Fifteen
years since the question that instantly arose over any attempt to con
vert men was the question, which one of two parties of people already
supposed to be converted would take the benefit; and the success of
either one was a grief or alarm to the other. That wicked absurdity,
at least, is over. Schools of opinion remain, which only means that
there are varieties of opinion which are not strictly individual but can
be classified. They are a necessity of intellectual health, and will last
as long as men learn and think. Almost any number of such schools
are better than two. Parties seem to be mischievous in the inverse
ratio of their number. No religious division is so fatal to charity or
piety as a bi-section. And so when it was announced to the last Meet
ing of the Board that this Body of Christ was no longer to be so debili

5
tated, but that the two were to be thenceforth one, another hindrance
to a true Christian advance was taken out of the way. To carry to the lost
one Gospel, one Cross, one Prayer Book, and one Creed, is certainly an
ambassadorship which requires no antagonistic agencies. We can
reckon it a part of our new Missionary equipment, then, that we have a
generous diversity of operations, but no longer a jealous rivalry between
brothers. Furthermore this Church is in a position of advantage in approach
ing any people, of any grade of culture, by its doctrinal standards. Its
Missionaries preach a Gospel which invigorates every faculty of man, and
stultifies or narcotizes none — salvation by Divine grace without anti-
nomianism, charitable works without saving merits, atonement without
commercial equivalents, personal character without self-righteousness,
penitence without penance, and Sacraments without superstition. It is
shut out from no Missionary enterprise in any part of the world by any
extra-scriptural dogma, or any collision with legitimate science. To
the scholarship of China, to the reflective Brahmin, to the keen-witted
Mussulman, to the shrewd, rationalistic Western pioneer, it offers an his
toric Creed of such clearness and simplicity that the subtleties of oppo
sition are disarmed. The authority is entrenched in the Divine human
ity of the Person Christ, from Whom all the visible and spiritual powers
and ministries are derived. The system is powerful because it is posi
tive — disencumbered of metaphysical theology. It is just as good for
the Oriental mind, always bringing its deities down to men, as for the
Western mind, always trying to lift men to gods ; and just as good for
the Guinea negro under his palm-tree, as for English judges and profes
sors in their libraries. It is remarkable that in these late years of im
mense scientific research neither the naturalist nor the antiquarian has
been able to raise a successful issue with a clause in the Book of Common
Prayer, and that in no instance has the Church committed itself to an
explanation or statement which any advance of knowledge has proved
false. Materialism can contradict that manual of faith only as-' it con
tradicts a supernatural world altogether, which, in the nature of the case,
the senses or material organs are incompetent to do. In the conflict
between Christianity and paganism in the East, which is sure to come,
and which Bishop Schereschewsky is planting his college to meet, this
strong and half-inspired reserve on points open to intellectual in
vestigation will be of more rnoment than it seems.
To complete this view, that the Church was never so well furnished
as it is now to fulfil its Missionary calling, notice two or three points
more. Maintaining its unity through a civil war which could not have
been more bitter without dismembering the nation, or more bloody
without draining out its life, and coming out of it undivided, it has sat-

isfied statesmen and patriots that it has an extraordinary power of com
prehension and cohesion. In its steady balance between a distributed
and a consolidated government it has stood in striking accordance with
the Federal polity. Keeping clear of political animosity, in the sectional
struggle, it never failed to treat the person of the slave — now a freedman
— with religious reverence ; it welcomed him to a spiritual equality with-
the European in all its offices; as early as 1795 Bishop White ordained
a negro to the Ministry. This age and this people are humane ; they
care for the poorer and weaker classes. For several years, in the larger
populations, our best Clergy and laymen have dealt with the problems
of poverty, misery, and ignorance in the only way that the social philos
ophers themselves have yet found out; not as sentimentalists or abstrac
tionists but by practical instruction, helping and raising up (not pov
erty, misery, or ignorance, but) the poor man, the miserable woman, the
ignorant child, through the Son of Man's grace, making them free citi
zens in the Kingdom of the Incarnation. One special element of
strength in any Missionary body is the confidence and co-operation of
the laity. The money is in their hands ; and they are most likely to
give it where their intelligence is informed and their judgment is con
sulted. Our whole legislative system, calling into our councils many of
the ablest business men in the nation, has endowed us with this strong
support. My friends, these, shortly stated, are some of the components that
make up the vantage ground we are on. You will find they are not
arrayed here for self-congratulation. Apparatus and machinery, method
and opportunity, grand antecedents, a splendid heritage, a glorious
trust— what cause, what people, what army, what Church, was ever
delivered and made immortal by these ? Not one of them is our own
creation. If God has done for us above all that we ever asked, or our.
fathers dreamed, He is summoning us, in this very hour, with all these
monuments of His bounty about us, with His estate beneath our feet,
with the levers of the vast engine in the hands of the engineers, to a
reckoning. Every historic privilege I have named, from the Faith once
delivered down to your act of incorporation, is an item in the account.
There seems to come a voice out of the mouth of the Lord : " Behold
the wheels ; but where are the living creatures, and the noise of the
wings that touch one another, and the moving fire among them ? "
We are here three thousand congregations and Ministers, in a repub
lic which believes itself born to be, in half a century, foremost among
the nations of the earth. Mr. Gladstone, speaking for " the name and
fame of England," and pointing to our national vigor in bearing and
reducing our public burden, declares that we have done in each twelve- '
month what England did in eight years, and that our " self-command

self-denial, and wise forethought for the future," have been eight-fold
hers. We are three hundred thousand partakers of the Lord's Body
and Blood, with a full share of the wealth of a wealthy people. We
have done something for Missions. For the continent of Africa — twelve
millions of square miles — we have six Ministers, as many as would form
the staff of two well-officered city parishes, and we have set seven specks
of light along a slender section of a barbarous shore. For four hun
dred and forty-six millions of Chinese souls we give eight Ambassadors of
the Saviour who died for them all. The whole Foreign Department
breathes hard and lies awake at night under a debt, the amount
of which thousands of single merchants in this city might lose to-day,
and sleep as well as ever till morning. In our own country, in our
Christian joy at the liberation of some four millions of slaves, we send
as much money to train them into the stature of Christian men as
would have paid twenty years ago for fifty of their bodies. We care so
much that the neglected and faithless multitudes unshepherded in our
Domestic domain should not lose eternal life, that we let mixed mo-
1 tives and pathetic appeals wring from us for their salvation less than
one-third the cost of equipping and sailing for a year one frigate in our
navy, partially supporting for Missionaries as many workmen as are sus
tained by many a factory on a New England stream. Among the in
genuities of our enterprising public advocates there has been printed a
map of the whole country showing in vivid colors what districts are
still barren of the services of our Church. There might be a far more
shameful scroll. There is a watchman at the Bible House who scans
our geography with a very accurate eye. Paint one paragraph in his
last year's report; sketch the territory of our two thousand eight
hundred parishes; darken with india-ink the area of those which the
year before gave not one penny to its treasury; and four-sevenths of
the surface would be blotted black.
What is the matter ? Nothing, you will all say, is the matter with
the heritage or the trust — the Creed or the original Commission, the
word preached or the way of worship, the historic preparation or the
principles avowed — and not much, unless we are bunglers at our best,
with the machinery of administration and the financial plan set on foot.
Brethren, we must carry our question to the Lord Himself. He an
swered it before it was ever asked. When He planted the Church He
planted it by Missions ; and when He made Missionaries He made them
by taking common men and filling them with Himself. Never, since,
when men have been filled with Him, has there been any lack of Mis
sionary life. He said, " Herein is My Father glorified that ye bear
. much fruit." What "fruit"? He makes it plain. It was fruit raised
' through men ordained and going, Missionary fruit; " I have chosen you

8

and ordained you that ye should go, and bring" it "forth." You
must travel and sail, climb and swim, learn languages and wash barba-(
rians' feet. It is rough and dirty work. How shall they bear such
fruit ? " He that abideth in me the same bringeth" it " forth." Rough
and dirty is it ? It is welcome and illustrious work. That doctrine
runs all through the four Gospels. How much personal love and faith
towards the Master, so much eager sacrifice for the spreading of His
Kingdom. St. Paul catches it and sounds it through His Epistle to all
those scattered flocks which knew that so he had gathered and nourish
ed them. He says it in that most churchly Epistle to the Ephesians,
and in the text. " The power that worketh in us " for the more abund
ant glory is Christly power. Nay, it is He, indwelling. We reach a
first principle of this heavenly economy. The measure of a personal
and intimate affection for the living Jesus, in the people dwelling at
home, in settled congregations, will be the measure of the Missionary
spirit, Missionary money and Missionary power.
Possibly that may sound like a truism. If it is, it is one of those
truisms, that are tame only when they are not believed, but which, when
they enter in, strike hard and cut deep: truisms that make the preacher
tremble while he speaks them, and hurt because they humiliate the
hearer. We have assembled at this crisis to search not other men, or
other denominations, but ourselves. Our business is not to cover any
thing up, but to open the fountain-head of our little river, and find
how much water springs there. We had better be honest, or else be
still. Come beneath this admirable mechanism, and see whether any
awful force lies latent in the heart of the ship. Come behind the breast
work, the artillery, the drill yard, and look at the magazines, where fire
and thunder and victory should be kept in store. It is in vain to think
of great income, wider fields, and rich harvests, unless a more definite
spiritual life, a heartier piety, warms and inspires the people. If we
are doing but little to convert the world, it is because we are but par
tly converted ourselves. Gasper Borzeo, the great Eastern Missionary,
used to say: " If Christ Himself had not established a Mission in a heart
worse than any Mohammedan land, I should never have been preaching
the Gospel in Persia." The heart and core of Christianity is to give
self away for the Son of Man, and for man. That is the heart and core
also of Missionary life. The identity of the two, therefore, is radical
and eternal.
Modern society has a great deal on its hands — a plenty of uses for
all its means: education, colonies, commerce, elections, communications
all over the planet, manufactures, conquests of nature, the completing
of a material civilization. You go to it and ask it for money to evan
gelize mankind. It answers you just as it answers other propositions

in its counting-rooms every day. " What for ? What will the investment
bring ? " If you say you want to civilize the world's barbarians, the an
swer will be: We are doing that already, in our own way by commerce
and railroads. If you say you want to extend the Christian morality,
they will compare the taxes in New York and Calcutta, and suggest
that morals come gradually with education. If you speak of Christian
ity as a Divine gift, or a blessed privilege to be extended, they doubt
whether the Turk and the Jew and the Indian deserve it. The man
who has the money you want, if he is the average American Christian,
wants a return for his outlay ; he wants comfort for his sensibilities, books
and pictures and the drama and a carriage, refinement for his tastes,
and respect, if not more, from the gentlemen and families of his class.
You invite him to help convert foreigners. Convert them to what ?
To Christianity. His idea is that such Christianity as he has is a very
convenient and handsome thing for himself, but he sees no particular
reason why he should give it away. However, he has a pew in your
church, and means to be obliging and polite to his Clergyman, and two
or three times a year he puts some dollars into a collection, pleasing him
self with the notion that it will do good somehow, and better his chances
for permanent and respectable well-being. It will take a great many
such men, and a great deal of their money, to create Missionary power.
You apply to another man, of a different stamp, less prosperous, of
sharp eyes, blunt speech, not profound, but practical. He points to
this average American Christian, and says, " If that is a specimen of
what you would turn Hindoos and Dakotas into, I decline to encour
age the enterprise. I appreciate him. He pays his debts, says his
prayers, makes a comely figure in the social scenery, and has some pub
lic spirit. But except for a few outside marks I should not be sure
whether he is a fashionable Christian or a civilized heathen. I am not
rich enough to export a religion of which this neighbor is a type." My
friends, our first step toward getting our Faith sent abroad is to make it
so strong a blessing as to be worth sending; and if men and women are
to part with their property for Christ, it must be because Christ is more
to them than property, His name dearer than success, and His favor
more1 precious than gold.
The truth is, the Missionary idea is too high and the Missionary sys
tem is too exacting to be supported by any other power than the inspi
ration of a very ardent affection, amounting to a holy passion of the
soul. It is costly work. It is slow work at best. It shows small com
putable returns. It has many discouragements. A cool and rational
calculation is not enough. A general desire to see Christianity substi
tuted for idolatry is not enough. A high appreciation of the ethical
advantages of our religion is not enough. I doubt, for one, whether even a

sense of duty, so far as it is kept alive by ordinary considerations, will
be sufficient to form the impelling force which will sweep a Missionary
army forward over the world. As far as I am acquainted with Christian
history, there is no instance on record of any such movement, of
any > grandeur, sustained by purely ethical or social inducements.
These will do a great deal to train people in home virtues, to foster
domestic charities, and even to plant colonies. But colonies are
not Missions, and they have always an ingredient of self-interest.
A Mission, anywhere, requires the enthusiasm of the Cross, or else
it drags and fails. There must be — there always has been — one of two
intense, burning convictions : Either a belief that the Gospel sent is to
save, literally and directly, each converted man from a horrible perdi
tion, or else a personal love and zeal for Christ so utterly self-forgetful
that it will do and suffer all things to make others His friends, and to
gladden His heart with their conversion. Everything short of this is
short of real success. There is this strange, unutterable, incomparable
power in the Son of God. No theology has ever explained it. No
philosophy has accounted for it. There must be a touch of the Pente
costal fire. We cannot imagine St. Paul or any of his brother apostles,
or the saints at Jerusalem, or Achaia, doing any part of their work
without that peculiar energy. So all along. This, and this only, ac
complished the marvellous conquests of the early Church, from Syria to
England, Northern Africa, and India. This alone belted the Mediter
ranean with a cordon of Christian altars. This, along with the fervor
of extending a great ecclesiastical institution, but never the latter alone,
sent the Romish Fathers into the forests of the St. Lawrence and the
fever swamps of South America, where the real honors- of the middle
ages were reaped. Nothing else brought the brave witnesses from the
" Brethren " in Holland to Labrador. Nothing else brightened the
beginning of this century in the Church of England with the opening of
the gates of the East to the Saviour. For whatever has been worthy of
her title in our own branch of the Church there is no different origin.
There must be either a Francis Xavier, crying, with solemn aspect, in
the streets of Europe and the cities of paganism, while he rings his bell in
his hand, to warn the lost of their ruin, " What shall it profit a man
though he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? " or there must
be a John the Baptizer, pointing with a kind of transport to the Healer
from Nazareth, and calling to them that pass by, "Behold the Lamb of
God which taketh away the sins of the world." There must be alarm
to drive men to their Saviour, or love to draw them; but in either case
it must be to the Saviour that they come, or the Mission has no breath
or blood, and dies.
We are not unfamiliar, in our natural efforts to make men give, with

a form of moral satire which consists in contrasting some enormous,
superfluous but common expenditure with the scanty sums dropped into
the treasury of the Church. It is proved to us by incontestable statis
tics that if the proceeds of the silk trade, or the tobacco trade, or the
wine trade, were poured into the. Bible House, every necessary dollar
for the conversion of the Gentiles would be supplied. These computa
tions are very striking. They demonstrate, by mathematics, that we are
a very inconsistent people, and belong to a very imperfectly Christian -
ized Christendom — that we care more for our own luxuries than for our
neighbors' salvation, and that we ought either to use our religion more,
or parade it less. Pertaining to all such sharp arraignments, however,
there is one remarkable feature. Nobody takes the slightest concern to
answer them, whether by way of disputing the data or mitigating the
inference. Over and over again these shameful facts are proclaimed and
printed. They make no impression on the offerings of our congrega
tions, the indulgences of men, or the fashions of women. Nobody de
nies that they are humiliating, and nobody appears to be humiliated.
Why is it ? It is because if the parties rebuked were to speak frankly
and put their conduct into words, they would say: "The figures are
correct enough, but the fallacy is in your premise. You assume that we
are ashamed of this contrast, or wish it were otherwise. But we say to
you that we have no such mortification. We like our silks and tobacco
and wine better than we like the satisfaction of turning heathen to the
Redeemer, or building a church among the mines of Nevada. We
shall go on just as before; we shall not give you our money, because,
while we have no quarrel with a Gospel that lets us alone in our pleas
ures, your Gospel of the Beatitudes and Calvary is troublesome. You
are looking at this subject from one point and we from another. Bring
us these Christian ordinances as a part of the decorated order of a re
fined and lively society, and we are with you, and will pay a moderate
tax to keep them up. But tell us they are essential, or supreme, tell us
to put your Kingdom of Heaven first, and we take leave to differ." Now,
that would be candid speech. The spirit of the world is not candid.
It is polite, diplomatic, shrewd, cruel. It ought to be candid. The
Ambassador of Christ ought to be candid ; and he ought to say: These
comparisons fail of their aim, because they are addressed to a callous
conscience and a selfish heart. The moment Christ enters in there,
sacrifices for Him will be easy, and the man will be miserable if he gives
more for luxuries for himself than he gives to his Lord.
If this is true, then a large part of the Missionary work of this next
generation is to be done in Dioceses and parishes and Sunday-schools
at home. Men that are running after fortunes will have to learn, in
some way, that a black man's soul, a. Mexican's, a Modoc's, a China-

man's, is worth more than any fortune in the land; that, while the yel
low fever comes now and then to decimate a section, the pestilence and
putritidies of the soul are chronic and universal over half the planet ; and
that the most complacent citizen has got to answer for that brother man
in the Day of Judgment. This sort of preaching needs a particular
sort of Preachers, and it will be well if our theological seminaries and
the students in them are considering of what stuff they are made.
Again,, we are not strangers, any of us, to the ready practice of trying to
make the cross of " giving " light and agreeable to those who have no faith
in being crucified with Christ by a variety of secular devices for getting
money, half traffic and half frolic, which return an equivalent of amuse
ment for what is paid, substituting this for offerings to God; or it is pro
posed to relieve the liberal givers by pursuading everybody to give a little.
But have we gone to the root of the matter when we have gathered up
the total sum and spent it on the field ? No doubt the mere fact of
giving is a means of grace. No doubt some dark soul in the region of
the shadow of death at Cavalla may get a glimpse of the great Light by
means of the profits made at a parish entertainment which begins with
something like a theatre, and has something like a gambling-table in a
corner, and ends with a supper and a dance. But suppose you
Christianize a heathen abroad by half heathenizing several Christians
at home ! After all, ought anything to be put instead of the " grace,"
the principle, the faith ! What if we succeed in persuading men to
give because they can give without feeling it, or contrive some other
fprm of benevolence made easy, is that a Gospel for them ? Are we
not rather preaching Christ when we teach them to give when they
¦ feel it most, to give out of poverty, to shorten rest, or lengthen labor
or abandon pleasure— to carry a cross which leaves on body or estate
" marks of the Lord Jesus " ? I ministered once in a church where
many a pew stood for a million dollars. There were generous men and
saintly women among them, not a few. But it only happened once in
the nine years that, after I had announced an offering for the following
Sunday, a person stopped after the Service to say, " I must be absent
next Sunday and wish you to take my gift now." She was not " a Samar
itan," but she was a cook, and she was to be absent to cook a rich
man's dinner, and I had some reason to suspect that her gift was larger
than his. The real " glory to God in the Church by Christ Jesus," the
great anthem,- the sound of many waters, will come when the life of the
Son of God in the body of His people mounts so high and runs so free
that the evangelizing of the world becomes their natural and perpetual
joy, their spiritual meat and drink, and its perils and heroisms and costs
are counted " but a chosen " loss for Christ."
It is under this eternal law that the whole history and life of the

i3
Church of God unfold. " In the beginning was the Word," the living
Word. This Son of Man stands on the earth and calls men in order
that He may send them. At the outset of His ministry He says
"Come." After a while, to the same persons, He says "Go." But in
the interval between He has touched and changed the springs of their
life, transformed them, filled them with Himself. They come common
people from the world's common places. They go royal Ambassadors of
Heaven, in the spiritual splendor of a self-sacrificing charity, giving the
life and light they have received. Out from Him flows the entire super
natural, inspired system of the Kingdom — Ministry, Sacraments, Litur
gies, Charities, " Rivers four that gladden
With their streams this better Eden,"
the garden of the second creation, with the Second Adam for its head.
But it is all a Missionary tide. It follows that every impulse and stroke
of Missionary power oh earth is from the heart of Christ. He sows, and
there is a harvest. He touches nations, and there arises a brotherhood
not only civilized by His light but sanctified by His love. The isles of
the ocean wait for Him. He spreads His net and gathers of every kind,
and lo ! the burden of the sea is not only fishes but fishermen, who
go, and gather, and come again. What follows, then, but that the cri
terion of all Missionary power and success in any branch of the Church
is its conscious nearness and likeness to Him ? If there are activity,
free giving, ready going, a full treasury, able men who say, " Here am I,
send me," it is because through all the organization Christ lives, and
His Personal Spirit works. There is no other possible spring for that
enthusiasm. Take Him away from the bravest Missionary at his post,
— the lion-heart of Selwyn would break. St. Paul would sink and die
of homesickness " alone at Athens." If the ship labors in the sea, it is
because there is no call of faith to the Master. If the machine stops
or creaks, it is because the motive force is not let on. If this flower of
Lebanon languishes, it is because the roots are not in the heart of the
ground. If money fails, you may start a thousand conjectures as to
this defect or that in the plan, but you are looking for a disorder on the
surface which is deeper down at the core. You have undertaken the
amazing task of converting the world to Christ, by a selfish Christianity.
Know, O blind interpreter, that when men love Christ with right loyal
and joyous devotion they will speak of Him, run for Him, give to Him,
tell out His story; and of Missionary money and men there will be no
famine. God's rivers of life will be full of water. It is time for Chris
tians to think, amidst their perplexities, whether the difficulty is not
where they forget to look for it,— in their piety itself. We shall have
more money for the Master when we have more of the Master... The,

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world and the flesh and the devil have got the money; and they have
got not a little of it in the hands of baptized men and women. It will
come out when they believe with all their might in Him by Whom that
" world " was overcome, Who transfigured the " flesh " into a living tem
ple, and Who by putting Satan behind Him drew to Him the ministry of
angels., How much of the present Christ, so much Missionary Strength.
And, my dear friends, this law is personal as well as universal, press
ing the individual conscience. The end of all our exertions is in
crease of life. But no man liveth to himself. Be the disciple as his
Lord ! You, the one member, can, no more than the whole body, live
in Christ without giving yourself, and of that which feeds and delights
yourself, for Christ. " He that loveth his life shall lose it." Freewill
offerings on Christ's altar of that which costs us something, constant
as His covenants are, uniform as His sun and seasons are, cheerful like
the songs of His harvests, regular and ordered like all the operations of
His Kingdom; O how long and how patiently, on this fruitful land,
Christ has waited for this due tribute at His feet, that He might turn it
to the glory of His crown ! Whenever we see these comings in of His ,
tithes we shall see the goings forth of His power.
In both the Creeds the article of the Catholic Church has, going
directly before it, the article of the Holy Ghost. Ages of faith in the
Spirit are ages of spiritual victory. The Spirit who inspires the body
breathes on the individual heart. It is well to mend and oil the wheels-
but into them let the living creatures come, on their wings ! We had
better not be too punctilious about methods, rules, by-laws, if we can
only get the blowing of the north wind, and the awakening of the
Spring-time. Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty. God
will forgive us if in our self-forgetting eagerness to save our brothers
and build wide our Father's House, we make here or there a mistake, or
overlook some prudent caution. When the great obelisk, brought down
the Mediterranean from Egypt, was erected by Fontana in the square
of St. Peter's in 1586, it was determined to make that gigantic under
taking an illustration of the knowledge and resources of the capital of
the world, in the time of Sixtus V. A student on the spot has painted
the scene in words. I recall the description imperfectly. The tackle
was arranged, the hands were picked and spotted ; every precaution
was taken for the difficult and perilous work. So necessary was silence
deemed, to prevent a panic and a crash, that it was agreed that whoever
should utter a loud word should be struck dead. As the majestic
monolith swung up on its end, the populace closed in, and the area was
crowded -to its base. Slowly the huge monument of Egyptian toil and
sweat rose— five degrees, ten, fifteen, twenty. Suddenly there are signs
of faltering and a pause. No voice speaks under the penalty of death:

i5
It moves again under the pulleys to the forty-third degree, and stops.
The hempen cables begin to stretch and give. The engineer' trembles;
the masons look at one another, and watch in despair the hanging mass
of stone. Which way- will it fall ? There was silence everywhere.
Tiptoe, on a post, in a jacket of homespun, his figure strained, and his
face like a prophet's, stood a workman of the people. From his lips,
over that breathless mass of men, rang a clear cry: "Wet the ropes! "
Fro.m the chief engineer and his band of servants that lawless shout
had instant obedience. Water was dashed on the cables; they bit
fiercely at the granite spar ; the windlasses were manned again; the Obe
lisk rose to its place, and took its stand for centuries. Possibly God
wants in this Church, just now, the fiery inspiration of uncalculating
zeal and a fearless faith more than mathematical proportions or a fault
lessly adjusted scheme. All honor to the regulation of the ropes; but
if they are dry and weak, and give, he will be pardoned who pours over
them living and saving water. " It shall come to pass in the last days,
saith God, I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh. Your young men
shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; and I will show
wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath. And whoso
ever shall call oft the Name of the Lord shall be saved."
Finally, dear friends, if there is to be power in our Missions there
must be no reckoning of Rewards. Our Lord's work, like all heroic and
glorious work, is to be done because it is constrained by the love that
worketh in us, which is power from on high. The messenger is to think
more of what he bears out, and of Him Who sends him, than of the num
ber of sheaves brought back. Let us take care how we try to forestall
the returns of the reapers, who are the angels, by the arithmetic of a
ledger. Songs " Sung of those who spread the treasures
In the holy Gospel shrined,"
are not modulated by a tabular view. The glad tidings, the ascension
command and gift, the intercessions round thousands of altars, the noble
army going before and coming after, the present and everlasting Leader,
these we have already and everywhere ; and for this half lighted
world they are enough. The new heavens and the new earth, and the
multitude that no man can number, by and by ! The joy of the Lord
be the strength of the workmen ! And the reign of His righteousness,
from the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same, will be your
" rest," when the work is done.
" Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all
that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto
Him be glory in the Church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world
without end ! " Amen.

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