MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

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MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

BY WILLIAM OWEN CARVER, M.A., Th.D.

PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE RELIGION AND MISSIONS

IN THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST THEOLOGICAL

SEMINARY, AUTHOR OF "MISSIONS

IN THE PLAN OF THE

ages", ETC.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1910

Jll rights reserved

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COPTKIGHT, igio

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published December, 191a

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NfltiDooU i^reaa : Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PACK

CHAPTER I Outlook on the Situation 3

CHAPTER n Religion in History 33

CHAPTER HI The Missionary History of Christianity ... 49

CHAPTER IV Christian Missions and the New Era in the World 74

, CHAPTER V The Present Advantage of Missions . . . -97

CHAPTER VI May Christianity Supplant Other Religions? . . 119 '-

CHAPTER VII Missions' and the Evolution of Religion , . . 146

CHAPTER VIII Christianity and the Future of Religion . . . 174

CHAPTER IX Missions as AflFected by Practical Conditions of

Christianity 199

CHAPTER X Missions and the TJieological Foundations . . 224

CHAPTER XI Modern Thought and the Essential Spirit of Christianity 261

CHAPTER XII The Modern Aim and Method of Missions . . 285

V

PREFACE

Every institution and activity of Christianity finds itself challengfed at the bar of modern thought. The gflory of this ag^e is its skepticism which is the natural outcome of its extensive discoveries. It is not to be taken for g^ranted that modern thought is always right and that all that is not modern must either give place to what is new or adjust itself to it. The adjustment must often be made from the other side. A new railway compels many established things to make way for it, but some of the mountains and the rivers compel the new railway to take them into account, and adjust itself to their permanence. Yet our life and work are in the modern world and it is our business at least to seek to understand the relations of whatever we deem worth while to the spirit and tendencies of our times. It is hoped that the following pages may contribute somewhat to defining the relations of the missionary enterprise of the Church to the thought of the time in which we live.

July, 1910

MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

I

THE TERMS OF THE CHALLENGE

CHAPTER I

OUTLOOK ON THE SITUATION

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Christian Church found itself facing the most marvelous opportunity in its history for extending its faith to cover the entire earth. The multitudes of its adherents, the enormous wealth in their hands, and the open condition of all the world for interchange of thought and travel were met by a spirit of inquiry and an eagerness to learn on the part of all the backward nations of the world. It seemed as if everything was favorable for that which has been, in its best elements, the constant purpose of Christianity from the days of Christ. But at the moment when the call to victorious con- quest is sounding in her ears the Church meets a challenge from the current thought of the time, not only of her right to bring all the world to the acceptance of her faith, but also, from many quar- ters, of her own right to be. Having answered all the arguments of ignorance the missionaries find themselves facing an array of questions from learning.

3

/t/ ^J'ISSJlOI^S . AN1> MODERN THOUGHT

William Carey forced upon Protestant Christian- ity the continuous facing of the question: "Is not the command given to the apostles to teach all nations obligatory on all succeeding ministers to the end of the world, seeing that the accompanying promise was of equal extent?" He also framed the answer for Protestantism for a century, in "An Inquiry into the Obligation of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen; in which the Religious State of the Different Nations of the World, the Success of Former Undertakings, and the Practicability of Further Undertakings, are considered." The question was not raised by him for the first time, but had been vigorously and per- sistently urged by able advocates, and foreign mission work had long been carried on, sufficiently at least to prove its practicability and value. So much Carey was glad to recognize and use as an argu- ment for English Christians to undertake the work.

From his day, English Christians had put their hand to the plow that was to cultivate all the fields of the earth. But the churches were slow to com- mit themselves to the task. After the work had been carried on by voluntary societies, from 1824 the various churches gradually committed them- selves organically to the work until it came to be

OUTLOOK ON THE SITUATION 5

taken for granted that this is a business of the Church.

Beginning with 1892, we have been celebrating missionary centennials in Great Britain, and, since 1906, in America. In connection with these centen- nials, there has been a great increase of interest in missions, and for a time gratifying advances in their support. There has grown up a very exten- sive missionary literature; history, biography, dis- cussions of theory, narratives, stories, statistics, besides marked improvement and enlargement in the magazine literature of missions.

Even with all this, there has been a distinct feel- ing of unrest and uncertainty that has not been met by all the output of books and periodicals. For a little more than a decade, there has been arising in one form or another a questioning of the whoje, principle of foreign missions. This questioning has arisen in part from a skepticism from without, that cared little, if anything, for the missionary work; but partly also from within, on the part of men deeply devoted to the enterprise, but with a feeling that new conditions call for a questioning of the motives, methods and aims of this work. This voicing has been sometimes in the secular press, where the subject has usually been treated

6 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

superficially ; partly in some of the general scholarly magazines, for example the Hibbert Journal and the American Journal of Theology ; partly in prom- inent addresses at annual missionary assemblies; and partly in addresses and discussions published in the missionary magazines and elsewhere. Pro- fessor W. N. Clarke, in his "Study of Christian Missions," in 1900, called for a new motive in mis- sions; in 1905, Rev. Robert A. Hume, after lectur- ing on the subject in several prominent theological schools of the United States, published a study of "Missions from the Modern View;" and in 1908, Dr. Dennis came forward with "A New Horoscope of Missions." The Rev. R. Wardlaw Thompson, D. D., took for the subject of his annual presidential address before the "Congregational Union of Eng- land and Wales," 1908, "The Message, the Task, the Power." These discussions, like many others besides, seek to find for the missionary enterprise a firm footing in modern life and thought. The late Charles Cuthbert Hall, D.D., became in the latter years of his fruitful life, the apostle of the mission- ary idea in its freest and fullest sense as the true spirit of all that is true in what we are so proudly calling the modern world. His apostleship finds expression chiefly in his "Christ and the Eastern

OUTLOOK ON THE SITUATION 7

Soul," and "Christ and the Human Race," wherein he undertakes to interpret "the attitude of Jesus Christ toward foreign races and religions." ^

Such works show clearly both that there is a feel- ing of need for fresh study of the grounds of the foreign mission work and that some serious study is already devoted to these subjects. ,^

In England the situation is more serious than in America. The demands of the older British socie- ties, with their more extensive work, are more urgent, if possible, than in America, and the pres- sure of skepticism is more keenly felt. The relig- ious and social conditions in Great Britain are like- wise more pressing and divert attention from the world-wide effort as they do not yet in America. Ten years ago America was feeling a relative lack of concern for foreign missions, on account of various conditions prevailing in the latter years of the nineteenth century. From this there has been a large measure of recovery. At that time England was making rapid advances and the outlook seemed bright, while now there is a relative slackening of interest in that country. We cannot enter into the details of the sources of the problem in the different countries, where there are peculiarities. It will be sufficient if we inquire into the nature of the ques-

8 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

tion and the common conditions that have given rise to it, thus getting before us definitely the ques- tion that faces our missionary task to-day.

We constantly meet the sentiment that modern thinking is radically different from that of a cen- tury ago in almost all respects, so that "the modern world," "modern thought," "modern life," "modem learning," are constantly asserting their presence, their importance, their distinction from former w^ays of thinking, knowing and living. We have come to know much that was formerly not known and to recognize limitations upon our knowledge formerly not recognized. We are proud of our knowledge and of our agnosticism, of our science and of our nescience. The inductive method of learning, the evolutionary interpretation of all growth, the scien- tific and historical tests of all knowledge, the practical demands of all life; these are supposed to mark us as a peculiar people, and our age as a new age, different from all that has been.

Truly the nineteenth century was a century of marvels. It seems to have destroyed pretty much all that it found in the world. It was an icono- clastic century. It not only destroyed the scientific theories inherited from the sixteenth century, but destroyed and rebuilt its own theories until it came

OUTLOOK ON THE SITUATION 9

to be a maxim of science that no book more than ten years old is worth shelf-room. Philosophy found itself in the grasp of a new spirit, took the wings of imaginative logic, and reached wonderful heights of speculation concerning the Absolute. But just when it seemed to be perched upon the summit of perfection it dropped to ruin, and the last half of the century knew only forms of eclecti- cism. With the turn into the new century we find philosophic thought under the lead of a new con- ception, calling itself "Pragmatism," and ''Human- ism," which is, after all, the negation of philosophy in the true sense, and only an effort to make man content with a theory comprehending human life and the present order, and to stop with that. To be sure, this is leading the way to a philosophy which will base itself on the spiritual experiences of the soul, but we are still without a philosophy.

In religion we have found the same process of question, negation, agnosticism, enlargement. The- ology has largely gone to pieces. We have had numerous celebrations of its death, some joyous celebrations of the passing of dogma, but with not a few tearful mourners about the bier of the departed. We have had also many who still believed that the body was alive and adored it as of old.

10 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

while others would galvanize it back into a sem- blance of life. We have had many honest toilers at the task of theological reconstruction. But we face the fact that theology has suffered a very serious shock from which up to the moment it has not recovered, and it is clearly evident that it can no more live the old life. When it shall live again, it will be a new life from the dead.

We had inherited from the Reformation the unquestioning conviction that "the Bible, the Bible alone, [is] the religion of Protestants," and there could be no general question of the "seat of authority in religion." But the last century planted a great question mark before this belief, and we are still struggling in the effort to remove it. So far it sticks fast. Most men have still been sure that there was — that there ever is — if not a seat, at least a scepter, of authority in religion; for they could not get away from it. But among those who still feel and recognize the fact of authority, there is wide diversity of opinion concerning its location, among half a dozen suggested sites. That there is some indication of emergence from the confusion of thought on this subject is cause for congratula- tion, but we cannot yet see that there is any definite hope of agreement. What the place of the Bible

OUTLOOK ON THE SITUATION II

is in our Christianity, what the nature of its author- ity, even what its contents, are for very many open questions.

A century ago Christianity was generally looked upon as a fixed set of dogmas with certain definite institutions. There were disputes among the various sects of Protestantism about some of the dogmas, and there was strife as to the correct form of the institutions. But the day of polemic war- fare over essentials of the Reformation faith lay in the past. While there was no little strife and no little bitterness concerning ordinances and institu- tions, there was little question as to the vital and permanent value of these, and in most of the denom- inations various items of polity or practice were so prominently stressed as to give character to the denominational integrity and position. . —

So far as the obligation to Christianize the world was accepted, the content and nature of its mission were generally agreed to be to carry a certain body of doctrines and forms into so much of the world as Christianity might claim. That this work was to seek the redemption of such as were reached by the Gospel was clear enough. But there is not much evidence that Christians generally had in mind introducing the force of Christianity as a

12 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

redemptive factor in the total life of humanity, with the goal a redeemed race. That idea belongs to the developing conceptions of race, society, history and religion. Christianity is now conceived as liv- ing rather than established, as growing rather than fixed, and, by consequence, capable of almost indef- inite adaptation to environment. A century of effort, in connection with many other forces at work, shows that European and American Chris- tians must, in some measure, modify their con- ceptions of the Faith. By various influences, we have been driven to an effort to ascertain what is "primitive Christianity," ''the Christianity of Christ," ''original Christianity," "ApostoHc Chris- tianity," all of which means that we are driven to \ seek "essential Christianity." We seek the nature / of the faith and force that have produced his- / toric Christianity by reaction of its spirit on the / environments of the centuries. If we can determine I that, then we know what is the function of the \ missionary in our own, and in all, times. For it is \ to proclaim that faith and free that force in all lenvironments of the given generation and thus to allow them to work out the character of the institu- tions of Christianity under the laws of adaptation, conformity, and conformation. Some are in dread

OUTLOOK ON THE SITUATION 1 3

of the principles of adaptation and conformity, unwilling to admit that the forms of Christianity are properly subject to these laws; while other some fail to recognize and to insist on the law of con- formation. Jesus Christ was himself the product of personality reacting on environment. He was not exactly the same that He would have been in any other time and place in history. That is why He came "in the fullness of the times." His relig- ion is for all times, and is subject to the laws that operated in the life of its Founder. His person- ality could not be other than it was, and no environ- ment was allowed to vitiate that, however much it might mar or modify His form. So of the faith of the Savior: if we know its essential character and set that freely and fairly in any environment, we shall have to allow it to produce the form that its character will effect in the given environment. This change in the way of conceiving the nature and the task of Christianity is part of the newness of the thought of our time.

The changed conception of the nature of God and of His relation to the world and to humanity has cooperated with the conception of religious evolution in the race to discredit the notion that men who "die out of Christ" are doomed to death

14 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

eternal/) It remains true that no satisfactory expla- ^naxTon has been offered how any other fate can I await men who do not attain unto salvation through \ the Gospel. Still, many men cannot believe in V^od — the God whom they know in experience, and think they know in the processes of nature and history — and believe that any creature of God shall be forever in sin or in misery. For a quarter of a century we have been facing- with growing urgency, j the question : Have we a sufficient motive for mis- I sions if not to rescue men from eternal doom ? ^'^e must seek to answer the problem, whether 1:he new way of thinking of religions alters the duty of the Christian and the destiny of Christianity. Fifty years ago it was assumed that Christianity was to supplant all other religions. That claim is now ridiculed by scientific students of religion, who tell us that the circumstances of race and place, of climatic, social, political and cultural conditions, determine the character and form which religion will take, with the added stimulation of personal leadership. So that we must now determine how far it is our right and duty to make Christianity part bf the environment, or even to make it the determin- ing element in the direction of the religious spirft in humanity. The foreign mission enterprise has

OUTLOOK ON THE SITUATION 1 5

had to face the question of its right of existence before the sciences of Comparative Religion, the History of Religion and the Philosophy of Religion. We have said that our thought of God and th(! world have changed. There is not uniformity of view, but the dominant idea of our time stresses the immanence of God, His omnipresent activity. On that account, but in a widely different sense, we come to conceive, as definitely as did the ancient Hebrews, that all things that come to pass are God's doings. That raises a further question for mis- sions. The ever-present, all-embracing God is as truly making the religions of India and the faiths of China as He is the doctrines and life of Christen- dom. Shall we therefore interfere? Have we any right to interfere? Or, having the right, have we the imperative obligation? Beyond doubt, this form of thinking affects the depth of the sense of sin, tending to make it transitory and functional rather than essential and deadly; affects the sense of human responsibility, enwrapping all in a vague fatalism; affects the iijiperious importance of pro- claiming the Gospel, since all-enveloping love is surrounding all men and moving — if slowly, still surely — to the final goal of ill, in the universal good. That such inferences are. superficial and not involved

l6 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

in the idea of the omnipresent immanence of the holy Father, and that refuge from responsibility, and lapsing into lethargy on account of this idea are unworthy this conception of God and delay the goal of the race ought to become evident in the study of the missionary duty.

There have come about two great changes in science, that have serious significance for religion: first, in the conception of nature prevalent in the natural sciences; and second; in the place which the physical sciences hold in the culture and thought of the time. It is only necessary to call attention to the place occupied by the sciences in the curricula of colleges to indicate the changed position of science in modern culture. The one stronghold of the Humanities, as sufficient for the culture of the scholar, • that stands out prominently before the world is Oxford; and the warfare which is being waged to maintain the historic position of this great seat of learning is significant of the new order — the one shining exception that proves emphatically the rule. Science holds first place in the education of the day. In American colleges the ancient languages are held at a discount, and in Germany the same tendency is evident enough. The circle of the sciences has grown so extensive that they

OUTLOOK ON THE SITUATION \J

attract attention for very magnitude. They touch practical life so powerfully and so universally that they not only clamor for recognition, they fill the horizon and they tend to materialize our life; and this materialization of life, with its cares, its com- forts, its luxuries and striving after luxuries touches seriously in many ways the idealism of the mission- ary cause and the practical working of missions from the home base, as well as in the field of mis- sionary activity.

The most serious aspect of science for Chris- tian missions is the encroachment of the scientific field on that of philosophy, involving the effort to apply the principle of exclusion to all that does not fall within the field of scientific investiga- tion and classification. Sir Oliver Lodge is good authority for the statement of the attitude of many scientists, when he says, "that orthodox modern science shows us a self-contained and self-sufiicient universe, not in touch with anything beyond itself — the general trend and outline of it known ; noth- ing supernatural or miraculous, no intervention of beings other than ourselves, being conceived pos- sible."^ Such an attitude reacts powerfully against Christian missions. Applied in history, it assails

* Science and Immortality.

2

l8 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

the historical foundations of Christianity, in the per- son and Hfe of Jesus and of the early Church. The effort has been made by the Ritschlian Theology to free Christianity from dependence on scientific demonstration of historic facts, and this effort has largely succeeded with many, enabling them illogic- ally to get a new grip on a slipping faith. But the same position is otherwise used to destroy the faith of many more, who had not before seen the situa- tion in this light. In any case, the Christian is sup- posed by many to be left without a sure message, with no sufficient support for his Gospel, with no right to expect the Spirit of God to bear witness with the Gospel, since prayer and all forms of supernatural activity are excluded. Indeed, all reality is excluded from the necessary foundations of knowledge and faith alike. It amoimts to an effort to free religion from dependence on both science and philosophy. In a sense, religion has this freedom, for it is not practically dependent on either or both of these, nor subordinate to them. It is just the fault of certain scientists and phil- osophers that they think of religion as subordinate. Religion may exist without science and without philosophy. In most men it does so exist, but it does not long live in the man for whom science and

OUTLOOK ON THE SITUATION I9

philosophy have destroyed the reahty of all values by a mistaken play upon the term "value-judgment." A value- judgment whose value arises wholly from a subjective source and contains nothing more than a subjective concept is valueless for religion, and can have no propaganda, for it cannot evidence itself in another consciousness. Religion is pecu- liarly founded on the value- judgment in the sense of judgments of eternal value, in the object and the objects of religion. If Christianity is cut off wholly from its historical facts by inexorable negations of a science which demands physical demonstration in a moral realm, and which denies the supernatural on the basis of an assumed circuit of the natural, that is closed and impenetrable; or if Christianity is denied natural explanation by a philosophy that proceeds upon the assumption of the unknowable- ness of the supernatural, then indeed is Christianity cut off from projecting itself into the life of human- ity as a history-producing force, and is cut off from the rational life of man, since man has thus already irrationally excluded religion from his life.

It will appear upon reflection on the terms of this challenge of missions that the question of the val- idity, the right, the continuity of Christian missions is a question of the very existence of Christianity.

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If Christianity has any place in the life of man at all, it has place in the life of mankind. Certainly early Christianity contemplated "a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness" as the outcome of its proclamation. It must have such a destiny, or it will cease to be. Our inquiry is thus seen really to involve the whole field of Christian apologetics. A hundred years of study and practice of the duty of foreign missions have made clear to modern Christian thought that universalism lies in the heart of Christianity. It will not be possible to cover, in this volume, the whole field of apologetics and to justify Christianity in the face of all forms of attack and conflict arising from the various fields of current criticism, thought, and ideals. It is hoped to show in several directions, most antagonistic to the conquering spirit of Christianity, that there is no necessary antagonism between any established facts or any accepted principles of life and learning in our day and the missionary contention that "the Glad Tidings of the Kingdom shall be preached among all nations." One hopes to suggest that there is rather encouragement for the Christian to accept the authority, value and spirit of his mission, and that there is no reason to fear the outcome of the work which was so well begun in the last century.

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The difficulties confronting us might be serious and discouraging but for two facts : first, that there are no fundamentally new objections now urged against the missionary enterprise ; and second, that missionaries and their supporters at home are not wholly unprepared for the new order. This new order has come with startling suddenness, but not without observation. There has been some little time for adjustment to the new way of looking at things. And missions and missionaries have had so large a share in producing the new order that they have considerable acquaintance and sympathy with it.

Another element of especial encouragement is that there is much enthusiastic interest, and widely prevalent throughout the Christian world, in the missionary cause. And this enthusiasm has its sources deep in extensive instruction and culture in the history and methods of missions. There are very many and very convincing proofs of the vital- ity of our religion and of its abiding interest in its universal enterprise. God is stretching forth the scepter of His strength out of Zion and calling upon His King to rule in the midst of His enemies. The Lord's people make a holy array of freewill offer- ings in the day of His power. The youth are to

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the Lord like dew out of the womb of the morning of the day of His triumph.^ The very things that make us sometimes so much afraid are in great measure the result of Christianity outgrowing its forms and breaking its fetters for the freedom of its world task. Along with the spirit of rational- ism, there is a spirit of revival, more or less mani- fest, in all parts of the world. It is a form of revival such as we are unaccustomed to in the records of the more recent past. We are in the habit of thinking of revival as primarily a process of adding converts to the church. In many parts of America this feature is present in the current revival, but in other places it is not so much so. In Korea multiplication marks the work of the Spirit, and in some parts of India, while from South America come accounts of the same sort. In Eng- land, apart from the remarkable Welsh revival, the efficacy of which some have doubted, so far from having additions in great numbers, the churches have in recent years found themselves unable to hold their own numerically. Does it seem useless to talk of revival already at work in a Church that seems barren? At any rate, there is serious and searching questioning of the condition, and that is ^Cf. Psalm no.

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itself a mark of revival. The condition in England is, in an extreme way, characteristic of the spiritual awakening in other parts of the world. It is a moral awakening, a new sense of the responsibility of the Church — of Christians, perhaps we should say — for the life of the nation, for the salvation of society, for the condition of the world. In America it manifests itself most significantly in civic reforms, in widespread awakening of public conscience, in ethical devotion to the needs and wrongs of chil- dren, of prisoners, and of the depraved and outcast. In England there has been rising a consciousness of the extent of Christian responsibility for social evils of all sorts. There are more serious efforts than ever before, in the established Church and the free Churches, to bring Christianity vitally to bear upon the profound problems that press for solution. Even where no way yet appears out of the diffi- culties there is the pressure of the difficulties upon the Christian conscience, such as only a deep sense of God and a profound yearning of the spirit of brotherhood can account for.

In international relations, with all the deceit and indirection that remain, there is a new diplomacy of frankness and honor, and in the Christian con- science there is an almost universal sense of shame

24 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

and mortification that no way yet appears for escape from the cruel speed with which feverish fear and unholy ambition are arming the interna- tional jealousies. Underneath it all the religious conscience is stirred by the Christ spirit, and the Christian heart prays for deliverance.

It is this ethical sense, this yearning for practical religion, this deepening sense of the bonds that unite all into one social community, that characterizes the new manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the people of God. Confession of sin, devotion to righteousness, yearning for the realization of the Kingdom are some of the marks of this revival in Japan and India, as well as of the notable work of grace in Manchuria and in China. Only let these fundamental effects of the Spirit continue and multitudes of new disciples will be won to Christ.

For evidences of deep and general interest in the direct work of missions, let us begin with reference to the Ecumenical Conference in Edinburgh in 1910. The great significance of this Conference is that it proposes to deal with the question of Christianizing the world as a practical undertaking, and to apply to the problem the best wisdom of men of all lands and creeds under the lead of the Spirit of God. The first such Conference, in 1888, was full

OUTLOOK ON THE SITUATION 25

of the Spirit of extending the Gospel message to all the nations, but was not stirred with any expectation of the speedy accomplishment of this result. In that of 1900 the spirit of world conquest was strong. There was recounting and surveying of the forces engaged, and some estimate of forces available. Now, so have faith and endeavor grown, and so has consecrated determination laid hold on the Church, we are discussing in systematic fashion ten great questions intended to embrace the whole problem of how immediately to press our advance so that Christ may be brought home to the needs and lives of all mankind. We omit, or greatly subordinate, the fea- ture of popular exhortation, while the main object is statesmanlike deliberation on the methods for doing the work to which we feel absolutely committed. To this end carefully selected commissions have been engaged for months in the study of these ten phases of the problem, so as to bring matured thought and suggestion to the Conference. These deliberations have occupied the attention of some two hundred men, selected from mission boards, professional chairs, and business offices. That so many men of highest ability and foremost rank are found ready to give time and trained thought to such questions is a new thing in modern missions.

26 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

In theological schools and seminaries, in universi- ties and colleges, there have been established lec- ture courses, and, in some cases, professorships in missions, which are giving systematic and scientific instruction to thousands of students and helping to create a new line of missionary literature. In con- nection with the University of Chicago, "the Bar- rows Lectureship," on "the Haskell Foundation," sends the most competent Christian students of relig- ion to lecture in India and other parts of the East. These lectures by such men as Drs. Barrows and Hall, from the United States, and Principal Fair- bairn, from England, have awakened the greatest enthusiasm in the East, where thousands heard them eagerly as they faithfully presented the appeal of Christianity to the Eastern mind. A commis- sion representing Chicago University has just completed a year in extended personal investigation of conditions in China with reference to some edu- cational plans for that empire. The Yale Professor of Missions is required, by the terms of the founda- tion, to spend one third of his time on the mission fields. The world journeys of Mr. Mott, head of the Student Volunteer Movement, and of other missionary leaders, are quickening the interest and enlightening the enthusiasm for missions on both

OUTLOOK ON THE SITUATION TTJ

continents. In connection with their missions, a work of grace has been inaugurated in the Uni- versities of the East which is fraught with incal- culable promise. The various movements of the Young Men's Christian Association, Christian Endeavor and other organizations, in behalf of the youth of the East, have welded bonds of humanity and opened opportunities of divine blessing among the younger generations in all the earth. Young men are seeing visions, while old men are dreaming dreams of youth and service.

One of the most notable facts of Christian history is the vigorous enthusiasm of the Student Volunteer Movement, with its achievements in recruiting the missionary forces. Its mission study courses in colleges and universities engage twenty-five thou- sand students. Similar courses are conducted under the guidance of the women's boards and young peo- ple's organizations. Even the children are now being carefully organized and taught in the interests of this work.

Numerous laymen of America and Canada, as well as from Europe, made the journey to Shanghai to attend the Morrison Centennial and to study Eastern conditions with a view to mission work. Such travels are not new with British laymen, who

28 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

have throughout the course of missions employed occasions of residence and travel in mission lands for gaining knowledge which was in turn used to enlighten and arouse their Christian countrymen at home. Now ''the Laymen's Movement" has been inaugurated and is gathering momentum in America, has made a beginning in Great Britain, and gives promise of working a revolution in the financial support and business direction of the missionary enterprise. Already there are enormously increased gifts for this cause. The recovery is marked from the relative indifference to missions of a few years ago. The amounts contributed for the work of the societies for foreign missions by the whole of Protestantism are still pitably small in comparison with the resources of Christian men and women, and the immeasurable demands of the mission fields ; but they have steadily increased at the average rate of half a million dollars annually for the last ten years. The number of missionaries engaged in the work has also steadily grown, the annual increase being about five hundred, and that, too, in the face of increasingly rigid requirements in the qualifica- tions for appointees.

Such and so much practical proof of the great and growing interest of Christianity in the

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world's Christianization shows that the spirit of missions is aHve and active. And every informed reader will know that it has been possible here to mention only a few of the more significant manifes- tations of this spirit. It is full of augury for the future. It is a source for inspiration and hope for all who believe in the love of God, the power of Jesus Christ, and the redeemableness of the race.

II

THE CHALLENGE IN THE LIGHT OF HISTORY

CHAPTER II

RELIGION IN HISTORY

Human history is the record of the development of individual personality in self-consciousness and in the apprehension of, and response to, relation- ships. Upon this turn all forms of social evolution, from instinctive tribal gregariousness, enforced by the influences of family origin and the struggle for existence in an unconquered environment, up to the highest civilization, with the most perfect social organism shaping its environment by voluntary cooperation and enlightened mastery, such as is coming into the prophetic imagination of construc- tive students of sociology. Is there any formative principle in human history which lies deep in the midst of all the forces at work in each generation of every place and people? On the material side the love for life and the demand for food to sustain the forces and to support the functions of life will be found fundamental and so universal. But no such principle can account for the development Of soul functions and aspirations. It is in the sphere of aspirations to rise above the animal needs and 3 33

34 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

the creature comforts that we must seek the civiliz- ing and elevating forces. And here it is not a better, but the best, that constitutes the call to man which leads onward and upward in social evolution. This call to the highest is the deepest impulse, and becomes the formative principle, in man's develop- ment. This call is religious. It involves the appre- hension of the highest personal relationships and the progressive entrance into these relationships, stopping not short of fellowship with the Infinite Source of All.

"Every great religion has produced a civiliza- tion;" and no great civilization has been produced in which religion was not the highest motive. Nor has any civilization been able long to survive the decay of the religious consciousness, or even the removal of the religious sense from its central position in the civilization. The aim of the study of history is the better to guide mankind in making history. No lesson is more clear and emphatic than that the cultivation of religion and development of and devotion to religion is the most direct line for the promotion of the advance of the race. If it shall appear that Christianity is the highest religion and at the same time adaptable to all grades of human progress, then it will be clear that all who

RELIGION IN HISTORY 35

would see the advance of the race should seek to promote the extension of the Christian faith. If Christian civilizations are the highest, the most ethical, the most spiritual, and if Christianity can reproduce its civilization in all races, with the ] modifications inherent in racial characteristics, then j

it should have a chance to do this in the freest and j

fullest manner.

One of the lessons of history in the branch of anthropology is the oneness of the human race, the unity of humanity; a lesson of course supported by all other lines of anthropological study. Unity of origin, oneness of nature, a common tendency, signify a common destiny. History discloses the one race pursuing the course of its development in detached fragments without mutual knowledge or sympathy and without cooperation or helpfulness among the different sections. The advance of the race towards its destiny demands facilities for the interaction of the different parts of the race. What- ever each division in its segregation has been able to develop that can contribute toward the common end must become the common possession of all, and the defects and limitations of isolated development must be corrected and supplied by a universal fel- lowship. It may well enough be that the general

36 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

advance of the race has been promoted by the tem- porary sectional development, where each tribe and people, so to say, specializes in the promotion of characteristic ideas and cultures that would in the end serve the need of the whole. Among the forces that have been bringing the races into conscious cooperation missions have promoted the highest ends of development. That is not to say that com- merce and culture have had no place in this process. They have. But is it not commerce that has brought on most of our wars; and are we not still constantly waging commercial warfares, that usually employ tariffs and embargos on trade, trusts and unions rather than the more crude and direct forces of battleship and cannon, but holding these ever in menacing reserve? Is there not an industrial war- fare always on? Even in those religious wars, which so many are constantly bringing forward to embarrass the claims of Christianity to be the great factor for realizing the brotherhood of man and the peace of the race, is it not true that the real causa belli has usually been political and commercial, while the promoters won the support and inspired the zeal of the masses who must do the fighting, with a religious pretext? Does not Christianity most of all restrain the tendencies of this warfare and pro-

RELIGION IN HISTORY 37

mote the sense of the brotherhood of man and the federation of the world?

In the science of anthropology the unity of the race means nothing for the advance of the race until the religious impulse awakens the emotions and stirs the will to use man's knowledge for the good of humanity. All our increasing knowledge of the oneness of humanity only provides materials and gives occasions for active agency in the promotion of the practical oneness of human brotherhood. The agent in this work is essentially religious. In the commercial unity of the world the economic impulse is selfish, national, the servant of caste and class against the mass and the race until touched and modified, sanctified, constrained and restrained by the impulse and motive of religion.

If, now, we seek this impulse in its greatest strength, in the permanence and power of its essence, attested by history, shall we not find it inherent in Christianity alone ? To be sure one finds in Buddh- ism a certain extensive altruism struggling toward universalism ; but altruism in Buddhism has never yet been able to free itself from the more funda- mental selfishness. The true Buddhist ever cultivates brotherhood as a help on his own way to Nirvana. In some of the greatest Stoics we find recognition

38 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

that the race is one and that nothing human can be foreign to the ethical man ; yet Stoicism has always lacked vital impulse to project itself into the life of humanity. It has ever been a philosophy of life rather than a vital force, a personal philosophy rather than a social power. In Confucianism we find a recognition that one should restrain himself from wronging another, but no conviction that can lead to the devotion of one's self to the good of all men. In no religion or ethics do we find positive brotherliness inherent in the system and funda- mentally essential until we come to Christianity. Elsewhere this principle may be partially perceived. Elsewhere the individual may, by rising above his system, apprehend the great principle. If this principle is ultimate it must here and there rise into consciousness as every principle basal in human nature is bound to do. But if the principle is to become an active agency in the advancement of the race it must be found explicit and emphatic in a system wherein it is not secondary but of the very essence. It must be constantly pressed upon the consciousness of men and not be left to struggle into a mere relative importance in occasional examples. Christianity alone gives this emphasis to the principle of brotherhood, for Christianity

RELIGION IN HISTORY 39

alone recognizes that *'God made of one all the races to dwell upon the earth." Christianity knows from the start that all distinctions of race, religion, culture, sex, social position are but fragment-mak- ing walls that divide the one humanity; and so it goes forth with the evangel that proclaims God's plan, in Christ Jesus, to create out of the fragments "one new humanity," thus effecting universal peace.^ In no other religion is this even a prominent fea- ture, to say nothing of an insistent fundamental. All the tendencies to universal peace and common brotherhood of men are primarily the products of historical Christianity. Where currents in this direction seem not to be the product of historical Christianity they are of the same spirit; and while they show the aspiration of the human spirit they manifest the fitness of that spirit for Christianity, and constitute an irresistible call to the Christian spirit to go out and encourage this aspiration in man that it may come into full realization. The growth of this spirit among men helps Christianity see its own nature in clearer light, and its task in distincter relief, but it is the Christian spirit alone that brings to their destiny these scattered strivings of the human heart.

* Ephesians 2.

40 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

It may be truly said that the general course of history has been a preparation for Christianity. Paul's philosophy of history, indicated in Acts 17 and Romans 9-11, was the generalization of a great induction and the inspiration of a divine faith. We now have his word of prophecy made more sure in the longer development and the better interpreta- tion of history. If we may assume the presence of God in history at all, whether immanent or trans- cendent or both, then Paul is right in saying that "in Him we live and move and have our being;" that His presence is in all the ethnic developments of the race; that God's end in it all is that men might seek after Him and by finding Him, always so close to every one of them, they might find them- selves and come again into that unity which in the divine ideal they ever hold. Paul believes most fully in the need for redemption. For him men are sinners, lost until a Messianic atonement unites them to God. But this Messianic presence and power the Apostle does not limit to a single place and time and race in history. He says that there is no need to ascend to heaven in search of the Christ, nor yet to go down into the under world to bring him thence, for God's word of reconciliation is always near thee, even in thy mouth and heart, that

RELIGION IN HISTORY 4I

IS the word of faith which we preach.^ Paul's idea, then, is that history is the redemptive process of God in humanity. God's "plan of the ages which he laid down in Christ Jesus" having been revealed to men, it becomes the glory of men to fall in with that plan and further it. Having gotten the key to history man is placed in position to work as a force in history and so to advance its progress toward the destiny of the race. Paul conceived that the supreme method here lay in the preaching of the Gospel; and who that looks into history since Paul's day can question that this same Gospel has indeed proved the greatest factor in the progress of man from the day of Jesus until now ? We now know that the West had not advanced so far beyond the East prior to the time of Christ. We are able to see how Christianity laid hold on the ethical ideals of the prophets of Israel and made them, vitalized in Christ, the most powerful factor in determining the lines of development in the West. Since then the West has outrun the East.

But look again, and we shall see that Christ found the West either dead or decadent, even as the East was until within the last two centuries. In the West there were in the days of the Son of Man

^Romans 10.

42 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

three classes of peoples to be considered in this connection. Great civilizations and empires had been destroyed and were either wholly forgotten or remembered only in the halo of a historic glory. Egypt was wholly dead, and in recent years we are uncovering the remains of civilizations in Palestine and Egypt forgotten by history already in the times of the Christ. Next we find the remnants of the Grecian state, beautiful, symmetrical, poetic, artistic in the fragments even as the limbless torsos and armless Venuses still lure the artistic taste of the world. The beautiful, the true and the good of Greek civilization and culture trailed amid the ruins of the Greek state like clambering vines over ruined remnants of walls once great and beautiful in towering strength. Christianity built new forms of living strength and enduring grace, and trained thereon the vines of Grecian thought and life, and they now live and bear fruit through all the cen- turies. Rome was in the glory of the empire, which was itself a proclamation of man's failure to gov- ern himself, as he had up to that time come to be and to know himself. Democracy was so far gone that an empire held its place; and that democracy had never been more than the common equality within a class which supported itself upon a mass

RELIGION IN HISTORY 43

of humanity which it held to be fit but for slavery. In the midst of that empire did the Christ set up a new democracy and proclaim it universal and per- manent. The history of Europe, as we write and read it to-day, is the tracing of the democratization of the West.

In all central and northern Europe when Jesus came there roamed hordes of untamed barbarians, the raw material out of which nations were to be built. From Asia, too, in centuries to follow there would pour similar hordes into that mill of Southern Europe where the issue has proven that God was making over mankind by the infusion of a new faith and new forces which took their rise afresh in the Son of Man. It is not difficult for us to see how these people, not yet acquainted with the arts of civilization and the refinements of culture, were, by their migrations, having their feet turned into the way of peace and growth. We can see how from the ruin of the dead and dying races the ele- ments of worth were rescued; and how out of all this the nations of Europe were made, by processes that are slow when measured by the impatient thought of one little man, but processes that are rapid when compared with the ages that had gone before in slow-moving millenniums, processes that

44 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

may well befit "the God of patience." The West had demonstrated its incapacity to make itself in the likeness of any high ideals. This demonstration lay in part in the great masses of men with no ideals or aspirations, the heathen hordes that roamed so great a part of the earth. The proof lay in part in that the ideals of the best had proved abor- tive, partly because incomplete and mixed with so many baser ends, partly because the ideals them- selves were lost in the luxuries of success or in the disasters of thwarted aims. Jesus and his followers brought into this world the ideas and ideals of a spiritual kingdom. Here is the formative force that has brought the Western world to lead the race in its advance to its destiny. Among the nations of the West, it is no vain boast, but the discernment of obvious truth, that the nations that have gone highest and are most surely recognized as strongest and best are just those in which the religion of Christ has had its fullest interpretation and freest life. Nations have decayed and fallen in the West since Christianity came, and will no doubt do so yet again. These fallings of the peoples no less than their rise prove the truth that spiritual ideals, lofty aims, devotion to truth, unselfish giving of the things of life and light are the principles that make

RELIGION IN HISTORY 45

for permanent power and lasting life in nations. These are the ideals that gain their dominant force from Him who taught that life is gained by giving it in the service of God and humanity.

We may assume that Western civilization is superior to Eastern and that history has been more rapidly advancing in the West than in the East. Whatever theoretical admissions or claims may be made by the scholastic or the doctrinaire, the average Westerner makes no doubt that this is so and to the average Western Christian this appeal is made and this argument addressed. In any case, it is obvious enough that the East is borrowing heavily from the West, while the West finds far less to appropriate from the East. There need be no jealous denial that the East contributes to the West. It has given us much and has yet more that we shall re- quire. But the demonstration of fact confirms the opinion of pride, or the judgment of reason, that the West has outrun the East in the making of civiliza- tion. Now that we have come upon the era of in- terchange and commerce among all mankind, we must recognize that there is to be a leveling, either up or down, or partly both, of the civilizations of the nations. The interaction of ideas and forces will effect this inevitably. If we have advanced beyond

46 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

our fellows on the other side of the world we must actively and vigorously contribute to their speedy elevation or find ourselves falling to an equality with their standards. The world's standards will more and more tend to parity and uniformity.

It will no longer do to say, as has sometimes been said, that Christianity is not the creator but the creature of Western civilization. Christianity is the religion of the West partly because of its adaptation to the mind of the West, for in the beginning it had the same opportunity to become the religion of the East, except for the movement of all things toward Rome. This exception and what was involved in it did make the chance less and the con- ditions of the East to-day call for a new testing of the power of Christianity to enter vitally and sav- ingly into its life.

If Christianity has made the West it ought to have a chance to make all the world. If Chris- tianity is the religion that best suits the growing ideas and the inspiring ideals of the West we ought to be ready enough to admit that the East is at least as far along in development as were our ancestors when Christianity was found to be the religion for our culture. It will not do to say, either, that Chris- tianity is suited only for certain classes of minds,

RELIGION IN HISTORY 47

certain types of character. Two answers stand ready to refute any such claim. The first is the now emphasized unity of mankind. In essential and fundamental character man is ever the same. He never outgrows nor sinks below his essential nature, an essential religion will ever meet his needs under all degrees of civilization. The forms of theology and worship may differ, the clearness and fulness of religious concepts will vary and grow; but to the fundamentals of Christian faith the human mind and heart will ever respond. Chris- tianity can be the religion of humanity, or else we are not one race. The other answer is not of the theoretical sort. It is the demonstration which modern missions have made afresh of the fitness of Christianity for all tribes, peoples, classes. This is a commonplace of the history of Christian missions and of Christian apologetics. That Christianity can come into the life of any people and prove a regen- erating and developing force is demonstrated beyond reasonable question. Take, on the one hand, the Terra del Fuegans, who, after cannibalism and base- ness hardly to be matched anywhere, were so tamed and civilized by the knowledge of the Christ that they became another people ; so that Charles Darwin, who had previously opposed Christian mis-

48 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

sions on theoretical grounds, from his own observa- tion gave vigorous testimony to the worth of the Gospel to such as these, and was ever thereafter a financial supporter of missions. He stands as but one out of many who were convinced by the argu- ment of fact. On the other hand, take the influence and power of Christianity in Japan, in its half cen- tury of marvelous development, as illustrating the fitness of Christianity to be the religion of a highly developed people.

CHAPTER III

THE MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

We must never forget that Christianity is not the native religion of any people and especially that the nations of Europe, who are to-day the outstanding Christian peoples, represent historically various forms of religion that are now designated heathen and all of which have been abandoned in the interest of Christianity. In basal principles and practices these native religions of Europe were just such as Christianity finds among the peoples of Asia to-day.

We have suggested that history prior to Christ represented the movement of the race along various lines of development up to a fulness of the times for the apprehension of the Messianic, the redemp- tive, idea, when it should be revealed in Christ Jesus. Such is the traditional idea. Such is the clear declaration of the Scriptures. This is proved by the history of the West, which since the coming of the Christ has been a history of progressive apprehension and appropriation of the Christian conception. In the awakening of the East in modern times it is easy to trace a large measure of 4 49

50 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

Christian influence in it all, and for the Christian there is easily discernible, also, a divine purpose producing a new fulness of the times, wherein Christianity is to be given to all the world through its missions.

There was an original evangelical period of Chris- tian missions following the ascension of our Lord, down to the time of Constantine. In this period the growth of the new faith was phenomenal. The converts came from every grade of society, with all degrees of culture, from scores of tribal divisions and from all phases of religion and irreligion. The social, moral and political influence was far superior to the relative number of Christians. This is a phenomenon of Christianity in all times and coun- tries that needs to be taken into consideration in estimating the value of Christian missions. If we inquire into the causes of the marvelous progress of early Christianity we shall find them partly in the circumstances of the preparation of the world for the reception of the Gospel, partly in the inner condition of the Christian Church itself. On the outside we encounter the greatest opposition, to be sure. Ballard^ has well summed up this opposition by saying that "the practical alliance between Jew-

^ Miracles of Unbelief.

MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 5 1

ish hate, Roman insight, and Greek subtlety, against the infant Christian faith, is absolutely without parallel in history," and by an illustration wherein he says : "If we can imagine a lion, a tiger, and a wolf uniting in desperate efforts to destroy a lamb — and failing — ^we should have a fair parallel to that which actually happened in human society at the commencement of the Christian era." The illustration might even be pushed further, for we see the Christian lamb triumphing in escape from the Jewish wolf, and employing in its service the tiger of Greek culture and the lion of Roman might. On the intellectual side Greek culture had made preparation for centuries for the beginning of Christianity. It had trained the world to think, had undermined the gross animism of myth and legend with a religious skepticism that awaited the positive response which Christianity was to bring to a rational religious nature. Greece had also led philosophy to make man the center of its interests and to build its reasoning on the ethical value of man as expressed in the individual conscience. All this gave a place in thought for the universal, ethical religion of redemptive monotheism. The Greek language with ethical and psychological words, largely emptied of religious content by Greek

52 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

skepticism, provided an all but perfect medium for the expression of Christian ideas, while Greek colo- nization afforded bands of earnest, religious souls in every city prepared by Jewish religious ideas to pass over from the anticipations of Jewish ethical monotheism to the Christian God-in-Christ reconcil- ing the world unto Himself. Greek language and thought were thus part of the materials for the new religion when it set forth to conquer the world. Roman law and power protected, even though they persecuted, the infant faith. Material advantages of many kinds were provided by Roman roads, Roman soldiers and Roman courts, which gave speedy access to the ends of the Empire for the heralds of the cross.

The Jews, persevering in exclusiveness in all lands, with their peculiar religious ideas commend- ing themselves to religious thought wherever it would consider them, with a literature unlike any- thing else in the world, were distributed throughout the earth, and won bands of proselytes ready to pass from the promise of Jewish theology to the realiza- tion of Christian redemption.

Within the Church itself we find all the enthus- iasm of a new faith, as yet free from forms and traditions, unhampered by the dignity of precedent

MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 53

or the reserve of order. Religion was, in each case and in all respects, at first personally accepted and was an individual experience. Such religion is powerful in propaganda; and any religion that aspires to continuous growth and conquest must solve the problem of maintaining the purity and vigor of personal experience free from the shallow- ness of form and traditionalism. Persecution maintained the purity of the early Church. Chris- tianity was the business of early disciples. It was recognized that "the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy," and the prophetic sense was common. Besides, all Christians were in immediate contact with the heathen world ; there was no avoiding the duty. There were no Christian lands. Missions were not at first ''foreign" but the task lying imper- atively next to every follower of the Lord Jesus. So they went forth with the message of the Risen Lord enforced, as all then believed, with demon- strating miracles ; they employed written epistles as well as spoken words ; they trained workers, wrote historical tracts and persuasive apologetics. They won multitudes to the faith that promised so much more than any religion the men of their time knew. From Constantine there followed a period of ecclesiastical missions, in which the aim was to

54 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

extend organized Christianity and to establish every- where the Church, of which the church at Rome was the type and the head. In the preceding period the aim had been to extend the Kingdom while the organization had been secondary. Now the King- dom was identified with the Church and the Church made first in Christian thought. The union of Church and State under Constantine had led the way for employing political power and material force to extend the organized faith. At first the incompatibility of the combination was not appre- ciated and it was centuries before it was recognized that there must be a desperate conflict to determine whether in becoming the patron of the Church the State became the master or the servant of the Church. It was doubtless hoped that the two might remain independent and coordinate; and we seem not yet fully to have settled this question. At any rate, there follows a period of some seven hundred years of effort to establish the Church in all the states of Europe, an effort which had attained gen- eral success about the end of the first Christian millennium. Christianity has proved itself com- petent to maintain its power and primacy in the life of European people, surviving all the changes of government, modifications of social organism, and

MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 55

conflicts of ecclesiasticism ; and it is still the dom- inant fact and factor in the life of Europe. From Europe it passed to America where its position and influence have, in some respects, been more free and effective than in Europe.

After the period of ecclesiastical missions the Church largely lost the sense of responsibility for the world's religious need. The task was looked upon as largely complete, for Europe had been won by the Church, and the rest of the world occupied, at this time, little or no place in the consciousness of Europe. The Church had come to aim at its own advancement, looking upon its conquests as prima- rily for its own glory which was now identified with the glory of Christ. The true Christian conception holds the Christian forces as existing for the service of the unsaved world in the ministry of the Gospel. Satan brought before Jesus, at the beginning of His ministry, all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, seeking to lead Him to look upon the human race as a means to His own exaltation. The very different conception which dominated His ministry is expressed in the statement that "He looked upon the multitudes as sheep not having a shepherd, and He had compassion on them;" and in that other word, "The Son of Man came not to

56 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a ransom for the world." The Church had, by the time now under consideration, fallen before this initial temptation of Jesus, had come to regard man- kind in great massive groups, losing sight of their individual need, and regarding them from the stand- point of her own glorification rather than in the light of their redemption for which she existed.

Mohammedan power had established itself on the south and east of Europe, hedging it in from com- munication with the world beyond, so that the Church was cut off from the life of Africa and Asia. Religiously the Christians had no dealings with the Moslems. The individual had been lost in the ecclesiastical hierarchy that mediated for him in all matters before God^ and all work of the Church became professional after 398, when laymen were prohibited from preaching the Gospel.

Europe was passing through the practical anarchy of feudalism into a new social era, and religion, like all else, was in the eclipse of the Dark Ages. Only here and there do we find a man, or an order, where burns the fires of conquest for Christ and of life for the lost. Raymond Lull, eagerly pleading the cause of the Mohammedan before civil court and ecclesiastical council, before university faculty and

MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 57

individual conscience is an exception to the general deadness and neglect. He devises and publishes a method of apologetics which he thinks will convince the Mohammedan; he secures the founding of chairs in Oriental languages in the schools where he hopes to see missionaries trained; he journeys Europe over in the effort to awaken the Church to missionary effort in behalf of Mohammedans, for whom Europe had only swords and the bitterness of hate. At length he leads the way in three mis- sionary journeys to Africa, where he suffers martyr- dom for the sake of a missionary faith.

Francis of Assisi is another exception. Cultivat- ing for himself personal piety and spiritual religion, he founds an order that shall preach the gospel of the regenerate life in the Church that has grown formal and cold. But a vital religion is necessarily universal, and Francis sent many of his Brothers, and went himself, to preach to the heathen the mes- sage of the Christ. Earnestly he sought to awaken the Church and to gain Papal sanction for a mis- sionary Gospel, but all in vain.

Men such as these, in small groups, were the apostles of the Spirit throughout this period, and kept up the continuity of a truly universal religion. The Crusades, with varying motives, gave vent to

58 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

the fire of enthusiasm for conquest in the name of the Christ, that must always characterize those who are stirred by His spirit. In sadly mistaken efforts they filled up, in a dark and an ignorant age, the gap between periods of true spiritual conquest of the hearts and lives of men. This, which we may call the sporadic period of missions, terminates with the Lutheran Reformation and the corresponding reformations in other countries out- side Germany.

We now enter a period of polemical, political Christianity, during which the foundations are being laid afresh and a new era is in the making. It seems a long stretch of unmissionary life from Luther to Carey. Warneck^ tells us of the efforts through all these years to awaken the churches of Europe to a sense of their responsibility for pro- claiming the Gospel unto all men. This entire period is best regarded as one of preparation for the modern evangelical period, which properly dates from Carey's success in founding the Baptist Mis- sionary Society.

This preparation follows three lines: preparation of the world to receive the Gospel, a preparation which has really been going on through all history

^ Outlines of the History of Protestant Missions.

MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 59

and comes into its fulness at this time; preparation of the Church to give the Gospel to the world; preparation of means by which Christianity can reach the world with its Gospel.

History had demonstrated man's religious nature and his need for religious teaching. Man could not dispense with that need, nor substitute for its supply anything short of the saving knowledge of the true God. There were in this period new demonstra- tions in Europe, and fresh knowledge of the demon- strations so long wrought out in Asia, that man must have God. Enlightenment and ''common sense," culture and philosophy were substituted, but disintegration, division and failure marked the effort. By the end of this period the Church could see, if it would, in clear light, several truths that lie at the basis of Christian missions. First there was the essential and inalienable religiousness of human- ity. Explorations and discoveries, the contacts of trade and commerce with the world had brought knowledge sufficient to show that God has nowhere left Himself without such witness that men had ever gotten away from the idea and the need of His religion. Again, it was apparent that men had not, by searching, found out God, even though they had not been able to run away from Him. Nature

6o MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

religions, which are only one form of natural religion so much lauded in the century that saw the rise of modern missions, had in various parts of the world issued in savagery, fetishism, demonolatry, or, to speak from another standpoint, religion had not been able to pass beyond these stages. Panthe- istic Absolutism, also in vogue in some quarters of Europe in this same period, had been tested through thousands of years in India in the comprehensive and elaborate systems of Brahmanism. The out- come was Hinduism, that modern marvel of relig- ious inclusiveness, based on the uncertainties of impersonal being. On the social and political side the outcome was modern India before the British occupation, and it was just this condition of India which Hinduism had, in part at least, produced and which Hinduism was, in any case, powerless to cor- rect, that made possible and necessary British occupation.

Practical Pessimism, and Agnosticism as to God, with negation as to continued personal existence of man, had had their chance in Buddhism which, fail- ing to satisfy the heart of man, had fallen into the grossest idolatries, and had in every land where it held influence associated itself with other religions in the effort to complete the response which it was

MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 6l

unable alone to make to the demands of the soul. Nowhere in the world could Buddhism point to a civilization that was its own product. In Thibet its elaborate hierarchical organization owed much to the Roman Catholic missionaries and is foreign to the real spirit of Buddhism. In Japan it had come nearest to an independent development of its natural tendencies, but for Japanese civilization it was only partially responsible ; and how quickly did the weaknesses of that civilization appear in the light of Christian ideals in the modern period.

Culture, under a high social ideal, was the soul and life of Confucianism, and China had had more than two thousand years to make proof of the power of this substitute for religion. A benighted and superstitious race, exulting in glorification of the past, was the result. Besides the ethics and culture of Confucianism, the degradations of Taoist super- stitions had been cultivated, the longings of Buddh- ism had been imported, and still the most numer- ous nation of earth lay asleep, facing the past and dreaming of the glories of the ancients.

In Europe we had the *'Age of Reason," and the glories of the "Illuminism," and they were rapidly doing for Europe what had been done by similar ideals for Greece and Rome in the earlier days,

62 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

when the revivals, originating in the various types of Pietism, rescued the spirituahty of Christianity and brought it into new vigor.

Nor was the outcome any better with the so-called "revealed religions" where these had sought to hold and develop their revelation, apart from the recognized presence of God, for in their case we find only arrested and perverted develop- ment. The transcendent Monotheism of Judaism, holding God aloof from the heart-life of man and introducing a reign of law almost as cold and dead as that of modern dogmatic science, had its answer in the "Lost Tribes" of Israel, who lost themselves because they lost their God and sought to recover divine immanence in the lesser divinities such as polytheistic peoples about them worshiped; and in the stagnant Judaism which was unable to per- petuate its national life or to reach the goal of its religious evolution.

Islam sought to build religion and national life on a narrow interpretation of an inapproachable God, and produced Stoicism in life, fanaticism in religion, despotism in government, low standards in social morality. However, it may have seemed in the three or four centuries of the glory of Arabic civilization, the longer centuries of its testing have

MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 63

condemned the Islamic ideals as unable to work out the destiny of civilization. These ideals have been outgrown even in some of the Mohammedan lands.

Roman Catholicism placed an authoritative Church in the position of the living Christ, ever present in His people, and substituted external authority of ecclesiastical control for the inner leading of the Spirit. The result was traditional dogmatism and ecclesiastical oppression which nurtured the Dark Ages, as also they contributed to produce Medie- valism and stubbornly resisted deliverance from it. Yet Catholic missions extended knowledge of the fact and of some of the facts of Christianity and thus, in some measure, prepared the world for the work of the Gospel.

What Christianity may become when its course is determined by a political power we can see in the Greek Church dominated by the despotism of Russia. The other "Eastern Churches," after a long era of honorable missionary evangelism lapsed into fruitlessness and impotence because they fol- lowed after rationalizing interpretations of the Christ and subordinated themselves to decadent political ideals.

During the period from the Reformation to Carey the world was in an era of awakening and educa-

64 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

tion. It has already been noted that CathoHc mis- sions played a part in this growth. Exceptional and increasing examples of Protestant missions served the same end. Especially notable are the missionary activities of Denmark, employing mis- sionaries provided by the influences of Pietistic Halle; and the growing heroism and achievements of the missions of the Moravian Brotherhood, who antedated the English Baptists by sixty years in the inauguration of missions that have continued with- out cessation. Discovery and exploration and the beginnings of trade and commerce aifid colonization were carrying forward the work of breaking down the barriers of ignorance between races and tribes. At least, these barriers were being discovered and recognized as barriers to an intercourse on all accounts to be desired. Here we have the begin- nings of friendly interchange of material goods and a more significant intercourse of ideas. Closer contact of nations would disclose elements of an- tagonism and bring occasions for conflicts and hatred. But further on would come judgments, modifications, mutual recognition of rights, clearer understanding of peculiarities, deeper sympathies in the bonds of common humanity and common inter- ests. Much of the nineteenth century was filled with

MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 65

the conflicts of increasing contacts and contending interests among the nations. We cannot misread the situation when we think we are now well on the way toward an era of understanding and helpful- ness; in spite of the clamorous noise of naval programs, military preparations and newspaper agitations.

All this while the Protestant churches, or to employ the more generic term, the Protestant Church, was itself being made ready for its duty and destiny of evangelizing the world. Much of this preparation was indirect and unconscious. There must be religious and political liberation from Catholic control. Until this is accomplished the world-obligation cannot be understood and accepted. Protestantism was at first the struggle of free spirit for existence and it knew only the functions of incipient life. It must discover and acquire con- trol over the organs of its life, must find and inter- pret its functions. Then it may see its destiny and accept its task of giving to all men that which it has acquired possession of. The faith must be set- tled with some sort of definiteness before it can undertake an evangel to mankind. The message and the method of the Gospel must first be clearly discovered. This was wrought out in a long period 5

66 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

of polemics, and the polemical spirit is in itself unfriendly to the missionary motive. Before Chris- tianity could enter upon a campaign of universalism it was needful first that the unit of salvation and service in the plan of Christ — the individual man — should be discovered, emancipated and enlightened. Discovered by the Sophists, dignified by Socrates, made the unit of all religion and progress by Jesus Christ, the individual had been lost again in the ecclesiasticism of Rome, the feudalism of Europe, the social conceptions of the Middle Ages. The Reformation marked his rediscovery, was, indeed, the product of his reassertion of himself; but he must be freed and educated, must find himself. All this required time. The English Bill of Rights, the American Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution: these marked the great outstanding epochs in the individualizing of the modern age, but are only the highest points, in which culminated innumerable strivings and movings in the social and religious life of the people. Responsibility did not exist and could not be felt apart from freedom. To implant and direct this principle of selfhood, with its implications of rights and duties, is the mission- ary task which the Christian West must undertake in the non-Christian E^st. This had to be learned

MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 6^

—has yet to be learned in many of its aspects — before the West can do its full work of teaching this principle to the East. But if it be a boon so dear in the West it is a treasure too priceless to withhold from the East. The sense of brotherhood follows the awakening of the sense of selfhood. Humanity belongs to the consciousness of true individualism. Brotherhood could not precede, and it could not but follow, the freedom of the individual man. Here is a true and inevitable motive to missions.

The Scriptures, so long buried in forgotten tongues and confined by priestly interpretation, had to be restored to all people and studied before their attitude toward the world could be understood and accepted by Christians in Europe. But with an open Bible, then as at no other time in the history of the Christian Faith held to be absolute in author- ity and inspired in every syllable, Christianity could not permanently remain ignorant of its duty nor indifferent to its command from the Christ to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. Prophets of this new mission arose in every country and in time the command pressed on the conscience of Christendom until the task was undertaken.

68 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

A matter of no little importance in explaining the rise of missions in the eighteenth century is the revival of spiritual religion, which preceded and attended the movement ; because there is an intimate relation between the missionary spirit and the revival spirit under all circumstances. It was from the Pietism of Halle that both the missionary impulse and the missionary workers came for the Danish- Halle Mission ; and from the same fountain of holy inspiration came the influences that, through Count Zinzendorf, made the Moravian Brotherhood the pioneer missionary church of modern times, giving it a new life and history because it had now a new reason for living. The rise of Methodism in Eng- land and its spread in America filled a large place in the religious history of the eighteenth century. The Methodist movement was first of all a mission to EngHsh Christianity in the interest of vital religion, and then a missionary movement for the colonists of America. Out of this grew, in part directly, in part indirectly, those missions to the Red Men of America that gave such names as Brainard, Zeisberger, the Mayhews and others to the annals of Christian heroism and devotion. The Pietism of South Germany fed the fires of Metho- dism and furnished missionaries for the early

MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 69

English societies, except the Baptist. It is possible to trace distinctly from the great revivals in western England, just before the middle of the eighteenth century, the stream of influence to America, then back again to England and culminating in its influence on Carey and his associates of the North- hampton Association, and so leading to the inaugu- ration of foreign missions. Revivals at the turn of the seventeenth century into the eighteenth, and again a hundred years later, are to be interpreted as a divine response, in Christianity, to the ration- alism of the seventeenth and of the latter eighteenth centuries. They are on the human side the reasser- tion of the religious spirit in man after the chilling oppression of rationalism upon that religious spirit. In the case of both revivals, as now again in our own time, organized orthodoxy either surrenders to the rationalistic spirit or wages against it a losing polemic that relies on logical demonstration coupled with compromising concessions. The an- swer that gained the victory in former times was acquired through the spirit of prayer; and so we may expect it to be again. True we are now told that it is unscientific to pray; but prayer was then ridiculed, and in grosser fashion than in our day. It will be necessary only briefly to call attention to

70 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

the place of prayer in the Halle and other Pietistic movements. Its place among the Moravians is one of the best known facts about that people, and it was in a prayer-meeting that Zinzendorf first pro- posed, and the Brotherhood agreed, to undertake, the work of foreign missions. It was also in prayer that the first two Moravian missionaries were led, separately, to offer themselves for the work. Already in 1723 Robert Millar, of Paisley, Scotland, was prophesying of the conversion of the heathen and urging prayer as the first means to its accomplishment. In 1744 a concert of prayer was undertaken in England for two years, "that our God's Kingdom may come ;" and America, on being asked to join the concert, entered for a period of seven years, and a great call for prayer was written by Jonathan Edwards. This call of Edwards was reprinted in England in 1784, and led to a new call to prayer by the Northampton Association, in which all other societies of all denominations were invited to join. Among other objects, prayer was to be for "the spread of the Gospel to the most distant parts of the habitable globe." It would be possible to add, indefinitely, proofs that prayer was preparing the Church for entering upon the task of carrying its Glad Tidings to the ends of the earth. The

MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY Jl

rising spirit of the Church, longing for the evangeli- zation of the world, began to find expression in hymns, both original productions and versions of the universal Messianic psalms. Various organiza- tions for promoting missions, more or less local and limited, arose throughout the eighteenth cen- tury. They were tentative efforts, leading the Church unconsciously into its universal mission. Toward the latter part of this century we find a number of godly English chaplains in the employ of the East India Company, some of them pro- foundly concerned for the spiritual welfare of the millions of subjects who were coming under the sway of British rule in this period of the rise of the Empire.

This properly brings us to note briefly how means were providentially provided for bringing the Church into responsible contact with the world and for making easy the acceptance and prosecution of its divine mission. The hegemony of the seas passes from Catholic to Protestant hands. The Dutch, the British and the Danes supplant the Spanish and the Portuguese as colonizers and car- riers for the world which was then so rapidly opening and enlarging, under discovery and ex- ploration, colonization and appropriation. Next

72 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

France, Catholic and atheistic, surrendered most of her colonies to Protestant Britain. A world com- merce had its inception and was promoted by the East and West India Companies of both British and Dutch. Numerous companies were exploiting and developing America.

The political control of the world thus passed largely into Protestant hands, and there arose in America a new Protestant nation destined to play a great part in the missionary programs of Christianity. All this preparation of Christianity, which led up to the assumption of the duty of foreign missions more than a century ago, has been enormously increased and extended in the past cen- tury. If Providence was leading the way in the eighteenth century He was opening up every nook and corner of the world and providing resources and facilities without limit or measure in the nine- teenth century. If circumstances pointed irre- sistibly to a call to evangelize the world a hundred years ago, they call to-day in thunderous tones for its Christianizing.

When we turn to look within the Church to-day do we find halting and hesitancy? Do we meet questioning and doubt about the message or con- cerning the world's need of the message? Let us

MISSIONARY HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 73

look again at the history of the rise and progress of this great undertaking, and fresh courage and assurance must arise. For if the march of events means anything of prophecy and direction, surely Christianity's history in the last century, when set beside the history of the world, means that the kingdoms of this world shall become the Kingdom of our Lord and His Christ. The movements of y international politics and the growth of the nations tend with unmistakable definiteness to enlarge and facilitate the opportunity of Christianity to make itself the religion of the world. There are those who minimize the outcome of a century of missions, among whom are some of the missionaries them- selves. But surely one who knows the facts must read them with little use of the interpretative imagination to find in them failure and discour- agement.

CHAPTER IV

CHRISTIAN MISSIONS AND THE NEW ERA IN THE WORLD

We have said that Christianity has been a highly important factor in the marvelous progress of the world, and have indicated, in the barest outline, something of this influence upon development in Christian lands. We have referred to the new era of awakening in the East and indicated our belief that in this awakening Christianity has no small share, as, also, that the awakening constitutes a fresh demand upon Christianity to exert itself to the utmost that it may contribute to the truest and fullest development of the East. It is time to sug- gest some lines of verification of this claim, some- what in detail.

It is worth while recalling at once that when we look upon the efforts of Christianity to enter the life of the Eastern races we meet antagonism, often bitter and violent; but that tolerance follows, and then encouragement, appreciation and cooperation. "Wisdom is justified of her children." The tree produces the peaceable fruits of righteousness,

74

THE NEW ERA IN THE WORLD 75

which yield the invigorating wine of progress, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. The people enjoy the fruits and will appropriate the tree for their own. If we begin with India, we find that Christianity has been greatly hindered by the conduct and attitude of those British "Christians" who were in India for purposes far other than leading India into the Kingdom of God ; and that Christianity has had to contend against these and their influence. It has been necessary also to Christianize the conduct and attitude of the British Government toward her Indian subjects. And this was no easy undertaking, and required long and patient effort. This task has progressed far and its effects are widely evident. Sordid greed for gain, ambition for empire, organized selfishness and corporate oppression have been checked, and the material forces turned to use in the furtherance of the social and civil evolution of the Hindus. Christianity has here won its place and its right to make conquest of India for Christ. That only a few hundred thousands yet sit down to the tables of the Lord's Communion may trouble the timid soul and may afford occasion for scorn by the unthinking unbeliever. But pause a moment, and ask what would India's condition be to-day, and

76 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

what India's relation to England, what England's position in India, if, indeed, she could have any position there, but for the influences and results of the efforts of the Church to Christianize first Eng- land's attitude to India and her operations in India, and then the Indian peoples themselves. English- men first occupied India for purely material and temporal ends, as did also Danes and Dutch. The powerful East India Company extended the aims and ends of commercialism and sought the protection of the British power while it exploited the people for private ends. The commercial mas- ters for a time successfully opposed the coming of missionaries into their field of operations, for rea- sons that are now well understood. The chaplains, whom a Christian government compelled the Com- pany meagerly to provide, were hindered from attempting to give the Gospel to the natives, till Henry Martyn gave up his chaplaincy that he might be free to give the Gospel to those who most needed it. British protection of commercial interests neces- sarily involved British civil control. But this was stubbornly resisted until the great mutiny gave imperative occasion for terminating the East India Company's occupation of India, when the country passed under direct control of the Crown and was

THE NEW ERA IN THE WORLD 'J'J

included in the Empire. Then it was that the Christian right of missions received the justice of distinct and final recognition, for the Queen wrote with her own hand into the proclamation of Empire that was to be read throughout India, that Britain's hope and power rest on the Bible. The brilliant Prime Minister protested, and many feared the results of this bold declaration of the Queen; but the outcome has justified a thousand-fold her faith and fidelity. The social and moral reforms that have been wrought in India, and far greater reforms that now become possible, are the product of the Christian spirit in and over the commercial spirit that pleaded for a policy of hisses faire. It was feared that the introduction of Christian ideas, and especially an active Christian propaganda, would rebuke the lives of the traders and other foreign residents in India; that Christianity would develop ideas of personality and freedom and so would interfere with the exploiting of the natives; that religious antagonisms would be aroused that would interfere with the holdings of the Company and with the volume of its profits. And these results were inevitable, so far as they involved inhumanity and injustice, if Christian propaganda proceeded. That fear which was used as a cloak for all the

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rest, the fear of armed opposition and rebellion against British rule, had no foundation in sound philosophy and has had no justification in the events that have followed in the half century of missionary freedom under the protection of the Government. We are able now to measure somewhat the outcome of British occupation. Whether we think of the religious situation, the political, or the social, in the present outlook one word characterizes all alike, unsettled. India has never been a nation, has never had a national consciousness, nor a unified history. It is still a long way short of the possibility of a national life. It has begun to develop a national consciousness, and this incipient nationaHsm finds partial expression in foolish and violent antagonism to the authorities and to the authority of Great Britain. There is, in all this, no real ground for fear, save that England may be unwise or unjust in dealing with her problems. There is yet no national consciousness that can move with any mighty force against British rule; and it will be possible to make it clear, as this consciousness grows, that British rule need in no way hamper or hinder the rise into nationalism, but will the rather foster and guarantee the truest national life, even as in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

THE NEW ERA IN THE WORLD 79

In social life the great overshadowing curse of caste is slowly coming to be recognized as incon- sistent with the ideas and activities of the modern life of the people, and it will eventually become an impossibility, and absurdity. With it will go the great barrier that has made so difficult the already extensive progress in alleviating India's many social enormities. Already the car of Juggernaut has ceased to crush its devoted victims; sati has long been outlawed and occurs no more; human sacri- fices are continued only in symbol, with possibly rare exceptions; the horrors of thuggism and the worst forms of self-torture are now seldom prac- tised; continuous widowhood is enforced only by the slowly waning social demand and against every legal discouragement. Child marriage has been modified by raising the "age of consent" to twelve. Many other social evils have been denounced by the law and linger only in the shadows of illegal con- nivance and ignorance. The iniquities of intem- perance and the vices of the opium traffic, gambling and other sins remain and offer a mighty burden for the civil power to deal with. What a change a hundred years have wrought in India! That the direct work of the missionaries and the continued agitation, in India and in England ; that the religious

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conscience stirred and enlightened by the interest in Christian missions, have been the chief forces for these now generally lauded reforms needs no proof.

The new social ideals of India and the national consciousness bode no real ill for British power and pride, but will contribute to the evergrowing great- ness of the Empire in just the measure that Eng- land can be wise and upright, can maintain worthy ideals and can proceed upon the assumption that men and ideals are more than glory and gain. To have a nation in the making, as an outcome of the insistent spirit and incessant toil of missions, is an appeal that Britain cannot fail to see and from which she cannot turn away. The religious thought of India is shot through with Christian ideas and the effort is making there, as elsewhere, to appro- priate the fruits and adopt the spirit and the ideals of Christianity without admitting its foundations or accepting its forms. Let the missionary be content that his work has progressed so far. The Somajes are undesigned tributes to the power and elevation of the Christian message, the religious unrest is the working of the leaven that has been cast into the lump. The missionary may be sure that the Christian foundations will assert themselves and

THE NEW ERA IN THE WORLD 8l

will prove their necessity for any real and abiding renovation in India. As for the forms, the mis- sionary need care for only so much as the funda- mental spirit of the Faith itself creates in Indian consciousness and environment. But what mis- sions have begun they must foster and complete or history will condemn them in the destruction of the work which they have so well begun.

Let us turn to a review of the situation in China. Protestant missions celebrated their centennial in Shanghai in 1907. A hundred years witnessed the change from a hermit nation, with little knowledge of the rest of the world and next to no intercourse with any people and with no desire to know aught of the outside, to a mighty people struggling into a new world-consciousness and eagerness for recog- nition in the sisterhood of nations. It is now just seventy years since the first unwilling permission was granted for foreigners, including missionaries, to take up residence and carry on business in five coast cities. Uncertain traditions of Christianity lingered from the missions of the Nestorians and the Catholics, in three periods, in the Empire, and these influences doubtless count for more than has been measured or suspected by most students, in determining China's preparation for the modern 6

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undertaking. In the modern period of Chris- tianity's effort in China we find the work falling readily into four divisions: Preparation, from Mor- rison's beginning to the opening of the first ports, 1807 to 1842 ; Beginnings, from the Opium War to the recognition of foreign diplomatic representa- tives, when general recognition was given for foreign travel and residence in China, 1842 to 1873 ; Proving, from diplomatic recognition to the Boxer uprising, 1873 to 1900; Freedom, from the Boxer troubles onward.

Marvelous revolutions have been wrought in China in a decade. And equally marvelous changes have come in the attitude of Western nations to China in two decades. Shortly before the Boxer movement China was looked upon as a moribund nation, the legitimate prey of the strong peoples who thought they were responsible for the world and were willing to defray the expenses of its administration with resources acquired by the unchecked exploiting of the peoples for whose guidance they assumed responsibility. We read everywhere of "spheres of influence" in China, of "the interests" of this nation and of that. Russia, Germany, Great Britain and France calmly appro- priated all the harbors of the Empire. The postal

THE NEW ERA IN THE WORLD 83

system, and the customs collections, the railway and mining operations, all these and more were under the practical control, where the control was not actual, of the nations of Europe. Having already nearly completed the partition of Africa, China was the next continental victim for the nations ; and they took up their positions like birds of prey waiting for the death, when, behold, the monster opened its eyes, stirred, groaned, convulsed and arose in might. Now, less then ten years after, the dreams of partition have been supplanted by dread of the "Yellow Peril," the talk of "spheres of influence" has passed out of the vocabulary of international diplomacy, and far-seeing statesmen are maneuvering for the advantages of China's friendship in the dawning day of her power.

Educational methods have been revolutionized. Instead of delving mechanically into the past, China's youth face the future and grapple with the problems of the present. Ruskin is studied along- side Mencius in the provincial universities, and modern science takes the place of the mysterious symbols of the Book of Changes.

In 1900 in the Ecumenical Conference, New York, a veteran^ of fifty years' service spoke of

*Dr. William Ashmore.

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"the China that is to be." He said that "the threat- ened collapse of the greatest empire on the face of the earth" was not due to "the decrepitude of old age," nor to "enervation produced by luxurious and riotous living such as sapped the energies of the Greeks and Romans." The causes he found to be, from within, in "the accumulated corruptions of a dozen dynasties and of many generations of evil doers," and in the loss of all power of recuperation; from without, "the impact of modern civilization," wars with outside nations; and from God's provi- dence, in His work of bringing in the Kingdom of Righteousness. Dr. Ashmore foresaw that there is to be "a reconstructed China," and "a regenerated China," by which he meant that the force and influence and personal following of Christianity in China would be such as to produce a new civiHza- tion and a new religious and social order. He also predicted "such ingatherings as the world has never seen." This new China is to be "homogeneous and self-governed" and democratic, and, "so far from being dominated, China will herself dominate the tribes and kindreds on her border" and "will ally herself with the most truly democratic governments of the West." Such "a regenerated China will be mighty in the world's religious future." In less

THE NEW ERA IN THE WORLD 8$

than ten years all this seems not only probable but well on the road toward realization.

It is easy to see, in this case, how the Christian elements and influences in Western civilization, in its impact on this mightiest of Eastern peoples, are the forces that have conspired to awaken China to her own strength and possibilities, and they have contributed directly to China's active interest and effort at advance in the course of her new era. When we consider the educational influences and the ethical inspirations that have begotten new vision and purpose, and that prophesy a new des- tiny in China, we cannot, if we would, avoid the conclusion that it is the missionaries who are most responsible. If, as in our day we must, we here recognize as truly Christian missionaries such Chris- tian statesmen and diplomats as Sir Robert Hart and Mr. Charles Denby typify, men whose presence in China and devotion to her welfare were con- sciously and confessedly guided by the Christian motive, we shall see all the more clearly that Chris- tian missions have been the greatest source of China's national redemption. There are to-day numbers who from truly Christian motives are giving their lives to **the uplift of China,"* who are

' Cf. work with this title by Dr. A. H. Smith,

SS MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

sent out by no board and make no reports for the annals of the societies. In schools and in offices they labor for the advance of the nation, for the sake of the Christ in whose redemptive power they believe because they have had in their own lives experience of His redemptive love. They represent the Christian motives and constitute a definite factor in the advance of the Empire. But for Christian missions the new chapter in China's history would not have been opened. If Christian missions could be abandoned her progress toward the high destiny that now calls her on would be retarded and di- verted until the way would be missed, the con- summation indefinitely postponed.

The story is not different in Japan, with the marvel of history it has made and experienced in half a century. Of course Japan's present is the product of the "evolution of the Japanese,"^ but it required the touch of the West to concentrate and bring to culmination the evolutionary activities, and the course which this evolution has taken in the modern period has been largely determined by the Christian thought of the West. And it is signifi- cant that the question that arises ever and again, concerning the value and permanency of Japanese

^ Ct Gulick, Evolution of the Japanese.

THE NEW ERA IN THE WORLD 8/

civilization, resolves itself at once into the question, how far Japan has apprehended and appropriated the ethical principles that belong to Christianity, as a controlling force in the life of the nation. Japan appealed mightily to the Christian imagination, and hosts of missionary preachers and teachers hastened to devote themselves to her welfare. These gave character and color to the influences from the West, perhaps beyond what we can find in any other coun- try. Nothing is more significant of the force of Christian influence upon the Japanese mind than the feeling, so prevalent in that country, that the people must approve themselves before the ethical judgment of the Christian thought of the West. This feeling has characterized the whole history of Japan's international relationships. Of course with varying intensity at different periods, but the con- cern of the Japanese to stand well with Western thought has never been wanting. In her education and her religion, in her civil government, and national ideals, even in her warfare Japan has shown a conscious effort to respond to the demands of Christian standards. The elevating value of such a motive has been an inspiration and spur to progress difficult to estimate. In Japan more than anywhere else in its modern missions Chris-

88 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

tianity won, from the very beginning, devoted fol- lowers from among the most substantial and progressive of her sons, and hence Christianity not only made marvelous progress in Japan, but speedily gained influence in the political and educational direction of the Empire out of all proportion to the number of its adherents.

It is not strange that there came a period of reaction in the progress of missions in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The conserva- tive forces of Buddhism and heathenism could poorly sustain such revolutionary advances as were manifest on every hand. The freedom of the Gos- pel as it was preached in Japan encouraged the independence of the native religious thought and contributed to an undue restlessness and impatience under the control of the foreign missionary. The tendency of the Japanese to adapt what he adopts and his feeling that he can improve on all that is worthy of his appropriation, influenced his attitude toward the missionary Gospel. Japan's success in the war with China and her urgent secret prepara- tion for the war with Russia developed an excessive spirit of nationalism and militarism, which the quick insight of the Japanese mind could not fail to see was curbed and straightened by Christian ethics.

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At the same time certain enervating tendencies in American and European Christianity found con- siderable place in the missionary message in Japan, weakening its aggressiveness and diminishing its power of resistance. But how quickly and splen- didly did Christianity recover itself, first of all, and then regain its power and position with the people. If more quietly than in its earlier stages, still more mightily and pervasively is the power of the Gospel manifesting its work in Japan. It is beyond question now that the highest and best ideals of Japan are more Christian than Buddhist, and Shinto is learning that, so far as it is justified in its ambitions, it has no rival in the Christian faith, for the acknowledged function of this ancient system is now the cultivation of the patriotic spirit, and for a chastened patriotism Christianity has no opposition but the most encouraging sympathy.

The Turkish revolution is by no means completed and no one may predict the throes through which it may yet be called to pass in the recreation of an empire so heterogeneous and filled with so many and so diverse elements. If a genuine nationalism can inspire the heterogeneous peoples, races, lan- guages, and cultures and barbarities, surely it will be a triumph of nationalization surpassing any yet

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witnessed. Ninety years have Christian mission- aries labored, as they might, within the Empire where they were merely tolerated under the most restricted limitations. Now the influence of these missions offers to the student of missionary science one of the finest fields for the study of method to be found in the whole range of the spread of Chris- tianity, in this or any other age. The influence of the educational missions, centering in the Roberts College in Constantinople and the Syrian Protes- tant College at Beirut, with their systems of schools of every grade, from kindergarten to university course, medical, scientific, and academic, is con- fessed freely by leaders of the Young Turk Party and recognized by all students of the Turkish situa- tion. The education of women in the mission schools had given to Turkey a host of intelligent and Christian mothers and had forced the authori- ties to the adoption of the unheard-of course of pro- viding for the education of girls. In essential Christianity lay, implicit and explicit, ideas and inspirations with which despotism was an impos- sibility when once these ideas had become extensive and had the opportunity to work out their natural results. Individualism, freedom, fraternity, hu- manity, and progress were seeds sown and culti-

THE NEW ERA IN THE WORLD 9I

vated inevitably where Christian teaching was given, and their harvest meant the control of gov- ernment by the people. That this harvest came earlier than it was looked for shows that even the prophets of the new order knew not the power of the principles they were disseminating. To be sure the work of preparing Turkey for the new order was indirect, and in large measure was the product of general influences that came from the association of Turkish subjects with Christian ideals in the various Christian countries of Europe whither they went for education, trade, diplomatic service and safe asylum from persecution at home when they found the fires of modernism burning in their souls. It seemed but a small return from the expenditure of so large a part of the resources, in money and men, of two of the foremost missionary societies of America and of smaller amounts by other organiza- tions, that they were able to point to only small numbers when asked to count converts and enu- merate organized churches. It required the faith of the true missionary and the insight of the prophet to continue nigh on to a century with such small results that could be tabulated in a field so full of discouragements. But in the end to redeem a nation, to bring deliverance to thirty millions of

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people, and to move them with some of the deepest and most vital principles of the Christian religion, even to have some universally recognized large part in this great work, is a vindication of the faith and method of the missions in the Turkish territory. Surely no one could ask or wish that Christianity should now desert this task and surrender its oppor- tunity at the moment when it can enter the harvest of a century of sowing, and when it is in position fully to take up its task.

The new order brings new problems and diffi- culties, to be sure, but if we have learned that life involves the struggle for existence, surely we have learned also that progress in redemptive work means overcoming obstacles and solving the prob- lems that lie in the way of advance. Christianity has in Turkey to-day an equipment in established institutions and a force in trained natives for every class of missionary service that give it a most remarkable preparation for grappling with the opportunities and the difficulties of the situation which it has so largely contributed to bring about, and which is so full of promise for one of the most remarkable triumphs of Christian history.

If we turn, for one more illustration, to Africa we find again that Christianity is playing a part of

THE NEW ERA IN THE WORLD 93

foremost significance in the making of a continent. Africa is the .continent of tragedy, in the condition of its native populations and in the history of the treatment of these peoples by the nations of civi- lization. If one turns his mind to the native popu- lations, the way of progress lies along an highway of tragedy unless the missionary, and the spirit that sends the missionary, shall temper and sanctify the spirit of conquest and hold back the spirit of greed that rush impetuously upon a helpless people. For centuries Europeans stole the Africans from Africa, as has been said with grim humor, and then turned to steal Africa from the Africans. The spirit of Christianity that was sending missionaries at length made the slave traffic impossible by Chris- tian peoples, and that same spirit is at the moment acting powerfully to restrain those who would exploit the weaknesses and impose upon the defi- ciencies of the backward races of the Dark Conti- nent. In the modern opening up of Africa the two names that stand at the head of an honorable list of intrepid explorers are those of Livingstone and Stanley. Livingstone was first of all a mis- sionary and became an explorer for the sake of the Kingdom of God in Africa. He accounted himself, and the world accounts him, in all his work the

94 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

great missionary statesman. "The end of the work of geography has become the beginning of mis- sionary enterprise." This was the conception that moved and nerved him for sufferings and successes such as no other had achieved. His heart, buried in Africa where he died on his knees, is no mere sentimental something with which to play upon the emotions of the unscientific and unthinking. Rather is it a true expression of the love of Christianity for the lowest and most needy, of the heroism of Chris- tianity where duty is coupled with deadliest danger and direst difficulties, and of the method of Chris- tianity in winning the world by the way of the cross of atoning suffering. The Christian puts his heart into the center of the world's deepest need, even as our God put His heart, in Jesus Christ, into the center of the needy race. In Livingstone Christ was completing His own sufferings for Africa, and hundreds of others are carrying for- ward in their bodies what is lacking of the afflictions of Christ for His body's sake. This appeal is to the deepest and the best in men and will stir their wills as well as their hearts, now as always. Stan- ley did not go to Africa as a missionary, but it is notable that his African experiences aroused in him the missionary spirit and that he became an urgent

THE NEW ERA IN THE WORLD 95

exponent of the cause and mightily influenced young men of the English universities to devote themselves to this work.

Besides these two, many another missionary name is found in the roster of those whose dauntless courage uncovered Africa to the knowledge of the world. It is already evident that the way of suc- cess in the appropriation of Africa by Europeans lies along the lines of devotion to high ideals, of which, up to this time, there has been all too little. There are problems of race and of education, of government and material development that will baffle all the skill of imperial imagination and imperial purpose unless the imperialism of Christ and His spiritual Kingdom shall control and inspire the imperialism of men. Cecil Rhodes felt incar- nate in himself the spirit of the British Empire while he planned for Britain's empire in Africa. There is in many a British subject, and many of the subjects of other powers, a sense of the incarnation of the divine empire in Africa, and they are build- ing for the imperial Christ. The higher and larger motive must control, constraining and restrain- ing narrow and sordid purposes, if the out- come in Africa is to be in any sense worthy of the civilization of Europe and ultimately profitable

96 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

to the nations that are seeking its development. Of the islands of the seas we need not speak, save to remind the reader how, beginning with Tahiti, in 1797, where the London Society first raised the banner of the cross, there has been created de novo, for one after another island and group of islands, a civilization where before primi- tive savagery reigned undisturbed. The general features of this work are everywhere the same. A simple, primitive, savage people, usually cannibals, always ignorant and non-ethical, within a period of from a quarter to a half century were led from animism and idolatry to the Christian faith and the simpler arts of a Christian civilization. Here in many cases the missionary was the only factor in achieving this result, while in all cases he was so clearly the dominant factor that no one questions that the work was his. The peoples thus won are not strategic for world conquest by Christianity, but they have value in themselves, and they afford fine opportunities for the study of the influences of Christianity on the native heart of the race.

CHAPTER t

THE PRESENT ADVANTAGE OF MISSIONS

In its foreign mission work in the past century ^

Christianity has come very much better to under- ^i^,^/ stand itself, and its influence has become more defi- nite, more pervasive, more multiform and better recognized, even if sometimes more vigorously re- sisted, than ever before, in Christian lands. Our age is pleased to emphasize the claim that it is charac- terized by "the ethical note." Even so ; that ethical note has come at the time of the bankruptcy of all the systems of philosophic ethics and the time of the dominance of the simple ethics of the Christ in His two fundamentally comprehensive command- ments. We may not order our lives ia-accordance with these commandments, but men of every school pride themselves on insisting upon their value. If we place the accent on the second of these com- mandments we are only bringing forward what was not sufficiently felt and acted upon by our Chris- tianity heretofore. There is always the danger that we shall be fragmentary in thought and conduct, and while we emphasize one element forget the 7 97

98 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

other upon which it rests and must rest if it is to abide as a permanent impulse and the regulating principle. What we have here to notice, however, is that the ethical note is the product of the mis- sionary age of our faith and that the moral reforms in the Christian countries, the moral revival, as It is truly designated, is, on its positive side, largely the product of that humanity and brotherhood of which Christian missions is the most outstanding exhibi- tion and which the missionary activity has had no small part in producing, ©n its negative side, this ethical note has been produced, in no small degree, by the exhibition of the evils of heathen civilizations which are seen in clearer perspective when studied in other peoples, evils which thus come to be recog- nized and rebuked in ourselves when otherwise they might not have come into definite consciousness. "After all these things do the heathen seek," said Jesus in warning His followers against a too eager concern for the things of time and sense. In the light of our modern world-wide intercourse we have been led to see elements of heathenism in our own civilization and life, and so to experience a reaction against them.

Then, too, missions have progressed so far that the consciousness of the Church has had to define

THE PRESENT ADVANTAGE OF MISSIONS 99

for itself its task as that of redeeming nations. If this is so, then we have forced upon us the demand that Christianity prove itself a redemptive agent in national life by the demonstration of a truly re- deemed nation. England, America and Germany are to-day facing that situation. As Christian lands can they exhibit Christian ideals and Christian achievements among their own people in such per- fection as to commend the redeeming agency of Christianity to other nations J* Are they (Christian in their dealings with other nations, in their diplo- macy and their commerce? These among other influences are sounding the ethical note in the ears of Christendom to-day, and we are becoming "lore^s^^^^^ Christian. It would be a strange misfortune for ourselves and the world if we should overlook, or forget, that our becoming more truly Christian is in order that the world may become Christian. If we shall so forget we shall lose the truest and most genuine character of that same ethical quality in which we take pleasure. Any suggestion that a larger knowledge of men and a higher development in culture might eliminate the reason for Christian missions involves a repudiation of the doctrine of the brotherhood of humanity and a negation of the claim to have advanced beyond former generations.

100 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

The Samaritan was less cultured than the Levite or the Pharisee, but far more human and far more in touch with the Divine. The man who passes by on the other side the brother wounded and among robbers, whether his neglect arises from Pharisaical pride or scientific indifference, lacks real culture of the heart. There is a culture in religious living without which no man or people can come into the highest development.

If all history is the making and the working out of religion, if Christianity has for two millenniums been the foremost factor in history making, and therefore stands forth as itself the greatest fact of history; if Christianity has made the West what it is, in advance of the East; if for a hundred years it has been the means directly and indirectly of awakening the East, and if its influence can justly be traced in the rapid developing of every people in the East, then all thought of the abandonment of missions would be treason against the spirit of Christianity, would be the repudiation of history, would be the absurdity of reason. To slacken our efforts would be for the farmer to abandon his crop at the haiVest time, for the builder to abandon his building at the roof. All the past has been getting ready for the age which lies just ahead of us.

THE PRESENT kovAm'AGE'O-^'lnSSlohV ' ' lOl

Christianity has been preparing for an era of uni- versal faith while all history has been leading up to that era. It is beyond question that the course of Christianity for the past century has been such as may be construed as preparation for making con- quest of the world for the Kingdom of God. The movements within the nations and the developments of international politics have brought about a con- dition which Christianity may interpret as a prepa- ration for the rapid promotion of its universal work. It cannot now turn back. The truest evaluation of the conquest of missions for the past century is in regarding them as a preparation for what remains yet to be done. Notwithstanding we are dealing with a challenge of the right of missions growing out of modern conditions of thought, still the changed position which foreign missions occupy with reference to their permissibility is to be cited as part of the justification of their value, and even more as an element in their opportunity. When Carey went to India he was not permitted to set foot upon British territory. To-day the entire , >^ authority of the Empire will guarantee the mis- sionary's right to proclaim the Gospel wherever floats the Union Jack. Some of His Majesty's officers may sympathize little with the aims or the

\i

102 MISSIONS Ai^D'. JttODERN THOUGHT

work of the missionary, but they must give him pro- tection and official courtesy, even though he may sometimes suffer because of unworthy neglect. As for India's own people, there are jealousies for the old faith and pride of race and tradition, but the ma« who can, with deep love for the people, point the way to better things will find a hearing in every community.

Morrison was compelled to go by way of America to get passage to China, because no European ship would carry so foolish and dangerous a cargo as a Gospel light-bearer, in 1807. In 1907 the great steamers of all lines gladly booked the hundreds of messengers who journeyed to Shanghai for Morrison's centennial. In China Morrison died after twenty-seven years of preparatory work, either toiling outside the barred doors of the closed country or laboring secretly in Canton at the work of preparing materials for other mission- aries who would follow him in the day of free preaching, which his faith certainly foresaw. Med- hurst and Milne labored among emigrant Chinese youth in the Straits Settlements, and sent their product of converted youth to begin the work where they themselves could not go. Gutzlaff quietly peddled contraband tracts and portions of the Cos-

THE PRESENT ADVANTAGE OF MISSIONS IO3

pels from his boat on bay and river, ready always to seek a new place of operations when the neces- sity came to move. Opium War and Arrow War, Tai Ping Rebellion and a hundred lesser civil strifes ; pressure and persuasion of the ablest diplo- macy have pressed back the hindering barriers of seclusion. When in 1900 the Boxer bolt fell with awful devastation upon foreigners, there seemed an almost universal agreement that the daily and periodical secular press should lay the blame on the missionaries. And that missionaries have been chief sufferers and that from their numbers were counted nearly all the slain, gave much show of color to the apparently spontaneous impulse to explain the uprising as aimed against the mission- ary propaganda. A more sober second thought made the appearance quite otherwise, and the true explanations came, in time, to be pretty generally understood. The consistent anti- foreign feeling of the Chinese, based on pride, prejudice and fear, had been fostered by the ruling class; foreign land aggressions and political ambitions; the influence and power of foreigners in the internal affairs of the empire; the introduction of machinery which threatened the occupations of the laboring class, these were reasons of which the secular journals

104 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

were ignorant or from which they wished to divert public attention. There was truth enough in the claim that missionary activity was distasteful to much of the sentiment of China. With the help of France and Germany, Roman Catholics were gain- ing for their missionaries political power and recog- nition. Mistakes in policy and errors in judgment by Protestant missionaries violated Chinese "pro- prieties." The successes aroused jealous leaders of the religion of China. The weaknesses of Chinese character and institutions, though uncon- fessed, were increasingly laid bare in the light of the education, in the scientific successes, and in the religious and ethical ideals of the West which were pressing upon China. The conflict was racial, commercial, social and religious. The world soon recalled that the missionaries were more widely distributed than any other class of foreigners, were least in position to avail themselves of powerful protection, were by their very purpose held more' tenaciously to their positions, were in places whefe representatives of commerce had as yet no call to go, and that the innocence and benevolence of their mission left them least reason to suspect or believe that harm could be planning for them. Hence they naturally received the fullest force of the fanatical

THE PRESENT ADVANTAGE OF MISSIONS 10$

and desperate effort of the Chinese at self-preserva- tion, against not the religion only nor mainly, but against all the encroachments of foreigners. Then, too, the world soon had the spectacle of the mis- sionaries returning to their fields of labor, with the places of the martyrs more than supplied with volunteers, and these going into places of even the remotest interior and everywhere received with glad welcome. It began to be recognized that, with the secular ambitions eliminated, with the civil fears abated, the Chinese had no real dread of the religion of the missionaries, but rather welcomed them as able to supply conscious need.

When we look back over the various attempts in "history to bring Christianity to China it becomes evident that Chinese hatred and exclusiveness have never once been asserted against Christianity as such, but only against the civil and political inter- ferences of those whom the Chinese, rightly or wrongly, associated in their minds with the aggres- sive religion. Christianity has so extensively been united with the interests of politics that it has not always been able to see its own independence of the ambitions of political aggression, and it has often, in spite of its best efforts, been unable to free itself from the entanglements of political

IN'''

I06 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

alliances. No one who looks upon the Boxer uprising as an effort to save the Empire from foreigners can fail of sympathy for the movement, and, while its barbarities and excesses are de- plorable in the last degree, we are bound, in the light of the changed relation of the outside world toward China and of the changed condition of China within, to justify the aim and rejoice in the outcome. With all the heavy indemnity that China is paying she must account that the price is wisely expended for the freedom which she now has to work out a national career in the light of modern ideals to which her own folly has at last per force committed her, by the reaction that inevitably fol- lowed the Boxer movement.

We venture to say also that Christianity's fearful baptism of martyrdom in China was not too much to pay for deliverance from its actual entangle- ments and from far more suspected identity with the earthy ambitions and designs of Western secu- lar forces. Christian missions understand them- selves better and are known and appreciated in China as never before, and nothing but such a catastrophe could have produced this result so speedily, so far as our insight can determine. Freedom has been gained for the operation of

THE PRESENT ADVANTAGE OF MISSIONS IO7

missions in every part of China, and the way has been opened for new lines of missionary work.

We have dwelt upon the progress of the opening of the door in China for the purpose of illustrating what has been going on in all countries during the past century, and because the course of events in China has brought to light some of the important principles which must guide missionary work and must help to determine the missionary motive and end. The work of "opening the doors" is now nearly completed. Even Mohammedan peoples are rapidly coming to be accessible to the heralds of the cross, partly by passing under political control of Protestant rulers and, what is far more signifi- cant, partly by the humanizing and liberalizing of the consciousness of mankind, so that in Turkey, at length, the streets of the cities are open for the pulpits of the preacher and the homes are open for the messages of the love of God. Pagan lands, Mohammedan peoples and Catholic countries are all now the legitimate territory of the man with a clear message from God that will call men into higher life.

Christianity has now the advantage of mission plants to serve as bases of supply, centers of influence and proofs of permanence within the lands

V

N -

c

I08 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

where missionaries are introducing Christianity as the force that is to redeem the people. Church buildings, hospitals, printing plants, school build- ings, missionaries' homes, Young Men's Christian Association buildings — these constitute in many ways an impressive advantage for the work of ^^^P' Christianizing the life of the nations. They give assurance to the workers, provide facilities for the work, and proclaim to the people the benevolence of its purpose. A Christian literature is an asset of immeasurable value even in the meager propor- tions to which it has so far attained. With the Bible in five hundred tongues, with multiplied thou- sands of missionary tracts, with the rapidly growing libraries of Christian books in the native languages, with valuable scientific and literary works bearing the imprint of Christian presses and provided by Christian agency for the needs of the new civiliza- tion of the people which must accompany the incoming of Christianity, with a periodical litera- ture which has the growing appreciation of the people, Christianity is now in a position to influence the life of the people such as it could not approach a half century ago. One of the most important lines of missionary service next ahead of us is the production of an adequate Christian literature.

THE PRESENT ADVANTAGE OF MISSIONS IO9

This will not be, in the main, translations of Eng- lish and German works, but the product of the thought of native Christians; not written by mis- sionaries, but coming out of the thought and spirit of the converts themselves who have come to think the concepts of Christian thought but in forms of native thinking. Does not Jesus Himself show us the way here? He wrote nothing Himself, but induced His way of viewing things into the minds of His followers and they produced the literature of the first century. One of the most marvelous achievements of Jesus is the measure of His suc- cess in impressing His mind on His disciples, until the fundamental conceptions and method of His thinking became native in their renewed minds.^ They interpreted Him in the forms of thought intelligible to their contemporaries. Christian mis- sionaries have usually aimed to do the same thing, and their work has proven temporary in the measure in which they have failed in this. Such a work requires time, under the conditions of heathenism in which the modern missionaries began their labors. We have now had the necessary time and results begin to show. In two generations more we may expect that a great volume of Christian *Cf. Mullins, Why is Christianity True?

no MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

literature will pour forth from the native mind in China and India, in Turkey and Egypt, and, in time, even in Africa and the isles of the seas. Christian thought will more and more permeate the general literature of the people, and what that may mean we can partly imagine if we reflect upon the significance of the Christian influence in our own general literature. The one hundred years of beginnings have brought Christianity to the thresh- old of this opportunity, and that result is enough to commend the enterprise and to guarantee its successful prosecution.

We think also of the Christian social centers planted in the midst of so many thousands of populous cities and towns of all the lands. A Christian community, now into the second and third and sometimes even a fourth generation of Chris- tian believers, constitutes a power for the attractive and permeating methods of Christian growth that must greatly increase the effectiveness of the mis- sionary work. These communities provide a con- serving and developing force for the results as they are gained, such as was, of course, wholly lacking at first and which had to be of slow growth, but which multiplies geometrically the influence and success of the work; lighthouses are these

THE PRESENT ADVANTAGE OF MISSIONS HI

Christian communities in the seas of heathen humanity. The Christian fellowship and sympa- thetic discipline of these growing communities give strength and courage in the face of the powerful temptations and bitter persecutions with which heathenism has, in the earlier stages of the mis- sionary conversions, been able to deter, intimidate and pervert the young Christians.

Directly related to this, and a part of it, is the great missionary force now ready for service on the fields. Paul tells us that when Jesus had com- pleted His ministry and had ascended up on high He carried with Him a band of captives whom He gave unto men as gifts. Among these gifts the Apostle mentions the four offices whose function it is to plant and propagate Christianity: apostles, or missionaries; evangelists, whose function was that which we attribute to home missionaries; prophets, whose business it was to guide the de- velopment of the newly planted churches with divine teaching suited to the new conditions as they arose in the unfolding life; pastor-teachers, who were the permanent guides of the Christian com- munities. Our Apostle goes on to say that the aim and end of all these offices is "the perfecting of the saints for the work of ministering." The

112 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

purpose was that in each body the private saints would minister the word, and so the work would grow and the influence be felt in ever growing power. We are coming in our foreign missions to the period of a competent native ministry. Already we have a host of pastor-teachers and thousands of private Christians devoting themselves with increasing intelligence and effort to extending the knowledge of their Savior. Evangelists and prophets are not wanting and will rapidly increase in numbers and value. With some seventeen thou- sand missionaries from Christian countries, includ- ing men and women, clergy and laymen, we have no fewer than a hundred thousand natives who devote themselves to the propagation of the Faith and the care of the faithful. Nor does this include the many who, in connection with the ordinary duties and relations of life, are all the while light- bearers in the midst of their generation.

One does not forget the added problems and new responsibilities that are involved in so great a body of native workers and native Christians. These responsibilities are great and often perplexing, but they are the problems of success and advance and so cannot discourage and delay but rather enspirit and impel to more vigorous and expansive effort.

THE PRESENT ADVANTAGE OF MISSIONS II3

The evangelization of any country is the work of native Christians. But before this work can be done there must be won by the missionary a band of natives to prosecute this evangelization and they must be so thoroughly trained, tested and developed that they will be able to give complete and genuine Christianity to their people. Until now the main work of the modern missionary has been the win- ning of these small bands of converts from whom it was possible to select an increasing number who were willing to devote themselves to the work of propagating Christianity, and who gave evidence of capacity for so important an undertaking. Not suddenly but gradually the function of the mis- sionary is changing to that of the guardian, guide, teacher, sympathizer and adviser. The ultimate end, of course, is that the missionary will no longer be needed. The completion of his work is the elimination of his presence. We are yet far from that stage in all our fields. We have so far approached it that suggestions are sometimes made that we no longer need the missionary and ought to transfer to the natives the entire responsibility of the work. For the present, we may use this exag- gerated view to set over against the more absurd claim of some that missions have proved a failure. 8

114 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

They are neither a failure nor yet a complete suc- cess. They are succeeding most encouragingly. So long as the native church is not self-supporting it may be taken for granted that it is not yet ready for absolute self-government nor prepared for assuming the entire burden and responsibility of self-propagation.

Christian missions, supported most niggardly in comparison with the unlimited resources of Chris- tendom, opposed by many and neglected by the great majority of professed Christians, their impor- tance realized by a very few, always hampered by an unbelieving and laggard Church and hindered by the worldliness and wickedness of travelers and sojourners from Christian lands, and with their forces scattered and few, have nevertheless in little more than a century made Christianity the standard for the world's religions, have permeated the world's thought with Christian ideals, and have introduced the power of the spiritual life as a regenerating force in the life of nearly all the peoples of the earth. The missionaries and their supporters, always till now a numerical minority of the Church, have made Christianity missionary whether the guardians of its organization and orthodoxy would or not; for, in the nature of the

THE PRESENT ADVANTAGE OF MISSIONS II 5

case, all the force and value of Christianization and culture, of Christian education and life, have been behind those who went to proclaim its saving mes- sage to men. Wherever a truly Christian man has gone there has gone inevitably a Christian mis- sionary. He would be more effective in most cases if he consciously and prayerfully recognized himself as a missionary, and devoted himself, in whatever capacity he might be going, to witnessing to Christ and making disciples. In the Greek of the Great Commission the command to go into all the world is secondary, expressed by a particle, the imperative injunction being to make disciples of all the nations. The relation of the two ideas would be suggested by rendering, "As ye go into all the world make dis- ciples of all the nations." Thus the Commission is generalized, and the great privilege and duty belongs to every disciple in all his goings. The whole of Christendom has been an asset for the foreign mission enterprise. The time has come to convert this asset into active capital. If we can do that the world will speedily become Christian. There are many indications that the Church is ready to respond to such an opportunity. When it does so respond the real Christian Era will have come into the world's history.

Ill

THE CHALLENGE IN THE LIGHT OF COMPARATIVE RELIGION

CHAPTER VI

MAY CHRISTIANITY SUPPLANT OTHER RELIGIONS?

One of the chief sources from which arises the question of the legitimacy, and more especially of the necessity, of foreign missions, is the modern study of religion, and of the religions. This study is still relatively new, and not all its bearings on the practical activities of the religions have yet been determined. For their full determination, we should need final results in the history, the psy- chology, and the philosophy of religion. But, in the nature of the case, final knowledge in some of the branches of this study is not to be attained. So far, these studies have advanced only to the point of raising the questions as to the function and finality of any one religion. These questions are legitimate. Any religion that now goes on propaganda must be prepared for a challenge of its right in the field of comparative religion. This is not to say that we are to halt, or even to hesitate, in Christian missions until we can satisfy every student of religion that our end is desirable and necessary. We have only to satisfy ourselves that 119

I20 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

our task is rational and necessary; and we may even come to see that the inner spiritual imperative for our v^itness to the Christ v^ill not wait on an entirely completed rational justification; because already we are assured that this is a rational service. The right of Christian missions is not a theoretical question in the study of religions. It is not merely, nor very largely, an academic question at all. Christian missions are not to be determined by expediency. A few years ago, the American Jour- nal of Theology had discussed in a symposium the question : "Has Christianity the moral right to sup- ^»«'''*'"'*^plant the ethnic faiths ?" Dr. Henry C. Mabie, then Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Union, Boston, in replying to this question said: "The influences which give rise to this query, often in the public mind, are mainly two: The conception of missions represented by questionable forms of missionary zealotry, and prevalent thought tendencies in com- parative religion. Of all religions, Christianity undoubtedly is the most missionary. Its aggres- siveness proves disturbing. The right of Chris- tianity to encroach on other systems is doubted. In viewing the contest speculatively, ere men are aware, sympathy is engendered for one type of these faiths as against another. A spirit of cham-

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS 121

pionship then springs up, zeal for partizan victory obscures the importance of the truth at stake, and the issue is Hkely to be viewed as if it were a game, to be lost or won on the field of athletics. If the question were, 'Has any form of religion the moral right to play at religion as a game?' we answer, *No!' The real issue involved is vastly deeper and more serious. There is something more than a tournament on ! The answer . . . profoundly affects, not only Christian missions, but moral effort — of every kind."^ We may add, that if the glori- /

fication of the Christian system, as a system, -is the /

end in view, the gaining of a partisan advantage, /

the exaltation of Anglo-Saxon civilization as against I

Semitic or Mongolian, the gaining of any human^^^^,^^ glory or advantage, then. Christian missions would be neither worthy nor worth while. But if we see that the question is one of fidelity to Christ, response to the norm of the Christian spirit, faithful devo- / tion to the highest endeavor for the good of man- ^^ kind, the case is very different, and Christian missions absolutely imperative. We must, how- ever, fairly face the questions introduced by the scientific, comparative study of religions. We cannot determine the relation of religions to each

* See The Divine Right of Missions.

1

122 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

Other until we have first determined the relation of any involved religion to the fundamental relig- iousness of the human heart. This, in turn, involves that we define religion. Here we are met by the fact that no definition has been agreed upon by students of religion. Professor Morris Jastrow^ and Dr. Jordan,^ among others, have tabu- lated a great number of definitions. Jastrow has thirty, classified under several types, to which he adds another hardly more convincing of its accu- racy than the rest. It will probably be accepted in a general way if we say that religion is man's God-consciousness, together with the theories and practices by which man gives expression to his God-consciousness. Religion has to do with man's spiritual nature, and with the facts and relations involved in spiritual experience. Man's conscious- ness of super-human, or extra-human, relationships, and the effects of this consciousness on thoughts and conduct enter largely into the content of religion. If we should define religion as we con- ceive it in ideal, it would be the participation by the creature in the life of the Creator, however one might define the terms creature and Creator. In religion man consciously determines his own

^ The Study of Religion. ' Comparative Religion.

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS 1 23

activity in accordance with the principles of the ground of his being and by means of energy shared by the finite with the Infinite — and let us call it spiritual energy. Such ideal religion would imply human nature complete and unimpaired, and moved from within by perfect motives. Man is very far from this ideal, and practically religion must be defined as something less than this; whether because of a fall from the ideal state, or because man has progressed only a little way toward that ideal. It is sufficient that he is near enough to picture this ideal before him.

There are in man certain fundamental, persistent sentiments that are satisfied only as man thinks himself to be in the way toward realizing the ideal of religion. It is now generally agreed that there are at least three fundamental religious sentiments : a sense of dependence upon the super-human, the recognition of obligation to the super-human, and desire for fellowship with the super-human. So soon as man reflects, as he must, on these senti- ments, there arise certain religo-philosophical ques- tions, the answers to which determine the religions which men make for themselves. Man asks: "On whom, or what, am I dependent, and why? To whom, or what, am I under obligation, and why?

124 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

With what spirit, or spirits, may fellowship be secured, and how?" Systematic answers to these questions express the formal doctrines of all the systems; practical answers constitute the cults and worship of all the faiths. Wherever a man has impulsively, and without reflection, made response to these soul fundamentals, we have the simpler forms of religions, known as animism, with the various forms of nature worship. When the ques- tions have been reflected upon, defined, and delib- erately answered, we. have systematic religions with organizations and books that are, or come to be, regarded as sacred writings. These reflective religions are local and national, or else universal in tendency.

Of course, in this view, all religions begin with the impulsive stage. So far as the history o£ religions can yet testify, this is true, but there are many facts and much psychology of religion yet to be learned; and not a few of the known facts point to decline and degeneration in religions. As for the "primitive man," with whom we are sup- posed to start in the study of religion, as in all anthropological studies, it cannot be said that he is as yet more than a convenient creature of the historical and scientific imagination. What original

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS 12$

man was, no one yet knows scientifically or relig- iously, and "primitive man" is a mere symbol for the least that is human, with which all anthropo- logical studies have to begin. Those who fancy that the Bible undertakes to tell us with any measure of completeness and definiteness what original man was will be greatly surprised if they honestly and fully look into the record, whether they had previously supposed the account to be full and complete, or had thought it only mythical and meager. Certainly religions have had a stage of impulsive, animistic worship, later to develop into reflecting systems, as, for example, in Greece and Rome, where also we witness the failure of development in arrested progress, resulting in skepticism and then religious decay and anarchy. Again, there are animistic religions that degenerate, or develop if one prefer, along the lines of super- stition and fetishism, and never attain to any systematic form or written word. Yet again in Buddhism and Taoism we find examples of religions that began from highly reflective sources, later to be almost completely swamped and surrounded by the superstitions and impulsive forms of animistic nature worship. Of course, these religions only relatively begin with Gautama and Lao-tse, but

126 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

they illustrate the line of development here sug- gested, namely degeneration. It is claimed that the religion of the Hebrews follows the course common to other religions, and that Christianity, being at first a variant product of Hebraism, through reaction against Legalism, is only one of the religions of the world ; and that there is, there- fore, neither reason nor right that Christianity should seek to supplant other religions, or to inter- fere with the normal religious evolution of any people. The first obvious reply is on the grounds of the challenge, that the universalism and aggres- siveness of Christianity constitute a part of its development, and that having reached that stage, and being essentially of that nature, its present world campaign, in foreign missions, is both scientific and inevitable.

A universal religion must be the religious goal of a unit race, and there would remain only the question whether the Christian religion has in it the universal elements that fit it to be the religion of mankind, without containing any essential ele- ments that unfit it for such a destiny; and the further question whether the world is yet ready for appreciating and accepting the universal religion. Even if one should think that the world is not yet

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS 1 27

ready, it may still be that the preparation of the world for Christian universalism will be promoted by the universal propaganda of the Christian Gospel. The advance of the world toward higher religious ideas in the past century gives corrobora- tion to this view of the case, especially when we consider the relatively limited missionary eflfort. And the superior progress of religion in those lands where Christianity has been the dominant religion argues the same conclusion.

Critics of Christian propagandism on the grounds of the legitimacy and the fitness of the ethnic faiths for the civilization and the peoples who hold them proceed on the assumption, if their reasoning is to be accounted of any validity, that Christianity is also an ethnic religion. That this is by no means the fact, is instantly apparent the moment one turns attention to the subject. Christianity is not the native religion of the Anglo-Saxon race, as much of the discussion of this subject would seem to imply; nor is it the native religion of any race or people now holding it. Even though Christianity arose in Palestine and among the Jews, relating itself historically, and spiritually to Judaism, it is still true that Christianity, even in the beginning, was not a Jewish religion. Before it had established

128 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

itself in its earliest self-consciousness, it was already cosmopolitan. Paul but expressed the conscious- ness of the Christian Church when he declared that in Christ Jesus there can be no racial distinction, Jew and Greek; nor social distinction, bond and free; nor cultural lines, Greek and Barbarian; nor even sex distinction, male and female. Christianity- was the religion of humanity.^ On the one hand, the Jews slew Jesus and rejected His Gospel, in great measure because of its universalism, while on the other hand, the effort of narrow-visioned Jewish Christians to make of Christianity an ethnic faith was defeated by Paul and those who saw with him that Christianity in its very essence is of and for the whole race. It was thus distinctly repu- diated as an ethnic religion and as definitely defined as a faith of humanity.

That a religion may supplant and include the native faiths is proved at every step in the growth of Christianity. That people may feel the need of a new religion and may naturalize it in their own life and thought, is seen readily enough in the career of Buddhism, which, like Christianity, is a foreign religion in all the countries where it is now extensive. It came into China by distinct mvita-

^Galatians 3.

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS 1 29

tion and desire of an early emperor, who expressed in himself the conscious need of the people ; and its introduction into Japan was by a similar process. Buddhism found its earliest homes in Burma and in Ceylon because the kings of these countries voiced the sense of their peoples' need in inviting, fostering and cherishing this religion. But here we find a difference between Buddhism and Chris- tianity. Buddhism did not supplant, but obviously and willingly complemented the religion, or reli- gions, already held by the people who adopted the new faith. In Ceylon and Burma there existed already unorganized nature worship, but this Buddhism allowed to remain and it persists to this day really the deepest and most universal element in the religion of both countries. In China Buddhism took its place alongside the already existing Confucianism and Taoism, and neither religion ever needed to displace the others. It often happens that the worship of the three relig- ions is conducted in one temple. Confucianism is the religion of human relationships, Taoism the religion of extra-human relations, Buddhism the religion of the future life. It takes all these to meet the conscious need of any normal soul. In Japan Buddhism has existed since the fifth century 9

130 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

alongside Shinto and nature worship, because, as elsewhere, each of the reHgions is incomplete, and in itself so consciously insufficient as to demand and welcome some supplementing faith. Surely in such a case it is legitimate to inquire whether the need is yet supplied and whether all the truth of these religions may not be included in one religion that offers to supply all the need of the religious soul.

The only other religion with universal elements and aspirations is Mohammedanism. That differs from Christianity and from Buddhism in that it has remained in the land of its birth, and has gained and held its adherents, mainly, among the race from which it sprang. Elsewhere, for the most part, it has gained converts from peoples socially and religiously backward and degraded, as in India, or undeveloped, as in Africa. It has never shown the adaptability and progressiveness that belong to a universal religion. Its theology is theoretically universal and not ethnic, but is too limited and defective to be universal, and a close study suggests that the defects are so far due to race and place as really to be marks of an ethnic, and hence a local and limited, religion.

Comparative religion necessarily involves a com-

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS I3I

parison of religions. All religions are but the common religion of the human heart, interpreted and expressed in variant forms, and varying with the growth of the religion, under the development of thought and culture. These varying develop- ments are — or else are not — under the guidance of the inspiration of God, more or less fully and purely understood and accepted. At this point the study of religion is as yet uncertain and unscientific. It is a definite assumption of the science of religion, in the hands of most students, that this divine guidance is to be ignored ; not because it is denied, necessarily, but because if present it is an element that cannot be definitely measured and estimated, and so, for the sake of scientific exactness, it must be left out of the account. It would, indeed, seem that to leave out of the reckoning any existent factor in the product and development of religions on the ground that this factor was beyond the power of human measurements would be to pur- chase exactness at the expense of honesty, to secure completeness at the price of truth. This might give to the science completeness within itself, but at the sacrifice of completeness in dealing with its subject, which is the important matter. If relig- ions are other because of God than they would be

132 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

if only of man we can gain nothing in our under- standing of them by ruUng God out of our study. Hence it is that in the philosophy of religion this divine element is recognized, and all inspiration, and the advance that it inspires, are taken into account and are interpreted as from the human side discovery, while from the divine side they con- stitute revelation. Man finds God because God is showing himself to man. The study of religion should reveal the measure in which the religions have found God. Further, in the Christian relig- ion, at least, no man finds God for himself alone, but for the race; and no religion exists for itself, nor for the people to whom it has now come. The Christian thought is that truth and faith are held in stewardship to be extended and imparted in love in the same measure in which they have come to be apprehended and enjoyed.

In comparing and criticizing religions, there are certain principles that ought to be recognized if we hope to arrive at right results and to determine the right and propriety of propagandism among the religions. There are three factors that enter into the making of any religion, that determine its prac- tical working out in history, and by which the religion must be tested. These factors are, its

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS I33

doctrine, its power, and its material. The doctrine deals with the facts and ideas as to God and spiritual verities; its ideals for humanity; its rela- tions, between Gk)d and man, man and fellowman, man and finite spirits other than human, man and the material world; the character and forms of its organized life and worship. We have to consider the power of a religion for moving man in the direction of the ideals which the religion holds for its worshipers. The material on which the religion works is human nature, with its religious senti- ments and tendencies, depraved passions, and cor- rupt practices. This human nature is the same for all religions. They differ in doctrine and motive power.

To test the doctrine we inquire how far it cor- responds with comprehensive spiritual truth, what it omits that is needful, and what it introduces that is untrue, defective, or superfluous ; in what measure are its ideals, ethical and spiritual, free from base- ness, from materialism, and from the temporal qualities; how far does it rightly apprehend man in his relationships, to God, to fellowman, to other beings, and to nature; are its theories and forms of worship in harmony with true religious ideas which worship ought to express and to develop,

134 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

and is the worship in harmony with the laws of the spirit of the worshiper? Worship should always express the present experience of the wor- shiper and at the same time invite and lead him on to new experiences, should be instructive and inspiring, as well as giving voice to his present devotion.

Concerning the power by which a religion pro- poses to move man, we ask: Is it available, is it adequate? The answer will depend upon whether the power is personal or impersonal, human or divine, limited or infinite, external or internal; and upon the means by which this power is procurable for man. Does it wait on him altogether, or does it move itself in man's behalf?

When we come to measure the practical results of the religion in human nature, in the life of the people of the religion, what it can do will depend upon how thoroughly the religion understands and interprets this material with which it must work; how thoroughly and persistently it can hold to lofty ideals for man without compromise with his base tendencies and serious weaknesses, on the one hand, and without lack of sympathy, on the other hand; for the priest must represent God in his holiness and at the same time ''be able to sympathize with

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS I35

them that are ignorant and out of the way." The result will also depend upon how great is the power on which the religion relies, how thoroughly- understood, and how consistently applied. Per- haps no religion has consistently drawn fully upon its power; certainly Christianity has been very far from doing so.

In applying these tests we must be fair. This is not easy to do, and at this point we often fail. When we face the evils of any people we must not off-hand charge these evils, all of them, up to the religion of the people. We must inquire what is the effect of the religion on the evil notions and practices. Are its tendencies for the correction of these evils and for the improvement of the ethical life of the people? Does the religion in any way sanction or incite to evil? Does it encourage or ignore sin? The inherent evil of human nature must not be charged against the religion that the people hold, nor must the forms of sin and vice be laid at the door of the people's faith, unless that faith is guilty. Even if the religion has failed to correct and expel the sin, that failure must be measured relatively to the task and the time the religion has been occupied with the task. There have been and are religions that do not elevate the

136 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

morals of the worshiper, and there are forms of religion that sanctify the base passions of our nature, and so degrade rather than uplift, but these things must be learned, by patient and honest inves- tigation, and not assumed in the case of any given religion.

We must take into account the influence of the religion on progress in all that makes for true civilization. Does the religion inspire and foster this, or does it hinder and retard? And here we have to take account of the whole people. The ideals and the lives and teachings of a few indi- viduals of a single generation, or of some particular period, will not indicate with certainty the charac- ter of a religion. The excellence of a certain select class will not commend a religion, if that excellence has been purchased at the expense of the degrada- tion or the neglect of the great body of the people. Roman citizenship was splendid and admirable in many ways, but could be truly estimated only in connection with the Plebeians and slaves of the Empire. We cannot estimate Hinduism by the Brahmin apart from the Sudra, nor can we measure Christianity by the churches in Chicago or London while we close our eyes upon the slums. A relig- ion must set itself the task of redeeming the whole

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS I37

life of the whole people, and it must be judged by the measure and promise of success in such a task. It ought not to be necessary to say that we should not take the best of one religion's teachings or life to compare with any but the best in another. We cannot estimate the literature of a religion by extracts from its best books, nor its ethics by isolated maxims from its best prophets. The whole of the one must be put alongside the whole of the other, and the comparison honesty made. In our time, too, it is important to consider the inter-action of religions upon one another. We are justified in claiming that Christian ideals have impressed them- selves upon all the world within recent generations, and the borrowing has not been without repay- ments. It is safe to say that Mohammedanism, at least about the Mediterranean sea, is greatly changed by the impress of Christianity. Religious and social India is greatly modified by the impact of Christian civilization, and it is easy to find influences of Hindu thought in Christian philosophy and theology in our day.

When we compare the religions of the world, with reference to their relation to the fundamental religious elements, dependence, obligation and fel- lowship, the mission of Christianity to other relig-

138 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

ions gains clearness just as in a preceding chapter Christianity was seen to have a mission to the world in the sphere of progress. As a religion, Chris- tianity claims in a sense not claimed by other religions, and which it denies in others, to be God's answer, in Christ Jesus, to the longings of the human soul, and especially in the sphere of fellow- ship. If Christianity has a superior answer for these deepest needs of the race, it has a mission to the race, whether one holds that its answer differs from others only in the degree, or also in the kind, of its inspiration from God. Man's native powers and natural opportunities enable him to give cor- rect answers, however limited, to the questions of dependence and obligation. God's everlasting power and divinity are, as Paul says, clearly mani- fest in nature, and men have written in their con- sciences a law of the ethical imperative, and hence become a law unto themselves, apart from any religious or ethical code. Intuition and conscience provide the conditions, the forces and laws of nature and of human nature supply the materials, and religious reason performs the task of sys- tematizing much truth concerning man's present moral and religious dependence and obligation; But man cannot stop here, for he would be left in

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS 1 39

fear and despair. The knowledge of God's ever- lasting power and divinity leaves man under dependence and obligation to a power which he cannot resist or control, and a Divinity with which he is out of harmony and fellowship. Deficient in his obligations, man's dependence is bondage. He will discover or invent some means- by which to gain the fellowship of which he feels the loss, some way of atoning for the violation and defective dis- charge of his obligations, some relief from the bonds of his dependence. In exceptional examples man resorts to atheistic rebellion against depend- ence, and repudiation of obligation, but he cannot long get away from his nature ; and no atheistic nor dogmatically agnostic system can long maintain itself. Buddhism was primarily the repudiation of religion, but the religious consciousness almost immediately reasserted itself, and avenged itself, by deifying the Buddha and his Law and his Order. Since the Reformation Europe has witnessed sev- eral attempts, along at least three different lines, to dispense with religion of a present personal God, so far without success; for in every case the mind and heart have turned again to fellowship with God. The history of two centuries encourages faith's hope in the current crisis. The ethnic faiths

140 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

constitute and embody the best solution to the fundamental religious inquiries of the soul that the mind and heart of man have been able to reach, subject as they ever must be, to the limitations of reason, the influences of depraved passion, and the ignorance of the human understanding. Chris- tianity does not, and has no need to, deny all revel- ation and divine guidance in the origination and the development of other religions. Rather does it assert this, and rests its own hope of a successful evangelism upon the fact. Some connection all organized religions must have had with the revela- tions contained in the Old Testament and the New Testament, witness especially Buddhism and Mo- hammedanism. Moreover, the Bible recognizes revelation outside that of its own prophets. The Priest-King of Salem was superior to Abraham; Job was no Hebrew, and in him are attained the heights of Old Testament revelation; lesser exam- ples will occur to every reader. In any case, one must refrain from the universal negation of God's revealing presence in the "heathen" religions. It is because God is in them, and more fully in Chris- tianity, that Christianity has a mission to the other religions. Perhaps we ought to drop the abstract form of speech and think of Christianity's message

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS I4I

to men, rather than to rehgions. Whom God is leading by the uncertain Hghts of immature and clouded faiths, He would bring to the fulness of religious knowledge and experience by the Day- spring from on high who shines through the mis- sionary message of the Gospel. It is in this religion that God offers to mankind that fellowship which converts dependence into sonship, which glorifies obligation with the motive of constraining love, and because it realizes the longed-for fellowship of man with God.

Thus we can see in what sense Christianity pro- poses to supplant other religions, and how super- ficial is the prejudice that questions the moral right of one religion to supplant another. "So far as there are in all men elements of nature religion, true in themselves, there is no occasion to displace them. Such residue of religion, wherever found, is to be complemented, fulfilled by *the true light which now shines.' " "The Christianity of the New Tes- tament is in no conflict with the soul in any land or time who in his light has acted penitently and believ- ingly toward his highest ideal," for in that soul is faith and the missionary of the Christ will not crush the bruised reed nor snuflf out the smoking flax, and surely he will not disdain nor overlook the

142 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

germ of faith that struggles to grow in the dim light. His mission is to bind up the broken- hearted, and to bring to full burning the dead fires of spiritual life in the soul. To be sure, there will be displacement, substitution, and supplanting, but this will be incidental, secondary, and indirect, not primary and the main purpose. Christianity is as far as possible from conducting a partizan warfare against the creeds of humanity. What is false and wrong needs elimination from the minds and hearts and lives of men. If Christianity can do that, it ought to do it. Thinking of the interests of men, and losing our concern for mere systems, by what right does Hinduism hold millions of children in the captivity of widowhood? By what right does the caste of Hinduism doom all its people to the bondage of narrow circles of suffering and degra- dation, shame and inhumanity, in which they chance to be born ? By what right does Buddhism enchain with idolatrous superstitions millions of lives? Whence the right of Mohammedanism to bind with mechanical fatalism in theology and with stagnant social ideals any part of the human race? Have the base superstitions of Africa any moral claims on the souls of the Negroes? Right is a personal function, and unless these souls belong to some

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS I43

demon of darkness, whose right is unquestionable, the Christian missionary^ or any other man with powers to release, may pursue his work in every place. The question of right can arise only as it relates to the adherents of the ethnic religion. It cannot even arise with reference to the founders of these religions since they are not supposed by their followers to possess continuous personal interest in their teaching and systems in the same sense in which the living Christ is the abiding object of love and loyalty on the part of every Christian. In Buddhism, Confucianism, or Mohammedanism, a man may surrender his faith and accept another without doing personal despite to the founder of the faith. In Christianity it is not so, because Jesus Christ is Himself the object of faith, and for the reason that in Him we directly reach God, while in the others we do not. To raise the ques- tion of right assumes a sort of violence, as if the people who are sought by the missionary were about to be compelled to forsake their native faith and accept a new religion. It ought not to be necessary to point out that the acceptance of Chris- tianity is in all cases expected to be voluntary. The really legitimate question is, whether all men have not an inherent right to the best in religion,

144 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

at least the right to know all religions that they may choose the best. Such is the attitude and spirit of Christianity. Paul is the typical mis- sionary when he declares himself debtor to Jew and Greek, to bond and free. He gave the true recognition of the religious right of humanity to all the good he believed himself to be able to ojffer. The sort of elimination and displacement that Christianity would effect in the religions of China and India is different only in degree from that which it is constantly bound to make even in Chris- tian lands. Many errors in thought and practice are corrected or destroyed, practices supplanted or supplemented, according to the demands of the situation and the effectiveness of the Christian work. The task is everywhere the same. Chris- tianity proceeds on the assumption that something needs correction. Sin and imperfection are the background against which Christianity pursues its work. If on the one hand there is elimination, on the other there is a filling out of the life and ideals. Christian missions aim to bring to full realization all the true hopes and right aspirations of men everywhere. "The real issue amounts to this: Is Christianity warranted in imparting its Divine Grace to all mankind, and thus realizing to them

SUPPLANTING OTHER RELIGIONS I45

the values hinted or incipient in other reHgions, even though the process in the end will discard the base and harmful elements encumbering them?^ Christian missions are, in their own purpose, "an outreach of grace in behalf of others, efforts to save men unto God and unto themselves." The Amer- ican Ex-Secretary Foster, after a tour around the world, in which he closely studied its conditions, said that he would answer the question : "By what right Christian America had gone into the various lands of Asia to disturb and reconstruct systems and institutions in those lands known as heathen," by saying: "The right to communicate to others, benefits too good to keep." The right of foreign missions lies in their being "the profoundest agency in the on-going civilization of the world," and in their being the means of bringing the world into the realization of the highest religious good in oneness with God. *Mabie, Divine Right of Missions,

10

CHAPTER VII

MISSIONS AND THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

. Does the reasoning of the preceding chapter seem to beg the question ; or to go wide of the real ques- tion raised in modern thinking? It is our purpose to face frankly the question as it is. Does the criti- cism and complaint against the Christian attempt to enter the East and readjust religious thought and social conditions, grow out of the assumption that the thought and condition of Eastern peoples is as good for them as is ours for us ? This assump- tion is based on the doctrine of evolution, "viewed extremely" and externally, and applied exclusively. On that assumption we would seem in our missions to be thwarting the laws of evolution and interfer- ing with the normal method in religion. In that case one could rightly ask; What is the use?

This objection assumes for the religions of the world that they are to ''be accounted for by a single, uniform, upward evolution." But, a gospel of grace is proclaimed in all nations and this idea of grace, in the primitive religious consciousness, lies back of all religions, and reasserts itself in 146

THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION I47

fulness and power in the highest forms of religion. There are ''persistent tendencies of sin to per- vert man's original stock of truth" and the history of religions demonstrates their degradation and corruption quite as fully as it indicates their advance and elevation. One of the over-wrought common- places of the critics of religion is the incubus of theology and the tyranny of the priesthood by which men are hindered in their religious and ethical evolution. Paul knew of those ''who hold down the truth in unrighteousness." But this phase of the religious condition of the followers of the ethnic faiths seems all too readily to slip out of mind when these same critics turn their attention to the propaganda of Christianity. May no one preach freedom to these captives of elaborate and binding theology, these slaves of extensive and oppressive priesthoods? But if it should turn out to be but an exchange of servitudes? That is the real question, and it is for comparison to determine how far this would be true when Christianity has gained converts from the other religions. Chris- tianity need not fear the test. It is moreover for Christianity to see that its missions carry the free- dom of salvation and not the bondage of super- ficial forms. But, to return to the principle of evo-

V

148 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

lution in religion : it is no legitimate bar to missions and can legitimately raise no serious question against a reasonable Christianity proclaiming its universal Gospel. Evolution is no more real, powerful, exclusive, or sacred in religion than in commerce, social life, civil institutions, general edu- cation and culture. Does any one imagine that Eng- land should have left India alone to work out her own political and economic salvation, or her com- pleter ruin, without external influences ; even if we may suppose that other nations would have k^pt hands off? Has the introduction of new forces into the process of evolution there violated the laws of evolution, or marred the "historical method" of study? Would any one think that China's culture is disturbed in its evolution by the introduction in its education of a new ideal that revolutionizes the examinations and the studies that have been con- sidered best since the days of Confucius ? Has the outside world allowed the commercial evolution of the East to proceed without molestation? We ought surely by this time to have reached the point where there is no need to argue for the admission of the principle of control in evolution.^ One of

^ Cf. Wilkin, Control in Evolution; MacDonald, The Tree in the Midst, etc.

THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION I49

the finest conceptions of our time is just this idea that the voluntary projection of personality into the working of the forces of the cosmos is the Divine method for bringing all to completion, or at least keeping forward the progress toward such an end. Nothing is complete. All is in making. We have become creators. We perfect the plants, flowers, and fruits by voluntary manipulation of nature's forces in ways for which evolution seems insufficient without our direction. Our oranges are seedless, our crops of grain are multiplied, our world is growing more beautiful, prolific and satisfying, because we help on what nature is aiming at, but missing until we intervene with our voluntary pur- pose. We enter the sphere of animal life and determine the development, and so the usefulness, of such animals as we have need of. The evolution of our craft for transportation over land and sea, what is it but the product of intelligent volition, working in the midst of the materials of nature by means of control over the laws of nature? It is evolution. Yes; but it is also creation and adjust- ment, and improvement, and progress. "The evo- lution of the jack-knife" is not an illustration of the working of a blind evolution containing its laws within itself. It is an exhibition of the voluntary

150 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

manipulation of the materials and control of the laws of nature. Is not the same truth apparent in government in Europe and America, as well as everywhere else? Is it not so in medicine, and in all social institutions ? Shall any one set- barriers and say that it shall not be so in religion, or that the application of the principle must be limited by the geography of the nations, and the accidents of tribal location? Who made the geography of the nations, after all, that this should constitute bar- riers for spiritual forces and redeeming activities?

It may well be asked, too, how the principle of evolution in religion came to be so local and nation- alized an affair, that it must work in different ways on opposite sides of the earth, and that neither side must interfere with the other. It may further be said that Christianity in the West is not without returns from the East.

At this point, too, emerges a new and very special reason for Christian missions. Since the world has become truly one, with channels of intercourse and constant interchange, the tendencies to uniformity, will manifest themselves mightily. Unless the cur- rents of religious thought and influence are strongly set from the West to the East, then from out the East they will flow into the West. We must make

THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION I5I

our religious ideas universal, or have them cor- rupted and degraded by the ideals of the Eastern peoples. Fairbairn^ carefully sums up the various lines of race unity in its Laws, Industries, Com- merce, Literature and Religion, and then says : "The essential unity of these products of the reason, and, consequently of the reason which has created them, is seen in their communicability, their being in the most perfect degree exchangeable and transferable things. Nation can borrow from nation; the later is heir to the earlier age. And no state creates a good for itself alone, and no empire can do an evil that is not an injury to the race. The life of human- ity is one, and its goods are common." In this age of physical oneness, spiritual interdependence and interaction are inevitable. International borrowing is recognized clearly enough in all material things and all temporal interests. Did not Japan import American and European educators to organize for her a modern educational system, in which she shortly came to equal the best? Did she not learn the military art from Germany and England? Did not Sir Robert Hart import a system of customs and posts into the economic life of China? Did not the invention of printing in Germany become at ^The Philosophy of the Christian Religion.

152 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

once a means of producing literature for the world ? This whole question of the right, pertinency, or fit- ness, of the injection of new forces and life into the evolutionary process is thoughtless and unreason- able. It would deny history and repudiate prac- tical philosophy. Confucius gave a sort of age-long finality to the evolutionary tendency of certain Chinese characteristics, but modern forces are breaking up this old order and changing the cur- rents of Chinese history, setting into fresh activity the evolution of the people. The Buddha, in his personality and teaching, became a new force in the religious history of Asia, and, in some measure, of the world. Mohammed is a mighty factor in the religious practices and destiny of multiplying millions.

It should be noted, also, that in all these cases there was the suppression, and sometimes the death, of many religious forms and ideas, and that in some instances entire religions were done away. In the case of Jesus Christ we find all the principles sug- gested above accentuated by a larger application. Did He not fulfill, in the sense that He brought to absolute completion and termination, the evolution of the practice of sacrifice, so that from His day to this wherever His Word has gone the bloody sacri-

THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 1 53

fice has passed into the things that were? Has He not ever changed the course of the history of whatever people His power has touched with the Gospel ? Without pressing further this Hne of thought, are we not led up to the suggestion that personality is itself an evolutionary force, and, in the development of all forms of personal experi- ence in history, the force? And, again, does not all evolution, in the end, subordinate itself to per- sonality, and must it not either be explained by per- sonality or remain an inscrutable and meaningless puzzle ?

At last, the consideration of comparative religion in its bearing on Christian missions comes round to the question whether Christianity has the highest good to offer to all mankind. Here the claim is not merely for a higher good. That might, or might not, justify our propaganda. Some of our more cautious and hesitant Christian apologists wish to claim only that Christianity is better than any other, not that it is the best. Among this number are Dr. Horton,* and Dr. Hume,^ a mis- sionary in India. A religion that will be univer- sally missionary and seek to implant itself as the central and formative principle in all men must be

*My Belief. * Missions from the Modem View,

154 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

ideally the best, as well as already the better in any given comparison. Otherwise our missionary undertakings will lack the force and vigor of the deepest conviction. Christianity is to be the world religion only if it contains within itself, ideally and potentially, the principles and the power that will, in its normal development, issue in the perfect religion. Taking best in this sense of ideal, Chris- tianity goes upon its missions to all the world because it is, in the vital and fundamental charac- teristics of religion, the best. This belief of ours must be tested and not held from prejudice, cus- tom, tradition, bigotry, ignorance of other religions. In order to be the best it must hold the best pos- sible ideals, the highest practical approach to the ideals, and the strongest inspiration and power for the ultimate attainment of its ideals. It will not be possible here to make detailed comparison with each of the ethnic religions. Our present purpose will be better served by indicating those respects in which Christianity is superior to all others and promises to become universal.

Christianity has the best God. "For what great nation is there that hath a God so nigh unto them as the Lord our God is whensoever we call upon Him? And what great nation is there that hath

THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 1 55

statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?"^ The God of Christianity is holy. The holiness of God unites in one ethics and religion, which in all other relig- ions are either separated or separable. This holi- ness gives a sanctity and inspiration, a motive, a reverent fear to our religion, to be sought in vain elsewhere. There is, thus, an ethical value and power in the Christian conception of God that must be permanent if there is moral evolution within the race, for the Christian ideal is perfect. Said Jesus, "Ye therefore, shall be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect."^

"God is love." "His gentleness hath made us great." He is "nigh unto them that call upon Him," for "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him, for He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust." His Son becomes our Saviour by revealing the Father love of our God, and by His spirit, we are taught to say "Abba Father." This love gives to life a new sacredness and significance, and with glory wraps around our being. It becomes a motive power unprofessed and undreamed in any other religion. Love and mercy are not qualities

* Deuteronomy 4. 'Matthew 5.

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of God in the conceptions of even the best of the ethnic faiths? Where these ideas seem to enter at all, their quahty and content are something quite different from what are found in Christianity. Mohammedanism alone makes any approach to such a conception of God, and in its teaching the mercy of God shows itself in condoning sin and compro- mising with the sinner. It sacrifices holiness in the interest of compassion for human weakness.

The holiness and the love of God remove the necessity, and introduce the impossibility, of any other god; and this Christianity vigorously asserts. "There is," for there can be, "no God but one. For though there be that are called gods whether in heaven or on earth, as there are gods many and lords many ; yet to us, there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto Him ; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through Him."^ To the nations and relig- ions, distraught with many fears and seeking to appease or enlist a multitude of imagined divinities in heaven, air and earth, we come with the word of our God : "I am the first, and I am the last ; and beside Me there is no God. Fear ye not, neither be afraid ; have I not declared unto thee of old, and

^ I. Corinthians 8.

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proved it? Is there a God beside me? Yea, there is no rock; I know not any."^ To them that are without God and without hope in the world, we bring this gift that is above all others. To them that in ignorance worship Him unknown, we declare the good God not very far from every man. To such as worship Him with narrow misconcep- tions that degrade their notion of Him and weaken His power in them, we bring the fulness of the revelation of God, for in Christ Jesus dwelt bodily all the fulness of divinity, so that when men have seen Him, they have seen the Father, and it sufficeth them.

This one God is a personal Spirit. All men will want Him when once He is clearly understood by them. The influences of impersonal metaphysics and imperfectly developed personality in man may delay the clear apprehension of a God with whom men may sustain personal relationships. The prac- tical needs of the great masses of mankind, are not, however, to await the philosophical adjustments of the metaphysical conceptions of Christianity with other philosophies. The human heart cries out, in its hunger and distress, for just such a God as is revealed in Christ Jesus. A Chinaman, on first

* Isaiah 43.

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hearing of this love of God, said, "There ought to be such a God." Deep down in their souls all men will recognize the same need, and it is this need which calls for the mission of Christianity.

Christianity has the best understanding of the world, and conceives of it in vital relations with its Maker as does no other religion. "The whole earth is full of His glory." "Of Him and by Him, and for Him were all things made," and "in Him are all things held together." It is His immanent activ- ity that we experience in all the life and movement of the world. It is by virtue of His presence in the world that it ever goes on in the progressive devel- opment of its life. This view of the world best appeals to what is best in man. The origin, exist- ence and destiny of the world have a brighter and a truer meaning in Christian thought than in any other philosophy. Our religion includes in its scope all knowledge, because it relates all knowledge to the ultimate mind of the personal God. Nature is rational. We are able to construct the various natural sciences by reading into nature the classi- fications and relations which grow out of the laws of our own thinking. Man thus becomes the in- terpreter of nature, but he becomes also, in the very act of interpreting nature, its interpretation.

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The mind which reads exists and interprets only because of a Mind in that which he reads and inter- prets.^ Philosophy and science, for Christianity, are religious and all knowledge is holy. Christian- ity ministers not alone to the human heart, but offers to the minds of men the surest paths to satis- faction and peace, in its principles of unity and law, both supported by the loving presence of the good God. This view brings every searcher for truth into paths that lead to God. Not that a man by searching may find out God; for with all his endeavors and attainments man does not come unto perfect knowledge of the Infinite. When he has done his best, even the modern man will sympathize with Job when he e^iclaims : "Lo, these are the out- skirts of His ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of Him, but the thunder of His power who can understand?"^ The Christian theory does not minister to the pride of human intellect, nor to man's self-sufficiency, but it cultivates just those qualities that contribute and enter into the char- acter which good men most admire and reverence. Christianity deals most frankly and thoroughly with man. It recognizes all his wants and woes,

*Cf. Fairbaim, Philosophy of the Christian Religion. •Job 26.

l6o MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

and reveals to him needs that he did not know. No one comes long into association with the thought of Christ without beginning to feel that the Founder of our Faith "needed not that any one should bear witness concerning man, for He Himself knew what was in man."^ Christianity leaves to man no cloak for his sin, oflFers him no flattery of his great powers, makes no effort to quiet him in his wicked- ness and guilt. No other religion so frankly recognizes sin and guilt. No other system, not even Buddhism, sees the condition of man as darker and more desperate than does Christianity. And yet, Christianity puts peculiar honor upon man. Every individual soul has its own personal standing before God, and is precious to His heart. With all the depth of misery and guilt, which Christianity emphasizes with unsparing insistence, there is a matchless worth in each man, a possible son of God, who enlists the care and interest of the Father, and of His Son and of the Holy Spirit. Christianity comes to men enchained in the bonds of transmigration and metempsychosis, and struggling through endless ceremonials into a faint hope of some dim and far off deliverance from the wheel of existence, and proclaims: "Ye shall know the truth, *John 2.

THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION l6l

and the Truth shall make you free, and when the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed."^ Christianity finds more in man and proposes to make more out of him than any other religion.

Christianity offers the only redemption. It is not mere jealousy for the name of his Lord that leads the devout disciple of Jesus to declare that "in no other is there salvation; for neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men wherein we must be saved. "^ It is because "the redemption of men's souls is costly and must for- ever fail, seeing that none can by any means redeem his brother nor give to God a ransom for him that he should still live forever," unless God's own arm shall provide salvation for him.^ "When we were without help, in due time Christ died for the ungodly."* The doctrine of a God who redeems is not absolutely peculiar to the Christian faith, although some writers on religion would have us think so. It is true, however, that the Christian doctrine of redemption is its most exclusive char- acteristic, and that which most of all makes it imperative that it shall prosecute its propaganda to the last man of the race. Until the Christ came no worthy answer had been found to the conviction

*John 8. 'Acts 4. "Psalm 49. 'Romans 5.

II

l62 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

of the human heart that in some way it must be redeemed. 'The answer which sprang from the consciousness of Jesus was a faith in God as the redeemer of every individual soul that would take toward God the attitude of piety; and of the race through the continued proclamation and growing efficacy of the offer of redemption." A prominent German historian has declared that its doctrine of redemption is the only distinctive peculiarity of Christianity, and he makes the statement in a con- nection that implies that this peculiarity is not greatly significant. More accurate is the insight of the American philosopher/ from whom the above quotation is taken, when he says: "Thus, as we have already said, the whole significance of the religion of Christ is found in its doctrine of redemp- tion. The peculiarities of the Christian doctrine of redemption are mainly three: its conception of the content of redemption, its idea of the means of redemption, and the personality of its Redeemer." The universality and completeness of this redemp- tion are wholly unique among the religions, *'both as respects its moral and spiritual intensiveness, and its extension over humanity. In it the eyes are focused upon the historical person ; but from this

* Professor George T. Ladd, The Philosophy of Religion.

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center they are directed abroad over the whole range of human history, and even of the cosmic evolutionary process. Jesus is God's appointed redeemer, but his redemption is thoroughly demo- cratic." The great missionary Apostle has told us from the beginning that ''God our Savior would have all men to be saved and come to the knowl- edge of the truth,"^ and in that paragraph, in Romans, where he deals comprehensively with the spiritual purposes of redemption, he represents the whole creation as groaning and travailing together in pain until, in connection with the disclosing of the personal Sons of God, the entire cosmic order shall come into the goal of its perfect ideal. And, a little later in this same Book, when interpreting history in the light of redemption, Paul dwells upon the relation of the Jewish and the Gentile ages of faith, concluding that ''God hath shut up all unto disobedience that He might have mercy upon all."^ The Christian conception of the meaning of redemp- tion is set forth most distinctly in the thought that "whom God did foreknow them did He also pre- destinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many breth- ren."' This is expressed in other terms by John *I Timothy 2. 'Romans 8, 11.

'Romans 8.

164 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

who says: "It doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is."^ It thus appears that the conception is nothing short of absolute perfection and completeness in which we shall be, in respect of character, full sons of God and brothers of Jesus Christ. We are to be saved "from all defilement of flesh and spirit, per- fecting hoHness in the fear of God."^ The Gospel aims to "present every man perfect in Christ."^

The means of Christian redemption are truly remarkable and unforeseen. Who would have guessed, before Christ revealed it, that the cross is to be the greatest principle in the rescue and devel- opment of human personality and of the race. The cross is an offense to religious pride and foolishness to merely intellectual philosophy, but to faith and life, the cross has come to be recognized as the mightiest principle in the evolution of character. Two thousand years of history justify the simple, startling word of Jesus, "Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth by itself alone ; but if it die it shall bear much fruit."* The Buddha arrived at the necessity for self-renuncia- tion but proceeded immediately to reassert the

* I John 3. ^ II Corinthians 7. ' Colossians 2. * John 12.

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principle of self-affirmation. Jesus applies without reserve or hesitation the principle that he who would save his life must continuously lose it.

Then, we have said that Jesus is Himself the Redeemer, but He is such only because He is God manifest in the flesh. Redemption is of God, and it is His grace and truth that come by Jesus Christ. Jesus stands in a peculiar relation to His religion. All other teachers and founders of religions must first save themselves. They start from the depths of sin. Our High Priest has passed through the Heavens on His way to the depths of the earth. Others seek to build a ladder, by which to climb up out of the mire, and as they go, they call others to follow. The strong Son of Man lifts us out of sin and death. Himself unstained by the filth of our sin. All the means by which men seek redemption fail, but "we were redeemed not with corruptible things, with silver or gold . . . but with the precious blood of a Lamb without blemish and without spot, of Christ."^ It is no longer often questioned that Jesus sustained an absolutely unique relation to God as His Father, however men may hesitate and demur at the metaphysical interpretations of His personality ; nor are there many left who venture to

'I Peter i.

l66 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

think otherwise than that He was ''undefiled and separate from sinners." These facts place Him in a position for representing God and man redemp- tively, which are unthinkable in any other. His superior personality He devoted without reserve to the needs of sinful men, and because of this course on His part, "God hath highly exalted Him and given unto Him the name which is above every name ;" and it cannot but be that in the end, "at the name of Jesus — Savior — every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father."^

It is already involved in what we have said that Christianity has the best ethical ideals and system. Its superiority consists in the fact that its ethics are based in the personal relation to such a God as Christianity alone knows. Its teachings are set forth in universal principles rather than in specific rules. This gives world-wide and age-long adapt- ability, and most honors individuality, because it allows the largest room for the free development of character. It is thus alone that character can be developed. In Christianity conduct has, in the highest degree, a spiritual and moral basis, and so it leaves least room for formal and ceremonial corres-

* Philippians 2

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pondence with requirements wherein the inward obe- dience may be obscured and omitted. The universal and all-inclusive motive of Christian ethics is the simple principle of genuine love, both as duty relates itself to God and discharges itself toward men.

Christianity has, in its conception of God, man, and the world, and in its redemptive motive, the most sure grounds for progress. The Christian nations are in fact most progressive and we need not stay to consider whether this is because Chris- tianity is their religion, or whether Christianity has come to be their religion because they are progres- sive. The fact would tend to the same end, by a different line of thought, under either interpreta- tion. The ideals of Christianity transcend at every stage its actual development. It always has a beyond for human endeavor, in religious, social, and political life. Contrast is always to be seen between its teaching and its practice, because the teaching wherein it sets forth its ideals always runs beyond anything that men have thus far been able to achieve. We advance ever toward God, and our satisfaction rests not short of the time when, fully awake, we behold his likeness, and are satisfied with it, and enter into correspondence with that likeness.

l68 MISSIONS AND MODERN THOUGHT

In its progressiveness, Christianity has rendered humanity the highest service. This progressiveness is due to its great vitaHty. It has demonstrated, throughout its history, power to regenerate itself from v^ithin, to reform its ov^n errors, and to heal its diseases. There have been days of darkness and unfaithfulness, days of barrenness and dead- ness, but always it has revived, stirred itself to new life, moved onward to new tasks, and the circle of its power and influence has grown ever greater. Buddhism and Islam manifest in recent times new vitality and oppose the progress of Christianity with apparently new life and vigor. It is impos- sible not to see that they have been stirred to this activity by the life and spirit of Christianity. A distinguished writer, who had the widest oppor- tunities for observation, and who began without sympathy with Christian missions, Mrs. Isabella Bird Bishop, says: "Several of the Asiatic faiths, and notably Buddhism, started with noble concep- tions, and with a morality far in advance of their age. But the good has been mainly lost out of them in their passage down the centuries ; and Bud- dhism in China is now much on a level with the idolatries of barbarous nations. There is nothing to arrest the further downward descent of the

THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 1 69

systems so effete yet so powerful and interwoven with the whole social life of the nation. There is no resurrection power in any of them." Even so cautious and sympathetic a friend of the Eastern systems as the late Dr. Hall fully supports this judgment, although he states the conclusion in terms somewhat less direct. And Lafcadio Hearn, who repudiated Christianity, and openly adopted the paganism of Japan which he sought to glorify with the splendid powers of his exquisite pen, found in the end "that the politeness covered heart-