Missions Past And Present

( Originally Published 1913 )

ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE LAYMEN'S MISSIONARY CONVENTION AT CHATTANOOGA, MAY 2I, 1907.

THE history of Christian Missions combines the interest which attaches to striking characters and strange adventures with that of tracing a long world movement which has passed through various phases, and has in each of them affected, and been affected by, events of the first moment. A comprehensive view of that history, connecting it with the general progress on the one hand of geographical discovery and on the other of religious thought and practice, would be a theme worthy of a philosophic historian. It is, how-ever, only with the most recent phases of missionary work that I can attempt to deal in this address.

In the ancient world there was, before Christianity appeared, neither religious propaganda nor religious persecution. Each tribe, each region, had its own special or local gods, and each respected the local gods of the others. If now and then some invading general pillaged a sanctuary of the deities of another country, it was avarice alone that prompted him. Opinion condemned him, and he was likely — so men believed — to receive speedy punishment at the hands of the offended powers. Thus the worship of one set of gods did not exclude the worship of another set, for all deities were deemed entitled to respect, each in his own jurisdiction. Similarly, since no faith claimed to be exclusively true or of universal authority, its votaries had no reason for trying to convert others to it by persuasion, nor for persecuting those who adhered to their local worships. Even when the people of Israel denied the existence of any God but their own, they did not seek to proselytize, because it was to Israel alone that Jehovah had revealed himself.

With the advent of Christianity the scene changed. It claimed to be the only true religion, and sought to save a world lying in wickedness by denouncing and expunging all the worships of the heathen. Devotion to God and love for perishing men alike made the propagation of the faith its first duty. Hence it encountered a hostility never previously aroused by any other religion. The first missions were immediately followed by the first persecutions. After three centuries of missionary progress, frequently interrupted by relentless severities, Christianity triumphed. Two centuries later, being then supported by the whole power of the State, it began to repress first the lingering devotees of paganism, then those who, differing from the ruling orthodoxy, had been branded as here-tics by Councils of the Church. So were ushered in those ages of persecution which in Spain and Spanish America lasted down to the days of our grandfathers.

There is a striking passage in Lucretius in which he laments the evil wrought by superstition, referring to the instances of human sacrifice, rare as these were in Greece or Rome, though common enough at Carthage, and dwelling on the gloom cast upon life by the fear of suffering after death. He wrote before religious persecution had been dreamt of. How much darker would have been the picture a poet might have drawn in those later centuries when it was deemed a duty to extirpate heresy by the sword and the faggot !

One may distinguish three chief phases among those through which missions have passed. In the first, which began with the Apostles, and was continued through a long line of glorious saints, Christianity went forth, trusting entirely to the power and the purity of its own teachings. It promised salvation through Christ and through a life led in obedience to his precepts. St. Patrick preached to the Gael of Ireland, St. Columba to the Picts of North Britain, St. Augustine to the heathen of Kent, St. Boniface, St. Columban, St. Gall, and many another missionary from the British Isles to the heathen of Germany. Some of them died a martyr's death. All of them went out like sheep among wolves, trusting only to the help and blessing of God.

In the eighth century a change came. The Frankish Charles the Great carried his arms against the pagan Saxons, and made conversion a part of conquest and a pledge of submission. From his time on other Christian warriors, some of them from ambition, some from what they believed to be piety, spread the kingdom of the Cross by arms. Olaf Tryggyvason in Nor-way and the Crusaders in Palestine, and after them the Teutonic knights on the shores of the Baltic, gave the choice between baptism and death. So did the Spaniards when they burst into the New World. Wherever these terrible conquerors went, the native worships were blotted out and Christianity enforced at the sword's point. They were continuing beyond the ocean the crusade on behalf of the Faith which they had only just completed in Spain against the Moors.

With them, however, the forcible propagation of Christianity practically ended. Neither the French missionaries on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, nor the English missionaries like John Eliot in Massachusetts sought the aid of carnal weapons. The earlier and better stage in which the Gospel relied on its own intrinsic virtue was now returning. In this third stage missions have, with few exceptions, remained ever since ; but it is still worth while to remember into what unchristian conduct misguided zeal drove men who thought they were helping Christianity.

In our own time missions entered on what may be called a fourth stage, in which their aim and purpose is differently conceived. We have learnt to distinguish more carefully between different kinds of non-Christian religions and to recognize the good features that belong to some of them, especially to Buddhism and to Islam. Time was when the success of a mission was measured by the number of congregations it was able to form in a heathen country, and the number of converts annually added to the fold. But this is now no longer deemed the chief object of its work, and the mere public profession of adherence to Christianity is valued only when it is believed to indicate a real and permanent change of life and mind.

The views now entertained as to the future in another world of those who pass into it without ever having heard the Gospel message, are less despondent than those that prevailed among Christians eighty years ago. There is an enlarged conception of what is meant by bringing truth and light to the people that sat in darkness, and it begins to be felt that what is needed is to raise the whole conception of life and transform the character by implanting higher ideals which will cut off at the root the degrading customs of pagan life. When the missionary has to deal with the religions of the more civilized non-Christian peoples, he treats with respect whatever is best in the moral teachings of Buddha or of Mohammed and tries to meet the followers of Confucius on the ethical ground he and they have in common, feeling that even when few converts are made much good may be done by the diffusion of elevating ideas and of Christian morality. Even such usages and superstitions as it may be desired to extirpate are treated more gently, not only because we have begun to feel a sort of scientific interest in these survivals of primaeval custom, but because it is seen that improvements come best when they come from within, from a mind and heart that has been awakened to a higher view of a Divine Power, and of man's relation to it.

These changes in our views of what missions may accomplish and what methods they may follow are not the index of any lessened faith or slackening earnestness. Preaching is not the only, nor always the shortest, way to the end desired. I remember that when Dr. Livingstone, after several short journeys, finally quitted his mission station to enter upon that great exploration of Africa and crusade against the slave trade which have given him a place among the benefactors of mankind, there were some well-meaning but small-minded persons who censured him for deserting his proper missionary work. But in a few years no one doubted that he had rendered infinitely greater services to the world and to Christianity by his journeys and the light he threw on African problems than he could have done by remaining with the little Kaffir congregation to which he ministered.

Such gatherings as the Laymen's Missionary Movement has been holding all over this country are an evidence that there is no decline of zeal among American Christians. So also the approaching International Congress in Edinburgh shows that the denominational narrowness and rivalry which used to distract the efforts of missionary organizations has given place to a fraternal spirit which seeks to make all the religious bodies work together, aiming not at uniformity in organization, but at friendly cooperation in a common cause. It is well this should be so, for the circumstances of the time we live in make the claim of missions an urgent and insistent call upon all these bodies. It is of that urgency, of the movements of change now passing on the world, and of the need there is for prompt and united action before change goes further that I desire to speak. I speak as a traveller who has seen missions in many a foreign country, and I am emboldened to speak to you by remembering that nothing has done more to keep the hearts of Americans and Englishmen close together than the work they have sought to do in the same spirit for the kingdom of God. In these latest centuries we have been the two great missionary nations. Spanish and Portuguese missionaries did an immense work, especially in the sixteenth century : French missionaries an immense work, especially in the seventeenth. Germans and Swiss have labored effectually in the nineteenth, but your and our peoples have perhaps done the most, and have done it on the same lines, in the same faith, following the same principles, always trusting to the power of truth and not to force. So the traveller, wherever he goes, finds American and British missionaries always working side by side, always ready to help one another.

Missions must now be regarded as parts of a great world movement, one out of the many influences which are now exercised, more powerfully than ever before, by the civilized upon the uncivilized or savage peoples.

The world has grown smaller ; steam and electricity have brought its parts together ; and as the civilized races have spread out over its surface, there is no place where their influence is not felt, so that, with the exception of two ancient empires in the East, nearly every part of the world has been brought under the control of some of the civilized white races, and even those empires are now in close relations with white races. Now, that is a new phenomenon. In the midst of these new phenomena missions to the uncivilized races, are indispensable, for if Christianity is not brought to bear upon them, the contact may make their last state worse than their first. To that point I shall presently return and shall try to convey to you two features in the more recent history of missions on which it seems proper to dwell, viz., the causes which retard the progress of Christianity in uncivilized countries, and the special need which exists at this moment for diffusing it there.

Meantime, let me, as one who has seen many missions in many parts of the world, bear testimony to the splendid work which is being done in our own time by Christian missionaries. There have not been any nobler examples of devotion to duty, of self-sacrifice, of the renunciation of the ordinary pleasures and joys of the world for the sake of a higher calling, than those which our missionaries have given during the last eighty years. Let me pay especial tribute to the work which is being done by the many missions of this country. I have seen them in India, where their work is admirable, and where some of your missionaries are men as wise as can be found in that vast country, men who know as much about India and are as much worthy to be listened to on that subject as any men to be met there. No better evidence than theirs can be desired as to the working of British rule there, for they can regard its action impartially, yet with perfect comprehension; I have seen them also in various parts of the Turkish East, where they are placed among Mohammedans and certain ancient non-Protestant churches. The Christian peoples of the East have suffered terribly in recent years, and they may have yet a great deal to suffer. In 1 895 and 1 896 more than one hundred thousand Armenian Christians were massacred by the orders of Sultan Abdul Hamid. Many of them were women, many might have saved their lives if they had spoken three words to renounce Christianity ; yet, like the martyrs of the apostolic age, they refused to sacrifice their Christian faith, and went willingly to death for the sake of their Lord and Master. Among these peoples it has been the duty of your American missionaries to labor, not proselytizing but befriending them educationally and otherwise. And the best work that has ever been done among them has been done by those missionaries. Whenever the English friends of the Armenian Christians desired to know what was happening in Asiatic Turkey, whenever we desired to find some means of relieving the famine-stricken and down-trodden people, whenever it became necessary to ascertain what, if anything, could be done by political action to alleviate the sufferings of these oppressed and martyred races, I have always found that the best thing to do was to turn to the American missionaries. And I have often heard from members of the ancient Armenian church the warmest acknowledgment of the great services which your missionaries have rendered to them.

Now, when you recall the splendid work which missions have done, when we think also of how long they have been at work, and of the advantages which those who come forth from civilized nations ought to possess, are you not sometimes surprised that Christianity has not long ago overspread the whole world ? Why is it that more progress has not been made ? Think of the beginnings of Christianity, when St. Paul and the other apostles went out to make those first missionary tours, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. They went out few in number, through a pagan world, a world which was dominated by ancient and powerful religions, where all authority and all secular powers were on the side of the old religions, and where before long those powers, the emperors and their governors and other officers, put forth their whole strength to resist and extinguish Christianity ; and a series of cruel persecutions took place, extending over nearly three centuries, by which it was attempted to root out the new religion from the earth. Those persecutions failed. Christianity spread itself over the empire against all the power the empire could put forth, and made its way in the teeth of persecutions until at last it grew so strong that the emperors were obliged to recognize it; and from that time forth it became the dominant religion over all the world, except fire-worshipping Persia, that the Romans knew. It did that work in three centuries.

Since that time sixteen hundred years have passed, and Christianity has had most of the material forces of the world on its side, nearly all the military power, as well as nearly all the learning and -civilization, except during a comparatively short period when there was more literature and science in Musulman than in European countries. Why, then, has not Christianity succeeded in converting the whole earth ?

That is, indeed, a question worth asking. It is a question you have doubtless often asked yourselves. We shall do better to reflect on what we have not accomplished, and try to discover why it is that we have failed, than to exult in what we have accomplished. It may be that we shall discover some of the causes which have weakened us and prevented us from obtaining, with material advantages on our side, what the apostles and their successors obtained with all the material forces and civil powers against them. I am going to give one reason ; it is only one of several reasons, but it is a reason which is brought forcibly home to who-ever travels in uncivilized countries and notes the limited success attained by missions in places where the zeal and devotion of the missionaries are evident.

The preaching of the gospel is but one among many forces and influences which have been brought to bear on the uncivilized races during the last four centuries, and some of those other influences have largely neutralized the effect of the gospel. What was the first thing that happened when the Spaniards and the Portuguese began to settle in the American islands and continents ? One of their main objects was to convert the heathen. They were pious, according to their lights, and quite sincere in their eagerness to spread the faith. They took out a great many friars with them, and set them to preaching. The cross was carried up • and down the islands, and the friars preached ; and the natives, whether or not they understood and believed, were at any rate baptized and compelled to attend mass and say that they were Christians. The native religions or superstitions had little hold on these poor, simple savages of the Antilles, and of many parts of the American continents also, so they yielded easily. The Conquerors thought they were saving souls, whether by persuasion or force; and they would have thought it absurd not to use force in that holy warfare. But the Conquerors did something more than this. Though the friars came to preach, the adventurers who swarmed into tropical America came with a fierce greed for gold. That was what they chiefly sought in the New World. Finding gold ornaments among the people, they asked where they came from ; they searched for the gold mines, and put the natives to work in them. They set them also to till the soil, and those weak, simple-minded aborigines, accustomed to raising just enough food to support them-selves, were driven to work under the stern eye and cruel scourge of a Spanish taskmaster, until in the island of Hispaniola (now Hayti )and in the Bahamas, the whole population died out under the severities of the Spanish rule within thirty or forty years after the discovery of the islands. The same thing happened in the other conquered territories. Wherever the Spaniard went he seized the land of the people, reduced them to what was virtually slavery, and forced them to work in the mines or till the soil for him.

That was probably the most harsh and terrible form which the contact of a civilized race with an uncivilized ever took. It ended with the extermination of many a native tribe. And yet something of that kind, though not so bad, has been going on ever since. Something of the kind is going on in the South American forests now. Wherever the strong races who, like the Spaniards, possessed horses and firearms, races with the appliances of civilization at their command, have come into contact with weaker races, that sort of thing has happened. Everywhere the native has gone to the wall. Sometimes, where the native race was weak, it has been extinguished ; it dies out either under harsh treatment or under the diseases which the white man brings with him, or through use of the liquor which he has supplied to them. In one way or an-other the native races, if not extinguished, have at any rate become demoralized. They lose those native customs which governed their life, and experience shews that it is easier to acquire the vices of the white man than to imitate his virtues.

I do not wish to overstate the case. I do not deny that some of these evils were inevitable. The contact of a superior civilized race with a barbarous race must always bring some harm to the weaker. But the evils need not have been so great if the civilized men who went among the natives had behaved like Christians. Unfortunately, that was just what few of them did. There were always some good men among them who tried to protect the natives, even some laymen among the first Spanish conquerors and many among the clergy. The noble Las Casas who spent his life in trying to protect the American aborigines was only one of many excellent Spanish churchmen. But the forces of rapine and avarice and that sort of arrogant contempt which the strong man feels for the weak were more potent forces. Down to our own times you will find that the natives suffered far more than they gained. Their land was taken without giving them anything for it, and they were driven away or shot down. The trader who went among them cheated them, and did what was even worse : he sold them vile liquor that ruined them body and soul. Despite all the efforts made in recent years, those practices go on in some places still. It would have been a good thing for the natives if the art of distillation had never been discovered. It was only the other day, after whole tribes had perished, that we awakened to a sense of the tremendous evils wrought among native peoples by the sale of drink. It does harm enough among white people, but far more among a savage or semi-civilized race, for they are not seasoned to it, as in a certain way a number of our own populations have become, and they have less self-control than civilized men. It works like poison upon them and destroys them.

These things could not but injure and retard the work of Christianity. How was it possible for the natives not to look at the practice of the white man as well as at his preaching ? The missionary represented a religion of justice, of peace, and of love. But with the missionary came the man who tried to take away the land of the native or sold him worthless goods or intoxicated him with his liquor. How was it possible for the natives, when they saw these men who called themselves "Christians" just as did the missionaries, not to be struck by the divergence between the practice and the doctrines of this new religion ? The saying is attributed to some African prince that the process going on in his country was : "First missionary, then trader, then army." The missionary came first, and well it would have been if he had been left to do his work alone. But before the missionary had succeeded in Christianizing the people, the trader came to undo the missionary's work.

Even where the white man does not rob or injure the natives there is something in his attitude when he finds himself among an uncivilized people that is harsh and unchristian. He acts toward them as if they were persons to whom he can do whatever he likes. Those who have travelled among savages or semi-savages will know what I mean when I say that it takes almost the temper of a saint to keep the white man from treating with arrogance or scorn a people who are very much weaker than himself and who frequently provoke him by an astonishing slackness or thoughtlessness or inconstancy of purpose. Nothing but a sense of human duty and Christian duty can prevent a man from acting harshly or unfairly when he is placed in such conditions. No doubt the natives often give provocation. In parts of Australia and in Tierra del Fuego they stole the sheep that had been placed upon the lands that once were theirs. But this does not excuse the settlers who went out in parties to shoot them down.

This behaviour and this attitude of the stronger white race have been among the chief obstacles to the advance of Christianity.

There were times when the governments of so-called Christian states themselves were little better than the adventurers who disgraced the Christian name. The long perpetuation, by the favour of such governments, of the African slave trade, the most hideous piece of cruelty and wrong ever perpetrated by civilized upon uncivilized men, is a terrible instance. It has been only in the last sixty or seventy years that these governments have awakened to a proper sense of their duties. Most of them have latterly tried, and are now honestly trying, to protect the natives. This is not yet the case in all parts of the world. There are one or two lamentable exceptions. But it is the case wherever either the United States or Great Britain holds sway. Your government and the British government are doing their best wherever their flags fly to protect the native in every way they can. In India it has been for a century past the sole and whole-hearted object of the English government to administer absolutely equal justice in India between the European and the native and to give the native as complete a protection and as good a government as the circumstances of the country will permit.

But even where the government performs its duty it is possible for the private adventurer, or the trading corporation behind the private adventurer that supplies the funds and does not watch how the adventurer behaves, to do a great deal of harm. They it is who discredit Christianity. While the missionary is preaching, the adventurer goes on cheating the native or ousting him from his land, sometimes even forcing him into a sort of slavery, and punishing him if he fails to fulfil the allotted task, and the trading company at home draws the profits. The temptations to abuse strength have been great and have been yielded to. No wonder that these things checked the advance of Christianity. No wonder that it spread more rapidly while adversity and persecution gave it the opportunity to show the distinctively Christian virtues of faith, constancy, humility, and love than it did when all the powers of this earth were on its side, that it advanced faster against the hostility of Roman emperors like Nero, Decius, and Diocletian than it has advanced with all the strength of civilization behind it. It is not that any power has gone out of the gospel ; it is not that the best men in Christian nations were any less zealous ; but other men went on undoing the missionary's work all the time he was preaching.

If this be true, what is the duty of Christian men to-day ? That duty certainly is not to ask governments to spread the gospel by force. No more action like that of the Spaniards who carried the scourge and the sword while the friars carried the crucifix. You do not believe that the blessing of God will rest upon such methods.

Neither do you desire that governments should give any political support to missionaries. The more that missions are kept apart from political authorities and left to rely on themselves, the better. What you do desire is to strengthen the hands of the civilized governments when they try to secure for the native justice, considerate treatment, full protection against the craft or violence of the adventurer.

It is in your power to do that. Public opinion can strengthen the hands of the governments ; it can encourage each government to lay down and carry out rules for the due protection of the native. We all know that the United States government desired to carry out honestly and in the right spirit such a policy even when the Red Indians were being defrauded of their lands or of the supplies given them. Your national government always meant to do right, though it was not always able to supervise its agents.

We in Britain wish to do the same ; and we are always appealing to our government and assuring them that they will have and do now have the spirit of the British public behind them in endeavouring to protect the native. And if there are still parts of the world in which the natives are to-day ill treated, let us trust that the public opinion of America and of England will speak out and will demand that the native races everywhere be duly cared for and delivered from oppression.

Your duty does not end with subscribing to the missionary societies. It requires you to watch wherever over the world the advance of Christianity is being hindered by the wicked practices of white men to see that the adventurer and the trader are restrained if they wrong the natives by force or fraud, and absolutely to prohibit the sale of liquor to the natives. The natives ought to be regarded as children, and have the measure both of care and of tenderness which is given to children, for under the conditions in which their life has been passed, they cannot be expected to rise quickly to the level of civilized man.

This brings me to the other point which I desire.

The position is now becoming critical. You are often told — and you are told with truth — that this is a critical time for civilized countries. It is a time when there are all sorts of new ideas in the air, a time when many ancient landmarks have been removed, and when efforts are being made to remove even those that remain. In this country you are receiving vast new masses of population. In the Old World new social and political movements have begun to stir up even the hitherto most stagnant countries. But if you look beyond Europe and America, at what is passing among the savage or semi-civilized races of man-kind, and note the changes which have come upon them within the last fifty years and which are telling upon them now, you will perceive that this is perhaps the most critical moment ever seen in the history of the non-Christian nations and races, a moment most significant in its bearing on their future. The races of European origin have now obtained control of the whole world (except two or three ancient Asiatic states, and their influence, political and financial, is felt far more deeply than ever before even in those parts of the world over which they do not exercise direct political sway.

While our material civilization is permeating every people, our ideas and the example of our institutions are also telling as never before upon these more back-ward races. In half a century or less that which we call European civilization will have overspread the earth and extinguished the organizations and customs of the savage and semi-civilized tribes or nations. The native tribes will have been broken up, native kingdoms will have vanished, native customs will have gone ; every-where the white man will have established his influence and destroyed the old native ways of life. All is trembling and crumbling away under the shock and impact of the stronger, harder civilization which the white foreigners, penetrating everywhere by our easier methods of transportation by land and sea, have brought with them. Things which have endured from the Stone Age until now are at last coming to a perpetual end, and will be no more. They will vanish from the face of the earth. This is something that has never happened before and can never happen again.

When all these savage and semi-civilized peoples have lost their ancient organizations, their ancient customs and their ancient beliefs, they will, along with these things, lose also their ancient morality, such as it was, which had its sanctions in those customs and beliefs. If you destroy these, their morality falls to the ground and is gone, and they are left with nothing, adrift upon a wide and shoreless sea. You may say that their customs were often bad, their morality often immorality. That is true. Much of it ought to disappear. Yet with all its tolerance of vice and all its degrading practices, it had in some ways a certain beneficial action upon their conduct. Its sanctions exercised some control for good. It furnished a basis for the conduct of life better than the mere unrestrained impulse to the gratification of every passion and desire. It prescribed some kinds of virtuous actions, such as good faith (at least with one an-other), mutual help in times of want, hospitality, and compassion for the helpless. There are savage peoples who have these virtues, and they were inter-twined with supernatural sanctions which are now perishing.

The process of destruction and disintegration which I have described is inevitable, and it is advancing swiftly. If we measure time by the lifetime of a man, the end may seem still distant, but we can begin to conjecture the date of its arrival. Already there are hardly any heathen left in the two American continents (though there are millions of aborigines who are not Christians in any effective sense), and hardly any in the isles of the Pacific. Only in India and the East Indian archipelago, and in South Central Africa and parts of West Africa do there remain any large masses of idolatrous or spirit-worshipping men. Within less than two centuries the whole non-Christian world may be practically divided between Buddhism and Islam, and although the latter of those two great faiths is still spreading in parts of Africa and Asia, the hold of both upon their votaries may by that time have been sensibly weakened.

That is why the present moment is so critical and so precious. If these peoples are losing the old customs and beliefs which have ruled them thus far, the time has come to give them something new and bet-ter. Unless they receive some new moral basis of life, some beliefs and motives and precepts which can appeal to their hearts and rule their conduct, can restrain bad impulses, and instil worthy conceptions of life and duty and worship, their last "state may be worse than the first. Having overspread the world, and taken these weaker races under our control, we cannot evade the responsibility that lies upon us to think and to care for them. It was at the prompting of our own interests that we of the white races disturbed their ancient ways of life, for we went among them, some few doubtless with a desire to do good, but the great majority from a desire to make money and to exploit the world's resources for profit of the white man. Under the ægis of his government, he is taking the agricultural wealth from the soil, the forests from the hills, and the minerals out of the rocks, all for his own benefit. Of all this wealth nothing, except perhaps a meagre wage for manual labour, goes to the native.