Forty Years in South China: The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D.

Produced by David Newman in honor of Barbara Talmage Griffin (1918-2004),
great-granddaughter of the subject of this biography.
The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D.
Rev. John Gerardus Fagg Missionary of the American Reformed (Dutch) Church, at Amoy, China
1894
Too near was I to the subject of this biography to write an impartial introduction. When John Van Nest Talmage went, my last brother went. Stunned until I staggered through the corridors of the hotel in London, England, when the news came that John was dead. If I should say all that I felt I would declare that since Paul the great apostle to the Gentiles, a more faithful or consecrated man has not lifted his voice in the dark places of heathenism. I said it while he was alive, and might as well say it now that he is dead. He was the hero of our family. He did not go to a far-off land to preach because people in America did not want to hear him preach. At the time of his first going to China he had a call to succeed Rev. Dr. Brodhead, of Brooklyn, the Chrysostom of the American pulpit, a call with a large salary, and there would not have been anything impossible to him in the matters of religious work or Christian achievement had he tarried in his native land. But nothing could detain him from the work to which God called him years before he became a Christian. My reason for writing that anomalous statement is that when a boy in Sabbath-school at Boundbrook, New Jersey, he read a Library book, entitled The Life of Henry Martyn, the Missionary, and he said to our mother, Mother! when I grow up I am going to be a missionary! The remark made no especial impression at the time. Years passed on before his conversion. But when the grace of God appeared to him, and he had begun his study for the ministry, he said one day, Mother! Do you remember that many years ago I said, 'I am going to be a missionary'? She replied, Yes! I remember you said so. Well, said he, I am going to keep my promise. And how well he kept it millions of souls on earth and in heaven have long since heard. But his chief work is yet to come. We get our chronology so twisted that we come to believe that the white marble of the tomb is the mile-stone at which a good man stops, when it is only a mile-stone on a journey, the most of the miles of which are yet to be travelled.