ADDRESS OF PROF. W. M. BARBOUR, D.D.
The topic assigned me is in the line of the theme just discussed by Dr. Dennen. My friend and classmate Dr. Pike insisted upon my coming over here and taking part in this evening meeting; and he said, “Your theme will be: Spiritual Vitality the Crowning Necessity in Missionary Work.”
I shall take it for granted that other means have been set before you and insisted upon—the one nearest always, money. That is a great necessity in missionary work. You have heard, I have no doubt, a good deal about that, and I merely wish to honor it as a means under God of the most pressing necessity. We can do nothing to send the blessings that God has put into our hearts abroad among our fellow men without means; and the first means is money. But all the money in the world will not serve our end. What is the next? We must have men. But all the men in the world won’t do missionary work, although we had them all enlisted in that work. Suppose we had all the money we could use and all the men that offered themselves and that we could procure; we would only have gone so far. What else is needed? We need fitness in the men as another great means. This is as necessary as money and men, this culture. But after we have the men, and after we have them qualified, there is still room for what in my theme to-night is called “the crowning necessity.” You may take Yale College as it stands, with all its culture, and you may turn out all our hundreds of young men down into the South this blessed night; what could they do in missionary work to-morrow morning? So you see that it is not the money, or the men, or the culture that alone is needed; something more is needed, and that is “spiritual vitality.”
And now, beloved, to take the first step and to say the first thing that must be said, in my judgment (since I am called here to give my opinion), the first position that we must assume and which this Association has assumed from its very start—although it is one of the old things that Christ says a well-instructed scribe must take out of his treasury—we must begin with God. We are to stand in his presence, we are to summon him as our witness, we are to avow ourselves openly and frankly, every day we live, as doing this for him.
I should like to know where our modern unbelief is that is such a distress to us in all our efforts and in our inward life, when you reverently, and in the deep meaning of thought say, “As the Lord liveth”? Look at it. There are two schemes of the universe: one, the Christian scheme, with a belief in the living God as the original of all things—a personal being who is personally interested in his creatures, and who is desiring, since he has made him in his own image, to have man hold communion with himself, and who desires to have all men reconciled to himself from their sin and their misery and their unhappy life. There is another scheme where there is no God, or, what is the same thing to us, we do not know whether there is or not. And what is the idea of the universe that follows from that? Why, that it must move along as the blind force behind it shall urge it. Where is it going to land? The day is coming, brethren, when we will cry, “Oh for the doctrine of a predestinating God”—God with his eye on an end, and with an end to which he is turning all things and which shall be satisfactory to all the creatures that he has made in his image.
Let us take a frank position here as a missionary society, and let it be known that we openly and avowedly, by word and deed, take the stand that we believe in God, and that we believe he is a living God, and in his name and for his sake and to effect his purpose we are going to the South, to the North, to the East, to the West, to gain trophies that shall be to the glory of his redeeming grace, since he has revealed to us, as we believe, the fact that he will complete these ends through our agency.