THE PLACE OF MISSIONARY LITERATURE IN THE CONVERSION OF THE WORLD.
REV. GEO. M. BOYNTON.
The literature of missions has a threefold function in its relation to the conversion of the world: to inform, to quicken and to direct. It would be hard to over-estimate the importance of the history and record of missionary efforts and successes in their relation to the intelligence of the Christian people of our land and our day. If we are exhorted to add to our faith, virtue (manly and holy enterprise) and to virtue, knowledge, the exhortation must apply (next to the knowledge of God and of His word) to the knowledge of the history and progress of His kingdom in the world.
We do not call him even a fairly intelligent citizen of the United States who does not know something of the history of his own country—who does not know the general order of its great questions and great conflicts. What shall we say of one who claims to have his citizenship in heaven and yet is willingly ignorant of the great battle-grounds of Christ’s kingdom of even the near past, and so knows nothing of the questions which agitate the present day or the forces of the foes now in the field?
It is no small thing to follow the current history of the world, as it has been brought so near to us in our day, and yet with what eagerness the morning paper is looked for in every home of even ordinary intelligence; and after the half-hour’s search, how often to the question, “What is there of interest to-day?” the answer comes, “Oh, nothing.” The journals are full of manufactured news; political squabbles; stories of scandal and of crime; with now and then some event which marks a step in the world’s progress of more than ordinary consequence. It is often said that our missionary periodicals are not of thrilling interest, but I am willing to leave it to the testimony of any candid man whether they do not at least fairly approximate the secular press in interest and ability, only that men are more eager to know what is going on in the kingdoms of this world than in the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It is the appetite which largely gives its savor to the food. When our hearts are all aglow with love to the Master of us all, and we want to know, above all things, that he is being satisfied with the travail of his soul, we do not count the tidings of the advancement of his kingdom dull. If his interests are ours, we shall watch them.
One of the great requisites to giving or praying is that men should know to what their alms are directed and for what their prayers go up to God. Let the missionary press, then, give us information, and give it freely. The men and the women who read want to have, not the impressions of other people reproduced, but the details which made those impressions. They want the facts, set forth with vivid exactness, with life-like coloring. It is only now and then one of our missionaries at the front who seems to comprehend that he must make us see what he sees, and must remember that his reflections upon the things that have become familiar to him will not make us familiar with the facts. If he can stir our imaginations and make us his attendants during his day’s work, we shall be led to sympathy and support.
When the Church Missionary Society of London was making its exploration into Africa the long pages of journal written on the spot from day to day were the most thrilling pages of current history that were being written; and many of you have not forgotten the diary of our own Dr. Ladd of his journey up the Nile. Nothing should be spared to open the eyes of the givers and the prayers to what you may call instantaneous views of the workers at their work. Give us the facts in the best possible shape if you want our sympathy, our prayers, our money. Until you have done that, you cannot, if you would, call down on us the condemnation spoken to him that “seeth his brother have need” and does not help him.
But Christian character needs inspiration as well as information. It needs not only to know, but to feel; not only to have its eyes made clear to see, but its heart stimulated to a worthy enthusiasm. We do not get our inspiration so much from great events as from great men. Souls are quickened by quickening souls. The contagion of enthusiasm spreads from life to life. That in the literature of missions, which will especially kindle missionary enthusiasm is to be found in the veins of the noble lives of the men and women who have counted their lives not worth the keeping, for their love for Christ and for the Kingdom of whom this world was not worthy, and who, in the world, were least of all men of it.
What other fuel can you find to build a fire of grand enthusiasm for the Master like the one you have in the biography of missions? Nowhere away from the sacred record can you find nobler events of Christian living and devotion. Nowhere are there grander illustrations of the spirit of Christian heroism. Nowhere more stirring suggestions of the possible attainments of Christian grace.
Nor do I recall a missionary biography which is morbid and so misleading—which sets up an introspective and dyspeptic type of piety as a model and standard. The missionary has no time to be morbid. He has made a consecration of all his energies to his Master. His life is led actually and daily by the high purpose which he has set before him. His biography is not a picture of still life. He cannot stop to take becoming attitudes, even before his own eyes. He has no time to write a journal of his supposed spiritual states. If you take his photograph you must take him in motion, as nowadays they take a horse upon the race-track, and you get him with every muscle set and every nerve charged with life.
I know no better books for men or boys, for matrons or maidens, than such books as these, in which you have such lives embalmed.
Where can you find a manlier life than that of John Coleridge Patteson, Bishop of Melanesia, his diocese the island of the sea, inhabited by blacks. The story of his patience and his pluck and cheerful confidence is enough to dispel the worst type of malarial saintship—shaky and intermittent. To see him with his senior bishop approaching a new island, rowing in his small boat as near as was safe to the breakers, and then the two pioneers of the Gospel taking a header through the waves and swimming to the land to tell the Gospel of great joy to the dusky and unclad islanders! There’s tonic in the very reading. He could be a bishop without robes or titles. God had sent him to be an overseer of lone regions and lost souls. Or what could be more tragic than the final scene of his death by the treacherous arrows of the natives, and the ghastly tableau of the still young hero of God floating out in the boat alone toward his waiting friends.
There is a biography yet unwritten of one connected with the work of this Association which, if it could be spread upon the record, would equal this in the sincerity of his devotion, in purity of his motive, in his bearing patiently when nearly all men spoke ill of him, for Christ’s sake and the Gospel’s, and even friends for a time began to doubt him, in his readiness to take up the hardest thing there was to do until the end. You will know of whom I speak when I tell you that he was equally the friend of the Indian and of the negro; that he became the target of all the shafts of malice when he sought to protect the poor Indian from his worse than savage foes within the capital of the nation and on the western reservation; that he became the victim of the deadly malaria of the African coast, where he had gone to reorganize and direct the work of this Association in the Mendi Mission. I speak of one whom we all delight to honor and call reverend—the Reverend Edward P. Smith.
And there are others still upon the field, whose names may or may not be known to any wide fame with men, and women, too, who have hazarded their lives for the privilege of preaching and of teaching in the name of Christ. We cannot afford to lose the records of such positive and aggressive Christianity for their stimulus to the Christian character of those at home and those whose characters are forming yet.
Dr. Goodell names as one of the ten ways by which the world is to be saved, that we keep the home and Sunday-school libraries full of that most interesting and profitable of all our literature for the young, the books written by Christ’s soldiers upon the field of battle. I would emphasize even more than that—the books written about these heroes of the faith and their lives of earnest and joyful sacrifice. Who will not acknowledge that we need the inspiration in our day?
If the Christian world needs for its own sake the information and the inspiration which can only come from the literature of missions, the missionary work itself needs equally this means to make its opportunities known to the Christian world.
That is only in part, if at all, a Christian church which is not a missionary church as well. The salt which has lost its savor is no longer salt. It will save deception if you take off the label. It is “good for nothing,” and is to be cast into the street only to get rid of it, and not because it is good for a road.
The true Church of Christ is concerned about the progress of his kingdom, is in earnest sympathy with those who are at the front, is eager in its outlook for new opportunities of service. To such a waiting ear—and, brethren, it is waiting—come through the missionary press the tidings of opportunity, the sound of doors, long closed, creaking on their hinges as they fling open for the feet of the delaying messengers of grace. This is the telephone which summons to instant response. It sounds in the counting-rooms of our men of business, and invites them to new investments in behalf of those for whom God goes security, for “he that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord.” It rings its summons in our Theological Seminaries and among our younger brethren in the ministry, and calls them to occupy until He comes. It goes into the offices of the organizations through which the churches reach the needy east and west, north and south, and says not pull down your barns, but build greater ones; for, as are the broad farms of the West to the old New England homesteads, so are the harvests to be reaped to those which have been already gathered in. It mixes in our homes, and calls on our sons and daughters to the waiting work.
And neither we at home, nor those in the broad field, can afford to be left unnoticed or uncalled. They need it that souls may be born into the kingdom; we need it that we may by pure toil and sacrifice grow unto the stature and the likeness of our risen Lord.
The Church of Christ will not know more of the advancement of His kingdom or of its hindrances than it is told. God will not save us the trouble of the inquiry or the report. The Church of Christ will have no more enthusiasm in the work than it gets by entering into sympathy with those who do it, and with Him who died that it might go on.
And yet, in the light of all this already trite and quite self-evident truth, you hear it said, even by those who are concerned in the progress of the work, “What are we going to do with this increasing mass of missionary literature? We are quite flooded with it, and especially with these periodicals, these Missionary Heralds, and Home Missionaries and American Missionaries. Can’t we make it less? Can’t we combine them and double the thing up? It bothers us.” Ah, brethren, the wonder is that we do not cry for more and better. The wonder is not that so many take the missionary magazines, but so few, and that so few of those who take them read them.
Brethren, the time will come—if the time comes when men seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, not last—that Christian men and women will not want to wait a month to glance over the few pages of a missionary magazine; but will want to know the latest news of the advancement of Christ’s Kingdom in the morning before they look to see the stock-list or the scandal-list of the day before. When the question of the morning will be what new progress, what new delays, what new need for the advancing hosts of Christian warriors; and at night the thought will be, the sun has gone to shine on other fields and other laborers, and while we sleep this work goes on. And in those days it shall go on with speed and sureness.
Let our missionary literature then be not lessened in quantity or deteriorated in quality. Let not our agents think the time is lost in which they stop to tell us of the work. The growth of Christ’s people at home is as important as the conquests of His grace abroad, indeed, the last will be largely proportioned to the first. Let ingenuity and enterprise be put into these channels of communication. Let the facts be fresh and full—more fresh and full than ever. Let them be clothed in choice and skillful diction. Let us leave the arts which the satanic or the merely mundane press monopolize to their uses. Let us not grudge the cost. It is not cost of administration at all. It is not cost of collection, though it helps that department greatly. It is more than all the missionary work of each society for the constituency that supports it. Our churches and our Christians here at home need it for their own vitalizing and the direction of their awakened energies. If our fires be not kept up at home the warmth will not be diffused. These are days of organization. It used to be that if a man had lost his way in these then dark country roads some one must go out alone with his hand-lantern to guide him to safe shelter. Now your streets are full of lamps, and your illuminated signs band them at every corner. You may take all the care that is possible of the lamps and burners; it will do no good if you neglect to keep the fires up where the illuminating gas is made. If the fires go out there the lights go out in every street and home. Do not let us ask these organizations to lessen their efforts to inform, to quicken and to guide our missionary zeal at home, as though it were not an important part of their legitimate work.