THE MISSIONARY INFLUENCE OF A LIFE, AND THE LIFE OF A MISSIONARY INFLUENCE.
BY REV. A. F. BEARD, D.D.
In the missionary influence of a Life it is my purpose to trace the life of a missionary influence.
This special life is selected as a significant illustration of certain specific features and forms of the missionary work which we are called here to consider.
It was a remote and inconspicuous consecration to certain radical ideas of human brotherhood, and to new and not popular methods of saving people who are low down in life by variations from the then accepted ideas.
As a study of sympathy with people in low conditions, of faith in the possibilities of those who have been degraded, of the application of Christianity to the prejudices of caste, of fidelity in witnessing to profound convictions, of prophetic insight as to the trends of God’s providences, of heroic self-denials among the oppressed and ignorant, together with the continuity and cumulative power of these far-reaching influences, this may stand for a concrete exhibition of the kind of work which we here are trying to do, and possibly may bring some new hope and courage to ourselves and some fresh sympathy to our devoted Christian workers who, removed from the world’s observation and sometimes from due Christian appreciation, are consecrating their lives to the same uses.
In the time when George III was King of England and our great-grandfathers were opposing the Stamp Acts, there lived in a house which still stands in Strasbourg, in Alsatia, a wise father and a mother of remarkable endowments, who trained their son to habits of conscientious economy, self-reliance, to the sense of responsibility to God and to man, and of the obligations which possession has towards human necessities, and to habitual benevolence.
Led on through youth to aspire to a learned profession, at the age of fifteen years he signed his name, John Frederick Oberlin, as a student of the University of Strasbourg. Three years later he was a Bachelor of Arts, and five years later, a Doctor in Philosophy. Ordained as a minister of the Gospel in 1760, seven succeeding years were held sacred to the conviction that large usefulness means large preparedness; so that he was still in his study at the age of twenty-seven years, when a missionary who had been trying to save needy souls in the mountains of the Vosges, ministering to the spiritual necessities of a people passed by in the movements of a world’s life and remote from civilization, came into Oberlin’s room and urged him to take up this service.
He confessed his own lack of success, and that he had made no impression upon them. He told Oberlin of the people, descendants of the Huguenots, who had fled from fiery persecutions in France to this wild and sterile mountain country. As the years had gone on for more than seven generations of men, their teachers had died, their preachers had died, until they, exiled and outcast, had declined into heathenish ignorance. He had found as a distant memory of what once had been, a single school in a mountain hamlet. It was in a miserable hovel in one corner of which lay a helpless old man on a rude truckle-bed, surrounded by a crowd of ragged, noisy, wild-looking children. He asked: “Are you the schoolmaster?” “Yes.” “What do you teach the children?” “Nothing.” “You teach them nothing, how is that?” “Because I know nothing.” “Why then are you the schoolmaster?” “Well, sir, I was taking care of the Waldbach pigs, but the people thought me too old for that, and so I was appointed to take care of the children.”
The missionary did not conceal the facts of the case, that the people living in these remote and solitary places were not only frightfully ignorant, but were rebellious against improvement. The region had six months of winter, with bitter icy winds sweeping over the mountains. There was not a single practicable road in the entire district. Deep mud holes were before the cabin doors and the huts in which the people were sheltered. In the short summer season they gathered enough food to sustain an impoverished life through the winter, in which winter they often herded for warmth in the stables with their cattle. So far had they sunk into material and moral desolation.
To such a ministry was invited this young man of large ambitions and large reasons for them; to minister to this wretchedness, to go to a people who were without sense of their needs, without aspirations, without appreciation of the services to be done for them. One prepared for the Professor’s chair in the great University where it was pleasant to live, was invited to bury himself among those who would not give him even the reward of gratitude.
It was not a pleasant call. The words of it struck the young man’s heart like the blows of a hammer. But seven years before, he had written in his own hand his consecration to God, that with all sincerity of heart and in a fidelity which should not sleep he would walk in the ways of Christ as God should reveal them to him.
And now what had this ardent student, with splendid talents and high education, rich in special studies, who had in mind a great sphere of usefulness, to do with this call but to take it to Him to whom he had once for all consecrated himself, “with all sincerity of heart”? In that little room, Oberlin, on bended knee, lifted up his voice and prayed, “Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth,” and in agony he listened for the still, small voice. He could not wish to go, but he could not refuse to hear. And a great battle went on in his soul.
There have been many battles in Strasbourg. The Roman armies fought there; the Germans triumphed there; the tri-colors of France have waved in the glory of victory there, but never a greater conflict, perhaps, or a more glorious conquering, than this between faith and sight, the issues of which God and the centuries were awaiting—a great soul meeting the questions of this world and the questions of eternity. When he arose from his prayer, he said: “I will go.”
Conviction was action. Soon among them, his quick eye perceived that preaching to them in their condition would fall far short of their needs. He must save souls, but he must also save men and women. And here developed his missionary idea. It was not new, for Christ taught it and lived it, but it was new, for Christians had forgotten it. Christ was divinity in humanity, and the people must realize the divinity in the humanity. He must save their souls, but their souls are in their bodies. So he would not deal with them as if they were disembodied spirits, but seeing them in all their ignorance and material poverty, he would teach them how to meet their physical destitutions and their mental destitutions, and would go to them as persons who have a life in this world as well as in the world to come. Salvation for this people was not to rescue here and there merely a vacant mind, nor out of multitudes of shipwrecked souls to save here and there one from the wreck; but to him the Kingdom of God was like unto seed which a man put in his ground and which should grow—he knoweth not how—by all kinds of help, but which might call for long watching and long waiting.
Therefore he said, “Education is indispensable to the uplifting of such a people,” and schools were planted. Home life must be redeemed, and home industries were taught. They need the industrial arts; hence he began to instruct them in carpentry, in masonry, in smithing and in agriculture. He introduced the planting of trees; societies of agriculture; instituted arbor days; taught them how to drain their lands, how to irrigate them, how to enrich them, how to make roads, and how to construct bridges across their mountain streams.
There he went to stay, and among them built his own house and brought into it a like-minded, large-minded, cultivated, earnest-spirited wife, who with him taught the lessons of home life, its divinity, its sacredness and its glory.
Remember, this was more than a century ago, when the world had not the missionary thoughts of to-day. None, so far as I know, had as yet such a missionary idea enunciated and systematized.
While thus he was laying the foundations for the regeneration of a despised people, a still greater sacrifice presented itself. It was to leave this missionary work for another in one of the Southern colonies of far-off America, to live among a people more needy than these despised ones, and more despised; to live among those who by law were being robbed of the very rights of being, and for whose degradation the forces of law were now operating.
Accepting the mission, he was ready to depart, when suddenly the war for American Independence was declared, and his life was saved. He could not then have lived a year in the South possessing his ideas, much less to apply and expand them.
His path blocked by Providence, nothing remained but for him to develop those ideas where he was, and to lift his voice from those out-of-the-way hills against the sin of slavery. He would not use sugar in his coffee, “for,” said he, “every granule of it is tainted with the blood of the unhappy slave.” No article wrung out of involuntary servitude should come into his house. No product of slave labor would he touch. He was a prophet, for at this date people in New England had not ceased to buy and sell their fellow-creatures, and scores of years after this, ministers of the gospel in this country were diligently searching the Scriptures to discover and establish the divine foundations for human servitude.
Meanwhile the churches increase, the school-houses multiply, the industries prove their value, and the mountain people are led along, and led up from their abject poverty and misery to the experience of comfort and prosperity. Then he worked and waited for three-score years save one, and lived to see a rude and vulgar and despised people regenerated and transformed, saved from the dominion of vice to good morals and gentle manners, and many of them converted to a personal experience of the grace that is in Christ.
You may easily now examine the results of this life and service after the long years have tested them.
Should you go with me to his house you would cross the pont de la charité by the way of his well-constructed road. When Oberlin proposed to make this road, to blast the rocks along the mountain side, the people did not see how it would look as we now do. If he had suggested a step-ladder to the moon they would not have been more amazed. They applied to him all the deprecatory adjectives in their possession. It was impossible, and unreasonable, and visionary. Assuredly he had lost his mind. Much learning had made him mad. They positively refused to sustain him. He was altogether out of his sphere. This would have been a good time for him to have tendered his resignation, but the great soldier did not run away, because he was needed. They could not starve him out, for he knew how to starve.
But if the road were made it would be useless, they said, for “how could we get across the stream?” He replied: “We will take the rocks which we blast for the road and build a bridge.” This confirmed them that the pastor’s mind was clean gone forever. Such a departure from the old paths showed not only the danger of theological studies, but also a capacity for speculative views that would halt at nothing. Nevertheless, he led the way in this enterprise, and the people looked on amazed when they saw him picking and shoveling with his own hands. Then one came and followed him, and another came and followed him; then a score who soon were fifty, and next a hundred, until by the time they had reached the bridge they all believed in it and always had! The last man who was converted over to the majority undoubtedly went home and told his wife that the original idea of the improvement was his own; that he had it in mind long before Oberlin came, and he himself would have proposed it to their leader but for the conviction that ministers ought simply to preach the gospel and leave the labor question alone. Perhaps the trusting soul believed him.
As you enter the home where he was a father to this people who were as children to him and brethren to each other, you feel his protest against caste, and his teaching that if God is a universal father this destroys caste and makes brotherhood a reality. In his study in his own plain hand, you may find his missionary idea fully expanded, and from that study you will no longer look out upon the wilderness and the solitary place, because they have been made glad by him. You will find happy children in good schools and happy parents in good Christian homes.
Let me turn now from the influence of the life, to the life of the influence. It is not always easy to trace the pedigree of an idea or to track an influence. Sometimes we can in part, for they all have their parentage, and their evolution has been so direct that we can tell where and when they were born. Seven years after the sorrowing people had gathered about the missionary’s grave, two young men in this country—themselves having something of the prophetic instinct—in acquainting themselves with the work of this missionary prophet caught his spirit, and set themselves to incarnate his ideas and his methods, in consecrating themselves to the work of education in order to salvation. The influence which Oberlin never thought to send so far, had winged itself from his mountain tops across the wide sea to a little village in the new State of Ohio. Then these young men who found themselves in sympathy with his ideas of brotherhood, its obligations and its needs, with his feeling towards the slave and to all who might be uplifted, took upon themselves this moral and spiritual inheritance and began the foundations of a school which should bear the name of Oberlin and become the reproductive center of like ideas and influences. I do not say that there were no other influences, only that there was this one, dominant in spirit as well as in name. The young college took on this stamp, a missionary character, sympathy with people in low conditions, radical ideas of human brotherhood, profound convictions of duty towards the oppressed and ignorant. From the atmosphere of this influence, soon from the Professor’s chair in this College there came forth a strong man girded for a great sacrificial work.
A little Missionary Society, the embodiment of the idea which Oberlin three-score and ten years before had proclaimed upon the mountains, “No complicity with slavery,” consciously or unconsciously, having adopted the same faith and spirit, needed a leader. From the influences of Oberlin College came Rev. Dr. Whipple to sound the bugle blast which went echoing through the land: “We will not use the revenues of unrighteousness to do the work of righteousness.” Was it anything more than a coincidence or was it a providence, that with thirty years of singular sacrifice this strong man in obedience to his mind and heart was working out the same ideas which the great missionary prophet had so clearly held forth?
I am not now attempting to assert heredity of ideas, or to decide the precise degree of historic continuity that there may be in an influence. I have the easier task of following a distinct stream of influence, one among many which flow into the great river of life. With no purpose to measure it I see the providence. Another evolution from the same atmosphere of the same institution brings to the American Missionary Association kindred ideas, kindred faith and kindred spirit, in the second Corresponding Secretary, thus connecting the history, and expanding and deepening the influence.
Yesterday’s Annual Survey exhibited, as well as figures may, the work of the Society now after more than two-score years of history. It is interesting as a fact, independent of any weighing of influences, to note that in church work and in Sunday-school work, in educational instruction and industrial training, in teaching those who have not had the chances for life, how to think, how to work, how to aspire and how to rise, we find ourselves, as if working by a chart in the expansion of the missionary methods of this prophet who gave his life to rescuing the despised, teaching them how to live in the world that now is, while they are taught the lessons that shall fit them for the world to come. The education of the schools, the lessons in the establishment of good homes, the industries, the churches, are pressing on in the plain paths of providence until this day.
Already our eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord. Its aforetime degraded people are rapidly learning to work out the decrees of God in the blessings of a Christian civilization. Among the dark millions of the South, in the long passed-by cabins of impoverished and ignorant mountain people in the heart of our land, of our own race, among the long-wronged red men and the despised Mongolians, the evolution of this missionary idea, and the developments of this missionary influence are proving their reproductive and fruitful energy in the sacrificial lives of noble missionaries, men and women who are themselves often despised while they are ministering to the ignorant and to those who are lowly. They also are powers for other lives, while they are sustained by a like devotion to the things that are eternal. As from this unlikeliest mission, a hundred years ago the light of life shone out, the influence of fidelity to convictions coursing down the centuries, showing what enlightened consecration can achieve; so now those who are working together with God for the same divine ideas, though they may be hidden from the world’s praises, may be confident that God will not forget them, nor fail to speed their labors of love in the Lord.
As we gather here in the interests of a work so near to the heart of Christ, like Him we may safely appeal to the confirmations of history in the evolutions of providence for courage now, and confidence for the future. How often when our Lord was testifying to the reality and power of the kingdom of God on the earth, and the faith which souls might have and hold in working in it and in waiting for it, did He send the minds of people back to the days of the prophets and righteous men that they might see how the work goes on when the workers die, and how the influences of their lives continue and enlarge in other lives, so that assurance might take fresh courage to discover itself in the historic current of an unmistakable divine purpose and in the evolution of the decrees of grace. The constancy and compassion of God in the past are cheering us, in that we have only to hold fast the beginning of our confidence, steadfast unto the end. We shall not fail, and we need not be discouraged.
Thus putting on strength, as we recall the care of God and power of His truth, may we not from this high place of Christian convocation send out our sympathies to those who have consecrated themselves to this same prophetic work of bringing in the cast-out, of raising up the cast-down, and of saving those who are out of the way. Much of their work is very kindred in form and feature to this work of Oberlin’s. It is remote, in conditions of rudeness, and in separation from kindred society. They are living the truth of human brotherhood. They are holding forth that which is not popular. They are standing with and for the despised.
They may remember that we bear them in our hearts and in our prayers; that they have the grateful recognition of the churches in their self-denials and heroisms. God has accounted them worthy to live lives that may well rebuke the selfishness and sinful ambitions of those who live for themselves and those who seek only high places. The greatness of Christian service is theirs. They can never know where their influences may go, nor how far. Nor until the roll-call of Eternity is made will it be revealed what great lives they have lived, and what Christian deeds have been wrought by these men and women, who from us have gone out and away from the world’s vision in self-abnegation, and often in the world’s scorn are like the prophet of the mountains, patiently laying deep and broad the foundations of a new earth wherein shall dwell righteousness.
And so long as our churches can produce this sacrificial spirit, the work cannot do other than move forward, and the will of God shall be done.