ADDRESS OF REV. E.P. GOODWIN, D.D.
I rejoice that I can lift my voice at least in a word of commendation, if such a word seem in any sense to be needed, in the furtherance of this particular kind of work. I remind myself sometimes that this very tone of apology is a tone that ought to set some of us, as ministers and as brethren, to reconsidering our conception of the gospel. Why, beloved, suppose it were an admitted fact that for the next hundred years not a solitary Chinaman would be converted. What then? Do you imagine that that fact would absolve us from allegiance to the commands of the Lord Jesus Christ? You will remind yourselves—I am sure I remind myself often—that in respect to our Christian work, the breadth of it and the particular departments of it, we have absolutely no option whatsoever: that when our Master said to his disciples, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature," he made no exception of those that might have almond eyes and yellow faces, nor of those that might have black skins and woolly hair; that he took in, in that wide sweep of his omniscient vision, every nation and kindred under the whole sky, and that should exist until the kingdom itself should come.
If it could be demonstrated that it required ten times as much work and ten times as much money to convert the Chinaman as anybody else, then all the more because of degradation and superstition and idolatry and hardness of heart—all the more must I storm the Gibraltar of that paganism. The Master's principle seemed to be, "Give ye them to eat." The fact of hunger is what lays the law upon the hearts of the disciples; and by so much as men are more hungered—if there be one nation more so than another—by so much as they are nearer to starving for the bread of life, by so much the more are your heart and my heart called upon in the name and in the sympathy of Jesus Christ, to respond to that cause. Those disciples of that early day might just as well have said, "Master, we can not feed all these ten thousand. We will pick out those around us, the nearest at hand. We won't touch that set of lepers just over there from Capernaum; we won't have anything to do with that other set of outcasts and vagabonds drifted in here, some of them from Samaria; we will have nothing whatever to do with these wretches from Chorazin—gamblers and abandoned people of every sort."
What do you think would have been his response to that sort of argument? I think if Peter had given him any such plea as that it would have cut him off hopelessly from any apostleship. There would have been a new band of apostles that would have been instituted then and there that were willing to take the Master's command, take Him as responsible for the authority and for the result. They knew better; they knew Him better; and though they had their little scant loaves that would not give a quarter of a crumb apiece to the great multitude, they said: "That is not our responsibility; ours is to obey. It is His to furnish when the resources fail." Brethren, that is my theory of missions.
Do you remember the little anecdote about Francis Xavier, that before he went abroad as a missionary to China, while he was sleeping with his room-mate one night, he startled him by rising in his sleep and throwing out his arms with great urgency, as he said, "Yet more, oh, my God, yet more!" His comrade wakened him and asked him what he meant. "Why," said he, "I was having a vision of things in the East. I was seeing missionaries tortured; some of them were being burned, some of them were having their flesh torn from their bodies, and in many ways they seemed to be suffering in their testimony for Christ's sake. And as I looked, the tears came to my eyes, and a voice said to me, 'That is what it will cost you if you go on this missionary tour. Are you willing to take the cost?' And I said, 'Oh, Lord Jesus; yet more, yet more, if I may win these perishing souls.'"
Brethren, it is the call of the hour. These people may become, in my judgment, pre-eminently the missionary people. They have been called the Yankees of the Orient. They are scattered every whither, in every quarter of the world. I think it ought to shame us to have less enthusiasm for these for whom Christ died than they of the Romish church in the palmiest days of its missionary zeal. God help us that we may stand true upon the Pacific coast and all through our land, and that for every missionary church abroad there may be a score and a hundred. Dr. Williams said, after thirty years' knowledge of the Chinese, that we might evangelize China from one end of the empire to the other in half a century if we were in earnest. God help us that we may labor and pray for the coming of such a day.
Now I believe this: That, so far as the facts go, there is just as large a percentage of results to be shown for work among the Chinese as for work anywhere. Take it in our city, among some of the Chinese schools; take it in San Francisco, take it in China itself. I received on Saturday last a letter from Mr. Gray, of Hong-Kong, speaking of a young man who had gone out from our church as his assistant in the work there. Said he to me: "He is one of the most valuable helpers I could have. He not only stands fast by his work, but he also seems to have spiritual discernment to meet the peculiar difficulties we have to encounter, and there are plenty of them. Here is a man, for instance, who says he would whip his wife to death if he should hear of her accepting Christ. There is another, a mother, who would let her child starve if she thought it was being taught the gospel of Jesus Christ. But among this people there is no more successful laborer that I know of than Sui Chung." I knew him well. He came into our Chinese Sunday-school, which is held every Sunday afternoon. I remember him distinctly, as giving, so far as I could see, clear evidence of being born of the Spirit. And I bear testimony to these young men now in my church—there are ten or a dozen of them—that, so far as I know them and so far as I have been able to talk with them in imperfect English or through Chinese interpreters, their Christian experience is as satisfactory as that of any others. Nay, I will say more than that. I will venture to say that the Chinese brethren in my church are more earnest. They sustain a Chinese prayer-meeting regularly every Sunday of their own accord in their own language, and have kept it up ever since there were enough of them to be united together. I frequently look in and talk with them; and there is one thing about these Chinese that I greatly respect—I never saw them pull out their watches while I was speaking to them. I never saw any of them going to sleep; I never saw a look in the face of one of them which indicated that he was not profoundly interested. I was in their meeting last Sunday, and I told them about Sui Chung. Most of these Chinese can read. Some of them are very fluent talkers, and some are very intelligent. I suppose we have a thousand or fifteen hundred in this city, and a very large proportion of them, they tell me, can read the Chinese Bible.
Now, I have great respect for this people, if for nothing more than for their history. We have a petty hundred years of history. How many hundred have they? Any nation that can hold itself together for 4,000 years—or shall I say for more?—and that to-day constitutes nearly one-quarter of the population of the earth, certainly deserves our respect. Any people that can take our own handicrafts and beat us at them—and they will do it in a good many directions, and make money, even though you may disapprove of their way of living—deserve our respect. Any people that can furnish diplomates fitted to stand side by side with Bismarck and Gladstone, and our own embassadors say that they can, certainly deserve our respect.
One thing more they desire of the Christian church, if it were only a debt to be paid. I insist upon it, brethren, that at least Christian England and Christian America ought to pay back to them in missionary moneys at least an amount equal to that of which we have robbed them by the infamous opium traffic, and to-day it is people from Christian lands, more than anything else, who are furnishing the difficulties in the way of the introduction of the gospel abroad.