(From Photo: supplied by the Church Missionary Society.)
THE LIBRARY AT THE MISSION HOUSE.
There was Ludwig Krapf, whose name, with that of John Rebmaun, should ever be joined with the origins of our growing empire in Eastern Equatorial Africa. He began his missionary work in Abyssinia, had to leave as the result of French intrigues, sailed down the East African coast in an Arab boat, and in 1844 settled at Mombasa. From the knowledge of the interior gained by Krapf and his companion, came the chain of African discovery which issued, as long afterwards as 1875, in the publication, through Mr. H. M. Stanley, of Mtesa's appeal for missionaries for Uganda. How little could Krapf ever have dreamed of the vast results, political as well as spiritual, that would flow from that early disappointment, his expulsion from Abyssinia!
There was David Hinderer, who, upon the other side of Africa, did so striking a work in the Yoruba country. The prosperity of his evangelistic labours, the virtual imprisonment in which he and his wife—half-starved and in deadly peril—were for five years in the town of Ibadan, and the ultimate discovery that their work stood the severe tests of isolation and persecution, go to make up one of the most interesting chapters in the history of African missions.
There was George Maxwell Gordon, the pilgrim-missionary of the Indian frontier, a pioneer who saw little direct fruit of his labours, yet left missions where none had been. Acting as chaplain to the British forces shut up in Kandahar, he was killed, when seeking to succour the wounded, in August, 1880.
But this is a list that might be almost indefinitely extended, and still would seem invidious. Let us come to some striking pages in the Society's history; again, of necessity, passing by many of the most impressive as well as some of the most familiar.
The city of Peshawur, upon the Afghan frontier, has long been a centre of missionary work. The fanaticism of the people when it was first occupied by British troops seemed to make missionary enterprise impossible. One Commissioner—he afterwards fell by the hand of an assassin—refused permission for missionaries to come, on the ground that they would excite the fanaticism of the people to a dangerous pitch. The arrival of Herbert Edwardes changed the situation. A meeting of English people, military and civil, was called in Peshawur itself; a sum of £3,000 was raised, a memorial sent to the Church Missionary Society, and, in response, missionaries provided. Here is an example of what is so often forgotten by critics of Indian missions, that they in a large measure owe their origin and support to men actually or formerly engaged in the administration of India. The Church Missionary Society has been peculiarly happy in the number of men of high distinction in the Army and the Civil Service who have served on its Committee. Now from the Punjab men are pushing still farther afield; Quetta has long been occupied, and the medical missionary has found a welcome from the Afridis themselves.
Let us take another mission founded in answer to an appeal from without, and that an appeal from a layman. People who recall the missionary meetings of a generation ago will remember that no more thrilling story was told at them than the history of William Duncan's early work amongst the Tsimshean Indians of the North Pacific coast. It was a marvellous example of courage, tact, and patience, rewarded by the conversion of savages of a singularly unapproachable type. It was a naval officer, Captain Prevost, who suggested that mission to the Society, carried Mr. Duncan thither, and landed him at Fort Simpson in 1857. In ten years' time he had baptised nearly three hundred adult converts. In 1862 the Christian community was moved to Metlakahtla, where the spectacle of a cannibal and violent people living in peace and industry was long deemed one of the marvels of missionary enterprise.
I pass by such striking histories as those of Uganda, of the attempt of J. A. Robinson and Graham Wilmot Brooke to reach the Soudan from the Niger, and of the massacre of English women at Hwa-Sang in Fuh-kien, to recall romances of another kind. What could be more moving than the careers of some of the Society's converts? Is there any more striking history of its kind than that of the Rev. Dr. Imad-ud-din, a learned Mohammedan, who had sought the peace of God by every available means, and at last found it in Christ? Or what would they who distrust converts say to the career of that once notorious Border bandit, Dilawar Khan, baptised in 1858, who served as an officer in the Guides, and died in Chitral whilst in the service of the British Government?