In a similar way New Testament polity is showing its power in our foreign work. At home we are getting to be lax in our reception of members, and are taking in numbers of persons without proper evidence of their conversion. Baptist churches which used to examine carefully their candidates for admission now receive them without public and oral confession of their faith. Yet these new members may vote, and may determine the attitude of the church in important exigencies. All this is avoided in our mission churches. They perceive the necessity of keeping out the unfit, as clearly as that of admitting the fit. They do not add to their membership by infant baptism, and they make sure that no pecuniary considerations influence professing converts. Our Baptist mission churches are fast becoming models of self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating bodies. Missionaries find that their only safety lies in hewing close to the line of New Testament requirement. Their success in building up Baptist churches in Burma and among the Telugus, keeps our missionaries faithful to the New Testament model of church polity. They have the joy of seeing churches organized on scriptural principles, and shedding their light upon the regions of darkness around them.
I wish to say something also about the physical environment of our missionaries and its influence upon them. I remember that half a century ago I called upon Doctor Thompson of Beirut, the veteran missionary of the American Board in Syria. I would not have been surprised if I had found him living in a hut, for my ideas of missionary hardship were very crude. But I was surprised to find him living in a great stone mansion, with twice as many servants as we ordinarily have at home. It has taken me some time to learn that in a hot country a cool and spacious house is a primary necessity of life, if the missionary expects to endure a climate where the thermometer at times goes up beyond a hundred degrees and stays there. And ordinary comfort cannot be obtained without servants to do your cooking and running. The large house can be built for half the cost of such a structure at home, and the servants can be obtained for only a few cents a day for each one. Remember that in many cases the missionary has not only to be his own physician and surgeon, but also the physician and surgeon of others; that his house is often a hospital as well as a gathering-place of inquirers. Remember, too, that the missionary's wife has not only to perform the household duties of a wife at home, but in addition has probably to be the supervisor of a girls' school and the only school-teacher and music-teacher that her children will know until they are old enough to go to the homeland. Remember these considerations, and you will see that a decent home is essential to a missionary's success in a heathen land. Our missionary work, like our diplomatic service, has been too long discredited by our insufficient care for our representatives abroad.
Our friends of other denominations are greatly ahead of us in this matter of provision for their missionaries. Not only are the bungalows built for their residences better than ours, but their plants of church and school buildings show a larger outlook for the future than ours show. The English Baptists, the Congregationalists, the Methodists, the Church of England, yes, even the Theosophists and Buddhists, furnish object-lessons to us in this regard. And yet, such has been the inventiveness and large-mindedness of our missionaries themselves, that in all the great centers of our work, they are housed better than the average pastors of our churches at home. I wish we could double their strength by the establishment of summer rest-houses in the hills, and by presenting every one of them with a motor-car. But even now, the days of extreme hardship are past, and no man of ordinary vigor need fear coming to the foreign field on account of its physical discomforts.
When our Lord sent out his first missionaries, he sent them two by two. The real trial of the missionary is more mental than physical. He greatly needs companionship. Silence in the midst of the beating of heathen tom-toms becomes enervating and appalling; it may make a man insane. We are learning the value of team-work in missions. What one man alone could never accomplish, he can do with the help of others. The American Board in its mission at Madura, India, has acted upon this principle, and the result is seen in an aggregate of twenty-two thousand church-members. Our own most successful work has been among the Burmans and Karens, where we have seventy thousand members, and among the Telugus, where we have as many more. In these fields there are enough workers to constitute a homogeneous society, with frequent conferences to help the discouraged and to stimulate the weak. Let us be generous in providing additional helpers and furloughs to men so far removed from our Christian civilization.
But let no one go to the foreign field expecting to get all his strength from his brethren. Missionary work is no sinecure. It requires not only a sound body and a sound mind, with a cheerful and hopeful temperament, but also a willingness to endure hardship for Jesus' sake, and, if need be, with him alone for helper. There are more alleviations of missionary conditions than were known in its early days, but they still require self-sacrifice. Separation from home and friends, and, for the pioneer, days of unspeakable loneliness, are the missionary's portion. The necessity of sending children to America, so that they may escape disease and immorality among the heathen, is an agony which only the affectionate parent can know. Opportunities for usefulness which cannot be seized, because of lack of reenforcement from the homeland, involve a "hope deferred that maketh the heart sick."
When Paul went to Athens he probably hoped to win the philosophers to Christ's standard. But the Stoics and Epicureans scoffed at him. He had to content himself with the multitude of commoner converts at Corinth. It was doubtless God's sovereignty that determined the result, but God's sovereignty is also wisdom. It took Paul a long time to learn that God builds his fires from the bottom, and ordinarily kindles the small sticks first. "Not many wise, not many noble hath God chosen," but the weak things first, "that no flesh may glory in his presence." Here is one of the trials of missionary life, and one of the tests of missionary faith. Can the missionary welcome the conversion of a multitude of low-class people, like the Madigas, when their acceptance becomes to the proud Brahman an evidence of the ignoble character of Christianity? Yes, he can, if he has faith in God. He can wait on God, and wait for results.
He builded better than he knew,
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
The great Sudra class, a class higher than the Madigas, under the influence of Christianity, is becoming more intelligent and more influential than the Brahman, and is gradually taking from him his social prestige and his political power. Many missionaries are expecting a great turning unto the Lord from among the Sudras. Meantime there is a promise "to him that overcometh." "If we suffer with him, we shall also reign with him." "Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." And
When we reach the shore at last.
Who shall count the billows past?
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