When I preached on a like occasion last year, I spoke at some length of the prospects of Christian missions,[24] and I ventured to give seven grounds which the peculiar circumstances of our time afforded for greater confidence in the future. First, the better knowledge of the Divine nature acquired by the extinction of the once universal belief that all heathens were everlastingly lost; secondly, the increased acquaintance with the heathen religions themselves; thirdly, the instruction which Christian missionaries have gained or may gain from their actual experience in foreign parts; fourthly, the recognition of the fact that the main hindrance to the success of Christian missions arises from the vices and sins of Christendom; fifthly, an acknowledgment of the indirect influences of Christianity through legislation and civilization; sixthly, the newly awakened perception of the duty of making exact, unvarnished, impartial statements on this subject; seventhly, the testimony borne by missionary experience to the common elements and essential principles of the Christian religion.
On these—the peculiar grounds for hope and for exertion in this our generation—I content myself with referring to the observations which I then made, and which I will not now repeat.
I propose on this occasion to make a few remarks on the End and on the Means of Christian Missions; remarks which must of necessity be general in their import, but which for that reason are the more suitable to be offered by one who cannot speak from personal and special experience.
The text is taken from a striking incident in the life of the greatest of apostolic missionaries. It was in the presence of Festus and Agrippa that Paul had poured forth those few burning utterances which to Festus seemed like madness, but which Paul himself declared to be words of truth and soberness. Then it was that the Jewish prince, Agrippa—far better instructed and seeing deeper into Paul’s mind than the heathen Festus, yet still unconvinced—broke in upon the conversation with the words which in the English translation have well nigh passed into a proverb, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” The sense which they thus give would be in itself perfectly suitable to the halting, fickle character of the Herodian family, and would accurately describe the numerous half-converts throughout the world—“Almost,” but not quite, “thou persuadest me to join the good cause.” But the sense which, by the nearly universal consent of modern scholars, they really bear in the original is something still more instructive. The only meaning of which the Greek words are capable is an exclamation, half in jest and half in earnest, “It is but a very brief and simple argument that you offer to work so great a change;” or, if we may venture to bring out the sense more forcibly, “So few words, and such a vast conclusion!” “So slight a foundation, and so gigantic a superstructure!” “So scanty an outfit, and so perilous an enterprise!” The speech breathes something of the spirit of Naaman, when he was told to wash in the Jordan—“Are not Abana and Pharpar better than all the waters of Israel?” It is like the complaint of the popular prophets in the time of Hezekiah, whose taste demanded stronger flavor than the noble simplicity of Isaiah, “Thou givest us only line upon line, precept upon precept.” It breathes the spirit of the Ephesian Christians who, when they heard St. John’s repeated maxim of “Little children, love one another,” said, “Is this all that he has to tell us?” It expresses the spirit of many an one since, who has stumbled at the threshold of the genuine Gospel—“So vague, so simple, so universal. Is this worth the sacrifice that you demand? Give us a demonstrative argument, a vast ceremonial, a complex system, a uniform government. Nothing else will satisfy us.”
As Agrippa’s objection, so is Paul’s answer. It would have indeed borne a good sense had he meant what in our English version he is made to say, “I would that thou wert converted both ‘almost and altogether.’ Halfness or wholeness—I admire them both. Half a soul is better than none at all. To have come half way is better than never to have started at all; but half is only good, because it leads towards the whole.” Nevertheless, following the real meaning of Agrippa’s remark, St. Paul’s retort, in fact, bears a yet deeper significance—“I would to God, that whether by little or by much, whether by brief arguments or by long arguments, somehow and somewhere, the change were wrought. The means to me are comparatively nothing, so long as the end is accomplished.” It is the same spirit as that which dictated the noble expression in the Epistle to the Philippians: “Some preach Christ of envy and strife, some also of good will. The one preach Christ of contention, the other of love. What then? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is preached.”[25]
And then he proceeds to vindicate the end which makes him indifferent as to the means. Agrippa, in his brief taunt, had said, “Such are the arguments by which you would fain make me a Christian.” It is one of the few, one of the only three occasions on which that glorious name is used in the New Testament. It is here charged not with the venerable meaning which we now attach to it, but with the novel and degrading associations which it bore in the mouth of every Jew and every Roman at that time—of Tacitus or Josephus, no less than of Festus or Agrippa. “Is it,” so the king meant to say, “is it that you think to make me a Christian, a member of that despised, heretical, innovating sect, of which the very name is a sufficient condemnation?”
It is only by bearing this in mind that we see the force of St. Paul’s answer. He does not insist on the word; he does not fight even for this sacred title; he does not take it up as a pugnacious champion might take up the glove which his adversary had thrown down; he does not say, “I would that thou wast a Christian.” In his answer he bears his testimony to one of the gravest, the most fruitful, of all theological truths—that it is not the name but the thing, not the form but the reality, on which stress must be laid; and he gives the most lucid, heart-stirring illustration of what the reality is. “I would that not only thou, but all those who hear me were (I ask for no ambiguous catchword or byword, but) what you see before you; I would that you all were such as I am—such as I am, upheld by the hopes, filled with the affections, that sustain my charmed existence;” and then, with that exquisite courtesy which characterizes so many traits of the Apostle’s history, glancing at the chains which bound him to the Roman guard—“‘except these bonds.’ This, whether you call it Christian or not, is what I desire to see you and all the world.” “You see it before you in the life, the character, the spirit, of one who knows what Christianity is, and who wishes that all his fellow-creatures should partake of the happiness that he has gained, repose on the same principles that give him strength.” This, then, is the statement of the greatest of missionaries, both as to the end which he sought to attain, and the means by which he and we should seek to attain it.
I. Let us first take the End: “Such as I am, except these bonds.” That is the state to which St. Paul desired to bring all those who heard him. That, according to him, was the description of a Christian. No doubt if he had been pressed yet further, he would have said that he meant, “Such as Jesus Christ, my Lord.” But he was satisfied with taking such a living, human, imperfect exemplification as he whom Festus and Agrippa saw in their presence. “Such as Paul was.” Here is no ambiguous definition, no obsolete form. What manner of man he was we know even better than Festus or Agrippa knew. Look at him with all his characteristic peculiarities; a man passionately devoted to his own faithful friends, and clinging to the reminiscences of his race and country, yet with a heart open to embrace all mankind; a man combining the strongest convictions with an unbounded toleration of differences, and an unbounded confidence in truth; a man penetrated with the freedom of the Spirit, but with a profound appreciation of the value of great existing institutions, whether civil or religious—a thorough Roman citizen and a thorough Eastern gentleman; embarked on a career of daring fortitude and endurance, undertaken in the strength of the persuasion that in Jesus Christ of Nazareth he had seen the highest perfection of Divine and human goodness—a Master worth living for and worth dying for, whose Spirit was to be the regenerating power of the whole world. This character, this condition it was to which St. Paul desired that his hearers should be brought. One only reservation he makes; “except these bonds,” except those limitations, those circumscriptions, those vexations, those irritations, which belonged to the suffering, toil-worn circumstances in which he was at that moment placed.
Such is the aim which, following the example of their most illustrious predecessor, all missionaries ought to have before their eyes. To create, to preach, to exhibit those elements of character, those apostolical graces, those Divine intuitions, which even the hard Roman magistrate and the superficial Jewish prince recognized in Paul of Tarsus. Where these are, there is Christianity. In proportion as any of these are attained, in that proportion has a human being become a Christian. Wherever and in proportion as these are not, there the missionary’s labor has failed—there the seed has been sown to no purpose—there the name of Christian may be, but the reality is not.
This preëminence of the object of Christian missions—namely, the formation of heroic, apostolic, and therefore Christian characters—has a wide practical importance. In these days—when there is so much temptation to dwell on the scaffolding, the apparatus, the organization of religion, as though it were religion itself—it is doubly necessary to bear in mind what true Religion is, wherein lies the essential superiority of Christianity to all the other forms of religion on the surface of the earth. It is not merely the baptism of thousands of infants, such as filled a large part of the aspirations even of so great a missionary as Francis Xavier; nor the adoption of the name of Christ, as was done on so vast a scale by the ferocious rebels of China; nor the repetition, with ever so much accuracy, of the Christian creed, as was done by the pretended converts from Mahommedanism or Judaism, under the terrible compulsion of the Catholic sovereigns of Spain. Nor is it the assurance ever so frequently repeated, that we are saved; nor is it the absolution, ever so solemnly pronounced by a priest; nor is it the shedding of floods of tears; nor is it the adoption of voluntary self-degradation or solitary seclusion. All these may be found in other religions in even greater force than in Christianity. That which alone, if anything, stamps Christianity as the supreme religion, is that its essence, its object, is in none of these things, valuable as some of them may be as signs and symptoms of the change which every mission is intended to effect. The change itself, the end itself, Christianity itself, is at once greater and simpler. It is to be such as Paul was; it is to produce characters, which in truthfulness, in independence, in mercy, in purity, in charity, may recall something of the great Apostle, even as he recalled something of the mind which was in Christ Jesus. It was this clear vision of what he desired to see as the fruits of his teaching that made St. Paul so ready to admire whatsoever things were lovely and of good report wherever he found them. In Gentile or in Jew, in heathen or in Christian, he recognized at once the spirits kindred to his own, and welcomed them accordingly. He felt that he could raise them yet higher; but he was eager to claim them as his brethren even from the first.[26] Even in the legends which surround his history there has been preserved something of this genuine apostolic sympathy. It was a fine touch in the ancient Latin hymn which described how, when he landed at Puteoli, he turned aside to the hill of Pausilipo to shed a tear over the tomb of Virgil, and thought how much he might have made of that noble soul if he had found him still on earth:—