HEROISM AND STATESMANSHIP.
FROM THE ADDRESS OF REV. ALEXANDER HANNAY, D.D., SECRETARY OF THE CONGREGATIONAL UNION OF ENGLAND AND WALES.
We sometimes talk—and I think in a very superficial and wild way—about heroic ages of certain nationalities, heroic ages of the church; and there are men who will say it was a heroic age in which foreign missions were projected, whether in England or here; that then the men were of great stature, and that they rose to the opportunities the great living Head of the Church offered them, and went out and did a giant’s work; and they look down on this time, and perhaps complain that it is not a heroic age, and that we cannot have a giant’s test put to us. Now that is all very flimsy and superficial talk in my judgment. There are epochs in the history of nations and of churches when great opportunities occur, the record of which becomes historical, and it seems that the men who take the prominent part then are men of Alpine bulk and grandeur of nature—true heroes; and then there comes a time of equable, dogged, plodding, unhistorical work, and it is said “The age of heroism and the age of heroes has passed away.” Brethren, the work of these quiet and plodding ages cannot be done well, except in the very spirit of the heroic age; and I take it there is a test of individual character, there is a test of strength and firmness in men, a strength of heroism demanded for the quiet, ordinary, fruitful work of times like these, equal, at least, to that which was needed to originate the new epoch. And I congratulate the representatives of the American churches assembled at the meetings of these great societies on the evidence which has appeared to me, (and I would use no words of mere courtesy in this, but a simple and unaffected expression of the feeling which has taken possession of me while I have attended these meetings), that here they are in the very spirit of their fathers, now gone to their rest, who said, “We must redeem the pagan nations and bring them to Christ.”
Another thing that has struck me is this: in listening to what we have heard here to-day, I have seemed to find not merely a fulness and vitality of the missionary sentiment, but associated with that, a keen, political outlook, the statesman’s thought about the demand of the hour and the special adaptations that are necessary in service for the carrying out of the great work that these societies have in view. It is especially encouraging in view of this, to which no one can be blind, that God is calling America to a singularly honorable, because singularly difficult, vocation, in dealing with the races with which her life of intelligence and faith is here being brought into contact.
It is quite true, sir, that the Head of the Church, as has been proclaimed from this platform, and from that at Lowell, again and again, is imposing on you the discipleship of the world, the duty of carrying the Gospel to all the nations of the earth. It thus lies upon the Christian nations so honored to stretch out their hands to lift the other nations up to the plane on which they are themselves living. But there has been brought to America, it seems to me, a specially difficult task. She has had thrust within her national boundary at least three separate races, that are on a different stage of intellectual development and civilization from that which she has reached; or if it be too much to say that these races have been thrust within her boundaries, then that the high and laudable ambition, which has moved you as a people to keep this great continent to yourselves, and to take as much more as you can get, has brought upon you this obligation in connection with the great races which are to be found on your soil. We are aware that the spirit and the policy of the world is hounded on, perhaps now more than ever, by that proud and insolent dictum of science, falsely so called, ready to be applied to the affairs of races as to other things—“the survival of the fittest.” No doubt there are men among you who are ready to take up the spirit of this maxim and to apply it all around, and to feel, as has been said here about the dead Indian, that it is the province of the stronger people simply to overrun, and press out, and hustle over the frontiers, or over the shores of your continent, the weaker races. Now, sir, as I understand it, you have been called to this vocation of bringing up these weaker races, of incorporating them into your own national life, of clothing them with all the honors and responsibilities of citizenship, of giving them a full status in the Church and in the township, of making them what you are yourselves, gradually scattering their darkness by the light of your intelligence, and vitalizing their enfeebled and degraded manhood by the overflow of the surplus energy of your own manhood. There has been given to you this great task to perform, to show the nations a better way of dealing with the weaker races than any nation has yet reached; and if the spirit of the American Missionary Association can but be breathed into the American people as a whole; if you can control your political action, if you can determine the issues in your Congress by that spirit, and control all your dealings with those peoples by it, one of the very brightest of the many crowns which will sit on the brow of the American nation will be the crown which you will win in that service. This is the work to which you are called.
I have been asked since I came here how I could explain the fact that the citizens of America seem to meddle so much in politics. I do not think we of England meddle enough with them. The existence of a political church among us forces a certain political contention upon us with which you here have nothing to do. But I take it that it is one of the highest, most urgent vocations of the Church of Christ, in this and in all lands, to see to it, that, so far as her influence shall go, by teaching and by testimony, by debate, by criticism, by all kinds of fair mental conflict to penetrate the political life of the nation with the spirit of Christ. It will not be well with you in America, any more than with us in England, whether with regard to your work for the black man and the Indian and the Chinese, or with regard to your own national stability and progress, until this work has been gone earnestly about. We can afford to rise above party politics, but we are bound to preach that righteousness, that truth, that spirit of self sacrifice, without which neither church nor nation can be made great and stable.
GENERAL SURVEY.
The battle cry of the American Missionary Association now is Enlargement. We are called to this by recent encouragements, and by the demands of the future.