ADDRESS OF PRES. CYRUS HAMLIN.
In the few remarks, Mr. Chairman, which I have to make on this most important subject, I shall draw chiefly from my missionary experience of thirty-five years in the Turkish empire, with those feeble churches formed among a people oppressed, persecuted, despised and ignorant, and yet churches that have come up in many cases from great weakness and great doubt into noble strength and manhood. This may be received as a general fact of the result of church organization. Gather from these poor materials churches enough to be trusted to their own self-government and care: organize the church; give to that church a native pastor, and place upon it all the responsibilities of Christian growth and Christian work. You give it, of course, the Bible, and “the entrance of His word giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple.” With the Bible always comes, and must come, the common school; and from the common school the high school; and from the high school the college; and from the college the professional school; and thus you have that necessary provision for preparing the native pastorate, and every church must have its pastor from its own race. I believe, in the entire field of the American Board, among all nations and races, there never has been a single instance of real success and growth of a church except under its native pastor, a pastor of its own race. And so you have in this Association the most sacred and solemn duty—duty to the church of Christ, duty to the great Head of the church, to educate for these churches competent pastors; and just so far as this great duty is neglected, our whole work will grow weak and be a failure.
I do not think it is possible to emphasize too strongly the necessity of having an educated pastorate from the people of the churches to which the pastors themselves belong—of the same race. The church and the college go together; you cannot separate them. Separate them, and they will both perish; unite them, and they will both succeed; for wherever you introduce a true evangelic work, there will be a demand for the very highest education. What a tremendous and almost tragic demonstration of this was the grand effort of the great Secretary of the American Board, to confine missionary churches to education in their own tongue—to lay aside all science, to lay aside all study of languages, and to confine education to the vernacular of each people! If anybody on this earth could, by any possibility, have carried that demonstration to successful result, it would have been our revered and beloved Dr. Anderson; but the failure was absolute and terrible. I do not believe there is a missionary now under the American Board, or under any other Board, that will contend for a thus limited education, a vernacular education, as sufficient for the pastorate or the ministry of any people, and especially of an ignorant and degraded people, where the elevating and educating force must come so largely from the pastor himself.
Now in these churches in the East, by necessity, the first pastors were not thus educated. The missionaries were compelled to get themselves such pastors as they could find, just as the apostles ordained elders in every place. They had to ordain just such elders as they could find, and the missionaries did the same. But these pastors have all been growing men; they have all been put into a way of study; they have all been kept under exciting influences; and pastors and churches have gone on together. And I think, from my personal knowledge of the pastors of those churches in the Turkish empire, that they are a noble, faithful and progressive company of laborers in the vineyard of our Lord. It must also be remembered that, in forming these churches and bringing them forward, they will commit great errors; there will be great immoralities breaking out among these church members. I have known such sins committed by church members in whom I had had confidence, that I would at the first impulse have immediately expelled them from the churches, and denied to them all possibility of knowing or having known anything of a true and pure Christianity; and yet those same men, when faithfully and patiently dealt with, have come to repentance, have returned to faithful Christian life in the church, and I have been at the bedside of some of them when they died in faith and joy, and in hope of a glorious and blessed immortality.
Now, I have great confidence in these churches which this Association has formed; I have great confidence in their progress, in their purification, in the elevation and competency and energy of the native pastorate; and it seems to me that this is the very centre, the fountain source, of the safe and onward progress of your great work.