The American Missionary — Volume 37, No. 12, December, 1883

by Various

Nor do I recall a missionary biography which is morbid and so misleading—which sets up an introspective and dyspeptic type of piety as a model and standard. The missionary has no time to be morbid. He has made a consecration of all his energies to his Master. His life is led actually and daily by the high purpose which he has set before him. His biography is not a picture of still life. He cannot stop to take becoming attitudes, even before his own eyes. He has no time to write a journal of his supposed spiritual states. If you take his photograph you must take him in motion, as nowadays they take a horse upon the race-track, and you get him with every muscle set and every nerve charged with life.

I know no better books for men or boys, for matrons or maidens, than such books as these, in which you have such lives embalmed.

Where can you find a manlier life than that of John Coleridge Patteson, Bishop of Melanesia, his diocese the island of the sea, inhabited by blacks. The story of his patience and his pluck and cheerful confidence is enough to dispel the worst type of malarial saintship—shaky and intermittent. To see him with his senior bishop approaching a new island, rowing in his small boat as near as was safe to the breakers, and then the two pioneers of the Gospel taking a header through the waves and swimming to the land to tell the Gospel of great joy to the dusky and unclad islanders! There’s tonic in the very reading. He could be a bishop without robes or titles. God had sent him to be an overseer of lone regions and lost souls. Or what could be more tragic than the final scene of his death by the treacherous arrows of the natives, and the ghastly tableau of the still young hero of God floating out in the boat alone toward his waiting friends.

There is a biography yet unwritten of one connected with the work of this Association which, if it could be spread upon the record, would equal this in the sincerity of his devotion, in purity of his motive, in his bearing patiently when nearly all men spoke ill of him, for Christ’s sake and the Gospel’s, and even friends for a time began to doubt him, in his readiness to take up the hardest thing there was to do until the end. You will know of whom I speak when I tell you that he was equally the friend of the Indian and of the negro; that he became the target of all the shafts of malice when he sought to protect the poor Indian from his worse than savage foes within the capital of the nation and on the western reservation; that he became the victim of the deadly malaria of the African coast, where he had gone to reorganize and direct the work of this Association in the Mendi Mission. I speak of one whom we all delight to honor and call reverend—the Reverend Edward P. Smith.

And there are others still upon the field, whose names may or may not be known to any wide fame with men, and women, too, who have hazarded their lives for the privilege of preaching and of teaching in the name of Christ. We cannot afford to lose the records of such positive and aggressive Christianity for their stimulus to the Christian character of those at home and those whose characters are forming yet.

Dr. Goodell names as one of the ten ways by which the world is to be saved, that we keep the home and Sunday-school libraries full of that most interesting and profitable of all our literature for the young, the books written by Christ’s soldiers upon the field of battle. I would emphasize even more than that—the books written about these heroes of the faith and their lives of earnest and joyful sacrifice. Who will not acknowledge that we need the inspiration in our day?

If the Christian world needs for its own sake the information and the inspiration which can only come from the literature of missions, the missionary work itself needs equally this means to make its opportunities known to the Christian world.

That is only in part, if at all, a Christian church which is not a missionary church as well. The salt which has lost its savor is no longer salt. It will save deception if you take off the label. It is “good for nothing,” and is to be cast into the street only to get rid of it, and not because it is good for a road.

The true Church of Christ is concerned about the progress of his kingdom, is in earnest sympathy with those who are at the front, is eager in its outlook for new opportunities of service. To such a waiting ear—and, brethren, it is waiting—come through the missionary press the tidings of opportunity, the sound of doors, long closed, creaking on their hinges as they fling open for the feet of the delaying messengers of grace. This is the telephone which summons to instant response. It sounds in the counting-rooms of our men of business, and invites them to new investments in behalf of those for whom God goes security, for “he that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord.” It rings its summons in our Theological Seminaries and among our younger brethren in the ministry, and calls them to occupy until He comes. It goes into the offices of the organizations through which the churches reach the needy east and west, north and south, and says not pull down your barns, but build greater ones; for, as are the broad farms of the West to the old New England homesteads, so are the harvests to be reaped to those which have been already gathered in. It mixes in our homes, and calls on our sons and daughters to the waiting work.

And neither we at home, nor those in the broad field, can afford to be left unnoticed or uncalled. They need it that souls may be born into the kingdom; we need it that we may by pure toil and sacrifice grow unto the stature and the likeness of our risen Lord.