In the missionary influence of a Life it is my purpose to trace the life of a missionary influence.
This special life is selected as a significant illustration of certain specific features and forms of the missionary work which we are called here to consider.
It was a remote and inconspicuous consecration to certain radical ideas of human brotherhood, and to new and not popular methods of saving people who are low down in life by variations from the then accepted ideas.
As a study of sympathy with people in low conditions, of faith in the possibilities of those who have been degraded, of the application of Christianity to the prejudices of caste, of fidelity in witnessing to profound convictions, of prophetic insight as to the trends of God’s providences, of heroic self-denials among the oppressed and ignorant, together with the continuity and cumulative power of these far-reaching influences, this may stand for a concrete exhibition of the kind of work which we here are trying to do, and possibly may bring some new hope and courage to ourselves and some fresh sympathy to our devoted Christian workers who, removed from the world’s observation and sometimes from due Christian appreciation, are consecrating their lives to the same uses.
In the time when George III was King of England and our great-grandfathers were opposing the Stamp Acts, there lived in a house which still stands in Strasbourg, in Alsatia, a wise father and a mother of remarkable endowments, who trained their son to habits of conscientious economy, self-reliance, to the sense of responsibility to God and to man, and of the obligations which possession has towards human necessities, and to habitual benevolence.
Led on through youth to aspire to a learned profession, at the age of fifteen years he signed his name, John Frederick Oberlin, as a student of the University of Strasbourg. Three years later he was a Bachelor of Arts, and five years later, a Doctor in Philosophy. Ordained as a minister of the Gospel in 1760, seven succeeding years were held sacred to the conviction that large usefulness means large preparedness; so that he was still in his study at the age of twenty-seven years, when a missionary who had been trying to save needy souls in the mountains of the Vosges, ministering to the spiritual necessities of a people passed by in the movements of a world’s life and remote from civilization, came into Oberlin’s room and urged him to take up this service.
He confessed his own lack of success, and that he had made no impression upon them. He told Oberlin of the people, descendants of the Huguenots, who had fled from fiery persecutions in France to this wild and sterile mountain country. As the years had gone on for more than seven generations of men, their teachers had died, their preachers had died, until they, exiled and outcast, had declined into heathenish ignorance. He had found as a distant memory of what once had been, a single school in a mountain hamlet. It was in a miserable hovel in one corner of which lay a helpless old man on a rude truckle-bed, surrounded by a crowd of ragged, noisy, wild-looking children. He asked: “Are you the schoolmaster?” “Yes.” “What do you teach the children?” “Nothing.” “You teach them nothing, how is that?” “Because I know nothing.” “Why then are you the schoolmaster?” “Well, sir, I was taking care of the Waldbach pigs, but the people thought me too old for that, and so I was appointed to take care of the children.”
The missionary did not conceal the facts of the case, that the people living in these remote and solitary places were not only frightfully ignorant, but were rebellious against improvement. The region had six months of winter, with bitter icy winds sweeping over the mountains. There was not a single practicable road in the entire district. Deep mud holes were before the cabin doors and the huts in which the people were sheltered. In the short summer season they gathered enough food to sustain an impoverished life through the winter, in which winter they often herded for warmth in the stables with their cattle. So far had they sunk into material and moral desolation.
To such a ministry was invited this young man of large ambitions and large reasons for them; to minister to this wretchedness, to go to a people who were without sense of their needs, without aspirations, without appreciation of the services to be done for them. One prepared for the Professor’s chair in the great University where it was pleasant to live, was invited to bury himself among those who would not give him even the reward of gratitude.