The Challenge of God to the Church
UNDER this heading the editor in chief of The Missionary Review of the World, Dr. Arthur T. Pierson, writes with his usual vigor of the missionary situation at the opening of the twentieth century. With a clear insight he interprets the meaning of the rapid progress in the field of science and invention, and the intensity of our modern life. These and other characteristics of the time are, as viewed by Dr. Pierson, evidences that the time has come for a quick work in fulfilling the great commission to preach the gospel to every creature. We take the following paragraphs from the article in question:— God is never done speaking. Truth is never new, but the emphasis laid upon it is, as there are no new notes in the musical octave, but there may be new combinations and chords. To him who has an acute ear for divine utterances, there are new voices, and they are not without signification; and he learns to distinguish sounds, and to know what is piped by the frivolous and gay, to provoke the dance; and what is harped by the thoughtful and spiritual, to incite devotion; and what is breathed by the still, small voice of the Spirit, to awaken consecration, or trumpeted forth as by the clarion call of Gabriel, to arouse to action. The opening of the twentieth century is signalized by a loud and imperial call of God to the prompt prosecution of missions on a practically new basis. We do not mean that the old foundation upon which the work is based has been supplanted, but that, as a form of aggressive activity, missions rest upon motives, considerations, and plans that are new and essentially modern—the outcome of the new history that the world is making. And the object of this paper is to urge some of these grand incentives which are like new signal lights of God, new signal peals, for our guidance. First of all it is plain that everything is moving on with a new pace. What we call civilization goes by strides, not steps—by leaps and bounds. Mr. Gladstone ventured to say that a single decade in the nineteenth century recorded more progress than a thousand years in the days of yore. There is in everything a strange celerity of movement never known before. As we have left behind the stage coach for the steam carriage, and the penny post for the electric telegraph, everything about mankind seems to have correspondingly quickened its rate of advance. Inventions so multiply, and so fast, that in a new sense we know not what a day may bring forth. Men yet living have seen the first steam carriage or steam vessel, the first telegraph and telephone, photograph and phonograph, spectroscope, sewing machine, typewriter, anesthetic, bicycle, electric light—and all these are but specimens of scores of other marvelous inventions and discoveries unknown seventy-five years ago. And what is the meaning of all this if it be not a new set of facilities and instruments for doing the work of God? Does not this constitute a new call of God to his people to prosecute missions with a fresh zeal and rapidity, so that we shall accomplish in one decade what a century ago would have demanded ten? Look at the moral peril of civilization. There is a fever heat of intensity in modern life. Wealth is accumulated often with astonishing rapidity and in vast amounts. The spirit of liberty degenerates into license. There is a tendency to anarchy. Individuality and independence are developing abnormally, and men are in danger of losing sight of the grand fact that God has so constituted mankind that there can be no real independence, and liberty is found only in restraint—obedience to law. We are members one of another. Even the head can not say to the feet, “I have no need of you,” and those members which seem to be more feeble are not less necessary. Any life that is lived without reference to others is destructive of others’ rights and welfare, and threatens ruin to society itself. There is but one remedy for the perils of civilization, and that is Christ. In proportion as he is preached, obeyed, imitated, in just such ratio does every best interest of man advance. A true, pure Christian faith and life bring forth fruit in beautiful character, happy homes, prosperous communities. The unanswerable argument for missions is found in the fact that so far as the gospel triumphs, we have some practical approach to the New Jerusalem let down from God out of heaven upon earth. Look again at the historic argument that had to wait for history to frame it. Christian missions have now had a new and modern trial of a century of organized work. It is not claimed that they are perfect. Nothing human ever is. But they have proved their right to be. It ill becomes Britons or Americans to sneer at missions. Our ancestors, little more than a thousand years ago, were savages and cannibals. Every argument against carrying the gospel to the degraded and debased tribes of men reacts upon us in constraining us to deny that we are any better off for this gospel. That must always be a grand work that makes grand workmen. And we risk nothing in affirming that, of all the products even of a Christian civilization, the true missionary is the ripest and best. To give one's self for one's country, as a soldier does who faces the enemy’s cannon, is heroic patriotism. To give one’s self for one’s conscience, and risk all for the sake of fidelity to the truth, is more heroic. But to give one’s self for the sake of saving others, that is the martyrdom of love; it is godlike. And if we would find not solitary stars, but constellations of glory, we must look to the missionary firmament. Look yet again at the prospect of the coming age. Who can deny that in both Old and New Testaments there is most prominent the promise of a day dawn to which the brightest hour of a so-called civilization is but as midnight? Describe it as we will, it is a new epoch in history when God promises, “Behold, I make all things new.” There is to be a commonwealth—a city of God—into which entereth no defilement of impurity, no abomination of idolatry, and no shadow of duplicity and treachery. There is to be an end of what is, in order to a new beginning of what shall be. And, as surely as God promises this glorious kingdom, he wakes our activity in preaching the gospel to the race of man preparatory to this day dawn. Whatever be the reason or the philosophy of the connection, it seems to us indisputable that the gospel herald is to usher in this new day. Perhaps God sees that neither the world nor the church will be ready for that day until the great message of the gospel is carried to the world’s ends. But whatever be the secret hidden in God, the duty of man is absolutely explicit: This gospel of the kingdom must first be preached as a witness to all nations, and then shall the end come. Surely if there is any people who ought to be quickened and stirred by the fulfillment of prophecy, and by the new call of God in the circumstances which surround us at the opening of this new century, it is the people who have been raised up to give the closing message to the world. These considerations place this people under a new and great responsibility to push their God-given work to a speedy completion. It is time that a new zeal and a new consecration should be manifested in this one definite effort to co-operate with the purpose of God for this very time; to preach the gospel of the kingdom in all the world; to say, “Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world;” to prepare the way for our returning Lord, that we may soon take up the words, “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, and he will save us: this is the Lord; we have waited for him, we will be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”