THEN AND NOW | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 2, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 22.

THEN AND NOW.

SAYS the Missionary Herald: "Eighty-five years ago the directors of the East India Company placed on solemn record: 'The sending of Christian missionaries into our Eastern possessions is the maddest, most expensive, most unwarranted project that was ever proposed by a lunatic enthusiast.' A few months since the lieutenant governor of Bengal said: 'In my judgment, Christian missionaries have done more real and lasting good to the people of India than all the other agencies combined.'"

A hundred years ago a bishop of the Church of England said that he had in his diocese a very good clergyman, but one who was very eccentric, and gave as proof of it the fact that the said clergyman actually believed the Indians of North America could be converted. Three years after Carey had arrived in India the Assembly of the Church of Scotland denounced the scheme of foreign missions as "illusive," "visionary," "dangerous to the good order of society," and as "improper and absurd to propagate the gospel in heathen lands so long as there was a single person in Scotland who was without the means of knowing the way of life."

It is worthy of note that both of these expressions grew out of State churches, in which religion was largely a matter of education and form and not of heart. They did not know the gospel. If they had known it, they would not have been connected with the State nor decried foreign missions. The Spirit of Christ is ever a missionary spirit.