FOREIGN MISSIONS.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13674, 17 August 1908, Page 2

FOREIGN MISSIONS.

PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE. SERMON AT CHALMERS CHURCH. At Chalmers Church yesterday morning the Rev. E, G. Guthrie preached on the .subject of foreign missions. The whole of the morning service was a mission, service Prayers and hymns, as well as Si-r----lnun were framed and selected with a view to that end, and of the • announcements of -meetings during the week, the only one calling - for comment happened to be a foreign missions notice. The preacher took for his text the missionary s general orders (Mark xvi., 15) '• Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." Mr Guthrie, recalled the recent annual'meeting ot the, church, the report of the Women's Foreign Missions Union, and his comment upon the statistics in that report—roll number 13, average attendance b, contribution to mitsion funds.£l3 10s 9d. His comment, was a. commendation of the pluck and energy of the eight, who sLuek to the work", and a condemnation of the financial result of the whole report as a scandal in a church of the members and wealth of Chalmers Church.. That was a hasty word, uttered without de.iberalion, perhaps ungenerous,, and perhaps not quite just, because the Church had done great things, and had done them nobly, generously and well. But , that wild their sixth annual'report, and,during the six years the congregation had put, their shouldeis to.the wheel, with the result that their .remaining debt, was :onlya little- heavier-than that of the parent church from which they had sprung,- and giving only £l3 odd was not ' iuiiiUing" their Master's orders : to all Christians, livery church. like theirs should pass beyond" the policy of se.f-.ceritredness,j- aud< take paib in the great enterprise of sending the. Gospel in(o all the .world. Proceeding to contrast the conditions of the present day with those of a century ago, he recalled the fact that when Carey went to India in 1793, of five continents of the world three, and two-third's of a fourth, were unexplored. China remained closed till 1896; and Japan itsued edicts against the introduction of Christianity nithin a generation, an din Stanley's time nine-tenths of ••Africa was une'xplored.Tliej progress made in the later yearn of the nineteenth century had been truly marvellous. To-day all those lands were open, and by improvement in communications, by railways and steam lines, the world was only one-tenth of the size it was; a hundred yeans ago, and foreign missions; had become little more than branches of the home missions. The great Eastern nations were awakening into life, and the movement was full of menace to the weH unlets those nations were permeated with the. spirit of Christ.. v Half a century ago the great field.of the non-Christian world' was only touched on its fringes by missionary effort; to-day .it-might be "said to bd garrisoned by Christian forces; with : 6000 principal stations, 22,000 out-sta-tions, 16,000, missionaries, and a million and a half of communicants implying a church of four and a half millions. The whole of the world save Mahomedan Africa was now garrisoned for Christ, and the time was ripe for a forward march. The day when missions were successfully l opposed in the interests of trade was past; statesmen had come to; realise that the interests of trade alone upon uncivilised peoples was invariably bad, but as yet no sufficient' check had been provided against the iniquitous greed that sacrificed life carelessly and wantonly. The opium trade of China and India had well been called England's greatest contribution to the world's wretchedness, and the title " free state" applied to the Congo was an abominable misnomer. " Trade followed the flag." A Christian people should see to it that the flag was stainless; Ex- . plorers, men of science, and men. of lelteis, all bore'testimony to the great' benefits bestowed by missions, and no such testimony-was available in regard to the effects of trade upon the uncivilised. Except among Mahomedan peoples, whose religion derived its power from if he o.d

Hebrew conception of God, the religions of the East were withering, not 60. much beneath t|ie flight of Christianity, \an-

through the influences of Western, 'civilisation : This was well ' seen as the result of English education in India. " Give the Indians everything else, bub leave them their own religion," it was oftensaid. But that, was impossible, for the secular education that was given them undermined and destroyed their own faith; -In this withering of the native faiths was to be seen the opportunity of the Christian Church The experience of rife last had taught the church itself much in the way of readjustment of Gospel forces, in the theory and .methods of.. missions. '.'- A profounder study of..' non-Christian faiths bad developed a new sympathy with. the peoples who held them. AV longer didanyone" dare to say or care to say that those religions were false, .and a specie's of spiritual insanity; Evolution had taught us to hear in them the cry of children for the light, to see in them attempts of human nature, to clasp its arms ab^ut'

the feet of God. But this did not imply that, those old faiths were good. Tested by .what they had done for the people, socially and individually, they were proved failures, in spite of their claims that they -were already old when Christianity was young. Theoretically they were much better than they were practically; those who knew them well spoke of the terrible gulf between -.their world asib'is, and the world u6' their great poets .aspired that it should.be. In order to make good its message , the Church: must./simplify the Gospel message, as Judaism. was simplified in.its.presentation to the Gentiles, for whom it was reduced to - belief in one God, and in regard to religions practices,: to respect . for the Sabr bath. . The : missionary church niust discipline itself to simplification and accommodation. An old Chinese elder,, when told that his father and grandfather must have gone to hell because they never heard of Christ, said "Then I will go to hell too," and gave up Christianity. The mission had to let him go, or lift up its faith to the larger hope. AmPfar more radical modifications than that must be, made to accommodate the Gospel, message ! to meet tie demands of the mission field. The time was long past when ib was considered sufficient* to send an earnest evangelist to a foreign mission with a Bible for his sole equipment. There were now four great departments in the work, that should appeal to the. sympatfiries even of people who had no religious convictions on the subject. The first of these was education, with its 23,000 day schools, 1000 high schools, and 1,100,000 student*. The second, was the medical missions in Asia and Africa, with some 800 medical missionaries'' and nearly 1000 hospitals, dealing with about 2£ million patients year- 1 ly. Tlie' third was the great literary department with 155 printing presses turning out 2000 missionary periodicals and thousands of books and pamphlets; arid a mighty influence was going forth in the issue of portions of scripture iri nearly 500 languages, by which means the Bible I was noy accessible, to four-fifths of the human race. Lastly an immense new department was that of industrial missions, which were preserving young people from idleness and insanity. Altogether an enormous plant was employed, valued at over two millions, and the sole aim of all the I work was to raise mankind to a higher standard of manhood and womanhood. Who could refrain from praying that.God would prosper such a mighty .work,? A notable and important feature of the modern mission work was-the way different demoninations were working together. The real unity of the churches that was talked of in the Homelands, was realised in the mission, fields, in division of labours, and in joint committees. Reverting to the question of opportunity,

Mr Guthrie spoke of great revivals. which have lately swept over eastern nations, plain calls to the christian world to step forward and help them, and then compared the'-'difficulties "of the present missions with those of the first. Some people, he said, bewailed the fact that missions did not. achieve such successes as St. Paul. But the apostolic missions did not have to conquer • foreign civilisations; Rome, was master of the world. They did not seek to alter the institutions of the people, such as slavery; social customs were the greatest enemies of missions to-day. The apostles were not -foreigners among those they converted; " and the Roman world' was prepared for Christianity by Judaism out of which ib sprang; there was no such introduction to Christianity in the East. In 251 A.D. only one-twen-tieth of the Roman Empire was Christian, and ib was 350 AID. before Christianity was accepted bv the State. On the same scale they might expect China to be christian at the close of four centuries. Between 250 and 300 A.D. Christianity went forward by leaps and bounds, and henceforth, with 75,000 natf- pastors *nd workers, and a church of one and a half million communicants, and self-supporting churches raising £400,000 to-day, rapid advances- might .be lcjoked for m tbe future. The safety arid peace of the, world depended very largely on those advances b.-ing made, for every influence of West on East affected the religion of the latter in- some- way, and cfor' western civilisation to be carried to the East without the safeguard of Christianity accompanying it. would, it had been said, be as shameful as for the forcing of opium on China. In this regard the-preacher quoted the well-known, lines- on the " White man's burden," and this was the churches' burden, ' and was expressed in the words of his text. Seme people, he said, did not like their minister, to"; beg for money, and some ministers did not like to do: it; but for this cause he gloried in begging. At the last church he served a system of pledge cards was used, and that church — about twice the financial strength of Chalmers—last vear raised £3OO for; foreign missions. Chalmers Church then ought to -be able to raie £IOO quite, easily, and he hoped that they would set £IOO and not £l3, as their ideal to be realised this year for-the great cause he had spoken of. '; < ■ Among the announcements made was one referring to the Rev. F, H. Spencer's lecture to-morrow evening in aid of the British" and Foreign ;Bible Society, arid in, advocating attendance at the lecture, . Mr Guthrie said that the work of the society was the basis and' foundation of all mission work, for it was this society which supplied 'the Bible in the multitude of languages of•. the peoples amongst whom the missionaries were at work.