In the few remarks, Mr. Chairman, which I have to make on this
most important subject, I shall draw chiefly from my missionary
experience of thirty-five years in the Turkish empire, with those
feeble churches formed among a people oppressed, persecuted,
despised and ignorant, and yet churches that have come up in many
cases from great weakness and great doubt into noble strength and
manhood. This may be received as a general fact of the result of
church organization. Gather from these poor materials churches
enough to be trusted to their own self-government and care:
organize the church; give to that church a native pastor, and place
upon it all the responsibilities of Christian growth and Christian
work. You give it, of course, the Bible, and “the entrance of His
word giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple.” With
the Bible always comes, and must come, the common school; and from
the common school the high school; and from the high school the
college; and from the college the professional school; and thus you
have that necessary provision for preparing the native pastorate,
and every church must have its pastor from its own race. I believe,
in the entire field of the American Board, among all nations and
races, there never has been a single instance of real success and
growth of a church except under its native pastor, a pastor of its
own race. And so you have in this Association the most sacred and
solemn duty—duty to the church of Christ, duty to the great Head of
the church, to educate for these churches competent pastors; and
just so far as this great duty is neglected, our whole work will
grow weak and be a failure.
I do not think it is possible to emphasize too strongly the
necessity of having an educated pastorate from the people of the
churches to which the pastors themselves belong—of the same race.
The church and the college go together; you cannot separate them.
Separate them, and they will both perish; unite them, and they
will both succeed; for wherever you introduce a true evangelic
work, there will be a demand for the very highest education. What
a tremendous and almost tragic demonstration of this was the grand
effort of the great Secretary of the American Board, to confine
missionary churches to education in their own tongue—to lay aside
all science, to lay aside all study of languages, and to confine
education to the vernacular of each people! If anybody on this
earth could, by any possibility, have carried that demonstration
to successful result, it would have been our revered and beloved
Dr. Anderson; but the failure was absolute and terrible. I do
not believe there is a missionary now under the American Board,
or under any other Board, that will contend for a thus limited
education, a vernacular education, as sufficient for the pastorate
or the ministry of any people, and especially of an ignorant and
degraded people, where the elevating and educating force must come
so largely from the pastor himself.
Now in these churches in the East, by necessity, the first pastors
were not thus educated. The missionaries were compelled to get
themselves such pastors as they could find, just as the apostles
ordained elders in every place. They had to ordain just such elders
as they could find, and the missionaries did the same. But these
pastors have all been growing men; they have all been put into a
way of study; they have all been kept under exciting influences;
and pastors and churches have gone on together. And I think, from
my personal knowledge of the pastors of those churches in the
Turkish empire, that they are a noble, faithful and progressive
company of laborers in the vineyard of our Lord. It must also
be remembered that, in forming these churches and bringing them
forward, they will commit great errors; there will be great
immoralities breaking out among these church members. I have known
such sins committed by church members in whom I had had confidence,
that I would at the first impulse have immediately expelled them
from the churches, and denied to them all possibility of knowing
or having known anything of a true and pure Christianity; and yet
those same men, when faithfully and patiently dealt with, have
come to repentance, have returned to faithful Christian life in
the church, and I have been at the bedside of some of them when
they died in faith and joy, and in hope of a glorious and blessed
immortality.
Now, I have great confidence in these churches which this
Association has formed; I have great confidence in their progress,
in their purification, in the elevation and competency and energy
of the native pastorate; and it seems to me that this is the very
centre, the fountain source, of the safe and onward progress of
your great work.
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