Christ: by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the
world_.--Gal. vi., 14.
The pivotal conception of missionary enterprise is the conception of
Christ as the eternal priest of humanity. If any need of the world's
heart is before us now, it is the need of the Cross. There is a
deep and anxious desire in men for the saving forces of sacrificial
Christianity. The ideals of the New Testament concerning Gethsemane
and Calvary are being thrust upon our attention by the upward
strugglings of the people. They, at any rate, have not forgotten the
forsaken Man in the night of awful silence in the garden, nor His
exceeding bitter agony, nor the perfect ending that made His death His
victory. The wastes of eccentricity, whether orthodox or heterodox,
and the over curious speculations of theologies remote from the
habitations of men, have had little influence upon the multitudes
we seek to serve. And if I had to choose a sphere where one could
rediscover the central forces of Christian life and of Christian
practise, I would lean toward the enlightened democracies which to-day
are vibrant with the plea that the shepherdless multitudes shall have
social ameliorations and new incentives and selfless leaders.
We are all very jealous for the honor and success of the propagandism
we sustain at home and abroad, and I hold that its honor and success
alike depend upon the priesthood and redemptive efficacies of Jesus.
These sovereign forces are correlated with His victories for the
twenty past centuries, and they constitute the distinctive genius of
the faith.
We shall gain nothing for the rule or for the ethics of Jesus by
derogating that peculiar office of the divine Victim which is, to
me, at any rate, the most sublime reason for the Incarnation and the
ineffable height and depth and mystery of all love and all strength
blessedly operative in every ruined condition by means of sacrifice.
The missionary fields confessedly can not be conquered by the unaided
teacher; he must have more than a system of truth, more than a
program, more than a reasoned discourse. Their vast inert mass demands
vitalization; and the life which is given for the life of men, the
divinest gift of all, is alone sufficient for this regeneration.
Moreover, can we rest the absolutism and finality of Jesus upon
anything less than the last complete outpouring of His soul unto
voluntary death for men's salvation? I do not think we can, and it is
a requisite that we place larger emphasis upon this holy mystery of
our life through Christ's death, the substantial soul and secret of
all missionary progress in all ages of the Church.
Before we can see the miracle of nations entering the kingdom of God,
before we can dismiss the black death of apathy which rests on so many
professedly Christian communities, before we can dominate the social
structure in righteousness and justice, the Church must be raised
nearer to the standards of New Testament efficiency. And New Testament
efficiency rested upon the perfect divinity and all-persuasive
mediatorship of "Christ and him crucified." The personality of Christ
involves for many of us the entire relation of God to His universe; He
is "the central figure in all history," and Pie is "the central
figure of our personal experience," creative in us, by His inaugural
experience, of all we are in Him and for our fellows. Thus we make
great claims for the Lord of the harvest, and we make them soberly,
and we know them true for our spiritual consciousness, and we are
prepared to defend them.
Yet I, for one, do not hesitate to admit that the theological
necessities of missionary work are many, and that they must be
recognized and met before it can fully accomplish its infinite
design. Indeed, the rule of Jesus in all these aspects of His mission
clarifies and simplifies the gospel. It is plain that such a gospel,
wherein the living personality of the Christ deals with the living
man to whom we minister, is not to be beset by complications and
abstractions. Its spiritual topography embraces the height of
good, the depth of love, the breadth of sympathy, and the width of
catholicity. It was meant for the race and for the far-reaching
reciprocities and inexpressible necessities of the race. It is attuned
to the cry of the common heart. Its interpretations have the sanctions
of an authoritative human experience which has never failed in its
witness. Sometimes I have challenged these honored servants of the
evangel who have come back to us from quarters where they were busy
on the errands of the cross. Almost pathetically, with the painful
interest of one inquiring for a long absent friend of whom no news has
been received, I have solicited the missionaries. They came from the
south of our own dear land, where they administered to the negro; from
the arctic zone, from the farther East. Their wider vision, their more
imperial instinct, were plain to me, and my usual question was, "What
do you teach the impulsive colored man and the stolid Eskimo and the
pensive Hindu and the inscrutable Asiatic?" And they replied, "We
teach them, that God is a personal spirit and Father, whose character
is holiness and whose heart is love; that Jesus Christ is the designed
and supreme Son of God, who lived in sinlessness and died in perfect
willing sacrifice for the eternal life of all men, that by the will of
God and in the power of His spirit men may have everlasting life and,
better still, everlasting goodness, if they will accept and trust in
Jesus Christ for all."
And this gospel obtains the day of overcoming for which we plead and
pray. For tho an angel from heaven had any other, men do not respond;
the charisma rests on no other message. Possest of it, and possessing
it, under the covenant of heaven and led by the Shepherd and Bishop of
souls, we shall go forth determined to give it place in us and in our
presentations as never before. May nothing mar the solemn splendor
of such a message from God unto men. Let us subordinate our undue
intellectualism and place our boasted freedom under restraints, so
that the evangel may be preached without reserve and with abandon.
"For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, himself
man, Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all."
Such in one grand passage is the creed that breathes the very life and
spirit of the most significant and overwhelming missionary period in
the history of the Christian Church.
There is a new day due in missions because of the immense superiority
in missionary methods. The _personnel_ of our administrations has been
superb, and of nearly all the honored servants of God who have labored
in domestic and foreign departments it could be said, "Thou hast
loved righteousness and hated iniquity." But I presume these seasoned
veterans would be the first to show us how the whole conception of
propagandism has been readapted, and its vehicles of communication
multiplied in various directions. The onfall and sally of the earler
evangelistic campaigns are now aided by the investment and siege of
educational and medical work.
The trackways of a policy embedded in the wider interpretation of the
gospel are laid and the new era takes shape before our comprehension.
Travel, exploration, and commerce have demanded and obtained the
_Lusitania_ on the sea; the railroad from the Cape to Cairo on the
land, and they have left no spot of earth untrodden, no map obscure,
no mart unvisited. Keeping step with this stately and unprecedented
development, and often anticipating it, the widening frontiers of our
missionary kingdom have demonstrated again and again how the Church
can make a bridal of the earth and sky, linking the lowliest needs
to the loftiest truths. And best of all in respect of methods is the
dispersal of our native egotism. We have come to see that the types of
Christianity in Europe and America are perhaps aboriginal for us,
but can not be transplanted to other shores. "Manifest destiny" is a
phrase that sits down when Japan and China wake up. Not thus can Jesus
be robbed of the fruits of His passion in any branch of the human
family. We are to plant and water, labor in faith, and die in hope,
scattering the seed of the gospel in the hearts of these brothers of
regions outside. But God will ordain their harvests as it pleaseth
Him. What will be the joy of that harvest? Throw your imagination
across this new century, and as it dies and gives place to its
successor, review the race whose devotion has then fastened on the
divine ruler and the federal Man, Christ Jesus. For nearly a hundred
years the barriers that segregated us will have been a memory. The
Church will have discovered not only fields of labor, but forces for
her replenishing. Then will our posterity rejoice in the larger
Christ who is to be. The virtuous elements of all other faiths will
be placed under the purification and control of the priesthood and
authority of Jesus. And tho in these ancient religions that await the
Bridegroom, the mortal stains the immortal and the human mars the
beauty of the divine, in the light of His appearing they will assume
new attitudes and receive His quickening and thrill with His pulse.
When I conceive of this reward for our Daysman I protest that all
other triumphs seem as tinsel and sham. The Desire of all nations
shall then see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied. The
subtle patience of China, the fierce resistance of Japan, the brooding
soul that haunts the Ganges valley, the tumult of emotion of the
Ethiopian breast, all are for His appearing; they must be saved unto
noble ends by His sanctification. For that time there will be a Church
whose canonization of the infinite is beyond our dreams, enriched on
every side, with common allegiance and diversity of gifts, and every
gift the boon of all, and Christ's dower in His bride increased beyond
compare.
This is the ideal of the new day; may it become our personal ideal.
Then shall we fight with new courage for the right, and abhor the
imperfect, the unjust, and the mean. Our leaders will care nothing for
flattery and praise or odium and abuse. Enthusiasm can not be soured,
nor courage diminished. The Almighty has placed our hand on the
greatest of His plows, in whose furrow the nations I have named are
germinating religiously. And to drive forward the blade if but a
little, and to plant any seed of justice and of joy, any sense of
manliness or moral worth, to aid in any way the gospel which is the
friend of liberty, the companion of the conscience and the parent
of the intellectual enlightenment--is not that enough? Is it not a
complete justification of our plea?
We shall do well to remember that no evangel can prosper without the
evangelical temper. The parsing of grammarians is of little avail
here, and to have all critical knowledge of the prophets and apostles
of the faith without their fervor and consecration is profitable
merely for study, and useless mainly for the larger life. Our culture
must be the passion-flower of Christ Jesus. To be more anxious about
intellectual pre-eminence or ecclesiastical origins than about "the
trial of the immigrant" and the condition of the colored races is not
helpful. "There is a sort of orthodoxy that revels in the visions of
apocalypses and refuses to fight the beast," says Dr. Nurgan.
Such barren indulgence is excluded from any glory to follow.
Technicalities, niceties, knowledge remote and knowledge general must
be appropriated and made dynamic in this life-and-death conflict;
any that can not be thus used can be sent to the rear for a further
debate.
Diplomacies in church government and adjustments in church creeds can
wait on this consecration, this baptism of unction. I never heard that
the statesman who formulated the peace at Paris in 1815 got in the
way of the Household Brigades and the Highlanders at Waterloo and
Hougomont. They played their commendable game, but they could not
have swept that awful slope of flame in which Ney and the Old Guard
staggered on at Mont St. Jean.
Let us redeem our creeds at the front, and prove the welding of our
weapons and their tempered blades upon every evil way and darkness and
superstition that afflict humankind.
And have you not seen with moistened eyes and beating hearts the
pathetic surgings of harassed and broken sons and daughters of
God toward His son Jesus Christ? I have watched them until I felt
constrained to cry aloud and spare not; and while viewing them here
and yonder, and refusing to be localized in our love toward them, have
not our spirits been rebuked, have they not known fear for ourselves,
have they not pensively echoed the charge of some that we have no real
roots in democracy, but are as plants in pots, and not as oaks in the
soil of earth? If independency is a barrier to the essence of which it
is supposedly a form, if superiority shuts us off from assimilation
with popular movements and delivers us over to cliques, then these
churches of ours[1] will end in a record of shame and confusion.
While we are busy in trivial things, our energy and our might will be
deflected, and the living God will hand over the crusade to those who
have proven worthier and who knew the day when it did come, even the
day of their visitation.
[Footnote 1: The special reference is to the Congregational churches.]
We must arise with courage undismayed, and join in the cry of the
ages:
When wilt thou save the people,
O God of mercy, when?
The people! Lord, the people!
Not crowns, nor thrones, but men.
Flower of thy heart, O Lord, are they,
Their heritage a sunless day.
Let them like weeds not fade away;
Lord, save the people.
If our hearts are thus enlarged, we shall run in the way of His
commandments; fatherhood and brotherhood and sonship will not be
symbols, shibboleths of pious intercourse, but ways of God's reaching
out through us for the total brotherhood. We shall silence the caviler
against missions; we shall raise the negro in the face of those who
say he can not be raised; we shall see the latter-day miracles, and
the lame man healed and rejoicing at the Temple gate. Thus may the
breath of God sweep across our pastorates and dismiss timidity,
provincialism, ease, and narrowness of outlook. And thus may the power
be demonstrated as of heaven because it is the power unto salvation.
Let us fear not men who shall die, nor be content to fill our peaceful
lot and occupy a respectable grave. The new world needs the renewed
baptism, and the "modernism" of which medievalists complain is the
robe of honor for the Christ of this epoch. So that there shall come
unto the Church the flame of sacred love, and, kindling on every heart
and altar, there shall it burn for the glory of Christ, the High
Priest, with inextinguishable blaze. We can rest content, for, behold!
the day cometh and in its light. Let us go hence.
JOWETT
APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
John Henry Jowett, Congregational divine, was born at Barnard Castle,
Durham, in 1864, and educated at Edinburgh and Oxford universities.
In 1889 he was ordained to St. James's Congregational Church,
Newcastle-on-Tyne, and in 1895 was called to his present pastorate of
Carr's Lane Congregational Church, Birmingham, where he has taken rank
among the leading preachers of Great Britain. He is the author of
several important books.
JOWETT
Born in 1864
APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM[1]
[Footnote 1: Reprinted by permission of A.C. Armstrong & Son.]
_Rejoicing in hope_.--Romans xii., 12.
That is a characteristic expression of the fine, genial optimism of
the Apostle Paul. His eyes are always illumined. The cheery tone is
never absent from his speech. The buoyant and springy movement of his
life is never changed. The light never dies out of his sky. Even the
gray firmament reveals more hopeful tints, and becomes significant of
evolving glory. The apostle is an optimist, "rejoicing in hope," a
child of light wearing the "armor of light," "walking in the light"
even as Christ is in the light.
This apostolic optimism was not a thin and fleeting sentiment begotten
of a cloudless summer day. It was not the creation of a season; it was
the permanent pose of the spirit. Even when beset with circumstances
which to the world would spell defeat, the apostle moved with the mien
of a conqueror. He never lost the kingly posture. He was disturbed by
no timidity about ultimate issues. He fought and labored in the spirit
of certain triumph. "We are always confident." "We are more than
conquerors through Him that loved us." "Thanks be unto God who giveth
us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."
This apostolic optimism was not born of sluggish thinking, or of idle
and shallow observation. I am very grateful that the counsel of my
text lifts its chaste and cheery flame in the twelfth chapter of an
epistle of which the first chapter contains as dark and searching an
indictment of our nature as the mind of man has ever drawn. Let me
rehearse the appalling catalog that the radiance of the apostle's
optimism may appear the more abounding: "Senseless hearts," "fools,"
"uncleanness," "vile passions," "reprobate minds," "unrighteousness,
wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife,
deceit, malignity, whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, insolent,
haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, without understanding,
covenant breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful." With
fearless severity the apostle leads us through the black realms of
midnight and eclipse. And yet in the subsequent reaches of the great
argument, of which these dark regions form the preface, there emerges
the clear, calm, steady light of my optimistic text. I say it is not
the buoyancy of ignorance. It is not the flippant, light-hearted
expectancy of a man who knows nothing about the secret places of the
night. The counselor is a man who has steadily gazed at light at
its worst, who has digged through the outer walls of convention and
respectability, who has pushed his way into the secret chambers and
closets of life, who has dragged out the slimy sins which were lurking
in their holes, and named them after their kind--it is this man who
when he has surveyed the dimensions of evil and misery and contempt,
merges his dark indictment in a cheery and expansive dawn, in an
optimistic evangel, in which he counsels his fellow-disciples to
maintain the confident attitude of a rejoicing hope.
Now, what are the secrets of this courageous and energetic optimism?
Perhaps, if we explore the life of this great apostle, and seek to
discover its springs, we may find the clue to his abounding hope.
Roaming then through the entire records of his life and teachings,
do we discover any significant emphasis? Preeminent above all other
suggestions, I am imprest with his vivid sense of the reality of the
redemptive work of Christ. Turn where I will, the redemptive work of
the Christ evidences itself as the base and groundwork of his life.
It is not only that here and there are solid statements of doctrine,
wherein some massive argument is constructed for the partial unveiling
of redemptive glory. Even in those parts of his epistles where formal
argument has ceased, and where solid doctrine is absent, the doctrine
flows as a fluid element into the practical convictions of life, and
determines the shape and quality of the judgments. Nay, one might
legitimately use the figure of a finer medium still, and say that in
all the spacious reaches of the apostle's life the redemptive work of
his Master is present as an atmosphere in which all his thoughts and
purposes and labors find their sustaining and enriching breath. Take
this epistle to the Romans in which my text is found. The earlier
stages of the great epistle are devoted to a massive and stately
presentation of the doctrines of redemption. But when I turn over the
pages where the majestic argument is concluded, I find the doctrine
persisting in a diffused and rarefied form, and appearing as the
determining factor in the solution of practical problems. If he is
dealing with the question of the "eating of meats," the great doctrine
reappears and interposes its solemn and yet elevating principle:
"destroy not him with thy meat for whom Christ died." If he is called
upon to administer rebuke to the passionate and unclean, the shadow of
the cross rests upon his judgment. "Ye are not your own; ye are bought
with a price." If he is portraying the ideal relationship of husband
and wife, he sets it in the light of redemptive glory: "Husbands, love
your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up
for it." If he is seeking to cultivate the grace of liberality, he
brings the heavenly air around about the spirit. "Ye know the grace
of our Lord Jesus Christ, that tho he was rich, yet for your sakes
he became poor." It interweaves itself with all his salutations. It
exhales in all his benedictions like a hallowing fragrance. You can
not get away from it. In the light of the glory of redemption all
relationships are assorted and arranged. Redemption was not degraded
into a fine abstract argument, to which the apostle had appended his
own approval, and then, with sober satisfaction, had laid it aside, as
a practical irrelevancy, in the stout chests of orthodoxy. It became
the very spirit of his life. It was, if I may be allowed the violent
figure, the warm blood in all his judgment. It filled the veins of all
his thinking. It beat like a pulse in all his purposes. It determined
and vitalized his decisions in the crisis, as well as in the lesser
trifles of the common day. His conception of redemption was regulative
of all his thought.
But it is not only the immediacy of redemption in the apostle's
thought by which I am imprest. I stand in awed amazement before its
vast, far-stretching reaches into the eternities. Said an old villager
to me concerning the air of his elevated hamlet, "Ay, sir, it's a fine
air is this westerly breeze; I like to think of it as having traveled
from the distant fields of the Atlantic!" And here is the Apostle
Paul, with the quickening wind of redemption blowing about him in
loosening, vitalizing, strengthening influence, and to him, in all his
thinking, it had its birth in the distant fields of eternity! To
the apostle redemption was not a small device, an afterthought, a
patched-up expedient to meet an unforseen emergency. The redemptive
purpose lay back in the abyss of the eternities, and in a spirit of
reverent questioning the apostle sent his trembling thoughts into
those lone and silent fields. He emerged with, whispered secrets such
as these: "fore-knew," "fore-ordained," "chosen in him before the
foundation of the world," "eternal life promised before times
eternal," "the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our
Lord."