Book: American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889

V >> Various >> American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889




Reference has been made to the opening up of the reservation, and the
crisis is now upon us in connection with our Indian work. We have eleven
million acres of land there just west of the Missouri River to be thrown
open for settlement. Do you know what that means? Were any of you down
at Oklahoma this last season? It means the rush of a swarm of people,
good, bad and indifferent--chiefly bad and indifferent--and these
settlers will crowd themselves in as a wedge between the two divisions
of the Indian reservation, and we shall have Indians both to the north
and to the south. They will be exposed to influences from which they
have been kept as yet; influences which will tend to uplift in the
outcome, as well as to degrade. I thank God for it. I thank God that he
is bringing the white man into the midst of the Indian country. It may
seem that this is a heroic remedy. So it is, but it is time for heroic
remedies. We need to meet the question as it comes to us to-day. There
is a ranchman out on Bad River, who tells me that there is no such thing
as an Indian question. "Why," said I, "what are you talking about?"
"There is no such thing," said he. I asked him how he explained it. "The
simple thing to do is just to treat them as men, and that will be all
there is to it. That will settle it, and there will be no such thing as
an Indian question." Treat them as men and make Christians of them, and
we will settle the whole thing.

* * * * *

ADDRESS OF REV. HENRY A. STIMSON, D.D.

Referring to Dr. Goodwin's powerful address, I find myself transported
again to China; but the fact recurs to my mind that this is not a
foreign missionary society, but a home missionary one, and what we have
to do is to open our minds to the conviction that it is possible to do
at home plenty of work for the Chinaman. I am glad to give a little
personal testimony because what we need most of all is to be convinced
of the necessity to give time and strength and labor to win the
individual Chinaman to Christ. Not very long ago there came to my
knowledge in St. Louis an ordinary Chinaman, comparatively a young man.
He joined our church and I knew he desired to be recognized as a
Christian man. About a year before, he had been a member of a
Sunday-school where ladies were teaching Chinese. Before that our
newspapers had created great outcry about a case of leprosy in the city.
This Chinaman appeared at my house in great trepidation. He had been two
or three years in this country, and had been saving his money in order
to go back and see his mother's face before she would die, and he hoped
to be able to return to China in the following fall. He had learned that
there was a Chinaman, unknown to him, lying ill in a little laundry, of
a disease of which nothing was known, without friends and without care.
He took care of this man, leaving his own work for the purpose, and at
length he came to me asking where he could get a physician to attend the
patient. I gave him a note to one of the best physicians in my own
church, who went at once and saw the man, and he seeing it was a strange
form of disease, went to a specialist of skin diseases, who had the man
brought to a hospital in order to watch his disease. Rumors of this
reaching the newspapers, the reporters thought it a good opportunity to
make a story about leprosy, giving the number and street of an imaginary
laundry in the heart of the city. Instantly the patronage of the Chinese
laundries stopped. My Chinese friend was in the greatest distress about
it, and particularly about me, lest I should think he had brought the
contagious disease to my house. I could hardly persuade him to enter,
and then he told me there was no truth in the story of the newspapers,
and asked what he should do. What was the result of the story? The
Chinaman took care of his friend in the house and in the hospital,
paying considerable for his care, and when he recovered sent him to San
Francisco--in fact, spent about $180 on him, the whole sum he had saved
to take himself home to his mother, and he did this for a man who was as
utterly unknown to him as to you or me. He also came to me with a $10
bill to pay the doctor, saying it was not enough, but it was all the
money he had, and he would add to it by and by. All we want is testimony
as to the character of the Chinese. Here was a man not converted by
Moody or by any service, but by the ministry of an unknown Sunday-school
teacher; as the result of that simple agency he found a charity so
Christ-like as to do work like this. That little Chinaman brought to me
some of his companions, asking me to do something to help them to be
Christians, and as the result of his work a large Sunday-school is
to-day in operation. There is abundance of such testimony, I believe, to
be furnished throughout our land, which we should have before our heart as
an answer to the anti-Chinese mania which now and then sweeps over this
country. Help us to carry the gospel to these men of unmeasured
possibilities, whom God in his mercy has brought across the seas to
plead at our doors.

This audience can help the Chinese in a better way than giving them
money. That Chinaman was asked in my house the other day how many hours
he slept, and he said, "Two or three." "Are you ever troubled by
hoodlums?" "Yes, every day. They break the windows. Last week they broke
into my laundry and stole five bundles of clothes, for which I had to
pay customers $20." "Do you get no protection from the police?" I asked
him. He shook his head--yes, sometimes, but they were no good. The
Chinese have the same right to life and liberty that we have, and if we
get them that, they'll get the money fast enough themselves. We owe it
to the Chinese that they get protection.

* * * * *

ADDRESS OF REV. E.P. GOODWIN, D.D.

I rejoice that I can lift my voice at least in a word of commendation,
if such a word seem in any sense to be needed, in the furtherance of
this particular kind of work. I remind myself sometimes that this very
tone of apology is a tone that ought to set some of us, as ministers and
as brethren, to reconsidering our conception of the gospel. Why,
beloved, suppose it were an admitted fact that for the next hundred
years not a solitary Chinaman would be converted. What then? Do you
imagine that that fact would absolve us from allegiance to the commands
of the Lord Jesus Christ? You will remind yourselves--I am sure I remind
myself often--that in respect to our Christian work, the breadth of it
and the particular departments of it, we have absolutely no option
whatsoever: that when our Master said to his disciples, "Go ye into all
the world and preach the gospel to every creature," he made no exception
of those that might have almond eyes and yellow faces, nor of those that
might have black skins and woolly hair; that he took in, in that wide
sweep of his omniscient vision, every nation and kindred under the whole
sky, and that should exist until the kingdom itself should come.

If it could be demonstrated that it required ten times as much work and
ten times as much money to convert the Chinaman as anybody else, then
all the more because of degradation and superstition and idolatry and
hardness of heart--all the more must I storm the Gibraltar of that
paganism. The Master's principle seemed to be, "Give ye them to eat."
The fact of hunger is what lays the law upon the hearts of the
disciples; and by so much as men are more hungered--if there be one
nation more so than another--by so much as they are nearer to starving
for the bread of life, by so much the more are your heart and my heart
called upon in the name and in the sympathy of Jesus Christ, to respond
to that cause. Those disciples of that early day might just as well have
said, "Master, we can not feed all these ten thousand. We will pick out
those around us, the nearest at hand. We won't touch that set of lepers
just over there from Capernaum; we won't have anything to do with that
other set of outcasts and vagabonds drifted in here, some of them from
Samaria; we will have nothing whatever to do with these wretches from
Chorazin--gamblers and abandoned people of every sort."

What do you think would have been his response to that sort of argument?
I think if Peter had given him any such plea as that it would have cut
him off hopelessly from any apostleship. There would have been a new
band of apostles that would have been instituted then and there that
were willing to take the Master's command, take Him as responsible for
the authority and for the result. They knew better; they knew Him
better; and though they had their little scant loaves that would not
give a quarter of a crumb apiece to the great multitude, they said:
"That is not our responsibility; ours is to obey. It is His to furnish
when the resources fail." Brethren, that is my theory of missions.

Do you remember the little anecdote about Francis Xavier, that before he
went abroad as a missionary to China, while he was sleeping with his
room-mate one night, he startled him by rising in his sleep and throwing
out his arms with great urgency, as he said, "Yet more, oh, my God, yet
more!" His comrade wakened him and asked him what he meant. "Why," said
he, "I was having a vision of things in the East. I was seeing
missionaries tortured; some of them were being burned, some of them were
having their flesh torn from their bodies, and in many ways they seemed
to be suffering in their testimony for Christ's sake. And as I looked,
the tears came to my eyes, and a voice said to me, 'That is what it will
cost you if you go on this missionary tour. Are you willing to take the
cost?' And I said, 'Oh, Lord Jesus; yet more, yet more, if I may win
these perishing souls.'"

Brethren, it is the call of the hour. These people may become, in my
judgment, pre-eminently the missionary people. They have been called the
Yankees of the Orient. They are scattered every whither, in every
quarter of the world. I think it ought to shame us to have less
enthusiasm for these for whom Christ died than they of the Romish church
in the palmiest days of its missionary zeal. God help us that we may
stand true upon the Pacific coast and all through our land, and that for
every missionary church abroad there may be a score and a hundred. Dr.
Williams said, after thirty years' knowledge of the Chinese, that we
might evangelize China from one end of the empire to the other in half a
century if we were in earnest. God help us that we may labor and pray
for the coming of such a day.

Now I believe this: That, so far as the facts go, there is just as large
a percentage of results to be shown for work among the Chinese as for
work anywhere. Take it in our city, among some of the Chinese schools;
take it in San Francisco, take it in China itself. I received on
Saturday last a letter from Mr. Gray, of Hong-Kong, speaking of a young
man who had gone out from our church as his assistant in the work there.
Said he to me: "He is one of the most valuable helpers I could have. He
not only stands fast by his work, but he also seems to have spiritual
discernment to meet the peculiar difficulties we have to encounter, and
there are plenty of them. Here is a man, for instance, who says he would
whip his wife to death if he should hear of her accepting Christ. There
is another, a mother, who would let her child starve if she thought it
was being taught the gospel of Jesus Christ. But among this people there
is no more successful laborer that I know of than Sui Chung." I knew him
well. He came into our Chinese Sunday-school, which is held every
Sunday afternoon. I remember him distinctly, as giving, so far as I
could see, clear evidence of being born of the Spirit. And I bear
testimony to these young men now in my church--there are ten or a
dozen of them--that, so far as I know them and so far as I have been
able to talk with them in imperfect English or through Chinese
interpreters, their Christian experience is as satisfactory as that of
any others. Nay, I will say more than that. I will venture to say that
the Chinese brethren in my church are more earnest. They sustain a
Chinese prayer-meeting regularly every Sunday of their own accord in
their own language, and have kept it up ever since there were enough
of them to be united together. I frequently look in and talk with
them; and there is one thing about these Chinese that I greatly
respect--I never saw them pull out their watches while I was speaking
to them. I never saw any of them going to sleep; I never saw a look in
the face of one of them which indicated that he was not profoundly
interested. I was in their meeting last Sunday, and I told them about
Sui Chung. Most of these Chinese can read. Some of them are very
fluent talkers, and some are very intelligent. I suppose we have a
thousand or fifteen hundred in this city, and a very large proportion
of them, they tell me, can read the Chinese Bible.

Now, I have great respect for this people, if for nothing more than for
their history. We have a petty hundred years of history. How many
hundred have they? Any nation that can hold itself together for 4,000
years--or shall I say for more?--and that to-day constitutes nearly
one-quarter of the population of the earth, certainly deserves our
respect. Any people that can take our own handicrafts and beat us at
them--and they will do it in a good many directions, and make money,
even though you may disapprove of their way of living--deserve our
respect. Any people that can furnish diplomates fitted to stand side by
side with Bismarck and Gladstone, and our own embassadors say that they
can, certainly deserve our respect.

One thing more they desire of the Christian church, if it were only a
debt to be paid. I insist upon it, brethren, that at least Christian
England and Christian America ought to pay back to them in missionary
moneys at least an amount equal to that of which we have robbed them by
the infamous opium traffic, and to-day it is people from Christian
lands, more than anything else, who are furnishing the difficulties in
the way of the introduction of the gospel abroad.

* * * * *

ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT ALBERT SALISBURY.

There are values even in this world for which we have no expression, for
which we have no definite standard, and of which we have no very clear
comprehension. They are values, none the less. But there is one standard
of value of which I think it may be safely said the American people have
come into a very clear comprehension, that is, of the weight of the
working power of a dollar.

Most of us know it by pretty thorough experience. We know what a dollar
costs, how hard it is to get, how hard it is to keep, how little we are
liable to receive for it when it goes. And, let me say it, I believe
there are no people on this Western Continent who have any more exact,
definite, clearly defined comprehension of what a dollar is, what it
will do, and what it will not do, than the managers of our missionary
enterprises.

Then, it is sometimes thought and sometimes said that these men who
conduct church work and missionary work do not know much about dollars;
that a dollar, a thousand dollars, or a million dollars, is a very
indefinite thing; and that they ask for a million dollars, or half a
million dollars, with a great deal of nonchalance, as if it were merely
a matter of asking. It is not so. When this Finance Committee indorse
the recommendation of the National Council that half a million of
dollars be raised for the work of this Association during the coming
year, they do it from a business point of view, and when the officers
and managers of this Association second this demand, they know what it
means. They know better than anybody else in the world knows how hard it
is to get half a million of dollars. For some years I went up and down
through the South and West in the service of this Association. I went in
and out of the rooms at No. 56 Reade Street, New York, and I must have
been very dull not to know pretty well the inside workings of this
Association. I have been among workers on the field. I know how closely
everything is reckoned, how carefully every penny is spent; and I know
how the demands of the work and the needs press upon the workers in the
field, so that they look back to those rooms in New York with the
feeling that somehow there is not a very great deal of liberality there,
that those officers pare very closely. But these workers in the field
have no such experience after all as the officers there at the centre of
things. Those members of the Executive Committee, those Secretaries and
the Treasurer, sitting there together, and facing the demands of the old
work and the new, have rolled upon them every day a sense of the value
of money and of the need of economy such as even the workers in the
field can not comprehend. I have been there, I am now outside, and I am
free to say whatever I please; and I make bold to say to you here that
the work which is alive and growing must have the most money. Increased
demands must cost. It is a law of nature. Now, then, when this Finance
Committee come forward to indorse this recommendation that $500,000
instead of $375,000 be raised for the coming year, they do not at all
reach the measure of the need.

There is only one thing necessary to get this money and more. It is a
pretty comprehensive thing. If upon the members of our churches in this
land as clear a sense of the need of what ought to be done and can be
done could be brought as comes to those in contact with the work, the
money would be forthcoming. How to make our people realize the facts in
this matter is the problem. Money will come when our people know how
much it is needed, how profitably it is spent, and how grandly it pays
dividends.

* * * * *

ADDRESS OF REV. WM. M. TAYLOR, D.D.

Last Wednesday evening at the Prayer and Conference Meeting of the
Broadway Tabernacle, one of the office-bearers of the church put this
question to me: "Can we hope to be instrumental in the conversion of the
Jews, so long as the present prejudice against God's ancient people
exists among us?" And that inquiry, taken in connection with the fact
that the Annual Meeting of the American Missionary Association was to be
held here this week, led me to examine the Word of God, that I might
discover what incidental light is thrown on the subject of pride of race
by its histories and other contents, and I mean to-night to put the
result of my examination before you.

The first and most striking instance of its manifestation which we come
upon in Scripture is the treatment given by the Egyptians to the
Israelites. "Every shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians," so
they counted themselves superior to the Hebrews, and subjected them to
the greatest indignities, grinding them under the harshest oppression,
and exacting from them, by the lash of the task-master, the most arduous
labor. But mark how their pride was rebuked and their cruelty punished,
under the moral and retributive government of God. Their land was
desolated by a series of plagues culminating in the death of the
first-born, and the people whom they had oppressed made their escape
from the most powerful empire then existing in the world, without
themselves striking a single blow. The Lord fought for them. Each of
these ten plagues was a Divine protest against that national pride which
arrogated to itself the exclusive right to power, privilege, immunity
and possession, and which met its merited punishment that day, when "the
Lord saved Israel out of the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the
Egyptians dead upon the seashore."

But the mention of the Hebrews in this connection may seem to some to be
most inappropriate. Were not they, it may be asked, virtually created
into a separate and exclusive nation, and taught to look upon themselves
as God's peculiar people? Did not they become proverbial for their pride
of race, and for saying on every occasion, "We have Abraham to our
father," and were they not especially the Pharisees among the nations?
Now it must be confessed that all these questions must be answered in
the affirmative, but when we widen our view and take into consideration
the great purpose of God in the formation and conservation of the Hebrew
commonwealth, we may see reason somewhat to modify our opinion. For the
settlement of the Jews in Canaan and their restriction within its limits
were not ends in themselves, but only means for the attainment of higher
ends which were to affect the moral and spiritual condition of "all
people that on earth do dwell." The promise made to Abraham was in this
wise: "In thee and in thy seed shall all nations of the earth be
blessed;" and it was for the purpose of securing the fulfilment of the
latter part of that promise that a special and peculiar hedge was
planted around the vine which God had brought out of Egypt. It was not
meant to be a permanent arrangement, but was designed merely for a
temporary emergency, until, as Paul has said, "the Seed should come" to
bless the world with his great salvation. It cannot, therefore, be
quoted as furnishing a universal example, or as giving any divine
approval to that pride of race of which we have been speaking. Moreover,
even when the Hebrews were selected by God for this purpose, they were
told over and over again that they were not chosen for anything in
themselves, and that they had no reason to plume themselves on the fact
that they were chosen. And when they degenerated into self-conceit on
the ground of their having been so highly privileged, they were finally
cast out of the land of promise. Nor is this all. In the system under
which they were placed by Moses, they were taught to look with
kindliness on those who came to sojourn among them, of whatever race
they might be. They were not, indeed, to be a missionary people, or to
seek to induce others to settle among them, but if others came to dwell
beside them, hear how they were to treat them: "Thou shalt neither vex a
stranger nor oppress him, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."
"And if a stranger sojourn with thee in the land, ye shall not vex him.
But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born
among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in
the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. Love ye therefore the
stranger, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." (Exodus xxii. 21;
Levit. xix. 33; xxv. 35; Deut. x. 19). Lay these commands alongside of
recent legislation among ourselves with reference to the Chinese, and
then see what God must think of that blot upon our statute book in this
age of our boasted enlightenment.

Take, again, the account of the singular retribution that came upon the
people in the days of David because of Saul's treatment of the
Gibeonites. These aborigines belonged to the ancient Canaanitish tribes,
and were so astute as to impose even upon Joshua, and to obtain from him
a treaty on false pretenses. Still an agreement was made with them on
the terms that they should be permitted to live in the land, but that
they should be "hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of the
Lord." This contract was faithfully observed on both sides until the
days of Saul, who sought to slay them "in his zeal to the children of
Israel and Judah." And what was the result? A famine lasting for three
years, which was only removed at last by the giving up, according to the
ancient practices of the Gibeonites, of seven of Saul's sons for
execution. Now there is much in that old history that is difficult for
us at this distance of time, and ignorant as we are of the customs that
prevailed among these tribes, to understand. But no one of us can read
it without being reminded of our treatment of the Indian tribes that
linger among us still. Have we not broken almost every treaty that we
ever made with them? Have we not said, unpityingly regarding them, that
their destruction before the advance of civilization is inevitable? And
have we not forgotten that the God of the Gibeonites lives to be the
avenger of the Indians? If the hewers of wood and drawers of water were
not beneath his notice long ago, think you he does not see and chronicle
the wrongs of the Indians to-day, and shall not he render to every man
according to his works?

Before passing from the Old Testament to the New, I merely mention the
fact that among the ancestors of the Lord Jesus Christ we find two
belonging to alien races, namely, Rahab of Jericho, and Ruth the
Moabitess, whose very presence in that noble line is a prophecy of the
glorious truth that the Son of David was to be also the Son of man, the
Saviour of sinners of every name and nation, the kinsman of all races,
the brother of humanity, and that as he represents them all in his
priestly intercession yonder, so in each of them we may see a
representative of him here and now upon the earth.

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