The light is given, and we must spread it. Salvation is come for us to make it known. "The world for Christ, for Christ's sake." It is an awful thing for a man to be cold and unmoved in the presence of such transcendent loveliness, such a mighty passion for souls, as He sees in Christ, the Redeemer of men! It is an impossible experience to that man whose heart Christ fills. The first cry of the regenerated soul is, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do!" There are three necessities of success in missionary work, and I want us to consider them for a little time this evening-"The Living Voice, the Living Word, the Living Spirit. And what I wanted specially to impress upon your minds was, that the fulfilment of these conditions forms a threefold certainty of the ultimate triumph of the cause which we advocate. The prospects of this victory are no less clear and emphatic than the injunctions to seek and strive for it. The promise of hope lies hard by the word of duty. I. The first certainty of success of which we may assure ourselves is found in the agency of the Living Voice, which God demands. Well has Carlyle said, "The speaking function, this of truth coming to us with a living voice, nay in a living shape, and as a concrete practical exemplar: this, with all our writing and printing functions, has a perennial place!" The magic empire of the living human voice has asserted its might in all lands, through all ages. All histories unite to tell its power, and sing its praise. It is said of Demosthenes that "his voice transformed the Grecian warriors into men: and a mighty cry, which was but the augmented echo of his voice, rolled over the country, the soldiers shouting, as they rose like one man, 'Let us conquer or die!'" And Divine Wisdom has ordained that the Gospel shall be "preached to every creature." Of all human agencies it has fixed on the mightiest. Could the Baptist have uttered a truth more promiseful of success in his mission than when he describes himself as a voice-a voice in the wilderness? A man speaking to men-a man proclaiming the Divine love to men in kindling speech and glowing word, his soul's pity accentuating every appeal-what sublimer sight on God's earth, or one more bright with hope? The Acts of the Apostles is the record of the triumphs of the spoken word; of the living voice as the divinely-appointed instrument in the salvation of souls. The apostles went everywhere preaching the word! Savonarola, Luther, Wesley, Whitfield, and all the glorious speaking men of church history, how mightily they charmed men's hearts, convinced their reasons, awoke their consciences, and stirred to frenzy their passions? "Their voice, attention still as midnight draws; Be it reverently said, the intensest expression of Divine Love was in human form, was given through human lips; and since the days when the Son of Man lifted up His voice in the streets and lanes of Galilee AND THE LIVING SPIRIT. 449 one prime element in the work of evangelizing the world has been the agency of the living man speaking the truth of the living God. cess! And this necessity of the work is also a condition, a promise of sucOur brethren who go out into remote lands, among strange people, preaching the Gospel; and their utterances, enriched with the wealth of their own experiences of the Saviour's redeeming love, wield a convincing, an all-persuasive power. "The spoken word, when burdened with love, subdued with tenderness, and saturated with the genius of the Gospel, is a sweet lyric song, having power to call forth the noblest aspirations, to penetrate the hardest heart with hope of Christ and God." The uttered name of Jesus throws a strange spell about the human heart; it melts all hardness, calms all storms, heals all wounds! "But how shall the nations believe in Him of whom they have not heard; and how shall they hear without a preacher ?" "O! Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain: O! Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up; be not afraid; say unto the cities of the world, 'Behold your God!' II. The second condition of success is the promulgation of the Word of God. The crowning glory of God's Book is that it is all men's book. The principles it asserts, the truths it affirms, and the Divine will it reveals, are broad as the earth in their application. Of it a man may say, "It is my book;" and to his neighbour, with equal truth, it is thine. Whilst it is the property of each, it is the undeniable possession of all. There is no speech, nor language, with which God's words may not mingle, and in which His voice may not be heard. Deep as human need, universal as the baneful power of sin, is this God's word of ours, demanding the field of the world wherein to sow its precious seed, and from which to gather its abundant harvest. What man is there, of what tribe and nation, of whom it may be said, "God hath sent no message to you; His word hath nought for thee ?" The charm of the Bible lies in this-that there is no phase of all human experience in which its words are not seasonable, and its truths powerful to console or convict. To the wisdom of the wise it lends an additional glory. To the untutored savage it speaks with a voice mighty to save. To the devout explorer it yields a plentiful reward. It has heights which no man can scale, and depths which no man can fathom; yet it meets our commonest wants with a fulness, and addresses itself to the simplest intellect, with a clearness which proclaim it to be divine. Wherever it is received it becomes the treasure of the poor, the solace of the sick, the support of the dying. It arouses by its warnings, and directs a beam of hope into the darkest mind. At the touch of its holy truth, guilt, despair, death, vanish away. To every farstraying child of God, whether lost under burning Syrian skies, or amid the chills of the frozen north; whether callous and guilty amid the liberties and privileges of free England, or crushed beneath the hellish hoof of an ignoble slavedom; to every child of man the divinely pitiful Father sends His message of grace, and has adapted His Word of Love. God's Book is all men's Book, the God of Books! It is this noble universalism of the Scriptures which inspires our breasts with hope, and inflames our minds with zeal in missionary enterprize. We have drunk of this cup, and it has quenched our thirst. We have eaten of this bread, and it has satisfied our hunger. Its promises have brightened our way. Its principles have directed our life, its Gospel has cheered our hearts. Concerning the way of peace its diction is simplicity itself. Concerning the great and grave facts which affect all human life, sin, sorrow, death, resurrection, and immortality, its teaching is authoritative and decisive. "It is able to make wise unto salvation." Therefore we say, "Let its words go out unto the end of the earth." In them hath God set a tabernacle for the Sun. Let its light shine over the whole world! We do not fear that the Gospel message will grow stale. The missionary is a man of one Book-but that one Book covers all the need, and want, and sin, of all the men before whom he may speak! Monotonous-yes! yet as lustrous and welcome as the sun who, from day to day, alters not his course, nor deviates from his own fixed orbit, but with delightful constancy and charming sameness brightens and warms and vivifies the earth! Not whilst man's wants are the same, not whilst his needs are as great as they were, must the subject of the Gospel message be altered-explained, enforced in a thousand different ways. O yes; and it will admit of it: just as on the organ you may play a tune in many keys, you may vary the notes and chords to an almost unlimited extent, from the deep thunderous base to the keenlypiercing clarionet, yet it is the same tune which is the burden of all the music, the meaning of every chord and harmony! The living Word of God; the light for all darkness; the solace for all woe; the power of God unto the salvation of all men! We are oldfashioned enough to believe that what the Gospel has done, it can do. It dethroned the idols of Paul's time; why not those of India? It charmed the rude barbarian then; why not the African to-day? It blazed as a consuming fire amid the corruptions and abominations of Greece then; why not to-day to burn up the sins and shame of the life of the corrupt Roman ? Go on, thou glorious Word of God; fulfil thy course; do thy work! Let the wide earth chant thy praises, and tell forth thy renown! Assault error with truth, darkness with light, and chase all mist away! No bloody deeds of war mark thy victories; no desolate homes mourn thine entrance! Thy path is not the path of horror and dismay ! Where thou art peace, righteousness, truth dwell with thee! Hammer of God art thou to break the rock of human enmity; sword of the mighty Spirit to cleave in twain the tyrannies and superstitions that afflict the children of men! III. And last, there is the Living Spirit of God above all and working through all, sustaining, illuminating, and guiding all things towards that one far-off event when the heathen shall be the inheritance of the Lord, and the uttermost parts of the earth His possession! The might of the Living Voice, the power of the Word of God, and the dominating Spirit filling that Voice, deepening its pathos, and flooding the inspired Word with inspiring and sanctifying power. THE FLYING YEARS. 451 The gift of the Spirit is the treasure of the missionary church. Through its eighteen centuries of toil and work the power from on high has been present. And still is He with us to make the words of human utterance into words of mighty power, to lead the mind of man into the light of the truth; to penetrate dead souls with life, and compel the idolatrous to bow in reverence before the true and living God. The Living Spirit still with us the stream that cleanses; the fire that burns; the power that sanctifies and saves. And herein is the threefold certainty of missionary success: the Living Voice, the Living Word, the Living Spirit. When these fail, then shall our hearts fail-but not till then. The Missionary Charter of the church contains the promise of the church's triumph. When God leads, He leads to victory. "Lo I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." "Christian brothers, glorious Shall be the conflicts close: Our Leader all controls: Our captives-ransomed souls. O, consummation devoutly wished, when the Sun of Righteousness shall flood the wide world with His glory! when Divinest Charity shall direct the judgments, and ennoble the characters of men; when the Prince of Peace shall exercise His benignant sway over all lands, and among all people; when the sweet and hallowing influences of Christianity shall soften the rugged wills of men, and calm all the surgings of human passion; "when the golden law of equity, and the golden grace of kindness, shall unite all the families of the earth in the sympathies of a common love and brotherhood!" This is the dream of the ages-the hope of the Christian-the promise of the Lord! Towards that illustrious day we look! Let us not despair of it. Let us labour; let us patiently wait. Though God tarry, He will come, and shall not stay. Even now His glory is fringing the darkness; His bolts of light are shooting through the mists; His arm is bared for war; His chariot wheels we hear; His voice is saying, "Be light! and there is light; the light of truth, of life, of Christ! The high places gleam with the beams of the morning. Night is passing from Africa, from China, from India, from Rome. Great God, speed the coming day! Amen. The Flying Years. YEARS fly, O Lord, and every year My world of friends thins round me fast: There are fresh gaps around the hearth, And young lives quenched before the old, Dear voices and dear faces missed; This rupture with the past; II. AMONGST THE EARLY ENGLISH BAPTISTS. THE question raised and discussed with so much clearness and force in our last issue concerning "the preaching of women" is by no means new. In times of deep and wide-spread religious fervour it has usually come to the front, and insisted on making itself heard. The inflow of Divine energy and life to souls, characterises itself, in its superlative moments, by a sublime independence of the restrictions of sex. Israel's victory over Pharaoh, and his pursuing hosts, inspires and vindicates Miriam's exulting song. Deborah, a prophetess, takes her place, in the perilous days of Israel's earlier development, amongst the divinely appointed Judges. Joel's picture of Pentecost groups together maidens and young men, daughters and sons, as equally recipients of the new life and new functions, consequent upon "the dispensation of the Spirit;" and Paul affirms, as a universal law, that there is neither male nor female," just as there is "neither bond nor free, Jew nor Greek, in Christ Jesus." The new life moves in a realm above that of the conventional distinctions of society, and of the limitations of race and of sex. As the church in its first days showed a singular superiority to the common love of property, so, in its splendid fervours, it paid little heed to the petty and earth-born barriers that obstructed its beneficent course. That impressive quality re-appeared in one of the most Pentecostal periods of English religious life, viz., the birth-time of the English Baptists. Barclay, in his "Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth," cites abundant evidence of the "free course" which was given to women to preach in the earlier days of English Independent and Baptist history. He says: "The preaching of women appears to have commenced among some of the Independent churches about this period (1641) in England. In America it appears to have existed among the Baptists about 1636. Johnson says: "The third dividing tenet by which these persons propagated their errors was between the word of God and the Spirit of God; and here these sectaries (the Baptists) had many pretty knacks to delude withal, and especially to please the female sex. They told of the rare revelations of the things to come from the Spirit, as they say. Come along with me,' says one, I will bring you a woman that preaches better gospel than any of your black coats that have been at the University, a woman of another kind of spirit, who hath made revelations of things to come; and for my part,' saith he, 'I had rather hear such an one that speaks from the mere motion of the Spirit than any of your learned scholars, although they may be fuller of the Scripture, and admit they speak by the help of the Spirit, yet the other goes far beyond them.'"* Keith says that "those called Presbyterians (in England) may remember how they have both allowed and countenanced women both to pray and speak of their experience in their private meetings, and yet they cannot deny but their private meetings are a church."† * Johnson's History, pp. 67-69, quoted in Bakus' "History of New England." |