THE chief aim of this volume is to give honor to the Holy Spirit and the Word of God in mission work.
“The Word of God, carried by the man of God, is simplest statement of mission work,” says the writer, and illustrates his statement by the lives, labors, and conquests of many missionaries throughout the Christian centuries. The missionary work of the Church is “to bring Christ to all the world,” and “in any century, whether in a single heart, or in a company of believers, whenever there has been a fresh effusion of the Spirit, there has followed inevitably a fresh endeavor in the work of evangelizing the world.”
Thus is Columba, of the sixth century, described: “The Holy Spirit was his great reliance for transforming the savage hearts to which he ministered; and the Holy Spirit in his own heart was his great resource for making him an effective preacher of the Word.” The volume overflows with testimony to the fact that the Word of God, dwelling in the heart of a pagan, does by the power of the Holy Spirit create Christian graces and a holy life, while all efforts to civilize pagans into Christianity are utterly vain.
From an abundance of incidents we select three which speak of the true spirit of mission work, of Divine guidance in it, and of God-given results.
Gossner, “instead of an elaborate manual of instructions,” gave the following “simple and stirring commission” to his missionaries
“Believe, hope, love, pray, burn, waken the dead! Hold fast by prayer; wrestle like Jacob! Up, up, my brethren! The Lord is coming, and to everyone He will say, Where hast thou left the souls of these heathen? With the devil? Oh, swiftly seek these souls, and enter not without them into the presence of the Lord.”
Barnabas Shaw, being forbidden to preach the gospel in Cape Town (in the time of Dutch rule in Africa), bought a yoke of oxen and a cart, and, with his wife, headed the kine towards the interior, not knowing whither he went. After having travelled for over three hundred miles, on the twenty-seventh day he encamped for the night. A company of Hottentots halted near them. “On entering into communication with them, they learned to their astonishment that this band of heathen, headed by their chief, were journeying to Cape Town in search of a missionary to teach them ‘the great Word,’ as they expressed it.” This was, indeed, a meeting of divine guidance! “What is this but a modern chapter of the Acts of the Apostles?”
“The Fiji Islands, perhaps, present the most impressive miracle of missions in all the world. James Calvert, the devoted pioneer evangelist to this people, says: When I first arrived at the Fiji group my first duty was to bury the hands, feet, heads, and bones of arms and legs of eighty victims, whose bodies had been roasted and eaten in a cannibal feast. I lived to see the very cannibals who had taken part in that inhuman festival gathered about the Lord’s table.’”
The growth of missions over the world, the multitudes of heathen who have become Christian, are well pictured; but the author makes too little of departure from the simplicity of Christian faith and the growth of paganism in Christendom. The volume will afford its reader not only instruction in godliness, but that which is all-important―help in the way of personal holiness.
FOOD FOR THE YOUNG.
MIND how you supply young Christians with spiritual food. Be as thoughtful and wise as the tender nurse with the infant: give them the pure, the unadulterated milk of the Word. Ours is a day of adulteration in food, but we can, more or less, keep supervision by inspectors over dishonest traders; but who can watch over and expose the distribution of adulterated spiritual food? Poor food makes poor bodies, and poor spiritual food makes poor souls. Also avoid shells and nuts; in other words, do not be very dry and difficult