FAR AWAY IN KASHMIR, a Yale man, one of Borden’s friends, was anxiously awaiting tidings. The mail arrived, bringing home letters, and was leaving again in a few hours. In his loneliness, Sherwood Day, the young missionary, wrote:
I cannot realize it yet. Last week when your letter told of Bill’s illness, I knew that the crisis must be over, and asked that all might be well; and it has been so, I am sure. I feel that I want to be by myself a while and think, yet this must go tonight. I cannot say all I would, but you will understand, Somehow, as I read your letter. I have a sense of victory and power that seems to bring that “Other Room” very near. Bill seems nearer and more gloriously living than he did at Yale or Cairo.... I cannot put on paper what his change of field means to me. He is the first of my friends whom I really loved, to be in that Other Place, and it makes that place very real. In fact, except for the pain to Mrs. Borden and his family, I am very happy in it all―a happiness that hurts, but one that rejoices in the victory of the thing. All victory is gained through pain, but it is a pain that spells joy―one of those strange things in life.
I have absolutely no feeling of a life cut short. A life abandoned to Christ cannot be cut short. “Cut short” means not complete, interrupted, and we know that our Master does no halfway jobs. We must pray, now, that those to whom God wants this to appeal, may listen. I am sure we can feel that He wants to use it, and that He counts on us to help.
I am glad for Bill! In His immediate presence―no longer a clouded, imperfect experience, but a wholly satisfying one. What his life means to us all! I mean the life we knew, the one he has finished, or the part he has finished. Put that loyalty, that staunchness, the quality for which weaker men called him “narrow,” over against the “modern” line of things, and how Bill’s life stands out! A splendid mind, a splendid body and a great soul―all handed over to the One who does all things well. It will mean more and more to me, as I try to do what my Master wants of me in this country, to know that Bill has finished his job and is just Over There. It all seems so near!... I feel this is the greatest thing Bill ever meant to me―a sort of volunteering for another, shall we call it, “foreign field”?
Amid the flood of sorrow that flowed so deep and wide, this was the conviction that seemed to dominate all others.
“There could scarcely a greater loss befall us than this,” wrote Dr. Robert E. Speer, in the first shock of grief. “William Borden was one among a million. There was no better among the younger men who have gone out from our colleges in the last ten years.... It seems impossible that all that strength and devotion can have been taken away from the work of the Church down here. Evidently there are missionary undertakings of even greater importance elsewhere.”
And to Mrs. Borden: “You do not need to be told anything of your son’s noble qualities of character, his simply rock-like faith, his loyalty that knew no limit, his remarkable abilities and above all the unreserved devotion to his Master. It is not possible to understand the providence that has taken him, except on the supposition that God has more important missionary work to be done elsewhere than it is possible for men to do here on earth, and that He needed your son in the ministry of those who serve Him day and night, and who look upon His face as they do service.”
In Cairo also this note was struck of triumphant faith. It was so manifest in Mrs. Borden’s life that the Syrian friend whose home seemed so empty could write of her help in their grief!
“I shall not forget that smiling, loving face of yours as long as I live. You were a great comfort to us, and we thank God for your coming to Cairo in the time of our trial.”
From the hospital, the nurse who had been in charge wrote of “the memory of a brave man who had faced illness with fortitude and patience, and never grumbled or complained, and a brave mother who did not make other people suffer because she was heartbroken.”
“The funeral was very informal,” a friend who was with Mrs. Borden could write. “The Anglo-American hospital is beautifully located on the island of Gezira, in the midst of green meadows, palms and roses. From there we went to the American cemetery. How strange it was to have Arabs doing everything! A great many friends and missionaries were present, the Syrian gentleman, too, in whose family William had lived. They are lovely people, simply devoted to William. Mrs. Zwemer says that the conditions in their home were perfectly all right, and that there was no risk to health in being there. The food was good, and William was in no way tired or rundown when he contracted the disease.
“Mr. Gairdner read the service and the Scriptures. Dear old Dr. Watson prayed, and so did Dr. Giffen and Dr. Zwemer. We sang ‘Face to face with Christ, my Saviour.’ I shall never forget it as long as I live. We stayed to the very last. The sun was going down, and the glow in the west was wonderful. They planted flowers on the grave, and it looked very beautiful.”
A missionary who was present added:
As we sang hymns during the service the Mohammedan gravediggers, standing a little way back, looked astonished, for it was all in such sharp contrast with the hideous and meaningless wailing which takes place at a Moslem funeral. Still greater was their astonishment as they watched the little company of native Christians weeping over the grave of a foreigner―one they had learned to love as a brother. Never shall I forget the feeling that came to us with our closing hymn:
“Sing it softly through the gloom,
While the heart for mercy craves;
Sing in triumph o’er the tomb―
Jesus saves, Jesus saves!”
Our very souls were lifted out of their mourning into a glad and glorious triumph, and we could indeed say: “O death, where is thy sting; O grave, where is thy victory?”
Even the rude, varnished coffin could bring no pang to the mother’s heart, different as it was from the casket that would have been provided at home. As she saw it lowered into the grave, containing all that was mortal of her son, a feeling not of pain at the outward lack of harmony swept over her, but a wonderful joy and comfort in the thought of that entire life spent for Christ, scarcely a moment of it wasted.
The surroundings were very different in Princeton when the Memorial Service was held that gathered professors, students and friends in one common grief, but the note of victory was the same. Miss Whiting wrote:
Some day you will read the true and appreciative words spoken at Princeton on Friday, but I wish you could have been there to feel the spirit of love and reverence. Dr. Charles Erdman said it was the most wonderful testimony and tribute he had ever listened to....
The day was ideal―Princeton in its first spring beauty; the hour, five o’clock, was perfect. Dr. Patton himself conducted the service in a way so dignified, reverent and affectionate that nothing more seemed needed. The chapel was nearly filled with students who had known William, and the service throughout was simple, strong, solemn, tender and triumphant... As I listened, the whole of William’s life seemed to sweep before me. There was not one word too much, nor undeserved. I marveled that they had understood so truly and loved so deeply in the space of but three years.
Another Memorial Service in Princeton had a significance all its own. It was held in the little African Methodist Church, where Borden had taught in the Sunday School for two winters. The pastor learned in that meeting, for the first time, that Borden had been wealthy in his own right. They had loved him for himself: “For his deep consecration and unassuming Christ-like life. We never at any time asked him to contribute a single dollar. We asked him to teach, not to give.”
So the colored children sorrowed for the loss of their friend.
At New Haven too, in the Yale Hope Mission, a touching service was held, the room packed with men of the very class Borden had sought to reach. One after another told of the new life that had come to them because of what he was and did, and one of the professors who had differed from him widely as to theological views, spoke of the house being filled with the fragrance of his love and service.
There and in the Moody Church in Chicago men were riveted by the story of what the grace of God had done in one they had known so well. A friend who was present wrote:
2 Chron. 16:99For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him. Herein thou hast done foolishly: therefore from henceforth thou shalt have wars. (2 Chronicles 16:9) has been in my mind ever since Friday evening. God is ever intently looking for those whose hearts are right toward Him, that in and through them He may “show himself strong.” And oh, the joy of his heart when He finds such a one! As William grew in knowledge of God, he lived up to that knowledge; as he learned more of God’s will, he obeyed that will. He followed the Lord wholly. As with absorbing interest the great company listened to what God had wrought, one could not but feel that the fire of a holy purpose was lighted in the hearts of some of those young men and women.
In the Marble Collegiate Church, New York, crowded to its full capacity, the number of students present and their interest were also remarkable. Mr. Charles Campbell was among the speakers and Mr. Delavan Pierson, Editor of The Missionary Review of the World, who was impressed with “the strong note of triumph and praise to God.” Mr. Don O. Shelton presided. The words of Mr. Hugh R. Monro had special weight, as the testimony of a businessman well known in the great city:
The thing that impressed me in my contact with William Borden was the fact that he was living the Christian life successfully. I suppose we all recognize the deep and abiding blessings of our discipleship. Some of us have a continuous consciousness of the abundant grace brought to us in Christ. Yet even in advanced Christian experience there is often an overpowering sense of insufficiency and failure, so that we are constrained to confess and bewail our weaknesses. Where there is triumph in one direction there may be failure in another. But more than any other young man I have ever known Borden seemed to have continuous victory. His life was so truly under the control of divine power that it breathed the spirit of the conqueror. It was an imperial spiritual life.
To myself there comes a new sense of assurance as I think of it, because I recognize that this overcoming life was not lived in the strength of any innate ability or natural gifts. It was the grace of God in him that made his life victorious and such a benediction to those with whom he came in contact. The same resources are available to your faith and to mine, so that while his life is a rebuke to the poverty of our spiritual experience it is a summons also to a closer following of the Saviour....
So it was in other Memorial Services, in Japan, Korea, India and South Africa, for the circle touched by this young life was practically worldwide. As to America, a friend could write, “All the papers in the country seem to have told about William”; and another, “I never heard, on all sides, such regret and sorrow expressed over the death of any young man.... Surely you must feel the volume of prayer that is rising for you from many hearts.”
“How strong his influence is, even in this remote corner!” wrote a missionary in Korea. “Many of our Christians know of him and his faithful consecration to the Lord. So he continues to live here below in many souls made better by his example.”
And from Cape Town came the following: “You have no idea, Mrs. Borden, what William’s life has meant to the South African students who knew him at Princeton, and what it means just now to the whole Dutch Reformed Church out here. Next Sunday the story will be told to the children practically throughout the whole Union of South Africa, in hundreds of Sunday schools.”
More permanent records, also, carried the message of his life far and wide, in several languages. Two of his own addresses were put into Arabic by Dr. Zwemer’s arrangement, who wrote of the booklet: “It will make a fine message. I am calling it in Arabic: Two Questions by a Young Man to Young Men.”
A sketch intended especially for Moslem readers was prepared by Dr. St. Clair Tisdall and published in English and in Arabic. A little later it was translated into Persian and Hindustani and circulated by the thousand, then into Dutch and Chinese. Of the latter translation made by a master of that difficult language, Mr. F. H. Rhodes of the China Inland Mission said:
As the first Chinese booklet published for free distribution among Mohammedans in China, this story of Borden’s life marks a distinct advance in bringing the gospel to these neglected millions. Requests for the book have come from practically all the districts where missionaries are in contact with Islam, and some even from Mohammedans themselves who have heard of the memorial. Thirty-five thousand copies have been put into the hands of Moslems, and as they are now being read, passed on to others and carried farther into regions where Christ is not named, we trust that the number who will hear the message will be much larger than the number published. Already the story seems to have opened the way for several missionaries to get into closer touch with the followers of Islam in their fields.
Thus in nearly every province of China proper, in Manchuria and far out on the great road across. Central Asia, Borden’s love to Christ was the means of making known the love of God in Christ to followers of the Prophet. It was a wonderful ministry, wider possibly than he might have accomplished in person, and its outcome who can tell?
But to come back to America. A sketch of Borden’s life by Dr. Charles Erdman appeared in The Missionary Review of the World, and was so much valued that it had to be published separately in pamphlet form. Yet another, written from the point of view of the college student, came from the pen of Charles Campbell, with all the freshness of a classmate’s understanding and appreciation.
A volume in itself might be made of the letters that flowed in―letters from leaders in the front rank of Christian activity, as well as from fellow-students and friends of his own age. From the National Parliament in Peking and the House of Commons in London, from great city churches, oriental universities and lonely mission stations came the same testimony. “Mr. Borden has become a national character in his life and influence,” said a leading man in Chicago. “It gratified me to hear him speak as he did,” wrote Dr. J. Timothy Stone, “because he is careful as to what he says, and views everything with a broad and real justice.”
From the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, Dr. Jowett wrote: “His life just now is standing before the American people; like some perfumed flower from the garden of God.”
“Apart from Christ, there is no explanation of such a life,” said Professor Charles Erdman at Princeton.
“I know of no young man in this country or in England,” wrote Dr. R. A. Torrey, “from whose life I expected greater things. But God has His own way of carrying out His purposes. He has some larger plan of usefulness through your son’s departure than could have been realized by his remaining here.”
“The loss is wholly inexplicable,” came in a letter from Dr. Charles R. Watson of Egypt, “but the thing which forbids doubt or criticism is, from the human side, William’s own spirit of perfect surrender. He had given himself to his Lord for life or for death, and where he trusted we cannot but share his trust.”
On his return from Asia, Dr. John R. Mott said that missionaries in every part of the world bore testimony to the influence of the life of William Borden, and that at the Student Conferences that summer (1913) no appeal was being used with such power as the story of his consecration.
“Many young men live stronger, purer, more yielded lives,” wrote a fellow-student, “because of the life your boy lived and because of the death he died. You cannot hear of them all. You will know some day. The name of Will Borden was more used than any other during the recent great Convention in Kansas City. Japanese students remarked that the investment of life as Borden invested it was the greatest of all investments. The memory of such a son must be a blessing. I am glad he lived and lives.”
“At Bryn Mawr,” a girl friend wrote, “when Dr. W. J. Erdman preached here in May, he told of William as an example of the Spirit-filled life―and oh, Mrs. Borden, it was a marvelous witness! I know it must have struck deep into many hearts.”
Dr. Henry W. Wright, of Yale University, said: “No undergraduate since I have been connected with Yale has done so much for Christ in four short years as Bill did. I feel very lonely trying to work without his visible presence to cheer and inspire me.”
Mrs. Walter Erdman wrote from Korea:
“William’s life has touched many of whom you have never heard, and no one can measure its influence. As for Walter, you can hardly realize what a blow it has been to him. It is the loss of a cherished brother, rather than a friend.”
And the Rev. Walter Erdman himself:
“We have been praying tonight that you may be comforted in the assurance that the love of God does not change, even when our understanding is baffled by His acts, and that our lives may be purified and made stronger through the inspiration of William’s friendship and love and his loyalty to Christ. I learned more things from William about simplicity of faith and steadfastness of purpose than he did from me, during the year we were together while he was still a boy, and the memory of our comradeship will be dearly prized until we meet again....
“I have been thinking more and more, since the news came, that the length of time God permits us to stay here is not related to a certain amount of work He wants us to do, so much as to a certain closeness of relationship to Himself He wants us to attain. Some of us who are less useful, perhaps, are allowed to live on longer that we may learn more and be perfected in understanding. And as for the mystery of the interruption of such a work as his was and promised increasingly to be, while there is no explanation now, I like to think that it is not interrupted, but that as he desired to serve so he will be permitted to serve, only with higher powers. I think of him as still working for Mohammedans in some relation to the proclamation of the gospel.”
Mr. Fennell P. Turner of the Student Volunteer Movement wrote of the fellow-worker he had loved; “Few men plan their preparation with such care and earnestness or carry out their plans with such faithfulness. What great things we expected of him, and how he is missed! But we have this assurance: the life so truly given to God was His life and the work William was preparing to do was His work. On His heart rests a far greater burden for the Moslems of China than we can possibly feel. He will not permit His work to suffer or be hindered because His servant was not allowed to enter upon it as he had planned.”
And a classmate who had preceded Borden to China wrote from Nanking:
“Somehow, already, I seem able to look down the years a bit and see, not one, but many giving their all to the Master to take up the work for Mohammedans here in China which William had planned to do. Just as Keith Falconer and Horace Pitkin did more even in death than in life, may we not believe that God will, out of seeming loss, get great glory to Himself and call many to fill the breach? William was taken while doing with great joy and enthusiasm the work to which God had called him. When my call comes, I pray that I may be found doing my Lord’s work with like faithfulness and devotion.”
Finally our thoughts are carried back to Cairo, for the words of Dr. Zwemer linger longest, spoken in the place and among the friends Borden had last loved. There in the American Mission were gathered, representatives of all forms of Christian service through the city, and with them men wearing the fez and the white turban of the Azhar student. Few leaders had influenced Borden more than Dr. Zwemer, and none could have had truer insight as he spoke at that Memorial Service from the words: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”
One of the great characteristics of this life we mourn and in which we rejoice is that our friend and brother was a soldier, every inch―a soldier of Jesus Christ. Those who knew him best knew that he was fighting, and now he “has fought.”
He won that greatest victory of all, the victory over himself. Charles Kingsley, who knew that life was not a bed of ease or a garden of roses, wrote:
“The very air teems thick with leagued fiends;
Each word we speak has infinite effects;
Each soul we pass must go to heaven or hell....
Be earnest, earnest, earnest―mad an thou wilt:
Do what thou doest as if the stake were heaven
And this thy last deed ere the judgment day.”
And Borden was earnest. No one could say of him that he trifled with the thing men are trifling with all around, the great talent of life.
He won the victory over his environment. By some the victory has to be won over poverty; by others over heredity, or over shame and temptation; but Borden won the victory over an environment of wealth. He felt that life consisted not in “the abundance of things a man possesseth,” but in the abundance of things which possess the man.
He won the victory in great measure over sin and temptation. There is not a young man living in America today who has not to fight a deadly battle for character. Borden fought and won―for two reasons: he always carried his sword and looked up for strength. He was a man of the Bible, as his Greek Testament and the Bibles he used for study and devotion show, and he was a man of prayer.... Even in the smallest details of life he looked up for wisdom and strength.
Another great thing that comes into a man’s life is “urgency.” At college as well as here in Cairo, Borden felt the call of urgency, and to him this was linked with thoughts of the Moslem world. I found underlined in his Testament: “I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day.”
The real secret of this full-orbed life was that, like St. Paul, Borden could say, “I have kept the faith.” How many men in these days―men at the beginning of their ministry, or in pulpits, or at the end of their service―have to cry, “God knows, I have lost the faith.” Borden held to the Bible. He believed it from cover to cover. His faith had been tested, for he had met destructive criticism in his college course. He had a grasp of the oracles of God, and to us it was a great joy to:
We that belief in the Book had made him a missionary.
He gripped the essentials; he had no shibboleth; his was no narrow creed. This gathering is indicative of his wide fellowship. His Egyptian brethren could never have told to which regiment he belonged in the army of God. He was too big a man to wear the distinctive colors of any regiment. He kept the faith―but he did not keep the faith to himself. Ask the man who met him.
“Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.” He now wears the crown of life and glory. “O God, to us may grace be given to follow in his train!”
Only today I was reading in Pilgrim’s Progress of the death of Valiant for Truth:
“‘My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and strength to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who will now be my rewarder.’... So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”