For some time a part of the busy and strenuous life of my husband had been occupied, both before and after the great famine, in seeking to impart to the youths what may be termed secular education. The term "secular " is used for lack of a better word, for to the true Christian there is no work secular or worldly. To the saint every part of life is hallowed, and whatever he does is to the glory of God.
To my husband the work of teaching the children to read was very poor, due partly to the roving, nomadic customs of the Akamba tribe. Whenever boys had just mastered the characters and a few syllables of their language, we generally found them ready to move to some other district.
Above and beyond this, was the fact that my husband was never quite clear that he was fulfilling the will of God in filling his time imparting secular knowledge to the unsaved. Often we heard the natives talking of the death of one and another of their friends whom we had never seen, and who had passed away without ever hearing even the sound of the name of Him in whom alone there is salvation. And these tragic scenes were occurring within easily reached distances from our own station, while we were busy explaining the sounds expressed by certain characters. The familiar lines of Bonar often rang in our ears:
Men die in darkness at thy side,
Without a hope to cheer the tomb;
Take up the torch and wave it wide -
The torch that lights Time's thickest gloom.
My husband felt condemned for using any part of his time in giving secular education while men were passing away who had never heard the glad news of eternal life through the Lord Jesus Christ. When our minds thought about the great, wide field of Missionary enterprise, and realized the vast number of Missionaries whose whole time is taken up with secular education, we were gradually led to the conclusion that there was something radically wrong in the modern method of conducting Missions to the unreached people groups who are lost in their sins.
To all those who are truly interested in the proclamation of the Gospel of the grace of God, there must arise at times the question, "Is the best use being made of the men and means available to accomplish the legitimate hope that in this generation the men of every tribe and nation shall, at least, hear the message of salvation through our risen Lord?" One cannot but realize that, however bright are the prospects in certain parts of the world, yet in some seemingly prosperous Mission fields how few real conversions there are among those who are enrolled as so called christians. By "conversion" I do not want lip-service to a teaching or truth, the pronouncing of a shibboleth, nor any merely pretend outward attachment to a sect or denomination, nor yet the fashionable, or may be national, following of the Missionary and his Book. We want only that regeneration of heart—the work of the Holy Spirit in all those who believe and receive the Gospel of Christ, as taught in the New Testament.
In the first century how few Christian workers there were, how isolated and independent their position, and how terrible the persecutions they endured, but what great results followed the labors of those few men of Galilee and Judea, most of whom were ignorant and unlearned. In the twentieth century what numbers of men and women are professedly laboring in the Gospel—oh that there were ten thousand times more!—but are the results in these latter days at all appropriate for opportunities presented to them; while at their back there exists such massive, religious machinery, in the form of organized societies with large incomes of many tens of thousands, and in some cases hundreds of thousands of pounds per year?
All must agree that the present spiritual issues of Missionary work are in no way to be compared with those which followed the labors of the few disciples of the Carpenter of Nazareth, who turned the world upside down in the first century, though they had neither Missionary society, printing press, steamships nor trains to help their work.
Everyone in whose heart there is a spark of true spiritual life will ask themselves why is it so? One thing is certain, God's arm is not shortened that it cannot save. He willeth that all men should be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. His voice still calls to fallen man, "Come let us reason together, though yours sins be as scarlet they shall be white as snow." It demands of us, therefore, to ask ourselves, in deep humility, if there is anything lacking in the usual methods of doing present-day Missionary work? Is there a cancer at the roots? Is there a fungus among the branches?
Perhaps none would be more ready than the Missionaries themselves to acknowledge that there is something wrong, which they cannot pinpoint; that there is a malignant growth, on which they are unable to place their finger. There are those who would suggest that the presence of unsaved men and women in the field—prophets whom the Lord "sent not, yet they ran"—is a great barrier to the progress of the Gospel. Others would say that in some cases Missionaries cling to the fashions and customs of the world, instead of obeying the voice of God in coming out from among them and being separate and touching not the unclean thing. Is there not, however, something else which bears not the "hallmark" of the New Testament methods-of proclaiming the Gospel of the Lord Jesus.
Let one question be asked, and if that is faithfully and truthfully answered, it may bring to light the one great cause of the lack of spiritual results commensurate with the Missionary operations of today. How many Missionaries are engaged in giving secular education to the lost people who have been instead sent out to proclaim the Gospel of Christ and salvation through His Name? May it not be that the vast majority of the Missionaries in the foreign field being so employed is the one great fungous growth, which, like a vampire, is sucking the blood of all Missionary power.
Be it emphatically known that concerning secular education, we do not disagree with it. It is a good thing; but education does not change the heart nor save the soul, or else from out our seminaries of learning there would not go forth year by year the subtlest false christians and the most wicked people.
Who would be even bold enough to suggest that the educated West End of London, with all its advantages of birth and worldly estate to boot, is more holy than the uneducated East End, which has been nurtured in degrading environment? The Gospel of Jesus Christ alone can regenerate the heart, and to preach that Gospel the Missionary is truly sent forth, and for that work he is manifestly supported.
Jesus Christ himself never said one single word about secular education, and it is notorious that his apostles (except Paul) were chosen from uneducated men. The people of Palestine in the beginning of the Christian era were a comparatively illiterate race, but Jesus Christ did not send out his disciples among the Galilean hills to increase the educational abilities of the population, but only to preach the Gospel which saves and regenerates, and of which the learned Paul was not ashamed, for he found it to be the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.
If Paul and his associates had settled down in some village or among some inhabited hillsides, and offered worldly inducements to the children to come and learn the first principles of their own language, would historians have had to chronicle such world-astounding conquests of the Gospel as have been recorded in the first century of the Christian era? That this mode has been adopted in many parts of the mission field no one can deny. To say the very least of it, what a grotesque, insincere and un-Christlike mode of proclaiming the Gospel. I do not think it is too much to assert that the devil is probably quite satisfied with the present arrangements, and that as long as the professed "Heralds of the Cross "occupy their lives with the work of imparting secular instruction, he will continue to give his approving smile.
Every Missionary well knows that in heathen lands the arch-enemy of mankind has for ages held undisputed sway. There the simple follower of Christ encounters the most diabolical onslaughts and the fiercest opposition. It is there the enemy strikes his mightiest blows, and directs his deadliest shafts. He does not always, however, appear in forms satanic. His ways are movable, thou canst not know them. If he can only foist upon the Missionary some idea, which, if carried out, would retard the onward progress of the enlightening, soul-saving Gospel of Jesus Christ, how gladly will he transform himself into an angel of light. Has he not done so, in inducing so many Messengers of the Cross to believe that the imparting of education to the heathen is, in some sense or other, analogous to the preaching of the Gospel.
In a Missionary book recently published, the author makes the following statement:—"If there is one thing that the Missionary has less to do with than another it is preaching. He rather assumes the roles of teacher, schoolmaster, etc., for he has learned that the African cannot be a saint without being a scholar and an artisan."
It is surely a travesty and defamation of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus to assert that, before men can be saints, they must become either mathematicians or craftsmen. To assume that a man's salvation depends, in any sense, upon his ability to read and write and solve problems, is no less than a covert confession of unbelief in the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to save the soul.
The revealed will of God declares that no man who comes to Christ is ever cast out, and that all who truly believe in His Name and accept Him as their Savior are born of God, and have passed from death unto life, and this irrespective of the degree of knowledge they possess, whether acquired by observation, experience or study. We have not the faintest evidence from the Scriptures of Truth, or even from our own fallible experience, that education makes men more ready or willing to accept God's Message. The most astute philosopher and cultured scientist are just as difficult to lead to a knowledge of salvation as the simple rustic or illiterate yokel.
Of the first fifteen men who were converted to God on our Station, fourteen had never learned to read a syllable of their own language, and all of them were fearless witnesses to the saving power of God, and lived a life of Christian testimony in their own villages.
Education is a power, just as wealth is a power; but wealth does not save the soul, and neither does education. Both may be harnessed in the cause of Christ, or prostituted to the service of the evil one. Wealth may be laid upon the altar for the furtherance of the Gospel of the world's Savior, and for the amelioration of human woe, or devoted to blighting and destructive purposes. Education, set apart and consecrated to God, may become a mighty potency in spreading the glad tidings of salvation, but what a scorching, withering, debasing influence emanates from the lecherous voice of the educated debauchee, and flows through the pen of the cultured writer of immoral and degrading literature. Educated men may be saved just as wealthy men may be saved, but they are saved in spite of their education and wealth, not because of them.
It can be useful that men and women who are born of God should be educated, and that institutions be established for the training of all be available; for, although the lack of education does not affect the saintship of the native, it may to an extent limit the sphere of his usefulness. Hence it is expedient that all those who are changed by the grace of God should be trained, and more fully fitted to be messengers of salvation to their unregenerate companions.
Whatever advantages, however, education confers, a passport to the Mansions of the redeemed is not one of them. The Gospel of Jesus alone can accomplish the miraculous work of regenerating the human heart. May we ever remember the wise remark of the old Japanese Christian to a late University professor on the eve of his departure from the East. "Tell the people," said he, "who send out the Missionaries that we need less formulas and more Christ." In taking to the heathen the soul-saving Gospel, we have in many cases been most careful to introduce with it many of the hoary excrescences and morbid developments which have attached themselves with parasitical tenacity to God's evangel, impeding spiritual life and veiling the redemptive power of the Omnipotent Savior. Let us lop off these non-essentials, and as faithful followers of the Master cling to New Testament Christianity, knowing nothing among the heathen "except Jesus Christ and Him crucified." No ceremonial bolstering nor educational attainments are necessary to prepare the heart to accept that everlasting life which is the free gift of a loving God.
Even to those who expected to find their salvation through a mere ritualistic examination of the Sacred Writings, Christ said, "Ye search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and these are they which testify of ME; and ye will not come unto ME that ye might have life."
If education is necessary to salvation, and if the earth's illiterate must be educated before they are prepared to receive the Gospel of the grace of God, when is the evangelization of the world to be accomplished? Leaving out of consideration the immense continent of Africa, with its countless tribes speaking hundreds of different languages, and the millions of China with conditions and figures which are both alike staggering, let us look for a moment at the comparatively small peninsula of India. Of its (then around 1900 AD) 300,000,000 (by 2000 AD a billion!) of people over 280,000,000 are unable to read or write. There are 89,000,000 adult women over fifteen years of age, and of these there are 88,500,000 uneducated.
In connection with this subject, I give a short quotation from the letter of a lady Missionary in India. "It must not be supposed," she says, "that a year is the average time in which a Hindi woman will learn to read. Miss B. and I have been teaching a pupil for four months who has only just got over the difficulty of letters and vowel marks! She is not more dull than the average of her class, many of whom begin to learn only to get weary of it when they see the difficulties.... I do not expect that she will be able to read the Bible by this time next year, even with our united efforts."
Again, when a Missionary was asked how long he thought it would take a coolie, aged thirty-three, to learn to read in the Oriya character, the answer was: "Very few would believe they could learn at all at such an age. If determined and methodical, a man might succeed in six or seven years, but it would be hard work."
Granted that Missionaries accept the fallacy that education is an essential introduction to conversion, when, in the name of God and humanity, at the present rate of missionary education, are these millions of ignorant heathen to be ready to "behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world?!"
I repeat once more that Jesus Christ never gave utterance to one syllable about education, nor is there a single statement recorded on the subject from the lips of His apostles. The learned have never had a monopoly of grace. The religion of Jesus Christ is a life, not an education. Education, however preliminary or advanced, means nothing in relation to one's nearness to Christ. "The world by wisdom knew not God." "God hath made foolish the wisdom of this world." A native's Christianity depends no more upon the amount of education he receives than it does on the quantity of clothing he wears. Men are not Christians by education no more than they are by birth. A man may be born a Hindu, or a Muslim, or a Taoist; but Christians are made—created by the Holy Spirit of God through the Message of the Word; and it is the task of Missionaries to proclaim that Message.
Surely the Gospel has been kept back from the lost multitudes long enough. It is but a century since European Christendom began to think seriously of obeying Christ's last injunction. Never before were the nations of the world so ready to welcome the Heralds of the Cross as they are today. Would it not be an unpardonable crime to attempt to give them education instead of the soul-saving Gospel of the Lord Jesus? They ask for bread: shall we give them a stone?!