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New York 14609 (7ie) 482 - 0300 -Phone (7 IB) 288- 5989 -Fox USA /5o/ THE MISSION AND GOHHISSION OF THE -«CHURCH,»- BY — Rev. a. T. PIERSON, D.D.. PHILADELPHIA. "The King'8 business requires haste. " Here am I, send me." MONTREAL: Hart & Son, Printkrs, 239 St. Jambs St. — ^ ■^■■^. ■ ^ The Mission and Commission of the Church, — BY — Rev. A. T. PIERSON, D.D., PHILADELPHIA. [Copied from " The Missionary Review of the World," by permission of the author, and sent out in the King's Name.] One of Dr. Guthrie's rules for preaching was : " Mind the three ' P's ' : Proving, Painting, Persuad- ing. In other woi-ds, address in every discoui-se the reason, the imagination, and the heart." Of the *' painting" we are to be not a httle on our guard. The art that seeks to adorn the truth sometimes sacrifices it, by giving to it false features or tints : what may be fitting in the department of illustration misleads when it invades that of pure demonstration or definition. Here the one law is rigid exactness. Burke used to say that the woi-ds of a sentence are the feet on which it walks; to change one woi-d, to shorten or lengthen it, or alter its place in the sentence, may change the whole course of the sentence itself. In some things, accuracy is so indispensable that a hair's-breadth distinction may be vital, as in as- « 8 ti-onomtcal culculationH tho minuient fraction of an inch must be mni'leliover's work for rouIs. 1. The limits of our commission are the limits of our authority. Paul writes: "We are ambassadors for Christ." An ambassador is one who represents another: who acts in the stead of a sovereign. Within the limits of his instructions he carries all the authority of the monarch, the empire, the government, which he represents. But the moment he passes the bounds of those instructions, he transcends also the limits of his authority and may even forfeit his commission. It is therefore vital that we under- stand our commission in order that we may always act and speak with authority. Here is a whole pro- vince in God's universal empire in armed rebellion. We who are believei's are sent to offer to evory rebel pardon and reconciliation; as though God did beseech by us, to pray them in Christ's stead, to be reconciled to God. We are to declare the conditions 8 of Hueh reconciliation and resloiafion, but we can- not compel an}' rebel to lay down his aims and submit to God. Nor is this our ])rovince. Our au- thority is explicit ; we aie empowered to publish the good tidin^'s throu^'hont the woild ; there our authority- be<,'in,s and ends. So lon<^ as we confine ourselves to that, behind us, backing up our mes- sage, stands the whole Godhead I But the moment we begin to think of it as our work to "convert " men, we are tempted to tamper with the gospel, tq, abate its seeming severity, to niako it more attrac- tive; or even to invade the province of the Holy Spirit and seek to move dii'ectly upon the unrenew- ed heart and will. It is a dangerous business, this trying to induce men to consent to the gospel. Paul lefers to this perhaps when he says, " We are not as many who corrupt— («aTr;M(iwTtr)_adultei-ato the word of God."* These kapeloi, or hucksters, tavern-keepei-s, were notorious for adulterating their commodities, for the sake of large sales and selfish gains. What a temptation to the gospel preacher to soften the severity of the terms, for the sake of winning men ! "How much owest thou unto my Lord?" "An hundred measures of oil." " Take thy bill and write fifty." What a snare to the church to accommo- date hei spiritual standard to the natural heart and become worldly ! What a temptation to count con- verts and justify as legitimate the means by which their number is swelled lo new propoitions ! Now, be it remembered that, if, even for the sake of drawing men to God, the ambassadoi- adds lo or • 2 Cor. ii. 17. 10 diminishes aiiylil from his message, ho no longor Hpejiks with auihorily. Kobels may bo induced to yield on our terms or their ovvn terms; but until there is submission on God's terms there is no recon- ciliation! The only way to keep out of the clutch of this subtlest satanic temptation is to keep steadily before us that our work is evangelization rather than conversion. Let us preach the gospel just as our Lord has bidden us, and just as he gave it to us to pi-each ; then we speak with all the authority and power of God behind us. But how- over much we may yearn over souls, wo must keep to our instructions, lost passing them we not only forfeit all authority, but betray the souls wo sock to save. II. The limits of our commission are the limits also of our responsibility. That word, responsibility, is full of awe. How far are wo hold accountable for the souls of others ? When is thoir blood on our skirts, and when is it no longer required at our hand? To be held to answer for the tinal loss of one soul is a load that no believer can bear; Paul's exclamation gets thousand-fold emphasis : " Who is sufficient for those things?" But, thank God ! it is not so. We need look no further than that gospel in Ezekiel to learn the law of responsibility.* Originally God ulone was responsible, for he only had power to save, or even knowledge of salvation. When He appointed ambassadors and committed to them the message, that transferred responsibility to them. The * Ezekiel xviii., xxxiii. 10 messenger becomes a mediator: having the good tidings and being commissioned to stand between God and the dying souls of men. Now observe, that from the moment the gospel is fully and faith- fully proclaimed, responsibility is again transferred to the hearer ! In every step and stage of this pro- cess and progress, the transfer of knowledge im- plies the transfer of obligation. The wicked is warned ; he may not bo won ; but the watchman is fi*ee of blame. The moment the gospel herald becomes unduly anxious about its reception, he lisks forgetting his own work and intruding upon that of the hearer, and of the Holy Ghost. Perhaps he loses courage,' boldness, peace. Ho begins to doubt and distrust not himself only but God. He is mixing up his own responsibility with that of those to whom he speaks. In other words, the herald reproaches himself with the heedlessness of his hearers; the ambassador, with the perversity of His sovereign's foes. No! blessed be God, to discharge our duty, by earnestly and lovingly preaching the gospel, is Ui be discharged of all further responsibility. Paul had passion for souls— "great heaviness and continual sorrow of heart "-could wish himself " accursed from Christ, for his brethren." Surely no cold heart, no meie sense of duty, goaded him on. Yet when, at Antioch in Pisidia, those " brethren "" judged themselves unworthy of ever- lasting life," and even raised persecution against him, he " shook off the dust of his feet," in solemn token that he shook off all responsibility for their condemnation, and departed; and at Miletus he j. 11 said to the Ephesiaii oldors, " I take you to record this day that I am pure from the blood of all men; for I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God I" We may be as faithful as Paul, but all we can do at our best will not, of itself, insure one convert or disciple. It will still be true as of him : " Some be- lieved ihe things which were spoken, and some be- lieved not." Some, -ever learning will nevorcome to the full knowledge of the truth." Not a few will become gospel-hardened, which is worse than sin hardened. But Paul's duty was done irrespec- tive of how many believe and obey. The limits of our commission and of our responsibility must co- incide; and because conversion is not our commis- sion, for conversion we are not held accountable. 111. Tke limits of our commissim are the gauge of our success. We are constantly tempted by Satan, and by our own carnal hearts, to weigh in human scales and to measure by worldly standai-ds, the results of our work. Not only in the world, but alas! in the church, (he satanic spirit is abroad, that dares to ask that supremely selfish question: Do missions pay? In this inquiry lurks a latent heresy. It assumes that we are capable of estimating results; still worse, it implies that our estimate of results may lawfully affect our obligation. Both these premises are radically unsound. The tendency is to walk not by faith but by sight, and to judge by appearances, and, because it fostci-s this tendency, our whole system of statistical returns is mislead- 12 ing and perniciouisly liublo to abiiso. Is :i ininiMler of Christ to be judged by the nurnborof converts he gathers in a given year or iho amount of monoy he secures to the Boards ? Away with such standards of Hucct.'^s ! The most important work upon the famous Eddystone is not visible, even at h)w tide. For a few hours each day patient workmen hibourel, .-inchoring lo the rocks those immovable blocks on wiuch rises and rests that symmetrical cone that Snieaton built. That work was slow and is now unseen ; yet, but for that work, there would bo no "LausDeo" graven on the face of that beacon which still stands, after 130 years, off Eiamhead, " to give light and to save life." It was not the quick explosion at Hell Gate that cleared the channel ; but the long under- water toil of miners who wrought out of sight and hearing. The tirst fourteen years at Tahiti passed without one convert or sign of success ; yet on the work of those fourteen years rose the structure of Polynesian missions ! There were nearly fifty years of fruitless toil among the Telugus before the "Lone Star" at Ongole blazed forth like the sun; but then in one year there were ten thousand con- verts, and the Lone Star became a constellation. Isaiah's barren ministry prepared the way for Paul's fruitful evar)gelism. Captain Allen Gar- diner's death at Ticrra del Fuego was the burial of a seed that in the next generation bore such fruit that even Charles Darwin declared that he '"could not have believed that all the missionaries in the world '' could have wrought such result?. . God leaves none of his faithful servants to spend 13 their Ntrcni^th for naught. Our Wi)rk in His work ; it is from Him, for Iliin, with Him, in Him; iind hcnco liiore can bo no faihirc, but wc must never iillompt U) gauge our success by apparent results. If faithful, our reward is sure, though "all day long " wc stretch forth pleading hands "(onl -lient and gainsaying people." The Master Hi" .0 If was "dedpised and rejected of men;" "he came unto his own possessions and his own people received liim not." "The disciple is not above his Master, nor the .servant above his Lord." But the fact is we are incapable of measuring our own suc- cess. To estimate results requires omniscience, omnipresence, eternity. In all work there are three stages: preparatory, intermediate, ultimate i tlie preparatory is often the most tedious and pro- longed, where the ultimate is most glorious. Man, noblest of animals, is most helpless at first and slowest to develop. The fields of the world that have yielded the greatest harvests have been long- est in the preliminary tillage. God's true mission- ary goes whort« He sends him and does what He bids him; and ho succeeds, though all he may do is to plow up tho hard ground and gather out the stones and leave a fair field for the sower. And in God's eyes many a man who, by tho armful or wagon-load, brings sheaves to the garner, is only reaping from others' sowing. I V. The limits of our instructions set limits to our field and work. Christ says: "The field is the world," and no part of it is to bo left untilled and unsown. If we 14 wait to ''convert our hearers, we shall never put onr working' force Into the whole field. Just here has been the great mistake of the church even in her missionary era! Chrinfs principle is D.rFusioN: our practice i« concentration. We emphasize conversion, while He emph.-.sizes evani^^elization- and so our human phllo,s,.phy counsels m to convert as we go, and so increase the converting force. The effect ,« that wo keep tilling a few little corners of the world-held, sowing them over and over, until the soil loses power lo yield, while tracts a thou- sand m.les Hqua,c have never yet borne the tread of the sower! Even disciples are asking, -Are there not heathen enough at home, that we send the^^flower of our youth to the ends of the ^n J^ mr' ^"^ ""^'^ '*"'^' " «« 3-0 into all the world?" There will always be heathen at home, and in our churches too~the worst sort of heathen who have heard so long without heeding that the word will never beai- fruit in (heir heaite. No soil in equatorial Africa is half so hard for (he gospel- plow as the respectable sinners in our home con- gregations. London has to-day a thousand more missionaries than the whole church supports on the loreign held ; and so long as we hold that our com- mission .s to convert men rather than to preach the gospel to all men, this radical error will confront us in our methods. But so soon as we accept our • mission and commission as woiM-wide evangeliza- tion, leaving to our Commander the time and the way of the final world-wide victory, we shall see the folly of our philosophy and be guided by the wis- 16 fh™ f ?^' .7''"" ^" '**'"" ''^'^^'^ ««'• force over he who e held ; we «hall cea«e to compare respec- tive field, and ma«8 our forces upon those which promme the quickest, largest harvests; we shall simply obey our Master and leave all the rest with xlim. We write with calm pen, when we write down the mistake of the church as radical. It Ih our «olemn conviction that we must change our empha- sis from converting men to evangelizing them. While we wait for long-tilled fields t.> bear fruit in con- verts, other fields, vast and wholly untilled, yield harvest after harvest ef death. After nineteen cen- turies, our labors are practically limited to perhaps one-tenth of the actual world-field. Meanwhile generation after generation has come upon the' stageofhuman history, and passed into the dark- ness of the unknown world, in ignorance of the gospel. Since our Loi-d ai.,se and ascended, not less than fifty such generations, aggregating pro- bab[y twenty times the present population of the globe, have lived and died. And yet there ai^ uearly a thousand millions now living who have never hea.-d the pure gospel. So long as the church tu.ned all her forces into the home field, the dark ages were upon her; and when she sent forth her heralds to light up the death-shade in lands afar her own morning began to dawn ; and so the last ceutury, which has been the missionary century has been the century of greatest growth to Chris- tendom itself. Should we multiply the force in foreign fields a hundred-fold, there would be a thou- sand-told increase at home. 16 V. The limits of our Miiunimon set the bounds to our lawful expectation. U i'ov the convoihion of tho world wo labor and 'ook, tho presont prospect in, it must l.e c.>rife«Hod, Homewhut dishenrienin^r. Tho Christian Churcn has had nineteen centnrios ;,s her workin<,M)eriod and out of 1,500,000,000 of inhabitants, has only about 30.000,000 P. olesiant church-members. After a century of modern missions, with over ono hun- dred missionary societies, some 300 translations of tho Gospels, some 0,000 missionaries in tho field and an annual expenditure of over ten millions of dollars, wo have but a million and a half of con- verts to show. The territory of Brahminism and -Buddhism has been invaded, but never pervaded. As yot, Confucianism mocks our efforts, and Islam- Jsm defies us at its central strongholds. We arc making very slow progress in converting tho world; and even "Christian nations" do such un- christian things that they are sometimes, by their traffic in rum and opium, and in tho bodies and «oulsof men, the chief hindrances of tho mission- ary. Meanwhile, tho increase of population far outruns us, and leaves our prosoltyism and propa- gandism hopelessly in tho rear. No wonder the "pessimists" are triumphant. This is one way of looking at the aspect and pi-ospoct. J3ut what if this be tho wvwty point of viewf What if our Lord has only commissioned us to go everywhere and preach His gospel, and leave to H.m to work ilis wonders when, and where, and as He will ? What if our work be simply to obey His last command-to scatter broadcast, and in 17 every field, the seed of the Won! ; nay, everywhere to bury ourselves as the ^'wkI hociI of the kin^'dom, eontent, ifsollo will, to die ai.d bring forth fruit when we can no longer see it? What if, oven in this "evangelistic era," the church is still making the strange mistake of not yet planning and pre- paring for that world-wide occupation which ho en- joined nearly two millenniums ago? It is not enough to work, or even to work for God and for souls. Only when wc work under Ills direction, and as He directs, do reward and blessing come. Never was mission or commission more clear and emphatic: "Go ye into ail the world and preach the gospel to every cieature." " This gos- pel must first be preached in all the world for a witness among ail nations; and then shall the end come." He who, in his impatience at the " miser- able contracting lines of pes.-imism,» says " there is no 'preaching the gospel as a witness,' here," sure- ly forgets that these are the very words in which our Lord Himself annoinces and defines the work of the present dispensation. There may bo disappointment, even to a di.-ciple, whenever his expectation is based upon an unscrip- tural foundation. Our wish is often farther, not only to our thought but to our hope. Within the limits of our instructions must wc find the entire territory of our assured expectancy. When hope plants her feet upon the promises of God, her standing place is firmer than the eternal hills;' and when she plumes her wings with the promises, there is no limit to her upwai-d flight. But only 18 those expoctationa ripen into fruition which sprinir from some seed of His woi-d. VI. The limits of our commission set the limits of the Spirit's blessing. Only in the way of ,)erfect obedience can be found perfect blessedness. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of love, joy, peace, and power. If we find that we lack confidence and courage in God con- tentment in our work, passion for souls, and unc tion in our message, it may be well to ask, are we in the way of duty? God hath given the Holy Ghost « to them that obey him." To those who " love" him and " keep his words " Christ has pro- mised that mysterious inwai-d revelation of his per- sonal indwelling. It cannot be a matter of little consequence to get a clear, full, exact apprehension of just what our Loi-d would have us to do. Both the teaching of the Word and the testimony of the ages unite in this great lesson to the church • that only so far and so fast as the working force is dispei-sed over the whole field, and the gospel is witnessed unto every nation and every creature, will the last and greatest Pentecost of history be f.ily realized. The primary question is not one of rival fields, whether " home " or " foreign "; not of saving our great cities or saving our own laud It IS primarily a matter of implicit and immediate obedience to Christ. Our mission knows no limits but the limits of the command, which are the limits of the world and of time. So long a.s one human creature has not yet heard the message, our duty as messengere is not done, however many who have 19 heai-d roroain yet unconverted. Our Master stands with imperative 6ngev pointing to unoccupied fields ; and while one such is left, Ho has not Iwen fully obeyed and the Spirit will not be fully outpoured. We believe this and therefore we must speak. Though sadly conscious of feebly stemming a tide that with tremendous energy of movement sweei>s the other way, we here recoi-d our solemn convic- tion that the church has yet to take up this work of missions in dead earnest. These unoccupied fields will never be taken possession of in Christ's name until the only ground of discrimination between one field and another is their comparative destitution. Whether near or far, those whose need Is most ex- treme, and whose ignorance is most appal ling, have the fii-st claim. The drift of the day is toward con- centration on the most hopeful, and even the near- est fields. Hence remote heathen and degr pagan peoples are neglected ; the question is sol - ly raised whether it be right to blast the very blos- soms of our highest Christian civilization in the furnace of African fever; whether it be not waste to send such women as Harriet Newell, Mrs. Grant, Mrs. Judson, Mi-s. Goi-don, to Oriental pagans and South Sea cannibals; and hundreds of Christians quote with relish the sneer of Dickens, who makes Mrs. Jelly by look past the misery of her own household and neighborhood to sigh over Borloboola Gha! For a century the Spirit has poured His fullest blessing on families, churches, and schools of the prophets, whence have gone the largest bands of laborers to fields remote. The paradox of modern 20 chmeh Ilfo in this: Appnronl depletion end. in vu'hcHl roplotion; tho most iiboral ^\a^ „f men and money to frt.ihcHt fields arc tho si^.nal for tho mont mpid roplonishmonl at home. lice is tho key to tho p„,.n,lox : tho Holy Spirit rewanl. ohc