THE

CHURCH MISSIONARY INTELLIGENCER

AND RECORD.

JANUARY, 1881.

THE GOSPEL OF ST. PAUL, THE LIGHT OF ASIA. A Sermon preached before the University of Cambridge on Sunday Afternoon, 20th June, 1880, being Commencement Sunday,

BY THE REV. G. E. MOULE, D.D.

(Now Missionary Bishop for Mid-China).

"I communicated unto them that Gospel which I preach among the Gentiles."-Gal. ii. 2. HESE words, taken from the midst of St. Paul's account of his own life, describe an act full of important interest. The Apostle had been preaching Jesus Christ already fourteen years. He had been indebted to no human authority for his commission, or for his message.

Jesus Christ, revealed to him in the midst of his career as a persecutor, had given him both the one and the other. Awakened and converted, he had at once cast himself at the Lord's feet, and put his whole being at the Lord's disposal. And thenceforward, though the Church at Antioch had borne its part in designating and sending him forth with Barnabas on a particular errand, his journeys and his preaching had all been guided by the direct authority and inspiration of God in Christ.

Why does he now, as if acknowledging some higher earthly authority, some court of reference in the Church, render to it an account of his, already so often repeated, evangelical doctrine?

Unquestionably it was from no misgiving in his own mind, as to the actual truth of the Gospel, or the universality of its application. Rather was it for the sake of his brother Apostles at Jerusalem, and lest they, misled by exaggerated and partial reports, should lend the weight of their authority to the spurious Christians who had gone down "from James," and were interfering with the evangelical work in the provinces.

Let us, for a few moments, remind ourselves what were the principles of the Gospel as Paul preached it, and who were the Gentiles to whom, before and after this visit to Jerusalem, he preached it.

With regard to the second point he says: "I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians, to the wise and to the unwise." Athenians and Corinthians, the people of Ephesus and of Antioch, those of the Roman province in Macedonia, and the inhabitants of the rough mountains of Galatia,-these, and Imperial Rome besides with

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all its miscellany of races and of classes, were the Gentiles, the Heathen, to whom the converted Pharisee proclaimed the Gospel in the course of his unresting itinerancies or by means of his weighty letters.

What he preached to them, and with what views of the scope and efficacy of the message, he tells us again and again. This very Epistle is penetrated with its phraseology and its principles.

But in the contemporary Epistle to the Corinthians we find it categorically set forth. Thus in the fifteenth chapter, he writes: "I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye received and wherein ye stand, by which also ye are saved if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He was seen of Cephas. Christ, the Messiah, according to Old Testament Scriptures dying for our sins, buried, risen the third day from the dead, seen by well-known witnesses, of whom a few were no more, but the majority still alive;-this was the theme, the subject-matter, of the announcement made to the worldly and sensual, yet cultivated, people of Corinth. As Greeks they affected philosophy and reason. The Apostle came amongst them resolved "to know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified." They asked for wisdom, but he,-" he preached Christ crucified, to the Jews,"-he knew well," a stumbling-block, to the Greeks foolishness; but, to those who are called, Christ the power and the wisdom of God."

Once more," Jesus and the resurrection," the coming judgment, the present duty of repentance, the authority of the Judge and Saviour attested by His own resurrection," these were the burden alike of the conversations and of the public address held by the Apostle in Athens itself, the eye and focus of all ancient culture and philosophy.

To the less cultivated, and to the more practical, nations, it was still the same. "Turn to God from your idols, to serve Him the living and the true, and to wait for His Son from Heaven, whom He raised from the dead." (1 Thess. i.) "The Gospel of Christ is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, The just shall live by faith.'" (Romans i.)

Truly Apostolic is our Creed, in this sense at least, that it is attested in its main outlines by every extant writing, nearly by every paragraph, of the great Apostle, St. Paul.

It was this Gospel, this historical exhibition of Jesus Christ, Messiah, the righteous Prince and Saviour of sinners,-that St. Paul deemed it advisable to "communicate" to the heads of the Church at Jerusalem "lest haply he should run, or had run, in vain;" lest it should turn out that through their refusing countenance to him, and lending it to his opponents, his influence as an evangelist should be blighted in the future, and the work already done by him be withered and rendered futile.

We know the result of the communication. James the actual head of the mother-church, Peter and John the chiefs of the Apostolic fellowship, offered no criticism, found fault with nothing, either in the message, the scope aimed at by the oecumenical messenger, or the applications he made of it, and the inferences he drew from it. The Gospel, just that tidings which St. Paul had recited, was in fact recognized by them as intended for all nations. It was to be freely offered, without reserve, without economy, to all. It was destined to be received by the Lord's chosen everywhere; and everywhere it was to be attested by the accompanying signs of a cleansed and sanctified life, of brotherly love, of heavenly hope, and of devoted allegiance to an unseen but beloved Lord.

Brethren! the Church of England, and this, thank God still Christian, University :-the Church and the University alike, in so far as they are Christian,-owe a debt to the Lord and to mankind, on account of the still unfinished work of Apostleship, of the propagation of the Faith throughout the world. That which eighteen hundred years ago was laid upon the Church by her ascending Saviour, as His last wish and command, is still unaccomplished. Christianity,-even if we include under that venerable name the semi-paganism of the erring Churches,-Christianity, in its widest meaning, is still the religion of the minority. "There remaineth yet very much land to be possessed."

There are those, it is true, who would persuade the Church to hold her hand,—and not to obtrude upon Asia the creeds of Europe, nor, on the other hand, to offer dogma and motives drawn from impalpable considerations to savage tribes whose need is rather civilization and material improvement. At one time Mohammed, at another Gautama Buddha, is proclaimed as the "Light of Asia;" and we are invited to lay aside our exclusiveness, to seek common ground in those great systems, and to wait hopefully for "some better thing," the result, not of the Divine revelation of a Divine atonement and a Divine teacher, but of I know not what development of the "enthusiasm of humanity," which is to promote in hitherto untried ways the best interests of mankind.

The existence of common ground between the divine Religion of the Church and the human Religions of the World is a fact full of interest for the Missionary and the Christian. Christianity is the gift of God, but it was given for man; and it assumes and bears witness to all true characteristics of human nature,-the remains, however defaced and imperfect, of the divine image in which God made man. And it affirms and sanctions as part of its own law the moral principles which conscience has, here and there, with more or less clearness, otherwise asserted.

The ethical distinction of Christianity is, not its exclusive possession, but its complete possession of every true moral principle. And we find therefore, and thank God for the discovery, witnesses for human responsibility, for divine justice, for the social virtues, and even for the immortality of the soul, more or less clear and full, scattered up and down in all the great religions of human origin.

Thus in Confucianism, the justice of heaven and the supremacy of conscience are taught with clearness and force. Confucius lays it down. that: "There is no place left for supplication for the man who sins against Heaven." "The good man," wrote one of his disciples, "is

watchful over his own conduct even when he is alone." And mutual goodwill and beneficence, the law of reciprocity, is stated to be the epitome of all duty. "What I would not have other men do to me, that will not I do to others." "I would fain stand firm, and help other men to stand." "Love men as you love yourself."

Meanwhile the relative duties are most strongly insisted on;-the mutual duty of parents and children, of brothers, of friends, of husband and wife, of the monarch and the minister.

In these particulars we cannot fail to see the common ground I have spoken of. There are halting expressions; there is a want now of balance, now of heartiness; there is frequently a mixture of downright error. But it is surely no light matter that, in the hearing of hundreds of millions, for more than two thousand years, the sovereignty and justice of heaven, the real authority of conscience, the general law of kindness, and the particular relative duties, have been inculcated in the name of the great Gentile master Confucius.

In Buddha's name too, in the glorification of his singularly lofty traditional character, many a precious fragment of ethical truth has been preserved.

The millions of China have, with quaint inconsistency, combined a certain faith in the ascetic and monastic religion founded by Buddha with the eminently secular and social rules of Confucius. They have naturalized in China the celibate religious orders of Buddhist India, and allowed the principle of the sacredness of life, and the consequent virtue of abstinence from animal food, to modify sensibly the social customs especially of the most populous provinces of the great empire.

To Buddha then they owe the encouragement of the instinctive persuasion of the immortality of the individual, which in the teaching of Confucius all but disappeared. Buddha recognized it indeed in the form of metempsychosis; but there was in his system nevertheless at least the assertion of continued individuality after death, and of the influence of the deeds done in the body upon the prospects of a future

life.

To him also his votaries owe the praise of gentleness and patience, as qualities of true virtue practised and taught by the proud heir of an Indian king, and in his eyes a greater glory than the conquest of the

world.

It is true these things are tainted and disfigured, even more than in Confucianism, by heavily countervailing errors and defects. There is the fatal and irremediable enormity of Atheism,-of the absence of God from the whole Buddhist system. Buddhism teaches no God; and it represents the gods as, after all, only in a happier stage of the metempsychosis, transitory like our own, and liable to give place to some lower condition in the shiftings of the ever-revolving wheel of existence.

Again, metempsychosis tends to destroy, so to speak, the very identity of the human species;-not of the individual indeed, since that is preserved under every possible disguise, but of the species,—since what is all-important is not man but life, just as sacred when it quickens the dull motions of the reptile, as when it beats in the veins of the Saint. "Thou shalt not kill" is the Buddhist commandment. "Thou shalt do no murder " introduces a distinction of no importance for the true Buddhist.

Amongst these Confucian-Buddhists it has been my lot to live and to converse for many years. And apart from the sceptical suggestions whose chilling echoes reached me there from time to time from the West, it has inevitably occurred to me to question myself also as to "that Gospel which I was preaching among the Gentiles." Was it really suitable in its fulness and its simplicity to a race, partly indeed prepossessed with moral principles analogous to its own, but, to so large an extent, also with habits of thought and with beliefs so alien, so hostile, to it? The Gospel had confessedly made but little way hitherto among those millions of India and China. Was there after all reason to deem it unnecessary for them; and even less suitable than their own systems to their national temperament and circumstances?

The answer to such doubts is partly documentary, partly founded on experience and consideration. Christianity is not, after all, the Western religion it is sometimes represented to be; but it is first of all, divine, and, next, it is the offspring of that very continent whose races, we are told, are constitutionally, as Asiatics, unapt for its reception. Above all things it is divine; and its Author and Inspirer, the Incarnate Saviour, the ever-present Spirit,-it is They, it is He, of whom we must inquire what are its destined scope and the limits of its comprehension. The inveterate "weakness of the flesh," the human, the mundane infirmity, which ever affects the Church inasmuch as her seat and sphere of influence is the world, has indeed sadly hindered her expansion and evangelical progress up to this time, the close of the nineteenth century of her existence. But there can be no hesitation as to the Christian believer's duty when he refers to his Lord's command; "Instruct, educate, all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things, whatsoever I have commanded you."

The missionary's heart, pondering never so anxiously the problems before him, needs but to refer to his authority, and his doubts are set at rest. What is his message? That "man hath sinned, but God hath suffered; that God made His Son to be the sin of men, that men might be made, in Him, the righteousness of God." (Hooker.)

This is " a way" indeed which the cultivated heathen must needs "call heresy." Nay there are philosophers, still lingering within the precincts of the Church, and affecting to serve at her altars, who do the same; who extenuate, first, the sinfulness of sin, and then cry out against the notion of the punishment of sin by vicarious suffering, utterly denying the reality of either sinfulness or righteousness by way