THE MISSIONARY RESOURCES OF THE

KINGDOM OF CHRIST.1

"Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand ?". LUKE xiv. 32.

WE turn aside to-night from deliberation and debate, from questions of method and policy, for worship and religious edification, to hear the Word of God, to recall our work in its more spiritual aspects, its nature, its principles, its authority, its power and progress, its resources and results. It is a great work. Years and experience do not diminish the impression of its magnitude. It rises on our larger knowledge, greater and increasing in difficulty and in glory. In every way, in its nature and its scope; in the space it is to cover; in the numbers it is to include; in the grandeur of its purposes, whether in the evil to be conquered or in the benefit to be administered ; in its results, deep as human nature, broad as society, eternal as the soul, it knows no rival. Missions contemplate the displacement of all other religions, to make Christ's the only one, to make it supreme; the creation of a new spiritual life in evil and dead souls and races, and prospectively of a new civilization of the world. It is an undertaking before which human wisdom or ambition might shrink. It stretches itself to a conquest altogether unparalleled in human history. No scheme of commerce or of colonization; no ambition of empire, of Alexan1 Preached at the Semi-centennial of the American Baptist Missionary Union, May 24, 1864.

ever

der, Cæsar, Napoleon; no philosophy, no religion, sought or dreamed such a result, so large, so difficult. All other revolutions are bubbles in the stream compared with this.

Its greatness will be an oppression or an inspiration, according to our view of it. In the face of all this vast, ancient, hardened heathendom, we might stop in dumb despair, appalled and impotent before its terrible grandeur. To confront gods whose thrones are as old almost as history, and ruling three quarters of mankind; to supplant religions to which Christianity is a child in age and in influence; to unweave the falsehoods knit into the thought and habit of nations organized, inlaid, consecrated, autocratic; to invade the spiritual beliefs of whole races on the other side of the globe, is either insane or sublime. It will either daunt or instigate, according as it seems possible or not. To know that the odds against us is in numbers, not in power; that missions go into this conquest equal to it; that Christendom, standing in the minority, yet carries in it and with it forces and allies sufficient,turns the very difficulty and magnitude of the enterprise, the sad magnificence of human sin and misery, into an inspiration. It becomes the mighty provocation of faith, and calls out all its reserves of power.

At any rate, the lines are formed, the orders are given, the field is set, the battle is joined; it is Christendom against Heathendom, and the one which carries weight and the heaviest resources is to win at last. And which? Are we able to take the world for Christ? Can it be done by missions? It is denied, philosophy in the name of civilization denies, that Christianity can dispost every alien religion and evangelize all races. If it has indeed become the religion of the puissant and leading races, perhaps has given them their precedence, still, it is alleged, there remain great, sullen, sluggish masses of mind impenetrable to the spiritual ideas and incapable of the vir

tues of the Gospel. At any rate, they must go through a preparatory dispensation of civilization before they are ready for Christ. And the confidence of Christians is not always fixed and sanguine. They know the difficulty, the resistance; the land for them is full of a people greater and stronger than they; but they do not know how much strength, reserved strength, what help, divine help, stands pledge for final success. They have not weighed some great facts which must incline the scale inevitably towards Christ. Their distrust comes of too narrow a measure of the forces actually engaged to this result. They do not know the possibilities, the undeveloped energies, the resources, actual and latent, of this enterprise of missions. They need to contemplate, as we shall for the hour,

THE MISSIONARY RESOURCES OF THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST.

That many of them should be latent; that God should hold in reserve yet unused forces; that, unrecognized, undisclosed, waiting their time, there should yet lie in germ the secret and coming powers which are to destroy heathenism and enlarge the kingdom of God; that this, like every great movement, should grow by the evolution of hidden energies, is only to state the method of Providence and the law of history. That Christianity should be capable of something more; that its forces are not exhausted, not yet all brought into action even; that the kingdom of redemption should carry in it supplies for every new demand and a constant growth; in a word, resources equal to its destiny, is only to say that Christ, its Head, is divine, and his riches unsearchable. That in present resources, already partially employed, there should be still hidden unknown quantities of power, waiting to be called into action; that every known resource, however old, is capable of great expansion, is not different from the fact that mind is dormant without education, or the soil

fallow and fruitless without agriculture. Raise every agency now at work for the world's conversion to its tenth power, and the kingdoms of darkness would shake out of their place.

I. In taking account now of our Missionary Resources, we begin inevitably with the Truth, Christianity itself, that doctrine of God which is the special and peculiar possession and instrument of the Church, the one thing she is trying to plant in the mind of heathendom. She has truth which is nowhere else; which man has never found; which no enterprise has ever used; which is in no philosophy, no religion, no scheme of philanthropy, of morals; separate, peculiar, divine. She did not borrow it of Aristotle or of Bacon, of science or of civilization. She received it of God. And it is like Him, so pure, so mighty, so eternal. It is no speculation, no sentiment, but a solid, living, smiting doctrine. This the Church has, if she will only use it. She need not go beating the air, blowing bubbles of excitement or of transient empire. She is intrusted with such truth as touches the bottom of all things; doctrine strengthening, vitalizing, majestic; the stuff out of which a divine virtue is made, a divine empire is built. She has this to rely on. She need not hurry. She need not wait. She need not put on appearances of strength. She need not tremble at any reed shaken in the wind. This is her strength, and it is real,- this solid artillery of Bible doctrine. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. And nothing carries the day but that which is charged of God with such power as He has put into the doctrines of the Cross. Evil is not an appearance, it is a vital, terrible reality. Words and wind and flourish will not kill it; nothing but this strong, hot, patient, undying

truth of God's Word. And that we have. And with that, what shall be too hard to subdue?

It is the truth which the world hungers and dies for, the only medicine and regeneration of a groaning creation. The wretched and the dying can look nowhere else. It is the truth of God, but it is the truth for man. gives, He maintains it. By it his throne stands or falls. For He is pledged to it. And by it poor, sick, restless, aspiring yet sinking human nature lives or dies. It is truth high as man's intelligence, deep as his sin, yet kindred to his best affections. It is not an abstraction, a philosophy, a hard, cold system of science and law. It is truth bathed in love, and warm with life; truth not spied out in the cold eternities above the stars, but gushing from eternal love, tender, searching, divine.

Therefore is it a truth which has power; which goes where logic cannot; which strikes home to man's spiritual nature, to sharpen his conscience, to break his heart. It is truth in Jesus, with his divine Life, his personal power in it. And the human mind has found no mightier power, after all. Science has gone far, and brought back much. It has sounded the sky. It has cracked open the earth. It has made the worlds transparent. It has kindled a light on the far horizons of being. It has found methods of timeless communication, of painless surgery. It builds a grand material civilization. But it has never found the secret of human happiness, the way of spiritual peace and everlasting life. It cannot penetrate an inch into the grave to make that transparent. It kindles no light on worlds beyond our horizon. It creates no holiness, while it multiplies luxuries. It builds no kingdom of God with its lenses and engines. It subjects nature to man; it does not bend man to God. No literature, no art, has invented any ideal person even, and civilization has produced no real one, like Christ. With Him we go to the heathen; Christ, the Divine Man, true to our nature, tender to our infirmities, yet perfect above all human excellence; Christ, the Incarnate God, to whom all their polytheisms, even