Christian Missions

THE ADVANTAGES AND OBLIGATIONS OF YOUTH, IN REFERENCE TO THE CAUSE OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS STATED AND ENFORCED

"Other men labored, and you are entered into their labors."
John 4:38

In these words, and in the context, our Lord compares the spiritual renovation of mankind to the process of agriculture. The field is the world; the seed is divine truth; the farmers are the prophets of the Old Testament, the apostles of the New Testament, with all other ministers of religion; entering in succession upon the scene of labor, some to plough, others to sow, and the rest to reap. The course of spiritual vegetation is ever continued, not indeed at all times with equal rapidity, for there are wintery seasons in the spiritual world, as in the natural world. Nor in all places with equal results, since God, in the exercise of his wise, inscrutable, and absolute sovereignty, has given greater luxuriance to some soils than to others! Every person and every thing—is preparing for, and hastening to, the general harvest at the end of time.

Our Lord, that he might rouse the energies and encourage the hopes of his apostles, reminded them how much had been done by John the Baptist and the prophets to prepare their way, to facilitate their labors, and to ensure their success. Information had been diffused, attention had been fixed, expectation had been awakened—and the minds of men in some measure prepared for the great announcement of the gospel. The ploughmen had been in the field to break up the fallow ground, the sowers had scattered the seed—and now the apostles were about to thrust in the sickle of the reapers, and to bear home with rejoicing those sheaves—the seed of which had been sown with many tears, by the men of a former generation.

I. This subject, young people, (for you are the special objects of my address tonight,) is exceedingly appropriate to you, as very accurately setting forth the relation in which you stand to that great cause which has convened us this evening. Listen to me attentively, while, in the first division of my discourse, I attempt to give a short survey of the principal events which have occurred since the beginning of time—and to trace their influence upon the spiritual culture of mankind.

This world, as it was finished by the hand of the Creator, was a place of ineffable loveliness; its natural and spiritual scenery corresponded perfectly to each other, and the material beauty of Paradise was but an emblem of the still richer beauties of holiness reflected from the first human pair, while they bore the unsullied image of their God. Their apostacy changed the scene of the whole; and the garden of the Lord, both within and around them, became a wilderness. Jehovah did not, however, abandon in disgust and indignation his disfigured and desolated race—but, in execution of the scheme which, upon a foresight of the fall, he had devised from eternity, and which had a direct reference to the cross of Christ as its center, commenced that series of means and operations which is designed ultimately to make the wilderness and solitary place to be glad, and the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose.

Before Adam left the scene of his transgression, the mercy of God laid for him, in the curse denounced upon the serpent, and the promised seed of the woman—the foundation of faith and hope, and therefore of penitence and holiness, and illustrated and attested all by the rite of animal sacrifice. Amidst the increasing crimes of the antediluvian world, the solitary voice of Enoch was lifted up in warning; while his miraculous translation into heaven, by opening a vista into the eternal state, and furnishing a proof of both the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul, supplied, in a most impressive form, the doctrine of man's future existence, without which morality has no foundation; and without which there is no consolation for the evils of life. That warning and that lesson failing, the Almighty, by the deluge, swept from the face of the earth the human race, as altogether abandoned and corrupt, planting it again from the holy stock of Noah, and giving a display of his own wrath against sin, which has never been forgotten in the traditions of the nations. When human pride and ambition had conceived the gigantic scheme of a universal tyranny, with the tower of Babel for its capitol, the design was frustrated by the confusion of tongues; and the dispersion of mankind which ensued originated or foreshadowed that system of colonization which is ultimately to fill the world with a people prepared for the Lord.

In the calling of Abraham, the plans of heaven began to be more clearly developed, and the purposes of divine mercy to expand with rapidity; then commenced that magnificent series of communications between the visible and invisible world, which, while they related primarily to the great Redeemer and Reformer of mankind, had a special reference to the Jews, that extraordinary people, whose history has borne, and, though less conspicuously, still bears so important a part in the great drama of providence. To preserve the chosen seed from being corrupted by the idolatry of the Canaanites, they were sent, by a train of singular events, originating in the envy of Joseph's brethren, to sojourn among the Egyptians, to whose mythology they were opposed both by their agricultural habits and their sacrificial rites. When they were so miraculously multiplied, notwithstanding the cruelties practiced to exterminate them, as to be sufficient to people the promised land, they were delivered from the house of bondage by dreadful visitations, intended not merely to humble the pride of the Egyptian power—but to be so many proofs of the folly and wickedness of Egyptian idolatry.

At the base of Sinai the Jews were formed into a nation, and fenced off from all other people by the peculiarities of their law, which served at once as a rule of spiritual conduct, a system of national regulations, and a dark shadow of the means of human redemption; but the great design of which was to preserve among them, when lost by all the world besides, the knowledge of the one living and true God, and the hope of eternal life through a system of sacrificial mediation. After forty years' wandering in the wilderness, during which many impressive types of the great work of the Son of God were displayed, they were settled in Canaan, then the center of the known world, where they might be a witness for Jehovah before all nations. After awhile, the spirit ofprophecy, the testimony of Jesus, which from the beginning had thrown a few scattered gleams upon the darkness of futurity, diffused a glowing luster upon the otherwise impervious gloom, and disclosed, in splendid vision, the glories which, in the train of Messiah, were advancing to fill the earth. By the frequent captivities of the Jews, and especially by the more permanent and extensive one in Babylon, exiles from Judea carried with them to other lands their sacred books, and spread through the East a vague notion of the approaching reign of Christ.

The Persian empire was raised up to overthrow that of Babylon, to break in pieces the yoke of the oppressor, and to restore to their native land the nation on whose preservation depended the purposes of mercy towards our guilty world. The Grecian empire ascended to dominion upon the ruins of the Persian, and by rendering the Greek tongue familiar to the civilized portions of mankind, made way for the diffusion of revealed truth of Scripture, through the medium of the Greek version of the Old Testament, and prepared the whole earth to read the New Testament in its original language.

Greece became the theater on which was performed, for the instruction of the universe, a grand experiment, the design of which was to prove how little human reason, unaided by divine revelation, could do in the discovery of truth; and to demonstrate that man, having once broken the bond of his allegiance to God, and wandered from the fountain of light and life, could never restore himself, and must be brought back—if brought back at all—by a special interposition of sovereign grace. For this purpose the Grecian philosophy arose. The scene of her instruction was well chosen, uniting all that was beautiful in natural scenery, and all that was interesting from historical association. Her apostles were men of gigantic minds; for where shall we find, in modern times, the equals of Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus? The note of invitation went forth from the schools through all the earth, multitudes flocked to Athens from all parts of the civilized world. And what was the result? The apostle has summed it all up where be says, "For it is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will set aside the understanding of the experts. Where is the philosopher? Where is the scholar?

Where is the debater of this age? Hasn't God made the world's wisdom foolish? For since, in God's wisdom, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of the message preached. For the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom—but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. Yet to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is God's power and God's wisdom, because God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength." (1 Corinthians 1:19-25)

When 'human reason' had shown its weakness by actual experiment, then did God divulge the mighty secret which had been in his bosom from eternity. The fulness of time was now come, the time fixed upon in the counsels of heaven, the time foreshadowed on the page of prophecy, the time when the world was prepared, by the changes of four thousand years, for the grand event, and God sent forth his Son! And he by his MIRACLES attested himself as the commissioned Redeemer of the world; by his SERMONS rescued the moral law from the false glosses which ignorance and corruption had thrown over it; by his LIFE gave an example of the beauties of holiness; by his DEATH upon the cross, offered a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of the world; by his RESURRECTION, declared himself to be the Son of God with power; and by his ASCENSION, poured out the Holy Spirit to apply the benefits of his death, and sanctify the hearts of men.

The death of Christ was the central part of the divine administration; everything, from the beginning, had looked forward to it; and all things, to the end, will look back to it. The Roman empire had now swallowed up the Grecian empire, and had become more extensive than any which preceded it. Its fine roads opened a way of travel through its provinces to the ends of the earth, while its unity afforded facilities of communication between country and country, never before possessed in so great a measure. The apostles, having received their commission to preach the Gospel to every creature, sped along the Roman highways with the ministry of reconciliation and the glad news of salvation. The Spirit of God was poured down upon their ministry—churches were planted; and the Scriptures of the new Covenant were written, those immortal words which are life and spirit. The New Testament believers scaled Olympus, and drove from their seats the conclave of gods and goddesses, with which an elegant but polluting mythology had peopled its heights, and then trampled to the dust the splendid material representations of those abominable mockeries of the Deity.

Mightily grew the word of God and prevailed; until, at the conversion of Constantine, Christianity was at the same time established and corrupted. At length, when the seed of the kingdom had been sown over a great part of Europe, a long wintery season supervened under the rise, growth, and prevalence of Mahometanism in the east, and the tyranny of Popery in the west. Centuries of tempest, gloom, and sterility rolled heavily along, until the revival of learning, and the invention of the art of printing, showed glorious and gladsome symptoms of returning spring. Then God gave first Wycliffe, and afterwards Luther—that greatest of uninspired men, the thunder and lightning of whose eloquence shook down to the earth the third part of the colossal fabric of Popery, and cracked and unsettled all the rest, beyond the power of popes, cardinals, and monarchs to repair it.

Events now followed in rapid succession, all closely connected with the spiritual culture of the world, and powerfully influential upon it. The discovery of the polarity of the loadstone, and the invention of the mariner's compass; the disclosure to Columbus of the new world beyond the Atlantic; the discovery of the passage to the East by the Cape of Good Hope; the establishment of the British power in India—all are leadings of Providence connected with the illumination, sanctification, and salvation of the human race. The puritans and nonconformists planted the tree of religious liberty—Whitfield and Wesley roused the spirit of piety which had lain down to take inglorious slumber in its shadow. By the hand of Robert Raikes, God gave us the Sunday-school system; by Carey and Bogue, the Missionary Society; by Bell and Lancaster, the improved schemes of popular education; and by Joseph Hughes, the Bible Society.

Nor ought I, in this survey, to omit that event—the greatest in modern times, whether we consider its influence on the politics, the commerce, the civilization, or the religion of the globe—I mean the independence of the United States of America. In this stupendous political phenomenon, we have seen the rapid expansion of a colony into a sovereign state, which has acquired a degree of strength, that for the period of its growth has no parallel in the history of the world. While, as a Briton, I cannot contemplate but with some apprehension the amazing energies of this youthful giant, rising up to contend for maritime and commercial ascendancy with the parent state, yet, as a Christian, I rejoice with joy unspeakable, to see that great and growing nation carrying her glory and honor into the temple of the Lord; uniting her strength and her resources with ours to establish upon earth the universal reign of Christ; and furnishing not only new territory over which the scepter of Immanuel shall extend—but an inexhaustible supply of all the means necessary for carrying on, in every part of the world, a war of aggression upon the powers of darkness!

This is only a condensed and rapid survey, my young friends, of what God in his providence and grace has been doing for the spiritual culture of the world. All his counsels concentrate here. He is ever enclosing the great moral waste in this lower world—always opening channels for extending to the parched and desert places of the earth—the river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb! He is ever throwing the verdure and blooming lines of cultivation over the wilderness. Yes; he has given the world by covenant to his Son. The decree is passed, that he is to have the heathen for his inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for his possession! He has written it on the page of revelation—it is published to hell, in the way of defiance; to earth, in the shape of invitation.

Next Part Christian Missions 2

Back to John Angell James