The London Missionary Society 3

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No, they cannot remain. But we have their characters and their examples; and in these we have the best part of themselves. There is this value in holy excellence—it goes itself to heaven to be perfect and eternal; but as it ascends to the skies, it lets fall its godly character instead of its mantle—to be copied by the aid of memory into the heart and character of all who survive.

The remembrance of 'departed piety' is sometimes more serviceable than even the contemplation of it was while it was yet living. In thinking upon the memory of the pious dead, the heart is softened by sorrow to receive the impression of their virtues; the eye, less clouded by envy, discerns them more clearly; while affection, ever prone to canonize its objects, now, by a refined and generous abstraction, sees them without their faults.

My brethren, let us call to remembrance the fathers and founders of our Society, in whom, if there lacked a measure of grace and splendor; there was a strength, simplicity, and grandeur which made you feel how solemn goodness is. Shall I remind you of Bogue, whose athletic person was but the type of the still more powerful soul which animated it, a soul replenished not with the elegances of literature, or the speculations of philosophy, or the subtleties of metaphysics—but with the great principles of the gospel, and with mighty energies to enforce them! When he rose to plead the cause of missions, he seemed a living embodiment of our Society. His speech was with the force and impetuosity, and something of the roughness, of a mountain torrent.

You heard no splendid diction, no dazzling metaphors, no ebullitions of genius, no honeyed tones; but there was the eloquence of a burning heart, which caused you to hear the cries and feel the miseries of the perishing heathen. You were too much absorbed in his subject to think of the speaker; you felt too deeply and too solemnly to give audible utterance to your emotions; and would have deemed our modern fashion of noisy applause as much out of place as would have been the clapping of hands after Paul's speech to the philosophers of Athens on Mars Hill. And you went away, not talking to your neighbor about the goodness of the meeting, or the eloquence of the speakers—but saying to yourself, "I must after this, do something more for the conversion of the world!"

Then, who that knew Waugh can forget that man of love, whose amenity won all hearts, even as his playful wit and silvery eloquence captivated all minds; or Wilks, under whose somewhat rough and repulsive exterior was concealed one of the noblest and most generous hearts which God ever lodged in a human bosom; or Burder, whose beautiful simplicity was power, operating by the meekness of wisdom; or Hill, whose very eccentricities were but the fantastic wreaths of smoke that rose over the fire of zeal and benevolence which glowed within him?

If I speak little of Haweis, of Eyre, Love, and Brooksbank, and Greathead, names to be repeated with affection by all who value our Institution—it is because time would fail me to enumerate them, and because I knew them only as matters of history. But I cannot omit those noble-hearted men belonging to the city "whose merchants are princes," men who brought from their counting-houses, their banking-houses, and their offices—both wisdom and wealth to our cause, and without whom even the men of the pulpit could have done nothing—Hardcastle, Wilson, Simms, Stephen, Shrubsole, Hankey, and others, who exhibited such bright patterns of that lofty style of renewed humanity, the religious man of business, the man deeply engaged in the affairs of both worlds—who, while he carries on his commerce to the ends of the earth, by the spirit of his dealings inscribes upon his merchandise "Holiness to the Lord!"

But had London the unshared honor of originating the cause? Had the provinces nothing to do with it? Besides Bogue, the originator of the Institution, were there not Williams, and the venerable Jay, the father of us all, (a paternity of which we are not ashamed,) and Roby, and Griffin, and Boden, and Townsend, and Bennet, and a long list of others? Think me not tedious in this recital. With you who knew the men there is no danger of this; and you who did not know them, must forgive this poor but loving effusion of a heart that did.

And shall I pass over your officials? Besides Love and Burder, already mentioned, there were the patient and plodding Arundel, the intelligent and large-hearted Orme, and Ellis, your first missionary, then your secretary, and now your historian. Oh, what men we have had! What men we have lost! But, thank God, over all these wrecks of mortality I can exultingly say, what men we still have! No, brethren, we are not left destitute. Death has swept our pulpits and the benches of our Mission House—but the Spirit of the living God has again replenished them; and were it decorous, and did not savor of flattery, I would make these walls echo, and your hearts vibrate, with the names of living men who are still your advocates, your directors, and your secretaries.

3. The PRINCIPLES on which these worthies acted, still survive. These they derived from the Bible, and not from any human theories of civilization, philosophy, or philanthropy. They founded the Society on the basis of the word of God, determined that it should stand or fall by that. Yes, my brethren, the BIBLE is the central luminary around which all Christian churches and all Christian missions revolve, in nearer or remoter orbits, reflecting the splendor of its beams, and governed by the power of its attraction.

To extinguish, if possible, this orb, has been the object of the power and policy of hell in every age. What was said of the church on a similar occasion to this forty-seven years ago, by Dr. Mason of New York, may with equal force be said of God's truth, "To blot out her memorial from the earth, the most furious efforts of fanaticism, the most bloody arts of statesmen, the concentrated strength of empires, have been frequently and perseveringly applied. The tribes of persecution have sported over her woes, and erected monuments as they imagined to her perpetual ruin. But where are her tyrants, and where are their empires? The tyrants have long since gone to their own place, and their empires have passed like shadows over a rock.

But what became of the gospel truth? She rose from her ashes fresh in beauty and in might, celestial glory beamed around her. She dashed down the monumental marble of her foes, and they who hated her fled before her. She has celebrated the funerals of kings and priests, philosophers, infidels, and heretics who plotted her destruction, and, with the inscriptions of their pride, has transmitted to posterity the records of their shame and her own victories." And here she is in the midst of us this day, in all the beauty and power of her heavenly birth, and all the freshness and vigor of her immortal youth, beckoning us onward to fight her battles, to achieve her victories, and plant her standards from the equator to the poles! The last enemy, with his iron scepter, has from age to age dashed in pieces the earthen vessel which contained the heavenly treasure—but not a particle of that was destroyed by the blow.

Your fathers when they died, left you an unmutilated Bible. Not a single promise lies interred in their graves. The Bible, the whole Bible, which was laid by them as the basis of the Society, remains to support it for us.

But in some cases the Bible is professed while its truths are denied—it is, in a certain way, held in gross, while it is rejected in detail. Our fathers dealt not in vague generalities, philosophical speculations, or in evasive reserves. The evangelical system, in all its purity and simplicity, in all its length, depth, breadth, and height, was their profession and their glory. The divinity of the Son and of the Spirit, the atonement of the cross, justification by faith, the necessity of divine influence for the illumination and regeneration of the soul of man, and the sovereignty of divine grace in the sinner's salvation—were the views of divine truth which kindled their zeal, inspired their energies, and aroused them to the achievement of the earth's conversion. And these have been the principles which alone have been ever found of any power in renovating the moral world. Churches have been known in modern times which have held the ancient symbols of these truths, while they have practically denied the truths themselves. The scenes of Calvin's and of Luther's labors bear melancholy testimony to this, where a semi-infidel rationalism had supplanted the doctrines of the great reformers, even before their creed was formally abjured.

But there is vitality in truth. Neither the sword of the tyrant, nor the pen of the infidel can slay it. From both it is safe, under the protection of its divine Author. It still lives in the very region of death—incorruptible, indestructible immortal. The seed which the Egyptians buried with their mummies, though enclosed in the catacomb, though held in the grasp or laid in the bosom of death for thousands of years, still retains its germ of vitality; and on being exhumed after its long interment, sowed in congenial soil, and exposed to the rains of the heavens, vegetates as certainly and as luxuriantly as if but yesterday it had dropped from the plant.

What are some churches but ecclesiastical mummies, in which the incorruptible seed of the kingdom has been shut up for ages in the icy hand of death, yet all the while retaining its own imperishable life, and when brought out from its grave, and sown in the earth, displaying its power and producing its kind? The doctrine of justification by faith, when brought by Luther out of the catacomb of Rome, was as vigorous and fruitful as when first preached by the great apostle of the Gentiles. Yes; and though now entombed in the rationalism of the continent, or the Puseyism of our country, it preserves even there the living seed, and shall come forth to prove its power and to produce its fruit.

4. Though the founders of the Society have long since departed, the CAUSE itself, which was the object of their living labors and of their dying prayers and hopes still survives. At the time of its formation, scoffing infidels asserted, and timid Christians feared, that it was but a bubble of religious enthusiasm, which would explode over the tombs of those who raised it. Men who turn prophets should make sure of their inspiration. Our ancestors have rested from their labors; but we have entered into them. They did not build a Babel; and we are not dispersed tribes whom different dialects have scattered from the work, leaving the frustrated and deserted scheme to be a monument of their folly and the matter of our shame. On the contrary, they raised a beacon to be the light of the world, the lamps of which are still kept burning by ourselves. They laid the basis of the society, which we have not narrowed. They stretched out the hand of fraternal affection and Christian fellowship to the members of the Church of England, which we did not draw back until, by prelatical bigotry and infatuation, it had been contumeliously refused.

They adopted the world as the field of their operations, which we have not contracted. They planted missions in Polynesia, Africa, India, and China, which we have not abandoned. They raised an income of ten or twelve thousand a year, and predicted that the time might possibly arrive when the liberality of the church would be so far enlarged as to reach twenty thousand—we now raise nearly seventy thousand. They numbered their agents first by tens, and then by scores—we count ours by hundreds. They labored long with scarcely a single convert—we have lived to bless God for myriads. They had government, literature, fashion against them—we, through God's overruling providence, have all these with us. They had to contend with headwinds from the prejudices of the age, of the nation, and in part of the church—our sails are filled with the breezes of popular approval, and our bark is floated onward by a favorable tide.

Does the infidel ask in derision what has become of the cause since the fathers fell asleep, and tauntingly say, "Where is it?" Where? Here this day in the midst of us, not its tomb, not its skeleton, not its monument, not its Spirit—but its living veritable self, in all the vigor of its strength and all the fullness of its growth, with no wrinkle on its brow, with its hair ungreyed, its eye undimmed, its step unfaltering. Where? In the hearts of these pastors and of these churches. Where? In every city, town, and village of this empire. Where? In the islands of the South Sea, in the wilds of Africa, in the islands of the West Indies, on the plains of India, and in the cities of China. Where? In the heart of God, in the councils of heaven, in the schemes of providence, in the predictions of prophets, in the design of the cross! Where? Anywhere, everywhere—but in its grave!

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