High can He raise me by His power, And though while on the earth I wander, Hereafter in His Kingdom yonder, Them all with bounteous hand He'll give. * -("Holy Joy of Soul," Book iii. Hymn 89.) The Psyche exhorts to following Christ : : Saith Christ, our Captain, follow me! Deny yourselves, forsake the world, Take up your cross, nor trouble shun, I am the Light, I lighten you And shew you virtue's way, Who comes to me and follows me I am the Way, to all I shew How they should truly forward go! My soul is ever full of love, I serve my God with all my pow'r Is 't often hard? I go before, A wicked servant he who stands And views the fight with folded hands. Whoe'er his soul desires to find Will lose it without me, Then let us each take up his Cross, In all our suffering. Who will not here the conflict share, The crown of life shall never wear. ("Holy Joy of Soul," Book v. Hymn 171.) J. K. *The above translation appeared in the Weekly Review, September 19. 1868. It has been revised for this article Have Indian Missions been Successful? 701 ART. III.-Have Indian Missions been Successful? "No," is the answer frequently given, "they have been a failure." We ask any one making this allegation, "What do you understand by failure? Success and failure are purely relative terms; and before one or other of them can be legitimately applied to an enterprise, a decision must have been come to with respect to the proper standard of judging. State, then, more precisely the standard you adopted in pronouncing on the want of success which has attended Indian missions." Possibly the disputant may reply, that in his opinion Indian missions have not been so successful as might have been expected. In this latter form, he virtually says no more than this: "Experience has disappointed the expectations which I had formed of Indian missions." experience disappoints the expectations of most people, not merely in regard to missions, but with respect to everything else, the charge made is not a serious one, for possibly enough the expectations may have been too high, at least it is necessary to shew that they were not so, before it is possible to establish the proposition, that Indian missions have really failed. it As Everything, then, depends on the standard by which success or failure is to be tried. Can that standard be fixed, or must vary with the temperament of the individual, the man of sanguine disposition placing it high, and the person of desponding spirit making it low? To us it appears that it may be fixed perfectly. Success in the heathen world must be tried by the same standard which we apply here. Or, to enunciate the principle in its most general form, there must be the same standard for every country, nay more, for every age. We think any one who properly reflects on this subject, will see that this is an axiom. If one wishing to know the relative size of Britain and of India, were to adopt a linear mile of one size in the one country, and another in the other, his whole calculations would be vitiated. The very essence of true comparison is identity of standard. Nor does the consideration that the Divine Spirit operates by laws almost wholly inscrutable by man, set aside the postulate, that the standard must everywhere be the same, if relative success is to be inquired into. This, we think, is not sufficiently regarded by some. have heard it maintained, that the work may be expected to go on faster in India than here, because we read that "a nation shall be born in a day." This nation, it is assumed, without a thought that proof is necessary, will be a heathen We one, and very likely India. Why is this? We fear from a certain amount of latent unbelief. The obstacles which impede the progress of the gospel at home being known, it is deemed unlikely that the work will ever advance, with any approach to rapidity here, and therefore the scene of the moral miracle now adverted to, is relegated to a less familiar land. We, on the other hand, should, a priori, expect that the predicted birth of a nation in a day, would be within the limits of Christendom, rather than in the heathen world. There no extensive trains have yet been laid, which a spark from heaven might ignite; here, on the contrary, they have. But in this, as indeed in most other subjects, a priori reasoning is out of place, what is requisite is a calm and impartial exegesis of the prophecy about a nation being born in a day, that we may ascertain whether there is any hint, however slight, as to the scene of that great event. The passage, in the exact form in which it is generally quoted, "a nation shall be born in a day," does not occur anywhere in Scripture. One resembling it is found in Isaiah Ixvi. 7-9: "Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child. Who hath heard such a thing? Who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children. Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the Lord: shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb? saith thy God." It, in a remarkable degree, exemplifies the inexact manner in which Scripture is often quoted, that while this passage is supposed to run thus, "a nation shall be born in a day," it is really so worded as to necessitate a negative answer to the inquiry, "Shall a nation be born at once?" A glance at the verse will shew this to be the case. "Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day?" Answer, no; "or shall a nation be born at once?" Again, no. This being so, then, it will stand a unique fact, that "as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children." To what event or events does the prediction refer? We think ver. 20 throws light upon it: "And they (the Gentiles) shall bring all your brethren for an offering unto the Lord, out of all nations, upon horses, and in chariots, and in litters, and upon mules, and upon swift beasts, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, saith the Lord, as the children of Israel bring an offering in a clean vessel into the house of the Lord." There is a passage in another chapter which seems parallel to the one now quoted: "For thy waste and thy desolate places, and the land of thy destruction, shall even now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants, and they that swallowed thee up shall be far away. The children which thou shalt have, after thou hast lost the other, shall say again in thine ears, The place is too strait for me: give place to me that I may dwell. Then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost my children, and am desolate, a captive, and removing to and fro ? and who hath brought up these? Behold, I was left alone; these, where had they been? Thus saith the Lord God, Behold I will lift up mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up my standard to the people and they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders (Isaiah xlix. 19-22). The idea apparently is, that the Gentiles shall bring the dispersed Jews back from the countries in which they have been exiles, and restore them to their own land, and to Zion, which they loved so well. The primary reference, we should suppose, is to the return from Babylon, now long past, while there is also a secondary allusion, either spiritual or literal, to an event in the church's history as yet future. What concerns us at present, is to point out that the great accession to the number of the worshippers at Mount Zion, was produced, not by the sudden conversion of a Gentile nation, hitherto heathen, but by the gathering from various lands of the church members who had long been there in captivity. When, then, the scene of the birth of a nation in a day is laid in the heathen world, considerable latitude requires to be given to the language of the prophecy, while no such want of precision attaches to it, when it is supposed that the nation born in a day was previously nominally Christian. Nations, we believe, were born in a day, and the prophecy fulfilled at the Reformation, but in Divine Providence all things had been put in train for their birth centuries before. Nations, we firmly hold, shall be born suddenly in the future, but in similar circumstances to those which existed in the past; namely, a silent and unnoticed preparation for the nativity long before it shall come. We demur to the doctrine, that trains slowly and laboriously scooped out and charged within the limits of Christendom, are to be proof against the divinely-directed spark from heaven, while that spark is to explode non-existent trains in the heathen world. There is therefore no reason why the passage, of which the exegesis has now been attempted, should disturb the axiom, for we must call it so, that the standard for measuring spiritual success, should be the same in every land, or establish the strange idea that progress in India, where the obstacles are so much greater than here, should be exceptionally rapid. There is another passage, misconception regarding the meaning of which has led to disappointment with regard to the results of Indian missions. We refer to the one in Haggai ii. 7, in which the Messiah is called "the desire of all nations." The idea, which is a somewhat natural one, is taken up, that the further the religion of a nation diverges from the truth, the less satisfying must it be to its votaries, so that when the gospel is presented to men of the most erroneous faiths, they will instantly embrace it, and that with an ardour not often seen in lands irradiated by revelation. This, however, will at once be apparent, that the verse makes no discrimination between one nation and another, but places them all on the same level, so that the idea to which we have made reference has but slender, if any, foundation in the text. The basis on which it is reared is this the expression, "the desire of all nations," is supposed to involve three ideas: 1, that the men of all nations are conscious of unsatisfied desire; 2, that that desire never can be satisfied except in Christ; 3, that whenever Christ is presented, they instinctively perceive this to be the case. The first two propositions we thoroughly accept. The third we do not believe to be in the text at all, and regard it as set aside by experience. There was a void in the heart of the Jews as of all other nations. They desired a Messiah to fill the void, but when he came who could have done this, that instinct of which the third proposition speaks was wholly at fault. They, therefore, rejected Him with every demonstration of scorn, nay, being exceedingly mad against him, they put him to an ignominious death. There must be an awful void in the heart of some of the thieves in our streets. None but Christ can fill that void. When seized and imprisoned, the chaplain of the jail does his best to impress this upon their minds, yet as a rule they are no sooner released, than they return to their evil courses again. Though Christ is "the desire of all nations" in the sense of being exactly adapted to the want of each, yet no human instinct, but only the Spirit of God, can make them feel this to be the case; and in the heathen world, and markedly in Pantheistic India, the feeling of sin is in most cases so slight as in large measure to deaden the desire for a Saviour. We therefore hold that no exegesis of the passage in Haggai can alter the axiom, that we must have the same rule for judging success in all lands. There is thus no valid reason for expecting more rapid progress in India than elsewhere; nay, we believe that a slower advance should be looked for there than in most heathen lands, owing to the terrible obstacle of caste, which has not been weakened nearly as much, away from the presi dency seats, as most people in this country believe. Our space, however, forbids us to enter on this subject; and we proceed at once to inquire what the actual results of Indian missions have been. To answer this question properly would demand a volume, and one too of considerable magnitude; all that we |