THE NEW ENGLANDER. No. CLVII. SEPTEMBER, 1880. ARTICLE I-THE HISTORICAL POSITION OF MODERN MISSIONS. ALL great movements affecting the welfare of mankind, sudden as may be their apparent origin, have their periods of preparation. They are never isolated phenomena, but parts of the Providential development of the human race. A sense of the utter inadequacy of this or that religion to meet the spiritual cravings of those who know no other; the manifest failure of systems of Philosophy to solve the great problems of life; the moral decadence that sooner or later attends all forms of civilization not quickened and constantly reinvigorated by new life from above, prepare the way to a just understanding of the great plan of providence and of grace which we call history. While it becomes us to beware of hasty generalizations in judging of the great events and still more of the great movements of history, we have the highest authority for the enquiry we now propose in our Lord's indignant reproof of the wise men of his day, "Ye can discern the face of the sky, but can ye not discern the signs of the times." agen By a careful observation we may find a convergence of cies and events, preparing the way for the early establishment of the kingdom of Christ, in many respects similar to those which heralded its first promulgation. I. As entering into the preparation for the coming of Christ, "when the fulness of time was come," the church historian is wont to dwell on the fact that for the first time in history the civilized world, then embraced in the Roman Empire, had become one in its political and commercial interests; that through the interchange of thought in consequence of the unexampled facilities for inter-communication, and through the prevalence of a common language of law and of literature, a world-wide breadth of thought and sentiment had been induced, wholly foreign to the narrowness of former days, and, that for the first time, men were become capable of conceiving of a kingdom of God that should embrace all nations. But this preparation is more than equalled at the present day as a consequence of the commercial enterprize that brings men of every race and language into such great centers of trade as New York, London, Cairo, Calcutta, and Shanghai, and scat-1 ters the products of a common industry to the remotest portions of the globe. The firing on Fort Sumpter sent a thrill through the civilized world, started new industries in Egypt and India, and doubled the price of the scanty clothing of the wanderers on the highlands of Central Asia. The best Roman highway, linking the capitol to the remotest colony on the frontiers of civilization, is not to be compared with the railway that spans the continents, the steamer that ploughs the seas, indifferent to wind or storm; while the months required for the transmission of intelligence to the most distant lands are reduced to hours, almost to seconds. More than two-thirds of the missionaries of the American Board can be reached by telegram within twenty-four hours. The most distant nations are brought, as it were, to our very doors. Our neighbors are no longer the men of the next town or state, or, those who use a common speech, but the human race. The physical world has thus become one to a degree far beyond the conception of the first Cæsar; one too in the play of the intellectual forces that are every where awakening men from the slumber of ages, and the stupor of a mere animal existence, to eager expectation and a generous hope of bettering their condition. The salute from a fifteen-inch gun in the harbor of Nagasaki, stirring the hearts of thoughtful Japanese to self-sacrifice, if need be, to secure for their native land material advantages symbolized by "big ships and big guns;" and the eager inquiry of Mtesa on Lake Nyanza for white men to teach his people the arts of civilized life, are but illustrations of the intellectual agencies of our modern life in securing a new and higher unity to mankind. As a means of diffusing the knowledge and the thought of the world, contrast the slow labor of Cicero's copyists with the steam presses of one of our great publishing houses. II. The decay of the old religious faiths and the general decline of morals at the opening of the Christian era, revealing the necessity for the new and more potent forces of the gospel, have been so ably and so fully discussed by Prof. Fisher in the first seven chapters of "The Beginnings of Christianity," and by Dr. Uhlhorn in the first two chapters of his "Conflict of Christianity with Heathenisin" as to leave nothing new to be said. The old religious faiths had lost their power. The intelligence of the educated classes rejected the traditions of the past, and the entire fabric of polytheism seemed ready to crumble to the ground. The moral restraints hitherto imposed by some degree of respect for the old creeds were relaxed, and the moral sentiment left unsupported by any outward aid, gave way under the pressure of a materialistic civilization. The social and moral degradation of all classes justified the fearful picture of the Apostle Paul in the first chapter of his letter to the Christians at Rome. The forms of religion were observed rather from custom than from faith, or possibly as an attempt to satisfy the cravings of deeper spiritual necessities. The want of faith in any one religion was relieved by the priests who were ready to accommodate worshipers by performing such rites as they should prefer. "Unbelief and su perstition," observes Mommsen,* "different hues of the same phenomenon, went hand in hand in the Roman world of that day, and there was no lack of individuals, who, in themselves, *Vol. iv. pp. 668, 669. combined both, who denied the gods with Epicurus, and yet prayed and worshiped before every shrine; when a wager might be laid that the more lax a woman was the more devoutly she worshiped Isis." So Uhlhorn* writes of the fickle Greek who at evening, in the comedy, laughed at the same gods to whom he offered sacrifices the next morning in their temples. In the pages of the "Missionary Herald" and in letters from missionaries at different points in the heathen world, may be found many passages, descriptive of the worship and religious sentiment of Chinese, Japanese, Hindoos, and other nationalities, that might almost have been quoted from the authors just named. In China, the same priest will serve the convenience of different sects in the same temple. Japanese laugh at the religious ceremonies they are observing, rather as holiday amusements than as worship. It would be difficult to find a better description of the posi tion of large numbers of educated Hindoos at the present time, thousands of whom have enjoyed the advantages of high English education from which Christianity in its principles has been purposely excluded, than is given by Uhlhorn in speaking of the educated classes in the Roman Empire of the first century, "Faith in the gods of the old religions had disappeared. In its place had come sheer Atheism and Nihilism, though only, it may be, among individuals, (at least only such ventured openly to express it). The majority substituted a kind of Monotheism. They imagined something godlike above the gods, a divine first principle, or at least they had a presentment of this without clearly discerning it, and especially without being able, definitely, to distinguish it from the world. This dissolving Polytheism led naturally to Pantheism. As the many deities of the heathen were all Nature-gods, so must the one Deity, in whom these all met, be a Nature-god. Nature itself is God; and the conviction which Strabo utters as his own was doubtless that of many :-The one highest being is that which embraces us all; which we call heaven, world, and the nature of the universe.' Doubtless there was in this Monotheism a presage of the true God, a longing and reaching forth by Heathen * Vol. iv. p. 47. ism after something higher, a testimony of the soul by nature Christian, as Tertullian says. But the One was still only 'the unknown God whom ye ignorantly worship.' The heathen did not go beyond this. The Monotheism, to which they came at last, remained abstract, lifeless. The God vaguely conceived of as above the gods was no divine being who has talked with men and who can be named and supplicated. Therefore this conviction, however widely it was diffused in cultivated circles, proved, on the whole, powerless. It gained no influence over public opinion and morals. The educated who shared it did not thereby attain to any higher worship, but remained continually in suspense between this, their own better conviction, and a hypocritical (we cannot otherwise term it) participation in the official rites."* Hundreds of this class crowded around Prof. Seelye, at Bombay, and Puna. Dissatisfied with the old faiths of India, some were seeking in the older literature of the Vedas, made accessible to them by English scholarship, a religious creed and a system of ethics, that should rival, if possible, the claims of Christianity; while others like Keshub Chunder Sen, recognizing the power of sin over the human heart, and the consequent degradation of man's spiritual nature, seem at times ready almost to accept of Christ as the Redeemer. Certainly no one has paid a higher tribute to the personal influence of Christ on the present condition of the millions of India than Chunder Sen, in his recent addresses. Not only in purely heathen countries but in some sections. of nominally Christian lands, where ritual observances and faith in the Papal hierarchy, have taken the place of the gospel, do we find singular correspondences to the religious and moral life of the ancient world. The graphic picture of the character and career of Petronious, the arbiter of taste and the special favorite at the court of Nero, finds its representatives in many centers of our high civilization and preeminently among the cultured classes of Italy and Austria; "a life without God, a life of prosperity and of most highly refined enjoyment; not coarsely material but finely cultured and art-loving, yet without any deeper meaning."† |