The Call of the World Part 1

The Call of the World.

by W. E. Doughty.

FOREWORD

The four questions which the author has most frequently heard in discussing world problems with men are the following:

What progress is the missionary enterprise making?

How much remains to be done?

What is America's share of world responsibility?

How can men relate themselves in a practical way to the spread of Christianity throughout the world?

It is to give a brief answer to these four fundamental questions that the following pages have been prepared for use in Missionary Discussion Groups, Men's Bible Cla.s.ses, Brotherhoods, Missionary Committees, and groups of Sunday School Officers and Teachers. It is also confidently expected that many men who cannot meet to discuss these problems in any of the groups mentioned will read and study the book in private. In preparing the ma.n.u.script the author has had in mind a large number of men who are now or should become public advocates of missions. The book presents information which they may use in addresses.

Many of the facts given have been taken from the _Report_ of the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, _The World Atlas of Christian Missions_, _The Statesman's Year Book, 1912_, _The Decisive Hour of Christian Missions_, by John R. Mott, and _The Unoccupied Mission Fields of Africa and Asia_, by S. M. Zwemer.

The author is indebted to his friend, the Rev. W. R. Dobyns, D.D., of St. Joseph, Missouri, for the design on the cover.

It is the hope of the writer that the reading and discussion of the topics outlined in these pages will inspire many men to undertake to master the world plans of Christ and lead them to enthrone at the center of life the missionary purpose--the one purpose around which a man may build all the facts of his life and to which he may cling and let everything else go when he is hard pressed.

New York, September, 1912.

THE CALL OF THE WORLD

CHAPTER I

THE WIDENING SOVEREIGNTY OF CHRIST IN THE WORLD

In a discussion concerning the elements of an effective speech, Dr. C.

H. Patton, of the American Board, gave the following outline:

An effective speech must be made up of

Facts,

Big facts,

Human facts,

Related facts.

These suggestions apply not only to speeches but to any case which is to make an effective appeal to men. What subject is there which so perfectly ill.u.s.trates the principles stated by Dr. Patton as the missionary theme? Nowhere else in all the realm of thinking and action are there such big, human, related facts as in the enterprise which has for its goal the world-wide propagation and naturalization of Christianity.

Christian business men are constantly asking certain pertinent questions about any business undertaking. Is it honest? Is it safe? Will it pay?

Is it big enough to be worth while? Will it succeed? Will it last?

Men have a right to ask such questions about business. They have an equal right to make the same thorough and searching investigation of the proposition to evangelize the world. Confident of the power of the cause to capture and hold men when once it has had a chance at them, believing that this is the greatest case that has ever challenged the manhood of the world, some of the evidences of the widening sovereignty of Christ in the world are marshaled here. The Scriptures unmistakably indicate that G.o.d has pledged universal dominion to his Son. The facts which follow are concrete ill.u.s.trations of the truth of the missionary principles of the Bible. The gathering momentum of the Kingdom makes an irresistible appeal.

For convenience the facts may be grouped under three general heads:

WORLD CONDITIONS FAVORABLE TO THE SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY

THE MULTIPLYING AGENCIES OF THE KINGDOM

SIGNS OF WORLD-WIDE VICTORY

I. WORLD CONDITIONS FAVORABLE TO THE SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY

=An Accessible World.=--1. Improved means of intercommunication. That we live in a contracting world is strikingly ill.u.s.trated by the fact that when Robert Morrison went to China it took him seventy-eight days to reach New York from England, and four months to go from New York to China. Hunter Corbett, of China, who was six months on his way the first time he took the trip, made the journey a few months ago in twenty-one days. It is now possible to go from Peking to London in twelve and one-half days over the Trans-Siberian Railroad. A recent journey around the world was made in less than thirty-six days. When Jules Verne published _Around the World in Eighty Days_, the journey described was laughed at as an impossible feat. To-day it is possible to circle the globe in less than one half the time of which Jules Verne wrote in his book. It took the old Greeks forty days to go the length of the Mediterranean Sea in their swiftest triremes. The greatest stretch of open water in the world is 10,000 miles in the Pacific Ocean. There are vessels afloat to-day that can traverse the 10,000 miles in one half the time that it took the old Greeks to go the length of the Mediterranean Sea.

2. The nations of the earth are accessible because of changed sentiment.

There are to-day no lands in the world which are closed entirely to modern influence and only a few which do not at least tolerate the Christian missionary with his advanced ideas of civilization and progress. It is difficult to estimate the amazing changes in sentiment in lands where missionaries have been at work even for a generation, as in Korea, or for a century or more, as in India or China.

It is unthinkable that there should ever be another Chinese wall shutting out all world contact. Edicts in force as late as 1870 ordering the death of Christians in j.a.pan are now exhibited only as relics of a buried past. The twentieth century is making hermit nations impossible.

3. A mental att.i.tude has been created in the non-Christian world which nothing but Christ can satisfy. This may be only an indefinite restlessness and dissatisfaction with existing conditions in many cases, but it is apparently true that the principles of the Christian gospel have created an altogether new mental att.i.tude in the world. It is stated by one of the great missionary authorities in India that there are millions of people in that land who are intellectually converted to the gospel who have not yet yielded personal allegiance to Christ. This mental att.i.tude is an enormous a.s.set to the Kingdom.

=A Plastic World.=--The nations of our day are plastic to a degree never before witnessed. Heat, pressure, and decay, are some of the forces which make physical substances plastic. There are intellectual and moral and spiritual forces which produce a like effect on men and nations. As great heat applied to metal fuses it, so the ideas and forces of the twentieth century have fused the non-Christian world.

Pressure, such as foreign aggression, world commerce, and modern science have helped to bring about the present plastic state in vast sections of the world. Added to these two and accompanying them are the forces of disintegration and decay in the old religions, old forms of government, and the customs and habits of centuries. In itself this present remarkable state of the non-Christian world has no moral quality. The significant thing is that, while nations are in a plastic state, they offer special opportunity to put the stamp of Christianity on them before they harden again, and to determine the direction their civilization shall take by building into them the principles of Christian civilization and the Christian faith.

=A Changing World.=--One of the most impressive evidences that the leaven of Christian civilization is at work in the non-Christian world is the fact that there are wide-spread changes taking place. G.o.d has been shaping and preparing the nations in the interests of a world-wide gospel. The extent and character of these changes make the present the most momentous hour in the history of the non-Christian world.

_The extent of the changes_ may best be ill.u.s.trated by comparing the present awakening with other great historic movements of the last two thousand years. In naming the epoch-making movements of the Christian Era the following could not be omitted: The Renaissance, The Mohammedan Conquest, The Crusades, The Reformation, The American Revolution, The French Revolution, The Wesleyan Revival, and The Rise of Popular Governments. On examination it is discovered that each of these movements was confined to a comparatively limited geographical area, one or two of the countries of Europe, or certain racial sections such as the Anglo-Saxon, or the countries bordering on the Mediterranean Sea, or, as in the case of the American Revolution, England and America. While these movements were all of far-reaching significance they affected directly only a few countries. But to-day all Asia is awake, Africa is stirring with life as never before, and the South American lands are in the midst of a period of commercial activity and of progress unparalleled. Instead of a limited area millions of square miles are in the midst of far-reaching changes.

The great awakenings of the last twenty centuries influenced directly only a few millions of people in contrast with the awakening of to-day which affects _THREE FOURTHS OF THE HUMAN RACE_. _From the standpoint of the vast populations involved as well as of the immense territory affected the world has never seen an awakening of such magnitude as that which is taking place in our time._

In _character_ also the present movement is eclipsing all former awakenings in history. One of the most satisfactory ways of measuring the power of any movement is to a.n.a.lyze it in relation to the fundamental inst.i.tutions of society. Reducing civilization to its simplest terms society is built around five great inst.i.tutions. In one column the inst.i.tutions are named, in the other the human relations which each represents.

The Home--social.

The State--political.

The Shop--commercial.