The Quiver 3/ 1900. AnonymousЧитать онлайн книгу.
A Shield 99
The name of Edward Bickersteth seems a natural succession to that of Simeon. The influence of both is still unexhausted. When the Church Missionary Society kept its second Jubilee in November, 1898, the sermon was preached by Bishop E. H. Bickersteth, the son of Edward Bickersteth. And the influence had been wider than the limits of any one Society, for Bishop Edward Bickersteth, of Japan, who died in 1897, represented another generation in this line of truly apostolic succession.
Edward Bickersteth had been a solicitor in prosperous circumstances when zeal for missions led him to take holy orders, and join the Church Missionary Society as Assistant Secretary in 1816. Almost at once he was sent to examine the Society's work at Sierra Leone. There he admitted the Society's first African converts to the Holy Communion. In 1824 he succeeded Josiah Pratt in the Secretaryship of the Society. He was never an autocrat in the sense that Henry Venn was; but his work for the Society in the country was enormous. It has ceased to be the kind of work which is mainly done by the Honorary Secretary of the Society, but at that period it was work which was of inestimable value. It was the more important because public opinion at home still presented a front of mingled contempt and indifference to missions, whilst abroad the outlook was far from hopeful.
ZENANA WORK. BIBLE SELLING IN EASTERN BAZAARS.
TEACHING THE YOUNG.
LECTURING TO CHINESE HELPERS. ITINERATING THROUGH THE VILLAGES.
SOME METHODS OF WORK.
A greater figure than that of Edward Bickersteth in the annals of the Church Missionary Society is that of Henry Venn. Here, too, the name appears in more than one generation. The first Henry Venn belongs, with Wesley, Whitfield, Romaine and others, to the beginnings of the Evangelical Revival. Then comes John Venn, who took the chair at "The Castle and Falcon" meeting. Then, in 1834, Henry Venn the younger, the son of John Venn and grandson of the first Henry Venn, began regularly to attend the Society's Committee. He was Hon. Secretary in 1841, and held office for thirty-one years. He is the standard by which, doubtless, for generations to come, Hon. Secretaries of the Church Missionary Society will be compared. He was a strong man in every sense; a statesman and an autocrat. But, like some other autocrats, he clung to his work too long. He resigned only a few months before his death, and left the Society in a condition of discouragement, from the failure both of candidates for the mission field and of means for carrying on the work. Under his successor, Henry Wright (who was drowned in Coniston Lake in 1880), the Society began almost at once to enter upon new life and activity. Here again the hereditary influence, so manifest in the work of the Church Missionary Society, is evident, for four of his children went to the mission field. His successor, Frederic Wigram, was one of the most munificent benefactors the Society ever had. He died, after resigning office, worn out by its responsibility and toil. He, too, has sent children to the mission-field. In his successor, the Rev. H. E. Fox, the hereditary impulse is manifest again. Mr. Fox's father was one of the founders of the Society's Telugu mission, and one of the most devoted of its workers in the foreign field.
And now let us glance for a moment at some of the Society's agents abroad. The task of selection is difficult. There are names on the list that all men who care for missions have heard of. Samuel Marsden, Samuel Crowther, Valpy French, Pfander, John Horden, James Hannington, Alexander Mackay—these, to name but a few, and many others, are familiar far outside the limits of the Society's own friends. But there are more, less widely known, whose work deserves not a whit less to be had in remembrance.
(From Photo: supplied by the Church Missionary Society.)
CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY'S TRAINING COLLEGE AT AGRA.
(With students in foreground.)
Amongst these was William Johnson, one of the first missionaries to Sierra Leone. He went out in 1816, and began an extraordinary work amongst the slaves released by British cruisers and landed at Sierra Leone. He died on the voyage home to England at the early age of thirty-four. Those were the days in which to face work in Sierra Leone meant facing a peril so imminent that each volunteer needed the courage of those who go upon a forlorn hope.
There was William Williams, first a surgeon and then, after graduating at Oxford, ordained for work in the Colonies. He went to New Zealand in 1825, when its people were a race of cannibals, not one of whom professed Christianity. He lived to see the whole country more or less fully evangelised. His wife died as recently as 1896, and his son, baptised in 1829 with the children of one of the most savage of the Maori chiefs, became Bishop of Waiapu in the land the father did so much to open up. William Williams had a brother, Henry Williams, who preceded him in the field. So great was the influence he won that, on the news of his death reaching two Maori camps, in which rival tribes were preparing to meet in battle, they at once proclaimed a truce, attended his funeral, and settled their differences in peace.
(Photo: G. P. Abraham, Keswick.)
MR. EUGENE STOCK.
(Editorial Secretary of the Society.)
(From Photo: supplied by the Church Missionary Society.)
THE LIBRARY AT THE MISSION HOUSE.
There was Ludwig Krapf, whose name, with that of John Rebmaun, should ever be joined with the origins of our growing empire in Eastern Equatorial Africa. He began his missionary work in Abyssinia, had to leave as the result of French intrigues, sailed down the East African coast in an Arab boat, and in 1844 settled at Mombasa. From the knowledge of the interior gained by Krapf and his companion, came the chain of African discovery which issued, as long afterwards as 1875, in the publication, through Mr. H. M. Stanley, of Mtesa's appeal for missionaries for Uganda. How little could Krapf ever have dreamed of the vast results, political as well as spiritual, that would flow from that early disappointment, his expulsion from Abyssinia!
There was David Hinderer, who, upon the other side of Africa, did so striking a work in the Yoruba country. The prosperity of his evangelistic labours, the virtual imprisonment in which he and his wife—half-starved and in deadly peril—were for five years in the town of Ibadan, and the ultimate discovery that their work stood the severe tests of isolation and persecution, go to make up one of the most interesting chapters in the history of African missions.
There was George Maxwell Gordon, the pilgrim-missionary of the Indian frontier, a pioneer who saw little direct fruit of his labours, yet left missions where none had been. Acting as chaplain to the British forces shut up in Kandahar, he was killed, when seeking to succour the wounded, in August, 1880.
But this is a list that might be almost indefinitely extended, and still would seem invidious. Let us come to some striking pages in the Society's history; again, of necessity, passing by many of the most impressive as well as some of the most familiar.
The city of Peshawur, upon the Afghan frontier, has long been a centre of missionary work. The fanaticism of the people when it was first occupied by British troops seemed to make missionary enterprise impossible. One Commissioner—he afterwards fell by the hand of an assassin—refused permission for missionaries to come, on the ground that they would excite the fanaticism of the people to a dangerous pitch. The arrival of Herbert Edwardes changed the situation. A meeting of English people, military and civil, was called in Peshawur itself; a sum of £3,000 was raised, a memorial sent to the Church Missionary Society, and, in response, missionaries provided. Here is an example of what is so often forgotten by critics of Indian missions, that they in a large measure owe their origin and support to men actually or formerly engaged in the administration of India. The Church Missionary Society has been peculiarly happy in the number of men of high distinction in the Army and the Civil