Chapter 3

The world has only one Washington. At sixteen he was county surveyor, the support of his widowed mother; at nineteen he was military inspector, with the rank of major; at twenty the governor of Virginia sent him six hundred miles to ask the commander of the French forces "by what authority he had invaded the king's dominions"; at twenty-two he was colonel in command of a regiment under General Braddock, and in the absence of a chaplain he read prayers daily himself. He saved the remnant of that ill-fated army from annihilation, and fifteen years after an aged Indian chief came to see the man at whom he had fired many times and who was protected by the Great Spirit. At his entrance as a member of the legislature of Virginia, the speaker greeted him with thanks for his military services. Washington arose to reply and blushed and stammered. The speaker said, "Mr. Washington, your modesty only equals your valor." He was a member of the first Continental Congress of whom Patrick Henry said, "Mr. Rutledge, of South Carolina, is the great orator, but for solid information and sound judgement Col. Washington is unquestionably the greatest man on that floor." When with one voice Congress chose him to be the commander-in-chief, he said, "I beg it may be remembered by every gentleman in this room, that I this day declare with the utmost sincerity that I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with. No pecuniary consideration would tempt me to accept this position. I will keep an exact account of my expenses, those I doubt not you will discharge. I ask no more." The nation applauded the prudence, the wisdom, the bravery and patriotism of Washington. Frederick the Great said, "His achievements are the most brilliant in military annals." Napoleon directed that the standard of the French army should be hung with crape at his death. Fox said of him in the British Parliament, "Illustrious man, it has been reserved for him to run the race of glory without the smallest interruption to his course." But the noblest eulogy ever uttered were the words of Gen. Henry Lee: "First in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen." He had hoped to retire to private life, and wrote to Lafayette, "I am a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac, under the shadow of my own vine and fig tree. I have retired from all public employment and tread the walks of private life with heartfelt satisfaction." The country would not permit it. He had refused to be a candidate for the office of president and accepted the nation's unanimous call with a heavy heart. His last act before leaving for New York was to visit his aged mother, then eighty-two, and in the last year of her life. We can picture that tender farewell to one to whom he owed under God that beautiful faith which shed glory on his life. The journey to New York was one continued ovation. His Virginia neighbors and friend gave him a God-speed and benediction. Baltimore outdid itself in generous hospitality. Philadelphia crowned him with laurel, the bells rang out their joyous peals, cannons thundered and the people with one voice shouted "Long live the President." Marvellous as was the enthusiasm of other cities, the people of Trenton, who remembered the cruelties of the Hessian in 1776 and their deliverance by Washington, outdid them all. On a triumphal arch was written "Dec. 26, 1776. The hero who defended the mothers will defend the daughters." At Elizabeth a committee of Congress met him, and Caesar never had so beautiful a flotilla as that of the sea captains and pilots who bore him to New York on the 23d of April. A week was spent in festivity. It is the 30th of April. In all the churches of New York there have been prayers for the new government and its chosen head. The streets swarm with people as the hour of noon approaches. Every house-top and porch and window near to Federal Hall is packed with a dense mass. The president has been presented to the two houses of Congress. The procession is formed. Washington follows the senators and representatives to the balcony. Around and behind him are his staff and distinguished patriots of the Revolution. Every eye is fixed on the stately, majestic man. A little over six feet high, his form perfect in outline and figure, a florid complexion, dark blue eyes deeply set, his rich brown hair now tinged with gray, firm jaws and broad nostrils, lighted by a benignant expression. Such was the Father of his Country. The brave soldier trembles with emotion as the chancellor of the State of New York reads the oath; the hand of Washington is on the open Bible. Was it a providence that they rested on the words, "His hands were made strong by the mighty God of Israel?" The secretary would have raised the sacred book to the president's lips. Washington said solemnly, "I swear, so help me God," and then bowed reverently kissed the book. He went to the senate chamber, and with stammering words, for his heart was almost too full for utterance, he delivered his inaugural address, and then turning to his friends said, "We will go to St. Paul's Church for prayers." It had been the habit of his life. His pastor, Rev. Lee Massey, said, "No company ever withheld him from church."' His secretary, Harrison, said, "Whenever the general could be spared from the camp on the Sabbath, he never failed to ride to some neighboring church to join in the worship of God." He claimed no praise for his matchless victories, but reverently gave all the glory to the blessing and protection of God. He knew, in the words of my friend Robert C. Winthrop, that "There can be no independence of God." The poet will sing and the orator describe eloquently the pageant of that day, but no incident will so touch the Christian's heart as the first act of the president of the United States, kneeling reverently with his fellow-citizens in the public worship of God. The service which had been set forth and was this day used in St. Paul's Church by Bishop Provost, also a patriot of the Revolution, and one who had suffered for his country's sake, was substantially the same used by us to-day. Washington assumed office in the midst of dangers. Edmund Randolph, one of the foremost members of the constitutional convention, wrote to Washington, "The Constitution would never have been adopted but for the knowledge that you sanctioned it, and the expectation that you would execute it. It is in state of probation. You alone can give it stability." There was a stormy sea before the new ship of state. The bitter hatreds between Federalist and anti-Federalist were not healed. Two states had not ratified the Constitution--there were tokens in more than one direction of rebellion. Without on dollar in the treasury, we were eighty millions in debt. The pirates of Morocco had destroyed our commerce in the Mediterranean, Spain threatened the valley of the Mississippi. Our relations with England were full of bitter memories; a country larger than Europe was to be protected, and we had a standing army of only 600 men. Washington called around him as advisers Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of Foreign Affairs; Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury; Henry Knox, Secretary of War; Edmund Randolph, Attorney-General, and John Jay, Chief Justice, and by these men, under God, the crumbling confederacy was cemented into one nation. Time forbids my reading you the words of wisdom, "apples of gold in pictures of silver," of Washington's inaugural and farewell addresses. I wish I had time to tell how, with a prophet's eye, he saw the future of the West, and again and again urged the opening of lines of commerce to bind East and West together. After eight years of wise rule, such as befitted "the Father of our Country," he retired to the shades of Mt. Vernon, to be, as he had been through life, the helper of the helpless, the friend of the needy and the almoner of God. On the 12th of December, 1799, he was exposed to a storm of sleet and rain, the severest form of quinsy set in; two days later, the 14th of December, he died. As friends stood weeping around his death-bed, he said with a smile, "O don't, don't; I am dying, but thank God I am not afraid to die." As the hour of his death drew near he asked to be left alone. They all went out and left him with God. There are lessons for our hearts to-day. Government is a delegated trust from God, who alone has the right to govern. He gives to every nation the right to say in what form this trust shall be clothed. No man has the right to be his brother's master. Take away the truth that government is a trust which comes from God, and you have left nothing between man and man but cunning and brute force. Burke said, "this sacred trust of government does not arise from our conventions and compacts," but it gives our conventions and compacts all the force and sanction which they have. I shall be told that the name of God is not found in the Constitution of the United States; it did not need to be when it was written on the people's hearts.

While we commemorate the noble deeds of our fathers, which under God were this day crowned with success, we gratefully remember that our fathers' God has guided us through all dangers. What other nation has come out of the horrors of civil war with victors and vanquished vieing with each other in love for one common country? Where has the hand of the assassin bowed the whole people by the leader's grave? This is no day for boasting or to call over the roll of our great dead.

We have sinned deeply, and deeply have we paid the penalty. No hand but God's could have over-ruled our mistakes and given us our favored position to-day. We must not forget that no nation has ever survived the loss of its religion. The year which saw Washington inaugurated president, saw in the fair land of Lafayette the beginnings of that holocaust of murder which turned France into a hell. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." No high-sounding words about freedom, no Godless philosophy, no infidel creed, which robs men of homes here and heaven hereafter, can save this nation. "Not unto us, but unto Thy name be the praise," must be our song, as it was the song of our fathers.

There are clouds and darkness on the horizon for the future. I see it in the impatience of law, in the jealousies between class and class, in the selfishness of the rich, and in the misery of the poor, in bribery and corruption in high places, and in the turbulence of mobs. I see it in the foul monster of intemperance and impurity which stalk unabashed through the land. But I see the greatest danger in that insidious teaching which robs humanity of an eternal standard of right, which makes morality prudence or imprudence, which limits man's horizon by the grave, and takes from hearts and homes God and Christ and heaven. Yet, I reverently believe that God has set us in the forefront of the nations to be, as our text says, "a beacon on the mountain-top," to lead on in His work in the last time. It may be that for our sins we shall walk again into the furnace, as we have walked and come out of it purified and fitted for the Master's use. I sometimes lose faith in men, but I will not lose faith in God. It is ours to work and bide our time; so did our fathers, and so will God give the harvest. I should wrong my heart and yours to-day, if I forgot the daughters of the Revolution. We might have had no Washington but for the lessons he learned at that mother's knee, that his duty to God was to believe in Him, to fear Him and to love Him with all his heart, with all his mind, with all his soul and with all his strength, to worship Him, to give Him thanks, to put his whole trust in Him, to call on Him, to honor His holy name and His word and to love Him truly all the days of his life; that his duty towards his neighbor--was to love him as himself, and to do to all men as he would have them do unto him, to love, honor and succor his father and mother, to honor and obey the civil authority, to hurt nobody by word or deed, to be true and just in all his dealings, to bear no malice or hatred in his heart, to keep his hands from picking and stealing, and his tongue from evil speaking, lying and slandering, to keep his body in temperance, soberness and chastity. Not to covet or desire other men's goods, but to learn and labor truly to get his own living and to do his duty in that state of life unto which it should please God to call him. We know this was the rule of his life. The Father of his Country found his solace, inspiration and help, as many of us have found it, in the love of a Christian wife. There are no fairer names in our country's history than Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, Sally Foster Otis, Alice DeLancy Izard, Jane Ketelas Beekman, and many more, who made up the republican court of Washington; and we do not forget humble names like Mollie Stark, whose lives were consecrated to their country. Wives, mothers, daughters! none have places of greater influence in shaping and moulding our country than you. Your power is the power of a Christian mother, a Christian wife, a Christian daughter. In the darkest hour look to God, believe that your mission is a nobler one than to be a slave of fashion or the leader of a party. Plant your feet on the rock of eternal truth--never speak with uncertain voice of the verities of the Christian faith. For you St. Paul said: "How knowest thou, O Woman, but thou mayest save thy husband and thy child," and saving them a nation is saved.

III. _SERMON AT THE SECOND ANNUAL MEETING OF THE MISSIONARY COUNCIL IN WASHINGTON, D.C., NOV. 13, 1888_.

"_The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign for ever and ever_."--REVELATION xi. 15.

THESE words are God's surety that the prayers, the trials and the labors of His Church shall be crowned with success.

We are living in the great missionary age of the Church. Impenetrable barriers have been broken down. Fast-closed doors have been opened. There is no country where we may not carry the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Divine Providence has been fusing the nations of the earth into one common brotherhood. Man has created nothing. The lightening would run its circuit in the Garden of Eden as well as when Morse made it man's messenger. In the fullness of time God has lifted the veil from human eyes to see the mysteries of His bounty, and so prepare a highway for the coming of our King.

I have no argument about the obligation of missions. It is eighteen hundred years too late for this.

I speak to you to-day of the progress of the Kingdom of Christ. Pray for me that the story may lead us to the foot of the Cross to consecrate all that we have to His blessed service.

At the close of the last century a thoughtful young Englishman asked the governor of the East India Company to go to India to preach the Gospel. The answer was: "The man that would go to India upon that errand is as mad as a man who would put a torch to a powder magazine."

A few years ago Chunder Sen, the great scholar of India, died. On his death-bed a friend asked him what he thought were the prospects of Christianity in India. He answered: "Jesus Christ has conquered the heart of India." Not that great battles are not yet to be fought, much weary work to be done, but with more than half a million of Christians in India, which have been won in this century, we are certain that the nation will be won to Christ.

I turn to that dark continent which has had more of human sorrow bound up in its history than any place on earth. Forty years ago in a cottage in the highlands of Scotland an aged man said to his son: "David, you will have family prayer to-day, for when we part we shall never meet again until we meet before the great white throne." David Livingstone read the thirty-fourth Psalm, the key-note of that wonderful life, and then poured out his heart to God in prayer, threw his arms around his father's neck and kissed him; they parted never to meet again in this world, and so he went to Africa. He did a wonderful work in the Bechuana country. He was a carpenter, blacksmith, teacher, laborer, physician and minister to these poor souls, but the man's heart was in the interior of Africa. One day, with about as much preparation as I take when I go to the north woods of Minnesota, he left for the interior of Africa. His route was along the path of slave traders, and every few days he came to some place where a poor woman had fainted in the chain-gang and had been strapped to a tree with her babe at her breast and left to be stung to death by insects. No wonder that he wrote in his Journal, and blotted it with tears: "Oh, God, when will the great sore of the world be healed?"

When you remember that the followers of the false prophet are the only people engaged in this traffic in human flesh, and that to the poor African it means slavery or death, you have the answer to the stories of the progress of Mohammedanism in Africa.

I cannot tell the story of his life. One day he was found dead on his knees in prayer in an African hut. That life had so impressed itself upon the heathen folk that they did what will always be a marvel of history. They wrapped the body in leaves. They covered it with pitch. They carried it nine months on their shoulders. They fought hostile tribes. They swam swollen rivers. They cut their way through impenetrable thickets, and at last stood at the door of a mission house in Zanzibar, and said, "We have brought the man of God to be buried with his people." And so David Livingstone sleeps in Westminster Abbey.

Our Stanley took up Livingstone's work, and he laid Africa open to the gaze of the world. He travelled nine hundred and ninety-nine days, and the thousandth day reached the sea-coast. In all that journey he did not meet a single, solitary soul who had heard that Jesus Christ had come into the world. Stanley tells the reason why he went back to Africa. He said:

"When I found Livingstone I cared no more for missions than the veriest atheist in England. I had been a press reporter, and my business was to follow armies and to describe battles; to attend conventions and report speeches, but my heart had not been touched with sympathy for missions. When I found this grand old man I asked: 'What is he here for? Is he crazy? Is he cracked? I sat at his feet four months and I saw that a power above his will had taken possession of his life, and given him a hunger to lead poor heathen folk out of their darkness.

"I have heard the same voice speaking to my heart, 'Follow me,' and I go back to Africa to finish Livingstone's work."

This was a few years ago. To-day there are fifteen Christian Bishops of our communion in Africa. Eight were present at the Lambeth Conference. One of them, Bishop Crowther, was captured when a boy ten years of age on a slave ship, placed in a mission school, transferred to a high school, then to the university, graduated with honors, and went back to Africa as a Bishop. As I looked in the face of that black man and thought of his wonderful history, I remembered another man from Africa that carried the cross of my blessed Master up the hill to Calvary, and that this aged servant of Christ was following in his blessed footsteps.

Another of these Bishops was one of the manliest men that I ever looked upon; Bishop Smythies, the picture of manly beauty, honored by his university, beloved by friends, a face gentle and loving as that of St. John. When I thought of this man going on foot in the interior of Africa, perhaps to die for Christ, I could not keep back the tears, and I went to him and said, "My good brother, I cannot tell you how my heart goes out to you in loving sympathy." He smiled and said, "Bishop, when the Church in Jerusalem had more work than it knew how to do, the Holy Ghost sent one of its ministers upon a long journey to convert one African. Surely it is not much for the Christians of Christian England to send a Christian Bishop to millions who never heard there is a Savior."

And now I turn to the opposite quarter of the globe--Australasia, New Zealand, and Polynesia. When I was a boy there was but one English settlement, and that was known throughout the world as Botany Bay, the abode of the most abandoned criminals of English civilization. There are to-day twenty-one Bishops in those islands. I wish I could tell the story inwrought in the lives of Selwyn, Patteson, Williams, and a host of others, some of whom have laid down their lives for Christ.

To-day cannibalism is a thing of the past. Human sacrifices, thank God, are to be found nowhere on the earth. There is not one of those islands without its Christian church, and in some of them the last vestige of heathenism has passed away. They have thousands of Christian men and women under their native pastors. Surely this is no time to talk about the failure of Christian missions.

Now I turn to Japan. Less than forty year ago one of our brave American sailors, Commodore Perry, cast anchor on Sunday morning in the harbor of Yeddo. He called his officers and crew together for public worship, and they sang that old hymn of our fathers, "Old Hundred"; and the first sound that this hermit nation heard from her younger sister of the West was that grand old hymn.

Next year Japan will have a constitutional government. It has already adopted the Christian calendar. There are more that a million of children in their public schools. Many of these schools are under the charge of Christian men and women, and it is only a question of a few years when Japan will take her place beside other Christian nations. This is more wonderful when we remember that until recently there was a statute in Japan that, "if any Christian shall set his foot on the Island of Japan, or if the Christian's God, Jesus, shall come, he shall be beheaded."

I turn to China. I wonder that its doors are open to Christian missions when I remember that Christian nations at the mouth of the cannon have forced upon that people that deadly drug which drags body and soul to death, that their names have been by-words and hissing in Christian lands. The secret is that God sent to China a young Englishman whose life was hid with Christ in God. Chinese Gordon saved the nation of China, and his name will be a household word forever. Surely a people where the poorest laborer can become the first prince of the realm if he becomes the first scholar, and if his son is a vagabond sinks to the place from which his father came, surely such a people have the elements to receive the Gospel of Christ.

Time would fail me to tell the story of missions in North America; I should begin at Hudson's Bay, where Bishop John Horden has lived thirty-five years amid its solitudes and won every one of its Indian tribes to Christianity. I should tell you of the Bishop of Athabasca, whose home is within the Arctic circle, who could not attend the Lambeth Conference because he could not go and return the same year. I should tell of my young friend, the Bishop of Mackenzie River, when I knew that he spent nine months each year travelling upon snowshoes and three months in a birch-bark canoe; that the only way that he could carry to them the Gospel was to follow them in the chase, hunt with them, fish with them, lie down in their wigwams in his blanket and always have waiting upon his lips the sweet story of the love of God, our Father. I told him I wished he would give me his post-office address and I would send him books and papers; he said: "Bishop, I am a thousand miles from a post-office and only get one mail a year."