CHAPTER XII

MISSIONARY SOCIETIES.

Illustrating what we have said before, it remains to be noticed, that nearly all the great societies sprang into existence almost simultaneously. The foremost among these,[14] founded in 1792, was the Baptist Missionary Society. It appears to have arisen from a suggestion of William Carey, the celebrated Northamptonshire shoemaker, who proposed as an inquiry to an association of Northamptonshire ministers, “whether it were not practicable and obligatory to attempt the conversion of the heathen.” It is certainly still a moot question whether Le Verrier or Adams first laid the hand of science on the planet Neptune; but it seems quite certain that, when one of God’s great thoughts is throbbing in the heart of one of His apostles, the same impulse and passion is stirring another, perhaps others, in remote and faraway scenes. Altogether unknown to William Carey, that same year the great Claudius Buchanan was dreaming his divine dreams about the conquest of India for Christ, in St. Mary’s College, Cambridge.[15] Undoubtedly the honour of the first consolidation of the thought into a missionary enterprise must be given to William Carey and his little band of obscure believers.

Footnote 14:

It is not implied that these were the first modern missionary agencies. The Moravians had already sent the Gospel into many regions. There were Swedish and Danish Missionary Societies also at work. In 1649 a Society for Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England had been formed, and about 1697 the “Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge” and the “Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts” were established. See page 256 and foot note.

Footnote 15:

See Appendix.

At the close of Carey’s address, to which we have referred, a collection was made for the purpose of attempting a missionary crusade upon Hindostan, amounting to £13 2s. 6d. = $65.60. The wits made fine work of this: the reader may still turn to Sydney Smith’s paper in the _Edinburgh Review_, in which the idea and the effort are satirised as that of “an army of maniacs setting forth to the conquest of India.” But this humble effort resulted in magnificent achievements; Carey and his illustrious coadjutors, Ward and Marshman, set forth, and became stupendous Oriental scholars, translating the Word of Life into many Indian dialects. Then came tempests of abuse and scurrility at home from eminent pens. We experience a shame in reading them; but it shows the catholicity of spirit pervading the minds of Christ’s real followers, that Lord Teignmouth, and William Wilberforce, and Dr. Buchanan, were amongst the ablest and most earnest defenders of the noble Baptist missionaries. We are able to see now that this mission may be said to have saved India to the British Empire. It not only created the scholars to whom we have referred, and the bands of holy labourers, but also the sagacity of Lord Lawrence, and the consecrated courage of Sir Henry Havelock. We are prepared, therefore, to maintain that England is indebted more to William Carey and his £13 2s 6d. than to the cunning of Clive and the rapacity of Warren Hastings.

Another child of the Revival was born in 1795—the London Missionary Society. But it would be idle to attempt to enumerate the names either of its founders, its missionaries, or their fields of labour; let the reader turn to the names of the founders, and he will find they were nearly all enthusiasts who had been baptised into the spirit of the Revival—Rowland Hill, Matthew Wilks, Alexander Waugh, William Kingsbury, and, notably, Thomas Haweis, the Rector of Aldwinckle and chaplain to the Countess of Huntingdon. Nor must we omit the name of David Bogue,[16] that strong and eloquent intelligence, whose admirable and suggestive work on _The Divine Authority of the_ _New Testament_, sent to Napoleon in his exile at St. Helena by the Viscountess Duncan, was, after the Emperor’s death, returned to the author full of annotations, thus seeming to give some clue to those religious conversations, in which the illustrious exile certainly astonishes us, not long before his departure.

Footnote 16:

See Appendix.

It is the London Missionary Society which has covered the largest surface of the earth with its missions, and it is not invidious to say that its records register a larger range of conquests over heathenism and idolatry than could be chronicled in any age since the first apostles went upon their way. We have only to remember the Sandwich Islands,[17] and the crowds of islands in the Southern Seas, with their chief civiliser, the martyr of Erromanga; Africa, from the Cape along through the deep interior, with Moffatt and Livingstone, whose celebrated motto was, “The end of the geographical feat is the beginning of the missionary enterprise;” China and Robert Morison; Madagascar and William Ellis, and many other regions and names to justify our verdict.

Footnote 17:

(The civilisation and Christian character of these Islands is largely, due to the labours of the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.—ED.)

In 1799 the Church Missionary Society came into existence. “What!” said the passionate and earnest Rev. Melville Horne, in attempting to arouse the clergy to missionary enthusiasm; “have Carey and the Baptists had more forgiven than we, that they should love more? Have the fervent Methodists and patient Moravians been extortionate publicans, that they should expend their all in a cause which we decline? Have our Independent brethren persecuted the Church more, that they should now be more zealous in propagating the faith which it once destroyed?” And so the Church Missionary Society arose;[18] and in 1804, the Bible Society; in 1805, the British and Foreign School Society; in 1799, the Religious Tract Society, which, since its foundation, has probably circulated not less than five hundred millions of publications. The Wesleyan Missionary Society—which claims in date to take precedence of all in its foundation in the year 1769—was not formally constituted till 1817.[19]

Footnote 18:

See Appendix

Footnote 19:

(The great missionary organizations of America belong to the early part of this century. The First day or Sunday-school Society was formed in 1791; the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810; the American Baptist Missionary Union in 1814; Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society in 1819; the Philadelphia Adult and Sunday-school Union (which, in 1824, was merged in the American Sunday-school Union) in 1817; the Protestant Episcopal Board of Missions in 1821. Of Continental Societies, the Moravian Missionary Society was formed in 1732; the Netherlands Missionary Society in 1797; the Basle Evangelical Mission in 1816. Appendix.—ED.)

Every one of these, and many other such associations, alike show the vivid and vigorous spirit which was abroad seeking to secure the empire of the world to the cause of Divine truth and love.

And, meantime, what works were going on at home? Education and intelligence were widely spreading; simple academies were forming, like that founded by the Countess of Huntingdon at Trevecca, where the minds of young men were being moulded and informed to become the intelligent vehicles of the Gospel message—eminently that of the great and good Cornelius Winter, in Gloucestershire; and that of David Bogue at Gosport; while, in the north of England, arose the small but very effective colleges of Bradford and Rotherham; and the now handsome Lancashire Independent College had its origin in the vestry of Mosley Street Chapel, where the sainted William Roby, as tutor, gathered around him a number of young men, and armed them with intellectual appliances for the work of the ministry.

Some of the earliest efforts of Methodism, and some of the most successful, had been in the gaols, and among the malefactors of the country—notably in the wonderful labours of Silas Told, whose extraordinary story has been recited in these pages. Silas passed away, but an angel of light moved through the cells of Newgate in the person of Elizabeth Fry, as beautiful and commanding in her presence as she was holy in her sweet and fervid zeal. Now began thoughts too about the waifs and strays of the population—the helpless and forgotten; and John Townshend, an Independent minister, laid the foundation of the first Deaf and Dumb Asylum, the noble institution of London.

In the world of politics, also, the men of the Revival were exercising their influence, and procuring charters of freedom for the mind of the nation. Has it not been ever true that civil and religious liberty have flourished side by side? A blight cannot pass over one without withering the other. The honour of the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts is due to the Great Revival: the Toleration Act of those days was really more oppressive on pious members of the Church of England than on Dissenters; they could not obtain, as Dissenters could, a licence for holding religious services in their houses, because they were members of the Church of England.

William Wilberforce owed his first religious impressions to the preaching of Whitefield; with all his fine liberality of heart, he became an ardent member of the communion of the Church of England. It seems incredible to us now that he lived constantly in the expectation—we will not say fear—of indictments against him, for holding prayer-meetings and religious services at his house in Kensington Gore. Lord Barham, the father of the late amiable and excellent Baptist Noel, was fined forty pounds, on two informations of his neighbour, the Earl of Romney, for a breach of the statute in like services. That such a state of things as this was changed to the free and happy ordinances now in force, was owing to the spirit which was abroad, giving not only freedom to the soul of the man, but dignity and independence to the social life of the citizen. Everywhere, and in every department of life, the spirit of the Revival moved over the face of the waters, dividing the light from the darkness, and thus God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.”