PROFESSOR MAX MaLER ON THE MISSIONARY SPIRIT.
WE have at length the authentic text both of Dean Stanley's fine sermon, delivered in Westminster Abbey on December 3, and of the beautiful address by which, later in the day, it was followed. On the general drift of that address we said something a fortnight ago, and find nothing to alter ; on the contrary, everything we then said seems to us to be even more appropriate to the fully reported lecture than to the somewhat abbreviated report which alone we had then seen. We return to the subject, because we want to raise explicitly one point on which we said little in our previous article,—the true basis of the missionary spirit. Professor Max Mailer says, what is indeed a truism, though a very important one,—that converts find it much easier to accept miracles and creeds than to submit their hearts to the Christian law :—" The were believing of miracles, the mere repeating of formulas requires no effort in converts brought up to believe in the Paranas of the Brahmans or the Buddhist Gatakas. They find it much easier to accept a legend than to love God, to repeat a creed than to forgive their enemies. In this respect they are exactly like ourselves. Let missionaries remember that the Christian faith at home is no longer what it was, and that it is impossible to have one creed to preach abroad, another creed to preach at home." That is per- fectly true, and the inference from it seems to be that so far as we have modified our conception of the Christian Gospel at home, so far we must modify also that which we try to preach abroad. To attempt to introduce into childish minds—or minds of in any sense inferior training—that which the preacher himself has ceased to believe, or even that in which he has ceased to feel any hearty confidence, would be to play an unworthy trick both upon him- self and on his hearers. That hardly needs stating. But it does not seem to carry us anything like the length that Professor Muller means it to carry us. What, as far as we can interpret his meaning, his lecture really enforces, is not that Christians should limit their missionary teaching to what they are quite con- fident of, but that they should cease to be confident of anything except the true moral attitude of the heart towards God and man. At least that is how alone we can interpret such passages as the following :— " If missionaries admit to their fold converts who can hardly under- stand the equivocal abstractions of our Creeds and formulas, is it necessary to exclude those who understand them but too well to submit the wings of their free spirit to such galling chains ? When we try to think of the majesty of God, what are all those formulas but the stam- merings of children, which only a loving father can interpret and under- stand ! The fundamentals of our religion are not in these poor Creeds ; true Christianity lives, not in our belief, but in our love—in our love of God, and in our love of man, founded on our love of God. That is the whole Law and the Prophets, that is the religion to be preached to the whole world, that is the Gospel which will conquer all other religions —even Buddhism and Mohammedanism—which will win the hearts of all men. There can never be too much love, though there may be too much faith—particularly when it leads to the requirement of exactly the same measure of faith in others. Let those who wish for the true success of missionary work learn to throw in of the abundance of their faith ; let them learn to demand less from others than from themselves. That is the best offering, the most valuable contribution which they
can make to-day to the missionary cause There are many of our best men, men of the greatest power and influence in literature, science, art, politics, aye even in the Church itself, who are no longer Christians in the old Beim of the word. Some imagine they have ceased to be Christians altogether, because they fool that they cannot believe as much as others profess to believe. We cannot afford to lose these men, nor shall we lose them if we learn to be satisfied with what satisfied Christ and the Apostles, with what satisfies many a hard- working missionary. If Christianity is to retain its hold on Europe and America, if it is to conquer in the Holy War of the future, it must throw off its heavy armour, the helmet of brass and the coat of mail, and face the world like David, with his staff, his stones, and his sling. We want less of creeds, but more of trust; less of ceremony, but more of work ; less of solemnity, but more of genial honesty ; loss of doctrine, but more of love. There is a faith, as small as a grain of mustard-seed, but that grain alone can move mountains, and more than that, it can move hearts. Whatever the world may say of us, of us of little faith, let us remember that there was one who accepted tho offering of the poor widow. She threw in but two mites, but that was all she had, even all her living."
That Professor Muller means in these passages to reduce to a minimum that Christian belief on which the discipline of Christian morality is founded, is proved, we suppose, not only by his view that the pure Theists of the Brahmo-Somaj,—who, in the case of Keshub Chunder Sen and his followers, no doubt are Theists of a very noble and Christian type,—should be adopted by the Christian missionaries as Christians, but by his clear intimation that to look for more than this is practically to say to them :— " Unless you speak our language and think our thoughts, unless you respect our creed and sign our articles, we can have nothing
in common with you." (p. 40). That surely means that the Theists of the Brahmo-Somaj have come as near Christian faith as it is possible for them, as Orientals, to come, when once they have acknowledged the authority of religious sentiments of the Christian type.
Now it is on this point that we must part company entirely with Professor Milner. We do not doubt that even Buddhists, with their impersonal or very faintly personal God, had something very distinct and valuable, and, we doubt not, divine, to preach, when they went forth into the world charged with the message which the Professor gives us,—" Do not hereafter give way to pride and anger ; care for the happiness of all living beings, and abstain from violence. Extend your good-will to all mankind ; let there be peace among the dwellers on earth." We have no doubt that if there had been nothing more in Christ's message than Mr. Matthew Arnold's 'secret of Jesus,'—the secret that, by inwardly acquiescing in the loss of that which human desire most coves, we gain a source of blessedness deeper and more permanent than anything which the satisfaction of desire can itself bring,—and that by such acquiescence we come into better harmony than before with that "stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness ;"—we do not doubt, we say, that even so, Christianity would have been a message distinct, valuable, and in its essence divine, to preach to the world. The Buddhist preaching was in any case a high moral preaching ; and Mr. Arnold's version of "the secret of Jesus" would, had it been the only burden of Christianity, have been an impressive lesson in the deepest moral experience of man. But we do deny that any preaching of the higher moral sentiments, or even any exposition of the deepest moral experience of man, would have been in any sense the best part of what the Christian missionaries had to preach, or of what was indeed of the very essence of their message. It is, no doubt, true in a sense, that the formation elf the perfect Christian character is the very highest end of all preaching, of all moral instruction, of all historical revelation, or, to use Lessing's phrase, of the whole "education of the world." But then that is u=ing the idea of the "perfect Christian character" in a very large sense indeed, so as to ipclude not only its true human relations, but its true relation to God, its life in God, and that, too, in a manner which would imply explicit instruction as to the nature of God himself. What we maintain is, that the very heart of Christ's Gospel consists in a theology, or knowledge of God communi- cated to us by God, in a revelation of what God essentially is, given us not merely through the character, but through the history and the express authority of Christ. Nor can the highest -Christian sentiments be adequately rooted in any teaching less substantial than this. It may be quite true that by some other and shorter path men may get to a real belief in the divinity of com- passion, of the duty of forgiveness, in the nobility of self-denial, in the self-renovating power of moral renunciation. It is quite true, of course, that God teaches the heathens no less than the Christians, and that all that every religion has of truth is but a kind of revelation. But still the great majority of Christians believe that Christ's revelation teaches us what God is, in a sense infinitely more striking and pure than such partial moral and spiritual revelations as these, because it gives us pure, unadul- terated divine acts, as well as the elements of divinity in human feeling, because it records the very self-renunciation and self- sacrifice of the eternal Son of God. This seems to us of the very essence of the Christian teaching ; and anyone who believes it has a source of hope and trust infinitely deeper than he who has only learnt to distinguish what is noblest and what ignoblest in himself and others.
Now we cannot doubt that the basis of the missionary spirit is not love, but trust,— that missionary love is the fruit of missionary trust. Nor can we for a moment understand how any one can read the New Testament and doubt it. What was the first announce- ment Christ made, but a declaration that the kingdom of heaven was at hand ? How did he expect to persuade men of it but by showing them that he saw their hearts, that be saw all that was evil and all that was good in them, and then appealing to those who had had experience of this his super- natural knowledge of their life and character, to accept his own account of what the Father had taught him ? Is not the Gospel from beginning to end an announcement of spiritual tidings, to be accepted on the strength of a spiritual authority established over men, and a spiritual affection engendered in men ? Love, DO doubt, was to be the result,—love to God and love to man,— but the source of that love was to be their trust in him and in what he told them. Why did he ask Peter so solemnly
what his belief was as to his own real origin and nature, and why did he declare the apostle specially blessed on the announcement of his belief that his Master was the Son of God ? We can only answer, because without such a trust as Peter declared, there could have been no real rock on which to build the Church, no real devotion to himself after the grave had closed over him, no real confidence that God's provi- dence would overrule the strange miscellaneous powers and prin- cipalities of this world, and subdue them in time to the divine purpose. It is quite true to say, as Professor Miiller says, that we want "less of creeds and more of trust." No doubt we do, but what trust is to remain, if all creeds are swept away ? Even Mr. Matthew Arnold's creed in "a stream of tendency, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness," is, so far as it goes, a creed, and quite essential to his gospel concerning "the secret of Jesus," for if once that creed were doubtful, it would be quite legitimate to say that the joy in self-renunciation so far as it had been experienced, was of the nature of accident, and could not be legitimately assumed as a law of spiritual life at all. It seems to us that the very root of a missionary's work is an absolute trust in some truth or some person, which trust he believes himself able to communicate to others, and which, again, when so communicated, will produce a deeper spring of life and peace. St. Paul speaks of love (or charity) in a more exalted strain than any other missionary, but he declared it to be the best Christian gift, the best fruit of trust in Christ, but not the root itself. He did not go to the Gentiles to announce "Charity," but to announce the Cross of Christ as the highest revelation of divine charity. We do not see what a missionary is without a trust, and a trust must imply more or less of a creed. Depreciate the element of knowledge, the intellectual element, as you will, still without the knowledge, without the intellectual element, you can have no confi- dence as to the moral structure of the universe and the order of Pro- vidence. Professor Muller seems to imply that those men of science who have lost all their faith in their own Christianity are none the worse Christians for that, so long as they have no less love for Christian virtues. But something much more than that is wanted. If Christian virtues are to grow amongst us, we must have the deepest possible belief that the order of creation, the secret of nature and history, is really in harmony with the Christian virtues ; that God is the origin of them and the spiritual spring of them, and that they do not, to use the language of a certain school of philosophy, first awaken to self-consciousness in man. If science could ever succeed in persuading us, for instance, that man is the highest moral being in the universe, we suspect man would soon cease to be even that. Confidence in God, who sent his Son into the world to rescue us, is of the very essence of hope, faith, and charity ; and we do not see how a Christian missionary can found his message on anything short of this. It is no doubt perfectly true that many who are not Christians in this sense have shown a far more Christian spirit than many who are. Keshub Chunder Sen may be, no doubt, far neater the true type of the Christian life than many a Christian bishop or so- called Christian saint. The few talents are of course constantly turned to better account than the many. But that is no reason for saying that the few talents are of as much intrinsic value as the many. The question is not who is nearest true Christian morality, but what spiritual, moral, and intellectual assumptions are, on the whole, most productive of Christian morality, and it seems to us sheer paradox to contend that any other than Christ's own assumptions are so likely to imbue us with his spirit. Now it hardly needs to be said that it was his assumption that he was revealing in himself the very life of the eternal Father, of which he gave evidence to his followers by reading their hearts, discerning and forgiving their sins, curing their diseases, and passing himself through death without being "holden of it." That seems to be a basis for missionary life such as it would be impossible to have without it. You cannot inspire in man a great love without inspiring first a great trust. The "stream of tendency, not ourselves," as Mr. Arnold calls it, is altogether too appalling and potent to be pliant to our wills, unless we are thoroughly possessed by the belief that it is the mysterious instrument of a divine love.
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