present century if there were but the spirit of enterprise to dare and undertake for our Redeemer. Talleyrand boasted that he "kept his watch ten minutes ahead of the rest of mankind." The Christian Church should surpass rather than be surpast by others in her enterprise. The time will come when disciples will look back to this age of missions with as much surprize as we now look back to those days when a learned prelate in the House of Lords, and a defender of orthodoxy too, could calmly argue against sending missionaries to the Orient! or as we contemplate with amazement speeches against the suppression of the slave-trade that have no interest to us except as fossils and petrifactions of an antedilluvian era!—A. T. Pierson, Missionary Review of the World.
(2068)
MISSIONS, SUCCESSFUL
In the course of his cruising in the South
Seas, Lord Byron (a cousin of the poet),
landed on an island of which he thought he
was the discoverer. Suddenly a canoe appeared.
Instead of containing armed savages,
its occupants were two noble-looking men,
clothed in cotton shirts and very fine mats.
They boarded the ship and presented a document
from a missionary stating that they
were native teachers employed in preaching
the gospel to the people of the island. Lord
Byron then went ashore. In the center of
a wide lawn stood a spacious chapel, and
neat native cottages peeped through the
foliage of banana trees. On entering a cottage,
he found on a table a portion of the
New Testament in the native language.
This story of Lord Byron's surprize visit was told at an overflow meeting in Exeter Hall at the anniversary of the Bible Society in 1836. When the speaker had concluded, a stranger arose and introduced himself to the audience as the missionary who had discovered the island, had made Christianity known to its people, and had translated the very portion of the Scripture which Lord Byron had found. It was John Williams, the heroic missionary of the London Missionary Society, whose noble work had drawn those savages from cannibalism and idolatry to the worship of the true God.
(2069)
MISSIONS, TESTIMONY TO
Edgar Wallace, the war correspondent of the London Daily Mail, writes in the highest terms of what he saw of the Kongo Balolo missions. He said in part:
"No battle I have ever witnessed, no
prowess of arms, no exhibition of splendid
courage in the face of overwhelming odds,
has inspired me as has the work of these
outposts of Christianity. People who talk
glibly of work in the mission field are apt
to associate that work merely with house-to-house
visitations and devotional services and
the distribution of charity. In reality it
means all these things plus the building of
the houses one visits, building of the church
for the devotional services, and the inculcation
in the native of a spirit of manliness
which renders charity superfluous.
Somebody told me there was difficulty in getting men and women for the missionary work in Kongoland. Speaking frankly as a man of the world, I do not wonder. I would not be a missionary in the Kongo for five thousand pounds a year. That is a worldly point of view, and it is not a high standpoint. It is a simple confession that I prefer the "flesh-pots of Egypt" to the self-sacrifice that the missionary life claims. Yet were I a good Christian, and were I a missionary hesitating in my choice of a field, I would say, with Desdemona, "I do perceive here a divine duty."
(2070)
A singular tribute to missions was that exprest to me by the editor of a North China newspaper: "Broadly speaking, it is a fact that the only white man who is in China for China's good is the missionary. It never occurs to the average business man here that he has any obligation to the Chinese. Yet only on that ground can he justify his presence."—William T. Ellis, Men and Missions.
(2071)
Mistaken Spiritual Judgment—See Illusion, Spiritual.
MISTAKEN VIEW OF CAUSE
In winter, when millions of city dwellers
breathe the air of ill-ventilated dwelling-houses,
lung affections are more frequent
than in midsummer, when ventilation is enforced
by the horrors of stagnant heat. But
the coincidence of frosts and catarrhs has
decided the bias of the popular hypothesis,
and in sixteen different European languages
the word cold has become a synonym of an
affection which the absolutely conclusive evidence
of physiological facts proves to be a
result of vitiated warm indoor air, and to
