Pioneers and Founders

Pioneers and Founders
Charlotte Yonge

Charlotte M. Yonge

Pioneers and Founders / or, Recent Workers in the Mission field

INTRODUCTION

It has been my endeavour in the ensuing narratives to bring together such of the more distinguished Missionaries of the English and American nations as might best illustrate the character and growth of Mission work in the last two centuries.  It is impossible to make it a real history of the Missions of modern times.  If I could, I would have followed in the track of Mr. Maclear’s admirable volume, but the field is too wide, the material at once too numerous and too scattered, and the account of the spread of the Gospel in the distant parts of the earth has yet to be written in volumes far exceeding the bulk of those allotted to the “Sunday Library.”

Two large classes of admirable Missions have been purposely avoided,—namely, those of the Jesuits in Japan, China, and North and South America, and those of the Moravians in Greenland, the United States, and Africa.  These are noble works, but they are subjects apart, and our narratives deal with men exclusively of British blood, with the exception of Schwartz, whose toils were so entirely accepted and adopted by the Church of England, that he cannot but be reckoned among her ambassadors.  The object, then, has been to throw together such biographies as are most complete, most illustrative, and have been found most inciting to stir up others—representative lives, as far as possible—from the time when the destitution of the Red Indians first stirred the heart of John Eliot, till the misery of the hunted negro brought Charles Mackenzie to the banks of the fever-haunted Zambesi.

We think it will be found that, so far from being the talking, exaggerating, unpractical men that the critical and popular mind is apt to suppose, these labourers were in general eminently practical and hard-working.  They seem to us to range themselves into three classes: one, stirred up by the sight of the destitution before their eyes, and quietly trying to supply those needs; one, inspired by fervid zeal to devote themselves; and one, selected by others, taking that selection as a call, and toiling as a duty, as they would have toiled at any other duty set before them.  Each and all have their place, and fulfil the work.  The hindrances and drawbacks are generally not in the men themselves, nor in the objects of their labour, but first and foremost in the almost uniform hostility of the colonists around, who are used to consider the dark races as subjects for servitude, and either despise or resent any attempt at raising them in the scale; and next, in the extreme difficulty of obtaining means.  This it is that has more than anything tended to bring Mission work into disrepute.  Many people have no regular system nor principle of giving—the much-needed supplies can only be charmed out of their pockets by sensational accounts, such as the most really hard-working and devoted men cannot prevail on themselves to pour forth; and the work of collection is left to any of the rank and file who have the power of speech, backed by articles where immediate results may be dwelt upon to satisfy those who will not sow in faith and wait patiently.

And the Societies that do their best to regulate and collect the funds raised by those who give, whether on impulse or principle, are necessarily managed by home committees, who ought to unite the qualities of men of business with an intimate knowledge of the needs and governments of numerous young churches, among varied peoples, nations, and languages, each in an entirely abnormal state; and, moreover, to deal with those great men who now and then rise to fulfil great tasks, and cannot be judged by common rules.  Thus it is that home Societies are often to be reckoned among the trials of Missionaries.

But we will not dwell on such shortcomings, and will rather pass on to what we had designed as the purpose of our present introduction; namely, to supplement the information which the biographical form of our work has necessitated us to leave imperfect, respecting the Missions as well as the men.

Of the Red Indians who first stirred the compassion of John Eliot, there is little that is good to tell, or rather there is little good to tell of the White man’s treatment of them.  Self-government by the stronger people always falls hard on the weaker, and Mission after Mission has been extinguished by the enmity of the surrounding Whites and the corruption and decay of the Indians.  A Moravian Mission has been actually persecuted.  Every here and there some good man has arisen and done a good work on those immediately around him, and at the present time there are some Indians living upon the reserves in the western part of the continent, fairly civilized, settled, and Christianized, and only diminishing from that law of their physical nature that forbids them to flourish without a wilderness in which to roam.

But between the long-settled States of America and those upon the shores of the Pacific, lies a territory where the Indian is still a wild and savage man, and where hatred and slaughter prevail.  The Government at Washington would fain act a humane part, and set apart reserves of land and supplies, but the agents through which the transactions are carried on have too often proved unfaithful, and palmed off inferior goods on the Indians, or brought up old debts against them; and in the meantime mutual injuries work up the settlers and the Red men to such a pitch of exasperation, that horrid cruelties are perpetrated on the one side, and on the other the wild men are shot down as pitilessly as beasts of prey, while the travellers and soldiers who live in daily watch and ward against the “wily savage” learn to stigmatize all pity for him as a sort of sentimentalism sprung from Cooper’s novels.

Still, where there is peace, good men make their way, and with blessed effect.  We wish we had room for the records of the Bishopric of Minnesota, and the details of the work among the Indians; more especially how, when a rising was contemplated to massacre the White settlers all along the border, a Christian Indian travelled all night to give warning; and how, on another occasion, no less than four hundred White women and children were saved by the interposition of four Christian Indian chiefs.  Perhaps the Church has never made so systematic an effort upon the Indians as in Minnesota, and it is to be hoped that there may be some success.

For the need of system seems to me one of the great morals to be deduced from the lives I have here collected.  I confess that I began them with the unwilling belief that greater works had been effected by persons outside the pale of the Church than by those within; but as I have gone on, the conviction has grown on me that even though the individuals were often great men, their works lacked that permanency and grasp that Church work, as such, has had.

The equality of rank in the ministry of other bodies has prevented the original great founders from being invested with the power that is really needed in training and disciplining inferior and more inexperienced assistants, and produces a want of compactness and authority which has disastrous effects in movements of emergency.  Moreover, the lack of forms causes a deficiency of framework for religion to attach itself to, and this is almost fatal to dealing with unintellectual minds.

On the whole, the East Indian Missions have prospered best.  Schwartz was the very type of a founder, with his quiet, plodding earnestness, and power of being generally valuable; and the impression he made had not had time to die away before the Episcopate brought authority to deal with the difficulties he had left.  Martyn was, like Brainerd before him, one of the beacons of the cause, and did more by his example than by actual teaching; and the foundation of the See of Calcutta gave stability to the former efforts.  Except Heber, the Bishops of the Indian See were not remarkable men, but their history has been put together as a whole for the sake of the completion of the subject, as a sample of the difficulties of the position, and likewise because of the steady progress of the labours there recorded.

The Serampore brethren are too notable to be passed over, if only for the memorable fact that Carey the cobbler lighted the missionary fire throughout England and America at a time when the embers had become so extinct that our Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had to borrow workers from Denmark and Germany.  Indeed, Martyn’s zeal was partly lighted by Carey, though the early termination of his labours has forced me to place his biography before that of the longer-lived Baptist friends—both men of curious and wonderful powers, but whose history shows the disadvantages of the Society government, and whose achievements were the less permanent in consequence.  The Burmese branch of their work is chiefly noticeable for the characters and adventures of Dr. Judson and his three wives, and for the interesting display of Buddhism in contact with Christianity.  According to the statistics in an American Missionary Dictionary, the work they founded has not fallen to the ground either at Moulmein or Rangoon; while there has also sprung up a hopeful English Church Mission in the same quarter.  The last thing I saw about it was a mention of the neatness and dexterity of Burmese girls as needlewomen.

Samuel Marsden may be called the patriarch of Australasian Christianity.  There is something grand in the bravery of the bullet-headed Yorkshireman, now contending with the brutality of the convicts and their masters, now sleeping among the cannibals of New Zealand.  His foundations, too, have received a superstructure on which we cannot dwell; because, happily, the first Bishop of New Zealand is not yet a subject for biography, and the Melanesian Mission, which has sprung out of it, has not yet seen its first generation.

The Polynesian work, of which John Williams was the martyr and the representative man, has chiefly been carried on by the London Mission.  It has always been a principle with the Missionaries of the Anglican Church, whose centre has been first New Zealand, then Norfolk Island, never to enter upon any islands pre-occupied by Christian teachers of any denomination, since there is no lack of wholly unoccupied ground, without perplexing the spirit of the natives with the spectacle of “our unhappy divisions;” and thus while Melanesia is for the most part left to the Church, Polynesia is in the hands of the London Mission.  Much good has been effected.  The difficulty is that, for want of supervision, individual Missionaries are too much left to themselves, and are in danger of becoming too despotic in their islands.  At least such is the impression they sometimes give to officers of the navy.  French aggression has much disturbed them both in Tahiti and in the Loyalty Islands, and the introduction of Roman Catholic priests into their territory is bitterly resented.  On the whole, observers tolerably impartial think that the civilization which these married teachers bring with them has a happier effect as an example and stimulus to the natives than the solitary ascetic priest,—a true, self-devoted saint indeed but unable to win the attention of the people in their present condition.  In India, where asceticism is the test of sanctity even among the heathen, the most self-denying preacher has the best chance of being respected; but in those luxurious islets, poverty and plainness of living, without the power of showing the arts of life, get despised.  If the priests could bring their pomp of worship, and large bands of brethren or sisters to reclaim the waste, they might tell upon the minds of the people, but at present they go forth few and poor, and are little heeded in their isolation.  Unfortunately, too, the antagonism between them and the London Mission is desperate.  The latter hold the tenets perhaps the most widely removed from Catholicism of any Protestant sect, and are mostly not educated enough to understand the opposite point of view, so that each party would almost as soon see the natives unconverted as joining the hostile camp: and precious time is wasted in warrings the one against the other.

The most real enemies to Christianity in these seas are, however, the lawless traders, the English and American whalers and sandal-wood dealers, who bring uncontrolled vice and violence where they put in for water; while they, on the one hand, corrupt the natives, on the other they provoke them into reprisals on the next White men who fall in their way.  That the Polynesians are good sailors and not bad workmen, has proved another misfortune, for they are often kidnapped by unscrupulous captains to supply the deficiency of labour in some of the Australasian settlements.  Everywhere it seems to be the unhappy fact that Christian men are the most fatal hinderers of God’s word among the heathen.

Yet most of the more accessible of the isles have a resident missionary, and keep up schools and chapels.  Their chiefs have accepted a Christian code, and the horrid atrocities of cannibalism have been entirely given up, though there is still much evil prevalent, especially in those which have convenient harbours, and are in the pathway of ships.  The Samoan islanders have a college, managed by an English minister and his wife, where teachers are educated not only to much good discipline, but to much real refinement, and go forth as admirable and self-devoted heralds of the Gospel into other isles.  They have furnished willing martyrs, and many have been far beyond praise.  One lack, however, seems to be of that definite formularies, a deficiency which leaves the teaching to depend over much on the individual impressions of the teacher.

The chief remnants of cannibalism are to be found in the New Hebrides.  The leader of the attack on John Williams is still alive at Erromango, and the savage defiant nature of this people has never been subdued.  They belong more to the Melanesian than the Polynesian races.  The first are more like the Negro, the second more like the Malay.  The Melanesian Missions are in the charge of the Missionary Bishop, John Coleridge Patteson, who went out as a priest with the Bishop of New Zealand in 1855.

The New Zealand story, as I have said, cannot be told in the lifetime of the chief actor in it.  It is a story of startling success, and then of disappointment through colonial impracticability.  In some points it has been John Eliot’s experience upon a larger scale; but in this case the political quarrel led to the rise of a savage and murderous sect among the Maories, a sort of endeavour to combine some features of Christianity and even Judaism with the old forgotten Paganism, and yet promoting even cannibalism.  It is memorable, however, that not one Maori who had received Holy Orders has ever swerved from the faith, though the “Hau-Haus” have led away many hundreds of Christians.  Still, a good number remain loyal and faithful, and hold to the English in the miserable war which is still raging, provoked by disputes over the sale of land.

The Melanesian Mission was begun from New Zealand; but whereas the isles are too hot for English constitutions, they can only be visited from the sea, and lads are brought away to be educated for teachers.  New Zealand proved too cold for these natives of a tropical climate, and the college has been transplanted to Norfolk Island, where Bishop Patteson has fixed his head-quarters.  One of his converts from Banks’s Island has received Holy Orders, and this latter group seems in good train to afford a supply of native ministers to islands where few Englishmen could take up a permanent abode.

The African Missions would afford much detail, but want of space has prevented me from mentioning the Rev. George Leacock, the West Indian clergyman, who gave up everything when already an old man to pave the way of the Gospel in the Pongas.  And the Cape still retains its first Bishop, so that it is only on the side of Natal and Zululand, where the workers have passed away, that the narrative can be complete.  But the African Church is extending its stakes in Graham’s Town, Orange River, Zululand, and Zanzibar; and while the cry from East, West, and South is still “Come over and help us,” we cannot but feel that, in spite of many a failure, many a disappointment, many a fatal error, still the Gospel trumpet is being blown, and not blown in vain, even in the few spots whose history, for the sake of their representative men, I have here tried to record.  Of the Canadian and Columbian Indian Missions, of the Sandwich Isles, and of many more, I have here been able to say nothing; but I hope that the pictures of these labourers in the cause may tend to some understanding, not only of their toils, but of their joys, and may show that they were men not easily deceived, and thoroughly to be trusted in their own reports of their progress.

    Charlotte M. Yonge.

March 16th, 1871.

CHAPTER I.  JOHN ELIOT, THE APOSTLE OF THE RED INDIANS

Since the great efforts that Britain had made between the years 500 and 1000 to bring the knowledge of the truth into the still heathen portions of the Continent,—since the days of Columban and Gal, of Boniface and Willibrord,—there had been a cessation of missionary enterprise.  The known portions of the world were either Christian, or were in the hands of the Mahommedans; and no doubt much of the adventurous spirit which, united with religious enthusiasm, forms the missionary, found vent in the Crusades, and training in the military orders.  The temper of the age, and the hopelessness of converting a Mahommedan, made the good men of the third 500 years use their swords rather than their tongues against the infidel; and it was only in the case of men possessing such rare natures as those of Francis of Assisi, or Raymond Lull, that the possibility of trying to bring over a single Saracen to the faith was imagined.

It was in the revival from the Paganism with which classical tastes had infected the Church, that the spirit of missions again awoke, stimulated, of course, by the wide discoveries of fresh lands that were dawning upon the earth.  If from 1000 to 1500 the progress of the Gospel was confined to the borders of the Slavonic nation, the space of time from 1500 onwards has been one of constant and unwearied effort to raise the standard of the Cross in the new worlds beyond the Atlantic.

Spain, Portugal, France, as nations, and the great company of the Jesuits as one mighty brotherhood, were the foremost in the great undertaking; but their doings form a history of their own, and our business is with the efforts of our own Church and country in the same great cause.

Our work was not taken up so soon as theirs, partly because the spirit of colonization did not begin amongst us so early as in Spain and Portugal, and partly because the foundations of most of our colonies were laid by private enterprise, rather than by public adventure, and moreover some of the earlier ones in unsettled times.

It may be reckoned as one peculiarity of Englishmen, that their greatest works are usually not the outcome of enthusiastic design, but rather grow upon them by degrees, as they are led in paths that they have not known, and merely undertake the duty that stands immediately before them, step by step.

The young schoolmaster at Little Baddow, near Chelmsford, who decided on following in the track of the Pilgrim Fathers to New England, went simply to enjoy liberty of conscience, and to be free to minister according to his own views, and never intended to become the Apostle of the Red Indians.

Nothing is more remarkable than the recoil from neglected truths.  When, even in the earliest ages of the Church, the Second Commandment was supposed to be a mere enhancing of the first, and therefore curtailed and omitted, there was little perception that this would lead to popular, though not theoretical, idolatry, still less that this law, when again brought forward, would be pushed by scrupulous minds to the most strange and unexpected consequences, to the over-powering of all authority of ancient custom, and to the repudiation of everything symbolical.

This resolution against acknowledging any obligation to use either symbol or ceremony, together with the opposition of the hierarchy, led to the rejection of the traditional usages of the Church and the previously universal interpretation of Scripture in favour of three orders in the ministry.  The elders, or presbytery, were deemed sufficient; and when, after having for many years been carried along, acquiescing, in the stream of the Reformation, the English Episcopacy tried to make a stand, the coercion was regarded as a return to bondage, and the more ardent spirits sought a new soil on which to enjoy the immunities that they regarded as Christian freedom.

The Mayflower led the way in 1620, and the news of the success of the first Pilgrim Fathers impelled many others to follow in their track.  Among these was John Eliot.  He had been born in 1604 at Nasing in Essex, and had been bred up by careful parents, full of that strong craving for theological studies that characterized the middle classes in the reign of James I.

Nothing more is known of his youth except that he received a university education, and, like others who have been foremost in missionary labours, had a gift for the comparison of languages and study of grammar.  He studied the Holy Scriptures in the original tongues with the zeal that was infused into all scholars by the knowledge that the Authorized Version was in hand, and by the stimulus that was afforded by the promise of a copy of the first edition to him who should detect and correct an error in the type.

The usual fate of a scholar was to be either schoolmaster or clergyman, if not both, and young Eliot commenced his career as an assistant to Mr. John Hooker, at the Grammar School at Little Baddow.  He considered this period to have been that in which the strongest religious impressions were made upon him.  John Hooker was a thorough-going Puritan of great piety and rigid scruples, and instructed his household diligently in godliness, both theoretical and practical.  Eliot became anxious to enter the ministry, but the reaction of Church principles, which had set in with James I., was an obstacle in his way; and imagining all ceremonial not observed by the foreign Protestants to be oppressions on Christian liberty, it became the strongest resolution of the whole party to accept nothing of all these rites, and thus ordination became impossible to them, while the laws were stringent against any preaching or praying publicly by any unordained person.  The instruction of youth was likewise only permitted to those who were licensed by the bishop of the diocese; and Mr. Hooker, failing to fulfil the required tests, was silenced, and, although forty-seven clergy petitioned on his behalf, was obliged to flee to Holland.

This decided Eliot, then twenty-seven years of age, on leaving England, and seeking a freer sphere of action in the newly-founded colonies of New England, which held a charter from Government.  He took leave of his betrothed, of whom we only know that her Christian name was Anne (gracious), and that her nature answered to her name, and sailed on the 3rd of November, 1631, in the ship Lyon, with a company of sixty persons, among whom were the family of Governor Winthrop.

They landed at Boston, then newly rising into a city over its harbour, and there he found his services immediately required to conduct the worship in the congregation during the absence of the pastor, who had gone to England finally to arrange his affairs.

On his return, Mr. Eliot was found to be in such favour, that the Bostonites strove to retain him as an assistant minister; but this he refused, knowing that many friends in England wished to found a separate settlement of their own; and in less than a year this arrangement was actually carried out, a steep hill in the forest-land was selected, and a staunch band of East Saxons, bringing with them the gracious Anne, came forth.  John Eliot was married, elected pastor, ordained, after Presbyterian custom, by the laying on of the hands of the ministers in solemn assembly, and then took possession of the abode prepared for him and of the building on the top of the hill, where his ministrations were to be conducted.

These old fathers of the United States had found a soil, fair and well watered; and though less rich than the wondrous alluvial lands to the west, yet with capacities to yield them plentiful provision, when cleared from the vast forest that covered it.  Nor had they come for the sake of wealth or luxury; the earnestness of newly-awakened, and in some degree persecuted, religion was upon them, and they regarded a sufficiency of food and clothing as all that they had a right to seek.  Indeed, the spirit of ascetiscism was one of their foremost characteristics.  Eliot was a man who lived in constant self-restraint as to both sleep and diet, and, on all occasions of special prayer, prefaced them by a rigorous fast—and he seems to have been in a continual atmosphere of devotion.

One of his friends objected (oddly enough as it seems to us) to his stooping to pick up a weed in his garden.  “Sir, you tell us we must be heavenly-minded.”

“It is true,” he said, “and this is no impediment unto that; for, were I sure to go to heaven to-morrow, I would do what I do to-day.”

And, like many a good Christian, his outward life was to him full of allegory.  Going up the steep hill to his church, he said, “This is very like the way to heaven.  ’Tis up hill!  The Lord in His grace fetch us up;” and spying a bush near him, he added, “And truly there are thorns and briars in the way, too.”

He had great command of his flock at Roxbury, and was a most diligent preacher and catechiser, declaring, in reference to the charge to St. Peter, that “the care of the lambs is one-third part of the charge to the Church of God.”  An excellent free school was founded at Roxbury, which was held in great repute in the time of Cotton Mather, to whom we owe most of our knowledge of this good man.  The biography is put together in the peculiar fashion of that day, not chronologically, but under heads illustrating his various virtues, so that it is not easy to pick out the course of his undertakings.  Before passing on to that which especially distinguished him, we must give an anecdote or two from the “article” denominated “His exquisite charity.”  His wife had become exceedingly skilful in medicine and in dealing with wounds, no small benefit in a recent colony scant of doctors, and she gave her aid freely to all who stood in need of help.  A person who had taken offence at something in one of his sermons, and had abused him passionately, both in speech and in writing, chanced to wound himself severely, whereupon he at once sent his wife to act as surgeon; and when the man, having recovered, came to return thanks and presents, he would accept nothing, but detained him to a friendly meal, “and,” says Mather, “by this carriage he mollified and conquered the stomach of his reviler.”

“He was also a great enemy to all contention, and would ring a loud Courfew Bell wherever he saw the fires of animosity.”  When he heard any ministers complain that such and such in their flocks were too difficult for them, the strain of his answer was still: “Brother, compass them;” and, “Brother, learn the meaning of those three little words, ‘bear, forbear, forgive.’”

Once, when at an assembly of ministers a bundle of papers containing matters of difference and contention between two parties—who, he thought, should rather unite—was laid on the table, Eliot rose up and put the whole upon the fire, saying, “Brethren, wonder not at that which I have done: I did it on my knees this morning before I came among you.”

But that “exquisite charity” seems a little one-sided in another anecdote recorded of him, when “a godly gentleman of Charlestown, one Mr. Foster, with his son, was taken captive by his Turkish enemies.”[1 - At first sight this seems one of the last misfortunes likely to have befallen a godly gentleman of Charlestown; but throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Algerine pirates swept the seas up to the very coasts of England, as Sir John Eliot’s biography testifies.  Dr. James Yonge, of Plymouth, an ancestor only four removes from the writer, was at one time in captivity to them; and there was still probability enough of such a catastrophe for Priscilla Wakefield to introduce it in her “Juvenile Travellers,” written about 1780.london: r. clay, sons, and taylor, printers, bread street hill.]  Public prayers were offered for his release: but when tidings were received that the “Bloody Prince” who had enslaved him had resolved that no captive should be liberated in his own lifetime, and the distressed friends concluded, “Our hope is lost;” Mr. Eliot, “in some of his prayers before a very solemn congregation, very broadly begged, ‘Heavenly Father, work for the redemption of Thy poor servant Foster, and if the prince which detains him will not, as they say, release him so long as himself lives, Lord, we pray Thee kill that cruel prince, kill him, and glorify Thyself upon him.’  And now behold the answer.  The poor captiv’d gentleman quickly returns to us that had been mourning for him as a lost man, and brings us news that the prince, which had hitherto held him, was come to an untimely death, by which means he was now set at liberty.”

“And to turn their hearts” was a form that did not occur to the earnest suppliant for his friend.  But the “cruel prince” was far away out of sight, and there was no lack of charity in John Eliot’s heart for the heathen who came into immediate contact with him.  Indeed, he was the first to make any real effort for their conversion.