MISSIONARY
PROSPECTS
A sermon, the substance of which was delivered in Hoxton
Chapel, on Tuesday evening, October 10, 1826, at the opening of Hoxton
College as a Missionary Academy, by John Angell James.
Let it be a great
object with us, to render our missions self-supporting, and
self-propagating. The spread of the gospel
must not always continue to depend on the country from which it originally
goes forth. This was not the way in which Christianity was diffused in the
first ages; nor is it the way in which it must be diffused now. The
societies that were raised up by the preaching of the apostles and others
who went forth from Jerusalem, were weaned from the mother church almost as
soon as they were born. How limited would have been the conquests of
religion if it had depended for its progress upon the veterans from Judea,
instead of the warriors which it raised up in its victorious career.
It is perfectly obvious to every thinking mind, that
the only work to be done by foreigners is to introduce the gospel into a
country--and then to send it forward by the hands of native converts. We
must send out seed corn for the first harvest, and then expect that this
first harvest should furnish the seed for future ones. Europeans cannot
endure the scorching heat of tropical climates. Already the records of our
society form a missionary martyrology; and must we go on forever to swell
this noble army of martyrs? No! We must look to converted natives, to whom
those torrid regions are their native soil, and who can endure those
pestilential heats.
NATIVES only can bear the climate—natives best know the
customs of the people, and how to attack their prejudices and opinions;
natives only can bring to perfection the translation of the Scripture, by
rendering its phrases in the idioms of their own tongues and excluding those
of foreigners; natives only can give to preaching all its effect, by
selecting those words which are the most appropriate symbols of the thoughts
passing in the mind, and by breathing forth their feelings in those tones
which are most calculated to awaken in the bosoms of the hearer a faithful
echo of the sentiments spoken from the heart of the preacher. And then what
a saving in expense will this ensure. Native teachers will easily be
supported, without our aid—they will wear the same clothing, and eat the
same food as their countrymen; and their temporal things will be furnished
them, as they should be, according to the apostolic injunction, by the men
to whom they have imparted their spiritual things!