THE MISSIONARY SPIRIT OF THE CHRISTIAN

T

LIFE

HERE are two different opinions which a man may hold regarding his life. He may regard it as belonging to himself, as something under his control-and there are few men who have not at some time or other in life held that view. There is a time when it seems inexpressibly sweet, when the old shackles for the first time fall off; when the old limitations for the first time are laid aside; when a man for the first time feels on his brow the breath of the larger liberty, and looking out over his life says to it, "I am thy master." The other view of life regards it as belonging to somebody else, as not belonging to the man. This is the view of life which the Scriptures constantly take. "Ye are not your own," they say, "ye were brought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body, which is God's. Ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, such as silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot." And this is the view which a reasonable man must take of his life. He knows perfectly well it does not belong to himself. He had nothing whatever to say about its coming into this world; he will have nothing whatever to say about its going out of this world. Regarding a good many influences which control it, he has nothing to say while he is in this world. Any man who will stop and deal squarely and honourably with himself for one moment will see that his life clearly is not his. And this is the view of life which Jesus Christ took of His. His life, He declared, was not His own. The

words that He spoke were not His own words; He simply spoke the words that were given Him by His Father. The works that He did were not His own works; He simply did the things that His Father had shown Him before He came. He came down from heaven, not to do His own will, but the will of Him that sent Him. And in this He revealed the true attitude of man toward his life. I am not my own. My life belongs to Christ as His life belonged to God.

Now, if our lives belong to Christ, if my life belongs to Christ, then it is my business to be of use to Christ wherever in this world I happen at any time to be. I have no right to serve myself. I have no right to do my own pleasure. I am here to do the works and to speak the words of Him to whom I belong. My business is to be of use to Him, wherever I am, in this world. I think all of us must have a great deal of sympathy with that man whom Jesus healed in the country of the Gadarenes; who after he had been healed, freed of his devils, wanted to sit down at Christ's feet and stay there. If I had been he, that is where I should have wished to sit, and it has always seemed a hard thing that Christ bade him go away. Yet He knew perfectly well that the man's first duty as one who now belonged to Him who had healed him and had spoken life to him, was to go out and be of service. "Go home," He said, "to thine own house, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee." The same truth is taught by a familiar story in the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He turned once to one of his younger monks in the monastery where he was living, asking him if he would accompany him on a little mission of preaching among the people of the village. The young monk, elated at the privilege of accompanying the good St. Francis, cor

dially consented. And so arm in arm they went down out of the monastery, through the wicket gate, down under the hill, and through the streets of the village. They passed by group after group of men. They stopped here and there. St. Francis never opened his lips. After going in and out, they came back at last to the little hill that led up to the monastery. St. Francis had not spoken. They climbed to the little gate and came to the monastery. The young monk said, "When shall we begin to preach?" "Ah," said the elder monk, "we have been preaching all the way. Our example was noted, marked, looked at; but little had it availed us to go anywhere to preach if we had not preached as we went." He understood that in the service of Christ the emphasis is ever on the constant service, rather than on the intermittent activity or the occasional change of activity, or of place. The same truth exactly Jesus phrases in the fifteenth verse of the sixteenth chapter of Mark, which our English Bibles translate, "Go ye into all the world. and preach the gospel to every creature." There are not two imperatives there. Only one is an imperative, and it is the word "preach." Our Lord did not lay the obligation on the word "go." He assumed that those whom He saved would go, but He wished them to be ever serving. It would seem to be very clear that if a man belongs to Christ his business is to be of use to Christ, wherever he may be.

And it follows, it seems to me, with equal plainness that if we belong to Christ, then it is our business to be willing to be of use to Christ anywhere; that our sympathies must be as broad as the sympathies of Christ; that our hearts must go out as widely as the heart of Christ, and that while we are of use to Him where we are, we must be ready to be of use to Him

in any sphere; if it please Him, so much the better in the largest sphere. I think this can be made perfectly plain if we will only stop to think of three different things. First of all, the example, the spirit, and the words of Jesus Christ Himself. If we belong to Christ, then it is our life's passion to be like Christ, and to do the things that Christ told us to do. What was His mission? Pause for one moment quietly and calmly to think about it. It was a missionary mission from the beginning to the end. He proclaimed that it was. "I came not to condemn, but to save the world." It was heralded before He came as a missionary mission. Old Simeon, as he took the little child in his arms in the temple, saw in Him that Light that was to lighten the Gentiles, the Glory of His people Israel; and those of the evangelists who were keenest in seeing the broad bearings of Christ's coming in the divine development, marked how this mission of the Son of man was a missionary mission. He came, Matthew pointed out, that those who sat in darkness might see the great Light. He came that He might send judgment among the Gentiles, even the distant isles waiting for His law. Our Lord Himself described His mission as a missionary mission. The love of His Father for the whole race of men, He said, brought Him here. "God so loved the whole world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him [in the whole world] might not perish, but have everlasting life." His teaching was missionary teaching. He drew no line of cleavage between the need of Gentle and the need of Jew. His spirit was a missionary spirit. It was part of the necessity of the incarnation that God should be entangled in flesh; that He should limit Himself as men must, with certain limitations that were a part of His sharing our

common humanity. But though our Lord thus sunk Himself into flesh, He never lost that wide spirit that linked Him with all the children of God. Although He came in an age when Greek was cut off from Barbarian by the custom of the time, and Jew from Gentile by a caste line wider than that between Brahman and Chudra or Mahar, He still absolutely and resolutely refused to acknowledge or recognize racial or sectional lines. Many accused Him of being possessed with a devil, and also of being a Samaritan. He refused to pay any attention to the charge that He was a Samaritan. He knew perfectly the line of cleavage that separated Samaritan from Jew in His day; that it was not lawful for a Jew to eat that which a Samaritan had touched. But in spite of that, many of His best illustrations were selected from Samaritan life. He stopped by the well side in Samaria to talk to a woman, and through all His life He resolutely refused for one moment to tolerate in His presence any hostile or bigoted distinction between races or peoples. His prayers were missionary prayers. The prayer that He made when the Greeks came up to see Him at the feast, the prayer He made before the door of Lazarus' grave, were both missionary prayers; and when in His great prayer in the seventeenth chapter of John He said, "I pray not for the world," what was He doing but telling us with unmistakable plainness that the world was the chief object of His prayer at other times? It added but little to the strength of the missionary argument based on Christ's missionary spirit and Christ's missionary purpose, that at the end of His life He summed up His desires in those clean-cut commands which close the Gospels. Lord Curzon, in his book on Problems of the Far East, sneers at the missionary enterprise because, he says, it rests on a few detached