The Puritan Hope

Iain Murray

‘The missionary from Livingstonia tells us that Scotland is so diminutive that, were its surface divided into portions like the segments of a dissected map, it could be all packed within the limits of Lake Nyassa. That lake is so small, though 350 miles long, as almost to require to be searched for, as we scan the map of Africa. Yet see what God has already done by Scotland. Scotland, small as she is, has already told on the destinies of the world. Why should she not gird herself for a new enterprise on behalf of the noblest object that can engage the enthusiasm of man — the salvation of millions.’

ALEXANDER N. SOMERVILLE, 1886, A Modern Apostle, A. N. Somerville, George Smith, 311

‘Oh, what promises are ours, if we had only faith to grasp them! What a promise is that in the great commission — Go and do so, and lo I am with you, even to the end of the world! We go forth amongst the hundreds of millions of the nations, we find gigantic systems of idolatry and superstition consolidated for 3,000 years, heaped up and multiplied for ages upon ages, until they tower as high mountains, mightier than the Himalaya.. .. But what does faith say? Believe and it shall be. And if any Church on earth can realize that faith, to that Church will the honour belong of evangelizing the nations, and bringing down the mountains.’

ALEXANDER DUFF Speech of the Rev. Dr. Duff on Foreign Missions and America, May 29, 1854, 19

SPEAKlNG of the movement for the reformation of the Church which in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms in the mid-seventeenth century, Samuel Rutherford once wrote, ‘Posterity will know to the second coming of Christ from whence came the first stirring of the wheels of Christ’s Chariot in Britain’. But if Scotland gave the lead in the 1630’s, it is equally true that England, one hundred and sixty years later, was first in preparing the way for the evangelization of the world. In the new era of missionary endeavour which began, as we have seen, in 1792, Scots had indeed played an important part. David Bogue and several of the first leaders of the London Missionary Society were from north of the Border. Yet the Scottish Church itself had taken no initiative, and for a while it seemed that the call to the North was simply for individuals to assist in a supporting role the work begun in England.

In the history of world missions, however, a greater part was in store for Scotland, and though we can only sketch the outline in these pages the story is one which cannot be omitted from a consideration of the effect of ‘the hope’ upon history. Nowhere does the outlook inherited from the Puritan era come to a more powerful or effective expression than in Scotland’s missionaries of the nineteenth century.

The first attempt to move the Church of Scotland to give new attention to foreign missions occurred in 1796 when the Synods of Moray and of Fife both laid overtures before the General Assembly in Edinburgh. These overtures petitioned the Assembly to consider the methods by which the gospel was to be spread over the world. The debate which resulted on May 27 of that year has been called ‘the most extraordinary perhaps, and the richest in character that ever originated in the Courts of a Protestant Church’. Its drama arose from the composition of that Assembly, for its members represented very different and far from homogeneous parties.

On one side there were evangelicals such as William McBean, minister of Alves, and John Erskine, joint minister of Old Greyfriars, Edinburgh, from 1767 until his death in 1803, in his eighty-second year. Erskine’s ministerial work had begun in the stirring revival period of the early 1740’s and he owed a personal debt to Whitefield’s example. We have noted how forty years later, this Edinburgh minister had provided the Baptists of the Northampton Association with Jonathan Edwards’ books. McBean was thirty-seven years old at the time of the great debate of 1796. He had been brought up under the ministry of James Calder who served the Inverness-shire parish of Croy from about 1747 until his death in 1775 and whose diaries, which record some of the years of revival in that parish, are among the finest devotional literature.

On the other side were men of a very different school, ‘the Moderates’, whose cold morality and anti-evangelical policies had long brought a blight which, despite the mid-century awakening, still remained in many parishes. Among their leaders was Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk. The character of ‘Jupiter’ Carlyle, as he was nicknamed, may well be judged by an incident which occurred during another General Assembly. The Moderates were just about to carry through some business favourable to their interests when Dr. Jardine, a friend of Carlyle’s, suddenly collapsed. Amid commotion he was carried out and it seemed that, in view of the general concern, voting would have to be deferred. Fearing the consequences of a delay, Carlyle made his way out, ascertained that Jardine was dead, and returned forthwith to assure the Assembly that there were hopes of his recovery! The voting then proceeded. ‘One hardly knows’, comments W. G. Blaikie, ‘which was worst; the moral recklessness that could utter such a lie in the house of God, and in the presence of death; or the moral levity that could see his friend hurried into eternity with such awful suddenness, and at the very moment, devise a mean and lying trick to make sure of a party motion.’

In the famous debate of 1796 William McBean spoke earnestly for his Synod’s overture. Addressing his ministerial brethren, he reminded them how they prayed every Lord’s day ‘for the speedy and universal diffusion of the gospel’ and that it was therefore incumbent upon them to prove their sincerity ‘by shewing an example of active zeal, in bringing about this happy event’. ‘Scripture prophecy,’ the minister of Alves concluded, ‘points our faith to the accomplishment of this promised event, and while we anticipate, it ought also to be our endeavour to hasten the time when the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth “as the waters cover the sea.”

This appeal was speedily countered by the Rev. Mr. Hamilton of Gladsmuir who affirmed: ‘To spread abroad the knowledge of the gospel among barbarous and heathen nations seems to me highly preposterous... The apostle Paul preached, not to naked savages, but to the inhabitants of cultured cities.’ Such a claim was too much for the conscience of John Erskine to endure in silence; rising to his feet and stretching his hand to the bookboard before the Moderator, the seventy-five year old evangelical leader exclaimed, ‘Rax me that Bible!’ He then proceeded to read from Acts 28, a passage which shows Paul preaching in the very kind of situation which Hamilton would have had them regard as impossible.

But Erskine’s long-to-be-remembered intervention made no impression upon ‘Jupiter’ Carlyle, who rose to support Hamilton’s motion that the two overtures on missions be dismissed. Dr. Hill, not wishing to put the Assembly in such an entirely negative position, suggested a rider to Hamilton’s motion of dismissal committing them to ‘resolve that they will embrace with zeal and thankfulness any future opportunity of contributing by their exertions to the propagation of the Gospel of Christ’. This expedient carried the day by a majority of fourteen and so, though apathy and unbelief had been rudely disturbed in the General Assembly of 1796, their reign was not yet broken.

Another twenty-eight years were to pass before the General Assembly in 1824 gave its formal support to foreign missions. Sinful though this delay was, it came within the overruling providence of God, for the means he had chosen to awaken the attention of Scotland to the crying needs of the overseas world had still to be fashioned.

Foremost among these means was the succession of births in Christian homes which marked the first quarter of the new century — John Wilson in 1804, John Anderson in 1805, Alexander Duff in 1806, David Livingstone and Alexander Somerville in1813, William C. Burns in 1815, and John G. Paton in 1824 — to name but seven of a larger number whose future work was to make districts in far-off India, Africa, China and the New Hebrides household words in Scotland.

Even while these men were infants, missionary work unattached to the Church was being organized from Scotland. The Edinburgh Missionary Society (later to be called the Scottish Missionary Society) and the Glasgow Missionary Society had both been formed in February, 1796. John Erskine preached the first sermon for the former, while John Love’s return from London to Glasgow in 1800 gave added strength to the Glasgow Society. These two agencies, which had close connections with the London Missionary Society, began work in widely diverse fields: Sierra Leone, Karass (between the Caspian and the Black Sea) , Jamaica, Kaffraria (South Africa) and finally India, where the first Church of Scotland minister, Donald Mitchell, landed at Bombay in January, 1823. Within eight months of Mitchell’s arrival one of the many illnesses of the East had claimed his life: ‘His last words,’ writes D. MacKichan, ‘uttered just as he was passing, breathed the hope which had guided his steps to India as a missionary of the Cross: “The earth shall be full of knowledge of the Lord. Amen and Amen.”

These early beginnings, coupled with the widespread interest which the Baptist and London Missionary Societies had awakened in Scotland, led to a rising tide of zeal for overseas endeavour. Robert Haldane, a wealthy landowner, sold his estate at Airthrey near Stirling and laid aside £25,000 for missionary work: ‘The object was of such magnitude,’ writes his biographer, ‘that, compared with it, the affairs of time appeared to sink into nothing, and no sacrifice seemed too great in order to its attainment.’ Robert Findlater,a Ross-shire merchant, was of humbler rank but of the same spirit. In his will, written in 1800 he appointed £100 to the London Missionary Society with this testimony: ‘The Lord has much honoured that Society. It was from it that my soul first caught the blessed flame that has so often warmed my cold heart and affections since; and at this present time while I am writing, the fire is burning — my heart and eyes are full, viewing with joy the spreading glory of Immanuel’s kingdom, when all His people’s prayers, and all His Father’s promises for the glory of His Kingdom, shall be fulfilled. . . O Lord, hasten the glory of the cross of Christ among all lands, that He may see of the travail of His soul, and be satisfied.!’

Robert Findlater's views of the gospel were such as were being deeply impressed upon many Scottish families at this period when local revivals were common. Findlater’s parents, like William MeBean mentioned above, had attended the ministry of James Calder at Croy. The fragrance of that ministry was continued in that of his son, Charles Calder, who for thirty-eight years (1774-1812) was minister of Ferintosh, Ross-shire. Charles Calder was popularly known as ‘the piper of one tune’, for he had but one theme in his preaching, ‘all was subordinated by him to the great end of setting only Christ before the eyes of sinners’. It was to Ferintosh that Robert Findlater and his family would journey on the Lord’s Day and, as he tells us, Calder’s preaching was the means which awakened his longing for the further extension of Christ’s kingdom.

On Charles Calder’s death, John MacDonald, ‘the Apostle of the North’, succeeded him at Ferintosh. His son, also John, was to go as a minister of the gospel to India in 1837. The, same connection between the power of the Spirit witnessed at home and the thrusting out of men overseas appears in many other instances. Win. H. Burns ministered for fifty-nine years, commencing in 1800, and in his long pastorate at Kilsyth he saw a great spiritual harvest such as James Robe had witnessed in the same place in the 1740’s. It was his son, William C. Burns, who died in far-off Nieu-chwang in 1868, one of the most outstanding of all the first missionaries to China’s millions. The work done in parishes like Ferintosh and Kilsyth moulded the men who were to be the leaders of Scottish missionary endeavour.

Another parish where the effect of a spiritual awakening was to touch a distant continent was that of Moulin in Perthshire. Until the month of June, 1796, Alexander Stewart, the minister of that parish was, like too many others of his day, a professional cleric with no personal experience of the grace of God. In that month, however, Charles Simeon of Cambridge, while passing through Perthshire, made an unpremeditated stop at Moulin, was invited to preach, and as a result the minister himself became a new man in Christ. The consequent change in his preaching and his adoption of what his critics called ‘Puritan principles’ was by no means generally welcomed, but God blessed the parish of Moulin with fruit hitherto absent. By the autumn of 1798 the convicting work of the Spirit was clearly manifest in the congregation and particularly in those of about twenty-five or thirty years of age. The following March, Stewart commenced a series of practical sermons on Regeneration which continued until the beginning of July. ‘These’, he writes, ‘were attended with a more general awakening than had yet appeared amongst us. Seldom a week passed in which we did not see or hear of one, two or three persons, brought under deep concern about their souls, accompanied with strong convictions of sin, and earnest inquiry after a Saviour.’

Among the young people thus drawn into the kingdom of God were James Duff and Jean Rattray who married shortly after and began life together on their farm of Auchnahyle, a mile from Pitlochrie, and in the parish of Moulin. There Alexander Duff was born to them on April 25, 1806.

We must enter into Duff’s career in some detail for he was to become to nineteenth-century Sotland ‘the very embodiment of missions ,“ and turning-points in Duff’s life were to affect profoundly the whole missionary cause. The first influence upon the Perthshire boy as he grew up amid the grandeur of the Grampians was that of his own father, whose great interest when the day’s toil was done was in the writings of the Puritan school: ‘Next to the Bible my father’s chief delight was in studying the works of our old divines, of which, in time-worn editions, he had succeeded in accumulating a goodly number. These, he was wont to say, contained more of the “sap and marrow of the gospel” and had about them more of the “fragrance and flavour of Paradise”, than aught more recently produced.’ And James Duff found no disharmony between his old books and the reawakening of missionary interest. His son wrote in later years, ‘Into a general knowledge of the objects and progress of modern missions I was initiated from my early youth by my late revered father, whose catholic spirit rejoiced in tracing the triumph of the gospel in different lands.”

A second powerful influence upon Duff was that of Thomas Chalmers. Chalmers, minister of Kilmany, Fife, was a brilliant product of the Moderate school, more interested in science than the Bible, until the years 1809-10, when he also experienced a saving change. Among the factors which established him in evangelical Calvinism were the reports of the Baptist missionary work in India. Little did he know at that time that he was to help train the man whom many came to regard as Carey’s successor. In 1815, Chalmers was called to the Tron Church, Glasgow, and as he there became a famous preacher there was considerable surprise when in 1823 he left the crowded congregations of that city for the classrooms of St. Andrews. But Scotland, and the world, were to gain from the five years which Chalmers spent as Professor of Moral Philosophy in the old university city. Among those who watched as the evangelical testimony of the new professor stirred the students as they had not been stirred for two hundred years was Alexander Duff, and his own spiritual life, ‘which had been slumbering into formalism’, was quickened into a burning enthusiasm. One result was that Duff and several fellow-students, in the session of 1824-25, founded the Students’ Missionary Society. The disapproval of the university authorities was registered by the denial of any meeting-place, and so it was, as Duff’s biographer tells us, that in a small schoolroom obtained in a dingy lane in St. Andrews, ‘this society, noteworthy in the history of Scottish Missions as the fruitful parent of the most apostolic missionaries of the country, met first’.’4 In the following year, forty-seven-year-old Chalmers became President of the Society and the monthly meetings, at which he spoke on missions, had to be moved to the Town Hall on account of the numbers attending.

Without taking account of men who entered the home-ministry under Chalmers’ influence, of the three hundred students who passed through his classes at St. Andrews, six, or two out of every hundred students, consecrated their lives to the work of Christ overseas.

Meanwhile, in the very year that the students formed their society at St. Andrews, the General Assembly had reversed its anti-missionary decision of twenty-eight years before. A committee was appointed to consider the evangelization of the heathen world. India was chosen as the first field of labour, and at length, on August 12, 1829, Alexander Duff was ordained in St. George’s Church, Edinburgh, as the Church of Scotland’s first missionary, ‘Dr. Chalmers preaching the subsequent address with his wonted ability and fervour’.

Duff’s responsibility was a formidable one. Others had gone out supported by the organization of societies, but his calling involved a new and comparatively untried concept, namely, that the Church herself is a missionary society. Arriving in Calcutta in 1830, he was not there long before it was apparent that members of the Church’s committee at home little understood what this concept meant. In 1833 they informed their first missionary that they were calculating on a missionary income of £I200 a year with which they hoped to support three men. From Calcutta came the reply, ‘Oh, do not fix on £1200 a year as your maximum. Put down £10,0000 without fixing any maximum at all.’ An astounded committee member wrote in the margin of Duff’s letter when it reached Edinburgh, ‘What! is the man mad? Has the Indian sun turned his head.

From the outset Duff had thus a double work to do, the one in India, the other in Scotland. He began the former with a school in Calcutta, later to be a complete college, but at the first the work was done single-handed, including six hours a day teaching Bengali youths the English alphabet! With characteristic independence of judgment (for other missionaries, except the aged Carey, thought differently) he determined that education must come through English: ‘The beliefs and habits of the peoples of India are one mass of soul-destroying error: let them perish!” Later, when one Indian convert of this institution was asked what constrained him to Christ, he replied, ‘The bigotry of Dr. Duff’, and added that the school’s founder ‘could teach nothing, not even mathematics and logic, without making these an avenue to Christ’.

This, then, was one part of Duff’s work -- confronting the heathendom of one hundred and fifty million in India. The other part, no less essential, was arousing the Church at home by assailing the general indifference and neglect which had long treated missions as an almost superfluous part of the Church’s calling. It was an overruling providence which unexpectedly directed Duff to this second duty and which gave him the opportunities to address the consciences of his fellow-countrymen. Becoming seriously ill in 1834, he was put on board a homeward-bound ship by doctors who feared he might be dying. Returning to India in 1840 he was forced home again in 1850. Once more Duff went back in 1856, but seven years later he was finally obliged to leave the country which was closest to his heart.

These long intervals at home became perhaps the most extraordinary part of Duff’s career. Probably never in their recorded history had the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland listened to such an address as the twenty-nine year old missionary delivered to them in 1835: ‘Rising from his bed, Mr. Duff made his way to the church in time to speak in connection with the Foreign Mission Report, pushing aside all remonstrances of the friends who feared he would do himself harm. When he sat down, after two or three hours, “drenched in perspiration as if he had been dragged through the Atlantic, all his hearers, moderates and lawyers quite as much as evangelicals were overwhelmed; all wept. After Dr. Gordon had prayed, it was found that indifference to the great cause was gone like summer snow. Those who had heard Fox and Pitt declared that they had never heard any speech to equal this “in transcendent eloquence and overpowering impressiveness.”

The impression made by Duff’s speech, of which 40,000 copies were printed, was immense. The Scottish Guardian wrote, ‘It has furnished principles and information for guiding our church which will lead to entire new model of missions” It led also to the calling of another man of Duff’s own calibre to do in Madras what was already being done in Calcutta. This was John Anderson, who in later years wrote of Duff’s first speech on Indian missions: ‘Though not privileged to hear him deliver it, we know that its statements flew like lightning through the length and breadth of Scotland, vibrated through and warmed many hearts hitherto cold to missions, and tended to produce unity among brethren standing aloof from each other. Never will we forget the day, when a few of its living fragments caught our eye in a newspaper in our quiet retreat on the banks of the Nith, near Dumfries, when suffering from great bodily weakness. It kindled a spirit within us that raised us up from our bed, and pointed, as if with the finger, to India as the field of our future labours, should it please God to spare our life and to open up the way.’

By the year 1842 the Indian mission of the Church of Scotland had thirteen ordained missionaries and one unordained in India, though their influence, as one London Missionary Society missionary noted of the four in Calcutta, was equal to more:

‘We want’, he wrote to his home directors of the L.M.S., ‘men of the stamp of our four Scottish brethren... the work they go through is amazing.’ The mission was based on three central stations — Calcutta, Bombay (where John Wilson was the leader from 1829 until his death in 1875) and Madras, with many branch stations. In the same year, 1842, there were in the schools of the mission some 2,000 scholars and several able converts in training for the ministry, while the missionary income of the Church had reached £5,802 :4:2 ½.

The next year came the historic Disruption of the Church of Scotland when the rising tide of evangelical conviction could endure no longer the interference of patrons over the scriptural right of congregations to elect their own ministers, and 451 ministers seceded to form the Free Church of Scotland, with Thomas Chalmers as the first Moderator. All fourteen of the Indian missionaries joined the Free Church and for the next few decades there can be little question that this body became the most missionary-minded denomination in Britain. Despite the double financial burden in losing all their property both in Scotland and India, the Free Church raised missionary income to £7,282 7s. 9d. in 1845, to £10,023 0s. 11d 1848, and thereafter for many years it was above £10.000. At the same time only her very best leaders were appointed to the convenorship of the Foreign Missions Committee. The concept of the Church as a missionary society was thus approaching realization, though in Duff’s estimation — as he told the Free Church General Assembly on several occasions they were still very far short of the ideal. If ministers were supplied to Scotland in the same proportion as to India, he warned his brethren, then their homeland would have but twelve men! Speaking of all the missionaries provided by Britain, perhaps as many as 800, he declared, ‘While we need one minister for every thousand of our home population, it is enough to send one for every million of the heathen . . . the Churches in Britain have abundance and to spare, but they will not spare it; God then, I say, may some day require the blood of these millions at our hands.’

Probably the most moving of all Duff’s later speeches came in the Assembly of 1866, when at the age of sixty he had seen India for the last time. In a long, impassioned address he laid down the principle that God must only be served with our best, and that the finest ministers were needed at once in India, yet since his return not one ministerial candidate had applied to him for the work abroad. If, then, no young men are to be found, he told the awed Assembly, he must himself go back tomorrow to die on the banks of the Ganges — ‘if this is to be formally acknowledged that we can no longer get men to go forth to work, we must be satisfied to get men to go forth as witnesses or martyrs, ready to. die, and in dying to bear testimony to the grandeur of the missionary enterprise’. Already moved by the sensation caused by these words the Assembly had to watch as Duff, prostrated with exhaustion from this supreme effort, left the platform. But his message was not finished; after a pause the ageing missionary resumed again and with almost overwhelming earnestness called upon his Church to greater faith and sacrifice. The voice of past history, of the glorified in heaven, of the Reformers and of those who gave Scotland her Creed and Confession, the voice of the perishing on earth and the tormented in hell, all summoned them to realize ‘the great doctrine of Christ’s Headship and Kingship over the whole world’. And so Duff, who had first attended a General Assembly thirty-seven years before, concluded a speech which runs to nearly thirty closely printed pages: ‘Let us press forward — resolved that we shall not desist or pause in our onward cause and career of victory till it [Christ’s crown] be triumphantly planted on the’ last citadel of the hitherto unconquered realms of heathenism.’ He was then ‘assisted out of the hall in a state of extreme exhaustion.

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What was the state of the missionary cause at that hour in history? In India, though conversions had been slow, the mood of Christians was one of expectation. The Free Church Mission alone had some forty stations and their colleges were now producing able native teachers and Scripture readers. In Bombay and adjoining mission stations, 1,071 converts were admitted to the Church between 1829 and 1877. By 1871 there were some forty-eight educated converts resulting from Duff’s institution in Calcutta, including nine ministers. One Parsee convert, who became ‘a revered minister and missionary in Western India’, wrote: ‘I think we may put down the year 1865 as the year in which the conviction prevailed generally among young India that of all the forms of religion Christianity is the best.’ Elizabeth Hewat, who reports this, adds: ‘Remarks such as, “Our children will adopt your religion”, or “In thirty or forty years we shall all be Christians” were often heard.’ Duff had such things in mind when he told the General Assembly in 1866: ‘While we cannot talk of great multitudes being converted, yet we can talk truly of individuals being everywhere turned unto the Lord; and of a prodigious work in the way of preparation, the relaxation of prejudices, the upsetting of old superstitions and obnoxious usages, and the opening up of the minds and hearts of numbers to hail something better that is coming.’

At the same time matters were no less hopeful in Africa, where Robert Moffat, Scotland’s first pioneer missionary in the South, had gone on behalf of the London Missionary Society in 1816. The Glasgow Missionary Society had also begun a mission in South Africa or Kaffraria (so named by Mohammedans from ‘Kaffirs’ — unbelievers) in the early 1820’s. The greater part of the latter work passed into the hands of the Free Church in 1845 and consisted in 1866 of twenty-eight stations, the most influential of which was Lovedale (named after Dr. John Love) where a college trained 6,000 men and women by 1902.

In the 1840’s, work on the West Coast of Africa, which had failed in the initial attempt by the Glasgow Missionary Society, was resumed, this time at Calabar by the United Secession Church. At that date the great interior of Central Africa was still a blank space on the map with vast populations not only unevangelized but virtually unknown. Twenty years later the position had been transformed by the labours of the best known of all Scottish missionaries of the nineteenth century, David Livingstone.

Livingstone went out to South Africa with the L.M.S. in 1841. He was soon persuaded of the necessity to expand the mission northwards into the relatively unexplored interior. Beginning a new venture into regions beyond he discovered Lake Ngami in 1849. The years 1852-1856 were spent on his amazing first expedition when, after discovering the upper Zambesi, he turned east in search of a new route to the coast which would replace the long journey from the Cape into Central Africa. This brought him at last to the Atlantic coast, south of the Congo river, where instead of taking ship to England — a step which would have been more than justified by the state of his health — he returned on the perilous journey back to the Zambesi from whence he proceeded upon a similar journey eastwards to the Mozambique Channel!

There were some Christians who asked why a missionary should thus spend valuable time in ‘wanderings’, while the British press began to represent him as a great explorer, but neither understood Livingstone’s great vision. Exploration was not his goal: ‘Viewed in relation to my calling, the end of the geographical feat is only the beginning of the enterprise.’ The great object was to ‘bring unknown nations into the sympathies of the Christian world’ and thus to introduce the gospel. He wrote in his diary in 1852:

‘O Jesus, fill me with Thy love now, and I beseech Thee, accept me, and use me a little for Thy glory. I have done nothing for Thee yet, and I would like to do something.... I will place no value on anything I have or may possess, except in relation to the kingdom of Christ. If anything will advance the interests of that kingdom, it shall be given away or kept, only as by giving or keeping of it I shall most promote the glory of Him to whom I owe all my hopes in time and eternity.’

This was Livingstone’s spirit to the end. On his birthday in 1872, the year before his death, he recorded: ‘My Jesus, my King, my Life, my All; I again dedicate my whole self to Thee.’ So far was he from civilization at the time of his death that eleven months passed before his body — carried by faithful native hands to the coast — was buried in Westminster Abbey on April 18, 1874.

His books and above all the testimony of his life had drawn the attention of the Protestant world to Africa, and a whole succession of men, including many from Scotland, came forward to lead new missions in the territories which had been discovered. The Free Church, at the initiative of James Stewart, established a new work in the area between Lake Nyasa and Northern Rhodesia — named Livingstonia; the Church of Scotland followed at Blantyre in Nyasaland; and Peter Cameron Scott of Glasgow formed the Africa Inland Mission in 1895. The dawn of a gospel day had come to the ‘Dark Continent’.

Before this brief sketch of Scotland’s part in world missions is concluded it remains to relate this subject to the theme of the book, and in doing so we shall note three things: first, that the theology of these missionaries was ‘invariably that of the Puritans and of the Westminster Confession; second, that belief in the general conversion of the Jews was prominent in the missionary thinking of Scotland a century ago; and third, that the conviction that the gospel would triumph across the the entire globe was paramount in their missionary endeavour.

On the first, little need be said for the fact is plain. The first generation of Scots missionaries were in the great majority of cases born, like Livingstone at Blantyre, in homes where the atmosphere itself conveyed the attachment of parents to ‘the old Scottish theology’. What is written of John MacDonald of India was equally true of many others: ‘Trained first in the school of his father . . . and then moulded or largely influenced by the profound and spiritual views of John Owen, John Howe, and Jonathan Edwards, who were his favourite authors, his theology was massive and substantial.’

In Livingstone’s first letter to the Directors of the London Missionary Society, W. G. Blaikie records that ‘he tells them that he had spent most of his time at sea in the study of theology’, and it was through the strength of that knowledge of God that he became, in the words of the same writer, ‘a prodigy of patience, faith and courage’. In one letter to his parents from the heart of Africa in 1850, he speaks of his brother Charles who in going to study at C. G. Finney’s College at Oberlin had put himself under an influence alien to Puritan theology:

‘Charles thinks we are not the descendants of the Puritans. I don’t know what you are, but I am ... Dr. Wardlaw says that the Scotch Independents are the descendants of the Puritans, and I suppose the pedigree is through Rowland Hill and Whitefield. But I was a member of the very church in which John Howe, the chaplain of Oliver Cromwell, preached and exercised the pastorate. I was ordained too by English Independents . . .

One more illustration of the same doctrinal orientation can be taken from Duff’s life. After his final return to Scotland he was appointed, in his closing years, Professor of Evangelistic Theology at the Free Church College, Edinburgh, and in his Inaugural Address, delivered on November 7, 1867, he sought at once to point the students to that rich theological inheritance in which he and all the older generation had found their strength: ‘My great anxiety is to enjoy the privilege of doing what I can, however insignificant, towards elevating the sacred cause of Missions.’ To that end he exhorted them to see to it that, whether they laboured at home or abroad, they were converted men and men who drew all their teaching from the Word of God: ‘Strive for yourselves to dig deep into that unfathomable mine. Or, if human help be resorted to, let it be that of the Reformers and old Puritans rather than, with a few signal exceptions, that of the modern German divines. Bear in mind the earnest counsel of the godly Brainerd “Strive to penetrate to the bottom of Divine truths, and never be content with a superficial knowledge”.

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As this doctrinal outlook was so predominant, it is not surprising that the old conviction that Israel’s future is bound up with the evangelization of the earth exerted a powerful influence in Scottish missionary thinking. With the new missionary societies of the early nineteenth century came auxiliaries with a special concern for the Jews. At one such auxiliary at Dundee in 1811, Walter Tait, a minister of Tealing, summarized the traditional belief in a sermon in which he gave three reasons why Christians should have a particular regard for the Jews:

‘1. Because their salvation must be peculiarly honouring to God.

‘2. Because taking a peculiar interest in the salvation of the Jews is only making a proper return for the spiritual advantages we enjoy by them.

‘3. Because their final restoration must have a favourable aspect on the conversion of the whole Gentile world.’

This same belief was to be expounded and preached upon with energy and fervour for many years to come. It is to be found in the influential commentaries of Robert Haldane and Thomas Chalmers on The Epistle to the Romans. Sometimes whole volumes were given to it, as in Archibald Mason’s Sixteen Discourses from Romans 11.25-27, published in 1825, and in the work, The Conversion of the Jews, 1839, containing the lectures of Glasgow ministers upon the subject.

By the latter date the attention of the whole country had been directed to Israel by the deputation of four Church of Scotland ministers appointed to visit Palestine in 1839 as a Mission of Inquiry into the state of the Jews. Among the four was R. M. M’Cheyne who, on his return to Dundee, preached on ‘To the Jew first’. Converted Israel, he declared, ‘Will give life to the dead world. . . . Just as we have found, among the parched hills of Judah, that the evening dew, coming silently down, gave life to every plant, making the grass to spring and the flowers to put forth their sweetest fragrance, so shall converted Israel be when they come as dew upon a dead, dry world. “The remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many people as a dew from the Lord, as the showers upon the grass, that tarrieth not for man, nor waiteth for the sons of men” (Micah 5.7).

One practical result of the Mission of Inquiry was the establishment of a work among the Jews at Budapest with John Duncan and four others appointed as the Church of Scotland’s first missionaries to the Jews. The work was abundantly blessed, but at the Disruption Duncan was recalled by the Free Church to take the Oriental Chair in their new theological school, New College. Though disappointed at leaving the Jews, Duncan was persuaded that their interests would now receive yet more attention. Speaking of his return from the Continent in the summer of 1843 he later commented, ‘I was cheered by learning from the Witness that the first thing our Church had done after its exodus was to take up heartily the mission to the Jews.’ Through the following twenty-eight years until his death in 1870, ‘Rabbi’ Duncan continued his work at New College and on several occasions thrilled the General Assembly of the Free Church as he pleaded the necessity of maintaining hope in the future conversion of Israel by the outpouring of the Spirit.

At the same period the Scottish missionaries to the Gentiles in India also remembered Israel’s place in the unfulfilled promises of Scripture. The three outstanding Free Church missionaries in Madras, John Anderson, John Braidwood and Robert Johnston, would meet with converts and other Christians on the first Monday of the month, ‘to plead for the world’s conversion’. At one of these meetings Robert Johnston addressed the little gathering on The Conversion of the Jews; and Its Bearing on the Conversion of the Gentiles. His address was published posthumously in Edinburgh in 1853. In a Preface, Braidwood writes, ‘We could not but express our conviction that the circulation of it was fitted to edify the body of Christ generally; while it would prove to all how strongly the missionaries to the Gentiles sympathize in efforts for the conversion of the Jews.’ And he closes his Preface with these considerations ‘to stir up our hearts to faith and prayer for Israel’:

‘1. The national restoration of the Jews, and its blessed effects on the world. For what have they been preserved, but for some wondrous end? If their lapse is the world’s wealth, and their loss the wealth of the Gentiles, how much more shall their replenishment be all this? Rom.11.12.

‘2. The Jews are the whole world’s benefactors. Through Jewish hands and eyes God has sent his lively oracles of truth to us. They penned, and they preserved the Bible.

3. Our Redeemer — the God-man — who has all power in heaven and earth, is their kinsman. “He took on Him the seed of Abraham.”

‘4. Viewed nationally, the Jews are the most miserable of all nations. The Messiah wept over Jerusalem, their capital, before the curse fell on it: ought not we to weep over the accumulated progressive woe springing from the curse, and drinking up the nation’s spirit for eighteen centuries?

‘5. Their covenant prospects are bright beyond all conception. On the grand day of their realization, will anyone of us all regret that we pitied Israel apostate and outcast?’

Johnston’s address closed with a quotation from Samuel Rutherford, and there can be no doubt that in mid-nineteenth-century Scottish missions the beliefs of two centuries earlier had come to their fullest practical expression.

As the century drew to its close it is true that this outlook upon history was already becoming obscured in Scotland, though there were prophetic voices which still spoke with undiminished conviction. One such aged spokesman was Alexander N. Somerville, a Free Church missionary statesman, who in the early years of the century had played as a boy with Robert M’Cheyne in Edinburgh and who later had met Duff on his first return from India. Though most of Somerville’s life had been given to the Gentiles, it was of Israel’s six and a half millions, and of the day when the Lord would turn again the captivity of Zion, that he spoke to the Free Church Assembly in 1887. Two years later, as the invited guest of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, he spoke for the last time upon the same theme with words of earnest warning:

‘Let the Churches of the Gentiles beware, at this late hour of the world’s history, not perhaps of resisting the re-entrance of the Jews into their own privilege, but of yielding to unbelief in the promises of God, and of betraying apathy on the subject of Israel’s conversion. By such neglect we shall commit a perilous mistake and incur the displeasure of the Lord.’

* * *

In conclusion, much could be said upon how Scotland’s missionaries displayed unwavering commitment to the belief that all their endeavours were towards the realization in history of the kingdom of Christ filling the whole earth. This goal would be reached, not in their day, but before the Second Advent, and it was their privilege to draw constant energy and hope from the assurance which possessed them. ‘Never for a moment’, Duff charged his fellow missionaries, ‘lose sight of the grand ulterior object for which the Church was originally constituted, and spiritual rights and privileges conferred, viz. the conversion of the world.’

There is no need, however, to elaborate on this school of belief for its outlines have already been extensively covered in the preceding chapters. But one thing which does call for emphasis is the manner in which the promises of unfulfilled prophecy affected missionary labour on the most practical level. It prepared men to face a baptism of sufferings, disappointments and set-backs with unwavering confidence in the final outcome. Thus although Sierra Leone and Karass, early fields occupied by the Scottish Societies, had to be abandoned, and four of the first six missionaries lost their health or lives in the cause, this was no deterrent to the continuance of the endeavour. John Love, preaching on ‘The Glorious Prospects of the Church of Christ’ for the Glasgow Missionary Society in 1802, reminded his fellow-workers that they had more than enough scriptural hope to sustain them. His text was Isaiah 49.18, ‘Lift up thine eyes round about, and behold: all these gather themselves together and come to thee,’ upon which he declared: ‘The Spirit of promise draws the picture of a whole earth, thick set with living converts, like the sky bespangled, with stars. It is a crowd, every individual of which appears rich with divine glory . . . The subject has enough in it, if brought home by the Spirit of truth, revelation and power, to form those Missionaries against whom the gates of hell shall not prevail..... Those gloomy, those burning shores shall become, sooner or later, a part of the triumphal ornaments of the Christian Church.’

The truth of Love’s words was to be demonstrated by the calibre of the many men who were to go from Scotland. David Livingstone illustrated it when he made his momentous decision to penetrate the interior of Africa. To his faithful wife, the daughter of Robert Moffat, he wrote, ‘I will go, no matter who opposes: I know you wish as ardently as I can that all the world may be filled with the glory of the Lord.’ To another he wrote, ‘I am trying now to establish the Lord’s kingdom in a region wider by far than Scotland. Fever seems to forbid; but I shall work for the glory of Christ’s kingdom — fever or no fever.’

Precisely the same persuasion can be seen in John G. Paton, pioneer with his wife to the island of Tanna in the South Pacific in 1858. Two previous missionaries had been compelled to flee from the island, while on nearby Erromanga John Williams had been martyred in 1839. Within months of their landing in this dark place Mary Paton died after childbirth, and, writes her husband, ‘To crown my sorrows, and complete my loneliness, the dear baby boy was taken from me after one week’s sickness.’ Of the burial of these two loved ones, far off from their own land, he thus writes in his Autobiography

‘I built the grave round and round with coral blocks, and covered the top with beautiful white coral, broken small as gravel; and that spot became my sacred and much-frequented shrine, during all the following months and years when I laboured on for the salvation of these savage Islanders amidst difficulties, dangers and deaths. Whensoever Tanna turns to the Lord, and is won for Christ, men in after-days will find the memory of that spot still green — where with ceaseless prayers and tears I claimed that land for God in which I had “buried my dead” with faith and hope.’

Such was the effect of Puritan belief upon individual lives:the isles of the sea would one day be Christ’s!

Still more important, however, was the effect which the same theology had in the formulation of over-all missionary strategy. Because of their outlook upon the future all the Scottish missionary leaders took the long-term view in evangelization, that is to say, they did not regard the number of individual converts in the present as the first consideration, but rather that energy should be deployed in work which would have the maximum influence upon nations in subsequent generations. Accordingly Alexander Duff though few could have surpassed him as a popular preacher, gave his best time in India to education because he believed that the schools, if thoroughly based on Scripture, would change the tone of society and be nurseries for the Church of the future. For the same reason he regarded his influence upon the minds of natives who might be expected to become preachers as more important than anything he could personally do by way of direct evangelism. This policy was questioned more than once and was discussed and endorsed, particularly at the Free Church Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1861. One powerful argument in its favour was Scotland’s own spiritual history where long periods of preparation and patient sowing - in which the tone of the public mind had been gradually changed - had been succeeded by great revivals and far-reaching missionary enterprise. As the Rev. Alexander B. Campbell wrote to the Conference from Madras, this was the object in view in the Indian work:

‘Christian education, more than anything else, has prepared a large body of the people for a wide rejection of Hinduism, and for a reception of Christ as the Saviour, should it please God graciously to pour out His Spirit from on high on this land. All history proclaims that this is the way in which God generally works. There are long seasons of preparation; the truth is spread; obstacles are removed out of the way, and then God comes in His power and turns the people to Himself. A nation is then born in a day; a little one becomes a thousand; and a small one a strong nation.’

Alexander Duff put the case with his own characteristic forcefulness:

‘We think not of individuals merely; we look to the masses. Spurning the notion of a present day’s success and a present year’s wonder, we direct our views not merely to the present, but to future generations. While you engage in directly separating as many precious atoms from the mass as the stubborn resistance to ordinary appliances can admit, we shall, with the blessing of God, devote our time and strength to the preparing of a mine and the setting of a train which shall one day explode and tear up the whole from its lowest depths.’

In Africa this same long-term view was equally prominent in all Livingstone’s planning. Early in his career he had to choose between concentrated missionary endeavour among the individuals of a small tribe, or the opening up of Africa — surveying the Continent, locating healthy sites for mission stations, paving the way for a civilization which would break the horrors of the slave trade and which would, by commerce, introduce a new social economy, using the products of the country to the best advantage. Livingstone followed the wider policy, not because he overlooked the need for the conversion of the individual — indeed ‘probably no missionary in Africa had ever preached to so many blacks’, — but rather because conviction compelled him to lay the foundations for broader results in the Africa of the future. Thus as he traversed his twenty-nine-thousand miles we find such entries as this in his Journal: ‘At the confluence of the Loangwa and Zambesi. Thank God for His great mercies thus far.... On Thy word alone I lean. But wilt Thou permit me to plead for Africa? The cause is Thine. .’ Elsewhere he writes: ‘I do not undervalue the importance of the conversion of the most abject creature that breathes; it is of overwhelming worth to him personally, but viewing our work of wide sowing of the good seed relatively to the harvest which will be reaped when all our heads are low, there can, I think, be no comparison.’

How much the vision of the future permeated all his endeavours in the present can be seen from innumerable passages in his Journal:

‘A good and attentive audience, but immediately after the service I found the Chief had retired into a hut to drink beer. ... A minister who had not seen so much pioneer service as I have done would have been shocked to see so little effect produced by an earnest discourse concerning the future judgment, but time must be given to allow the truth to sink into the dark mind, and produce its effect. The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord — that is enough. We can afford to work in faith, for Omnipotence is pledged to fulfil the promise. . . .

‘A quiet audience today. The seed being sown, the least of all seeds now, but it will grow a mighty tree. It is as it were a small stone cut out of a mountain, but it will fill the whole earth. He that believeth shall not make haste.... The dregs of heathenism still cleave fast to the minds of the majority. They have settled deep down into their souls, and one century will not be sufficient to elevate them to the rank of Christians in Britain. . . .

‘Our work and its fruits are cumulative. We work towards another state of things.

‘Missionaries in the midst of masses of heathenism seem like voices crying in the wilderness — Reformers before the Reformation; future missionaries will see conversions follow every sermon. We prepare the way for them. May they not forget the pioneers who worked in the thick gloom with few rays to cheer, except such as flow from faith in God’s promises! We work for a glorious future which we are not destined to see. We are only morning-stars shining in the dark, but the glorious morn will break. . . .

When Livingstone was found by his natives, dead upon his knees, on May 4, 1873, it was a fitting end to such a life. He had died in the act of prayer and who can doubt that the last prayer, like so many that preceded it, had borne up to God ‘this poor long downtrodden Africa’? Though his death occurred in an area where darkness and ignorance of God were universal, he had passed on with undiminished confidence in his testimony of former years: ‘Missionaries do not live before their time. Their great idea of converting the world to Christ is no chimera: it is Divine. Christianity will triumph. It is equal to all it has to perform.’